Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Religion

Water

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 14:42:27 +0000

Durham University

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

Abstract:

Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on how societies organise themselves socially and spatially; its role in leisure activities and the enjoyment of its aesthetic qualities. Human relationships with water, though culturally and historically specific, share common themes of meaning, recognising water’s essentiality to life, health and well-being at every scale. This often translates into the use of ‘living water‘ in religious rituals, such as baptism or mortuary ceremonies, in which water expresses important ideas about social identity and spiritual movement between material and non-material domains.

The material control of water has long been recognised as vital to gaining and maintaining political power. In recent decades anthropology has focused increasingly on debates about water ownership and rights of access to water, and considered how the control of water reflects social, economic and political relations. There is growing interest in water infrastructures, and how they have often enabled unsustainable practices in water use and management. Today, as the world faces an anthropogenically-created ecological crisis, water issues are central to concerns about climate change, global warming, and increasing volatility and uncertainty in water flows. This has encouraged a new area of anthropological focus on non-human as well as human rights in relation to water. Thus the anthropology of water extends from its multiple uses in everyday life to the major issues that all societies urgently need to address.

Introduction

As the element essential to life and to all processes of production and reproduction, water permeates every domain of human existence. It has always had a background presence in anthropology’s ethnographic literature, where it appears in religious rituals; shapes human spatial organization around water sources; and structures people’s lifeways and modes of production, as well as their ecological knowledge and environmental engagement. However, water itself has not been the focus of anthropological studies until relatively recently. It came to the fore with growing interest in the relationship between the control of water and political power and, more strongly, when environmental anthropology emerged as a lively subfield in response to increasing concerns about sustainability. As societies have begun to realise that the world is facing a human-made ecological crisis, water has become the focus of intense research in multiple disciplinary areas. Anthropology brings to this a vitally important capacity to illuminate its diverse social and cultural dimensions (Hastrup 2011, Hastrup & Hastrup 2015, de Wolff et al. 2019, Wagner 2013).

Human engagements with water take place on every scale, beginning with the most basic physical needs for clean water to maintain health and to ensure bodily and domestic hygiene. Recognition that water is literally essential to all biological organisms means that it has cross-cultural meaning as the ‘substance of life’. This understanding supports important concepts of water as a common good, to which everyone must have rights of access and use, and this fundamental principle permeates many discussions about water ownership and governance. Yet many people lack access to clean water and sanitation for a variety of reasons, including the overuse of limited local resources; disruption of rural lifeways; economic imperatives to migrate to marginal and poorly served urban areas; and insufficient fiscal or technical capacities to create infrastructures for water supply. Such a lack of access to clean water is a key indicator of governmental capacities to provide for people’s most basic needs, and of the deep inequalities existing both within and between societies.

Religion, health and wealth

Anxieties about meeting basic human rights of access to sufficient clean water tend to obscure other aspects of people’s immediate engagement with it, but these are also powerful influences on how people respond to a range of water issues. Water’s essentiality to life means that it has a central place in multiple religious belief systems. In many place-based societies, where what are often described as ‘nature religions’ pertain, its elemental powers are frequently manifested in deities responsible for rain, fertility, and the creation of life. For example, in Africa, Mami Wata, a water goddess valorised in many parts of the continent’s west coast, provides all of these things (Drewal 2008). In Aboriginal Australia, water is the source of cosmogenesis in the creative era known as Dreamtime, in which the world was formed, while the Rainbow Serpent, which is a manifestation of the powers of water, continues to generate life from within the land (Merlan 1998, Strang 2009). In the monotheisms of larger societies, water features as a vital manifestation of a humanised deity’s divine beneficence or, in the form of floods or drought, as an expression of god’s wrath. Thus for many people, access to sufficient and timely water carries an important moral and religious dimension.

Whatever the form of the providing deities, many religious schema also conflate ideas about water and the human spirit, generating visions of ‘living water’, vital to physical and spiritual well-being (Krause & Strang 2013). Such beliefs are central to a host of rituals in which water cleanses, heals, and blesses, and metaphorically carries the spirit between material and non-material domains. The notion of living water is also a response to people’s phenomenological engagement with it as an animated and animating element that is always in motion: shimmering, flowing, appearing, and disappearing. Physical and immediate interactions with water – bathing, drinking, swimming, and observing – provide a range of compelling sensory experiences, which lend emotive weight to people’s thinking about water and what it means (Krause 2016, Strang 2005). Thus, an understanding that water flows through, enlivens, and connects people and places supports important ideas about common substance and identity. These are neatly expressed, for example, in the use of water for rituals of baptism that welcome individuals into particular groups or congregations, or which conjoin them in marriage (Mallery 2011). The inevitable dark side of this understanding is that a vision of identity as literally ‘substantial’ also allows for many anxieties about social and/or physical pollution, and invasions of ‘otherness’ that might compromise individual or collective health and well-being (Strang 2004).

Concepts of holiness, health, and wealth are both etymologically and conceptually related. They express capacities for maintaining (spiritual, bodily, or fiscal) wholeness and flourishing. As well as being seen as fundamental to physical health, the relationship between health and water has seen a transition from assumptions about water’s intrinsic healing qualities (as assumed, for example, in the thousands of holy and healing wells in many parts of the world) to more material notions about the healing properties of water’s mineral content, which led to a major fashion in Europe for spas and baths (Anderson & Tabb 2002). Water’s centrality to processes of production leads to cross-cultural acknowledgement of its essential role in enabling human agency and generating wealth. What constitutes wealth is culturally diverse, but in many societies the relationship between water and wealth is often demonstrated in the ways that the ownership of water, displayed in landscaped gardens, fountains, and pools, provides a key signifier of wealth and social status.

Power and control

As the above implies, the control of water is intrinsically related to economic and political power, and historical and ethnographic research has demonstrated that how water is controlled and distributed provides a precise mirror of social, political, and environmental relations. A classic study of Balinese water temples, for instance, describes the carefully balanced social and hydrological relations mediated by local priests acting as both religious leaders and water managers (Lansing 1991). On a larger scale, it has famously been argued that major infrastructures such as irrigation schemes, requiring the centralisation and coordination of labour, were foundational to the creation of nation states (Hocart 1970). The importance of water in political organization is particularly clear in the historical emergence of ‘hydraulic societies’ dependent upon major irrigation schemes, such as those in Mesopotamia, and in the Indus Valley (Butzer 1976, Giosan et al. 2012, Tvedt & Jakobsson 2006). Karl Wittfogel’s historical analysis of water in China suggested that state capacities to control a vast network of canals was vital for the establishment of powerful imperial dynasties (1957). However, subsequent writers have rejected the argument that the control of water necessarily leads to ‘despotic regimes’, observing that relationships between water and power can take many different forms (Krause & Ley forthcoming).

However, Wittfogel’s more fundamental point, that power and the control of water are inextricably related, remains influential, and contemporary ethnographers have continued to explore how the control of water mediates relations between states and citizens, with access to water often demonstrating persistent social inequalities. For example, the manipulation of weirs, sluices, and water flows in a South Indian irrigation scheme has been shown to reinforce the advantages of village elites (Mosse 2003). In multiple development contexts, gender inequality influences women’s access to and control over water (Coles & Wallace 2005, see also Lahiri-Dutt 2006). The provision of water in Mumbai turns out to be linked to social identity and recognition of ‘hydraulic citizenship’, and leads to the exclusion of marginal groups lacking such recognition (Anand 2017). Shifts in ideology are similarly reflected in water. A strong focus on instrumentalism – a determination to act directively on the material environment – in industrialised societies has been exported, via literal and economic colonialism, to many parts of the world under the guise of development (Lewis & Mosse 2006).

Focusing on the history of the American West, the commodification of water into an asset may mean that ‘capitalism has created over the last 100 years a new distinctive type of hydraulic society, one that demonstrates once more how the domination of nature can lead to the domination of some people over others’ (Worster 2006: 50, see also Escobar 2005, Josephson 2002, Reisner 2001).

Water has its own material powers, of course, in the force provided by water flows. Many societies have harnessed these powers, via channels, water wheels, and mills, to do ‘work’ to support their processes of production, and to direct irrigation to their crops. But water is not always amenable: it also has its own agentive effects in making and unmaking environments and impacting upon human lives. In a world dominated by dualistic ideas of nature as the ‘other’ to culture, water is commonly seen to represent the capacities of the non-human world to reject the authority of human instrumentality. Water’s material forces highlight that such efforts often involve an intrinsic tension – a wrestling for control (Edgeworth 2011). This brings to the fore the reality that every cultural landscape is also a cultural waterscape. Control over water flows is achieved via the imposition of dams, canals, drainage, reservoirs, pipes, and other directive infrastructure that materialises societal ideas, values, and practices in relation to water. As with other forms of infrastructure, such concretization inscribes long-term patterns of human-environmental engagement upon the land and waterscape (Bichsel 2016, Harvey & Knox 2012, Larkin 2013).

Over time, human communities have engaged with water with varying degrees of determination to control its movements and direct its flows into serving their interests. Early societies, and those that have retained pre-industrial economic modes of hunting and gathering, horticulture, and small-scale agriculture, have tended to be conservative in their practices, working with the inherent processes of local ecosystems, and imposing relatively low-key forms of manipulation of the landscape for their purposes. In many larger societies, however, trajectories of human-environmental engagement have been very different, as population growth and technological developments have encouraged more assertive efforts to control water flows. Social and religious changes, in particular movements from nature religions to monotheistic beliefs, have led to notions of ‘dominion’ and the desire to impose patriarchal authority on ‘nature’, often feminised as alternate to male ‘culture’ (Plumwood 1993, 2002). The objectification of nature has also been encouraged by a more scientific lens upon the world, through which ideas about what water is have become ‘disenchanted’, leading to its reconceptualization as H₂O (Illich 1996, Linton 2010).

Greater dominion over water has been realised through new forms of science and technology enabling extensive engineering of the landscape and increasing capacities to direct water flows into supporting the needs and desires of rapidly enlarging human populations. Water usage has risen, in part because of more profligate domestic habits, but also in its use to support societies’ growing dependence on irrigated agriculture, as well as industry itself, which – due to the embodied water in goods and production processes – often results in the movement of water globally from arid environments to densely populated and wealthier temperate regions (Hoekstra & Chapagain 2007, Meissner 2012).

The commoditization of water, and its reductive reframing as a resource or economic asset, has further encouraged utilitarian ideas about the material world as the basis for the provision of ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ to humankind. Patterns of water use in many societies have reflected the dominance of these ideas. In the last century there has been a race to build large dams, canals, and other infrastructures designed to direct water into enlarging urban areas; into hydro-electric generation; and into irrigated agriculture (Khagram 2004). Today over 70% of the Earth’s freshwater is directed into irrigation, and the World Bank has stated that a further 15% will be needed in the next decade to provide sufficient food and energy for the expanding human population.^[1]They are predicting major shortfalls, which raises the prospect of a range of problems, including rising numbers of environmental refugees.

Infrastructure and conflict

Shortfalls in water supply also exacerbate the issues surrounding the management of transboundary water flows which provide opportunities for both collaboration and conflict. The United Nations reports that 145 states share transboundary lakes or rivers (2019). In the last fifty years, 295 international water agreements have been signed, but there have also been thirty-seven ‘acute transboundary water disputes’ and two-thirds of the 263 transboundary river basins lack any framework for cooperative management. With rising demand, and with water flows becoming less reliable (in particular where global warming has diminished the water storage provided by glaciers), there is obvious potential for greater conflict.

Such tensions are readily evident in the controversies relating to the construction of big and ‘mega’ dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (built in 1936); the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River (funded by the World Bank in the 1950s); and, more recently, the Sardar Sarovar Damon the Narmada River, and the Three Gorges Dams on the Yangtze River. 57,0000 large dams have been constructed over the last century: these generate nearly 20% of the world’s energy, and assist much of its irrigation. They have supported worldwide population movement into urban areas, and the development of industries. Thus – like the earlier hydraulic infrastructures noted by Arthur Hocart – they have often been seen as integral to the building and flourishing of the nation state (Biggs 2012, Mohamud & Verhoeven 2016, Verhoeven 2015).

However, the human and environmental costs of such large-scale directive engagements with water have also been massive (Rodgers & O’Neill 2012). As well as increasing the potential for transboundary conflicts, their focus on water storage for resource extraction, urban supply, and cheap hydro-electricity has resulted in many human rights violations and, with concomitant social impacts, the displacement of thousands of people living in riparian rural communities (Hwang et al. 2007, Mathur 2006, McDonald-Wilmsen & Webber 2010, Oliver-Smith 2009). Such projects have also resulted in extreme violence at times – such as the massacre of 400 Indigenous people to make way for the Chixoy Dam in Guatamala in 1982. Thousands more have been killed by dam failures; for example the collapse of China’s Banqiao Dam in 1975 killed an estimated 171,000 people.^[2]Huge dams, because of the enormous weight of water that they contain, have also been implicated in causing earthquakes: thus the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan is thought to have triggered a major earthquake in 2008.

Many of the costs of dams and related water infrastructures are less dramatic but no less damaging. Financially, large dams tend to be uneconomic: they typically overrun predicted levels of investment by up to 96% (Ansar et al. 2014). They also incur major social, economic, and environmental costs. In disrupting hydrological flows, dams are hugely destructive to aquatic ecosystems, and there are human costs as well in the loss of access to water for downstream farmers, fisheries, and tourism. More broadly, irrigated agriculture in many regions has led not only to diminishing harvests, but also to widespread land salination, rendering vast areas infertile even for native vegetation. This is particularly the case in ecologically vulnerable areas such as Australia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southern United States, where irrigation has been aimed at producing profitable – but for arid regions, unsuitable – crops, such as cotton, rice, and wheat.

But, as Peter Bosshard, the policy director for International Rivers (an international NGO seeking to protect rivers) notes, ‘[m]any actors have vested interests in building dams’ (2014). It is an area rife with corruption, in which major engineering contractors, irrigation consortia, and others stand to gain considerably, either through huge profits on construction, or through the gaining of water allocations for massive irrigation or hydroelectric schemes.

A notorious example is provided by Cubbie Station: an irrigation venture in south Queensland, so large as to be visible from space (Strang 2013). Cubbie Station’s directors persuaded the Queensland Government to allow it to buy up over 50 water licences, and to build a series of dams along twenty-eight kilometres of the Culgoa River. The station is situated just above the New South Wales border, and diverts about a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow into the Darling River, and thus into the Murray Darling Basin, one of the most intensively farmed and ecologically compromised river basins the world. Unsurprisingly, this upstream abstraction has fuelled considerable inter-state conflict. As well as depriving downstream farmers and other local communities of water, irrigation has destroyed over 90% of the wetlands in the Basin, which formed critical breeding areas for migrating birds. The major beneficiaries are the station’s owners (an international consortia) its directors, and shareholders, and to a lesser extent the rural community for which it provides some employment and other local economic benefits.

Owning water

Major irrigation schemes such as Cubbie Station, and the thousands of other companies and consortia around the world taking control of water through dam building and the acquisition of water allocations, bring to the fore key questions about the ownership of water. For much of human history, water’s status as a common good remained the norm, albeit with some managerial control exercised by powerful groups: for example, the dynastic rulers of hydraulic societies or, in the medieval period, the Church, whose monasteries often provided communities with hydrological expertise and management (Tvedt & Oestigaard 2010). Although many of the traditional common property regimes described by Elinor Ostrom (1990) have undergone major alterations, water continued to be seen, until recently, as a common good.

Patterns of water ownership changed, however, as societies began to build major urban areas which demanded greater investment in technologies for water supply and waste removal. The Industrial Revolution introduced a new level of complexity, both in enlarging conurbations, and generating increasing levels of domestic and industrial pollution. The impacts of these developments were so challenging as to require major reform. In early twentieth century Britain, for example, water supply and waste removal services were initially provided by a mix of municipal authorities and Victorian philanthropists. The results were patchy, leading to considerable inequality within cities, in terms of access to piped supplies, and between cities and rural areas, the latter often remaining reliant upon local wells and pumps well into the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, democratic ideals demanded comprehensive provision of piped supplies and the public ownership of water. A national network of local water authorities was established, with water users paying for services via property rates. This worked well until the costs of maintaining aging water infrastructures became more pressing, and politicians were faced with the vote-losing prospect of raising charges for water. The Thatcher government, in accord with its conservative ideologies, decided (despite angry public protests) to privatise water, leading to a situation in which British water companies today are largely owned by international corporations (Bakker 2003). This proved profitable for water company directors and shareholders, but as water charges jumped by 60% in the following five years, rather less so for domestic water users (Strang 2004). The UK-based water companies made further profits by exporting to many parts of the world their expertise on how to privatise water.

This process proved even more controversial in countries where increases in water charges have more extreme impacts. In 2000, when the government of Bolivia responded to pressure from the World Bank to pay off its international debts through water privatization, and invited an American company, Bechtel, to enact this, citizens revolted and a violent water war erupted that succeeded in retaining public ownership (Albro 2005). However, although governments internationally have subsequently become wary of such wholescale national water privatizations, the process has continued in various forms: for example, through types of public-private partnership, and through mechanisms such as Government Owned Corporations which, as the name suggests, reform local or regional water authorities along the lines of privatised companies, sometimes separating the profitable operational (supply) side from the more costly infrastructural maintainance, with only the latter remaining a wholly public responsibility.

There have also been more covert forms of enclosure, as illustrated by the example of Cubbie Station in Queensland, Australia. Following the colonial appropriation of land and water from Indigenous groups, European settlers’ rights to water generally came with riparian land ownership. As pressure on limited resources increased, farmers were given volumetric water allocations. In the 2000s, these were effectively privatised and transformed into tradeable commodities, which could be bought up en masse (as with Cubbie Station) or, in other cases, traded away from the related land, leaving ‘dry blocks’. The conversion of allocations into profitable assets meant that those using water for the most profitable purposes (mining, cotton, rice, and wheat production) could readily outbid small farmers, or conservation organisations hoping to preserve wetland areas. This has resulted in higher levels of water use and environmental degradation.

In Australia and elsewhere, the creation of virtual water markets, whether in the form of allocation trading or as shareholding in water companies, has effectively detached water from the landscape. This process of ‘disembedding’ material things from their local environments and creating virtual global markets (Polanyi 1957) raises some key questions about social and environmental accountability. There is an important recent trend towards more ownership and trading of water (and other resources) by transnational corporations who are not physically present in the social communities or in the material environments where the water is located. Cubbie Station, for example, was bought up by a Chinese consortium; most large oil and mining companies are owned transnationally, as are other extractive industries. Regulating water users, even when these are locally based, is complex and challenging, and becomes more so when regulators have to deal with major transnational corporations. There are more fundamental questions, too: if a government hands control of the country’s most essential resources to external agencies, how does this affect its decision-making capacities about these resources? And does it uphold democratic processes? (Strang 2016).

Similar patterns can be seen in the use of marine resources, where overfishing has led to a process of formalising quotas and creating virtual trading schemes (Minnegal & Dwyer 2010). Competitive economies have done little to address the inequalities that pertain in both areas: customary rights to fishing have often been overridden by commercial interests, just as local rights to freshwater have been overtaken by the commodification of the water industry.

The loss of customary rights of access and the devastation of local waterways by extractive industries have been particularly distressing for place-based Indigenous communities, who retain close and affective attachment to their homelands, and for whom local land and waterscapes are often both sentient and sacred. As their land and other material resources have been appropriated, enclosed, and privatised, many groups have protested, and continue to do so (Berriane 2017, Strang & Busse 2010). Given the meanings of water within their cultural landscapes, the misuse and despoilation of waterways has evoked particularly anguished protests; exemplifed, for example, in response to the downstream pollution caused by mining on the Ok Tedi, in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2003), or in relation to rivers in northern Australia (Rumsey & Weiner 2004).

Over the last several decades, Indigenous communities have created international networks, working with each other, and with conservation organisations, to tackle these issues. In 2016, for example, the Dakota Sioux brought together a range of like-minded groups to stage a major protest at Standing Rock about the impacts of an oil pipeline on their land and water. Indigenous communities are challenging not only the appropriation of their traditional ownership of water (Morphy & Morphy 2009), but also the imposition of ideologies that in their view fail to value it properly. In New Zealand, in the 2000s, the Māori Council, on behalf of all iwi [tribes], fought a legal battle to try to reclaim Indigenous people’s ownership of freshwater, taking a case through the Waitangi Tribunal, the High Court, and the Supreme Court (Strang 2014). Although the claim did not succeed, the debates resulted in a robust co-management agreement, ensuring that Māori iwi would have a substantial voice in decisions about their related waterways (Muru-Lanning 2016, Ruru 2013).

Water in the Anthropocene

There is a readily discernible link between the enclosure and privatization of water and constant growth and intensification in the use of freshwater and other resources. Such intensification, and humankind’s impacts upon the planet, have become so extreme that we have now entered an age described as the Anthropocene (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Stensrud & Hylland-Eriksen forthcoming). It is equally plain that water is a central factor – and a key area of vulnerablity – in climate change. As well as melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, higher planetary temperatures are melting the glaciers that store freshwater for many of the world’s major rivers, and destablising global weather patterns. Meanwhile, the clearance of forests and wetlands for further agricultural expansion continues. The result is much greater volatility in water flows, and higher risks of unmanageable floods and droughts.

The impacts on ecosystems are not only felt by human communities, but also by their non-human inhabitants. The Anthropocene marks the first human-caused mass extinction event on par with earlier planetary devastations. In the last century, species extinctions have spiked dramatically: a report by the World Wildlife Fund (Grooten & Almond 2018) documents the loss of 60% of species since the 1970s, and rates of extinction are continuing to rise.^[3]As Donald Worster observed, this pattern of environmental destruction goes hand in hand with an extremely exploitative mode of environmental engagement, and the widespread control of resources by commercial corporations, rather than by local communities with long-term attachments to places:

Whatever they [major corporations] may accomplish in the manufacture of wealth, they are innately anti-ecological. Immense, centralised institutions, with complicated hierarchies, they tend to impose their outlook and their demands on nature, as they do on the individual and the small human community, and they do so with great destructiveness. They are too insulated from the results of their actions to learn, to adjust, to harmonize. That is another way of saying that a social condition of diffused power is more likely to be ecologically sensitive and preserving (2006: 332).

It is not a given that relocating environmental control locally will necessarily produce less exploitative kinds of engagements with land and water. However, it is useful to consider the alternative values promoted by place-based communities in relation to non-human interests. Many retain traditionally egalitarian and reciprocal positionality towards non-human beings, locating humankind within living systems, rather than as rulers over them. This way of thinking has been inspirational for environmentalists, and interactions between Indigenous peoples, conservation groups, and scholars has produced a serious critique of notions of human dominion, and of the anthropocentricity and the entitlement implicit in exploitative practices (Brightman & Lewis 2016, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010, Orlove & Caton 2010). This critique argues that there is an urgent need for a repositioning that – for both ethical and pragmatic reasons – gives greater parity to non-human interests, with a view to halting (and hopefully reversing) the wholescale destruction of ecosystems and their dependent species, including, of course, human communities (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet 2015, Kopnina & Washington 2019). The proponents of this critique recognise the centrality of water in this regard, and thus protecting waterways has become a key part of their endeavours.

Indigenous communities have approached this challenge in various ways. Some, such as the Kogi in Columbia, have spoken up to warn about the consequences of rampant exploitation of the environment (Ereira 2009, see also de la Cadena 2010, Fienup-Riordan 2005: 233). There have been protests (as in the case of Standing Rock), and some have pushed their governments to make constitutional changes. Thus, in 2008 Ecuador passed legislation affirming the rights of nature, and a few years later Bolivia established the Rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama). Some groups have campaigned for rivers (such as the Atrato River in Colombia, and the Ganges in India) to be acknowledged as living persons with concomitant legal rights. In New Zealand, Māori iwi succeeded in gaining legal rights for the Whanganui River. In 2017, the New Zealand government announced that the river had been granted the status of a living entity, ‘comprising the River from the mountains to the sea, its tributaries, and all its physical and metaphysical elements, as an indivisible and living whole’ (Finlayson 2017: 129(1); see also Strang 2019).

At an international level, there is growing pressure from environmental activists to persuade the UN to make a formal declaration about the rights of nature (Cullinan 2003, Gray & Curry 2016).^[4]Some are trying to establish ‘ecocide’ as an international crime.^[5]There is a widening conversation about ecological justice (Baxter 2005, Schläppy & Gray 2017) and the ethics of human-environmental relations, and for some groups this is connected with ideas about spiritual engagement with the world and, most particularly, with water (Sponsel 2012, Taylor 2010). There has thus been a refocusing on the spiritual meanings of water, which as well as permeating traditional religions, has an important role in New Age movements long aligned to environmental activism. New rituals are appearing to celebrate the spiritual or social meanings of water: in the UK, this has taken the form of well dressing, a revival of an ancient Roman ritual, fontanalia; in Australia, there are events such as the Splash! Festival in Queensland, in which people bring containers of water from their home places, and pour them into a central vessel to celebrate the social and spiritual connections between communities (Strang & Toussaint 2008).

The input from Indigenous, environmental, and related groups into global debates, along with widespread concern about societies’ unsustainable direction of travel, has led international NGOs, state governments, religious leaders, and the United Nations to focus on the issue of values. In 2016, the UN established a High Level Panel on Water to focus on water and values, which, in their terms, meant ‘economic’, ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural and spiritual’ values. Their aim was to produce a set of principles for water to underpin the Sustainable Development Goals declared in 2015, with the aim of encouraging heads of state to rethink their policies and practices in relation to water (UN 2018a). This was followed by a wider World Water Development Report, which advocated an infrastructural turn towards ‘nature-based solutions’ (UN 2018b). These aim to work with the processes inherent in ecosystems and to therefore move towards more sustainable practices (Thomé et al. 2016). There are thus concerted efforts to address the urgent issues that societies face in relation to water. Whether these endeavours will change human engagements with water ecosystems sufficiently, and quickly enough, to avert social and ecological collapse, remains to be seen. It is therefore vital that the anthropological study of water continues to elucidate the relationships between human societies, non-human beings, and the material world, and assists efforts to reform these relationships to ensure that the rights, needs, and interests of all are sustained.

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Note on contributor

Veronica Strang is the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and a Professor of Anthropology. She is the author of The Meaning of Water (Berg, 2004), Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009), and Water, Nature and Culture (Reaktion 2015). She is currently working on a major volume about long-term trajectories in human engagements with water. See https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/staff/?id=10491.

Professor Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Cosin’s Hall, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RL, UK. veronica.strang@durham.ac.uk

Magic

Felix Stein — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 11:03:55 +0000

Matteo Benussi

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Initially published 25 Oct 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19magic

Abstract:

Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational’ science, even though both religion and science are objects just as elusive. Despite its ambiguous status and the prejudices attached to it, or maybe precisely for these reasons, magic has long enthralled scholars in the human sciences, and anthropology in particular. After first exploring the genealogy of magic as a concept, this entry will examine the manifold ways in which occult knowledges and practices play a role in the life of many societies. It will touch on the role of vernacular magic in experiences of crisis, and dwell on how anthropology has found a way to appreciate the ‘truth’ of magic. It then explores magic as a ‘craft’ – a set of techniques through which practitioners creatively shape their relationships with the world and their own selves. Emphasis will be given to magic’s documented potential to activate the imagination. The case of ceremonial magic and its revival will allow the reader to appreciate the modernity of magic. The entry concludes with a reflection on the recurrent attributes of magic – often identified as a particularly experimental, do-it-yourself, and manipulation-based form of spiritual action – and its compatibility with a post-secular age that has not renounced enchantment.

