Reflection: The Sparrow

I talked in class (and I think, failed to make my point a little bit) about the fine line of anthropology and moral culpability. What I think I was trying to point out was that the society the Jana'ata lived in created a pretty unfortunate scenario. These third-born males have little to no outlet, being unable to reproduce, and being offered token concubines by their better-off siblings doesn't always seem to do the trick in terms of relieving their feelings of impotence and discontent. Then you get someone like Kitheri, who has made a triumph out of what we could consider perversity--his poetry is, according to Emilio, essentially pornography, and not in an ironic, Robert Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia way.

Although, if you think of the kind of rapture and connoisseurship Kitheri et al. seem to attach to their poetry, it's more akin to something like the Song of Songs than a kind of perversity. It's only that we see it from the perspective of Emilio, who was essentially treated as a beast, and what we consider morally culpable--i.e., the fact that he was brutally raped, and that his suffering was in fact a kind of aphrodisiac to the Jana'ata--but we don't know if they perceive suffering in the same way we perceive suffering. After all, we come from a planet where we force-feed geese until their liver are soft and distended. I could also mention veal...Maybe they viewed Emilio (and this has been indicated) as a kind of beast as opposed to a person--which is easy when you realize that they eat the children of the only other sentient species on the planet.

I'm not a Jana'ata apologist--I'm just trying to understand and put into perspective an act that is otherwise mind-numbingly horrifying.