Incest

From Encyclopedia of Uses and Abuses of Science in Anthropology and Archeol-

ogy, vol. 134, (2214), University of Andaman Press, Andaman.

Skin (n., but also v. in old use)
Long, long time ago we all were skin walkers.
No no, let me start again, in the beginning there was no skin.
No, it is really difficult to say where it begins. All that can be said
about skin of those times is through the multiple references it has in
religious and philosophical discourses. It was a common belief for ex-
ample that only human beings die, skins do not. That there was One
Universal Skin of which all individual skins are part of, was also a
prevalent belief, albeit with minor variations. There were theories of
rebirth as well professing that skin is born again and again in lives af-
ter lives. Of course it all was rejected by the scientific community. It
could never be understood why they kept on dismissing the same
thing again and again but a good part of scientific labour was to run
the polemics against any idea of skin. Science had therefore limited its
scope to the realm that they considered - within quotes - empirically
available. Like all intangible things, skin entered the scientific dis-
course only in order to be disproven. It was an empirical fact that we
possess the ability to walk into anyone we want. It was like leaving
your body and going into another's, if you want to translate it in mod-
ern terms. Of course the scientific community would not agree to this
description. For them the starting point was that we could go inside
anybody. Well, not anybody, if one presses for precision. There was
often resistance- poets preferred to call it reluctance- as well. There
were certain groups who vociferously protested against free intermin-
gling and had detailed rules which regulated who can walk into whom.
But science had little interest in these movements. It was more inter-
ested in the empirical phenomenon that walking into each other was.
For example, a central question was to understand that resistance or
not, all acts of walking into somebody else required a certain amount
of attraction, some convincing and sometimes a little force. There
were denials as well but they always remained understudied. Scientists
carried experiments after experiments to understand why some stay
longer inside while others get tired in a while. There were beings who
were known to have lived in each other for decades. The common
phrase of one walking into other also comes from a scientific question
of reciprocity. Before debates of reciprocity sparked controversy, it
was generally expressed in words like two people walking together.

Sayeed
1

But reciprocity was yet to play a major role many centuries later when
it became an everyday problem apart from being a scientific concept.
But long before that, happened some unpredicted transformations
which shook the scientific world. Many conjectures and hypotheses
were proposed from molecular changes to shifting cloud patterns to
explain these transformations but archaeological reports lead us to
one ordinary village and two ordinary people. Science has always de-
nied simplistic stories like this for a phenomenon of such magnitude
but multiple evidences establish at least the sequence of events, irre-
spective of their role in these transformations.

So it happened that these two ordinary people stayed together or
stayed into each other or one stayed inside the other- whichever way
you prefer- that they thought they are not two but one. People had
overstayed in others skins before as well, but their stay was stretched
on and on, as if they would never get separated. They just got stuck
together, fused together. They became inseparable. Not only this,
both of them even denied any possibility of occupying or being occu-
pied by anyone else ever again. In their heart they had resolved the
problem of longing- well for science it was always a pseudo-problem-
which they thought was governing the separation and joining, but for
others, it resulted in great imbalances that nobody has predicted. Even
if one ignores tongue-in-cheek talk and long deliberations, the trend
of being-done-with-longing-once-and-for-all really caught on and
sooner or later everybody found the partners they got fused with for
eternity or whatever they thought the eternity was. Whoever was left
out became a problem for the administration and many still trace the
birth of control institutions to those times.
Man overcame thus the longing and the separation. People started liv-
ing in skins of their partners. They found permanent abodes. There
was no more leaving one skin to find another. They had overcome the
movement. They had overcome the time. Ages and ages passed like
this. Until something interesting happened again just little after what
is nowadays called age of reciprocity.

Some say it started with scratching, a new sensation that nobody knew
before, while others say, scratching was one of the results of whatever
was happening to the man. Reciprocity had already caused among
other things, an exchange of fluids between the two sharing a skin.
But there were other things, they started feeling a desire to do. Most
intense one was to just close the eyes and withdraw from the com-
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mune for a moment, to take a breath of one's own. But almost equal
was the urge to open the eyes once again and look at each other. But
there was another thought, not that compulsive, but so lingering that
it smudged the boundary between dream and imagination. Many
scholars who trace birth of scratching sensation to much later times
describe this thought as ghost scratching. They ascribe any reference
of scratching during that era to this thought which kept occupied the
people. And this thought was to touch each other, touch all over, feel
all over.

