Author: Jackson Wolford

“It is an error to assume that to know is to understand, and that to understand is to like.” (Bowen 291).

 

The main text we read for today’s class, Return to Laughter by anthropologist Laura Bohannan, operating under the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen, challenges us in three distinct ways. The first is at the level of genre, the second is at the level of method, and the third is at the level of discipline.

 

Genre

The immediate questions that arise from reading a novel alongside ethnographic texts are about facticity and how the strategies of authentication change across genre. A novel does not claim authenticity by pretending to facticity. If Crime and Punishment conveys something of the angst and terror present when living an intellectual life of pure rebellion against order, or if Harry Potter conveys something of the dynamics of courage, fear, friendship, and frailty that drive aspects of adolescence, they manage this without being in any way factually true. The events they recount did not occur.

We have spoken a good bit over the course of our semester together about the deep embodiment of experience, the perhaps irreducible system of place, person, and world that are involved in a particular person’s experiences. It would be possible, thinking perhaps through Birgit Meyer, to suggest that experiences themselves can’t be generalized, that they only exist in mediated forms that do not descend from a prior idealized form. Meyer herself might not suggest this, but the logic of mediation—when it fails to answer whether mediation mediates an original, what that original might be, and whether the mediation reduces the original—lends itself to this kind of thinking. We are only able to understand mediated forms of experience, fear that emerges from complex and specific cultural forms. There is probably no ur-experience of something like love, or fear, or suffering. And even if there is, we have no way to access it, trapped as we are within systems of cultural forms and the irreducibility of particular, mediated experiences. This is a postmodern maneuver that many anthropologists navigated into—fragmentation, partiality, and our unaccountable ability to understand. In this context, even Michael Jackson’s beautiful but ultimately mild claims that we can understand others primarily in those rare moments when our cultural context breaks apart might seem to many anthropologists to be too radical or philosophical.

What does it mean, then, that we can understand something of a kind of fear or love from a novel that recounts events that never occurred? There is no particular, mediated experience of fear or love or heroism that is being communicated—the experience of the characters doesn’t factually exist. But we feel it. Is it merely an illusion, such that we are tricked into feeling a particular and mediated sense of joy, loss, etc. by the author’s ability to use language to fake us out and make us believe that things actually happened that did not? A kind of trick we play on ourselves? If so, how is it possible that the self can deceive the self? How can it know and not know what is true at once?

I am more inclined to the perspective Bowen (I’ll use the pseudonym for the precis) outlines in Return to Laughter. Stories are able to convey certain dimensions of experience because we can look at them and, as Kako’s blind brother responds to the pantomime of a blind man searching for honey, laugh and say, “‘That is the way it is…Indeed it is so. What can one do?’” (Bowen 294). But that “is the way it is” not because the events factually occurred, but rather because a generalized experience is evoked. While I don’t have complete answers, I think I have tipped my hand enough in class for it to be clear that I think this gestures at the possibility that there is, in fact, something of ur-experiences. Or at least, there is some mechanism by which we can relate to general qualities of experiences even amidst particularized circumstances, allowing the particular process of understanding to derive from the general. I understand that you are afraid because I know what it is to fear.

The novel as genre gives a fascinating look into the relationships between facticity, evocation, and understanding. What emerges next is to ask how, exactly, ethnography ought to position itself within these relationships.

 

Method

            Particularly in the early part of the book, the method of Bowen’s project is clear and familiar in its messiness and foreignness. The anthropologist implants herself in a community, and then tries to discover the categories by which the community regulates itself. She slowly begins to decode the forms of cultural communication. The word far can refer not only to physical distance but also time and social distance (Bowen 52). We’re introduced to a classical set of ethnographic descriptors like little wife, age mate, witchcraft, etc. But things change slightly when Bowen realizes that being a mother is not determined purely by kinship, but also by ways of being in relation to another (Bowen 126-7). This revelation marks a turn whereby Bowen begins to consider these conceptual categories not as simple pieces in a jigsaw puzzle of her own scientific inquiry, but as compasses that are used to navigate social realities.

When scandal emerges around the infidelity of a woman named Ticha, this experiential dimension comes to the fore. After a discussion of how infidelity is experienced differently but emerging from a familiar set of concerns—“the old passionate resentment of anything that threatens any possession” (Bowen 137)—Bowen recognizes the error of her method to that point. She had been anticipating that “people would differ only in externals of dress and custom, that their basic reactions to the same basic situation would be the same” (Bowen 144). She admits that she had been thinking of all of the characters of her encounter as not so far removed from common European archetypes. And in recognizing their real differences, she finds “the points beyond which I could not go” (Bowen 145).

