Tag Archives: ritual

Jonathan D. Hill reflects on his career

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Jonathan Hill featured on BBC's "Science in Action" | Anthropology

What moment of fieldwork interaction do you still think about, amazed that you got to witness it and/or record it?

While doing fieldwork in 1981 for my doctoral dissertation, I was using my stereo cassette player and pre-amped external microphone to make audio recordings of a shamanic curing ritual in an indigenous Wakuénai (Curripaco) village. As usual, the shaman had set up his bench, hallucinogenic snuff, maraca, tobacco, and other materials facing the eastern horizon. That day was sunny and hot without a cloud in the bright blue sky. I recorded songs and took photographs all morning. The shaman looked straight up through the feathers of his maraca at exactly twelve noon, and soon a patient and several curious villagers gathered in the space behind the shaman. As the ritual progressed, the shaman repeatedly blew tobacco smoke over the heads of everyone present, including the patient, her family, the gathering of villagers, and even the visiting anthropologist and his tape recorder. After another two hours, I began to feel a kind of energy that I can only describe as exhilarating. It was a hot afternoon less than two degrees north of the Equator, yet I wasn’t sweating or even feeling hot. I hadn’t eaten since early morning but didn’t feel hungry at all. In the mid-afternoon, as the shaman sang and chased after shadow-spirits in the eastern sky, a powerful thunderstorm became visible in the distance and quickly approached the island village. But when the storm began dumping heavy rains on the manioc gardens just across the east channel of the river, it stopped approaching. The shaman was standing up and singing to the thunderclouds in a sort of antiphonal musical dialogue with flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. I had interviewed shamans, other ritual specialists, and non-specialists who claimed that powerful shamans had the ability to control weather events. Later in my fieldwork I learned that the reason shamans blow tobacco smoke over the heads of all people present is to gather up the life force of their bodies to help bring patient’s lost soul back to the world of living people. My tape recorder was also said to be pulling in the patient’s lost soul, so it was also included in the effort. I still wonder about that day, the energy I felt, and that mysterious thunderstorm.

What article or book was hardest for you to write, and why?

Probably the hardest essay for me to write was the chapter in the Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas:  South America, Volume III, Part 2 (1999, “Indigenous Peoples and the Rise of Independent Nation-States in Lowland South America,” F. Salomon and S. Schwartz, editors, pp. 704-764). I had been invited to contribute a chapter on this topic but not given clear guidance on how much of lowland South America was to be covered. I realized immediately that the topic would be unmanageably huge if it were to include all of Brazil in addition to the Guyanas, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Fortunately the group of anthropologists and ethnohistorians at Universidade de São Paulo (Núcleo de História Indígena e do Indigenismo) organized by Manuela Carnheiro da Cunha agreed to cover Brazil, and the volume’s editors were kind enough to accept this division of labor. Yet that still left a huge swath of lowland South America and an incredibly diverse assortment of Indigenous peoples with a multitude of culturally specific histories. I realized then that as an ethnologist I had detailed knowledge of deep histories for a finite number of specific Indigenous regional communities but needed to find some way to connect them all into a broader, macro-level history of the profound political transformations taking place in South America as the colonial power structures began to unravel after the expulsion of the Jesuits and official abolition of indigenous slavery in 1767.  Also, the newly independent states of the 19th Century needed to be interpreted as new systems of power that used rationalist social theories of the Enlightenment to radically dehumanize Indigenous peoples and to justify the erasure of their territorial rights and cultural identities. Finding a way to write about these macro-level transformations while still being able to hear culturally specific histories in which Indigenous peoples understand themselves as the agents of their own transformations was extremely challenging.

What do you need to have produced/completed in order to feel that you’ve had a productive writing day?

