Saw an interesting paper float by, Why Monsters Are Dangerous.
Monsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their properties be predicted? These were long-standing questions for structuralist or cognitive anthropology, as well as literary studies and cultural evolution. The task is to solve the puzzle raised by the popularity of extraordinary imaginary animals, and to explain some cross-cultural regularities that such animals present — traits like hybridity or dangerousness. The standard approach to this question was to first investigate how human imagination deals with actually existing animals. Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly “good to think with”. According to Mary Douglas’s influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that disrupt intuitive classifications of species— the “monsters-as-anomalies” account. But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded. This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters —“monsters-as-predators”— starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with”, and should be over-represented in imaginary animals. This paper argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts, which attempts to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together.
The question in the title is more interesting than the answer they land on after surveying a lot of theories from anthropology, cognitive science etc. I wish they’d actually presented big tables of examples. The paper is mostly focused on traditional mythologies and folklore, but I think the question is more interesting in relation to modern media, like superhero universes or Doctor Who.
About Venkatesh Rao
“Where one might encounter monsters depends as much on our expectations of
dangerous places as it does on where monsters prefer to lurk.” – Tracking classical monsters in popular culture (2020) Liz Gloyn
I’ve met some men who have never had the shit knocked out of them. One buddy of mine said to me if you avoid bad places then bad things won’t happen. I also believe Nietzsche said somewhere that terrible things happen to terrible people. Perhaps the notion of their being no victims but volunteers possesses some validity. I like your notion of being in the Charnel Age but it may be more accurate to say we are in the Age of Aries, 2024, monsters galore and war.
“Where one might encounter monsters depends as much on our expectations of dangerous places as it does on where monsters prefer to lurk.” – Tracking classical monsters in popular culture (2020) Liz Gloyn
I’ve met some men who have never had the shit knocked out of them. One buddy of mine said to me if you avoid bad places then bad things won’t happen. I also believe Nietzsche said somewhere that terrible things happen to terrible people. Perhaps the notion of their being no victims but volunteers possesses some validity. I like your notion of being in the Charnel Age but it may be more accurate to say we are in the Age of Aries, 2024, monsters galore and war.
We are afraid of what we do not know, what we cannot explain.
Monsters are incongruent, they are singular, inexplicable horrors we cannot know.
Sloterdijk lays it out nicely in Modernity’s Enfants Terribles.
There’s a interesting book called “Monster of God” by David Quammen that surveys some remaining traditional cultures that live alongside man-eating animals (lions, tigers, crocodiles, bears, I forget what else.) It doesn’t draw any grand conclusions but speculates about the origin of “monsters” in an interesting way.
They hunt us in our dreams. Fortunately we use to wake up, right after they killed us.
What are they? Evil cryptids of course.