Defining magic

Magic is one of the most puzzling phenomena studied by social scientists, which has inspired and challenged generations of observers. Is magic irrational, maybe even delusional, the product of minds that cannot think straight? Despite widespread prejudice, most specialists nowadays think this is not the case. Historical and ethnographic research has revealed that many reasonable, lucid, and intellectually sophisticated people, including great philosophers and artists of the past, dabbled in magic (Yates 1964; Saunders 2010; Jütte 2015). One may wonder: perhaps such people, despite their discernment, were ignorant of modern science – is magic ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarous’, then? This too is unlikely. Categories like ‘primitivism’ and ‘barbarity’ would not get us very far in exploring magic, not only because anthropologists consider such evolutionist concepts inherently misleading and derogatory, but also because all types of societies, including ones characterised by highly complex technology, organizations, and scientific knowledge, appear to have room for magic. Understanding magic, then, requires that we be prepared to shed or at least bracket ingrained prejudices. But how do we define magic, to begin with?

The word ‘magic’ evokes a vast array of associations: from the solemn, white-bearded sage, endowed with mystical power in fairy tales and fantasy films, to sinister witches and sorcerers surrounded by grimoires, occult sigils, potions, and astrological charts; from ‘cunning folk’ healers, combining incantations and herbal remedies, to stage magicians asking us, with a wink, to let our senses be deceived. Yet explaining clearly what the many tropes associated with the concept of magic have in common is easier said than done. The concept has been used in association with divergent practices such as folk medicine, divination, palmistry, necromancy (communication with the dead), astrology, alchemy, spiritualism, occultism (the study of hidden or paranormal things), illusionism, neo-paganism (the worship of natural forces, often modelled after ancient religions), and New Age spirituality. To complicate things, the field of magic as the term is commonly understood – including amongst many of its practitioners – has come to incorporate elements that elsewhere would fall under the category of ‘religion’, such as Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical tradition) or Yoga (a set of spiritual doctrines emerged from within Indic Dharmic faiths). A plausible working definition of magic, loose enough to accommodate at least most of the nuances associated with it, may describe it as a set of activities and technologies intended to manipulate invisible or immaterial agencies and energies, not recognised by science, to an advantageous end. However, there are risks inherent in defining such elusive a subject as magic.

The word ‘magic’ has long evoked negative connotations, associated with the exotic religious customs of a threatening Other. The vocabulary and concept of magic have a distinctly Western genealogy: the word comes from the Greek mageia, which, in ancient Greece, was used to describe the priests (magav) of the arch-inimical Persian Empire (Graf 1995; Bremmer 1999). In this ancient sense, the word was associated with practices that were outlandish because they were foreign. Over time, however, and partly due to the influence of Christianity, the idea of magic became attached to spiritual or remedial practices that, while originating from within Western societies, were classified as eccentric, illegitimate, or dubious because of their external/marginal status vis-à-vis religious and scientific orthodoxy. In early modern Europe, arcane knowledge and practices were also associated with marginal groups like the Jews or peasants (Ginzburg 1991; Jütte 2015). Despite this shift in orientation, the concept of magic retained its association with notions of weirdness, mysteriousness, and unorthodoxy (Stratton 2013). When we use the category, therefore, we must be alert to both its potentially negative connotations and its shifting boundaries.

Another, related danger inherent in the vocabulary of magic is connected to its usability in non-Western contexts. For instance, let us take the Islamic notion of siḥr, usually translated as magic or sorcery. Siḥr partly resembles Christian understandings of magic as unorthodox dealings with the occult, and therefore illegitimate and sinful. However, alongside familiar items like goetia (commerce with demons) and astrology, siḥr also includes slander, malicious gossip, the ‘charismatic seduction of crowds’ (Knight 2016: 16), and other arts of deception which would not be considered ‘magic’ in most Western understandings. When it comes to magic, nuance risks easily getting lost in translation.

Furthermore, distinguishing between ‘unorthodox’ magical practices and ‘legitimate’ religious ones is particularly problematic in the case of religious traditions that are not based on highly codified doctrines and liturgies, and therefore do not encourage distinctions between prayer, incantation, or spell to the same extent as Christianity, in particular, as we shall see, in its Reformed versions. For instance, in certain Tibetan Buddhist contexts, religious specialists take part in propitiatory rituals to conjure or restore ‘fortune’ (Humphrey 2012) that in Western settings might easily be classified as magical spells and rituals.

Magic, science, religion… and anthropology

It is impossible to omit the role of anthropology itself in construing the idea of magic that was to become dominant in the modern era. In other words, we must consider that anthropology as an academic discipline has greatly contributed to establishing what counts as magic and what does not in today’s mainstream consciousness, including amongst many practitioners of magic.

The early-nineteenth-century rise of scientific interest in magic was both fuelled and conditioned by Europe’s encounter with hitherto unfamiliar spiritual traditions in the colonies. Nebulous concepts like ‘shamanism’ and ‘fetishism’ both enthralled and repelled European intellectuals, divided between an optimistic embrace of empirical science and technologic progress and a hard-to-kill Romantic fascination with all things mysterious and arcane (Pels 2003). Both the asymmetries of the colonial encounter, with Europe seeking to justify its exploitation of faraway peoples as a ‘civilising mission,’ and the intellectual establishment’s anxieties over the popularity of phenomena like occultism, thus conspired to turn magic into a veritable culture-war item. If colonialism ‘required’ the foil of native magic as a pretext for domination (Wiener 2003: 140), magic never stopped haunting the metropole itself through the mediation – or mediumship? – of homegrown Spiritualists and Theosophists, generating in turn the reaction of scientific-minded debunkers. The latter group encompassed novel professional figures as diverse as besuited stage illusionists, proponents of a disenchanted version of magic as pure entertainment and skill, and erudite scholars of ‘native trickery’: early anthropologists (Jones 2017).

Building on the reports of missionaries and explorers, Victorian-era anthropologists (of the mid- to late-nineteenth century) busied themselves with creating hierarchically organised taxonomies of social facts they had second-hand knowledge of, and that corresponded, in their view, to more or less well-defined ‘steps’ in an evolutionary ladder of human cultures. Influenced by the styles of reasoning of their time, these scholars classified magic, religion, and science in different categories, corresponding to progressive ‘stages’ of cultural complexity, with magic attached to ideas of archaism and childlike irrationality. From a magical stage, human groups would progress to a religious stage, followed by science supplanting religion at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy.

Where did the assumption underpinning nineteenth century academic conceptualizations of magic come from? Later scholars of magic (Tambiah 1990) have identified a mindset imbued with Protestant sensitivities, and the prestige of classical heritage and erudition, as crucial factors in shaping magic as an object of social-scientific study. Some of the most influential pioneers in the study of religious life had a Protestant background, in particular E.B. Tylor, who famously defined religion as ‘belief in Spiritual Beings’ (2008: 25). Scholars like Tylor, however, were reluctant to put religion – a respectable sphere of contemplation and worship – on the same footing as ‘base’ magic. It has been persuasively argued (Tambiah 1990: 12-5) that evolutionistic ideas of magic as distinct from and inferior to religion were likely fuelled by Protestantism’s deep dislike of occult practices and Biblical characterizations of magic as diabolical. This Protestant legacy contributed to the consolidation of a narrow idea of religion as a system of abstract beliefs (cf. Tylor’s definition), culminating in theology and metaphysics, as opposed to magic with its hands-on, result-oriented manipulation practices. A distinction between prayer (religious) and spell (magical) epitomised this opposition.

As far as the second source of influence – the Hellenic tradition – is concerned, Classical Greece grouped what we today call magic (understood as the occult manipulation of invisible forces) together with philosophy, the manipulation of concepts, and medicine, the manipulation of bodily substances. These activities were quite distinct from the sphere of religion understood as the worship of the Gods. While the first realm was characterised by an inquisitive, experimental attitude, the realm of divinity was not seen as an arena of human disputation. Stanley Tambiah (1990: 8-11) has argued that, given the prestige of Hellenic traditions in Western academia, a separation between magic and religion ended up influencing Victorian anthropologists such as James Frazer. In his pioneering research into magic, Frazer came to consider magic a failed attempt at science, as both systems were thought to share the idea that the universe is regulated by impersonal forces that can be intervened upon, harnessed, and manipulated. However, magic was understood to be based on incorrect ideas about these forces, as well as distorted and incomplete factual knowledge of the world (Jarvie & Agassi 1970).

Scholars in the turn-of-the-century French sociological tradition came up with yet different reasons to push magic to the margins of spiritual life. Émile Durkheim, one of the key figures of the early social science of religion, defined religion as a set of beliefs and practices concerning sacred things and shared by a moral community: a ‘Church’. He expressed the view that magic, while consisting of belief and rites like religion, though ‘less developed’, should be considered distinct from the latter because, being chiefly an individual endeavour, magic fails to generate proper ‘Churches’ (1995: 39-42). This notion too contributed to framing magic as something eccentric, peripheral, and somewhat lacking vis-à-vis religion, despite being tightly connected to it.

Later scholarship, based on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive time spent in the company of magic practitioners observing how magic is carried out in practice, became more interested in understanding magic rather than debunking it. Resulting approaches tended to call into question the notion that clear-cut divisions, let alone hierarchies, between magical, religious, and scientific worldviews can be objectively established. Furthermore, a consensus has emerged amongst anthropologists and religious studies specialists that deciding where religion (e.g. belief in spiritual beings), folk knowledge (e.g. non-biomedical healing systems), or ‘natural philosophy’ (e.g. astronomy) end and magic begins, has more to do with cultural boundary-making and social normativities than with any ‘objective’ reality. In innumerable historical and socio-cultural settings, drawing clear lines would be impossible. In Renaissance Europe, magic was performed by clergymen, scientists, and philosophers, while twentieth-century occultists, guided by a keen interest in scientific discoveries, moved in a grey area between science and magic producing ambiguous yet highly successful concepts such as ‘animal magnetism’, ‘mesmerism’, or ‘psychic energy’. In colonial Africa, sorcery was part and parcel of communities’ everyday religious and ritual life (Evans-Pritchard 1937). In 1980s Euro-America, witchcraft was rediscovered by tight communities of college-educated urbanites. These cases invite us to abandon the deeply ingrained stereotypes about magic as spiritually aberrant, irrational, and irredeemably ‘other’ that influenced early anthropology.

In spite of the fallacies of evolutionism outlined so far, the works of Victorian anthropologists remain relevant today. Some of their ideas are still compelling and they are frequently referenced by contemporary occultists themselves. One example of such lasting contributions is Frazer’s typological distinction between imitative magic, based on similarity, and contagious magic, based on contact. In the case of imitative magic, actions, objects, or enactments that resemble a given thing, person, or event, are understood to have an effect on the latter (e.g., enacting a hunt to secure abundant game); contagious magic, on the other hand involves using items once connected to the intended target of magical action (e.g., using someone’s clothes or nail pairings to cast a spell on them). This distinction has become a staple in magical studies and even within magical milieus. More broadly, early social scientists’ characterization of magic as a quintessentially pragmatic, experimental endeavour, an attempt to harness and manipulate occult forces – getting one’s hands dirty with the occult, so to speak – retains most of its validity today, even if we might not want to see this as absolutely incompatible with, or subordinate to, canonical religion or academic scientific thinking.

Dealing with the negative: maleficium and modernity

If drawing clear boundaries and establishing hierarchies with respect to magic may be difficult, how does contemporary, fieldwork-based anthropology go about understanding it? Especially after anthropology’s methodological revolution in the 1920s that established ethnographic fieldwork as the paramount avenue to investigate social and cultural life, anthropologists have become particularly interested in understanding magic in and through practice – in other words, in figuring out what people do exactly, when they do magic.

Focusing on the uses and meanings of magic in concrete social settings has had the effect of showing us that magic, far from being something archaic, lies at the heart of global modernity. As people from Latin America, to central Africa, to Mongolia, to the US and Europe become engulfed in urbanization, capitalist markets, and dreams of social mobility, ideas about the occult gain currency. They reveal deep connections between personal experiences of distress and anxiety, historical transformations marked by dynamics that exceed the ordinary and the visible, and lasting yet flexible cultural models of the cosmos which include both visible and invisible forces (Geschiere 1997, Harding & Stewart 2003, Buyandelger 2007, Barkun 2013). Magic, thus, serves as a powerful resource through which people across the globe cope with their lives in a complex, unpredictable, and often intractable world.

Indeed, scholarship based on immersion in concrete socio-cultural settings has, from its inception, recognised magic as an existential resource people draw upon ‘to compensate for the uncertainties of chance and to forearm against bad luck’ and ‘create confidence, enhance hopes and anticipations’, as fieldwork pioneer Bronislaw Malinowski wrote describing vernacular propitiatory agricultural spells amongst Trobriand islanders (1935: 217, 246). Malinowski thereby suggested that magic becomes psychologically salient when humans are confronted with the problem of the unknown: a spell is a linguistic buffer against anxiety in the face of an ever-present threat of misfortune. Malinowski’s explanation of the psychological function of magic – as part of an explanatory approach called ‘functionalism’ – has spearheaded studies that focus on cognition, some of which will be discussed in the next section (Luhrmann 1989).

In a watershed study conducted in the 1930s, Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard investigated witchcraft and anti-witch vengeance magic among members of the Azande ethnic group of current day South Sudan. The concept of witchcraft, i.e. the capability to cause harm to others through mystical means either deliberately or unwittingly, was described by him as providing members of the Azande with ‘a natural philosophy by which the relationship between men and unfortunate events is explained’. In addition to offering practical means of dealing with misfortune, Azande witchcraft theory also pointed to a system of values regulating human conduct (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 18). Hostile or envious attitudes carried the risk of attracting ruinous witchcraft accusations. Furthermore, misdeeds could result in retaliatory magical attacks. Azande witchcraft theory thus inhibited socially disruptive behaviours, thereby strengthening the stability of what Evans-Pritchard saw as a social system. Interestingly, witchcraft accusations did not undermine social cohesion in this analysis. Instead, witchcraft could be seen to contribute to social stability.

The Azande, however, were perfectly aware of non-magical causal links. Witchcraft was not meant to explain all aspects of how a certain misfortune occurred. For example, when a building collapsed and killed somebody, any Azande could easily figure that its supporting structure had been weakened by termites. However, magic offered a framework to explain why something happened to a particular person and not someone else. Evans-Pritchard famously described this as the theory of the ‘second spear’. If a man is killed by an elephant, the elephant – the direct cause – is the first spear. Maleficium (causing evil through occult means) is the second spear. The elephant rammed into him, and not someone else, because he, not someone else, was bewitched.

This study revolutionised understandings of magic by framing it as a socially appropriate and culturally meaningful answer to the problem of a negative unknown, rather than a cognitively inadequate one. It emphasised that the Azande were not credulous, but people who prized inquisitiveness and rational thinking, and whose mental processes where not dissimilar from those of Evans-Pritchard’s fellow Europeans. Indeed, a major implication in Evans-Pritchard’s work is that it draws attention to the fact that all humans are likely to ask the question ‘why me?’ when visited by misfortune, with recourse to supernatural strategies. Azande witchcraft was not, after all, so exotic. This realization led to the emergence of sustained debates on the ‘rationality’ of magic that have been engaging anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers of various backgrounds and orientations (Winch 1970, Jarvie & Agassi 1970, Sperber 1982, Lewis 1994, Boyer 2002) ever since. These on-going debates have helped establish that multiple forms of rationality, apt to address complex moral, relational, and emotional problems alongside technical ones, are at play in all human societies. ‘Apparently irrational beliefs’ may appear much less outlandish once considered as parts – and expressions – of broader social and cultural logics.

In addition to recognising the social meaning of magic, anthropologists have also drawn attention to its therapeutic efficaciousness vis-à-vis experiences of the negative, especially illness and trauma (Lévi-Strauss 1974; Lindquist 2005; Favret-Saada 2015). Writing on folk magic in the deep rural south of Italy after World War II, Ernesto De Martino (2015) shed light on the experiences of anguish that characterised communities caught between impoverishment and rapid modernization – and especially the most vulnerable groups, labourers and women. He wrote, ‘[t]he root of … any form of magic, is the immense power of the negative throughout an individual’s lifetime, with its trail of traumas, checks, frustrations, and the corresponding restrictedness and fragility of the positive’ (2015: 87). In circumstances such as illness, exploitation, or uprooting, vulnerable individuals and communities faced a radical existential uncertainty that manifested itself in altered states of consciousness ranging from frenzy to catatonia, a condition called tarantism (literally a ‘tarantula’s bite’). De Martino investigated the vernacular magic-based emergency procedures, most prominently spells and ecstatic dances (Tarantella), activated in these cases. Folk magical techniques are, in De Martino’s view, procedures that facilitate recovery from crises, helping to overcome illness and existential dread. Magic enables people to makes sense of suffering, and offers a ‘first aid kit’ of materials, spells, exorcisms, and ritual specialists capable of reabsorbing the negative and thereby restoring a sufferer’s sense of self. De Martino mixes a phenomenological approach characterised by a focus on first-person experience, useful to grasp the intimate, personal dimension of magic, with a Marxian concern with the ‘structural’ dimension of the problem of suffering.

Related post-Marxist approaches have further illuminated magic’s relation with political-economic dynamics, such as the rapid development of capitalist markets disrupting pre-existing social arrangements and spreading anxieties across social bodies. Michael Taussig (1977), for example, has explored how in the 1960s, impoverished labourers in Latin American mines and sugar plantations employed the occult idiom of ‘the devil’ and the trope of the Faustian pact – the risk of losing one’s soul – to make sense of their work. These ideas were used to express intellectual and moral statements about the ‘hidden’ mechanisms of aggressive capitalism, such as uncompensated labour, the extraction of surplus value with the amassment of wealth into a few private hands, and commodity fetishism.

Indeed, devil talk turns out to be a surprisingly sophisticated tool through which unschooled peasants and miners could formulate theories and critical judgements about their political and economic reality of exploitation. Inspired by such studies, as well as Max Gluckmann’s notion of ‘magic of despair’, anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff have further contributed to our understanding of the political economy of magic and witchcraft though their notion of ‘occult economy’ (1999), i.e. imaginative and material practices connected to the use of magical means to achieve utilitarian ends. Phenomena such as witchcraft ‘epidemics’, urban lore on zombie labour, or occult-related conspiracy theories are, the Comaroffs submit, ‘symptoms’ of occult economies ‘waxing behind the civil surfaces’ of development. Cultural tropes such as the undead slave and the blood-sucking warlock become urgently salient when entire populations are drafted into regimented, mindless, and exhausting forms of labour or confronted with exploitative, seemingly invincible corporations. The term ‘occult economies’ thus indicates people’s ‘recourse to the occult in situations of rapid social transformation, under historical conditions that yield an ambiguous mix of possibility and powerlessness, of desire and despair, of mass joblessness and hunger amidst the accumulation, by some, of great amounts of new wealth’ (1999: 283): it is easy to see why although the Comaroff’s main focus is Africa, their approach has been applied to multiple contexts across the global South.

Working on the invisible: the magus craft

Despite the importance of studies that explore magic as a phenomenon straddling the personal, the cosmological, and the socio-historical, some scholars have argued that insisting on its negative aspects does not tell us the entire story. The occult is more than a symptom of suffering, turmoil, and distress. Indeed, a well-established scholarly tradition focuses on magic as an occult technology – a ‘craft’ – used to bring about desired change in both self and world. These approaches should not be seen as antithetical to the ones discussed above, and indeed the two aspects often coexist within the same instance, as the change being pursued with magical means may aim to restore balance and wholeness in the face of affliction or illness. Bearing in mind that distinguishing between ‘negative’- and ‘craft’-oriented approaches to the study of magic is to some extent an analytical artifice, this section will foreground examples of the creative and positive dimension of magic.

The case of ceremonial magic and especially Western esotericism is particularly helpful to appreciate magic’s ‘craft’. While all types of occult practices and knowledges are learned with varying degrees of mastery, Western ceremonial magic, being based on written bodies of tradition and often socialised through relatively organised communities, offers an ideal case study of magic as a set of techniques for the transformation of both the self and the world.

Many consider the Renaissance the golden era of European ceremonial magic. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries CE, polymaths and thinkers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Isabella Cortese, or John Dee devoted considerable energy to the investigation of both the visible and the invisible dimensions of the universe. These figures, at once proto-scientists, theologians, and explorers of the occult, played an important role in defining the field of ‘erudite’ Western magic, drawing on repertoires as different as astrology, Christian theology and ethics, Greek mystery religion and philosophy, and Jewish mysticism (Yates 1964, 2001; Culianu 1984; Jütte 2015). The Renaissance model of the cosmos featured an ethereal dimension, called pneuma, existing between the physical and the spiritual realms. All persons and things, although materially separate from each other, were understood to be invisibly interconnected at the ‘pneumatic’ level, clinging to each other in secret correspondences that escaped the base senses. Anthropologists working on magic have identified comparable models of reality in a vast number of societies. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl has classically defined this model ‘participatory’ (1999); more recently, Philippe Descola has proposed the notion of ‘analogism’ to describe models of the world in which all things are thought to be invisibly interlinked (2013).

Importantly, accessing the etheric dimension required sophisticated training of one’s imaginative and affective faculties. This involved rigorous spiritual discipline, encyclopaedic knowledge, articulated ceremonials, and the craft of handling matter according to its occult, etheric properties. In what is known as ‘desire magic’, for instance, Renaissance magicians would use their ability to discern and activate ethereal interconnections between objects, including persons, to influence the latter’s psychic life.

Intriguingly, this has originated the hypothesis that Renaissance magic is best understood not as a prefiguration of natural science, but rather of advertising, propaganda, and ‘mass psychology’ – the use of affective means to induce inter-psychic dynamics (Culianu 1984: 88). Indeed, the fact that there seems to be a strong family resemblance between ‘magic’, understood as the ability to generate and control interpersonal affective states, and mass publicity phenomena – from charismatic leadership to the attractiveness of brands – has long been recognised by anthropologists (Mazzarella 2017).

The advent of Protestantism likely drove ceremonial magic and its etheric intermediate dimension underground, ushering in an order of the universe premised upon a stark separation between the terrestrial and divine realms (Orsi 2002). However, the extent to which this transformation was successful is disputable: as we have seen in the previous section, modernity remains far from magic-free. Anthropological research (Luhrmann 1989, Lewis 1996) has revealed that ceremonial magic did not altogether disappear; rather, it withdrew to the counter-culture, where today it is actively pursued by new generations of practitioners. In contemporary Euro-America, occult circles of various types, such as Wiccan and neopagan covens, consciously attempt to revive Renaissance magic. Yet unlike their predecessors, latter-day Western occultists inhabit a post-Enlightenment, Cartesian mainstream anxious to exorcise the unruly spectre of magic (Pels 2003) or at least push it out of sight – either into the disreputable category of the ‘primitive’ or into the sanitised realm of ‘art’ (Mazzarella 2017).

Under these unfavourable conditions, anthropologists are interested in exploring how people who are socialised in a secular, non-magical, scientific cosmos, actively learn to ‘believe’ in magic. In other words, through which activities ordinary, scientifically literate Westerners reorganise their cognitive processes in order to ‘see’ the invisible workings of magic, in the mundane flux of everyday life. Anthropologists have described the transformative processes whereby magicians accustom themselves to finding magic persuasive as a work of cognitive cultivation. They have proposed concepts such as ‘interpretive drift’ (Luhrmann 1989) and ‘magical consciousness’ (Greenwood 2013; 2014) to characterise changes in magicians’ thinking styles.

Although magical forces are unpredictable, practitioners attempt to become alert to, and manipulate, them through disciplines requiring assiduous training, such as meditation, visualization, and dream interpretation. Ritual is equally important to ‘forge magical selves’ (Pike 1996). Consider the following example reported by Tanja Luhrmann: in the 1980s a London-based sorcerer performs a ceremony to propitiate fortune in finding accommodation (even then a notoriously tall order in the city’s housing market). A few days after the ritual, ‘no house is forthcoming, but a packet of advertising leaflets on house maintenance arrives in the post. This is reported with pride and self-mockery – the rite worked, but not quite with the intended results’ (Luhrmann 1989: 130). Recognising and attributing importance to hidden connections does not imply naiveté on the sorcerer’s part. Rather, doing magic entails a degree of irony, and a valorization of the imagination. Fantasy is not dismissed as mere ‘pretend’, but valorised as a ‘serious play’, a realm in which things and events are meaningful and wondrous. As Greenwood put it, while participating in magical consciousness, the question of belief in the ‘real’ existence of spiritual forces and beings frequently becomes ‘irrelevant’ (2014: 203).

What often counts for practitioners is that magic offers an avenue to positively engage with the world, while at the same time cultivating cognitive skills and imaginative or emotional resources that otherwise would remain inert. Owing to its ability to generate desirable affective states, William Mazzarella (2017) surmises, magic makes reality more enjoyable and pleasureful – even the mundane encounter with a packet of leaflets is experienced with delight – and this has positive repercussions on a sorcerer’s self. Ethnographic studies suggest that not only the goals, but also the methods of magic are considered invigorating by practitioners. When it comes to ritual, for instance, ceremonial magic allows ample scope for creativity compared to mainstream religious organizations: ceremonies change over time and magical milieus borrow from multiple traditions such as mythology, folklore, academic literature, and pop culture. Far from being seen as problematic, eclecticism in ritual is often proudly declared, an emphasis on creativity and bricolage understood as empowering (Magliocco 1996: 99; 2006).

While in this section we have focused on Western magic, it should be stressed that this form of ‘erudite’ occult craft is by no means the only one that underwent a revival in recent years. Consider, for example, the Book of Changes or I Ching – a classic Chinese divination text dealing with techniques of prognostication based on casting lots. Straddling philosophy, metaphysics, and soothsaying, I Ching has been described by some modern scholars as evidence that imperial-era Chinese literati were immersed in a ‘magical worldview’ (Chun 2014: 30). While, historically, divination has not been pushed underground or stigmatised to the same extent as Renaissance magic, I Ching was nonetheless harshly critiqued as superstitious during socialist-led modernization. Recently, however, I Ching divination made a comeback amongst middle-class urbanites, with some seeing it as having ethical value in view of its association with ‘traditional’ Chinese virtues. Others appreciate it for complementing scientific knowledge without being incompatible with a rational picture of the world (Matthews 2016, 2017). This example shows that in non-Western settings, too, occult disciplines may come to be cherished as helpful tools for ‘positive’ self-development and satisfying engagements with the world.

Despite the mainstream’s uneasiness with occult crafts such as ceremonial magic and divination, their stubborn refusal to simply vanish into thin air points not only to the inherent contradictions of modernity, but also to the value that practitioners attach to such crafts. Regardless of what individual scholars may think of the truth of magic, anthropology seeks to understand what makes it valuable in the eyes of its practitioners.