For me, a productive writing day cannot be measured in quantitative terms. Productive writing can only result from clear and coherent thinking. Scribbles, notes, outlines, and fragments of ideas are important prerequisites to translating complex and often ‘fuzzy’ thoughts into effective prose. It is important to think what one is going to say rather than just say whatever one happens to be thinking at any given moment. Likewise, it is essential to think what one is preparing to write rather than vice-versa.

Which class did you most enjoy teaching, and why?

I really had fun creating and teaching a graduate seminar on “Narrative Practices, Music, and Social Cognition” in Fall semester 2009. At the time I was participating in an interdisciplinary research and publication group of linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists who were working to understand the importance of narrative practices known as folk psychological narratives in the development of human social cognition. I had just published a book on Trickster Myths, Music, and History from the Amazon (U. Illinois Press 2009) and was co-editing a major comparative study of indigenous Amazonian instrumental music (Burst of Breath, U. Nebraska Press 2011). In addition to the close fit between the topics covered in the graduate seminar and the research I was doing at the time, the graduate faculty and doctoral candidates in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale had reached an unprecedented level of quality and productivity. It was a time when a group of junior and senior scholars, each having their own unique research interests, were able to find common ground that allowed for openly sharing ideas and knowledge and significant intellectual growth.

Was there a specific moment when you felt you had “made it” as an academic?

Yes. In the fall of 1989, the start of my fourth academic year at SIUC, the Chair of the Department of Anthropology suggested that it was time for me to assemble a dossier in order to be considered for an early promotion and tenure decision. My first book had come out in 1988 while I was on a postdoc fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, where I had written the first draft of my second book. In the summer of 1989, I had been invited to participate in a research project in Colombia and to present a paper at a Wenner-Gren International Symposium in Brazil. I had been working since 1986 as a contributing editor for the Handbook of Latin American Studies, U.S. Library of Congress, and the new Editor of American Anthropologist had recently appointed me to serve on the editorial board. I felt strongly supported by the senior faculty in the Department, and their support in turn motivated me to keep expanding my professional and intellectual horizons with the knowledge that what was good for my development was also good for the faculty and students in the Department.

Chris Ball on his book, Exchanging Words

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https://unmpress.com/books/exchanging-words/9780826358530

Meghanne Barker: This book moves, part by part, from within the park to outside of it, until we end up in France. How did you decide to organize it this way, rather than according to some of the main terms of inquiry, such as exchange and ritual? It seems that this tactic was designed, in some ways, to counter narratives of indigenous groups perpetually repeating or risking assimilation or annihilation. But were there aspects of your fieldwork at the Park that were then obscured by this framing – for example, giving more attention to the role of visitors from the outside?

Chris Ball: First of all, many thanks for reading the book and posing such thoughtful questions!

I committed to the framing of an ethnographic narrative about how Wauja people of Brazil move from inside the Xingu Park to outside early on in my fieldwork. Although the chapter on the Atujuwa mask dance that Wauja performers debuted in France in July, 2015 is the subject of the book’s last chapter, the event happened relatively soon after I began working with the Wauja. I was invited to accompany the troupe on their journey abroad and in doing so I learned so much about Wauja people’s initiatives to engage with outsiders. I also returned to the village with many questions about how such encounters work out. From then on, I became increasingly interested in scalar study of the pragmatic means through which Wauja outreach to alters was accomplished and understood from their perspective. That meant looking locally at political discourse, communication with spirits, and out to regional exchange rituals with other Xinguans, and meetings with foreign and Brazilian NGO and government representatives. This perspective helped me to locate classical anthropological topics such as ritual and exchange as they emerged in relations of development that variously purported to target healthcare, material culture, environmental protection, and spirituality. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha had a great influence on my research by encouraging cultural analysis of how Amazonian indigenous people do development. While I ended up paying less attention to the role of visitors from the outside, the upshot was to reverse the perspective of how Euro-Americans and/or non-indigenous Brazilians encounter Amazonians by following the movements and itineraries of Wauja people as Amazonians who engage outsiders.

