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2012 12: 386Anthropological TheoryGillian Goslinga

uncanny in anthropologySpirited encounters: Notes on the politics and poetics of representing the

  

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Anthropological Theory

12(4) 386–406

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DOI: 10.1177/1463499613479266

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Article

Spirited encounters:Notes on the politics andpoetics of representingthe uncanny inanthropology

Gillian GoslingaWesleyan University, USA

Abstract

This essay returns to two foundational ethnographies in the anthropology of spirit

phenomena by E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Vincent Crapanzano, as well as Jean Rouch’s

controversial Les Maıtres Fous, to problematize the ongoing and subtle ways in which

cultural relativism and its subsequent critiques reproduce disengagement from and

disavowal of the uncanny metaphysics of others, even while we anthropologists repre-

sent them. Arguing that the stakes of what gets to count as ‘real’ in anthropology have

had and continue to have profound consequences for how we imagine sociality as well

as practice encounter across ontological difference, I trace, with Marily Strathern, James

Clifford, and Michel de Certeau’s help primarily, how incommensurability with ‘uncanny’

phenomena is both created and sustained at three points in the anthropological project:

fieldwork, the writing of ethnography, and the reception of ethnography. I close by

advocating that we risk opening ourselves to the ontologies of others.

Keywords

Cultural, difference, epistemology, ethnography, history, Les Maıtres Fous, political

ontology, relativism, representation, spirit possession, the uncanny

To see the myth in the natural and the real in magic,

to demythologize history and to re-enchant its reified representation;

that is a first step.

Michael Taussig

Corresponding author:

Gillian Goslinga, Wesleyan University, 281 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA.

Email: ggoslinga@wesleyan.edu

In 1954, the French ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch screened a rough cutof Les Maıtres Fous to a select group of anthropologists and African intellectuals atthe Musee de L’Homme in Paris. Les Maıtres Fous, or The Crazy Masters as it istranslated in English, grew out of Rouch’s earlier work on the life of Songhaymigrants in the colonial Gold coast of Africa. The half hour rough-cut documentedin vivid detail a seance of violent Hauka spirit possession. The Hauka, spiritswhom the Songhay themselves think ‘crazy’ because of their erratic and violentbehavior, arrived in the Songhay in 1925 at the height of colonial resistance: theymimic through their mediums French and British colonialists, especially the mili-tary, or so the footage showed. Attired with rifles and pith helmets, the possessed,an eclectic group of Songhay and Zerma migrants (a town clerk, an army private,bottle washers, ditchdiggers and pickpockets), foam at the mouth and torch them-selves to prove the presence of the powerful Hauka. Eyes bulging and rolled up,they sacrifice a dog, drink its blood and, cooking it in a pot of boiling water, helpthemselves barehand to its scalding meat. They rejoice, proclaiming the event asuccess. Rouch famously juxtaposed these images with footage of a military paradein the capital, scenes from the city of Accra where the participants live, and closedhis controversial film with live ‘snapshots’ of each medium back at work the nextday, smiling and relaxed. The rough-cut he showed was soundless; Jean Rouchnarrated from the back of the room.

I first saw Les Maıtres Fous 38 years later in 1992 as a graduate teaching assist-ant for an ‘Introduction to Culture through Film’ class offered at a majorAmerican university. From its controversial beginnings, Rouch’s film had goneon to become an award-winning classic of the ethnographic genre and a staplefilm in anthropology. While critics and supporters unanimously agreed that thefilm suffered from a lack of historical and cultural contextualization, I have foundteaching this film that with or without contextualization its raw images fascinateand confuse. Paul Stoller, who is an expert on the Hauka and who can context-ualize Les Maıtres Fous better than most, reports that at each of his more than 50classroom screenings of Les Maıtres Fous one student at least has vomited (quotedin Taussig 1993).

‘Contextualization’ as a remedy for culture shock and racist gut reactions simplyfails. If Jean Rouch’s images scream a need for ‘context’ to the anthropologicallyminded, they do so because they emasculate anthropological discourse where itclaims to be most powerful: in its humanist power to explain difference. JeanRouch’s run-away images speak of ontological differences that simply refuse cap-ture by a familiarizing EuroAmerican-centric discourse. In this visual encounterwith the ‘incredible, the unthinkable’ (Stoller 1992: 160), we are confronted withthe canny question: what if the Hauka were real?

Paul Stoller has rightly argued ‘the unexplicated scenes [from Les Maıtres Fous]challenge us to decolonize our thinking, to decolonize ourselves’ (1992: 160). Thisessay takes up this challenge anew by returning critically to the politics and poetics ofencounter between anthropological discourse and the uncanny in Les Maıtres Fousand two foundational ethnographies of the uncanny: Edward Evans-Pritchard’s

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Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande and Vincent Crapanzano’sTuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. I am interested in how all three ethnographersstage the presentation of the uncanny to their publics in such a way, in the candidwords of Crapanzano, as to ‘wittingly or unwittingly . . . cause the differences todisappear in the act of translation’ (1980: 8).

To remedy this sleight of hand, Crapanzano proposes adopting a position of‘extreme cultural relativism’, arguing that differences between ‘more or less suc-cessful ways of constituting reality’ are rooted in different cultural assumptionsabout the nature of things. In what follows and with the help of MarilynStrathern’s brilliant deconstruction of the trope of the ‘context’, James Clifford’sreflections on the habitus of the fieldworker, and a little known essay by Michel deCerteau, I trace how Crapanzano’s conceptual attribution of the nature of differ-ence to cultural difference formally reproduces earlier attributions in Evans-Pritchard of the difference of witchcraft to social structure and in Jean Rouch ofspirit possession to historical experience. More to the point, I suggest they share amanner of disciplinary meaning-making that still endures, where concretes arecausally accounted for by abstract elsewheres and these mixtures of concretesand abstractions are posited as universal ontology when they ought to be moreproperly recognized as the methodological legacy of European modernity(Chakrabarty 2007; Latour 1993).