Re-enchantment and the future of magic

Mainstream ideas of magic and sorcery are linked to the stereotype of the broomstick-riding witch that crystallised during the Euro-American witch-hunts (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). While witch trials are often described as ‘mediaeval’, it is now well established (Ginzburg 1991) that during the actual Middle Age, ecclesiastical authorities were dismissive of magical threats, as they were certain that only God had sovereignty over the unseen. It was only as Europe entered early modernity that wizards and sorceresses became a real problem and the witch-hunts started. Recent interpretations (Stephens 2002; Silverblatt 2004) suggest that the reasons for this lie in an attitude of scepticism and inquisitiveness as well as a novel bureaucratic rationality, which began to pervade early-modern European society. Institutions such as the Inquisition sought ways to methodically explore the supernatural and systematically inquire into an occult realm. The latter had already started receding from the consciousness of Western elites, and was increasingly associated with marginal populations such as women or racial minorities. Paradoxically, even though in retrospect the witch-hunt bloodsheds may strike us as irrational, they may have been driven by a dispassionate experimental and bureaucratic mindset, rather than impulsivity and credulity. The useful lesson that this historical case can offer us is that enchantment and disenchantment are often intertwined in unpredictable ways.

This is not any less true today. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influential European intellectuals like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber appeared convinced that a worldwide increase in literacy, better living conditions, and growing acquaintance with modern science, would make people gradually forget their consolatory but false beliefs in spirits, gods, witches, and magical forces (Casanova 1994). On the other hand, it has been noted that occult-related themes often associated with these thinkers’ works – such as fetishism, the uncanny, or charisma – haunt and complicate simple visions of progress (Pels 2003; Morris 2017). And indeed, empirical observation of recent social phenomena – such as the aforementioned global boom of occult economies or the worldwide success of Wicca and neopaganism – show that the world may not be bound to become a disenchanted and secular place after all. Contemporary scholars even propose to understand the modern as being ‘re-enchanted’ (Partridge 2005). In such a re-enchanted world, many practitioners take ‘occulture’ – an eclectic milieu mixing esotericism, pop culture, and urban mysticism – to be perfectly compatible with logical thinking and a sensible outlook on life. They also treat magic as a valuable resource to address existential predicaments, foster resilience in the face of the negative, expand their cognitive resources, work on their spiritual selves, explore fantasy and creativity, and generally improve their relationship with the world.

Though scholars agree that late modernity has witnessed a resurgence of organised religions as well, magic, with its experimental, do-it-yourself character, appears particularly well-aligned with the post-secular spirituality of the twenty-first century. ‘Church’ religions remain powerful actors, but modernity has limited their hegemonic claims over the spiritual, enabling new opportunities for mystical, alternative, individualised spiritualities to blossom. From this point of view, Durkheim’s judgment of magic as a quintessentially personal spiritual endeavour was not so mistaken, and indeed late-modern spirituality has been defined by an influential commentator as ‘post-Durkheimian’ (Taylor 2002). Social research has shown, however, that magic is perfectly capable of fostering communities, even if it is as yet impossible to predict how, and whether new, ebullient magical milieus – like neopaganism or Wicca – will consolidate. In any case, scholars have argued that magical spirituality should not be considered any less genuine just because religionists do not ‘sit in pews’ nor ‘believe in systematic theologies’ (Partridge 2005: 2). What seems beyond doubt is that magic is not set to vanish into thin air anytime soon.

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Note on contributor

Matteo Benussi (PhD, Cantab.) is a social anthropologist specialising in the study of religion, ethics, and post-secularism. He has conducted research on vernacular spirituality and ritual in Ukraine as well as on Islamic piety movements in Central Eurasia/Russia, and has lectured on the anthropology of religion at the University of Cambridge. For his current research project on memory and morality amongst Russia’s Muslims, he divides his time between the Universities of Berkeley and Venice (Ca’ Foscari), and his fieldwork site in the Volga-Ural region of Russia.

Dr Matteo Benussi, Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3484/D, Venice, Italy. matteo.benussi@unive.it

Revolution

Felix Stein — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:26:19 +0000

Alice Wilson

University of Sussex

Initially published 16 Oct 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19rev

Abstract:

Revolutions encompass political mobilizations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures. Although early anthropology rarely addressed such movements or programmes for change directly, in recent years longstanding anthropological insights have helped shape an emerging field of the anthropology of revolution. Ethnographers’ non state-centric approaches to studying political life have generated distinctive, and wide-ranging, insights into revolutionary movements and their attempts at social transformation. In-depth, long-term fieldwork highlights how revolutions involve not just transformations, but also continuities, contradictions, and slowly-unfolding legacies. Social life during revolution, even while experienced as exceptional and liminal, relates to political, economic, religious, and social phenomena before and after revolution. Ethnographic studies have also foregrounded contradictions and paradoxes surrounding official narratives of revolution as ordered teleology and emancipation from class-based, gendered, and racial marginalization. Finally, recent studies have foregrounded long-term legacies arising from divergent revolutionary outcomes.

Introduction

Whilst there are different ways of defining the term, revolutions as understood here encompass political mobilisations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures. Activist and scholarly discussions of revolution address both movements of revolutionary activists, and outcomes such as the achievement (or not) of rapid transformations for which militants mobilise (see Bayat 2017: 15). The anthropological study of revolution in both these senses has begun to coalesce as a field of research relatively recently. Early generations of anthropologists had usually focused on social stability, rather than revolution. As the discipline changed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, anthropologists developed distinctive insights into revolutionary contexts. In doing so, at times anthropologists drew explicitly on longstanding insights into social life. Thus, the anthropology of revolution is both new and, in a sense, has deep roots.

For reasons of space, the present discussion does not extend to a review of related topics such as organised political violence, guerrilla fighters, insurgencies, and the responses of non-combatants to them (e.g. Hoffman 2011, Coulter 2009, Nordstrom 1997, Burnyeat 2018). Rather, the focus of this entry is a review of ethnographic and similarly rich qualitative studies (e.g. Shayne 2004, Vince 2010) which show how anthropologically-minded, non-state-centric analyses illuminate lived experiences of revolution. Historical and political science approaches have often focused on the conditions which lead to revolution, and the causes and scope of revolutionary outcomes (e.g. Tilly 1978: 189-222). This scholarship acknowledges that seizing state power does not necessarily lead to the revolutionary transformation of society (Tilly 1978: 220). Anthropologists have also challenged the idea that revolutions entail the rapid transformation of social structures, in particular by highlighting their continuities, contradictions, and slowly-unfolding legacies.

This entry first addresses definitions of revolution. It then describes how longstanding anthropological accounts of ritual and kinship, and in particular the liminal stage of rites of passage (Turner 1967), provided for distinctive anthropological insight into revolution. The entry then identifies three areas of discussion which have emerged as a result of the way that anthropologists place revolution in wider social contexts. First, anthropologists have explored how social life during revolutions, even while experienced as exceptional and liminal, relates to political, economic, and religious life before and after they occur. Second, anthropologists have foregrounded contradictions and paradoxes surrounding official narratives of revolution as ordered teleology and emancipation from class-based, gendered, racial, and other forms of marginalisation. Third, ethnographic studies have highlighted long-term legacies arising from divergent revolutionary outcomes.

Defining revolution

‘Revolution’ has two, apparently quite different, meanings in English (see Donham 1999: 1-2). The older meaning of revolution, prevalent until the Enlightenment, refers to ‘re-volution’, in the sense of the restoration of things to their original place. Such an interpretation corresponds to an understanding of time as cyclical. Time, in such an account, functions like planets revolving around the sun and returning eventually to their original place. Another pre-Enlightenment understanding of re-volution is the notion of the ‘wheel of fortune’: the metaphorical wheel revolves, causing people’s fortunes to rise and eventually fall back to an earlier position.^[1]Prior to the Enlightenment, political events described as a revolution similarly referred to the restoration of a previous state of affairs. For example, in late sixteenth century France, Henri, King of Navarre (1553-1610 CE) was baptised a Catholic but raised by his mother in the Protestant faith. Nevertheless, when he became King of France in 1593, he converted to Catholicism in order to appease those opposed to a Protestant taking the French throne. Observers commented on his return to the Catholic faith as a ‘revolution’ (Donham 1999: 1-2).

A contrasting meaning of revolution came to the fore with the Enlightenment, however. This sense, which has become the predominant contemporary meaning, implies a reversal of social, political, and economic order. Thinking of revolution as reversal corresponds in turn to a notion of time as linear, not cyclical. From the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment values of belief in human rationality as a source of progress implied teleological understandings of time, and the assumption that humans could transform their political, economic, and social life for the better. Since the Enlightenment, the toppling of monarchical and imperial regimes are known as the American, French, Haitian, Mexican and Russian Revolutions etc., reflecting teleological notions of time, the human capacity for progress, and an understanding of revolution as reversal. One of the most influential theories of revolution, Marxism, similarly takes revolution to be a reversal and a means of achieving progress towards the end point of socialism.

In accordance with this second meaning, narratives of revolutionaries since the Enlightenment depict revolutions as bringing about a reversal of existing orders – political, social, and economic – and the establishment of an alternative order. Definitions of revolution within the social sciences have sought to capture this sense of achieving not only political change, but also wider social change. One approach for doing so distinguishes ‘social revolutions’ from both ‘political revolutions’ and ‘economic revolutions’ (Skocpol 1979: 4-5). In this account, political revolutions might take the form of a coup d’état, and produce a change in those occupying government; economic revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution, bring about a change in the organisation of production and distribution and, we might add, consumption. In theory, political revolution in this sense could take place without economic revolution, and vice versa. When two kinds of programmes for change combine, however, bringing together both change in the way that political authority (such as the state) is structured, and change in the way that social relations are ordered and inequalities legitimated (such as class, or gendered and generational relations), then this would amount to more than a political or economic revolution, but rather ‘social revolution’ (Skocpol 1979: 4-5).

The long-term, in-depth empirical inquiries of anthropologists and related scholars are well-placed to grant insight into those revolutions combining ambitions for political, economic, and social change. Revolutions thus defined entail

a fundamental and irreversible change in the organization of a society; the destruction, often rapid and violent, of a previous form of social and political organization, together with myths which sustained it and the ruling groups which it sustained, and their replacement by a new institutional order, sustained by new myths and sustaining new rulers (Clapham 1988: 1).

The scope of change extends to ‘a rapid, basic transformation of a society’s political structures’ and ‘an effort to transform not just the political institutions but also the justifications for political authority in society, thus reformulating the ideas/values that underpin political legitimacy’ (Thomassen 2012: 683). Importantly, anthropological studies draw attention to ways in which transformations take place as changes in everyday lives as ‘micro-processes’: that is, ‘a countlessly repeated uprooting of social relations, in thousands of local communities, in millions of lives’ (Donham 1999: 35).

The scope of revolutions necessarily varies across different contexts, as does the meaning of local terms used to mean ‘revolution’. Amongst the various terms used in other languages, several emphasise change moving in a singular direction. For instance, the Arabic term is thawra, from the root ‘to rise up’. The Chinese fanshen means ‘to turn the body’, used in the sense of standing up to oppression (Hinton 1966). The Quechua/Aymara term pachakuti, though, is more ambiguous: it combines ‘upheaval’ (kuti) and a term spanning both ‘world balance’ and ‘space-time’ (pacha). Pachakuti has been used since the sixteenth century to describe the catastrophe of Spain’s invasion, but also since then to describe rebellions seeking to overcome colonial and neo-colonial rule and to restore indigenous world balance (Silva Rivera 1991, Swinehart 2019). Despite the emphasis on rupture/transformation across a range of terms as well as in definitions of revolution, echoes of the pre-Enlightenment understanding of revolution as a process of restoration nevertheless continue to haunt revolutionary movements and events in the post-Enlightenment period. Revolutions may re-establish the kinds of hierarchies that revolutionaries originally attempted to question – a sense of ‘revolution as restoration’ to which anthropological approaches have pointed.

A field takes shape

Early to mid-twentieth century anthropology focused on colonised peoples on the margins of capitalist economies. The early years of the discipline thus at first seem unpromising terrain for assessing revolutions. Nevertheless, one of anthropology’s founding figures, Marcel Mauss, analysed Russia’s Bolshevik revolutionary government as it unfolded in the years following the October 1917 revolution (Mauss 1984 [1924-5]). It was Mauss’ work on gifts, though, rather than on Bolshevism, which became foundational in anthropology. Arguing that gifts can create strong and lasting bonds between givers and recipients, Mauss stressed – crucially for his own and subsequent work on revolution – that some fields of social life, such as gift giving, interconnect with so many other aspects, such as politics, law, economics, religion, kinship, etc., that they are a ‘total social phenomenon’ (Mauss 1990 [1923-4]). Mauss recognised that revolutions – like gifts – connect many areas of social life: he saw the Russian Revolution as ‘of special interest to the sociologist’ because it was ‘a gigantic social phenomenon’ (Mauss 1984 [1924-5]: 336). Subsequent ethnographic accounts of revolution similarly embed the analysis of revolution in wide-ranging areas of social life.

Despite Mauss’ interest in Bolshevism, early to mid-twentieth century anthropology neglected revolutionary movements. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the dominant theoretical school in British social anthropology was structural-functionalism. It assumed that persons and social institutions ultimately served the function of reproducing and maintaining the prevailing social order, and that society functioned as an isolated whole. Consequently, structural-functionalist studies sought to explain social stability and the reproduction of hierarchy in apparently unchanging societies. For instance, in the context of richer agriculturalists’ dominance of poorer cattle herders among the Kpelle of central Liberia, a mid-twentieth century anthropological study analysed social rituals (Gibbs 1963; Gibbs, Breitrose & Silverman 1970). From a structural-functionalist perspective, Kpelle rituals – such as public dispute resolution councils and the accompanying slaughtering of a calf for wide distribution of the meat – dissipated social tension whilst legitimising, reproducing, and entrenching existing hierarchies. To the extent that this kind of anthropological inquiry engaged with revolution, it did so indirectly by explaining why and how societies managed to avoid it.

Similarly, theoretical predisposition to see certain societies as static and unchanging prevented some anthropologists from recognising how revolutionary conditions emerge. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a flourishing field of Andeanist studies. Andeanismo, or Andeanism, as a theoretical perspective assumed that Andean societies were largely pristine, unchanging cultures (Starn 1991). Andeanism was one of the factors which meant that most scholars during this period failed to acknowledge that in Peru there were growing connections between rural and urban communities, and that many Andean Peruvians desired to fight against conditions of poverty. Andeanism left ‘hundreds’ (Starn 1991: 63) of anthropologists surprised by, and struggling to explain, the outbreak in 1980 of Peru’s Maoist armed guerrillas, the Shining Path.

Although andeanismo clung to notions of social conservatism, in the 1960s and 1970s the problematic assumptions underpinning structural-functionalism became clearer. Anthropologists were increasingly critical of static notions of culture and social order (Geertz 1975, Clifford 1988), and of complicity with colonial domination of non-Western peoples (Asad 1973). Yet during this period, some earlier anthropological work on the reproduction of social structures emerged as the background for insight into revolution as a social process entailing – like other forms of ritual – rupture with, temporary suspension of, and then restoration of social order.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1950s with the Ndembu of then Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia), Victor Turner studied the role of ritual in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Turner took inspiration from the work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage from one stage of the life course to another. Van Gennep (1960 [1909]) had suggested three stages in the rites of passage through the life course: separation, liminality, and re-aggregation. Turner (1967) suggested that four stages were at stake in ritual for transitioning to a new stage in the life course: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. He emphasised that during the phase of crisis (van Gennep’s liminal phase), there was a particular quality of social experience. Those involved experienced a temporary suspension of ordinary forms of hierarchy. During this crisis/liminal phase, persons acquired intense feelings of camaraderie for one another, which Turner called communitas. These feelings of communitas continued to underpin strong bonds between members of the same age set. These bonds lasted even after the phase of liminality ended, and ordinary social hierarchies were restored with each person taking up his or her place within those hierarchies.

Later, Turner (1988) applied his ideas about liminality and communitas to contemporary political contexts of revolution (see Thomassen 2012: 688). He suggested that movements seeking to reverse social order, such as revolutions, created spaces of liminality and communitas. From the anthropology of ritual, then, emerged one of anthropology’s most distinctive contributions to the analysis of revolutions: revolutionaries often experience their mobilisation as times and spaces of liminality or as the temporary cancellation of ordinary hierarchies. As is the case for the liminality of rites of passage (Turner 1967), revolutionaries may experience communitas, the intense solidarity amongst those who have shared extraordinary liminal circumstances. For instance, in the early 2000s, feelings of communitas bolstered young Iranians who engaged in rebellious acts that defied the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic (Mahdavi 2009). These young people considered themselves to be taking part in what they called a ‘sexual revolution’ (enghelāb-e-jensi) by dancing, party-going, wearing attention-grabbing styles of clothing, and engaging in extra-marital sexual relations – activities all forbidden by the Islamic Republic. They were convinced that cumulatively these small acts of resistance questioned the legitimacy of the state. In the words of one young woman,

If any member of the morality police tries to touch me, I will scream at him, and everyone will support me. I can wear my nail polish, and my lipstick too! That means something. That means that we are getting to them, that we do have power (Mahdavi 2009: 122).

Anthropology’s turn away from the static to the dynamic, and its increasing attempts to interrogate global and local power structures, saw late twentieth and early twenty-first century analyses of revolutions blossom in their thematic, temporal, and geographic coverage. To mention but a few studies, anthropologists have examined revolutionary life in: socialist societies and movements in Eastern Europe (Verdery 1996, Ledeneva 1998); Latin America (Rosdendahl 1997, Montoya 2012, Härkönen 2016); Asia (Humphrey 1983, Luong 1992, Yan 2003) and Africa (Lan 1985, Davis 1987, Donham 1999); the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran (Haeri 1989); the 1994 Zapatista guerrilla uprising against Mexico’s neoliberal policies (Nash 2001, Speed 2008); and the Arab Spring revolutions (Bayat 2017). This scholarship takes inspiration from Turner’s and Mauss’ insights into the ways in which revolutions – even when participants experience them as liminal – connect with wider social, political, and economic structures and values.

Placing revolutions in wider social contexts

We might expect that, as movements aspiring to achieve social and political transformations, revolutions rework political and economic life. But it is worth stressing the multiple ways in which revolutions draw upon religious life. Some religious orientations have famously inspired revolutionaries. Liberation theologists in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s took inspiration from Christian faith to encourage political action to counter socioeconomic inequities (Gutiérrez 1974 [1971]). Connections between religious life and revolutionary action also exist for revolutionary movements which directly challenge institutionalised religion.

Turner’s work established that revolution shares characteristics of religious ritual. Revolutions also connect with other aspects of religious and moral life. Their discourse can assume the qualities of demand for self-sacrifice. In socialist Cuba, revolutionary subjects experience, talk about, and at times put into practice a commitment of self-sacrifice for the revolution, even to the point of expressing the righteousness of being willing to die for it (Holbraad 2014). Cubans distinguish between the revolutionary principles to which they feel loyal, and disappointment with everyday living conditions in revolutionary Cuba. Their views that the revolution deserves self-sacrifice withstand their complaints about everyday shortcomings (Holbraad 2014: 6).

Another parallel between religious and revolutionary social life concerns injunctions to preserve ‘purity’. Just as some devotees are meant to keep themselves ‘pure’ from threats such as sin and pollution, revolutionary cadres may face pressure to keep themselves ‘pure’ by distinguishing themselves from the masses who have not yet acquired sufficient revolutionary credentials. This was the case in Sri Lanka in the 1980s for cadres serving with the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the areas under the movement’s control (Thiranagama 2011: 212). Overtly, the LTTE sought to distance itself from Hinduism and its taboos about specific categories of people maintaining their social purity through the avoidance of contact with polluting persons and matter. Nevertheless, the movement itself engaged in ‘constant purification’ to reinforce cadres as a special category distinct from the wider population – with this separation ultimately constraining the movement’s ability to transform Tamil society (Thiranagama 2011: 212).

Revolutionaries can also echo devotees in their concerns to respect a higher moral order. In the northwest Sahara, from the 1970s to the present day, Sahrawi revolutionaries hailing from the Polisario Front, the liberation movement which seeks to liberate the disputed Western Sahara from Moroccan annexation, have sought to transform Sahrawi society. These revolutionaries live in exile in autonomously run refugee camps in southwest Algeria. On the one hand, the refugees and their government experience their revolution as a new social contract introducing a new governing authority – their (partially recognised) Sahrawi state authority – which replaces tribal authority (Wilson 2016b).^[2]On the other hand, though, Sahrawi refugees also experience their revolution as a new moral contract between governing authorities and governed constituencies (Wilson 2016b: 238-43). This moral contract emphasises that each party expects the other to put the interests of national liberation and the revolution above narrower interests of personal or familial gain. This moral contract determines whether or not refugees consider the government’s discretionary distribution of resources, such as extra rations and travel opportunities, as corruption or not, and whether officials consider refugees to have deserving claims on them. This notion of revolution as a moral contract has proved enduring in exile. Over time, tribes have partially re-emerged amongst Sahrawi refugees as influential in areas of governance such as dispute resolution and elections, suggesting that the revolution as social contract has modified. But the sense of revolution as a moral contract, entailing injunctions for parties to live up to moral norms, has persisted.

Another link between religion and revolution is that religious dispositions can provide pathways for joining a revolutionary movement. In India in the 1970s, a Maoist guerrilla movement, the Naxalites, emerged to oppose the Indian state. With the Indian state fighting back against them, by the 2000s Maoist militants were operating under cover in terrains such as the jungles of Jharkhand. The marginalisation of Jharkhand’s tribal populations also motivated locals to support, and sometimes join, insurgents who were intent upon challenging that marginalisation (Shah 2014). The guerrillas were expected to give up personal ties; but before becoming revolutionaries, many senior guerrilla leaders had in their youth been religious renouncers who had already abandoned personal possessions and ties. Religious orientation can thus prepare the way for revolutionary commitment.

To explain the endurance of the Naxalite movement, Shah (2014) nevertheless stresses both cultural factors (such as religious practice) and political and economic factors (such as the exploitation and marginalisation of India’s tribal communities in Jharkhand). She echoes Mauss’ emphasis on the interconnection in revolutions of cultural, religious, political, and economic life. In addition to the many ways in which revolutions can resemble religious life, they also draw on longstanding political and economic forms.

The revolutionary reworking of existing political forms can be seen in a Shiraz village during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 (Hegland 2013). Villagers perceived political life as a set of potential conflicts between taifeh (tribal) groups. Villagers understood these groups to be dynamic coalitions of persons with shared interests that brought together and surpassed kinship groups. When conflicts arose, belligerents mobilised taifeh connections until one group prevailed and the conflict was resolved. In the build-up to 1979, the Shah’s increased political repression had disposed most villagers towards revolt; nevertheless, the specific way in which male and female villagers took the decision to join in protests derived from their understanding of taifeh conflicts. A villager associated with the Shah’s supporters assaulted another villager opposed to the Shah. This incident led other villagers to mobilise, just as they would have for a conflict between taifeh groups, and join anti-Shah protests. Pre-existing political values and structures, here entailing tribal conflict, shaped participation in the revolution, even though the latter came to present itself as a form of rupture with the past. Interestingly, longstanding political values both facilitated, and at the same time were transformed through, revolutionary participation. Where villagers had not previously recognised women’s contributions to village political networks, they acknowledged women’s contributions to revolutionary action (Hegland 2013: 189).

Previous economic forms influenced the shape of revolutionary structures amongst Western Sahara’s revolutionaries in exile in Algeria (Wilson 2016b: 136-40). From the formation of the refugee camps in 1976 into the 2000s, the refugee government and liberation movement, Polisario Front, recruited unwaged labour from refugees to staff social services and ministries. By the 2000s, however, refugees expected to earn money to compensate for decreasing rations. By the mid 2000s, Polisario Front was having to pay teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats (low and irregular) wages. Yet amid expectations of wages, one form of unwaged labour survived: ‘work party’ events known as a ḥamla (campaign). These work parties were a reworking-cum-transformation of local labour-pooling known as twiza. Ḥamla and twiza shared characteristics such as sex-segregation, a light-hearted atmosphere, and an expectation that organisers provide some drink/food as hospitality. The transformation was that where twiza had relied on tribal networks, the revolutionary government recruited ḥamla participants (and also provided the hospitality). In sum, the creation of revolutionary forms of state power can rely on recycling pre-existing economic, political, and social forms.

Paradoxes and contradictions within revolutions

Revolutionary activists and leaders typically stress their intentions to achieve social, political, and economic change – and anthropological work often challenges this by showing how revolutions rework existing social forms. This combination of rupture and continuity constitutes a contradiction among the many paradoxes within revolutions. Anthropologists are not alone in observing these contradictions. Many revolutions – the American (1765-1783), French (1789), Russian (1917), amongst others – have claimed to promote emancipation but have nevertheless preserved or established forms of subjugation. It is also well known that revolutionaries who in theory support, for example, women’s emancipation may expect women to put gender-specific demands ‘on hold’ whilst the ‘higher’ goals of capturing state power are achieved, as was the case amongst Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s (Molyneux 1985). Revolutionary vanguards also tend to mobilise mass supporters less well-versed in revolutionary discourse than cadres. These supporters may have rebelled for the ‘wrong’ reasons, leading to the paradox that vanguards who seize power expunge revolutionaries deemed ideologically deficient from historical narratives (Scott 1979). Further revolutionary paradoxes and contradictions come to light through ethnographic studies.

There have been many paradoxes concerning the revolutionary promotion of gendered forms of emancipation. Socialist revolutionary societies have focused on increasing women’s labour force participation, assuming that achieving (more) equal rights for men and women as workers will achieve broader gender parity. Nevertheless, women are usually still left with the main responsibilities of homemaking, in addition to being political activists. This leaves women in revolutionary societies with a ‘triple burden’ of waged labour, domestic duties, and political activism (Verdery 1996: 65). In socialist Cuba, another paradox is that the state’s provision for women’s practical needs, such as labour force participation and childcare, has, in some Cubans’ eyes, diminished the possibilities for the development of autonomous feminist activism (Shayne 2004: 152). Revolutionary agendas to promote gendered emancipation can be fraught with contradiction.

It is far from guaranteed that women who participated in revolutionary action, including by taking up arms, feel recognised for their efforts either by a revolutionary government or by peers. Women revolutionaries may afterwards be treated by peers as if they are polluted, as was the case for some Algerian female revolutionaries whose moral propriety male peers questioned (Vince 2016: 140-1). Former members of Mozambique’s elite female Frelimo detachment similarly bemoaned that male co-fighters were unwilling to choose female combatants as spouses, preferring instead to marry women whom they perceived would be more compliant (West 2000). Egalitarian values do not always travel smoothly from slogans to everyday lived experience.