Meghanne Barker: In the introduction, you promise that this book will bridge the gap between two approaches to studying Amazonia, one of which uses a structuralism modeled after Saussurian semiology, the other of which adopts Peircian semiotics to focus more on everyday discourse. This seems like an ambitious task! At what point in your research or writing did you realize that this was what your project was doing? What made it seem possible, or desirable, or necessary, for you to do this?

Chris Ball: It is a tall order, and I am sure there are many ways that I fell short in this book. Again, I was influenced and encouraged by my teachers in this regard, primarily by Michael Silverstein and Sue Gal in the application of Peircean semiotics to communication, and by the wonderful opportunities I had to learn from scholars such as Carlos Fausto and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in Chicago and in Rio de Janeiro. They brought a range of perspectives to the table to be sure, but I inherited a lasting engagement with Levi-Straussian structuralism and Amazonianist (post)structuralism from these anthropologists. In addition, my training in structural linguistics at Chicago by Jerry Sadock and Amy Dahlstrom, among others such as Bruna Franchetto, prepared and required me to engage with grammatical systems in the tradition of Sapir, Bloomfield, and Saussure. I guess the ingredients were all in the mix before I left for the field, and I can see in retrospect how much the fingerprints of my teachers are left on the book. I should also say that I still believe that one of the main tasks of linguistic anthropology at least since Roman Jakobson has been to unite elements of Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics as they illuminate fundamental properties of language structure and function. The synthesis is ongoing, but what makes it possible, desirable, and necessary is the complementarity of studying langue as a social fact on the one hand, and parole as a site of sociocultural (re) production and transformation. This book is one entry in the collective research project into that dialectic.

Meghanne Barker: Beyond scholarly work on ritual, language, exchange, or indigenous groups in Brazil, is there another scholarly conversation into which you see this book offering an intervention that might not be obvious, immediately? If so, can you tell these readers why they should read your book?

Chris Ball: I think the outreach that the book attempts, beyond the audiences you mentioned, is to scholars and practitioners of development. I make a largely culturalist argument that ritual, discourse, and exchange influence how people from the Xingu region of Brazil engage in development projects. Understanding their cultural approaches to ritual, to trade, and to political discourse in their own communities sheds light on how and why development projects may succeed or fail. Indeed, we should even ask if the people involved define communicative success and failure in anything like the same terms. The point of view brought by linguistic anthropology can hopefully say something applicable to the realization of development in a variety of contexts.

Meghanne Barker: It is common for authors to mention their indebtedness to their interlocutors in the acknowledgments section of the book, yet you do so as your conclusion. Then you break somewhat with conventional ethnography and appeal to the reader, whom you interpellate as a probable anthropologist, to accept the status of indebtedness as requiring sustained engagement. What provoked you to conclude in such a way, with such an appeal?

Chris Ball: One of the points of my book is that Wauja people often work to sustain indebtedness and asymmetry in their exchange relations with outsiders. This leads to confusion in intercultural encounters when NGO representatives laud the successful conclusion of projects, touting the success of debts paid.  Meanwhile Wauja people may see in the same instance an undesirable foreclosure of future social relations. I tried to make that point in the body of the book, and in the conclusion, I hoped to return to the question that your first question indicated might be foreclosed by my approach to Wauja outreach; attention to the role of visitors from the outside. What I wanted to suggest, perhaps to overcome at least momentarily the act of description in the service of engagement, is how anyone who visits the Wauja from the outside, myself and my readers –you included—  is indebted to them. We should take indebtedness not as a negative however, instead we might approach it the way Wauja often do, as a positive corollary of continued relationships, of sustained engagement signaled in the promise of a return.

Graham Jones on his new book, Magic’s Reason

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http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo27351943.html

Interview by Dalila Ozier

Dalila Ozier: In this book, you revisit your ethnographic work on French magicians in order to critically examine the ways in which both magicians and anthropologists use the magic concept. Why did you choose the theoretical framework of analogy/counter-analogy to re-analyze your ethnographic data? What methodological difficulties did you experience when developing your arguments?