I intend this essay as a contribution to what I can only describe as an‘ontological turn’ underway among anthropologists (for example, de LaCadena 2010; Engelke 2007; Taussig 1993; Weiner 2007), science studies scholars(Barad 2003; Stengers 1995; Verran 2001), and postcolonial scholars(Chakrabarty 1997) who from their disciplinary locations are troubling inheritedontological assumptions about the metaphysics of the real, though arguably thequestion of ontological difference has been at the heart of European knowledgeever since its professional beginnings in the 19th century. In returning to twoearly classics in the anthropology of the uncanny as well as Jean Rouch’s con-troversial Les Maıtres Fous, my goal is to contribute to this turn – and to PaulStoller’s broader call ‘to decolonize our thinking’ – by unraveling, through atextual performance of sorts a family of conceptual moves that de-ontologizethe ‘reals’ of others. As practices of thinking, these conceptual moves are boundup not to a politics of epistemology as these earlier scholars contended, but to amore pernicious politics of metaphysics, whose stakes are, I would wager, civi-lizational in the old 19th-century sense. Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) speaks ofthese stakes in the context of Australian settler society relations withAboriginals as the ‘cunning of recognition’. For even as the concept of ‘culture’is hybridized, pluralized and historicized and so conceptually made more com-mensurate with what we take in our epoch to be the materiality of human life,recourse to the elsewhere of cultural knowledge to render ‘uncanny’ phenomenarecognizable at all betrays a stubborn refusal to encounter this phenomena atface value for what it might say back to us about the facts of life or, for thatmatter, of history.

388 Anthropological Theory 12(4)

Out of context: The knowledge Les Maıtres Fous confounds

Marilyn Strathern has shown how ‘context’ has been a persuasive trope of anthro-pology ever since Malinowski. Malinowski’s genius, she proposes, was to produce anew primitivism by which the difference between others and ourselves was one ofperspective, where ‘they did not use the same frames as ‘‘we’’ do through which tovisualize the world’ (1987: 259). The anthropologist stepped in to mediate thisdifference of frames, translating the perceived savagery of the other into an ‘ordin-ary’ that was, once properly contextualized, meant to be not so unlike our own.Following Clifford and Marcus (1986), she suggests that Malinowski accomplishedthis invention through the literary devices of the monograph:

the fieldwork experience was reconstructed in the monograph in such a way as to

become an organizing device for the monograph as such. Malinowski was able to

create a context for ‘new’ ideas by making much of the social and cultural context in

which individual ideas were found. [. . .] Ethnocentrism was invented both as a theor-

etical principle and as an organizing framework for writing. (Strathern 1987: 260)

The theoretical success of the monograph rested on its ability to write theOther as inhabiting a single ethnocentric culture so that the translation of the‘savage’ into the ‘ordinary’ that would be its tour de force would be thoroughlypersuasive. Ideas and behaviors that appeared bizarre to us were in fact ordinaryfor them, and presenting the cultural context for these bizarre behaviors enabledthe shift in perspective. Strathern notes that Malinowski inverted the literarystrategies of the Frazerian anthropology he wrote against: if Frazer as an evo-lutionist liberally sampled irrational beliefs and behaviors across cultures to showthe savagery still evident in civilizations everywhere in a mode akin to biblicalexegesis, Malinowski endeavored to show the ‘civilization’ inherent in individu-ally considered cases of ‘pure’ savagery (1987: 257). Erecting a staunch dichot-omy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was a vital part of his intellectual strategy and theseparation produced was naturalized in the monograph as growing out of thefieldwork experience itself.

But Malinowski’s strategic objectification of the other into a domestic and suigenesis space of ‘society’ or ‘culture’, Strathern insists, ‘was a product of a pos-itioning of the anthropologist’s own ideas (analytical frames) against those attrib-uted to his other subjects’ (1987: 260, emphasis added). Malinowski’s monographreorganized the relationship between writer, reader, and subject of study, estab-lishing distances between them by ‘manipulating one’s own concepts to conceptu-alize ones constructed as alien’ (1987: 261). Strathern is thus careful not tonaturalize the reified idea of context to grow out of the fieldwork experience aswritten through the monograph. For such naturalizing locates strangeness ‘outsidethe boundary of [culture or society] and [renders it] identifiable only in context-crossing’ (1987: 260). In other words, what Strathern persuasively shows is that theplay of differences and sameness between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is the outcome of the

Goslinga 389

conceptual methodology of anthropological discourse, in which the notion of ‘con-text’ plays a pivotal textual and organizing role.

Jean Rouch’s Les Maıtres Fous defies this tacit topography, its rules for locatingand domesticating strangeness, ironically by crossing context in an unexpecteddirection. In the film’s most famous and controversial edit, Rouch cut from theexotic image of a Hauka medium cracking an egg on a pith-helmet-shaped anthill,the ‘symbol’ of the most powerful of Hauka spirits – the Governor-General – to atop view of the white and yellow plumed casque of the actual Governor-General ofWest Niger, sitting erect on a horse in resplendent military regalia, overlooking themarching troops of his native black army in the capital of Accra. In the cut, the eggoffering takes on a satirical lucidity difficult to misrecognize. The real Governor-General, symbol of colonial authority, in contrast, takes on the flavor of the bizarreand the exotic, and the out of place. ‘The primitivism within modernism is allowedto flower’, wrote Michael Taussig of this moment (1993: 242). Who is readingwhom here? The fiction of two private cultures each responsible for its own ‘ordin-ary’ collapses in Rouch’s cut: the two ‘cultures’ miscegenate and the resultinghybrid was to be explosive for EuroAmerican audiences accustomed to the distan-cing work of an ethnocentric imagination of culture. The Hauka suddenly confrontthe film’s metropolitan publics from within a shared and lived historical immedi-acy, a confrontation colonial authorities in the region understood well and movedto repress with great brutality from the start (Stoller 1992: 99–101). The theoreticalimport of Jean Rouch’s montage is that the Hauka can no longer be contained inan othered space of culture for the film’s European publics, but instead seem toconfront within a common historical context – colonial relations – that encom-passes both subject and audience. In the cut, Jean Rouch restores an historicalparity that is revealed, persuasively, to have always been there.

Jean Rouch threw his audiences ‘out of context’ so to speak and into paroxysm:Marcel Griaule, as noted, would be furious at his protege. (I address Rouch’sAfrican publics later.) From the vantage point of intellectual work, Rouch’s tourde force was, to bring Strathern back, ‘a product of a positioning of the anthro-pologist’s own ideas (analytical frames) against those attributed to his other sub-jects’, except in this case ‘his other subjects’ were his European publics. If thevehicle that enabled Malinowski’s context crossing was a concept of culture asbounded and self-referential, Rouch crossed contexts in an opposite direction,through the figure of history, in effect enlarging the contextual frame to an encom-passing historical and pitting this enlarged view against the tacit and provincialevolutionist understandings of his audiences.

But Rouch’s real tour de force, augmented by the immediacy of film as medium,is how this ‘flash’ reorganization of knowledge so thoroughly persuades: the vividimpression is that we are restored to a truer view of the whole picture, to an actualhistorical coevalness with this African Other, despite obvious and profound cul-tural differences. As Paul Henley (2010: 128) in his remarkable re-analysis ofLes Maıtres Fous also notes, one of the consequences of this persuasive horizonfor knowledge has been that the Hauka, and other spirits and their mediums, have

390 Anthropological Theory 12(4)

been caught for the most part in an interpretive paradigm of ‘colonial mimesis’ andresistance ever since.