By focusing only on differences of custom situated in structural concern, she had missed the ways in which those structures were navigational devices that oriented them to experience the world in a different way than she did. But this difference did not prevent any understanding. Here, in fact, her ability to understand emerges directly from her recognition of the limits of their mutual understanding.

This issue arises most pointedly in cases of moral dilemma. When smallpox threatens her village and a local man, Saar, is infected and returns to seek shelter and food, she claims strongly that she believes she had a moral obligation to aid him, one that those she was with did not share (Bowen 272-3). Because of the values of the locals, she retreated from her felt moral obligation in what she described as cowardice. This is one of the key insights into method that emerge from the book—the boundaries of understanding, which can help to create understanding itself, are often found at points of moral dilemma.

 

Discipline

This point about moral dilemma and understanding is one of the subjects of Don Seeman’s article on ritual, “useless suffering” and the Warsaw Ghetto. In much the way that I suggest moral dilemmas can highlight limits on the simple business of our interpersonal understandings, Seeman proposes that radical suffering outlines the limits of meaning-making as an anthropological project (Seeman 467). As Bowen’s account turns to the dark business of smallpox, paranoia, and violence in the later pages of the novel, this claim is demonstrated. This was not the death of a single person, “Not the death of Amara. That was grief, and sanity” (Bowen 279). The terror of smallpox represented terror that defied categorization or structuring. Bowen goes one step further, suggesting, “We have no vocabulary left for terror” (Bowen 280). This is a bigger statement than it sounds. A vocabulary is a set of correspondent meanings, a semantic field in which things mean something in relation to one another. We are left with the conclusion, from Seeman and Bowen, that we have no vocabulary for terror because terror—of the kind experienced in Bowen’s smallpox outbreak—defies semantic relationships. Terror and suffering are phenomenological experiences that disrupt the horizontal field of discretely intelligible, categorical concepts.

And yet, we know something of terror and suffering. If

1) all understanding is really situated in the decoding of cultural meanings or the translation of mediated experiential forms, and

2) suffering and terror both defy the ability to create meaning and nicely order experience,

then the only way to understand the suffering of the Warsaw Ghetto should be to have been there. And to some degree, that is certainly true—it is probably impossible to fully understand its facticity without presence. But there are reasons why the accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto haunt us—they evoke something that we understand. We know, if not just how Rabbi Shapira suffered, at least what it means to suffer. And these experiences that can be evoked, experiences that defy meaning-making, seem to operate as the means by which we may recognize the presence of the kind of ur-experience that allows understanding in the first place.

So finally a few disciplinary concerns arise from this exploration:

1. If understanding occurs in part by means of encounter with phemomena that break systems of meaning, and can be evoked in ways that do not require facticity, what is the point of ethnography? Why don’t we all just write poetry (other than the fact that we lack the skill)? What is added by facticity?
2. In answering the above, when do we reach a point where the real subject of our ethnographic work is ourselves? If the text can be fictitious, experience is (in this formulation) necessarily factual—it actually occurred. Bowen is clear that the main theme of her novel is “the sea change in oneself that comes from immersion in another and savage culture.” Do we need facticity merely so that we can form ourselves as more complete moral subjects? It is worth remembering that by the end of Bowen’s story, the only character who grows or learns is herself.

Theoretical Terms

First, I thought it might be useful if I listed some of the theoretical terms from this book that I thought were particularly interesting or helpful, along with some page #s (although they appear throughout the book mostly):

Theories of continuity (6-8): According to Robbins (and Premawardhana seems to agree), anthropology has often assumed cultural continuity in a way that denies the possibility of radically discontinuous events like conversion. This produces a form of stasis, where it is unclear how change can ever occur.

Theories of rupture (6-8): Opposed to this, Robbins and others have suggested models of rupture, radical discontinuity, and change. Premawardhana suggests these theories can become complicit in promoting stasis by identifying rupture too closely with modernity. This would seem to suggest that rupture is only ever a transformation that is on its way to settling into a new, perhaps more modern, state.

Existential mobility (161-3): This is Premawardhana’s alternative model for a kind of continuous rupture in which the Makhuwa, and perhaps all of us, are in some ways able to neogtiate between various historical and contemporary experiences and affiliations. The experience is neither a total break from continuity, nor an unchanging stasis, but a navigation of multiple and multiplying pasts and presents.