Graham Jones: I had known I wanted to write about Western encounters with non-Western illusionary practices for a long time, but I was having trouble shaping it as a book project. In fact, all the archival materials were gathering dust in a file cabinet as I tried to figure out what to do with them. Then I started teaching a graduate seminar in ethnographic methods. After several years of that class, I began to see my project in a new light. Working with anthropology grad students on their research projects, I realized that one of the fundamental epistemological issues that all ethnographers all have to sort out is making the categories they use for analysis commensurable with the native categories they encounter in the field. How do we know our categories are transferrable? When do we need to invoke native categories to shake up received wisdom? The historical materials I had were a great illustration of ethnographers deploying spurious categories and then building anthropological theories atop their faulty findings. I thought it could be a great methodological object lesson. So in the beginning, I envisioned Magic’s Reason as a text for teaching ethnographic methods! I hope someone will use it for that one day.

You’re right that analogy isn’t necessarily the obvious go-to concept for dealing with this kind of epistemological issue. Metaphor is probably a much more robust category in the anthropological tradition given, for instance, the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate or the wonderful work by George Lakoff. But analogy had several things going for it. You may laugh, but I really liked the pliability of the word itself. I encountered the work of a philosopher named Cameron Shelley who had originated a great typology of some of the specific types of analogical moves that occur in scientific argumentation: disanalogy, misanalogy, counteranalogy, and so on. These are exactly the kinds of things anthropologists do when they work with analogy in practice, and dis-metaphor, mis-metaphor, and counter-metaphor just aren’t as euphonious! But there was something else that was crucially important about analogy: Tylor identified it as the core operation of both anthropology and (occult) magic. So I wanted to trace out some of the intellectual history of how anthropologists have understood analogy as central to what they do scientifically (through the work of Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner for instance) and what they think people who believe in magic are doing when they engage in magical practices. This is what the title of the book means: anthropologists are using analogy to figure out the reason for magic, and magicians are using analogy as a form of reasoning. In the end, I don’t think there’s any real difference.

One of the methodological challenges I faced in developing the arguments had to do with the diagrams. My thinking about analogy was deeply influenced by the cognitive psychologist Dedre Genter. She has beautiful diagrams designed to show how people make abstractions based on similar patterns they identify in different domains—through analogy. Yet in my case, I was looking particularly at the way people make abstractions based on differences (as well as similarities) between different cultures—the dissimilarity part is really important for anthropology. It turns out that it is really difficult to diagram, at least within the visual idiom that Genter and her colleagues have perfected (Cameron, in fact comments on this). I struggled with that for a long time, and then I had an epiphany while reading Charles Sanders Peirce, grasping a very simple way to combine analogy and disanology in one diagram by drastically decreasing the amount of detail I was trying to capture. It was not necessarily a very original epiphany within the Peircean vein (spoiler: it’s a triangle), but it allowed me to create a very minimalist visual idiom for representing the argument as a whole. So much depended on properly calibrating the amount of information encoded in the illustration.

Dalila Ozier: Your book discusses how both early Western anthropologists and early Western magicians contrasted “reasonable” Western cultural practices with irrational, “primitive” Others. What was your primary goal in pointing out the connection between two Western disciplines—that is, anthropology and magical performance—that are often considered to be distinct?

Graham Jones: This is a difficult question, and strikes a surprisingly personal chord. When I was in grad school, one of my mentors was an elder Africanist who had trained under Evans-Pritchard. I admired him deeply and desperately wanted to do a reading class with him on the subject of magic. When I asked, he immediately kiboshed the idea. “You don’t work on real magic,” he said. I was crushed. And for a long time after, I doubted that there was any connection between the anthropology of “real” magic and the kind of magical entertainment I was studying. What’s more—perhaps this may date me a bit—I felt like there was a stigma in anthropology attached to doing ethnographic research in a Western context and on an entertainment practice at that. Something fun in a comfortable place. Showbiz was not “real” culture and research in Europe was not “real” ethnography, hence I could not be a “real” anthropologist. I deeply admire all the challenging cross-cultural work our colleagues do, and I really worried about the validity and value of my research.