In a series of vignettes akin to portraits at the close of the film, Rouch shows theHauka mediums back in their everyday lives the next morning, relaxed, joyful, hardat work, and comments in his narration that, if anything, the seance is a masterfulway of coping with the tensions of survival under colonialism. (Paul Henley high-lights other details in the film that suggest a therapeutics of another kind.) I under-stand this gesture towards the private therapeutics of possession to be the inverse ofthe enlargement of the frame of analysis to the historical, training an audience’s eyeon what it would take self-evidently to be the personal node of historical processes,the psychological subject. But Rouch’s proposed therapeutics strain this common-sense on the heels of the images of the taut bodies of the mediums during the ritual,the violent staccato of their gaits, the foaming of mouths, the veins protruding fromflesh, the eyes bulging out of sockets. The preternatural bodies of the Haukamediums turned well overnight provocatively upstage the norms of civility andcomposure Rouch invokes, psychological or mimetic. Their excess leaves intactthe sense of witnessing a primitive, mute, irrational and terrifying savagery,which Jean Rouch’s African and African diaspora audiences at once understoodand loudly protested. From my point of view, whether we zoom into individualpsychology or telescope out to witness the oppressive histories in which we all findourselves as psychological subjects positioned, the sheer physicality and force ofHauka possession beckon another horizon of knowledge, demanding that we ‘slowdown’ our reasoning (Stengers 2005). How does one account for the physical featsof the possessed – the unscathed skin of hands dipped into boiling water or ofchests burnt by torches that prove the presence of the uncanny Hauka? Whatlanguage do these surreal deeds, so vividly and ontologically excessive, speak?

The management of excess: Disciplining body-to-body contactthrough civilizing ecriture

My intent in dwelling on Les Maıtres Fous has been to set the stage for an onto-logical and political disruption of anthropology’s discursive strategies for mana-ging otherness. Following Strathern, I have argued that Les Maıtres Fous operatesboth in and out of context, first by destabilizing the othering dichotomy between‘us’ and ‘them’ built into anthropology’s project of translating the ‘strange’ into acommon-sense ‘ordinary’, secondly by reorienting audiences to the historical con-text of colonial relations and their locus in psychological beings and, thirdly, bystill escaping our explanatory frameworks. But if Marilyn Strathern brought ourattention to the textual production of otherness and its translation through thetrope of context, James Clifford (1997) reminds us that the very practices of field-work are also implicated in this cross-context othering.

Provocatively, Clifford draws our attention to a normalizing (and highlyunstable) ‘discretion’ drawn at some point during fieldwork between ‘physicaland hermeneutic acts of connection’ (1997: 76). Professional fieldworkers, he

Goslinga 391

points out, do not ‘try to disappear into the field by indulging in ‘‘superficial’’ travelpractices of masquerade [or in messy sexual and other entanglements]. Their embo-died distinction suggest[s] connections at deeper, hermeneutic levels, understand-ings forged through language, co-residence, and cultural knowledge’ (1997: 74,emphasis in the original). To illustrate this point, Clifford recounts an anecdotein Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1977). Levi-Strauss, while visiting aBuddhist shrine, decides not to prostrate before the altar, as does his companion.He explains:

I did so less through self-consciousness than discretion: he knew that I did not share

his beliefs, and I would have been afraid of debasing the ritual gestures by letting him

think I considered them as mere conventions, but for once, I would have felt no

embarrassment in performing them. Between this form of religion and myself, there

was no likelihood of misunderstanding. It was not a question of bowing down in front

of idols or of adoring a supposed supernatural order, but only of paying homage to

the decisive wisdom that a thinker, or the society that created his legend, had evolved

twenty-five centuries before and to which my civilization could contribute only by

confirming it. (1977: 410–11)

‘The anthropologist’s authentic bow to Buddhism is a mental one’, reflectsClifford, ‘[Levi-Strauss] marks a line at the physical act of prostration. The lineexpresses a specific discretion, that of a visitor who looks beyond ‘‘mere conven-tions’’ or going along with appearances to a deeper level of respect based on his-torical knowledge and cultural comprehension’ (1997: 75, transposed). The‘mental’ bow serves to distinguish the anthropologist from the crude excesses ofthe ‘cosmopolitan traveler’ or the ‘tourist’ but also, at once un-self-consciously andself-righteously, translates a body-to-body contact (de Certeau 1988) into a mind-to-mind contact, or more accurately, a contact between the mind of the anthro-pologist and a cultural knowledge-made-abstract.

Clifford’s interest is with making explicit the politics of the ‘ungendered,unraced, sexually inactive’ body of the fieldworker and the eclipsing of its historicaldeterminations, including those of travel against which anthropologists havedefined their science of ‘dwelling’. But his analysis of the ‘fieldwork habitus’ power-fully brings into relief a structure of encounter at once idealized, represented andembodied in a set of practices as an encounter between concepts (‘a connection atthe hermeneutic level’). The excesses of body-to-body contact are, at least in theoryif not always so easily in actual experience, purified into concepts through thedifficult work of keeping a mental discretion operant in the field (Latour 1993).His analysis conjoins with Strathern’s, supporting her claim that what anthropolo-gists mediate are ideas. But what Clifford adds is the embodied aspect of thismediation: the concept of ‘culture’ emerges, quite literally, as the mind-placewhere contact is discretely made in the field. The embodied practices of recognizingculture in the field (having natives inform on their cultural mores, learning thelanguage, participating but not to the point of sexual relationships, etc.) and the

392 Anthropological Theory 12(4)

abstract construction of culture thus circularly reinforce each other during fieldworkin a flawless tautology. Furthermore, by bringing our attention to the unmarkedbody of the fieldworker and the work done to produce this unmarking, Cliffordalso draws our attention to the over-marked body of the other. This is a body madeto signify so prolifically, a body so culturally and historically saturated that itanticipates the ‘reading’ expertise of the anthropologist. His analysis raises, Ithink, the much more provocative insight that the same habitus that disciplinesthe body of the fieldworker also disciplines the body of the Other into speaking the‘common’ idea of ‘culture’ (or ‘history’).

If, as I am proposing, the phenomenon of spirit possession poses a challenge tothe ontological assumptions that make this kind of anthropological discourse pos-sible, this last disciplining of the other into a semiotically readable cultural text hasprofound consequences for knowledge and power as well as the politics of ourencounters with ‘our’ others. For we can speak of an ontologically evacuation inthis move. Michel de Certeau makes the same point in an important but littleknown essay, ‘Ethno-graphy, Speech or the Space of the Other: Jean de Lery’(1988), where he suggestively, and ironically for my purposes, compares a figurehe argues is prototypical of the anthropologist, the explorer-missionary of the 16thcentury, with his compatriot at home, the exorcist (1988: 233).

