User:Wound theology/ontology


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 * "Drawing briefly on an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which Cuban cult practitioners use oracles, the article seeks to formulate a radically alternative concept of truth. This viewpoint eschews common premises about the role of 'representation' in the pursuit of truth in favor of a notion of truth as 'conceptual redefinition'.
 * Arguably, anthropology's defining characteristic is that it is "oriented toward difference -- what used sometimes to be called 'the Other' and is now often designated as 'alterity'." For Holbraad, "alterity proper must be construed in ontological rather than epistemological terms."
 * Questions pertain to 'worlds' rather than 'worldviews'
 * Holbraad argues that "thinking of truth in epistemological terms" inhibits our understanding of truth in Ifá divination
 * Analysts charged with deriving an "alternative conceptualization of truth -- one that does not make nonsense of diviners' own claims." Instead of understanding truth in terms of representation, but rather in terms of 'ontological operation.' "[D]ivination brings novel entities forth into existence."
 * Holbraad's argument is recursive: the attempt to redefine truth as an act of redefinition must count as an act of truth by its own measure.
 * 'Ontographic' approach, charting out the "ontological presuppositions required to make sense of a given body of ethnographic material."
 * "An easy way to tag alterity would be to say that it comprises data that resist collection."
 * Alterity is intimately related to truth.
 * The 'difference' of alterity initially takes the form of negation.
 * "Divination appears 'alter' to the extent that it negates a number of key notions that I -- not as a person, but as an analyst -- would assume to be obvious: that deities do not really exist [etc]..."
 * Anthropologists treat negation as the cause of alterity. The flawed syllogism: Cubans use oracles. "We" do not because we do not believe in them. Therefore, Cubans must believe in oracles. Negative projection: "we are basically in the business of representing others' concepts and practices that are not only interesting but also available to us (i.e., understood) as negations of our own."
 * Ifá diviners (babalawos) emphasize that their oracle is infallible: "Ifá no se equivoca" and "en Ifá no hay mentiras"
 * "Ifá speaks past, present, and future."
 * Clients, as well as or including anthropologists, are liable to confuse the oracles as normative, falsifiable truth-claims
 * Babalawos invite us to "imagine an alternative concept of truth -- one that ought not to be defined by opposition to falsehood."
 * A distinction between truth-functional definitions and 'inventive definitions'
 * Inventive definition: a speech act that inaugurates a new meaning by combining two or more previously unrelated meanings. Such a definition cannot be an ordinary truth-functional claim. They are not predicative truth claims.
 * The oracle prouncounes definitions which redefine things.
 * Ifá divination and initiation denies the distinction between concepts (or meanings) and things (or people) is axiomatic
 * Predication presupposes the 'common' distinction between world and word, whereas the inventive definition does not
 * "So when a diviner says that his oracle tells no lies and makes no mistakes, we mobilize our ordinary concept of truth and say that he is claiming that divinatory truth is unfalsifiable. Secondly, we know that when glossing native claims, our default concepts produce falsehoods."
 * "So what if, through conceptual analysis, we were to alter the premises of our concepts (here, that of truth), transforming them to such an extent that, when used to gloss native statements, they would yield statements of truth?"
 * "How can we redefine our own terms in order to make them behave -- truth-functionally -- like the natives' concepts appear to?"
 * "All we have to go by are our misunderstandings of others' views -- our initial descriptions of their statements and practices. What we then produce, if we are to avoid projection, is a series of concepts that imiate those statements and practices truth-functionally, but are nevertheless peculiarly ours...to subvert Maurice Bloch's (1998) formulation, anthropology is not about 'how we think they think'. It is about how we could learn to think, given what they say and do."
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 * "To [locate diverse lifeworlds] they must render experiences in all those past lifeworlds duly commensurable and mutually intelligible....the fundamental problem here is that all of these tools of our practice presuppose a knowledge of experience that is far from universal, as post colonials theorists and historians...have so well observed."
 * "In [cultural history's] mainstream forms, it still presupposes a peculiarly 'European' knowledge of experience, one that takes for granted a primordial divide between matter and meaning, between a pre-given material reality and the culture one uses to represent reality."
 * "Every past way of life presupposed its own particular ontology, its own prevailing account of the givens of existence, its own particular forms of subjectivity and sociality, agency and authority, freedom and equality, temporality, spatiality, ideality, materiality and so forth [...] The net result [of European standards of realness and truth] is a disciplinary practice that effectively modernizes the very fabrics of non-modern being, thereby denying past peoples the power to determine the truths of their own experience."
 * We can formulate an alternative historicism, in which realness is not an "objectvie, pre-given material condition" but rather as a "process," an "ongoing effect ...[of] dynamic entanglement of thought and materiality."