Polyontology (100-1): An alternative to terms like syncretism or hybridity coming from Janet McIntosh. It is a belief that we maintain fluid access to distinct realms of experience. Premawardhana crafts this into a notion of polyontological mobility. There is an acceptance of distinct spheres of religion. But no sense of personal taboo, located in a static identity, is viewed as coming from transgressing those boundaries.

 

Context: Circularity and Circumstance

In his chapter on global Pentecostalism, Joel Robbins discusses three primary “threads” of anthropological approaches to the subject—cultural process, everyday life, and the relation of Pentecostalism to modernity (Robbins 173). In Faith in Flux, Devaka Premawardhana explores the first two of these categories by challenging approaches to the last, particularly a common claim, expressed here by Robbins, that, “Pentecostalism was born in modernity and could not exist without it” (Robbins 172). Instead, Premawardhana echoes Pentecostal theologian Nimi Wariboko that, “The pentecostal principle predates pentecostalism and is likely to outlive it” (Premawardhana 163, quoting Wariboko 2012:4). To Premawardhana, Robbins’ claim borders on or perhaps falls right into the trap of modernization narratives, narratives that tie the growth of global (and particularly African) Pentecostalism to a rupture of modernity (Premawardhana 13). Time, or at least our experience in it, must not be imagined with a linear trajectory. Instead, we are mobile, returning constantly in “circular and situational” ways to elements of the past, dependent on the context in which we find ourselves (Premawardhana 14).

Premawardhana elaborates this mobility as characteristic of a way of life among those with whom he worked. It is present not only in time, but in space, religious affiliation, and identity. The opening chapter encapsulates many of these dynamics in the tragic story of death of Fatima and Jemusse’s 10 year old daughter, Luisinha. Spatially, Jemusse and Fatima leave the village as a way of dealing with situational problems of sorcery (Premawardhana 39). Likewise, in their response to their daughter’s death the couple cross boundaries between Pentecostal practice and local spiritual practices considered off limits by their Pentecostal preacher (Premawardhana 49). Finally, this story serves as an example of Premawardhana’s general argument for a consideration of the constant formation of disposition rather than the static language of semi-mutable identity. The tragic moment, in Premawardhana’s conception, “stretches individuals in ways not always predictable by or reducible to their ascribed identities” (Premawrdhana 17). What is evidenced at this moment of stress is not a static identity, whereby Jemusse and Fatima could be thought of as behaving as discretely “village” agents, or “Pentecostal” agents, where “villager” or “Pentecostal” constitute a feature of a static identity. Instead, they are navigating their experience with a quality of mobility—the ability to return to various features of their lives to negotiate the particular circumstance.

For the purposes of our course and the consideration of the ethnography of religious experience, it is important to take Premawardhana at his word: This is not, for us, just or even primarily a book about the pitfalls of approaches to the study of Pentecostalism, but rather, “This is a book about change” (Premawardhana 4). While this is true, I will add that I think it is also a book about a particular model of relation.

 

Change: Rupture and Continuity

What is the role of change in religious experience, and how does Premawardhana explore it? Essentially, Premawardhana is looking to negotiate between the models of rupture—defined by Robbins as “radical discontinuity with what has come before” (Robbins 159)—and continuity, which creates a sort of cultural stasis where “certain people, usually labeled ‘traditional,’ are prone only to reproducing their past” (Premawardhana 7). While Premawardhana wishes to develop, not discard, the work of Robbins and others theorists of rupture, he believes that they rely too much on “modern catalysts” as prompting rupture (Premawardhana 7). Premawardhana asserts instead that the very possibility of rupture is not a new modern development, but a “mundane extension of an already convertible way of being” among the people he lived with (Premawardhana 8). This leads Premawardhana to an attention to the complex relationship between rupture and continuity, the paradoxical fact that capacity for rupture is continuously present.

Whatever may be said about this paradox, it is certainly not static. A model of pure continuity is almost definitionally in stasis. But Robbins’ notion of modern rupture is also static in its own way by conceiving of both modernity and conversion as trajectories that end in a final deposit. Premawardhana highlights Robbins’ important work on rupture and conversion, but questions the fact that Robbins’ notion of conversion seems both: 1) too much informed by easily-identified Christians with ready theological stories to tell (the same problem as Turner finding the one villager with a story of the meaning of ritual that we have discussed in class), and 2) permanent (Premawardhana 106). I think Robbins evidences this static tendency in his article for today as well, in a telling line. He dedicates a final section to looking at “what kind of culture” Pentecostal ideologies and practices “produce” (Robbins 168). Even if the process of production is continuous, “culture” here is a static product, one that can be defined by terms like “modern.”