Both these figures, de Certeau asserts, assign to themselves the task of expellingwitches, those unruly beings who consort with spirit(s), the one from foreign lands,the other from the countryside at home. Both find this difficult to do: the ‘Sabbath’world of witches and natives – ‘festive, prohibited, threatening’, in other words, fullof spirit/s and carnivalesque – disturbs proper (bourgeois, Protestant) discourseeven as it tantalizes and seduces. De Certeau contends that the ethnological projecthas its origins in these efforts at domesticating this unruly, grotesque other. Thedomesticating means is ecriture, the instrument of writing:

. . . the decisive element [was] the possession or privation of an instrument that can at

the same time ‘keep things in all their purity’ (as Lery would remark) and stretch all

the way ‘to the other end of the world.’ In combining the power to keep the past (while

the primitive ‘fable’ forgets and loses its origin) with that of indefinitely conquering

distance (while the primitive ‘voice’ is limited to the vanishing circle of its auditors),

writing produces history. (1988: 215, emphasis in the original)

Writing civilizes because it enables the ‘expansionist labor of knowledge’ that ishistory from a center which itself does not travel – the author. This labor takes theform of the crusade: de Lery conquers and converts the alterity of things (thefantastical flora, fauna and humans) by translating this alterity into the ‘discourseof an effectivity’, that is, into a sign. Explains de Certeau, ‘What separates theWestern world from the [Tupi] world is no longer an array of [fantastical] things[or behaviors], but their appearance – essentially a foreign language. From stateddifference there only remains a language to be translated’ (1988: 223, emphasis inthe original). This conversion plays out literally in de Lery’s text: a massive

Goslinga 393

dictionary of the Tupi language inaugurates his journey home in the second half ofhis Histoire, concrete evidence that a conversion has been accomplished. As deCerteau maps them out, the ‘theoretical’ moves that operate in de Lery’s text arethoroughly modern: a spatiality between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is produced by literarymeans; this spatiality conjures an enigma in the form of a ‘rift’ between an aesthe-ticized exteriority and a meaningful interiority. Textuality becomes the space of thisproduction and language itself ‘moves from the affirmation of a conviction to aposition of knowledge’ (1988: 225). Concludes de Certeau: ‘Here is a discourse thatcomprehends the world’ which lets ‘primitive reality pass into Western discourse’(1988: 224–5, emphasis in the original). The uncanny other is exorcized by means of‘circum-scription’, a civilizing, historicizing discourse that comprehends the world.

De Certeau, however, is more interested, as am I, in what does not get capturedby this staging. Jean de Lery’s 16th-century civilizing ecriture is as yet tenuous andunstable (as is Rouch’s historicism in 1953). The missionary recognizes that some-thing escapes his instrument of writing: he is ‘ravished’ by the ecstatic moans andjoyful screams of the Tupi while they feast. De Certeau explains: ‘Whereas theobject beheld can be written – made homogeneous with the linearities of statedmeaning and constructed space – the voice can create an aparte, opening a breachin the text and restoring a contact of body to body’ (1988: 235). ‘Voice’ enchantswhile ‘speech’ civilizes. ‘Voice’ is ‘speech without writing’, pleasure.

But de Certeau’s point is even more astute. He proposes that the very pleasure inthe breach between ‘ecriture’ and ‘voice’ produces an erotics of the other thatrelentlessly drives the anthropological project: ‘The savage becomes a senselessspeech ravishing Western discourse, but one which, because of that very fact, gen-erates a productive science of meaning and objects that endlessly writes’ (1988: 236,emphasis added). Whereas body-to-body contact could produce a knowing – arelating – of another order, de Certeau remarks that ‘visible marks of alterity [infact] do not posit other truths or another discourse but found a language upon itsoperative capacity for bringing this foreign exteriority back to sameness’ (1988:227, emphasis added). In other words, the other is ontologically evacuated, coveredover (Dussel 1995) through re-inscription into a fetishized abstract space of signi-fication, a discourse, which has the distinct advantage of traveling (multiplyingcultures or historicities) without ever leaving the center (the anthropologist’s dis-course and ideas, the world of authors) (see also Asad 1993: 55–79).

The paradox, then, is that this excess of body-to-body contact is necessary forthe ‘discourse of an effectivity’ to successfully operate its trick of converting‘voice’ into ‘true speech’. This means that the space of the other must by neces-sity be rendered as unstable, on the one hand, and, on the other, vigilantlymanaged discursively, to ensure that it stabilizes as the right kind of enigmafor modern knowledge. When the alterity of the other is taken outright to positother truths or other discourses, as for example was the case of CarlosCastaneda’s work with a Yaqui shaman in the 1960s or more recently EdithTurner’s work with ritual healers (1994, 2005), the discipline publicly objects ortheoretically dismisses.

394 Anthropological Theory 12(4)

I turn next to Evans-Pritchard’s and Crapanzano’s classic texts in the anthro-pology of spirit phenomena – which I define broadly as phenomena that presup-pose the existence of nonhuman agents (spirits, witchcraft force, ancestors, ghosts,and so on) – and trace the ways in which these ground-breaking ethnographersmanaged ontological risk and body-to-body excess in their fieldwork. I also want toshow how this excess nonetheless escapes, in their very texts, their discursive stra-tegies. We need to note that each text proposed a novel frame of analysis in its dayand so, like Jean de Lery’s utility to de Certeau, Evans-Pritchard and Crapanzanohelp me see these as yet forming conceptual strategies. Evans-Pritchard’sWitchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1976 [1931]) intended to dem-onstrate that the difference between the civilized and the primitive lay not in a‘pre-logical’ mentality, as his interlocutor Levy-Bruhl had argued, but rather in‘differences in the social context of their intellectual analysis’ (Luhrmann 1989:347). The persuasiveness of Evans-Pritchard’s work lay in the richness of his ethno-graphic descriptions and the logical acuity with which he wove them into a theoryof Azande social structure. In other words, Evans-Pritchard was instrumental inlaying out not only a theory of social structure but also an ontology of the social, inthat the ‘social’ under his pen accrued a visible and intelligible empiricity corro-borated by ethnographic detail. My second case study, Crapanzano’s Tuhami:Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), openly struggles, as we shall see, with the conceptualand practical legacies of this earlier social ontology but does not fully break from it.De Certeau might say that, as ethnography, it cannot.

Evans-Pritchard spots a witchcraft light

There is actually not much ontological risk evident in Evans-Pritchard’s master-fully written Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. His one account ofpersonal contact with witchcraft happens in his introduction and serves, as I readit, to demarcate his expert authority. He writes, and I quote at length:

I have only once seen witchcraft on its path. I had been sitting in my hut writing notes.