 * "[I]t follows that modern liberal ontology is also thoroughly secular. Insofar as it recognizes the possibility of divinity at all, it objectifies gods as effects of the thoughts and beliefs of human beings, as artifacts of human faith, prayer, and ritual, not as independently existing, "magical" agencies in their own right. It thus feels comfortable relegating all gods...to a second-order realm of experience called "religion," a sacred space or sphere that is rationally disaggregated from the rest of social life. This idea of a detached, abstract realm of "religion" may well mae sense to those who have come to think of divinity itself as a detached, abstract object of belief, like the God of Protestant Christianity...gods have been turned from subjects into objects."
 * "We alone believe that humans are always already unitary, integrated selves, all born with a nautural, pre-social disposition to pursue a rationally calculated self-interest....[w]e alone...see forms of sociality...as somehow continent, exogeneous phenomena, not as essential constituents of our very subjectivity..."
 * "[O]n a basic ethical level, there is something deeply troubling about a historicism that would re-engineer non-modern social being to fit our modern ontological presuppositions."
 * "[O]ur standard mode of history-making authorizes us to engage in a kind of retrospective political violence, a historicist imperialism that would forcefully impose the realities of our liberal capitalist present upon peoples who can no longer speak for themselves...our current practice comes at too high a price for our subjects, effectively depriving them of the power to determine the essential truth of who and what they really were at the time."
 * "Cf. Carol Symes's observation that modern historicism's 'colonization' of the Middle Ages means that 'there is no way to study 'medieval' people for their own sake or on their own terms', 'When We Talk About Modernity,' 716."
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 * Scholars adopting a genealogical approach have shown that "secular anthropology" is the product of a highly Christian intellectual legacy
 * Joel Kahn, in the context of his own 'ontological crisis' as a secular Jew, proposed a 'gnostic scholarship' that looks to the religion of the other as a source of radical subjective displacement
 * Based on the author's fieldwork among Catholic devotees of Padre Pio, the author proposes a form of 'embodied surrender' as a prerequisite for an intersubjective engagement with the ontologically other worlds of our informants.
 * Evans-Pritchard noted that "the majority of anthropologists are indifferent, if not hostile, to religion"
 * Radical contextualism: religious phenomena becomes interpreted in terms of biological, psychological, and/or social constructions
 * "The other in this case does not simply refer to 'cultural' others but also the 'not-self' including the 'other beings' that animate differing ontologies [...] such works enjoin us to be willing to be displaced by the spirit worlds of their informants."
 * The 'classical' approach to the beliefs of others in anthropology has been to recognise the reality of the beliefs of their informants, while contriving to ifnore or discredit their ontological claims.
 * Evans-Pritchard: "Witches, as Azande conceive of them cannot exist."
 * Meneses et al. propose a "methodological faith"
 * Fountian advocates for an active engagement with theology in a post-secular anthropology, an "un-repression of theology, the active embrace of an anthro-theology" as a "key site for future theoretical, methodological, and epistemological research within the discipline"
 * Joel advocates for a 'gnostic diplomacy' -- Gnosis presents a third way between faith and reason, an epistemology that is "beyond belief"
 * Anthropologists have historically privileged the systemic analysis of categories of beliefs over practice
 * Mitchell argues that focusing on th edoctrines or categories of religion has skewed our understading of religions: 'A focus on performance takes us away from the search for a categorical logic, or 'truth.'"
 * "In the crypt I believe I was engaging in an intense dialogue between myself and the saint even though he remained resolutely mute."
 * Kneeling, and prostration more generally, is an embodied form of surrender and submission that is remarkably challening for the archetype modern subject. Kneeling is a gesture that dramatically subverts the triump of the naturalist modern secular subject.
 * Meneses et al. propose a "methodological faith"
 * Fountian advocates for an active engagement with theology in a post-secular anthropology, an "un-repression of theology, the active embrace of an anthro-theology" as a "key site for future theoretical, methodological, and epistemological research within the discipline"
 * Joel advocates for a 'gnostic diplomacy' -- Gnosis presents a third way between faith and reason, an epistemology that is "beyond belief"
 * Anthropologists have historically privileged the systemic analysis of categories of beliefs over practice
 * Mitchell argues that focusing on th edoctrines or categories of religion has skewed our understading of religions: 'A focus on performance takes us away from the search for a categorical logic, or 'truth.'"
 * "In the crypt I believe I was engaging in an intense dialogue between myself and the saint even though he remained resolutely mute."
 * Kneeling, and prostration more generally, is an embodied form of surrender and submission that is remarkably challening for the archetype modern subject. Kneeling is a gesture that dramatically subverts the triump of the naturalist modern secular subject.