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A Surrealist Writer’s Diary of a Twenty-One-Month Anthropological Expedition

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/17432197-6609130

1751-7435

Alphonso Lingis,

Cultural Identity and Heritage

Michel Leiris (1901, 1990) joined the surrealist group led by André Breton in 1921; he published a volume of poetry and a surrealist novel, Aurora. In 1922 he began a lifelong practice of keeping a diary. He married Louise Godon (“Zette”) in 1926. In 1929, afflicted with depression, a year of sexual impotence, masochist tendencies, alcohol abuse, and writer’s block, he entered psychoanalysis with Dr. Adrien Borel. His diary, dedicated to total lucidity and a ruthless account of everything mortifying in himself, now is also psychoanalysis. He joined the dissident surrealists gathered around Georges Bataille. He followed anthropology courses taught by Marcel Mauss. He came to know Marcel Griaule, a young pilot in the French Air Force who now devoted himself to anthropology and had obtained diplomas in two Abyssinian languages. In 1931 Griaule organized a twenty-one-month expedition traversing Africa from Dakar to Djibouti. Leiris joined the expedition as its secretary and archivist. Upon his return he published the 533-page diary he had kept during the expedition as Phantom Africa. He now enrolled in anthropology classes; studied the history of religions, sociology, and the Amharic language; and in 1938 received a degree in anthropology. He then headed the Africa Section of the Musée de l’Homme until his retirement in 1971. He published some forty books, a series of autobiographical writings, ethnographic studies, and studies of major contemporary artists.In 1931 the six months of the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris celebrated the economic and cultural resources of the French Empire. The “Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission” that Griaule launched profited from the publicity from the exhibition and from a grant of 700,000 francs voted by the French Parliament, and from private subsidies.1 The mission crossed nine French colonies, part of the Belgian Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and Abyssinia (Ethiopia).The mission’s primary purpose was to collect objects for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, which was soon to become the Musée de l’Homme. They brought back 3,600 objects and Abyssinian paintings, 70 human skulls, 300 manuscripts, 6,000 photographs, and 200 sound recordings. For the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, they brought back 5,000 butterflies and insects, 170 stuffed birds, 20 stuffed mammals and preserved embryos, and live animals: a lion, a leopard, a warthog, two African hunting dogs, an armed duck, and a wild dog.The mission was also an ethnographic and linguistic mission. The collection of utilitarian objects and clothing, ritual objects and status and ceremonial adornments, musical instruments and recordings, and paintings and sculptures was to constitute the primary documentation of a society. Griaule enlisted for the expedition an ethnographer, two linguists, a musicologist, an artist, a naturalist-taxidermist, a cinematographer, three technicians, and Leiris, who was to record the identity, provenance, use, and cultural significance of the objects collected. They stopped two months to study the Dogon of Sanga, six weeks to study the Kirdi of northwestern Cameroon, and five months to study zar spirit possession in Gondar in Abyssinia.Ethnographers were enjoined to keep a daily journal in the field; Leiris was to do this for the expedition. He transcribed into the journal accounts of dances and funeral ceremonies witnessed and meticulous observations of spirit possession in Abyssinia. He also wrote of the acquisition of artifacts and ritual objects and of practical problems of transport. Griaule also expected Leiris would produce for publication a history of the expedition. But from the beginning Leiris had no intention to do so. The journal he kept was in fact the continuation of the diary he had kept since 1922.Leiris wrote little of the character and activities of the other members of the expedition. He mentioned one or another only inasmuch he had interacted with them that day (although a few times he mentions one of them had sex with a native woman). He took pains to prevent them from seeing what he wrote; periodically he mailed installments of the diary to his wife, enjoining her to reveal their existence to no one.2 He wrote often of his state of mind, his moods, his boredom, his depression. He recounted his dreams and sexual urges, masturbations, and nocturnal emissions.Leiris intended to leave nothing out of the diary; the lack of time would be the only constraint. The surrealists had proclaimed total lucidity and total honesty; they denounced the hypocrisy they saw everywhere in the ideologies, moralities, and politics that issued in the world war. Psychoanalysis