About midnight, before retiring, I took a spear and went for my usual nocturnal stroll.

I was walking in the garden at the back of my hut, amongst banana trees, when I

noticed a bright light passing at the back of my servants’ huts towards the homestead

of a man called Tupoi. As this seemed worth investigation I followed its passage until

a grass screen obscured the view. I ran quickly through my hut to the other side in

order to see where the light was going to, but did not regain sight of it. I knew that

only one man, a member of my household, had a lamp that might have given off so

bright a light, but next morning he told me that he had neither been out late at night

nor had he used his lamp. There did not lack ready informants to tell me that what I

had seen was witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, on the same morning, an old relative of

Tupoi and an inmate of his homestead died. This event fully explained the light I had

seen. I never discovered its real origin, which was possibly a handful of grass lit by

someone on his way to defecate, but the coincidence of the direction along which the

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light moved and the subsequent death accorded well with Zande ideas. (1976: 11; empha-

sis added)

This passage is noteworthy for the repertoire of figures that it uses to negotiatethe enigma of a spirit phenomenon: we have the industrious fieldworker, workingon field notes late into the night; the well-adjusted fieldworker, taking his presum-ably Azande spear for his nightly walk and living like the natives in a homestead;the unafraid rationalist – no Azande would dream of taking a walk at night we aretold earlier, as witches are most active at night; the thorough scientist – ‘as thisseemed worthy of investigation’ – and the ever skeptical empiricist – ‘I never dis-covered its real origin’. Each of these images establishes the unquestionable author-ity and integrity of Evans-Pritchard-the-social-scientist. His alternative hypothesis,that the light might possibly be accounted for by ‘a handful of grass lit by someoneon his way to defecate’, produces a comical effect of catachresis: if you can forgivethe crude language, the hullabaloo might have been all about shit!

The paragraph nonetheless plays the enigma of witchcraft beautifully, master-fully poised on the tightrope between belief and dis-belief, where ‘naive’ belief ishumorously, but perhaps not so innocently, qualified by an association with feces.The natives are either simpletons mistaking a commonplace light for witchcraft orthere may be some empirical veracity to their accounts of witchcraft: the sighting infact accords with their beliefs. The natives Evans-Pritchard goes on to show are infact not simpletons at all, even if they are unscientific, but for reasons they them-selves are not conscious of. At the conclusion of the book, he lists 22 reasons whyAzande magic forms a ‘logical’ belief system, explaining every ambiguity andcontradiction in belief through particular details of Azande social practices(1976: 201–4). The Azande, for their part, are not aware of these ambiguities orcontradictions because they are unable to abstract across contexts: ‘they do notgeneralize their observations’ (1976: 202). In fact, they shouldn’t, because wide-spread fear of witchcraft has a necessary social function: it reinforces local hier-archies and customs as violations are believed to cause witchcraft attacks (1976:200). Evans-Pritchard answers the enigma of witchcraft through an analytical con-struction that has the force of empirical fact: Azande beliefs are literally the gluethat holds Azande social structure together (subconsciously for them) while the‘hidden’ Azande social structure is the glue – by way of function – that holds theirbelief system together, in a flawless circular logic. This circularity, I would argue,only clear to the anthropologist, reinforces the theory’s truth-claim.

In this construction, the substantive alterity of the witchcraft light is translatedinto the conceptual problem of how a group’s beliefs function within a given socialworld. The usefulness of Evans-Pritchard’s ‘social structure’ is that it resolves theproblem by serving both as an ‘instance of’ and a general and universal ‘empirical’principle (see Verran 2001; Chakrabarty 1997). Unlike the Azande, Evans-Pritchard can generalize – that is, think – across contexts, and this hermeneuticability enables him (and his publics) to visualize the relationship between patternand function through concrete examples. This double work of ‘social structure’ is

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what enables him to repatriate Azande alterity into a semiotic ecriture withoutengaging with this alterity in the least. The ontological real of the Azande becomesdiscursive fiction (‘beliefs’), the ‘discourse of an effectivity’, in de Certeau’s lan-guage, waiting to be deciphered by the author-anthropologist. And, although it isbeyond the scope of this short essay to show how, anthropologists often do know-ledge as Evans-Pritchard did, by substituting in lieu of ‘social structure’ anynumber of empirically appearing schemas that resolve the ontological enigmas sofrequently occasioned by the ‘reals’ of others. Evans-Pritchard’s genius lay in theprotean possibilities for anthropologists of a metaphysics of the social simultan-eously generalizable and particularizable, one in which the ethnographer never hadto leave the center of his own discursive world.

Practicing ethnography, though, does periodically threaten the conceptualboundary between what the fieldworker understands to be cultural ‘belief’ andwhat he knows to be empirically ‘real’, the context – in Evans-Pritchard’s case,social structure – that conditions these beliefs. Evans-Pritchard concedes that asensitive, polite fieldworker will end up at least half-believing while in the field,caught up as he must become in the lives of his subjects. A very real tensionthus emerges in the practice of fieldwork, like the voice/speech aparte de Certeautheorizes. If the belief/social structure must hold, this tension in turnsthreatens beliefs at home with relativism as well, a dilemma Evans-Pritchard waswell aware of:

We do not think that witchcraft exists, but we have been taught that God does, so we

do not here feel that we have to account for an illusion. We have only to describe how

a people think of what we both regard as a reality and how in various ways the belief

influences their lives. The atheist, however, is faced with the same problem as with

witchcraft and feels the need to account for an illusion by various psychological or

sociological hypotheses. I admit that this is a very difficult philosophical question, for

it might reasonably be asked why, other than in faith, should one accept God and not

witchcraft, since it could be held, as many anthropologists do, that the evidence for the

one is no greater than for the other. (1976: 246)

I would like to suggest that this ‘very difficult philosophical question’ growsout of the conceptual apparatus that Evans Pritchard sets up as the nature ofbelief, and not, as he posits above, out of the ambiguous nature of belief itself(see Engelke 2002: 8). In this passage, Evans-Pritchard naturalizes his own the-oretical assumption that belief is a socially organized surface standing in for adeeper and more binding hence more real structural empiricity. His experientialknowledge in the field – where ‘acting as if’ leads to a knowing of a particularkind, even for a person ‘conditioned’ as himself to believe otherwise – butts upagainst his theoretical position. To remain faithful to his sociological empiricism,Evans-Pritchard can only resort to the defense that his own cultural conditioningwill ‘naturally’ be more binding than his field experience for having grown up init. Cultural relativism steps in, but precariously, to conserve his theory of social

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structure that the ‘excess’ of his field experience threatens to rattle, even whilethis very excess is what generates and invites both the theory and itscontestation.