Just as promises of revolutionary gendered emancipation meet contradictions in practice, official narratives of revolutionary origins and outcomes can face competing personal experiences. The 1974 Ethiopian revolution established a Marxist-Leninist state. After the coup, Amharic-speaking members of the revolutionary vanguard set out to bring the revolution and its promise of modernisation to remote regions, including that of the Maale people in the South (Donham 1999). Maale subjective experiences, however, disrupted the narrative that the revolution brought modernisation. The Maale had already experienced a ‘pre-revolution’ of rupture to their traditional social order during Protestant missionary activity (Donham 1999: 82-101). Furthermore, Amharic conquest in the late nineteenth century had already so transformed Maale traditional kingship that when revolutionary students destroyed symbols of Maale kingship, some locals interpreted this as the restoration of earlier (pre Amharic-conquest) tradition (Donham 1999: 59-81). The Maale case also contradicted theoretical expectations that the relatively affluent ‘middle’ level of peasants would be more likely to embrace revolution than their more indigent, oppressed peers. Eric Wolf (1969) theorised that the poorest peasants would be too downtrodden to rebel. In fact, those Maale who most readily mobilised as revolutionaries hailed from the poorer converts to Christianity rather than middle-ranking Maale traditionalists (Donham 1999: 46). Popular experience of revolution can contradict officially promoted intentions and expectations.

One consequence of the origins and results of revolutions playing out quite differently from participants’ expectations is that many revolutionaries end up feeling disillusioned. They feel disappointed with the outcomes after their extraordinary and painful efforts and sacrifices. Revolutionary disappointment stretches from former female fighters in Mozambique (West 2000) to mid-level cadres and rank-and-file activists in El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí liberation front turned peacetime political party (Sprenkels 2018). In a Mexican town that was one of the first to join the country’s 1910 revolution, locals in the 1980s felt like ‘spent cartridges of revolution’ because they found themselves still fighting the same struggles over land and labour (Nugent 1993). The emotional experience characteristic of revolution can shift over time from communitas to disillusion.

Yet paradoxes can emerge even in cases of revolutionary disappointment: those who are disenchanted with socialism in Cuba still feel loyalty to the revolution (Holbraad 2014). In Egypt, many who mobilied in 2011 to depose President Mubarak felt, once the military deposed democratically elected President Morsi in 2013, that the revolution had failed to transform state power and social life. But many still experienced enormous change in their personal lives – as if there was a lasting, intimate effect of communitas as people questioned old bonds and forged new ones. One Egyptian activist noted,

[S]o much was revealed about people around us... irreconcilable differences in values were revealed. When a group of people are killed and one person reacts by celebrating and the other by mourning… what happens next? There were divorces, estrangement, other big rifts within families (Fernández-Savater et al. 2017: 146-7).

Personal and national experiences of revolutionary rupture and continuity intersect and can indeed contradict one another.

A further, and profound, revolutionary paradox lies in the merging of the two meanings of revolution as transformation and restoration. Revolutionary movements which seek to undo old hierarchies frequently end up creating new kinds of hierarchies, such as between vanguards and to-be-enlightened masses (Donham 1999, Thiranagama 2011) or between those given priority for accessing resources and those excluded (Wilson 2016b: 233-4). In diverse ways, revolutions can end up establishing at least in part a re-aggregation or reintegration of social and political hierarchy.

Legacies of revolution

Anthropologists have studied revolutions as participants and activists (Cabarrús 1983, Speed 2008), as concerned locally employed researchers (Bourdieu & Sayad 1964), and as fieldworkers who happened to be there when revolution erupts (Donham 1999, Hegland 2013). Being in situ during a revolution can nevertheless mean being one of the ‘hidden majority’ excluded from accessing iconic demonstration spaces – such as Cairo’s Tahrir square during the 2011anti-Mubarak protests – and who instead encounter promises of political transformation whilst confined to safer domestic spaces (Winegar 2012). But even when anthropologists cannot conduct fieldwork during revolution, their long-term engagements with interlocutors lead to rich understandings of the legacies of revolutionary movements across varied outcomes not limited to self-proclaimed revolutionary states.

Revolutionary legacies play out in contexts of ambiguity in revolutionary outcomes. The end of revolutionary insurgency and its control over state power does not necessarily mean the end of revolutionary influence. In Nicaragua during the 1990s, a neoliberal government proposed policies that would undo many forms of social protection and progressivism achieved during Sandinista revolutionary rule in the 1980s. Nevertheless, new social movements emerged through which people mobilised to resist neoliberal policies and preserve revolutionary social achievements (Babb 2001). Thus ‘it may be precisely after the revolution that the long struggle for democratisation and economic justice will be waged’ (Babb 2001: 15-6). In El Salvador in 2009, the Farabundo Martí liberation front became the first revolutionary movement in Latin America which, having failed to achieve power through insurgency, took power instead through elections. The ties between erstwhile combatants and revolutionary activists lent themselves to being recycled into ties of electoral clientelism which contributed to the party’s success – despite the fact that many El Salvadorans at the same time felt disillusioned with the recognition they received from their movement-turned-party (Sprenkels 2018). Just as revolutions rework existing social relations, people rework revolutionary social forms and ties as they build post-revolutionary lives and projects.

Close attention to the everyday lives of former revolutionaries opens up the question of when and how revolutions end. In Algeria, official historical narratives focus on the National Liberation Front’s successful achievement of independence and takeover of the government. Life histories of female revolutionary activists from independence in 1962 to the 1990s nevertheless show the many challenges that these women faced in gaining recognition for their contributions and in participating in political and economic life. Yet the women concerned did not necessarily experience this as a sign that the revolution failed, but rather that it had not ended (Vince 2016: 174).

The everyday sociality of defeated revolutionaries who live in conditions of political marginalisation and repression can also call into question the ending of defeated revolutions. In Dhufar, southern Oman, four decades after the 1975 defeat of Dhufar’s erstwhile revolutionary liberation movement, former members socialised in mixed-race, mixed-tribal gatherings that reproduced social egalitarian values associated with the revolution (Wilson 2019). Bonds of communitas between those who experienced revolutionary liminality can outlive the revolutionary liminal period itself. Furthermore, Dhufar continues to produce new platforms for progressive politics in elections and during Oman’s Arab Spring protests (Wilson 2016a). The defeat of a revolution, then, does not preclude later mobilisation echoing earlier demands for social, political, and economic inclusion and participation. Meanwhile in India, former Maoist Naxalite militants demonstrate lasting social consequences of their militancy. When they were Naxalite revolutionaries in their youth in the 1970s, these men questioned conservative norms of masculinity. Decades later, aged in their fifties to eighties, these men continued to question conservative gender norms even after political defeat. They avoided conforming to dominant models of South Asian masculinity of renouncers (those who renounce personal possessions and attachments) or householders (those who take on the responsibilities of heading a household) (Donner 2009). Defeated revolution can have a ‘social afterlife’ (Wilson 2019) whereby networks, values, subjectivities, and identities produced through it ‘cannot just be resolved or cast away’ but ‘have to be negotiated anew’ (Thiranagama 2011: 12).

The long-term legacies of the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the revolutions-turned-civil-wars in Syria and Yemen, are still in the making. Egyptian workers set up revolutionary institutions to organise labour after the 2011 anti-Mubarak revolution. President Sisi’s counterrevolution repressed workers’ organisation – but younger workers’ adoption during their revolutionary organisation of new values of egalitarianism created a legacy of novel values with the potential to outlast more transient institutions (Makram-Ebeid 2014). In Tunisia, the world watched the dramatic events of the Jasmine revolution in 2010-2011, which deposed President Ben Ali. Media stories subsequently moved on, but years of work lie ahead in creating the political aperture for which protesters mobilised. Youth activists who seek to support their country’s transition to democracy through participation in democracy-promotion workshops must strike a balance between making their efforts legible for international funders whilst maintaining locally meaningful forms of engagement (Boutieri 2015). Whatever revolutions’ successes and failures in the eyes of their participants and opponents, legacies of movements and militants’ plans for social change unfold over years.

Anthropologies of revolutions

From having been a discipline which mostly overlooked the possibility for revolution, anthropology has produced distinctive insights into the social, political, economic, and moral lives of revolutionaries. A sub-field of an anthropology of revolution – or rather anthropologies of revolutions, given the range of approaches therein – is emerging in anthropologists’ teaching and writing for audiences in the academy (e.g. Thomassen 2012, Holbraad et al. forthcoming) and beyond (Shah 2018, Starn & La Serna 2019). Anthropological accounts of revolution both underscore the tension between revolutionary liminality and connections with wider social life, and foreground ambivalent experiences of revolution: rupture and continuity intersect, transformation overlaps with restoration of hierarchical social order, and lived experiences contest clear beginnings and endings. Ongoing studies of revolution in anthropology, and beyond, are strengthened by placing the experiences of those living through, with, and after revolution in wider social and temporal contexts.

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Nordstrom, C. 1997. A different kind of war story. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. 1991. Aymara past, Aymara future.Report on the Americas 25(3), 18-45 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.1991.11723133).

Rosendahl, M. 1997. Inside the revolution: everyday life in socialist Cuba. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Scott, J.C. 1979. Revolution in the revolution: peasants and commissars. Theory and Society 7(1/2), 97-134 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.2307/657000).

Shah, A. 2014. ‘The muck of the past’: revolution, social transformation, and the Maoists in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, 337-56.

——— 2018. Nightmarch: among India's revolutionary guerrillas. London: Hurst.

Shayne, J.D. 2004. The revolution question: feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Skocpol, T. 1979. States and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge: University Press.

Speed, S. 2008. Rights in rebellion: indigenous struggle and human rights in Chiapas. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Sprenkels, R. 2018. After insurgency: revolution and electoral politics in El Salvador. Notre Dame: University Press.

Sneath, D. 2016. Tribe. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. (eds) F. Stein, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, S. Lazar, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch. http://doi.org/10.29164/16tribe.

Starn, O. 1991. Missing the revolution: anthropologists and the war in Peru. Cultural Anthropology 6(1), 63-91.

——— & M. La Serna 2019. The shining path: love, madness, and revolution in the Andes. New York: Norton.

Swinehart, K. 2019. Decolonial time in Bolivia’s Pachakuti. Signs and Society 7(1), 96-114 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1086/701117).

Thiranagama, S. 2011. In my mother's house: civil war in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Thomassen, B. 2012. Notes towards an anthropology of political revolutions. Comparative Studies in Society and History 54(3), 679-706.

Turner, V. 1967. Betwixt and between: the liminal period in Rites de passage. In The forest of symbols (ed.) V. Turner, 93-111. Cornell: University Press.

———1988. The anthropology of performance. New York: PAJ Publications.

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Wilson, A. 2016a. Oman's consultative council elections: shaking up tribal hierarchies in Dhufar. Middle East Report 281(Winter), 41-3.

——— 2016b. Sovereignty in exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

——— forthcoming 2019. Invisible veterans: defeated militants and enduring revolutionary social values in Dhufar, Oman. Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 5, 132-49.

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Note on contributor

Alice Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research examines legacies of radical projects for social change in revolutions and liberation movements in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Sovereignty in exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs (University of Pennsylvania, 2016).

Dr Alice Wilson, Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, United Kingdom. alice.wilson@sussex.ac.uk.

[1] British Library 2012. The wheel of fortune. Medieval Manuscripts Blog (available on-line: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/02/the-wheel-of-fortune.html).

[2] The English term ‘tribe’ and its derivatives have problematic connotations when it comes to translating and theorising indigenous social forms, such as Sahrawis’ qabīla or Iranians’ taifeh. See Sneath, D. 2016. Tribe. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/tribe).

Divination

Felix Stein — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 12:54:34 +0000

Diana Espírito Santo

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Initially published 4 Apr 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19divination

Abstract:

Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The classic distinction is that of Cicero’s inspirational divination versus that which requires some form of trained skill. Oracles, seers, and prophets in Ancient Greece would be part of the first category, while African basket diviners, Yoruba priests of divination, and Mongolian shamans would be part of the latter category. Arguably most forms of divination require both inspiration and skill. Divination practices are often based in nature, taking form through its elements. It can be done with things, such as tea leaves, bones, nuts, and water, as well as cards, and other non-nature-based components. It can also be done in and as the body, such as with spirit possession, mediation, and dreams. Furthermore, there are spontaneous forms of divination, such as reading the movement of birds, and more formal ones requiring meticulous human input. But links to the divine can vary, with Western forms of divination often devoid of a tradition or theology behind the use of oracles. As a concept, divination has constituted one of anthropology’s primary tropes for representing its exotic ‘other’. While cognitive and symbolic-intellectualist approaches understand divination as a mostly explanatory device, critics signal to divination’s embodied, worldmaking, and also ontological character.

Introduction

A good first way of approaching divination is to consider it as a means of arriving at answers to a personal or social quandary. As such, divination may be diagnostic, in that it offers advice, guidance, rules, and taboos to be followed. It can also be forecasting, by predicting future events, and it may even be interventionist, by intervening in the receptor’s spiritual and physical health or indeed in their destiny.

That said, divination is also a ritual and a tradition, ‘constituted by, and constituting, an ongoing dialogue with more-than-human agents’ (Curry 2010: 114-115). Nature is traditionally fundamental to divination, whose indigenous metaphorical roots remit to natural phenomena such as stones, water, and animal behaviour (Curry 2010: 115). In some African and Afro-American religious communities, animal blood and other sacrifices are necessary to obtain enough vitality for the gods to manifest in an oracle, as a prelude to interpretation (exegesis) on the part of the diviner. Different concepts of temporality seem to apply in divination. To engage in ‘evil eye’ exorcisms and coffee-cup readings, or tasseography, in Greece, for instance, one has to be able to comprehend multiple temporalities. C. Nadia Seremetakis explains, ‘[l]inear, compartmentalized time advanced by modernity precludes any interpenetration of the present and the future’ (2009: 339), characteristic of divination. For instance, modernity’s temporality has little to say about dream signs from the future and how these penetrate the present, for dreamers. In modern times, the present is something impermeable (Seremetakis 2009), unaffected by the future-telling of oracles such as coffee-cup readings, which interpret the patterns on remaining coffee sediments.

Divination has been documented ethnographically as a phenomenon with an astounding variety of methods and techniques across cultures. In De Divinatione (2007), written in 44 BC, the Roman philosopher Cicero distinguishes between inspirational kinds of divination, such as visions or dreams, and those requiring some form of trained skill, such as astrology. Oracles, seers, or prophets in Ancient Greece would be considered part of the first lot. Indeed, healing sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world promoted forms of dream incubation for the premonition and recognition of ailments (Tedlock 2010). Techniques for skill-based divination tend to involve interpreting diviners, who can be socially recognised and highly respected as experts, or indeed shamans,[1] in their respective societies.

Divination can be done with things, such as consecrated or significant objects, bones, shells, stones, tea leaves, or cards. But it can also be carried out via bodies, cultivated through spirit mediumship and shamanism, in which there is a communicative prerogative to the possessed: messages come from the mouths of mediums but do not originate with them. A medium’s sensory and subjective information can remain relevant, such as with North American ‘channelers’ (Brown 1999) or with Latvian ‘sensitives’^[2](Skultans 2007). Alternatively, full possession can annihilate the medium’s consciousness altogether and they become pure vehicles for the divine (Wafer 1991). In some cases, trance by a witchcraft spirit can constitute evidence of foul play by others, whereby it qualifies as divination of sorts (see Fontein 2014, for a discussion of this in UK courts).

Links to the divine in divination vary. It can be buttressed by a cosmology of invisible entities, which an oracle mediates, such as with the orisha gods in the Yoruba cowry-shell divination (Bascom 1969). Yet it may also be experienced as a direct configuration of the cosmos as it is, such as with the Tarot, astrology, or numerology, which animate the cosmos with extra-human causal forces, but do not necessarily rely on the existence of a single god or deity. This second category includes conceptualizations by Jungian scholars such as Marie-Louise von Franz, for whom the unconscious is a repository of collective archetypal knowledge, that is catalysed perfectly through divination (1980).

Importantly, divination does not just belong to ‘traditional’ societies. In Western societies for example, experts often use divination without a cultural sanction of any kind, and indeed magical traditions are often associated with the upper classes (Greenwood 2009). Electronic and digital technology can also become important, such as when paranormal investigators contact the dead using white-noise generating machines known as Ghost or Divination Boxes, resulting in so-called Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) (Noory & Guiley 2011). Further, divination has something to say about representational concepts of mediation and transcendence in modern technology. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús has used the ethnography of transnational divinatory practices between Cuba and the United States (2015) to argue that electronic media, such as the Internet, or DVDs, enable the expansion not just of Afro-Cuban religion, but also of the movement and transit of its deities through electric currents. Modern media and spirit here cannot easily be analytically separated.

Some scholars have proposed divination is part of ‘magical thinking’, which we are all capable of, either because it is biologically, evolutionarily innate (Barrett 2004; Boyer 1994; Nemeroff & Rozin 2000), or because we are all in possession of an ultimately ‘irrational’ intuition. Thorley et al. (2010) have even proposed the term ‘essential divination’ to describe the quotidian symbolic thinking, some of which is unconscious, which characterises all human beings. In any case, divination is not an arbitrary cultural practice; it is, in the words of Philip M. Peek, ‘often the primary institutional means of articulating the epistemology of a people’ (1991: 2): both a way of knowing, and a trusted means of decision-making. It is also a source of social and political power.

But as a concept, it has also constituted one of anthropology’s primary tropes for representing its exotic ‘other’. In this entry, I follow the main functionalist and intellectualist-symbolic perspectives that have dominated the anthropology of divination. In broad stokes, structural-functionalism sees cultural elements as fitting together organically and maintaining social cohesion, whereas intellectualist-symbolic approaches see divination as commenting on or explaining the social and natural world. These perspectives are underwritten by the notion that practitioners represent reality in myriad and expert ways with available but limited knowledge, and that divination implies a complex knowledge of social relationships in a given society articulated in symbolic ways. At the end of this entry, I will explore recent approaches to divination that understand it thoroughly in its worldmaking and ontological capacities.

Randomness, interpretation, and language

One of the guiding questions of the anthropology of religion has been, in the words of Dan Sperber, why some people entertain and reproduce ‘apparently irrational beliefs’ (1985). This puzzlement has haunted much of the anthropology of divination.^[3] For Sperber, this assumed ‘irrationality’ can be explained if we take into consideration that evolved minds are capable of having meta-representations, i.e. representations of representations. The paradigmatic example of these are spirits and other beings that perform extraordinary feats with disregard for the laws of physics and biology. Thus, it is because a person can have reflective beliefs (2001) based on a meta-presentational capacity inherent to the human brain that we can believe in, say, dragons (an example in Sperber’s 1982 text), or guiding spirits in the absence of ever having seen them.

Another way in which the anthropology of divination has partially redeemed its denizens of the charge of ‘irrationality’ (see Argyrou 2002) is by working from what is taken as the basic condition of divination – randomness. The assumption of some anthropologists is that oracular systems don’t really work, and that what matters about them is interpretation, not divine or mystical intervention of any kind. Randomness, and chaos, have thus been largely understood as a necessity of divination; namely, as a prelude to an expert’s exegesis in the language of cultural symbols. The key is that randomness provides a blank canvas of sorts for the oracular enterprise, something to be worked over cognitively and socially, which may sometimes be necessary for the survival of a community. In his study of scapulmancy, or shoulder-blade divination,^[4]among the Naskapi Indians of the Labradorian peninsula in Canada, Omar Khayyam Moore argued that divination is instrumental in the tribe’s life-supporting hunting endeavours because it randomises human behaviour in a context where avoiding fixed hunting patterns can be an advantage (1957: 73). Habitual success in certain hunting areas can lead to the depletion of game; randomness, presupposed for divination, is here constitutive of Naskapi livelihood itself.

Indeed, randomness is so taken for granted by some divination scholars that it is widely assumed that the difference between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ divination is the diviner’s capacity to theoretically leap between complete arbitrariness and representational form. This is done through competences and knowledge of social and personal circumstances. Tedlock, for instance, observes that diviners are

[s]pecialists who use the idea of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. Compared with their peers, diviners excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions (2001: 191).

Moving from an unbounded to bounded plane is thus informed by theory, cosmology, and knowledge of one’s social cohort and its myriad relations. The anthropology of African divinatory systems has been particularly elucidative of this. The utterances of African diviners often imply linguistic and poetic dexterity, as well as the ability to artfully select or omit certain passages or oracular observations, banish socially problematic implications, as well as infer collectively what the best possible result might be.

The prime example of these social and rhetorical strategies is Richard Werbner’s work on the Kalanga of Botswana (1973; 2017), where he posits a ‘superabundance of understanding’ on the part of diviners, which must be whittled down and tuned to suit a particular situation or client. As in many African societies, Kalanga diviners are persuasive, and have ‘highly stylized language’ – both immediate events and matters of personal history must be part of their divinatory speech (1973: 1414). ‘Transparent talk without counterpoint of hidden and manifest meanings is inadequate for divination’ for the Kalanga, Werbner argues (1415). Divination consists of throwing four separate pieces of ivory, each of which has two surfaces, one marked, the other unmarked. The pieces have characteristics of age and sex at first glance. The ‘senior’ of these pieces is Old Male, while the others include Young Male, Old Female, Young Female (Werbner 1973: 1416-17). Sixteen possible configurations can result from a throw, taking into account that all four pieces are thrown at once, and that some may land with no markings. Most people are familiar with the overt meaning of these configurations. However, Werbner’s argument is that there is a matrix of metaphors to the configurations known expertly only by the diviner:

[a] diviner strings together riddles, paradoxes, and equivocal figures of speech, with barbed emphasis in rhetorical questions, each associated with a cast of the diviner’s four two-faced lots (1421).

He speaks in praises, imagery and evocations, some cryptic. The point is not just one of aesthetics, he says. It is, in essence, the

‘sociologically significant aspects of the ordered relations’ – based on, say prior knowledge of personal circumstances – ‘which free divination […] from the risk of being such a gamble. There is a cognitive control such that contextually relevant meanings within a matrix shape divination, rather than randomness’ (Werbner 1973: 1419).

David Zeitlyn also stresses the interpretive and collaborative dialogues needed to achieve successful divinatory outcomes (2001). The series of operations that manipulating an oracle implies may themselves be random, but the interaction between clients and diviner is indispensable to the processes of interpretation itself, especially when texts are particularly opaque, such as the I Ching,[5] and the diviner must take on the qualities of a ‘literary critic’ (2001: 228). Elsewhere, Zeitlyn writes on spider divination among the Mambila in Cameroon (1993), whose results are presented as evidence in court among, say, chiefs of lineages. Again, oracular meanings are not simple. They involve a host of factors, including a complex negotiation of political, familiar, and personal concerns.

Symbolic and intellectualist approaches

Symbols are of primary importance in Victor Turner’s analysis of divination. We will focus on his ethnography Revelation and divination in Ndembu ritual (1975) and on Ndembu basket divination, nğombu yakusekula within that. It involves shaking up or tossing a series of objects in a round, flat, open basket, a type of action associated with women’s winnowing of millet, and standing for the ‘sifting of truth from falsehood’ (Turner 1975: 213, 215). The objects – figurines – are selected by the diviner from a large group of objects of assorted shapes, colours, and sizes, kept separately. Each one represents the human being in various postures. Before throwing, the diviner asks a question; after the toss (he does three) he examines which figurines were left above the others. More questions can follow. Turner argues that his skill ‘consists in the way in which he adapts his general exegesis of the objects to the given circumstances’ (1975: 214).

Turner’s ethnography is considered to be exhaustive and theoretically innovative (De Boeck & Devisch 1994). For Turner, divination can be thought of as

a form of social analysis, in the course of which hidden conflicts between persons and factions are brought to light, so that they may be dealt with by traditional and institutionalized procedures (1975: 235).

It is, under this light, a ‘form of social redress’, whereby the diviner exonerates or accuses individuals, uncovering ‘unconscious impulsions behind antisocial behavior’ (Turner 1975: 233).

The diviner is all too aware of the precarious nature of his own position. Approached by a family for revealing causes of sickness or misfortune in a family member, his work includes identifying the witch who may be responsible for it. The diviner knows that the witch-culprit may be a family member who stands to gain politically by the death of the victim. His appraisal of the balance of power between competing factions is therefore critical. Turner argues that divinatory symbols open an understanding of the ‘social drama’ at hand, and redirect social action appropriately:

[t]he diviner […] is trying to grasp consciously and bring into the open the secret, and even unconscious, motives and aims of human actors in some situation of social disturbance (1975: 232).

De Boeck and Devish argue that Turner’s symbolic analysis fails to account for the multidirectionality and polyvocality of symbolic and metaphorical processes (1991: 103). While he acknowledges the emotive character of divination, the latter is taken unproblematically as part of a ‘script’ or ‘text’ that somehow represents or condenses social life. Ultimately, for Turner, divination

is a device to help a conscious individual to arrive at decisions about rightdoing and wrongdoing, to establish innocence or allocate blame in situations of misfortune, and to prescribe well-known remedies’ (1975: 233).

The ultimate aim of divination is then to heal social schisms and lead to a consensus. But this view may be too simple: De Boeck and Devish recommend that Turner’s emphasis on structure and social engineering be balanced with one that sensitises agency, praxis, performativity (1991: 103). In the Luunda and Yaka basket divinations studied by these authors, meanings are open-ended and social redress is not necessarily their aim: instead, social dramas multiply into more social dramas. Furthermore, ‘in the act of performing and doing’ divination, the transformation implicit in the oracular process ‘is being embodied by the consultants in the ritual praxis’ (De Boeck & Devish 1991: 111). De Boeck and Devich stress that the performance of the oracle invites the consultants to redefine their relations (of reciprocity, commensality, solidarity) and their involvement with their ‘life-world’ (1991: 112). In this sense the diagnosis that is forthcoming by the diviner already carries within itself ‘the meaningful (re)generation of a new integrative social and world-order’ (De Boeck & Devish 1991: 112).

Sonia Silva, on the other hand, calls the knowledge produced as part of basket divination in Zambia ‘integrative’, in the sense that knowledge is lived as pain in the body, as the configurations of material objects in the basket, and as their interpretation (2014). According to Silva, human bodies, materials and spirits work in tandem (that is, integratively) in the divination process. She says that ‘truthful knowledge in basket divination is not delivered as a set of abstract propositions flushed out of the diviner’s mind’; rather, it is imputed to an ancestral spirit:

[t]his spirit, however, manifests itself through a human body that feels pain and operates the oracle by shaking it. The contrast between the statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia is revealing of a broader, telling story that has defined the scholarship on divination systems in particular, and the study of knowledge in general (2014: 1176).

Silva points to the fact that many of the foundational divination scholars saw diviners as ‘scientists’, whose ultimate aim was to explain, albeit bad scientists at that. Indeed, like some of his predecessors, Turner too says that the diviner ‘does not try to “go behind” his beliefs in supernatural beings and forces’ (1975: 231). He holds that the premises by which the Ndembu diviner deduces his conclusions are non-rational.