had made Leiris’s diary a lucid and pitiless recording of dreams, sexual urges and fantasies, frustrations, anxieties, and humiliations. “Thesis: it is through subjectivity (carried to its paroxysm) that one attains objectivity. More simply: writing subjectively, I augment the value of my testimony; by showing that at every moment I know what to confine myself to, with regard to my value as a witness” (319). “Some will say that, speaking of Africa, I don’t need to say whether, on such-and-such a day, I was in a good mood, or even how I defecated. . . . Not only is it just as important in itself as the fact that this or that tree, or a native dressed in this or that fashion, or that this or that animal happened to be at a given moment on the side of the road. But this phenomenon of defecation also must be recounted because it is valuable from the perspective of the narrative’s authenticity” (322).Since Leiris wrote each day at the end of the day, sometimes when a great deal happened, it was recorded summarily, sometimes when little happened trivial events were recounted in detail. “A curse on this diary (which—whatever I do—will end no longer being entirely sincere” (677).Leiris throughout recounted his dreams, some of which were elaborate. The surrealists, totally disinterested in therapy, had been fascinated by the rich-ness, the poetry, of the manifest content of dreams. Leiris recounts his dreams with no analysis or speculation as to their latent significance.3In Africa Leiris was sexually inactive. Even masturbation and involuntary nocturnal emissions were infrequent. “Soon I will have been chaste for two whole years. Some people will call me impotent, or say I have no balls” (657). He reflected often on this. “What, in my eyes, prevents black women from being really exciting is that they are habitually too naked, and that making love with them would put nothing social at stake. To make love with a white woman is to strip her of a large number of conventions, to lay her bare as much from a material as from an institutional point of view. No such thing is possible with a woman whose institutions are so different from our own. In some respects, she is no longer a ‘woman,’ properly speaking” (199). At the end of the expedition, he wrote, “No more desire for colored women (might as well make love with cows; some have such beautiful hides!)” (684).Notes of boredom, pessimism, depression, and misanthropy recur throughout the diary. Very early in the expedition he noted, “I no longer have the least affection for any of my companions” (87). Toward the end of the expedition, he wrote, “I can’t stand to be with Europeans; this is the sole reason for my ‘sympathy’ for the Abyssinians, who are odious in the end” (548). “A stroll at sunset. Palm groves still so beautiful that it is unbearable that all the rest of life shouldn’t be the same. What’s the good of making love? Is it what keeps men and women from growing old? Why travel? Can this way of getting hold of things prevent one from being helpless, if it is fate that one is to be helpless?” (677).There were also days of euphoria. “I am filled with enthusiasm by the expedition, happy to be responsible at last, to have people to watch over, even to judge. It feels like I am becoming the leader of a group, something like a gangster” (386). “To stay here. Do nothing any more. Settle on the mountain. Take a wife there and make a home. A utopian desire that these people and their rustic gifts inspire in me” (254). “I am grey with dust. I turn over on my back. It is about as pleasurable as wading in thick mud, or making love on a pile of manure. I am no longer a soulless body, or a bodiless soul. I am a man. I exist” (345–46).When the expedition returned to Paris, Leiris was loath to extract from his massive diary the history of the expedition that was wanted. He handed it to a publisher with only slight review and without telling Griaule. (Recent French editions of the diary include excerpts of Leiris’s letters to his wife, and these are included in the present translation also.) And Griaule was indeed furious, believing that Leiris’s most often caustic descriptions of French colonial officials and settlers would make ethnographic work there more difficult.The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition had generated much public interest in the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, and Leiris and his publisher expected a considerable non-specialist audience for the book.4 We can be interested in a published diary inasmuch as it recounts a discovery of a (to us) unknown land and culture. But Leiris wrote, “Not for a moment have I proposed to write what is known as a travel narrative, feeling that in these days there are activities more urgent than providing touristic impressions for dilettantes. . . . The travel narrative is a literary genre that aims to make of the reader an armchair traveler” (323). Yet for nonspecialists reading this book eighty years later, reading each day’s