I’m not saying that I had an axe to grind, but as I looked more deeply into the historical archive, I was very surprised to discern what looked to me like the influence of magical entertainment on anthropological theory—an influence that anthropology seems keen to suppress. I wanted to know more about how the anthropological theory of magic had been constructed with reference to magic as a form of entertainment, but also about something bigger: how authentic “culture” in the anthropological sense was historically constructed as the conceptual antithesis of phony showbiz. You asked about my goals. None of this was an explicitly formulated goal when I started out on the project. But by the time I finished, I had come to make an argument about how anthropology has traditionally constructed its objects of study through an optics of alterity that just doesn’t make sense without reference to Euro-American popular culture itself. Ultimately I was forced to conclude that occult magic simply wouldn’t have mattered so much to anthropology if entertainment magicians hadn’t made such a sensation out of debunking it.

Dalila Ozier: Early in your book, you mention the esteemed magician Robert-Houdin, who (as described in his memoirs) once performed in colonial Algeria as a way of exposing local ‘Isawa mystics as charlatans, thereby reaffirming France’s colonial hold over the Algerian state. Additionally, you discuss how some ‘Isawa mystics later traveled to Europe as theatrical performers, with their religious practices consumed by Western audiences as entertainment. How did the systemic recategorization of ‘Isawa religious practices as either spectacle or trickery (or both) contribute to the colonial project of diminishing the symbolic power of subaltern communities? How does this impact the ways in which contemporary magicians (and audiences) theorize the relationship between Western and non-Western states?

Graham Jones: Magic is a microcosm, a tiny microcosm. So is anthropology. But when we see a pattern of racist representations linking magic and anthropology, then we can begin to take it as indicative of larger structures of domination and oppression in the colonial worldview. I don’t want to overstate the cultural and historical importance of entertainment magic, but it really was a privileged site, during magic’s so-called golden age (from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries), of visualizing ethnic differences. Orientalist imagery of exotic others was omnipresent in the iconography of the era, and remains a vestigial part of modern magic’s legacy. While Euro-American magicians were making careers performing in yellow, brown, and black-face, golden-age magic also provided circumscribed, but still substantive, opportunities for East Asian, South Asian, and African performers. In some cases, East Asian illusionists were able to tour extensively in the West, competing directly with the Orientalist acts staged by white rivals. The case of the ‘Isawa is more ambiguous, because we are really talking about ritual experts hired to perform entertainment spectacles. I don’t want to reify categories like “ritual” and “spectacle”—a part of what I try to do in Magic’s Reason is, if not break down those categories, show how they are situationally conditioned by power. In any event, my basic point is that the recategorization of ‘Isawa ritual as spectacle was very easy because Orientalist associations of the global East (and global South) with mysticism, fanaticism, and the occult were such a pervasive part of golden-age magic.

A second part of your question concerns the lasting legacy of binary oppositions such as modern/primitive, rational/irrational, and so forth, that historically achieved such clear expression in both magic and anthropology. I’m reminded of a beautiful verse by the French rapper MC Solaar: “la présence d’un passé omniprésent n’est pas passé.” When the past is everywhere visible, it’s not really past, is it? As we’re doing this interview, the President of the United States has just called African countries “shitholes,” voicing neocolonial chauvinism but also mystifying a history of systematic underdevelopment. But if we just concentrate on magic itself as a microcosm, I think the issue specifically concerns the opportunities available to magicians of color in postcolonial France or in the contemporary U.S., not to mention opportunities available to women. In a genre that has been such a privileged site for visualizing differences of sex, gender, and ethnicity, how can performers who don’t fit with the image of the modern magicians as a white, European gentleman acquire credibility?