It is interesting how the whole proposition is at once fragile and robust.What accounts for its strength is its very fragility. The concept of culture as‘belief’ works to de-realize the excesses of fieldwork by transforming them intoproductive theoretical problems for anthropology to solve: more thinking andmore writing. Thus, cultural relativism as interpretive method patrols theboundary that the idea of culture naturalizes between us and them by main-taining a conceptual symmetry (we all live within social structures). Not unlikethe historical parity Jean Rouch restored with his mimetic cut in Les MaıtresFous, the democratic valence (here same as there) adds to the truth-value of theproposition.

Turning to Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, we shall see that VincentCrapanzano finds himself caught in a more serious version of Evans-Pritchard’sconfrontation with excess because, in part, his subject is a person. I offer a closereading of his text to show how he also works his way out of the challenge.

Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami: Excess that won’t bemanaged away

Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, written in 1980, is a deeply moving account ofVincent Crapanzano’s relationship with one of his informants during his fieldresearch of the Hamadsha possession cults of Morocco. The book announcedthe crisis of representation in anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986) pre-cisely for how it flirted with differential ontology, the theoretical ‘problem’ thebook centrally sets out to resolve. Crapanzano’s informant Tuhami is ‘married’to the camel-footed demoness ‘A’isha Qandisha, who plays an important role inthe cults he is studying. The book chronicles with stunning honesty and vul-nerability, and enacts in its literary choices, the anthropologist’s failure to elicitfrom Tuhami a coherent life history that might provide the clues that wouldcontextualize the old man’s life-long possession. Crapanzano’s efforts to makesense of this possessed person through psychoanalytical and semiotic framesstrain and eventually unravel. The anthropologist (and his readers) becomesmore and more aware that neither he nor the theories he tries out onTuhami can contain this man’s fantastical narrative, let alone his complexhumanity. Tuhami and ‘A’isha Qandisha escape him both. Faced ‘with differ-ence that does not resolve formally’, Crapanzano speaks of an ‘epistemologicalvertigo’ where ‘the very constitution of reality is at stake’ (1980: 8), but herefuses to cause ‘the differences to disappear in the act of translation’. Theresult is a groundbreaking text about the realist pretenses of anthropology,one of the first of its kind.

Crapanzano is disconcertingly honest about the asymmetries that exist betweenhimself and his subject Tuhami. Obscured by the translation work and time lag of

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ethnographic writing, these asymmetries, he astutely remarks, are ‘defensive man-euvers’ that slip in to protect his own sense of the real:

Even today, as I write, such defensive maneuvers come into play. Indeed, at some level,

my literary enterprise must be conceived in such terms. I have difficulty, both stylistic-

ally and psychologically, in distinguishing the time of encounter from the time of writ-

ing. For Tuhami, I have my notes; for myself, I have only my memory. (1980: 139)

With this disclosure, Crapanzano (unlike Evans-Pritchard) seriously undermineshis authority to explicate Tuhami. Tuhami’s unhappy possession by ‘A’isharemains an inscrutable, indomitable enigma which he admits he cannot entirelycrack. The ‘epistemological vertigo’ produced, he argues, demands ‘a position ofextreme cultural relativism’ (1980: 8).

By refusing to write over inscrutable differences, Crapanzano can now recognizethat ‘Tuhami’s tale is ontologically different from the subject of those tales withwhich we in the West are familiar’ (1980: 7, emphasis added). The untranslatabledifference between Tuhami and ‘us’ is that, for Tuhami and Moroccans, ‘A’ishaQandisha is real. ‘To look at the saint and the jinniyya as simply symbols, ofwhatever status’, explains Crapanzano, ‘is to lose sight of their most importantfeature for the Moroccan: their facticity, their givenness in and for themselves’(1980: 75). Unlike Evans-Pritchard, who 40 years earlier finds it not too difficultto dismiss the witchcraft lights that the Azande see, Crapanzano, writing at adifferent moment in history, cannot in good conscience write away the givennessof demons for Moroccans. Crapanzano brushes up with startling honesty againstthe alterity of the other on its own terms and not as it is construed after this alterityhas been transmuted into an effect of some deeper meaning or structure.

However, no sooner than he does, another defensive maneuver occurs, forCrapanzano at once transmutes this ontological difference into an epistemologicalone. The authentic problem, he proposes, is that our Western understanding of thereal collapses into the true (1980: 9). If we were to give up ‘our pretension ofcollapsing the real and the true’, he argues, Tuhami’s fantastic, exotic tale can bereal without having to be true. The givenness of saints and jnunn would constituteTuhami’s ‘cultural idiom’, just as in our own culture schizophrenia may be the‘idiom’ with which we explain such a fantastical state of being. Both states of beingare real, but both are also not true, in the sense that their ‘idioms’ are metaphorical,cultural: ‘The Other [the radically other spirit] may very well be the empty space ofdesire that can be described only metaphorically’ (1980: 9). Schizophrenic visionsand spirits alike must be understood as ‘explanatory concepts’ in the ‘dialectics ofidentity formation’. He concludes that ‘the difference is perhaps simply that in theone instance the Westerner is willing to accept the conspiratorial reification thatprovides him with a satisfying explanation, but in the other he is unwilling to enterthe conspiracy’ (1980: 22). ‘Culture’ as the (psychoanalytically construed) uncon-scious matrix of identity everywhere enables such local ‘conspiratorial reifications’and a multiplication of ‘truths’.

Goslinga 399

By admitting that Tuhami remains an enigma, Crapanzano advances the‘simple’ relativism of Evans-Pritchard that ties public beliefs to a culturally privatesocial structure. But rather than critically evaluating the stakes of this receivedwisdom as a package, Crapanzano retains the boundary that simultaneously sep-arates ‘us’ from ‘them’ and accounts for this difference through the trope of thecontext. In effect, he relativizes twice over, compounding Evans-Pritchard’s‘simple’ relativism. What allows him to do this without experiencing too muchcognitive dissonance is that this twice-over relativizing maintains the perfect sym-metry between ‘us’ and ‘them’. If simple cultural relativism contains at its heart whatEvans-Pritchard rightly recognized as a ‘very difficult philosophical question’,namely, why our belief in God would be different from their belief in spirits,Crapanzano’s compounded cultural relativism does away with this problem byasserting that both our and their beliefs are metaphorical constructs and thenature of belief is such that belief itself ontologically constitutes reality throughculturally shared ‘conspirational reifications’.

