Magical Laments and Anthropological Reflections
نویسنده
چکیده
Anthropological writing becomes ritual when its unfolding argument structure parallels and thus its voice resonates with lament or even prayer. Structural features of lament are apparent in some ethnographies of lament, and anthropologists with no interest in traditional lament have nonetheless joined ineffectual modern elegies over modernity’s destructiveness. Magical laments achieve their effects by thematically progressing from death to the afterlife by means of heteroglossia or a shift in verb mood from indicative to optative. Some anthropological accounts of lament dwell on their “death” and use metaphors also found in ritual lament. The conclusions of several relevant anthropological writings are marked by shifts in verb forms, though subtler than in laments, evincing perduring contradictions of modernity. Anthropology cannot avoid playing a role in cultural production—but what role? We can and should explore appropriate ways to mourn modernity’s destructiveness—bringing the argument about the anthropology of lament full circle and enabling a shift of focus in modernist discourse from past to future.
منابع مشابه
Magical Laments and Anthropological Reflections: The Production and Circulation of Anthropological Text as Ritual Activity
متن کامل
The Ghost in the Machine: Why and how the belief in magic survives in the rational mind
Since the time of Galileo (1564 – 1642), Western civilization has increasingly fallen under the spell of science. Despite this fact, anthropological and psychological research has shown that magical beliefs are present in both children and adults in modern industrial cultures. How can a belief in magic coexist with a belief in science in the mind of a rational, educated adult? A possible explan...
متن کاملPhilosophical Reflections in Transcendental Modernism and Religious Politics
The current article believes that the intrinsic interdependence of modernity, science and secularism is an ideological non-universal interdependence but a hegemonic discourse. This kind of explanation and consideration is built upon a collection of ontological, epistemological, anthropological, methodological and evaluative sources. Based on two laws of "interchangeability of existence and scie...
متن کاملImmanent critique and Islam: Anthropological reflections
This article offers an anthropological outline of immanent critique in Islamic traditions. In addressing the question – what is immanent critique? – it dwells on the interrelationships amongst the Enlightenment’s notion of reason, critique, and Islam. My main contention is that to construe the Western notion of critique derived from Enlightenment’s specific conceptualization of reason as critiq...
متن کاملCulture and intelligence: anthropological reflections on non-physical aspects of evolution in chimpanzees and humans.
The scope of this work is the recent history of studies on the behavior of chimpanzees, emphasizing research results, propositions about the existence of 'chimpanzee cultures' and their validity. The work discusses the idea based on transmission mechanisms and social learning as well as anthropological and paleoanthropological concepts of culture that associate such phenomena, among modern huma...
متن کامل