While Turner turns to symbols to explain divinatory practice, E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 explanation of the benge poison oracle among the Azande in Sudan is decidedly intellectualist in scope. Here, poison is given to domestic fowl with the result of its life or death impinging upon the question asked. The poison is a liquid mixture from a forest creeper and is inserted in the fowl’s beak. Sometimes the doses prove immediately fatal; often the fowl recovers; other times it remains unaffected. Reasons why people consult this oracle can vary. Mostly, they aim to discover the agent of some misfortune (namely, a witch). In order to answer a question, there are usually two tests involving two fowl, each of which will be administered the poison in sequence. A verdict (say, if X has committed adultery) must be confirmed through the second test. If the results are contradictory, the verdict is considered invalid (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 139). The poison oracle is by far the most important one among the Azande: it has a force of law. For instance, a man wishing to avenge a homicide cannot act without authorization from the poison oracle (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 121).

‘Witches’, Evans-Prichard says famously, ‘as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist. None the less, the concept of witchcraft provides them with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained, and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events’ (1976 [1936]: 18). Evans-Pritchard was well aware that the Azande had other concepts of causation that were not mystical. The classic example is that of a granary collapse at a time when people were sitting under it (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1936]: 23). The Azande know that termites undermined the support of the granary ceiling. What is missing is an ‘explanation of why the two chains of causation intersected at a certain time and in a certain place, for there is no interdependence between them’, Evans-Pritchard says (1976 [1937]: 23). The missing link is provided by Azande philosophy of witchcraft. Both natural and mystical causation co-exist, supplementing each other:

[h]ence we see that witchcraft has its own logic, its own rules of thought, and that these do not exclude natural causation. Belief in witchcraft is quite consistent with human responsibility and a rational appreciation of nature (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1936]: 30).

According to Evans-Prichard, the Azande as studied during the period of 1926-30, when he did his fieldwork, did not rely on belief, but on action, conceptually informed as it was. Thus, when the poison oracle did not work, or contradicted itself, the Zande came up with all kinds of ‘secondary elaborations’ to support the thesis that it failed for some reason, whether because of a breach of taboo, anger of ghosts, or wrong variety of poison administered (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 155). In sum, while the Zande were described as fully rational people, Evans-Prichard held that they ‘cannot go beyond the limits set by their culture and invent notions’ (1976 [1937]: 163). Their ‘web of belief’ was not an external structure in which the Zande were enclosed. It was the texture of their thought and they could think that it was wrong (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 194; Horton 1967: 155).

Robin Horton has advanced this intellectualist approach (1967a, 1967b). He proposes dealing with the ‘puzzling features of traditional religious thinking’ through an analogy between theoretical Western science and religious African thought. Horton uses Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Azande extensively, as well as his own work among the Kalabari in contemporary Nigeria, to argue that ‘traditional thought’ cannot operate outside itself. According to Horton, while there is valid theoretical thought in ‘traditional cultures’, it is ultimately ‘closed’ because it is based on magic, witches, oracles, and other mystical phenomena inconsistent with ‘reality’. Propositions here are not open to disconfirmation and there is a reluctance to take failure of, say, an oracle as evidence against the existence of spirits or deities. Herein lies, according to Horton, the difference with Western scientists, who operate an ‘open’ thought system, marked by an experimental method that tests hypotheses and advances theoretical claims. The point for Horton is that both African traditional thought and Western science are theoretical and explanatory, in the sense that they explicate particular circumstances through a particular causal context. Horton’s comparison has come under critique for implying in myriad ways that African thought is inferior to Western science (Tambiah 1990: 91). Stanley Tambiah also questions whether the African ‘theorizing’ observed by Horton would not be in actual fact the pursuance of other values and interests (1990: 91). In the next section, I explore a body of literature that has taken this postcolonial critique to heart and tries to break with functionalist, symbolic, and intellectualist approaches to divination.

Counterpoint: ontological approaches to divinatory truths

In an article from 2012 on religious conversion among followers of a Japanese new religion, Philip Swift makes an argument that is indicative of a new direction in the study of religion. He says that conversion is not conceived of as a ‘reordering of one’s world-picture, in which novel representations (or beliefs or propositions) are imported into the mind’ (Swift 2012: 272-3). Rather, it is essentially a bodily process. Thus the need to shift gears, drop the epistemological focus and foreground difference right from the start, by adopting an ontological analysis. Swift says this is a well-trodden path in anthropology; indeed, he cites Victor Turner who argued that rites of passage involve ‘not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but a change in being’ (Turner 1967: 102; Swift 2012: 273). In other words, Turner made a case that rites actuate, not represent, changed states in people. This praxiological understanding of rituals on the part of Turner contrasts significantly with that of divination, which we have seen above.

A paradigmatic case for the ontological approach to divinatory practice is Martin Holbraad’s work on Afro-Cuban Ifá divination. Ifá is an all-male-dominated religious cult in Cuba, in which the diviner, the babalawo, chosen for his role by the gods, undergoes years of rigorous training and extensive study of oracular divinations signs (oddu), of which there are 256. Babalawos divine with a consecrated board, a white-powder called aché, and sixteen palm nuts. Orula, the god of the Ifá oracle, is called, and as different throws are effected, the number of palm nuts remaining in both hands dictates the marks the diviner will draw on the powdered board.

Both Ifá and Santería (Ifá’s more popular religious sibling in the Afro-Cuban field) present a relatively fixed cosmology, and a corresponding world of causality (Holbraad 2010: 76). The latter is articulated extensively in myths (patakies), as well as in divination, through oracular signs with which they associate. Everything that has existed, presently exists, and will exist is regarded as encompassed under the auspices of the oricha-gods and their respective domains and life stories. While the notion that human beings can disrupt a divine social and cosmic equilibrium is rife, and explains misfortune and illness, this is underpinned by an even stronger concept of predestination. Most importantly here is that Orula, the god who has witnessed the destiny of every man and woman, never lies (Holbraad 2007, 2012a, 2012b). Thus, according to Holbraad, oracular pronouncements should not be subject to the truth verification of anthropologists. Holbraad’s interpretation is therefore pitted exactly against the intellectualist (and also cognitivist) analyses described above.

Holbraad proposes a new answer to an intractable problem anthropologists have faced with divination (and religion more broadly): the problem that, when in the face of alterity, they often decide to negate the assumptions of the people they study. According to him, ‘the job of anthropological analysis […] is not to account for why ethnographic data are as they are, but rather to understand what they are’ (Holbraad 2009: 96). The idea is to review and revise anthropological assumptions analytically, so that they become congruent with the said data. Radical alterity demands a fresh conceptual field. Holbraad explains, ‘[r]ather than enunciating the conditions of native error (be they epistemic, cognitive, sociological, political, or whatever), the analytical task now becomes one of elucidating new concepts’ (Holbraad 2012b: 84). In broad strokes, he argues that the job of anthropologists would not be to explain but to conceptualise. He proposes the concept of ‘infinition’ (in other words,‘inventive definition’) as the answer to this conundrum.[6] Just like Cuban diviners infine their clients, gauged through the notion that the oracle is infallible and indubitable, anthropologists too must invent new terms and new concepts to deal with alterity, say, of a divination system in which truth is not subject to verification or doubt.

There have been other scholars of Afro-Cuban religion inspired by this line of argument in their respective fields, myself included (see, e.g., Espírito Santo 2013). Taking Holbraad’s notion of motility as central to the oracular enterprise in Cuban creole espiritismo – in which deities are not seen as individual entities but as motions, such as the markings on the divining board – I have argued that randomness is essential to the divinatory act and its results, and is tied to the movement inherent in the ‘things’ used for such purposes, like water or flames or cards flicked in quick succession. The oracle itself can be secondary to its movement. Movement is what allows spirits to intervene in their messages – it excites a metaphysical domain of beings, and moves potential cosmology into action, bringing it into the concrete world. Relatedly, chaos may not just be a backdrop for meanings but a substance that brings cosmology into concrete existence (Espírito Santo 2013: 33).

Anastasios Panagiotopoulos has also worked with a perspective on ontology, focusing on both diviners and clients. Articulacy, defined as the capacity of a given entity to ‘speak’ through the oracle, cannot be taken for granted. It requires sacrifice, both literal (animal blood, for instance) and metaphorical (taboos, restrictions, good conduct). In a recent paper, he argues that sacrifice should not be seen through the opposition of sacred/profane, but – in the context of Afro-Cuban religion – as the fuel with which oracular perspectives, and thus articulacy, are ignited (2018: 483). This fuel yields words, which in turn yields perspectives and paths (caminos) for the people who seek diviners. As these paths solidify in a given individual, they create centers of oracular production, which are in turn generative of articulacy itself (Panagiotopoulos 2018: 475).

In another article, Panagiotopoulos speaks of spirit ‘affinity’ as the glue through which these paths are revealed (2017). Affinity here, spirit-person kinship if you will, is materialised through spirit representations (dolls), for example, which acknowledge and reify the dead’s voices and perspectives. Importantly, this relies on being seen and manipulated by a medium. Panagiotopoulos thus takes inspiration from Viveiros de Castro in that he argues that points of view matter in the creation of personhood (2018: 479). But they are not simply momentary points of view. Offerings and sacrifices are catalysts for the solidification of divinatory perspectives (‘paths’) that create the conditions for a certain kind of person to exist and modulate her life.

Another anthropologist with similar references is Katherine Swancutt (2006, 2012). In her monograph Fortune and the cursed, she argues that Mongolian Buryat shamans adopt spirit perspectives in their oracular dealings, but that these are characterised by a combination of intersubjective and perspectival encounters (Swancutt 2012: 156). In some cases, the divinatory implements, such as cards, can be ‘hijacked’ by rival shamans resulting in a revelation of only the rival’s perspectives, imbued as they can be with witchcraft. Shamans can thus inadvertently adopt their nemesis’s agency and pronouncements (Swancutt 2012). ‘Buryats, then, try to control the divinatory implements so that they only represent dangerous people, rather than becoming agents-cum-representations of them’: they try to avoid that divinations take on an intensive dimension and turn into outright cursing wars (Swancutt 2012: 162). Instead, they work towards more desirable outcomes such as those of ‘revising’ the clients’ views of the past (Swancutt 2012: 175). Throughout this case there is a tug of war, on the part of the officiating shaman, between representational and ontological dimensions of the divination. It also alerts us to the notion that in divination ‘things’ are not passive, but can take on life, and uncontrollably, for that matter. As Swancutt puts it, objects can ‘carry their subjects within themselves’ (2012: 161). Her work thus alerts scholars of divination to attend to the multiple potential properties of the ‘things’ used for such purposes. In the final section, I turn towards the ‘body’ as the main instrument of divination – often, in the absence of such objects.

Possession, dreams, and divining spirits

Apart from all its cultural concepts and theorisations, divination is also a decidedly bodily thing. As Patrick Curry says, ‘the diviner’s body and everything he or she ‘physically’ performs and experiences is essential to it’ (2010: 115). This is even more so in the absence of divinatory implements or objects. Then the source of knowledge is the diviner’s own bodily manifestations, born as they are from enskilment, expertise, and experience. The prime example of this is spirit possession or shamanism, where oracular pronouncements by the person are perceived to come from a source outside the possessed’s body.

Eliade explains shamanism well among a Siberian community, noting that

[t]he shaman begins by circling the yurt [tent], beating his drum; then he enters the tent and, going to the fire, invokes the deceased. Suddenly the shaman's voice changes; he begins to speak in a high pitch, in falsetto, for it is really the dead woman who is speaking (1972: 209-10).

The shaman is ‘replaced’, somehow, by the divinatory voice. The idea that the dead ‘speak’ through their medium, and that this communication should be taken seriously, is arguably cross-cultural (Bubandt 2009; Lambek 1981; Placido 2001; Rasmussen 1995; Vitebsky 1993). However, these extraordinary individuals do not always lose their consciousness, as Todd Ochoa shows for Cuban Palo Monte (2007, 2013), a spirit possession practice associated with Bantu-speaking slaves. During such possession, there is sometimes no clear boundary between ‘voices’. Even outside of ritual circumstances, Kalunga, a Ba-Kongo derived term referring to the ‘sea of the dead’, may coexist with the medium’s body in varying intensities (2007: 488). According to Ochoa, Palo invites us to linger on the power of sensation and its capacity to dissolve the body’s boundaries. The sea of the dead is not constant, but something that takes one over in waves of saturation, only to recede again. Most interesting is Ochoa’s observation that the dead themselves constitute a play of forces that ‘suffuses and makes the person who lives Palo’ (2007: 488), as people also come into being by sharing the moods, pains, and sensations, as well as thoughts, of the dead. In this dynamism, one cannot wholly distinguish object from subject, matter from spirit. Neither can the bodies and biographies of mediums be separated from the oracular act itself.

Dreams are a field that is understood to be little mediated by the conscious cognition of the diviner him or herself, and thus are seen as spaces where knowledge is freely revealed, including about oneself (Hollan 2004). They are also open to anyone, including entire communities. In an article called ‘Dreams of treasure’, Charles Stewart argues that ‘dreams may be treated as exemplary moments of vision in which imaginative temporal flights fuse and create a present imbued with meaning’ (2003: 483). Stewart describes how in Naxos, Greece, people have been dreaming with the Virgin Mary who tells them about the location of lost religious idols buried in the hillside for more than a century (2003: 490-3). Dreaming revelations are not considered extraordinary in many parts of the world. Indeed, Rane Willerslev describes how, for Siberian Yukaghir elk hunters, ‘the world of dreams and that of waking life are two sides of the same reality, which together constitute one world’ (2004: 410). Hunters penetrate the ‘shadow world’ to lure prey into theirs. Thus, the dream has ontological as well as premonitory effects. In African inspired cosmologies in the Caribbean, dreams may be considered places of encounter ipso facto. Karen McCarthy Brown reports on the dream of a Haitian vodou priestess in New York – Mama Lola – in which a guiding spirit of the pantheon (Papa Gede) appears to answer a specific question (1993); and Diana Maitland Dean analyses the social impact of dreaming in the wider Afro-Cuban religious community (1993). These two ethnographies point to critical culturally-sanctioned concepts of the self in the emergence of dream divination.

Conclusion

Divination, as discussed in this entry, is widespread and varied. It can entail objects, consecrated or not, but it can also be bodily processes, for instance, in dreaming, or in spirit possession. Oracular cosmologies often imply a world of metaphysical processes, causality and beings, and different temporal logics, where the future is at the reach of the present. Divination also implies linguistic and discursive dexterity on the part of diviners. The anthropology of African divination systems has demonstrated that diviners are often individuals who are politically, socially, as well as cosmologically knowledgeable, and can draw on this awareness during séances. While some scholars have understood divination in terms of ‘magical thinking’, it is not generally associated with magic per se. It is a craft – a skill – that must alternatively be learned and sanctioned, and/or embodied in some way, such as with sensitives or mediums. The anthropology of divination has taken a variety of analytical routes, among which is regarding divination as an explanatory drive, on the part of certain cultures. With the ‘ontological turn’, scholars have paid more attention to local, native concepts that promise to challenge and renew conceptions of truth, personhood, and reality as such.

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Note on contributor

Diana Espírito Santo is a social anthropologist teaching at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She obtained her PhD at University College London in 2008, working with Cuban spirit mediums on concepts of self and knowledge. For her postdoctoral fellowship in Lisbon, she worked on cosmological plasticity and religious change in Brazilian Umbanda, and is currently developing a project on ontologies of evidence in Chilean parapsychology.

Dr. Diana Espírito Santo, Programa de Antropología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Vicuña MacKenna 4860, 782-0436, Santiago, Chile. gimmefish@yahoo.com.

[1] Diviners are people who practiced divination and have the capacity to interpret the results; they do not necessarily have special powers. Shamans, while they can also practice divination, are considered intermediaries of sorts between worlds, and in most cases can fall into trance states.

[2] Channelers are people who speak for non-physical beings or spirits, whereas ‘sensitives’, sometimes also called ‘intuitives’, are those who have increased susceptibilities for stimulation of the sensorial kind, often feeling things in their bodies – pains, emotions, spirits in the environment.

[3] Not all anthropologists regard divination as something irrational. Indeed, David Zeitlyn speaks of ‘divinatory logics’ with diagnostic and prognostic implications (2012).

[4] Scapulmancy is divination by means of the observation of the cracks in an animal cadaver’s shoulder-blade, when heated by fire or another instrument.

[5] I Ching is also known as ‘Book of changes’, and is a classic Chinese divination text dating from around 1000 BC. The I Ching uses cleromancy, which relies on the generation of random numbers. Consultants will throw coins or another object, and generate a hexagram with six numbers between 6 and 9, and then look up its meaning in the book.

[6] Holbraad is here inspired by both Roy Wagner’s The invention of culture (1981), and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s take on Amazonian perspectivism – the idea that the point of view makes the subject (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2012; see also Lima 2005).

Islam

Felix Stein — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 19:57:06 +0000

Samuli Schielke

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Initially published 30 Oct 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18islam

Abstract:

Islam is not an anthropological concept in the way, for example, culture, or even religion, are. People have thought about and discussed Islam long before anthropologists started thinking about it, and those discussions therefore inform anthropological ones. Fieldwork encounters have been important for a textured understanding in context of what it means for specific people in concrete situations to have a relationship with the God of the Qur'an and His revelation to Muhammad. Such contextual nuance is especially important vis-à-vis the highly politicised context of the demand for social scientific knowledge ‘about Islam’.

Basics

The Arabic word islām describes human recognition, submission, and worship towards the One God of the Qur'an. It has connotations of completeness, health, peace, surrender, and handing over. In its archaic meaning, which prevails in the Qur'an and also remains relevant today, Islam is first and foremost an act humans commit towards God.

Over the following millennium and a half, the word Islam has gained a wider range of meanings, including: the creed and practice established by the divine revelation to Muhammad and the tradition (sunna) of Muhammad and his companions; the historical era that began with Muhammad's revelation; the lives and acts of those who associate themselves with Muhammad's revelation, and their traditions of interpreting and living by the revelation; knowledge, cultural production, and social life related to the revelation in one way or another; and the identity of people and peoples associated individually or collectively with that revelation.

Evocations of ‘Islam’ are often normative: they are somebody's claims about what that creed, practice, history, tradition, knowledge, cultural and social life, and identity really should be, as opposed to the mistaken understandings or misguided practices by others. Followers of different branches of Islam – such as the majority Sunni tradition and the minority Shia tradition, both of which encompass numerous more or less distinct traditions and movements within them – have many different views and practices. And yet Muslims generally recognise each other as such even in disagreement. Muslims don't generally brand other Muslims as part or not part of the same faith on account of their practice or non-practice of Islamic doctrines and norms; and debate and disagreement about how to follow these doctrines and norms correctly are a constant part of the history of Islam. Some Muslims, among them many contemporary Sunni Jihadists, claim that some people following other interpretations of Islam are infidels. Such exclusionist views have gained currency recently but remain a minority position. What is widely considered a bare minimum of shared faith is remarkably basic: that there is only one God, and that Muhammad is His messenger.

There are widely shared basics of faith and practice that one is likely to encounter in almost any Muslim community. The Qur'an is the central text of Islam, and is generally understood to be the direct speech of God to humans. Muhammad is understood to be the ultimate prophet in a series of revelations involving (among others) Adam, Moses/Musa, David/Dawud, and Jesus/'Isa. Groups of Muslims like the Ahmadiyya, who believe to have received a later, additional prophecy, are often rejected – even not considered Muslims at all – by followers of mainstream traditions. Prophesy is a cornerstone of Islamic faith, with various dimensions. In the mystic tradition (Sufism), the Prophet Muhammad is elevated to an almost super-human medium of divine love and help, whereas in the tradition of normative reasoning, he is the perfect example of proper human conduct. Along with the Qur'an, his acts and sayings (hadiths) provide a main source of shari'a, the teaching of normative action.

The Shari'a is often translated as Islamic law, which is misleading. It includes norms that are legal in a contemporary sense (such as marriage, inheritance, contractual procedures, some crimes and punishments), along with norms concerning polite greetings and interaction, and the proper form of worship and ritual. The tables of contents of classical works of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, such as the Muwatta' of Malik ibn Anas (711-795) give a good sense of these many dimensions. There is no code of ‘Islamic law’, but various traditions (madhhabs) of fiqh that provide ways to find judgment or advise.

For example, the so-called ‘five pillars’ of Islam are all matters of Shari'a: the declaration of faith in God and Muhammad as His prophet; fasting from food, drink, and sex during the daytime in the month of Ramadan (Möller 2005); pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime (Mols & Buitelaar 2015); ritual prayer; and almsgiving.^[1] While marriage and divorce, contractual procedures, crime and punishment, polite greetings, and decent clothing are acts between humans (mu'amalat), the ‘five pillars’ are acts of worship ('ibadat) directed to God.

When followers of contemporary Islamist movements demand ‘the application of the Shari'a’; when modern states codify Shari'a norms on marriage and divorce, prohibitions and punishments; and when these codes are considered at courts: then Shari'a can become Islamic law (Dupret 2006). But a great number of Muslims who may or may not agree with Shari'a-based state law also do live by the Shari'a, in the sense that they practice worship and consider right and wrong in their actions based on Islamic traditions of normative reasoning. Yet others may express a strong Islamic faith but give less concern to living by Shari'a.

Human worship of the God of the Qur'an raises questions about truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and salvation and punishment after Resurrection Day. Anthropologists, however, have usually not seen it as their task to tell what or how Islam should really be. Instead, they have in various ways recorded and tried to understand how humans around the world live in relation to Muhammad's revelation.

Is there an anthropology of Islam?

There is a long-standing debate among anthropologists about how to define Islam as an object of study. I cannot give a full account of that debate here (for overviews, see Bowen 2012; Kreinath 2012). Instead, I will highlight three proposals that are helpful to understand what anthropologists may mean when they claim to study Islam.

Responding to an emerging conversation about how to understand the simultaneous unity and plurality of Islamic faith and practice, Abdul Hamid El-Zein (1977) argued that, anthropologically speaking, Islam could only be understood in context and not be taken for an analytical category. Telling what Islam truly is is the job of theologians, not of anthropologists. El-Zein did not argue to study locally specific ‘Islams’; he was skeptical of such qualifiers as ‘local’ or ‘Moroccan Islam’. Instead, El-Zein proposed to take specific articulations of Islam seriously in their own right, without assuming or establishing a hierarchy between them. El-Zein's proposal is helpful to understand how people may live Islam in ways that do not foreground debates about orthodoxy (Marsden & Retsikas 2013). But how can one account anthropologically for those debates? After all, they are an important part of becoming and being a Muslim.

In an influential essay, Talal Asad proposed to study Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’ that ‘consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history’ (1986: 14). Previously, anthropologists had tried to explain Islam's plurality as a socially embedded practice vis-à-vis its unity as a revelation. For Asad, in contrast, plurality is a hallmark of the Islamic tradition, and therefore requires no explanation. Instead, an anthropology of Islam should have as its topic the ongoing attempts by Muslims to maintain coherence and establish correct practice.

Tradition, in Asad's sense, means being grounded in an authoritative past that provides one with values, practices, and concerns to cultivate in the now and towards the future. The historical formation and scope of the Islamic tradition are not in focus. Asad does not suggest that anthropologists should tell what is correct practice and what not. Rather, he suggests studying how Muslims debate about and establish orthodoxy – that is, the power to successfully claim one's interpretation of the tradition as the correct one. Those who are able to claim orthodoxy and those who appear heretic according to them are all part of the conversation. However, some of Asad's readers have distinguished between ‘Islam as a long-standing tradition and [the term's] various contemporary uses’ (Hirschkind 1996: 475), thereby excluding heretic views^[2] from the discursive tradition.

Asad's proposal has been very productive, because it directs attention to a key concern of contemporary movements of Islamic revival and reform: how does one follow correctly the commandments of God and the example of the Prophet?^[3] However, people also engage with God's message to Muhammad in ways that are not about living by the Shari'a or about establishing coherence. Is it possible to understand them together, without excluding one or the other?

In light of the many overlapping dimensions of Islam, Shahab Ahmed's (2016) book, What is Islam? proposes a theory that tries to understand them all at once:

A meaningful conceptualization of 'Islam' as theoretical object and analytical category must come to terms with – indeed, be coherent with – the capaciousness, complexity, and often, outright contradiction that obtains within the historical phenomenon that has proceeded from the human engagement with the idea and reality of Divine Communication to Muhammad, the Messenger of God (6, emphases in original).

Ahmed, a scholar of Islamic studies, proposes understanding Islam as the historical totality of different hermeneutical engagements – that is, ways to make sense of, understand, and perhaps also to misunderstand – with the ‘text’ of God's revelation to Muhammad, the ‘pre-text’ of an overarching understanding of a God-centric world in which a revelation is understood, and the ‘con-text’ of all other hermeneutical engagements with the text and pre-text of the revelation (Ahmed 2016: 346; 356; 405). According to Ahmed, learning to live by the Shari'a is Islamic, and so are seemingly counter-intuitive aspects such as classical Persian poems about wine and seductive boys.^[4] Thinking with Ahmed, when Islamophobic European or Hindu nationalists circulate fearful stereotypes of Islam, and when Muslims and others try to counter those stereotypes, this is also Islamic.

The choice for the best theoretical approach does not need to be decided on the level of abstract conceptual debate. Personally, I rather agree with Abdellah Hammoudi's (2009) suggestion that fieldwork should not be a surrogate for theory, but instead an open-ended and often surprising encounter through which anthropologists may learn how God's revelation to Muhammad matters for some human beings in specific situations.

Where is Islam?

Where might such encounters take place? Muslims often understand themselves as being part of a global community (umma) – a very large and diverse one, currently counting some 1.8 billion people; that is, close to a quarter of the world's human population. And yet Muslim faith is usually inseparable from the social worlds in which people grow up and live, and goes hand in hand with ethnic, cultural, doctrinal, and ideological traditions and divisions. Some people are very committed to practicing their faith, others less so. Local and political contexts make for different articulations and experiences of Muslim faith and lives. It is a different experience to be Muslim in, say, Pakistan than in Belgium - in the first, one is part of the dominant category that defines a multi-ethnic nation (Khan 2012); in the second, one faces the stigma of an exceptionalised ‘Other’ (Fadil 2009). A similar gender ideology of female modesty and shyness (haya', see Mahmood 2005; Sehlikoğlu 2018) is taught in mosques and reading groups in the Middle East and Indonesia alike, but in much of the Middle East it is linked with an ecumenical ethos of male honour through control over female kin (Joseph 1999: 135-39), while in many parts of Indonesia it is not (Srimulyani 2010).

To what degree does it make sense to speak about the lifeworlds, lives, and strivings of different people around the world as Islamic? Certainly it makes sense when they explicitly engage in acts of worship, or try to craft their lives according to what they see as Islamic teachings. But Islamic faith and norms can also inform the ways in which more or less pious people eat their lunch (Tayob 2017) or interpret their dreams (Mittermaier 2011). Where should one draw the line? Should one draw a line?

Anthropologies of Islam in a narrow sense have focused on practices of worship, religious discourses and movements, and ways of becoming a God-fearing person. Dedicated religious groups and institutions therefore offer accessible starting points for fieldwork, especially in urban contexts where a ‘community’ for anthropologists to study is not easily found. In such contexts, God-oriented strivings and activities are also most pronounced.