entry that notes the desert or forested landscape, houses and people seen, sometimes their dress, a hyena or warthog sighted, identifying the place arrived at, all these impressions just summarily noted (“I describe little” [320]) without reflections on their significance, we really do read it as a travel narrative. “The voyage we have made so far has been nothing more than a tourist trip, and it doesn’t seem like things will change anytime soon” (316).We can be interested in a published diary inasmuch as it recounts a personal adventure, ordeal, or conquest, or a personal path toward healing or enlightenment. When he committed himself to twenty-one months in Africa, Leiris had sought to become someone else, an adventurer and someone authentically in contact with others. His diary instead recounts his disillusionment with ethnography, which, divorced from psychology, records only externals and does not approach contact with people of other societies and cultures. And he finds that the expedition nowise changed him.Leiris’s place in literature is especially founded on the series of autobiographical books L’âge d’homme (1939; Manhood [1963]) and the four volumes of La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game [1948, 1955, 1966, 1992]): Readers who appreciate this work as literature may well be interested in Phantom Africa and his complete diaries, published posthumously according to his wishes in 1992, as Journal, 1922–1989. There are passages of fine writing and poetry in Phantom Africa.A vile Sunday night, made stickier than all the other nights by the saliva of the phonograph that, armed with a frightening pickup, spews its gobbets of harmony across the deserted terrace of the station buffet. (134)A windy night. Through the mosquito netting covering the verandah where I sleep, the air hisses like an angry theater audience. (352)During the rainstorm, alone in my tent, I copulated with the earth and sold my soul to the ants. (412)Phantom Africa will find its most interested readers to be those concerned with anthropology. They will see issues in the relationship of anthropological work with political power, the methods and meaning of collecting, and the relationship with native informants in the Dakar-Djibuti expedition. The present reviewer also finds in it the occasion to question the epistemological and ontological presuppositions of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and surrealism.When the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris was founded in 1925, its explicit purpose was not simply to study societies and cultures but to do so in view of providing colonial administrators with an understanding of their colonized subjects. At every move of the expedition, Griaule first visited the local administrator and military base commander and the team was given dinner, information, and practical assistance. Griaule and his team also made contact with colonial settlers and merchants. Colonial soldiers accompanied the expedition in requisitioning cultural objects, and Griaule threatened punishment by the colonial army to induce unwilling natives to give up their possessions. Griaule repeatedly called on the French embassy in Addis Ababa to intercede as he sought to enter independent Abyssinia without customs inspection and duties with a caravan of some six camels and forty mules laden with their crates. The expedition set up quarters for four months on the grounds of the Italian consulate, where they were out of the reach of Abyssinian law. Later, in Eretria, the whole mission was housed and dined lavishly by the Italian governor. (Two years later Mussolini ordered the invasion and occupation of Abyssinia.)When, five months later, having loaded fifty mules with their crates with ancient religious paintings covered with paper and repainted to pass as copies, and hundreds of ancient religious books and objects in false bottoms of their crates, and having paid a bandit to take the most precious objects and compromising documents out of the country for him, we are gobsmacked to read that Griaule wrote up a list of all the hassles with customs officials and took it to Emperor Haile Selassie, demanding 750,000 francs indemnity “payable in cash and in manuscripts and items for our collection”—more than the 700,000 francs the French Parliament had granted for the whole expedition! Even the French consul finds this exorbitant and intimates it would harm French influence with the emperor to the benefit of other powers.In France the surrealists had from the beginning vociferously denounced colonialism. The contact with the realities of colonial suppression and exploitation increased Leiris’s opposition to colonialism. He wrote uniformly of his distaste of and contempt for the administrators who received them with drinks and dinners. “I am less and less able to stand the idea of colonization. Pacification and medical aid have only one purpose: to soften up the people so that they offer no resistance and pay their