At some hour of the night those two were touching each other in
imagination. They might have been touching each other in dream as
well if that matters. Touching each other was nothing new as being in
each other's skins was being in complete touch already. What they
were really doing, it is said, was to distinguishably feel one part from
another. To stay at one place a bit longer and to pass from another
rather quickly. To forget where one is touching at a specific moment
and to preserve the memory of that very moment of touch. To pass
by the same place thinking of it as always new and to reach to a new
place thinking of it as the same. Maybe it was a dream because they
woke up in the morning and really found touching each other. First
thing they felt was skin.

It was a new thing. They were touching before but it suddenly felt dif-
ferent. It was dry but not too much. Velvety, but not too much. Silky,
but not too much. It was different. Queerly familiar. Gently rough.
The legend have it that while eyes took days to adjust to the light, in-
terrupted by soothing nights, and ears took weeks to adjust to all the
noise there was, punctuated by pauses, they woke up touching and
they kept on touching for days and days. It took a lot of time to real-
ize that they were awake. But when they were finally awake they
found out that many others were awake already. May be all of them
were awake as there was no way to find out who is not awake. They
only knew now the awakened people. They were in a new world. Liv-
ing in each other for a really long time they had already lost touch
with the people in old world. They now did not have any access even
if they wanted to know.

They also discovered that people around, who they found already
awake- people moving hands and feet, making strange noises from
lips, winking eyes, shaking heads, rubbing palms, crossing fingers,
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waving hair- meet each other in strange manners. Strangest thing was
that they had all forgotten their solution for the problem of longing.
Now they were meeting only to be separated. Yes, many stayed to-
gether for longer but people usually got together for brief encounters.
At times just for moments, with exchange of some syllables or with-
out. Sometimes they were whispering things to lips rather than to ears.
It was so much like before, changing skins again and again, with resis-
tance and reluctance, with persuasion and force. And at the same
time, it was nothing like that at all, as everybody was so contained in
their skins. Even more stranger was the fact that a skin was often
taken for a person.

But when the two of them, saw each other and kept on touching each
other, they could not have enough of each other. They fell for the
skin. They hadn't seen and hadn't touched anything like this before.
But they knew it so well that they often wondered whether they have
created it themselves, while touching and rubbing it in the imagina-
tion. They started loving the possibilities that skin provided, but at the
same time, hating the contained-ness that stopped them in a bound-
ary. Unlike others they could never leave each other. Not that they did
not try. Or rather they were made to try to separate from each other
even if it was for some time. They did participate in the ways of the
new world and did learn the wonders of sound made with lips but
everything they did, they did it together. All their lives were around
each other's skins.

The only direct material evidence for story of these two skins that has
survived are two lines in a lost script. Paleographers have established
the following reading of these lines-

nau-KHez kuchen do Ghuncha hain, hai narm shikam ki KHirman-e-
gul
baariik kamar jo shaaKH-e-gul, rakhtii hai lachak phir waisii hai

While there is some kind of agreement on this reading of the text,
there is no consensus on the meaning. There are two more lines
which are occasionally ascribed to the same text-

mahram hai hubaab-e-aab-e-rawan, suraj ki kiran hai us pe nipaT
jalii kii kurtii hai wo balaa, goTe ki dhanak phir waisi hai

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However, Scrollists contests these claims saying that only the former
has survived from the original text and all other lines are later addi-
tions. Strangely enough, last words of second lines in both the pairs
are same and one before them rhyme. May be this led to the assump-
tion that the two fragments might be from same text. Neither legend
nor evidence supports this.

What happened to the two of them. This is the part that science finds
most ridiculous, but as story goes it is said that they stayed close to
each other. And they were the first to discover decay of the skin and
eventually its death.

See also:- reciprocity, womb

Acknowledgement : Marcel Mauss, Claude Levi-strauss, Erick
Fromm, Bahadur Shah Zafar
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