Good ethnographies of Islamic practice in the narrow sense always also tell about the wider societal and political context. Marloes Janson (2013) conducted fieldwork in the Gambia among followers of Tablighi Jamaat, a global proselytising movement originally based in South Asia. Members of the movement travel near and far to call other Muslims to follow the proper teachings of their faith, which they understand in a conservative and purity-oriented way, but with a conscious avoidance of politics. In the Gambia, members of the movement can enter conflicts with their families when they reject communal traditions of life-cycle celebrations and ostentatious gift-giving. In turn, they may be seen as behaving in weird and improper ways, for example, when Tablighi men share in household duties that are considered women’s business in order to give their wives time to spread the call. Studies of religious movements often provide good accounts of urban living, be it in the milieu of Hizbollah's^[5] supporters who search for spiritual and material progress at once in the southern suburbs of Beirut (Deeb 2006), or members of a Muslim youth organization for whom their religious commitment is linked with striving for successful living in Berlin (Bendixsen 2013).

However, one can also encounter Islam in a rural community where faith and ritual practice are inseparable from communal life (Marsden 2005; Kloos 2017), or in a restaurant where people come to eat halal food^[6](Tayob 2017). In such places, anthropologists are also more likely to meet some of those people who do not frequent organised religious groups. The list could be continued endlessly, for in a wider sense, most good ethnographies among people of Muslim faith also tell something about Islam, but it is often impossible to isolate Islam as a separate topic.

Thus, in many parts of the world, the God of the Qur'an is a third party in most transactions and polite speech that is often indistinguishable from prayers. The polite answer to ‘how are you?’ in Arabic is ‘praise to God’, meaning that God is to be praised for good and bad times alike. Running a small business in Egypt means that one must equally consider supply and demand, Chinese imports and currency exchange rates, Islamic understandings of legitimate income and mutual trust, and political and family networks of patronage (Ismail 2013). Maintaining peace among neighbours in Pakistan involves mutual care, cultivation of emotions, female modesty, and male provider roles – all of which are also Islamic values, and may be at the same time articulated by neighbours as markers of their social class or ethnic group (Ring 2006). Nightlife in a small town in northern Ivory Coast is structured by the way Islamic norms of public interaction dominate the daytime, confining drinking to the discretion of night (Chappatte 2017).

The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are marked by a global demographic shift from villages to cities. Among many Muslims, this move has been accompanied by a shift of theological dominance: since the late-twentieth century, localised traditions, Sufi movements, and also secular lifestyles of old urban populations have become contested, influenced, and sometimes replaced by a worldwide ‘Islamic revival’, i.e. the proliferation of strivings to make lives and societies more in line with a ritually purified and morally disciplined understanding of Islamic scripture. Rural-urban migrants and urban middle classes have been at the forefront of revivalist movements, and consequently are also at the focus of most contemporary anthropologies of Islam.

Everyday ethics and exceptional politics

At the height of the Islamic revival in Egypt in the 1990s, an increasing number of women attended study circles at mosques. They were something of a puzzle for Egyptian and foreign researchers of feminist inclination. Were they unable to resist the pressure of a patriarchal religious movement? Or were they perhaps subverting that rule from inside by reinterpreting Islamic teachings? Saba Mahmood (2005) conducted fieldwork with women in lecture circles in Cairo, and found neither to be true. She encountered women who wanted to be better at submitting to the will of God. This was not easy and required active learning. These women clearly had agency. But they did not resist the divine or male authorities they faced.

Mahmood argues that Cairene women's ‘pedagogies of piety’ needed to be understood in the framework of a discursive tradition (see above) that provided models and techniques towards becoming a ‘docile subject’. Such ethical self-making – that is, a reflective work on oneself to become a certain kind of person – is a key concern of Islamist political movements that aim to change society and state, as well as pietist movements that encourage more and better worship.

Part of a wider anthropological turn towards ethics in ordinary life (e.g. Lambek 2010), Mahmood's intervention has inspired a wave of studies foregrounding Muslim women's pious, ethical strivings (e.g. Huq 2009; Masquelier 2009; Hafez 2011; Jouili 2015; Liberatore 2016), and has established piety and ethics as key concepts through which anthropologists try to understand Muslim lives.

Within that same turn, some anthropologists have highlighted the cultivation of a complex set of skills. Magnus Marsden (2005) describes how young Sunni and Ismaili men in Chitral, northwestern Pakistan, learn to skillfully balance and shift between different forms of cultivation, including religious debates, the pleasures of music and poetry, and careful considerations about when to act in what way, which feelings to show and which to conceal and when. In my own research in Egypt (Schielke 2015), I have argued that strivings for perfection and purity are inherently fragile. The intense ethical work described by Mahmood may be of short duration, and ethical strivings may more likely take the shape of temporal ‘islands of certainty’ that allow one to be committed to God in one moment, and follow other moral aims (and also amoral ones) at other moments.

In reply, Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando (2015) have critiqued approaches that, according to them, mistakenly treat religion and everyday life as separate entities, and normalise a liberal-secular ideal of resistance to religious norms, while possibly pathologising followers of Salafi and other revivalist movements. In a direct reply to that debate, Lara Deeb (2015) has suggested to ‘think together’ the power of normative discourses to structure everyday life on the one hand, and the open-ended productivity of everyday life that complicates normative discourses and shapes life trajectories, on the other. A good example of how they can be thought together is a book by Daan Beekers and David Kloos (2018) that shows how experiences of moral failure can also motivate and enforce pious strivings.^[7]

There is a deeper, political layer to this debate that is not easily resolved, however. Fadil's and Fernando's critique is explicitly directed at the ongoing scandalization and problematization of Muslims in Europe, and the associated political search to tell ‘good Muslims’ from ‘bad’ ones. A European nationalist discourse demands Muslims to ‘act normal’ (in the words of the Dutch Prime Minister Rutte). In places like Pakistan and Egypt, in contrast, the same revivalist movements that are scandalised in Europe have successfully established themselves as mainstream, normal models for Islamic religiosity. They have partly marginalised ways of life, theologies, and practices that until recently had been normal, even dominant. In some countries – notably Saudi Arabia – they provide the religious ideology of the ruling elite. Just like Egypt and Pakistan can't provide a model of what it's like to be a Muslim in Europe, so also France and Belgium may not help to understand Muslim living in the Middle East and South Asia.

The way Islam is exceptionalised in European and Northern American contexts requires special attention, because it is the political backdrop of the current interest in knowledge ‘about Islam’. The global ‘war on terror’ has generated a strategic interest for security-relevant knowledge (Deeb & Winegar 2016). Social conflicts related to migration in Western Europe have become addressed increasingly in terms of religion instead of ethnicity or nationality (Spielhaus 2013). Fear and hatred towards Muslims – known as Islamophobia – has proliferated (Bangstad 2014). In such a highly politicised atmosphere, it is the task of anthropologists and other social scientists to also ask critical questions about the political desire to know and ‘domesticate’ Muslims and Islam (Sunier 2014; Amir-Moazami 2018).

For example, anti-radicalization programmes and radicalization studies have recently proliferated to counter the ‘radicalization’ of young Muslims (that of European nationalists appears to cause somewhat less concern). But what is radicalization? It remains unclear. Based on ethnographic research in Belgium and the Netherlands, Nadia Fadil, Martijn de Koning, and Francesco Ragazzi (2018) argue that the concept of radicalization has no content and explains nothing – but it compels political institutions and social actors to do something about it. And by doing something about it, they generate societal realities. Sometimes this can be helpful for the families of youths who have joined Jihadist militia, but often it does not contribute towards an understanding of and solution for violent conflicts. In the worst case, it can structure and justify a generalised suspicion of Muslims without offering productive solutions. Some anti-radicalization programmes deal with ‘radicalization’ as if it were a sort of virus – which renders invisible the political, societal, and personal conflicts that make it reasonable from some people's point of view to enter the path of violent struggle to promote their political, religious, or other causes.

Frightening as such militant movements are, one can understand them better by asking open-ended questions. Anthropologists working with people who may sympathise with or join militant movements have found out that militancy is but one possible path among others in the difficult struggle for radical moral purity (de Koning 2018), and that while some people recently moved to Syria to join the Jihadist war, others may have gone there to lead a God-fearing married life (Navest et al. 2016). European nationalist media and politicians have sometimes mistaken such research for endorsement of terrorists, and some researchers have faced media outrage and political pressure as a result of their work (Moors forthcoming).

Humans and God

In addition to His disciplining role as the Commander about right and wrong, the God of the Qur'an is also the Creator, Protector, Provider, Healer, and the one who decides about life and death. Everyday use of invocations as greetings is a way to call upon God to be a third party in relations of trust, a helper in need, a healer of the sick, and an ally against enemies – not only enemies of Islam, but also one's intimate enemies among neighbours and family. Migrants and refugees who leave their homelands search for their God-given share of worldly income (rizq) (Gaibazzi 2015). They and others take risks or endure, trusting in their God who has written everyone a destiny which they do not know, but will actively fulfill (Hamdy 2009; Elliot 2016; Menin & Elliot 2018). These and other dimensions of faith include ethical, normative aspects but cannot be reduced to them.

This capaciousness is evident also in core Islamic acts of worship. Ritual prayer (salat) consists of a sequence of prostrations towards God that one should undertake in a state of ritual purity five times a day, either alone or in congregation with others. It can be an individualised communication with God (Haeri 2013), part of an ethical project of pious becoming (Mahmood 2005), or a way to address – but not necessarily to solve – the moral tensions of life (Simon 2009). Prayer can also be a powerful gathering of a community under God, a ‘fixed point of Islamic tradition’ (Henkel 2005) that can mobilise political projects but also transcends them. Also, for those who don't pray or don't do so regularly, the expectation that one should pray (if not now, then at a later stage in life) can structure their life trajectories (Debevec 2018; Kloos 2017).

Based on an obligation to give a part of one's income (ca. 2 per cent annually) as alms (zakat) to the poor and needy, Islamic charity stands in an interesting contrast to humanitarianism. Although alms are given to other humans, they are an act of worship ('ibada) towards God. Giving alms does not require (but can involve) compassion or attempts to overcome social inequality. As an ethical practice, Islamic charity is thus not only about acting towards others and being a certain kind of person: it has its main focus on God and one's own reward in life after death (Schaeublin 2016; Mittermaier 2014; 2019).

Prayer and alms are material, visible practices, although alms are usually given discreetly. However, the invisible realm (ghayb) also is an important part of Islamic faith and lives. God is omnipresent yet invisible, which is further underlined by the taboo on images of God. Instead, the Arabic word for God, Allah, is very present as calligraphy (see Starrett 1995). The reality of angels and spirits (jinn) is considered an orthodox doctrine across Islamic traditions, but there is no agreement about whether and how humans can be in contact with them (Drieskens 2008; Doostdar 2018).

Dreams are the most important way of contact with the invisible. The appearance of the Prophet Muhammad in a dream vision is understood as a true message from elsewhere, and not just an expression of the human subconscious. In her work on dream interpretation in Cairo, Amira Mittermaier (2011) argues that such dream visions point beyond both the liberal fiction of the autonomous subject as well as the religious ideal of the disciplined pious subject, and instead highlight the dialogical dimension of ethics as an encounter – often a puzzling one that can also unsettle anthropologists' professional certainties (Ewing 1994; Willerslew & Suhr 2018).

Followers of Sufism often understand the Shari'a as the visible (zahir) surface of Islam, accompanied by a hidden (batin) truth (haqiqa) that followers of the mystical path strive to access. In Sufi ‘paths’ (tariqa, often translated as ‘orders’ or ‘brotherhoods’) the ‘friends of God’ or saints take an intermediary position between humans and God (Werbner & Basu 1998; Mayeur-Jaouen 2005; Soares 2005). Among Sunni Muslims, this has resulted in a disagreement between those who see the friends of God as a legitimate part of Islamic devotion, and those who consider their veneration a heresy that borders on polytheism (shirk). Sufi pilgrimages generate a space and time of celebration markedly different from everyday life, which can be seen as backward and un-Islamic by those who equate modernity and Islamic faith with order and discipline (Schielke 2012). And yet, the idea of learning to ‘taste’ (a Sufi metaphor for knowledge that is not mediated by language) the invisible layers of Islam remains compelling and productive also in an age of reformist revivals (Abenante & Vicini 2017). Rather than being a binary alternative to a Shari'a-based life, Sufism and other metaphysical pursuits offer themselves as an additional dimension, an invitation to explore invisible realms (Doostdar 2018).

The search for the invisible is an embodied practice, just like learning to live by the Shari'a is. For example, embodied vocal performance is central to dhikr (remembrance of God), a Sufi meditation based on rhythmic movement, speaking out names of God, and devotional poetry (Abenante 2013). This has made Sufism a rich ground of devotional music (Frishkopf 2001). Music is a crucial part of Muslim popular cultures and devotional practices around the world, but is also considered illicit by many (van Nieuwkerk et al. 2016). While music remains controversial, voice is central to core practices of worship. Recitation of the Qur'an is an indispensable part of ritual prayer, and a highly valued religious art that can take elaborate melodic forms (Frischkopf 2009). Preaching and the call to prayer rely on the aesthetics of the voice as much as they do on the message (Hirschkind 2006; Tamimi Arab 2017).

The body is also the site of another very important relation that humans have with God: sickness and healing. Be it with traditional techniques of healing and divination (Sündermann 2006; Graw 2006) or among professionals and patients in contemporary biomedical and psychiatric therapies, sickness raises pragmatic questions about what works, and ethical questions about good living. It can be a compelling reminder of God's power over human destinies. Unlike in political conflicts, where Islamic and secular visions of life can be pitted against each other, the search for healing tends to be integrative. In Egypt today, it can relate to molecular and microbiological factors, Islamic ontologies of body, self and spirit, the will of God, witchcraft and envy, politics, and ethical conduct alike. These aspects typically come in combination, and one of them seldom excludes the others (Hamdy 2012; Tabishat 2014).

Sickness and healing thereby remind us that Islam is not so much a separate object or practice that can be understood on its own, but is rather an inseparable part or dimension of many different ways to be in the world, importantly including ways to expect life after death. As a part or dimension of life, Islam constantly intertwines with other parts and dimensions, shapes them and is shaped by them – sometimes in inspiration, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes in modes that are not easy to name but are simply good to live with.

Women and men

In her book Veiled sentiments, Lila Abu-Lughod (1986) tells about Bedouins from the Awlad Ali tribe in Egypt's sparsely populated Mediterranean coast. The Egyptian government was busy turning them from nomads to permanent settlers, in part so as to control them better. But they remained staunchly and proudly people of their own kind. Bedouin men, they asserted, were real men who had a sense of honour unlike the people of the Nile valley whom they considered effeminate. Honour provided a gendered language that described how men would not show their emotions, and would protect and control their womenfolk. But it was not the only language in circulation. The women with whom Abu-Lughod spent much time took pride in their husbands' honour – which was always dependent on the acts of their female kin. Yet, they also composed and sang poetry that told about passion, suffering, and other emotions that might not be quite as honourable. Abu-Lughod argues that honour and poetry both provide partially true accounts that depend on each other, yet cannot be reduced to one another.

Neither honour nor poetry are Islamic in a narrow sense. They weave together Islamic values, Bedouin custom, and wider Middle Eastern and Mediterranean traditions, as well as conditions of livelihood in such a way that it is difficult (and perhaps also not helpful) to tell them apart. Abu-Lughod's book paved the way for an understanding of gender relations that is not reduced to a binary of oppression and liberation, and that brings together intimate relations and social hierarchies in equal measure (for an overview, see Sehlikoğlu 2018).

Today, relations between men and women are among the most important concerns advanced by movements of Islamic revival. The same is true of those who are critical or fearful of the Islamic faith and norms, and also those who hope to rethink Islamic teachings along emancipatory lines (such as Islamic feminists, see Mir-Hosseini 2006). The position, behaviour, and appearance of women in particular raises emotions on different sides.^[8]

In Saba Mahmood's aforementioned work, women's striving to be God-fearing unsettled the liberal assumption that ‘everybody wants to be free’. In European debates on Islam, Muslim women who willingly follow a conservative moral discipline cause puzzlement, because they fit neither the role of the helpless victim, nor that of the freedom-striving emancipated woman (Fadil 2018). Conversely, the Islamic revival has encouraged women to act as responsible moral agents in their own right, rather than as extensions of their families (Karlsson Minganti 2007). This is a form of authority and assertive action that, in turn, does not fit either to the role of the committed and obedient Muslim daughter or wife, nor to that of the sinful improper woman.

In her more recent work, Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) has argued that the Western desire to ‘save’ Muslim women is more likely to serve imperial political aims than to actually help oppressed women. I taught her book in Egypt to an audience of young, highly educated people, more than half of them female. Some of them very much agreed with her argument. Others disagreed, and argued that her proposal did not help them in their feminist struggle either. One participant took no sides, and instead told that Abu-Lughod inspired her to reflect about how being a Muslim structures her way of being a woman.

Such questions go beyond issues having to do with agency and resistance. Some examples: when women's covering dress (hijab, literally ‘veil’, usually taken to mean a covering of the body except of the face, hands, and feet) was reintroduced in urban milieus in the late-twentieth century, it was initially a form of anti-fashion, promoting female modesty and invisibility. With its popularization, however, the hijab has become a form of Islamic fashion, which includes the commerce, desire, and vanity that characterise the industry (Jones 2010; Tarlo & Moors 2013). A religious life can also mean that one seeks to have pleasure and desire in a halal way. Turkish women's recent interest in sports is a way to pursue personal wellbeing without openly challenging female roles (Sehlikoğlu 2015). Thriving Islamic cafeterias and restaurants in southern Beirut invite conservative Shia Muslim families and youth to participate in leisure activities (Deeb & Harb 2013). Different ways of talking about sex and desire exist in Egypt, but new sexuality counselling services (some of them provided by Islam-inspired groups) tell that there is a need to ‘break the silence’, which actually means learning to speak about desire in a therapeutic framework (Kreil 2016). Young men and women in Morocco, who seek to marry a partner they love, imagine a better world ruled by affection and care. But they are also acutely aware that God's predestination may set another path for them, and that love stories are often unhappy ones (Menin 2015).

Reform and critique

Recently, some secularists, critical of values promoted by conservative and revivalist Islamic currents, have called for a ‘reformation’ of Islam. This demand is problematic for two reasons. First, another historical movement of reformation, the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth century, initially resulted in a century of devastating wars – something hardly worth imitating. Second, most Islamic currents against whom secularist critics address their demand are in fact the outcome of a successful Islamic reform that began in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For modern Muslims, as among Christians since the sixteenth century, reform more often than not means a purer, stricter, more encompassing practice of faith. Powerful reformist theologies today include the Sunni Deobandi school of theology in South Asia, and various Sunni currents such as Salafis and Wahhabis (not all followers of these latter movements accept these labels) that strive to live as exactly as possible by what they understand to be the example of the Prophet and his companions (Meijer 2009). Reformist theologies have inspired political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world and Jamaat-i Islami in South Asia, and also militant groups like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the so-called Islamic State. Reformist theologies are not inherently militant, however, just as conservative and mystical theologies are not inherently peaceful. More often than not, though, they offer compelling ways to live an ‘enchanted modern’ life (Deeb 2006).

School education and upward social mobility have proven to be powerful allies of the Islamic revival (Eickelman 1992; Starrett 1998). Islamic schools that combine traditions of religious learning with contemporary national curricula promise a spiritual moral education and knowledge towards social advancement (Hefner & Qasim Zaman 2007). Religious movements of various colourings have proven very media-savvy – some by appropriating commercial formats, others by creating parallel ‘counterpublics’ (Meyer & Moors 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Moll 2018). Southeast Asia is a forerunner region in the Islamization of neoliberal capitalism – and neoliberalization of Islam (Hefner 2012). Fashionable styles of conservative religiosity fuse with global consumer cultures to promote a godly life in style (Jones 2010; Hew 2018). A thriving sector of interest-free Islamic finance offers halal profits (Rudnyckyj 2018). Training programs for company employees promote both capitalist profit-maximising as well as a pious care for salvation (Rudnickyj 2009). In the Arab Gulf states, migrant workers often find appeal in the combination of cosmopolitan mobility, flashy consumerism, the prospect of ascent in social class, and revivalist theologies of ethical self-discipline that are opposed to localised communal traditions (Osella & Osella 2007; Stephan-Emmrich & Mirzoev 2016).

Secularism in Muslim lands has usually not meant a decline of religion, but more often its subordination to political imperatives (Asad 2003). Egypt, for example, is not secular in the sense that religion would be rendered private, but it can be seen as secular in the sense that the nation state is the primary instance of power (Agrama 2012; Mahmood 2016). In Western Europe, by contrast, where Islam is a minority faith, secularism vis-à-vis Islam has often entailed the attempt to ‘domesticate’ Muslims and Islam towards an imagined European norm (Bowen 2007; Fernando 2014; Sunier 2014).

Islam and government are interlinked in many ways, only some of them secular. Many states, amongst which we also find some western ones, enforce and standardise what they and their constituencies understand to be correct Islamic practice (Müller 2017; Dahlgren 2013). State institutions take over key religious responsibilities such as determining the beginning and end of Ramadan based on the sighting of the new moon (Long 2017). Reflecting the neoliberal shift of power from governments to international standards, halal food has become subject to bureaucratised international certification procedures (Tayob 2017).

A key insight of Asad's discursive tradition concept (see above) is that debate and disagreement are the Islamic tradition. Islam as a lived practice involves ongoing reflection, discussion, and critique (Kresse 2007; Khan 2012; Aishima 2016; Ahmad 2017). Given the tremendous amount of sophisticated cultural production and knowledge by Muslim intellectuals for over a millennium, this should not come as a surprise. Critical thinking and debate are not inherently secular - but they are also not necessarily emancipatory. Whether religious or secular, grounded in Islamic or other faiths, they hinge upon structures of power and ethical premises. They open avenues to question some things, and pose others as unquestionable.

Sometimes, religion can be explicitly marked as outside of debate. Matthew Carey (2012) describes how Amazigh (Berber) villagers in a mountaneous region of Morocco entertain pluralistic and often heated debates about local issues – and carefully avoid linking them with their faith. For them, Islam is a site of absolute truth. Evoking it could put an end to pluralistic disagreement.

Furthermore, not all debates are as consequential as others. When men in eastern Africa gather to chew qat (a mild stimulant) in the afternoons, they often become involved in debates that have the intrinsic pleasure of debating itself as their main purpose (Desplat 2016).

Islam as a critical engagement has inspired many anthropologists to think against the grain of secular, religious, and other assumptions. Anthropological theories about Islam have always carried acknowledged or unacknowledged theological and political sympathies and antipathies, and anthropological debates may echo theological ones (Moll 2018). But there is more space for dialogue today than there was in the past. Even if unsolved problems remain, it has also become easier to combine Muslim faith and mainstream academic research. While it indeed is not the anthropologists' job to give a normative account of Islam, they may nevertheless have some constructive critiques to offer.

Acknowledgements

I'm indebted to Hatsuki Aishima, Sindre Bangstad, Martin van Bruinessen, Nadia Fadil, Aymon Kreil, Annelies Moors, Dominik Müller, Ali Nobil, Jonas Otterbeck, Sertaç Sehlikoğlu, Felix Stein, Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Fabio Vicini, and the anonymous reviewers of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology for their suggestions, help, and feedback.

References

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Note on contributor

Samuli Schielke is a social and cultural anthropologist working on contemporary Egypt. He is a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), associate primary investigator at Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, and visiting fellow at the ERC project Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics at University College London.

Samuli Schielke, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Kirchweg 33, 14129 Berlin, Germany. Samuli.Schielke@zmo.de

[1] More on prayer and alms comes later in the section, ‘Humans and God’.

[2] Hirschkind takes issue in particular with the liberal hermeneutics of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd (1943-2010), see, e.g. Abu Zayd 1991.

[3] More on this question below.

[4] They are commonly interpreted as allegories of a mystical union with God, and they thrive on the ambiguity of two possible readings.

[5] A Shia Islamist party and a main power-holder in Lebanon.

[6] Food is considered halal, i.e. permissible, when it contains no blood, pork meat, or alcohol, and when the meat comes from animals that are slaughtered by cutting their throat with a knife.

[7] For other examples, see, e.g., Dupret et al. 2012.

[8] Men and masculinities have received attention more recently, e.g. Ghannam 2013.

Death

Felix Stein — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:14:40 +0000

Bob Simpson

Durham University

Initially published 23 Jul 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18death

Abstract:

The variety of ways in which death has been handled in human societies has been a source of much scholarly fascination. In this brief overview, anthropological approaches to the study of death are identified and explained. The emphasis is on death as a social event rather than the mere cessation of bodily functions. The piece describes classical anthropological approaches to death rituals and specifically as these are found in the work of Robert Hertz. Consideration is then given to the transformation of death and the way that mortuary practices have changed over time. In these changes can be seen the way that the lives of the dead are conceived in relation to those who are left behind. Contemporary examples of this relationship are drawn from biomedicine and the practice of organ transplantation and from instances where those killed in political violence are exhumed. The piece ends with a brief reflection on the future of the afterlife.

Introduction

Mortal immortals, immortal mortals,

Living each other’s death and dying each other’s life.

Fragment 46, Heraclitus (2001)

We are all going to die! In physiological terms the deaths that all will die will be broadly similar, in the sense that either suddenly and unexpectedly or maybe over a long period of time, the systems that keep us active and sentient will cease to function. However, throughout the world, people make important distinctions between a body that has expired and a dead person; that is, as someone who is connected to others through complex social relations which bring into question any simple notion of a finite ending. Complex and varied imaginaries can carry the dead person beyond any simple cessation of bodily functions. In other words, there is no easy way of separating the facts of death from those of life; they come all-of-a-piece.^[1]

Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic thinker, captured the conundrum well in the famous aphorism with which this piece begins: the living and the dead are never far apart. This entanglement led the philosopher Hans Jonas to characterise death as an archetypal human problem (Jonas 2001: 8). From the earliest glimmerings of sentience and self-reflection, evident in what he refers to as ‘panvitalism’,[2] humans had also to make sense of the plain facts of senescence. Where did the person go? Western philosophical approaches to this question have tended to treat death as an abstract totality. As Buckingham argues, death is the point at which philosophers are most likely to think outside of time and history (Buckingham 2013: 21). Heidegger, for example, doesn’t see the person as going anywhere. Death is final and non-relational and the challenge is to confront this truth in the quest for existential authenticity (Heidegger 1962). Being in the world (Dasein) is only fully realised when death and finitude are faced. In contrast, the question ‘where did the person go’ has been answered in different ways across time and according to different ways of life. It is this variation that anthropologists studying death and mortuary practices have tried to capture and make sense of. Anthropological interest is thus not so much in the abstract death that all will die but in the socially and metaphysically distinct circumstances in which each death actually occurs. In other words, death is not merely a biological event but is, as we will go on to see, a profoundly social, cultural, and political one.