In the end we are just like them, once more, or they are just like us, but in thisinstance with respect to how belief functions culturally. By inverting Evans-Pritchard’s logic (reality produces cultural belief to cultural belief produces reality)and swapping ‘social structure’ with ‘conceptual reifications’ while retaining theformer’s metaphysical function (the real ground of meaning), what is held constantbetween the two is the empty trope of context or culture but now persuasivelyscaled out to encompass both Tuhami and Crapanzano in its workings.Crapanzano can thus do away with the dizziness of ontological vertigoswhere two true reals might vie with each other. Make both of them untrue realsfor the same reason and the problem more or less goes away. One mighthave to acquiesce to the failure of anthropology to bridge these two untrue reals,but this failure is an honest and very poignant one because it is the inevitable resultof the way in which the very nature of the real operates everywhere (i.e. beliefstructures ontology). A new universal is re-inscribed and naturalized and,once again, the social anthropologist need not heed the ontology of his inform-ants but retains his position of cultural broker, albeit now a profoundly melan-cholic one.

There is irony here. The one statement Crapanzano repeatedly can make aboutthe givenness of Tuhami’s saints and jnuns is that, in the dialectics of identityformation, their givenness means that an individual is not accountable for hisaffective world or his actions. He explains:

‘The conflict between adequacy and inadequacy, potency and impotence, superiority

and inferiority, aggressiveness and passivity, maleness and femaleness, animus and

anima – it matters little what idiom we use here – is expressed and resolved on a stage

external to the individual. This symbolic expression and resolution of conflict has

the singular advantage of shifting responsibility from self to saint and demon, who

resonate with feelings and sentiments grounded within the personal history of the

individual’ (1980: 76).

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The irony is that this shifting of responsibility is not so different from the shifting ofresponsibility that operates in Crapanzano’s text and thinking when he displacesTuhami’s enigma unto a newly conceptualized meta-level of his own discourse,which equally appears to him as also having an existence exterior to his ownself. This isomorphism reinforces Crapanzano’s point, in flawless tautological fash-ion: we are all caught up in this fundamental human ‘defensive maneuver’, anthro-pologist as well as informant. Crapanzano and Tuhami pass each other by as twoships in the dark night of extreme cultural relativism.

My argument is that this restored symmetry, however politically proper for thepost-colonial epoch, is a trompe-l’oeil, the outcome of a twice-over application ofthe cultural relativism move, itself the outcome of a historical discursive strategywhose initial aim was to realize the real in such a way as to retain the authoritativeprivilege of an expert intellectual at a proper remove from the uncanny ontologiesof others (Favret-Saada 1980). Crapanzano de-realizes this ‘real’ with a candor thathas greatly benefited anthropology since Tuhami, but he does so in the direction ofa re-materialization. The shadows in Plato’s cave dance a little more vigorously,and have more defined outlines, after Crapanzano and the literary turn in anthro-pology. The authority of the anthropologist is undermined, to be sure, but not thediscursive strategies through which the anthropologist locates and explicates the real,whether it’s the true real or the untrue. Anthropologists, texts, and publics now seethrough ‘empirical’ universals: culture as human process.

Universalist ontologist claims indeed pepper Crapanzano’s text, such as ‘theboundaries of self, of inner and outer life, and the source and location of motiv-ation – or desire, as the word I prefer – must be recognized as essentiallymetaphorical’ (1980: 21). The real may not be as solidly empirical as he (or func-tionalist-structuralists) once imagined; however, this de-materialized real remains afoundational ground of meaning. His notion of ‘culture’ appeals to a compellinghumanist universalism, much as Jean Rouch’s therapeutics of possession do inLes Maıtres Fous, reinforcing their ubiquitous naturalness. All one has to do ischange the analytical frame, but the center doesn’t move. The ontological possibi-lities Crapanzano opens by acknowledging the givenness of the demoness are in thevery same moment foreclosed to knowledge, much as the ontological possibilitiesof the witchcraft light were in Evans-Pritchard’s text or the feats of Hauka bodiesin Les Maıtres Fous.

A crack in the fetishized surface of Crapanzano’s extremeculture relativism

Tuhami frames itself candidly as an encounter between an anthropologist and aninformant. Progressively, the anthropologist becomes self-conscious of himself asthe representative of a discipline and of his informant as a person endowed with ahumanity he cannot ignore. The politics of this encounter are brilliantly articulatedand deconstructed in Crapanzano’s text. I have so far objected to their resolutioninto a perfect symmetry; this symmetry is discursively produced and rests on the

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continued silence/silencing of Tuhami’s possessed being. In other words, Tuhami’spossession is an enigma that still cannot speak for itself. Though Crapanzano’s textappears uneven – he refuses closure, interrupts and undermines his authority – histext nonetheless reassembles itself almost effortlessly into theoretical coherence(a broadening of the frame of analysis) where all is a negotiation of ‘culturalidioms’ in the universal human work of identity formation.

And yet there is a ‘crack’ in this restored veneer, one that would suggest anequivalence (Stengers 2005) between Crapanzano and Tuhami of an order differentthan extreme cultural relativism. This ‘crack’ I found in a footnote, towards the endof the book. Crapanzano has explained, powerfully, that ‘to experience the Otheras a subject through the full range of his emotions is not an act of passive cogni-tion’, but this mandate also plunges the anthropologist into a dilemma of inten-tionality, for the anthropologist must retain his ‘ethnographic distance’ in order todo science. As soon as Tuhami comes to matter to Crapanzano as a person,Crapanzano finds he can no longer do science (1981: 141–2). This realization crys-tallizes just before he is to leave the field. Tuhami shares a series of dreams that, inCrapanzano’s psychoanalytical register, betray that his informant has grownattached. Again reaching for symmetry, Crapanzano regrets that he has no exactrecord of his own dreams of that time, since his dreams might reciprocally evidencethat Tuhami mattered also to him. He vaguely recalls a dream fragment he had inParis, after he had left, in which Tuhami, from the courtyard of a saint’s tomb,smiles at him. This dream prompts the memory of another, which he footnotes:

I should point out that in Paris, several weeks before my arrival in Morocco,

I dreamed anxiously that I was trapped in a saint’s tomb – it was white and damp

like clay – and that I was rescued by a woman’s brown hand that pulled me through a

slit-like window. When I first came to Meknes, several Hamadsha [men from the cult

of saints/jnuns that he came to study], who were still suspicious of me, asked if I had

ever dreamed about Morocco. I told them the dream, and they said that it meant that

‘A’isha Qandisha had sent for me. One of them, a muqaddim, began to call me

‘Tahush’– the name of an important jinn, he explained, laughing. My relations with

the Hamadsha improved immensely thereafter. (1981: 142)