In one version of the book, I had a long section about the racism I saw directed towards one young magician of North African descent in contemporary France. For me, this example showed that, even though one form of overtly racist imagery has been more-or-less relegated to magic’s colonial past, new and, in some ways, more insidious forms of entrenched discrimination persist in the postcolonial present. Here magic was a professional microcosm for me to think about the kind of prejudice that people of color face in French workplaces. That ethnographic section didn’t make it into the final version of the book. I was constantly fighting against centrifugal, digressive tendencies to try to make the book lean and coherent. But I’m in the process of publishing it now as a standalone essay, which should be out later this year, along with a few other small pieces that I couldn’t quite fit into the confines of the book.

Dalila Ozier: Later, you discuss Robert-Houdin’s affection for the Davenport Bros., a vaudevillian performance duo that professed to have supernatural powers. Though Robert-Houdin wrote treatises debunking the Davenports as charlatans (in much the same way he did for ‘Isawa mystics), he celebrated the Davenports for their cleverness and ingenuity. What does Robert-Houdin’s differing perspectives on the ‘Isawa and the Davenports indicate about how Western thinkers alternately attach stigma and value to acts of “fakery”?

Graham Jones: The “fake” is a wellspring of cultural meaning, and I can only begin to do it justice here. On the one hand, fakery constitutes a moral affront and a metaphysical abomination. On the other hand, it is the height of ingenuity, intelligence and skill. And in many arenas of experience—magic is no exception—it is impossible to define what is “authentic” without reference and recourse to the fake. The discipline of Art History only exists because collectors needed techniques for expertly adjudicating between forgeries and originals. Robert-Houdin has a very sustained engagement with the notion of the fake, and he is very consistent in his views. At one point, he remarks that everything the magician says is a tissue of lies, and he delighted in telling some whoppers both on stage and in his autobiographical writing. Still he views the modern magician’s fakery in light of an ethical code: if deceptions are ludic and if they are sufficiently sophisticated, then they pass muster. In his autobiography, he subjects lots of different performers to this litmus test. Of course there is a kind of bigotry built into his assessment, but he effectively considers the Davenports to be worthy of respect because their stagecraft and their promotional strategies were so ingenious. Robert-Houdin depicted the ‘Isawa as the antithesis of everything he stood for as a “modern” magician. He depicted them as charlatanic impostors who used only crude legerdemain, but that assessment clearly assumes that the ‘Isawa were operating under the same ethical and metaphysical assumptions as Robert-Houdin. They were not.

Michael Taussig and others have written brilliantly about the problems and perils of thinking of ritual practices in terms of reality, sincerity, and authenticity. In the realm of ritual, artifice, illusion, mimesis and deception have a different valence than they do when exhibited as ends in themselves, or objects of enjoyment in their own right, as they are in the context of modern magic. Here we are coming to an aporia at the heart of anthropology: on the one hand, ethnographers in the nineteenth century and beyond exhibited a gleeful hubris in drawing invidious contrasts between natives’ susceptibility to believing in fake things, like the tricks of shamans or ritual experts, and their own imperviousness, as modern Westerners, to such deceptions. On the other hand, the anthropological category of culture was taking shape as the realm of real, authentic experience as opposed to the fake, ersatz arena of show business and Western popular culture. This paradox amounts to the view that non-modern people are credulous dupes, but that that’s precisely what allows them to have real culture. This view is inextricable from a tradition of anthropological research that positions occult magic as both the fakest possible thing and the very quiddity of culture. Anthropology has been trying to work itself out of this hole for a long time, and I think magic is an inescapable part of how we got to this point and what we need to do to get beyond it. My main goal in Magic’s Reason is to enhance the conversation about the connection between anthropology’s past and its future by adding some additional dimensionality based upon my own admittedly idiosyncratic engagements with one of our key concepts.