People might experience their own deaths up to a point. There might be idioms in which to contemplate death and compelling reasons for doing so. For example, Buddhists in Sri Lanka are encouraged to cultivate ‘mindfulness of death’ (maranasañña) which, as Langer (2007: 53) suggests, is aimed at ‘the final liberation’ and disengagement from society. In a very different setting, Irvine takes us with great insight into the thoughts and feelings that people living with HIV/AIDS have as they approach death (Irvine 2016). Similarly, Das and Han question any simple symmetry between death and dying but rather seek to understand the ways in which death features as part of day to day life and, indeed, the ways in which life and death have what they refer to as an ‘intimacy’ (Das & Han 2016: 623). The contributors to their collection show how, even in the most dire of circumstances, people strive ‘to die well’ (624). However, in this brief introduction to the topic of death, the focus is not so much on the problem that death poses for the dying and the dead but rather the problem this poses for those who are left behind.

Here, attention shifts to those who are in a primary relationship with the dead – mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters – whose responsibility it is to dispose of their dead and to manage the ending of mortal attachments and the loss and grief that this brings. It also encompasses wider family and community relationships as well as the rather more impersonal bureaucracies of the state and its responsibilities for categorising and disposing of the dead. But it is not only that significant social networks are activated by a death. A substantial literature in anthropology demonstrates how the cessation of life is a point at which distinctive, and often expert, routines are put into practice to ensure that, for the living as well as the dead, the corpse undergoes a meaningful transition to an afterlife, a re-birth, a place of memoriam. The list of ways in which bodies might be disposed of to the satisfaction of the living (and the dying) is long. It encompasses preparing the dead by washing, shaving, dressing, and ritually disposing of the corpse through burial, cremation, and other funerary rites. Encounters with ghosts, spirits, and ancestors all attest to the ways in which the dead have influence and agency in the worlds of the living. Photographs, tombstones, heirlooms, and archives might similarly give death immanence in the midst of life. This theme is currently being carried forward in novel ways with the advent of information and communication technologies (Arnold et al. 2018). People the world over are, as Heraclitus put it, ‘living each other’s death’. Desjarlais goes so far as to argue that there is a deep-felt need to bring something into existence at the very moment that a person ceases to be (Desjarlais 2016: 654-5). Describing death and dying among the Yolmo of Nepal, he sees their responses to death as a creative act of making a new reality. Among the Yolmo, the ritual processes that accompany the death of a person set in motion a re-configuration of relations between persons, objects, and memories.^[3]It is the attempt to make sense of this mixing of social relationships, ritual practices, and metaphysical beliefs as it is found in different societies that has made the study of death such an engaging and intellectually challenging field within anthropology.

Hertz: death as transformation

The study of death in anthropology is one that has a long and important pedigree. Through the study of classical mythologies, James Frazer and Johan Jakob Bachofen attempted to decipher the rituals and symbols of ancient mortuary practice. Consistent with the intellectual preoccupations of the second half of the nineteenth century, their interest was in origins, evolution, and the traces and survivals they believed they could see in the world around them. In an important turn away from the classically-oriented collages of mortuary practices that that these approaches tended to produce, Robert Hertz laid important foundations for the anthropological study of death as a distinct field (Hertz 1907, Parkin 1996). Hertz was a member of the Année Sociologique group working under Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and others. In keeping with Durkheim’s overall project, their main achievement was to transform a predominantly theological approach to the study of religion into a fundamentally sociological one. In the case of Hertz, this entailed showing how individual feelings and sentiments evident at the death of a member of society were made sense of, and indeed shaped by, shared and durable patterns of beliefs, values, and ideas. These were Durkheim’s ‘collective representations’^[4]and Hertz saw them as evident and consequential in the orchestration of ritual, symbol, and myth on the occasion of a death.

In an early and important exercise in comparative anthropology, Hertz analysed detailed ethnographic accounts of burial practices in Borneo and Indonesia (Metcalf & Huntington 1991: 34). In these rites, known as secondary burials, the corpse is ceremonially separated from the living and kept for an ‘intermediary period’ in the earth or in special pots. In his attempt to understand this process, Hertz drew inspiration from the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep (1873 -1957). Van Gennep had earlier succeeded in gathering a wide range of materials on rituals held to mark important transitions such as births, marriage, and deaths (Van Gennep 1960). From these he was able to extract commonalities and identify what he referred to as schema. He described these in an important work called Les rites de passage in which he showed how transitions commonly feature acts which separate and then marginalise ritual participants before re-aggregating them back into society (Hockey 2002). In his work on death, Hertz was particularly interested in what Van Gennep had referred to as the liminal phase of rites of passage (Van Gennep 1960, also see Turner 1969 and Berger & Kroesen 2016). In this phase of the ritual, the corpse, the living, and the souls of the dead are in an ambiguous and dangerous relationship. The corpse rots and, over time, loses its mortal appearance and becomes an object of dread. Eventually, all that is ‘wet’ (flesh) becomes ‘dry’ (bones). In the final stages of the rite, the corpse, amidst great celebration, is moved to a more permanent place of keeping; that is, the dead are moved irreversibly from the world of the living to join the souls of the dead: they have become ancestors. As Hertz put it, the purpose of funerary rites is ‘to make a material object or living being pass from this world to the next; to free or create the soul, it must be destroyed […] As the visible object vanishes it is reconstructed in the beyond, transformed to a greater or lesser degree’ (Hertz 1960: 46).

In this process of moving the dead out of the world of the living, Hertz identifies a very important dramatis personae. First, there is what might be thought of as a metaphysical dimension to mortuary practice overseen by those concerned with ensuring that the soul – or what it is that is believed to abide beyond death – is safely conducted to the afterlife. Second, there are those who live on and in various ways feel their loss, which introduces an important emotional dimension to Hertz’s analysis. Questions of attachment and loss and how these are collectively managed are seen as a key function of the ritual process. Third, there is the corpse and its eventual interment which signifies the ultimate extinction of the social person. The essential Durkheimian point in Hertz’s analysis is that society is transcendent and, whilst an individual death is often portrayed as a dangerous tear in the ordered fabric of society, it is one that its members can repair. As Hertz himself put it: ‘the collective consciousness does not believe in the necessity of death, so it refuses to consider it irrevocable […] the last word must remain with life’ (1960: 78).

The influence of Durkheim is strong in Hertz’s work and often leads to a problematic over-reification and -personification of society: can society really have power and agency in the way that they presume? Notwithstanding this important criticism, Hertz’s work has continued to be an important stepping-off point for scholars interested in the topic of death. One reason for this sustained interest is that his work brought diverse and widely observed phenomena – mortuary rituals, fear of the dead, impurity of the corpse, and the performance of mourning – into a single analytical framework. Davies points out how focus on the fate of the corpse within this schema was a precursor of the more recent interest in materialization and embodiment in religious practice (Davies 2000). Similarly, Hertz’s interest in the powerful emotions that are unleashed in bereavement, or what he referred to as ‘internal partings’ (Hertz 1960: 81), anticipated later interest in ritual and emotion and the relationship between inner states and outward actions. Finally, Hertz’s work was also an important precursor of work which focused on themes of birth and regeneration that are commonly found in mortuary rites (for example, Bloch & Parry 1982). In many traditions, the symbolism of tombs and wombs are never far apart. Death is an ending – we are indeed all going to die – but it is also a moment of transformation, potentiality, and beginning. The work of ritual officiants and the participants they assemble enable the dead to be resurrected and regenerated in ways that are meaningful to those that are left behind.

The transformation of death

Although originating in a tribal society in Indonesia, Hertz’s work has provided a number of important and durable themes that are often referred to in the anthropological study of death. In particular, his work provides a useful framework for understanding death as the occasion for action that is both collective and transformative. Where it is less effective is in understanding the ways in which such processes change over time and how conceptualizations of death itself are transformed. In what follows I provide two examples of such transformations.

The first is taken from Piers Vitebsky’s ethnographic work among the Sora, a tribal group found in the state of Orissa in the east of central India. Based on material collected in the 1970s and 80s, he produced an important monograph, Dialogues with the dead: the discussion of mortality among the Sora of eastern India’ (1993). This work details how Sora people are brought into connection with their deceased relatives through the agency of shamans. The shamans are orchestrators of the memories of the dead (sonum), and by way of the ‘dialogues’ they initiate, the living and dead communicate over matters such as illness and its causes, the emotions triggered by attachment and loss, and how to deal with the jealousies that come with managing inheritance and property. A dominant theme of the book is that death is not the negation of life but rather a matter of its transformation and continuity, albeit with relatives who now dwell in the underworld along with all the other spirits of the dead.

Vitebsky returned to the Sora several decades later and reported on their present circumstances. In his book, Living without the dead: loss and redemption in a jungle cosmos (Vitebsky 2017), he describes how in the years since his original sojourn among the Sora, there had been a remarkable transformation. Young people had turned away from their traditional cosmology and the beliefs that upheld it. In response to the incentives and encouragements of evangelical Christians and fundamentalist Hindus, new routes to education, social mobility, and respectability were beckoning. Yet embrace of the new religions came at a cost. Becoming a Christian meant that there was no place for the dead in the lives of the living. After death, good people went to heaven rather an underworld from whence they could continue speaking to the living. The shamans, who had routinely put the living into contact with their recently dead relatives, were replaced with male priests whose job it was to construct and maintain a very different relationship with the afterlife. For many Sora, this silencing of the dead was a source of profound sadness and anxiety: how could they grieve without the reassurances, and indeed the wisdom, of the dead? What would it be like to die and not be spoken to by one’s children? Whilst the Sora might have been gaining access to new modes of redemption and eternal life, an entire register of emotional and existential life was being erased in doing so. Vitebsky’s account highlights the deep and distressing existential rupture which opens as people shift between radically different ways of understanding death and the place of the dead in their social world.

The second examples are taken from the works of Geoffrey Gorer and David Cannadine and their accounts of how world wars in Europe changed ideas of death and the way that people perceived their relationships with the dead. In his speculations on the impact of war on public expressions of grief, Gorer suggests that extensive losses of relatives on the battlefield led to very visible expressions of grief and mourning. Most notably, widows would wear black for prescribed periods of mourning. As the body count grew on the battlefield, the visibility of ‘widow’s weeds’ on the streets at home increased accordingly. Gorer argued that, at the time, this was perceived as bad for morale and the war effort; consequently, such public displays were discouraged by the British establishment. This, he suggested, played a key role in making death the occasion for private rather than publicly expressed grief. A similar argument was made by the historian David Cannadine writing about the aftermath of the First World War (Cannadine 1981). The level of loss across Britain (and indeed the whole of Europe) following the First World War is difficult to comprehend. Cannadine argued that such was the swell of raw grief in the aftermath of the war that accepted routines were, in a sense, overwhelmed. In Durkheim’s terms, the tear in the social fabric was simply too enormous to be repaired by resorting to existing practices of memorialization. With the absence of bodies over which to mourn, this was a time in Britain when there was a significant rise in spiritualism, spiritualist churches, and the practice of holding séances in the hope of having ‘dialogues’ with the dead. In a way, the direction of travel was opposite to that described by Vitebsky for the Sora – whereas the Sora turned away from their dead as active in their lives, British mourners, with the help of spiritualists, actively sought them out. Crucially, the First World War not only changed a nation’s relationship with death but also, for a time at least, its relationship with the dead.

Although very different, what both these examples show is that death and the kinds of contact that the living might then expect to have with the dead are subject to change over time and according to circumstance. This is particularly so where change is sudden and traumatic. Phillipe Ariès, in his monumental history of death in Europe, attempted to plot such changes across a longer durée (Ariès 1974). His evidence was drawn from a variety of historical sources regarding mortuary practices, gravestones, wills, artworks, literature, and other clues as to the social life of the dead in former times. He concludes that there has been a transition over the last 1000 years from what he calls ‘tame’ death to ‘wild’ death. Tame death is used to characterise death in pre-modern Europe. It is seen as a kind of repose and one accepted as part of the natural order, and its management by family, kin, and community was consistent with this framing of death. It was an event for which the tramlines of meaning were very clearly laid down and for which appropriate preparations could be made by the living and the dying. By contrast, the wild death of modern times is portrayed as a troubling intrusion for the living and one for which collective and shared routines are unclear. In Ariès’ work, Europe becomes the arena for a particularly ‘modern’ kind of death; that is, one seen as an individualised site of resistance rather than one of collective acceptance. Medical rather than spiritual interventions at the deathbed are likely to be the norm in managing this kind of death (Illich 1974, Porter 1989). To varying degrees across western societies, death had become the object of taboo. Privatised, medicalised and secularised, it was seen as sequestered away from family and kin and with no prospect of a happy meeting in an afterlife. To get to this point, Ariès makes some broad sweeps across time and space. However, what is lacking in this account of ‘modern’ death is an ethnographic specificity which captures how death is actually managed and just what it means for those involved. In the next section, I turn to some of the more recent anthropological work on death. I briefly explore three themes: death and contemporary biomedicine; new immortalities; and thanato-politics.

Death and contemporary biomedicine

Franklin and Lock explore the question of how, in modern medical and bio-sciences, the conundrum of life, personhood, and cessation is dealt with at cellular, bodily, and species levels (Franklin & Lock 2003). The linkage with earlier insights into the symmetry between death and regeneration remains a potent theme throughout their account. Yet, the distinctions between culture/life and nature/death that run through earlier anthropological accounts of death are held up for critical scrutiny. These analytical distinctions may no longer be quite so useful in a world where new technologies render biology an object which is not merely given but made. Novel distinctions are now made across the former binary and new fields open up to ethnographic enquiry as death becomes differently visible. Work carried out in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and genetic modification is a case in point. These technologies have profound implications for life and also for death, in that ideas of body, personhood, and value are increasingly inflected with those drawn from the world of technology, markets, and capital.

Margaret Lock, for example, gives an account of the emergence of the concept of ‘brain death’ and the increasing possibilities for a misalignment of a social death and biological one (Lock 2003). Within the biomedical world, biological death was hitherto thought of as a self-evident and clear boundary between life and death, and marked by indicators such as the cessation of pulse and respiration. However, the possibilities for technological intervention at the end of life mean that failing bodily functions can be overridden mechanically. As a result, attention has now shifted to other places in which vitality might be located, specifically: the brain, the display of neocortical activity and, by inference, the presence of consciousness (also cf. Kaufmann 2000). The idea of a ‘persistent vegetative state’ (PVS) sans sentience and intentionality but with continuing blood flow and respiration gives rise to some complex ethical and philosophical reflections. How are we to understand the relationship between life and death at a point where this fundamental binary appears to collapse? As Lock shows in an illuminating comparison between approaches to this problem in the US and Japan, the meaning of death is historically and culturally situated and deeply contested (Lock 2002). Whereas in the US, consciousness and the location of personhood have been moved up into the brain, so to speak, in Japan, life is seen as running through every part of the body and cannot be so easily partitioned off. As a consequence, criteria that were put in place in the US and Europe to help make sense of PVS were not compatible with Japanese ideas about the locus of vitality and how legitimate organ retrieval could be distinguished from first degree murder (Lock 2002). One important consequence of this different reading of brain-death in Japan was that organ transplantation was for many years severely restricted. The inverse corollary of this reading of the unconscious-but-still-living body was that in western countries ‘brain death’ enabled access to a new source of large organs for transplant (Sharp 2007, 2014). Hearts, liver lobes, kidneys, lungs, and cornea are just some of the organs and tissues that are now ex-plantable from the body of a ‘brain dead’ person. Indeed, there is a significant and widening repertoire of ways in which the organs and tissues of one body might find use in another. If we expand the use of cadaveric tissue beyond the therapeutic, to encompass educational and research purposes, then there is now little that cannot be meaningfully recovered from a body at the point of death or shortly thereafter. Amidst shortages of organs and tissues for these secondary uses, death as closure and finality begins to give way to death as opportunity and resource. This is an important shift. It signals some profound changes in the way that death is made meaningful in a growing number of contexts.

New immortalities

Secularization has been an important theme in studies of death in contemporary societies. This is often taken to mean the stripping away of the religious trappings of death as they featured in earlier times and other places. In recent work I have argued that secularization does not make for any simple nihilism but that new kinds of meaning making emerge which are of ethnographic note, particularly when it comes to post-mortem tissue and body donation (Simpson & Douglas-Jones 2017; see also Asad 2016). Indeed, in answering the important question posed by Cannell (2010) – ‘what does death look like without religion?’ – the possibilities afforded by the modern imaginaries of medicine, education, and research come into view as novel vehicles for immortality. Moral and social sensibilities are tapped in donor campaigns which play on the rhetoric of the ‘gift’ to elicit commitments to donate (Simpson 2011). The corporeal rhetorics of such campaigns offer the public glimpses of how the living might imagine their own mortal transformation as having value and perhaps a presence beyond the finality of death (see, for example, Hallam 2017 for an account of whole body donation for medical education).

One way in which these secularised framings of death, transformation, and continuity are becoming more evident is in the growing expectation that individuals will take responsibility for their own deaths by way of pledges, donor cards, living wills, and end of life directives as these relate to tissue and whole body donation. These pre-mortem acts carry with them glimpses of post-mortem sociality and the responsibility that others will have after a person’s death. Even more compelling are the ways in which transplant technologies mean that parts might ‘live on’ in spite of, or outside of, the body. New kinds of kinship connections come into existence as parts of dead relatives are assimilated into the bodies of strangers (Kaufman, Russ, & Shim 2006; Sharp 2006, 2007). In one such case, the newspaper headline read ‘Bride Is Walked Down Aisle by the Man Who Got Her Father’s Donated Heart’.^[5]As people imagine themselves living on in one another in this way, possibilities open up for how grief might be expressed and managed. In Durkheimian terms, cadaveric donation becomes once again an occasion for the repair of the social fabric which death has opened up. Relatives and friends might gain solace from their ability to transform a death in their midst into something productive, such as the saving of another’s life or the anatomical training of a medical student.

Thanato-politics

Operating at a rather different scale, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault attempted to map the changing relationship between death and the state. Central to his thesis was the emergence of biopolitics, a term he used to capture the ways in which knowledge and power translate into regimes for the management of human life and well-being. As part of this thesis, Foucault also identified how, in extremis, biopolitics encompasses the administration of death, or what he referred to as the ‘thanato-political’ (Foucault 1976). The most absolute form of thanato-politics was seen in the quest for racial hygiene perpetrated under National Socialism in the 1930s. Under a totalitarian regime, those who were deemed to threaten this project, either by reason of their ethnicity or political views, were systematically incarcerated and reduced to a state of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1995). This loss of citizenship and identity was often followed by what we might think of as a ‘bare’ death: an unmarked and uncelebrated desecration of the person. The use of terror and violence by the state in the name security and stability did not, however, start with National Socialism in Europe and nor did it end with it).^[6]The misuse of state power in relation to minorities, the marginalised, and the displaced constitutes an important theme in the anthropology of death.

One anthropological response to the use of state violence has been attempts to recover ethnographically the ways in which death is managed and given meaning by those who are left behind. Here we are dealing with what Hertz referred to as inauspicious or ‘bad’ deaths (Hertz 1960 [1907]). These are deaths in which survivors are often unable to carry out appropriate rituals of disposal and mourning and are left in despair at the circumstances of the loss and separation they have experienced. Understanding the specificities of what happens under the heading of thanato-politics has generated anthropological interest in topics such as searches for those who have disappeared during conflict or political violence, exhumations of the disappeared, and the use of forensic science and genetics in enabling the living to make connections with remains of the dead. Examples of recent work in this area include Francisco Ferrándiz’s account of exhumations of those summarily executed by the Franco regime at the end of the Spanish civil war. In this work he documents some of the ‘technical, political and legal skirmishes’ that arise as the present government confronts the skeletal remains of those exhumed from mass graves (2013: 44). In a similar vein, Isias Rojas Perez’s account of relatives’ search for missing victims of the counter-insurgency violence in the Highlands of Peru documents the efforts of relatives to identify and seek recognition for victims of political violence. Here the emphasis is on how remains figure in emerging narratives of memorialization and possible reconciliation (2017). Covering similar issues, Ernesto Schwartz-Marin and Arely Cruz-Santiago’s participatory research on ‘citizen forensics’ shows how the families of the disappeared in Mexico are using DNA evidence from bodily remains to challenge state versions of atrocity (2016). Verdery traces the ‘the political lives of dead bodies’ in Eastern Europe in a different direction. In her study of post-socialist Eastern Europe she describes how the bodies of now dead leaders, artists, and poets become part of symbolic efforts to configure state politics after communism (2000). Similarly, Heonik Kwon describes how, in post-conflict Vietnam, beliefs about the wandering souls of the war dead continue to animate contemporary culture and politics (2008). Describing responses to other kinds of ‘bad’ death, Sarah Green has written about how the bodies of unidentified migrants are treated by the Greek authorities on whose beaches they wash up (2012). In a similar vein, Claudia Merli and Trudi Buck have described the different treatment according to nationality of bodies identified in the aftermath of the tsunami which hit Thailand in 2005 (2015). In each of these ethnographies, the imperatives of grief, memorialization, and immortalization are seen to work strongly to prevent a ‘bad’ death becoming a ‘bare’ death.

Afterword/afterlife

In this brief excursion into the anthropology of death, two powerfully recurrent themes stand out. The first is that the ways humans make sense of death are always deeply entangled with the question of how they live. The second is that the work of the creative imagination works to transform death into a celebratory assertion of continuities of one kind or another. Such continuities are often conceived through the imagery of rebirth, regeneration, and reincarnation. These are powerful planks on which the experience and sense-making of death have been built. But what if these planks were removed? What if the endless circularity that Heraclitus’ aphorism conveyed at the outset was catastrophically ruptured? Scheffler, in an important essay entitled ‘Death and the afterlife’ (2013) asks just such a question. He does this not from any metaphysical standpoint but from the very obvious and deep-rooted idea that as humans we live with the idea of a future that extends beyond our own mortal span. When I die, I assume that the species will not die with me. There will be others that outlive me, and yet others that will follow after them. These future people will in turn become ancestors. Scheffler, however, asks what life would be like if this assumption did not hold and we knew this to be the case. Let’s say that, in these times of anthropocenic anxiety, our failure to manage the environment upon which we depend means that we come to know definitively that there would be no one to follow. What would happen to ideas of life and death if we, as humans, had to confront the imminent extinction of our species? Anomie or a frantic affirmation of people and things that we value? A dystopian fragmentation of social and cultural orders or a celebratory assertion of a deeply human sociality? One would hope that we are never in a position to see this philosopher’s thought experiment concluded. Rather, we should perhaps see it as but another demonstration of how much we can learn about life from our reflections upon death and the deep call to compassion that lies at the heart of Heraclitus’s aphorism.

References

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Cannell, F. 2011. English ancestors: the moral possibilities of popular genealogy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(3), 462-80.

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Kaufmann, S. 2000. In the shadow of death with dignity: medicine and cultural quandaries of the vegetative state. American Anthropologist 102(1), 69-83.

Kaufman, S., A.J. Russ, & J.K. Shim 2006. Aged bodies and kinship matters: the ethical field of kidney transplant. American Ethnologist 33(1), 81-99 (available on-line: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2006.33.1.81).

Kwon, H. 2008. Ghosts of war in Vietnam. Cambridge: University Press.

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Lock, M. 2002. Twice dead: transplants and the reinvention of death. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———2003. On making up the good-as-dead in a utilitarian world. In Remaking life and death: toward an anthropology of the biosciences (eds) S. Franklin & M. Lock, 165-92. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Mbembe, A. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1), 11-40 (available on-line: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11).

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Metcalf, P. & R. Huntington 1991. Celebrations of death: the anthropology of mortuary ritual. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Rojas-Perez, I. 2017. Mourning remains: state atrocity, exhumations, and governing the disappeared in Peru's postwar Andes. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Scheffler, S. 2013. Death and the afterlife. Oxford: University Press.

Schwartz-Marin, E. & A. Cruz- Santiago 2016. Forensic civism: articulating science, DNA and kinship in Mexico and Colombia. Human Remains and Violence 2(1), 58-74.

Sharp, L. 2006. Strange harvest: organ transplants, denatured bodies, and the transformed self. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2007. Bodies, commodities, and biotechnologies: death, mourning, and scientific desire in the realm of human organ transfer. New York: Columbia University Press.

———2014. The transplant imaginary: mechanical hearts, animal parts, and moral thinking in highly experimental science. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Simpson, B. 2011. Blood rhetorics: donor campaigns and their publics in contemporary Sri Lanka’. Ethnos 76(2), 254-75 (available on-line: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2010.546868).

Simpson, B & R. Douglas Jones 2017. New immortalities: death, donation and dedication in the 21^stcentury. Medicine Anthropology Theory 4(4), 1-21 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.4.4.308).

Turner, V. 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. London: Transaction Publishers.

Van Gennep, A. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage (trans. M.B. Vizedom & G.L. Caffee). Chicago: University Press.

Verdery. K. 2000. The political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change. New York: Columbia University Press.

Vitebsky, P. 1993. Dialogues with the dead: the discussion of mortality among the Sora of Eastern India. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 2008. Loving and forgetting: moments of inarticulacy in tribal India. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, 243-61.

——— 2017. Living without the dead: loss and redemption in a jungle cosmos. Chicago: University Press.

Note on contributor

Bob Simpson is a professor of Anthropology at Durham University. He has written widely on the anthropology of bioethics, biomedicine, and biotechnologies. His current research interests centre on tissue economies and moralities as these relate to organs, gametes, and embryos. One of the main themes he works on is the procurement and use of cadaveric tissue. As well as numerous publications on this topic he also he convenes the New Immortalities network which brings together scholars interested in this topic. His work has also explored the encounter between challenging technological developments and local systems of values and beliefs in South Asia. His forthcoming monograph (co-authored with Salla Sariola) is Research as development: clinical trials, collaboration and bioethics in Sri Lanka (Cornell University Press).

Prof. Bob Simpson, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Dawson Building, Southroud, DH1 3LE Durham, United Kingdom. robert.simpson@durham.ac.uk

[1] This raises an interesting problem: the word ‘death’ refers to something out there that there is a deep compulsion to name, but in so doing it is deeply and inevitably inflected by each person’s own beliefs and values. It is the kind of word that, following Derrida, we should place ‘under erasure’. We ought really therefore not to write ofdeath, but of ~~death~~. Were I to use this convention, the erasure would serve to indicate that whilst the term is not quite up to the job we are expecting it to do, it is the best we have.

[2] The term ‘panvitalism’ refers to an elementary belief that everything in the world is alive and possessed of a life force.

[3] Desjarlais lists the objectives of Yolmo mortuary practices as follows: to make things more or less concrete or virtual; to alter or fashion the appearances of the world; to shape or change the consciousness of someone or something; to sense or perceive the world in a particular way; to shape memories; to change the form of someone or something; to teach someone something significant or lasting; to create relations between forces in the world; to alter the ways in which relations take form or proceed; to bring forth something previously dormant or hidden or germinating; to play with the forms and formations of life; to unmake something: to dissolve something or take it apart (Desjarlais 2016: 654-5).

[4] The term ‘collective representations’ features in Durkheim’s theories of religion and describes specifically how beliefs and values come to have power in society. Essential to his definition of collective representations was the fact they are external to the individual and operate autonomously and collectively.