Premawardhana situates existential mobility as his way of maintaining both rupture and continuity. This mobility is not a description appended to an object called “culture.” Instead, existential mobility is a way of being that takes change and transformation not as challenges, but as “a precondition for wellbeing” (Premawardhana 161). It is a dispositional suitability to change, one Premawardhana identifies with the “Pentecostal principle” (162). But Premawardhana is also aware that he is making a point not wholly limited to the Mahkuwa with whom he lived. He draws on both Western philosophical and local experiential knowledge to try and create an account of this existential mobility, but its implications are already in conversation with basic existential questions about human existence. He writes that there is nothing radically new, uniquely modern, or uniquely Pentecostal about the notion of rupture present in “radical renewal” (Premawardhana pp. 162-3). The implication we are left with is that this existential mobility, navigating and returning and oscillating between facets of our being, is a feature of all human existence, and always has been. It is, again, the paradoxically continuous presence of change.

 

Relation: Doctrine of the Unity of…?

While Premawardhana locates his book as being about change, I think it is also about a particular model of relation. This is most clear as the book concludes, where he writes, “Thus some of the most widely assumed antinomies dissolve and fall away—roots versus routes, structure versus agency, continuity versus discontinuity” (Premawardhana 162). The move is to disrupt easy categories and dichotomies, which we can see as an inheritance from Michael Jackson’s through our reading from last week. But it is more nuanced than this. With the question of change, Premawardhana doesn’t allow continuity and rupture to exist as poles that we navigate between in a kind of dialectical model. Instead, continuity and rupture both collapse into mobility, which is both at once, a continuous rupture. This move is replicated in conversation on structure and agency through Bordieu and habitus. Premawardhana doesn’t argue for a middle way between poles of structure and agency, but rather that agency and structure exist always together. This move is applied to enough topics throughout the work that, as much as it is making a theoretical point about change, it seems to also be making one about relation.

Because it is typically so present, it is notable when it is absent. When it comes to the question of experience and identity, Premawardhana uses the frame of polyontology. This model of polyontology maintains “fluidity” between “distinct compartmentalized essences” (Premawardhana 100).  He crafts this into the slightly different notion of polyontological mobility, which emphasizes that certain distinctions are taken as real, but allowed to be transgressed. This frame allows him to speak about distinct “cultural or religious formations” as being tools in a “repertoire” that “may be foregrounded at one time and backgrounded at another” (162) in what he calls a “serial” (100) manner, without a sense of contradiction. While he narrates experiences in the field that substantiate that something close to this is going on, this model of polyontological mobility seems at odds with his framing of the relation between things or concepts that is in play more generally. If the general relational move is to collapse distinction, such that experience is not congealed in identity but rather is experiencing continuous rupture, then how can there be multiple, distinct, ontological categories of “cultural or religious formations” to fit as objects into our “repertoire”? Even if they are taken as socially real, their inscription in experience through habitus is, by Premawardhana’s own account, a messy non-distinct business where agency, experience and social structure are not separate from one another such that the purity of these religious dimensions can be maintained. The static, object-language that Premawardhana consistently avoids in describing features of experience seems to emerge when he begins to speak about our mechanism of drawing upon disparate experiences.

 

Questions

This last point leads into some of the questions I have for these readings that I hope might be helpful for discussion:

• Does Premawardhana’s framing of continuity and rupture complicate or deny our ability to speak about particular, discrete religious experiences?
• What implications might Premawardhana’s approach to change and relation have for our discussion of the Self/Other divide in ethnography?
• To what degree should we treat religious experiences, such as conversion, as distinct and complete events within the lives of those we work with? Premawardhana is guided to contest the permanence of conversion because it’s not an accurate frame for the experiences he observes. But if we were to work with communities that both speak and (at least superficially) act as if conversion is “permanent,” to what degree ought we to seek out potential discontinuities?
• Building off of conversations from last class, how does Faith in Flux combine Western philosophical work and local experiences? How does this compare to Michael Jackson’s efforts at the same? Are there places where it is more or less effective?
• Are Premawardhana’s critiques of Robbins fair, based on the article we read for today? What from Robbins should we be careful to hold onto?