Bracketing for a moment Crapanzano’s assumptions that his anxiety about field-work caused the dream and that its value was to serendipitously build rapport withhis informants, the interpretation that remains, as the Hamadsha decide, is that‘A’isha Qandisha herself authorized the anthropologist’s fieldwork. Looking at theencounter this way, from the perspective of the Moroccans taken at face value,Crapanzano is interpellated into the ontology of his informants. Furthermore,this ontology is not neatly demarcated geographically or culturally, as culturalrelativism in all its guises would have it, for Crapanzano is an American and hedreams of ‘A’isha in Paris before he begins fieldwork. In Crapanzano’s own inter-pretation, everything refers back to himself. He is the referent of his own reality andhe projects that other realities have other human beings as their referents also. From

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the perspective of the Moroccans, one could say that ‘reality’ does not exclusivelyattach itself to human beings ‘culturally’, nor does it emerge out of the figure of the‘human’ and certainly not out of the humanist subject in full possession ofhimself. If one foregrounds body-to-body contact, this dream – marginalized in afootnote – reveals how the elegant symmetries professed by Crapanzano’s theory ofextreme cultural relativism are not fully bi-lateral. From the perspective of theMoroccans, the boundary between cultures does not fall in the same place(a national or cultural frontier), nor is it organized by the same ontological invest-ments and commitments. These two worlds do miss each other as ships in the night,but not for the reasons Crapanzano imagines.

I wonder what kind of fieldwork Crapanzano would have done if his dream hadmattered in ways other than for a privatized subject. For the privatized subject, thedream has no theoretical value, except for its utility in gaining access or as anexpression of a private psyche. But what if Crapanzano had introduced thisdream into his encounter with Tuhami? Might it not have fundamentally upsetthe power balance between the two men, creating a parity of another order betweenthem? What other understandings of the real might have emerged if they hadencountered each other as ontological equals, dreaming in the same idiom? Ithink ‘culture’ would then don a fantastical elasticity, particular to each encounterand saturated with a roomy historicity, and the real of ethnographic writing mightthen genuinely express the specificities of place, time, and history.

Conclusion: The value of partial connections

Crapanzano’s account resolves in a failure, a failure he attributes to the doomedproject of anthropology. Though he came close, Evans-Pritchard was blind to thissame failure in his account of Azande witchcraft because of his unshakeable faith inthe binding ontology of social structure. While Jean Rouch’s vivid images ofHauka possession exceed explanatory frameworks, they easily default in a19th-century imaginary of savagery and primitivism. Rouch can only cast failureas the failed humanism of Europe.

The dream I rescue from Crapanzano’s footnote is indeed a small crack in theveneer of a tenacious cultural relativism more properly understood as a politicaland intellectual project with deep roots in Europe’s civilizational ambitions. Eventoday, in our post-reflexive and post-humanist moment, writing against culture(Abu-Lughod 1991) is a more daunting task than is assumed. The magical forceof culture conceived as ‘context’ – its power to give us what Marilyn Stratherndescribes as ‘a numerical vision’ of life (1995: 53) – is truly protean, transposingagain and again and in toto what it encounters into more of itself and more foritself. The thinking practices of the discipline remain beholden to context as cir-cumscription; the center (the thinking anthropologist) holds steady; only the scopeand scale of analytical frames shape-shift (Strathern 2002). Concretes mingle withabstractions that in turn persuasively appear as deeper empirical materialities. ThusPeter Geschiere (1997) can consider witchcraft solely as a way to understand the

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contradictions of Cameroonian modernity and James Smith (2008) as a wayto understand development discourses in Kenya, while occult economies(e.g. Comaroff 1993) reveal the perpetual undead of capital and zar spirits(e.g. Boddy 1989) are at bottom about gender oppression. Even these most sensi-tive and ethnographically rich readings of the uncanny transpose as their first andlast analytical move the ontology of their subjects onto their theoretical constructsas if these theoretical constructs have the same ontological make up as spirits, orthe same origins and histories (cf. de La Cadena 2010).

The question of ontological difference is rarely posed. More recently, the turn toglobal health as a way to frame the therapeutics of spirit possession unfortunatelyreturns us to a barely disguised evolutionist-cum-relativist metaphysics where bio-medicine confronts spirit possession as different historical choices on a contempor-ary menu. The trope of ‘medical pluralism’ recognizes and documents difference butfilters this difference through the ‘numerical vision’ of a world already domained bythe anthropologist. When anthropologists do foreground these other ontologies intheir texts, coevally, in dialogical encounter, they often find themselves caught in adangerous crossing full of professional risk (for example Favret-Saada 1980: 7).

How, then, might we make difference count for an understanding of power andknowledge that does not exile our others’ lived ontologies or our own? That mightrestore coeval dialogue as opposed to monologue (Bird Rose 2004: 28)?.

Marilyn Strathern asks us to restore the ‘strong presence’ of others in anthro-pology. She muses, with some irony I think: ‘To be able to conceive of persons asmore than atomistic individuals but less than subscribers to a holistic communityof shared meaning would be of immediate interest for comparative analysis’ (1995:52). Michel de Certeau puts his hopes in the metaphorical power of ‘voice’, ‘thevery ruse that subverts the word’. He muses:

Through these metaphorical eruptions of fable and these lapses of meaning, voice,

exiled to the distant shores of discourse, would flow back, and with it would come the

murmurs and ‘noises’ so distinct from scriptural reproduction. Thus an exteriority,

with neither beginning nor truth, would return to visit discourse. (1987: 236, emphasis

added)

The Songhay are less heady about this dilemma and more pragmatic. One of theirproverbs suggests, ‘The uninitiated cannot join the circle of possession dancers’(quoted in Stoller 1992: 161). Without practicing something oneself, there is little toknow.

My own modest suggestion is to remain attentive, as a matter of course, to boththe intellectual histories of our thinking practices and the delightfully heteroge-neous materialities of our worlds.

Acknowledgements

James Clifford, Donna Haraway, Triloki Pandey and Lisa Rofel were instrumental at thegenesis of this essay and I extend my sincere thanks to them for their tutelage and for

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inspiring my thinking. Gelya Frank and Janet Hoskins offered important suggestions as I

was revising, as did Margot Weiss, who also helped with the onerous task of cutting theoriginal much longer draft down to the required word count. Finally, I owe a great debt toPaul Stoller both for his incisive comments on a near final draft and for his openness to the

world, and to my work. All interpretive and factual errors are my own.

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Gillian Goslinga is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science in Society atWesleyan University. She researches social and physical phenomena that vexmodern and postmodern metaphysics and knowledge classifications. Her currentbook project, Virgin Birth in South India: The Order of Things and the Making ofLife, is about contemporary virgin birth ‘beliefs’ (births without biological causal-ity) at a famous Tamil temple during the years Tamil Nadu was opening its mar-kets to the new reproductive technologies in the 2000s. Goslinga is also anethnographic filmmaker. Her latest film, The Poojari’s Daughter (DER, 2010), isabout a Tamil goat sacrificial ritual officiated unusually by a woman priest.

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