[5] (available on-line: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/fashion/weddings/bride-is-walked-down-aisle-by-the-man-who-got-her-fathers-donated-heart.html)

[6] The idea of thanato-politics has been refined in a number ways. For example, Mbembe has developed the idea of necropolitics and the systematic and state legitimated use of lethal violence in African settings (2003). Similarly, Rojas Perez has identified what she refers to as necro-governmentality in an exploration of the way the Peruvian state has managed political disappearances (2017).

Cargo cults

Felix Stein — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 11:51:14 +0000

Lamont Lindstrom

University of Tulsa

Initially published 29 Mar 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18cargo

Abstract:

Cargo cult—the term—appeared in 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists rapidly embraced the neologism to label the Melanesian social movements that had come to their attention during the colonial era (which began in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century) as well as post-war movements that captured ethnographic attention. A southwest Pacific example of messianic or millenarian movements once common throughout the colonial world, the modal cargo cult was an agitation or organised social movement of Melanesian villagers in pursuit of ‘cargo’ by means of renewed or invented ritual action that they hoped would induce ancestral spirits or other powerful beings to provide. Typically, an inspired prophet with messages from those spirits persuaded a community that social harmony and engagement in improvised ritual (dancing, marching, flag-raising) or revived cultural traditions would, for believers, bring them cargo. Ethnographers suggested that ‘cargo’ was often Western commercial goods and money, but it could also signify moral salvation, existential respect, or proto-nationalistic, anti-colonial desire for political autonomy. Although some one-time cargo cults have been institutionalised as indigenous churches or local political organizations and remain active, few new movements of the classic cargo sort emerged after most of the Melanesian colonies achieved national independence in the 1970s. Cargo cult stories, however, today continue to circulate widely beyond Melanesia, serving as useful metaphors of contemporary unrequitable desire, both ordinary and peculiar.

Introduction

Anthropologists have invented or cultivated a number of important keywords, including ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘worldview’, ‘socialization’, ‘ethnography’, and ‘rite of passage’. Among these terms is ‘cargo cult’ which, although more particular in scope, has enjoyed surprising popularity both inside the discipline and beyond. Peter Worsley, who compiled an early overview of cargo cults in The trumpet shall sound (1957), offered what had already become the standard definition. Cargo cults are:

strange religious movements in the South Pacific [that appeared] during the last few decades. In these movements, a prophet announces the imminence of the end of the world in a cataclysm which will destroy everything. Then the ancestors will return, or God, or some other liberating power, will appear, bringing all the goods the people desire, and ushering in a reign of eternal bliss (1957: 11).

In the Melanesian islands of the southwest Pacific, ‘cargo cult’ provided a handy label which could encompass a variety of forms of social unrest that ethnographers elsewhere tagged millenarian, messianic, nativistic, vitalistic, revivalistic, or culture-contact or adjustment movements. After the Second World War, anthropological attention (including Worsley’s) had shifted from functionalist accounts of simpler social systems to issues of social change, and how to describe and explain that change. The label presumed that these Melanesian movements typically focused on the acquisition of ‘cargo’ or kago (supplies, goods) in the Pidgin Englishes of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides). Anthropologists offered a variety of explanations for cargo cult outbreaks, within the broader context of global social transformations that the War had caused. Simple greed and cupidity, fundamental Melanesian cultural and religious belief systems, or colonial inequality and oppression variously accounted for cult outbreaks. The term fell out of anthropological favor by the 1970s when Melanesian colonies obtained national independence (Fiji in 1970; Papua New Guinea in 1975; Solomon Islands in 1978; and Vanuatu in 1980). Active social movements continue, however, in colonised West Papua, the western half of New Guinea that Indonesia annexed in 1962. Some have tagged these anti-Indonesian liberation movements as cargoistic (e.g., Giay & Godschalk 1993; Timmer 2000), but caution is warranted insofar as the label undercuts the political gravity and legitimacy of organised liberation efforts. Although most anthropologists have abandoned ‘cargo cult’ as misleading, and even embarrassing (although, see Otto 2009 and Tabani 2013, who defend the label’s merits), the term enjoys a post-ethnographic afterlife and continues to pop up frequently in popular commentary and critique.

Cargo cult erupts

Anthropologists briskly adopted, but did not invent, the term ‘cargo cult’. The label first appeared in print, as a calumny, in the November 1945 issue of the colonial news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (Bird 1945). Norris Mervyn Bird, an ‘old Territories resident’, wrote to express worries that wartime upheavals, a more liberal postwar colonial regime, and ill-digested Christian teaching would unsettle local people and spark cargo culting. Bird introduced the term as an alternative to an earlier cultic label, ‘Vailala Madness’:

Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as ‘Vailala Madness’, or ‘Cargo Cult’. . . . A native, infected with the disorder, states that a great number of ships loaded with ‘cargo’ had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the ‘cargo’ for his own use. . . By his very nature the New Guinea native is peculiarly susceptible to these ‘cults’ (1945: 69-70).

F. E. Williams, Government Anthropologist employed by the Australian Territory of Papua, had investigated curious incidents around Vailala in 1922 (Williams 1923). Predictions circulated about the return of ancestral spirits on ghost steam ships carrying desirable cargo. Enthusiasts abandoned the traditional male initiation ceremony and destroyed ritual artifacts, mimed Australian tea parties at flower-bedecked tables, and took up marching, drilling, and ecstatic dancing. By the time Williams arrived to investigate, colonial officials and others had tagged all this as ‘Vailala Madness’, and Williams adopted the label as ‘the most distinctive and suitable’ of various alternatives (Williams 1923: 2).

‘Cargo cult’ bested ‘Vailala Madness’ as a movement cover term as it was not tied to a particular locale, elevated madness to cult, and featured catchy alliteration. Australia-based anthropologists including Lucy Mair and H. Ian Hogbin, who then lectured at the Australian Army School of Civil Affairs in Canberra and had served as anthropological consultants during the War, embraced the label, importing this into anthropological circles (see Mair 1948; Hogbin 1951). ‘Cargo cult’ quickly spread through Australian academia and beyond as anthropologists and journalists borrowed the term to label almost any sort of organised, village-based social movement with religious and political aspirations—movements that were increasingly on the colonialist and academic radar throughout Melanesia, as elsewhere. Anthropologists retrospectively applied the new term to pre-1945 Pacific movements, including Vailala Madness itself.

Although anthropologists had occasionally grappled with social change (e.g. Malinowski 1945), post-War transformations focused ethnographic attention on disorder and disruption, including social movements. Several important analyses of historical movements appeared in the 1950s, including Norman Cohn’s The pursuit of the millennium (1957) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive rebels (1959). The Melanesian cargo cult expanded the catalogue of notable global movements, old and new, including Handsome Lake’s (Wallace 1956) and the Ghost Dance in North America, China’s Boxer Rebellion, Kenya’s Mau Mau, and more (see Lanternari 1963). By 1952, seven years after Pacific Islands Monthly introduced the versatile label, South Pacific Commission librarian Ida Leeson found enough ethnographic and administrative material on cargo cults to produce a robust bibliography. Peter Worsley’s comparative compendium, The trumpet shall sound: a study of ‘cargo’ cults in Melanesia, which tracked 60-some movements across the southwest Pacific from Fiji to New Guinea (including West Papua), followed in 1957.

Celebrated cultists

Melanesian social movements before and after the 1950s were each distinct and particular, but similar enough to come under the cargo cult label. Steinbauer (1979) tallied 185 of these. The new term disposed observers to find common elements and themes, including: desire for cargo (however imagined); expectation of spiritual assistance, whether from the ancestral dead or Christian figures, as locally reimagined; mimetic ritual reflecting European colonial or wartime practices (flags and flagpoles; marching and drilling); the washing and other manipulation of money; and ecstatic dancing and other forms of paroxysm. Cargo prophecy varied from movement to movement, although a common assertion was that ancestral spirits (who governed natural forces and fertility) were equally implicated in the production of manufactured goods. A technologically wise ancestor, perhaps, had sailed off to America, or Europe, or Australia and there was taught the secrets of cargo. Or, wily Europeans were filching cargo that ancestral spirits were beneficently shipping to their descendants.

The period between 1956 and 1964 was cargo cult research’s golden age. During these years, five important cargo ethnographies were published: Jean Guiart (1956) on Tanna’s (New Hebrides) John Frum Movement; Margaret Mead (1956) and Theodore Schwartz (1962) on the Paliau Movement, Admiralty Islands; Kenelm Burridge (1960) on movements in Madang Province; and, not too far away, Peter Lawrence (1964) on the Yali Movement. One might also include here Robert Maher’s (1961) New men of Papua: a study in culture change about the Tommy Kabu Movement of the Purari River delta area, except that Maher did not use cargo cult idiom to frame his analysis. The term only appears as a bit of an afterthought on the book’s final page, where Maher warns that Purari people, although pragmatic, might turn to cargo culting should their desire for social change be thwarted. Malaita’s Maasina (Marching) Rule also was labeled a post-war cargo cult, although Keesing (1978; see Akin 2013) and others argued that it was rather a nationalist movement with only minor spiritual rudiments.

On the island of Tanna, the shadowy figure who people called John Frum (or Jon Frumm, or John Broom) appeared in the late 1930s and instructed new devotees to return to original lands, resume kava drinking and dancing, and in general maintain island tradition, or kastom (Guiart 1956). Presbyterian missionaries had attempted to prohibit kava (Piper methysticum) drinking as men, when under its mild psychoactive influence, communed with their ancestral spirits, with local kava-drinking grounds serving also as burial grounds. John Frum foretold reversals of land and sea; mountains and plains; and black and white. He also predicted American material assistance that, indeed, eventuated in 1942 when US forces landed to establish military bases in the archipelago. A series of mostly male leaders (in spiritual contact with John Frum) originated movement rituals shaped by both Christian liturgy and wartime experience. As did Vailala adherents and cultists elsewhere in Melanesia, movement rituals included marching and drilling, flags and poles, and flowers. Followers gathered weekly, each Friday evening, to dance through the night. On 15 February 1957, leaders raised two red flags hoarded from American ammunition dumps, and this day remains the main annual movement holiday. Over the years, John Frum talk of cargo has shifted from new money and goods, to local autonomy, to economic development projects (Lindstrom 1993).

On Manus and neighboring Admirality Islands, the Pacific War likewise stimulated and shaped the Paliau Movement (known subsequently as The Noise, Makasol, or Wind Nation). Paliau Maloat, a mature man returning home from conscript service with the Japanese military, and drawing on Christian teaching, proposed a ‘New Way’ wherein people could better pursue economic development through cooperation. He proposed that people from different communities join to share garden and sea resources, working together to advance economically. Younger followers, claiming spiritual contact with Jesus, predicted Christ’s imminent return alongside the ancestral dead. Expecting impending arrival of cargo planes, ships, bulldozers, sheet metal, money, and tinned food, followers destroyed property, danced ecstatically, shared ancestral inspirations, and waited (Schwartz 1962: 227, 268). Over the years, the movement morphed into a political bloc (Makasol) and independent church (Wind Nation) (Otto 1992). Paliau was elected to Papua New Guinea’s pre-independence Parliament in 1968 and then to the Provincial Council in 1979. Wind Nation and Makasol continue to enjoy some support on Manus.

In Madang, Peter Lawrence (1964) followed the history of regional social movements through five phases, between 1871 and 1950. Road belong cargo’s opening chapter on the ‘native cosmic order’ is a magisterial summary of the cultural context of these disturbances, culminating in the poignant story of Yali, Madang’s most recent and celebrated prophet.

Yali Singina from Sor village on Papua New Guinea’s Rai (Madang Province) coast, like Paliau, was caught up in the Pacific War, working with Australian forces including coast-watchers (during the Pacific War, Australian and American servicemen, with Indigenous support, manned a chain of remote outposts, reporting on Japanese military movements.) At war’s end, also like Paliau, Yali returned home to push economic development through cooperation, attracting followers across Papua New Guinea’s Rai Coast. Weekly on Tuesdays (the movement’s holy day), ‘flower girls’ decorated ritual tables:

At the core of this cult was ritual sexual intercourse between Yali and these women, following which the sexual fluids were collected in a bottle decorated with specific flowers (codiaeum variegatum). The bottle was placed on a table in the hope that the ancestors worshipped would offer their help by producing money at the bottom of the bottle (Hermann 1992: 58).

Yali also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the colonial House of Assembly. His son James Yali, however, was elected several times to Papua New Guinea’s national Parliament.

The Mambu Movement, which developed in the Bogia region on the western side of Madang Province in the 1930s, was still active in the 1950s when Kenelm Burridge (1960) arrived to undertake investigative cargo fieldwork. Mambu, a former plantation worker and Catholic convert from Apingam village, near Bogia, had disappeared during the Pacific War, but his prophesies continued to echo around the region. These foretold that ancestral spirits living inside Manam Island’s volcano were preparing cargo for shipment to the faithful, and that followers would no longer need to pay colonial head taxes. Waiting for tinned food, axes and bush knives, soap, cloth, and the like, people built cargo sheds near cemeteries and cult temples adorned with red flags, abandoned mission churches, gave up minding their crops and drying coconut for the market, underwent cultic rebaptism in water, enjoyed promiscuous if ritualised sexual intercourse, and adopted European clothing. Colonial authorities jailed Mambu for six months, as they would Yali and also John Frum leaders on Tanna, to little avail, as upstart prophets and new movement leaders carried the message over several decades.

Following Lawrence, anthropologists have suggested several aspects of Melanesian cultures that shaped these renowned cargo movements, along with many others. These cultural elements include the traditional importance of wealth, presumptions of necessary spiritual contribution to economic production, a disjunctive temporality, and village polities wherein big-man leadership facilitated that of cult prophets.

New cultic orders

Many movement leaders and prophets, where these existed, were typically concerned with social harmony and order, insisting on new orders for cargo to arrive, and blaming disorder when it failed to do so. Worsley argued that cargo cults functioned to ‘weld previously hostile and separate groups together into a new unity’ (1957: 228); and that ‘by projecting his message on to the supernatural plane’, a cargo cult leader demonstrates that his authority ‘transcends the narrow province of local gods and spirits associated with particular clans, tribes or villages’ (1957: 237).

Ethnographers have repeatedly documented Melanesian dreams of unity alongside attendant fears of social disintegration—the difficult political balance between ideals of social harmony and competitive status games. People’s ongoing pursuit of status and power subverts the sociability they strive to achieve. Social movements cultivated new orders, new ways, and new men that might transcend Melanesia’s fissiparous social systems. The prophet of the Kekesi Rites—an early twentieth century Papuan movement – commanded: ‘the people are to observe the moral code of the tribe’ (Chinnery 1917: 453). Within the cult, totalitarian social orders could be imagined as a new ‘Law’ (lo in Pidgin) or social regime (Lindstrom 2011). Burridge called such totality ‘rigorism’, noting that ‘every millenarist believes he has grasped the secret and is driven to enforce it on others’ (1969: 127, 135; see also Guiart 1962: 133). Worsley, too, documented the new orders’ new moralities:

All prophets, therefore, stress moral renewal: the love of one’s cult-brethren; new forms of sexual relationship; abandonment of stealing, lying, cheating, theft; devotion to the interests of the community and not merely of the self (1968: 251; see Burridge 1969: 165).

Marching and drilling, and communal dancing, embodied these new social unities and orders that cults, at least for a time, made possible.

Cult luminaries frequently instituted regularising, and sometimes repressive, mechanisms to protect a new Law’s totality. Some leaders commissioned guards, police, and courts to enforce this (Guiart 1956: 173). Sex and sorcery were particular worries, given their capacity to roil social order. In some movements, sexual morality was relaxed, and customary restrictions of exogamy and incest ignored (see, e.g., Worsley 1957: 251; Kolig 1987: 189). During Espiritu Santo’s Naked Cult, for example,

the sexual act was to take place in public, since there was no shame in it; even irregular liaisons should be open affairs. Husbands should show no jealousy, for this would disturb the state of harmony which the cult was trying to establish (Worsley 1957: 151).

In other places, cultists concluded that the best way to deal with sexual conflict is not to have any sex at all. New Laws and orders also often promised to vanquish sorcerers and the disruptions they caused.

Money, too, which people found alien and difficult to acquire or comprehend, was often targeted as a threat to unity. Burridge (1969) argued that money, as this became a new measure of personal value and prestige, created Melanesian moral crises and sparked cargo cults. Leaders of many movements, including John Frum bosses on Tanna, urged followers to rid themselves of old money by hurriedly spending it all or dumping it at sea (Guiart 1956: 155; Worsley 1957: 154-55). Prophets instead promised new money that would replace colonial coinage. When every believer acquired money and other desired cargo, people would be free at last from the onerous personal debts and economic obligations that the region’s complex reciprocal exchange systems engendered.

Cargo cult explanation

Beyond describing cargo movements, anthropologists also ventured to explain them. Cargo theorists argued whether cults spontaneously combusted in many communities given a shared, volatile Melanesian culture, or whether cultic elements originated in fewer places and then diffused across the region. They also compared the roles of charismatic prophets; whether cults were nativistic (concerned with reviving waning traditions) or iconoclastic (focused on replacing local culture with modern [Western] substitutes); who, exactly, was charged with bringing home the cargo (returning ancestral spirits; the American military); why cults broke out in certain areas but not others; and also what ‘cargo’ meant. Was this simple cash or tinned foods? Did cargo stand for proto-nationalist desire for autonomy, the removal of colonial authority, even independence? Or did cargo represent existential concerns with respect and spiritual salvation?

Explanation hinged particularly on what, exactly, cargo signified. What was the object of Melanesian desire? Some in early days took cargo literally, as did Lucy Mair: ‘the motive force of cargo cult is a feeling of hopeless envy of the European with his immensely higher material standards’ (1948: 67). Seemingly cupidinous Melanesians of course desired European commodities including tinned foods, cloth, tools, money, and (perhaps curiously) refrigerators (Lindstrom 1993: 139-42). Simple education could thus ‘cure’ cargo culting when Melanesians learned the value of hard work and the intricacies of modern manufacture (e.g., Burridge 1960: 228).

Anthropologists, however, soon complicated cargo explanation, rooting cargo cults within essential elements of Melanesian culture itself (e.g., Lawrence’s [1964]), or colonial oppression and disruption of local communities, or both. Those who argued that fundamental Melanesian culture led to culting focused on key elements thereof. These included concepts of economic production that presumed the necessity of both human and spiritual effort; the significance of various forms of wealth for personal prestige; belief in spiritual inspiration rather than individual creativity to account for novel ideas; notions of episodic time with expectation of sudden jumps from one period to another, rather than of constant temporal progress (McDowell 1988); and big-man leadership systems that easily incorporate charismatic prophets as big-manlike leaders. Some, because of these cultural elements, argued that Melanesians are inherent cargo cultists, inexorably imbued with ‘cargoism’, ‘cargo thinking’, or ‘cargo sentiment’ (Harding 1967). Or, reverting to earlier Vailala Madness themes, even a cargo psychology, whereby pervasive, underlying anxiety or schizophrenia (Burton-Bradley 1973; Lidz, Lidz, & Burton-Bradley 1973), paranoia (Schwartz 1973), or other mental disorders induced cargo culting. Following this train of thought, a few suggested that cargo culting is an antique Melanesian phenomenon, antedating the arrival of European colonialists (Berndt 1954: 269; Salisbury 1958: 75; cf. Iteanu 2017).

Others, while acknowledging that aspects of Melanesian culture facilitated cargo cults, pointed instead to the existential and political effects of colonial domination. The desired cargo, here, was emancipation of spirit and body. Burridge (1960: 215) was exquisitely sensitive to the painful condition of Papua New Guineans, distressed by European colonialism and racism. They desired to be New Men because Australians mostly treated them as animals or children. Drawing on substrate culture, they thus spun out cargoist ‘myth-dreams’ to self-medicate: ‘The most significant theme in the Cargo seems to be moral regeneration: the creation of a new man, the creation of new unities, the creation of a new society’ (1960: 246-47).

Some writers, more religiously inclined, took cargo desire to symbolise human yearning for spiritual salvation. John Frum, Mambu, and the rest were indeed avatars of Jesus to their followers (Steinbauer [1979] favored the term ‘new salvation movements’). Cunning missionaries therefore might step in and redirect cargo desire to Christian ends.

Those with a more critical perspective rooted cargo cults in post-war political and economic relationships. Rather than pointing at Melanesians and Melanesian culture for cargo culting, cults erupted because of insufferable social conditions. Some, like Mr. Bird, continued to cast cargo cult blame on liberal Christian missionaries whose preachings about man’s brotherhood natives might ill-digest. But most explained cargo culting as a desperate reaction to colonial inequality and oppression. They were, as Guiart put it, ‘forerunners of Melanesian nationalism’ (1951: 81). Worsley’s observation that cults functioned to weld scattered, autonomous local and kin groups together into wider ‘new unities’ (1957: 228) echoed the contemporary political expectation that classes-in-themselves might transform into classes-for-themselves, on the road towards some sort of future political independence. Explanations by the 1980s favored the critical stance: ‘Cargo thinking was a product of the forced interaction between two economic systems, the gift economy and the capitalist economy, with their religious support structures’ (Buck 1989: 164; see Kilani 1983). When taken to be spawned by colonial inequalities, as social disruption caused by an intensifying world system, cargo cults were reframed as a Melanesian sort of ‘globalization movement’—this term replacing earlier adjustment or culture-contact movement labels.

Sackett (1974), along these lines, proposed to explain why cults occurred in some places but not others. Key factors were distance and degree of local and colonial authority. Remote communities at the fringes of administrative systems had yet to develop hostility towards them. Those located nearby colonial centers had better access to cargo, in its material form, and the knowledge of ruling regimes. But those at some middle distance who suffered colonial meddling and lacked access to cargo (goods and knowledge) were ripe for cargo culting (this essentially is a theory of relative deprivation [Aberle 1962]). Moreover, cults mostly flared up in locales with weak local authority structures. Effective leaders, where these existed, could step up to quash any upstart, troublesome cargo prophet. This might also explain the post-1970s decline in cargo culting, insofar as authority structures have strengthened and social distances shortened.

Cargo cult embarrassments

Anthropologists since the beginning have not been altogether comfortable with their adopted term. ‘Cargo’, they knew, meant more than mere manufactured goods. And ‘cult’ could be discourteous, even insulting, deprecating people’s fervent beliefs. ‘Movement’ often read better than cult. Some ethnographers refused to use the term, defaulting instead to local appellatives (e.g., Rimoldi & Rimoldi 1992), or relying on Pidgin English kago to signpost cargo’s complexity. Kaplan (1995) insisted that Fiji’s Tuka Movement was ‘neither cargo not cult’.

Others have deconstructed cargo cult as a misleading analytical artifice, an observer’s false category. It bundles together diverse and particular uprisings, disturbances, and movements that may have little in common (McDowell 1988; see Lindstrom 2004). Hermann argued that ‘“cargo cult” should be written under erasure for the good reason that it is an inadequate concept’ (2004: 44). The scare quotes that often bracketed the label when cargo cult emerged in the 1940s are back, as ethnographers distance themselves from its discomforting implications. Others, however, defend the term as ethnographically useful, even if it has been applied to ‘heterogeneous, uncertain, and confusing ethnographic reality itself that, after all, cannot be claimed to exist in the minds of Western observers alone’ (Jebens 2004: 10). Although some find cargo cult to be at least historically useful, setting the bounds for comparative analysis, few ethnographers apply the label today. This partly reflects disciplinal embarrassment but, more directly, shifting forms of organised and disorganised Melanesian desire that, today, takes the form of charismatic, ‘health-and-wealth’ Christianity, new interests in Islam or the lost tribes of Judaism, bingo and numbers games, and dubious Internet money-making scams.

Cargo cult echoes

Several Melanesian movements remain active but, whatever their ‘cargoist’ heritage, these certainly no longer are cargo cults – rather, they have institutionalised themselves as indigenous churches and/or regional political organizations. These include John Frum on Tanna, Makasol/Wind Nation in the Admiralties, the Peli Association of the eastern Sepik region, the Pomio Kivung and Kaliai movements on New Britain (Lattas 1998), Tutukuval Isukal Association of New Hanover, and the Lo-Bos Church descending from the Yali Movement in Madang. To these, some would add Vanuatu’s Nagriamel Movement and New Georgia’s Christian Fellowship Church. Some adherents, like John Frum supporters on Tanna, earn a little income by performing as cargo cultists for bemused international tourists.

Cargo culting may have died away in Melanesia but cargo cult—the term—has jumped into global popular media where it thrives, alive and well. As in Melanesia, cargo culting anywhere can be appreciated or deprecated. Cargo cult originated as invective, and it retains its sting. Any sort of woeful or forlorn desire for material goods or other coveted objective, joined with a seemingly irrational program to obtain this, can be blasted as a wrongheaded cargo cult. It is instructive to run an Internet search on the term (text and image). This turns up a wild tangle of popular cargoist discourse. One finds entire parliaments of cargo cult politicians, cargo cult computer code, cargo cult development plans, cargo cult trade policies, cargo cult science, and much, much more (Lindstrom 2013). Brexit is cargo cult (Kuper 2017). Donald Trump is a cargo prophet (Davis 2017). Melanesians themselves continue to lob the term at one another, when outraged by the ludicrous plans or claims of political rivals.

Oppositely, cargo culting and wild desire can signify personal development, creativity, and individual freedom: the noble resistance to oppression by the state, global forces, or any intrusive authority. Just as John Frum supporters on Tanna battled colonialism, so might we all defy troublesome authority. Moreover, cool cargo cult can boost market share. Far beyond Melanesia, we might enjoy cargo cult rock band music, purchase cargo cult art, or read cargo cult literature. Fervent consumers sip John Frum rum, spray John Frum perfume, or enjoy the 2015 Portuguese film John From which, of course, featured rash, unrequited love. Held in the Nevada dessert, the trendy Burning Man Festival’s 2013 theme was Cargo Cult. John Frum got torched.

If Melanesian cargo cults have faded away, why have cargo cult stories persisted and spread? Our interest in cargo cult tales reflects normative modern desire as much as it does anything actually happening in the Pacific (Lindstrom 1993). Cargo stories are desire stories. They function to remind us how modern, consumerist desire operates. This is desire—for things as for others—that is never sated. We seek perfectibility but we would be astonished should we one day actually achieve this. Self-development is a lifetime’s work. We find reassurance and desirous echoes in strange tales of people who are madly in love with what they cannot have. The marketplace, where one may never stop shopping, never fully satisfies. Even when cargo does arrive, this fails to quash desire and may even make things worse. It turns out to be not at all what one really wanted in the first place and, worse, often causes unexpected injury and suffering when it arrives. If cargo is potentially dangerous, culting and myth-dreaming are honorable, even essential human capacities. Unending desire is our human duty. Although cargo cults have vanished in the southwest Pacific, cargo cult stories of foolish, unrequited, but necessary and understandable love, remind us of our modern condition.

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Note on contributor

Lamont Lindstrom is Henry Kendall Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Cargo cult: strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond (1993, University of Hawai'i Press) and various other cargo cult explorations.

Prof. Lamont Lindstrom, Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa, 800 S. Tucker Dr, Tulsa, OK 74104, United States. lamont-lindstrom@utulsa.edu