taxes. Official tours, sometimes bloody, to what end? To collect taxes. Ethnographic study to what end? To be able to carry out a policy better able to bring in taxes” (267). “It is a pity that the colonized are not a little stronger, so as to teach the Europeans a lesson, in their own fashion! I can think of no grander activity than to lead them—if, of course, they would accept it” (256).Yet Leiris maintained his European status in the colonies. “My ashkars, who are there, sitting not far from me, singing, laughing, and clapping their hands, irritate me. I realize only too well how they would despise me if I descended to their level and let myself go. . . . Horrible to be a European, disliked but respected as long as he remains walled behind his demi-god’s pride, jeered as soon as he tried to come any closer!” (487). Working as a member of the expedition, Leiris found he behaved like the colonial authorities. Just three months into the mission, he wrote, “If he bothers me again, I’m going to break his neck. . . . How impatient I am with black men who irritate me” (162). “Will I too end up saying that ‘these Negroes are all the same’? And that the only way to make them behave is with a good beating?” (270).Wherever the mission stops, they set out collecting. “So far we haven’t yet bought all their clothes right off a man or woman and left them naked on the road, but it will certainly happen in time” (145). They haggled down to the lowest price. When people were unwilling to part with objects of great personal or sacred value, they did not hesitate to requisition them under threat of arrest. Griaule cursed a village to induce its people to give up objects. His men stole skulls from mortuaries. They stole sacred objects in the middle of the night. They paid children to slip into sanctuaries and steal sacred statues and masks for them. Three times they took sacred figures called kono in view of the horrified village elders, threatening them with arrest. They threw ten or twenty francs to the elders in compensation (equivalent to forty or eighty cents today).5 The elders refused the money.Taking these objects would be carrying away the very life of the country, one boy told us, who even though he had “done soldier” during the war, remained that our act of sacrilege would bring upon them; and so, opposing our evil intentions with all his might, he alerted the old men. . . . This morning, while bidding an affectionate farewell to the old men, who were delighted that we were willing to spare them, we keep an eye on the immense green umbrella . . . [that] contains the precious statuette with upraised arms, which I myself stole from the foot of the cone of earth that serves as its altar, as well as that of its fellow statues. (208–10)I have again behaved a bit like an adventurer, but I have no regrets: there are sublime objects that it would be a thousand times more disgraceful to buy than to steal. Among others, you will see a miniature ladder by which God descends onto the altars at the moment of the sacrifice, and a human figure with upraised arms, in a gesture designed to put the earth in communication with the sky. We have left four other very beautiful statues, because the people would have been devastated, as if we had ripped out their hearts: their millet would have been spoiled, the rain would no longer have come, the whole village would have died, etc. (letter to Zette, 210)In Abyssinia they removed fifteenth-century paintings from the Antonios Church and replaced them with paintings that their mission artist Gaston-Louis Roux made. To hurriedly finish sixty-square meters of canvas, Griaule, Luttens, and Leiris, none of whom had any training in painting, painted the replacements. The provincial head of the church objected in a report to the provincial governor and to the emperor. To remove and replace the paintings in the Gondarotch Maryam Church, Roux and four other “painters” went armed with guns, and with twelve hired men with seven guns. When they were preparing to leave Abyssinia, hiding these paintings in false bottoms of their chests and pasting over and disguising sacred objects, Leiris cavalierly wrote, “We hear a crackling sound in Larget’s room. . . . Roux, who is guarding the door, tells me what is actually going on: the destruction of the altar board that we are accused of having stolen or having had someone steal, the discovery of which might well lead to nothing short of a massacre” (634). What Leiris called the “altar board” is the tabot, a replica of the Arc of the Covenant, the most sacred object in an Abyssinian Christian Orthodox Church.Leiris was exalted by the sense of sacrilege, profanation. “I admire the squat, round little animal and stroke its hump, enjoying the feel of its cracks. I feel as if I had stolen fire” (161). He did realize that the purpose for which they were stolen reduced the sacredness and thus the sacrilege. “When you see them they will be in Paris, in a display case or under museum glass. They will have lost all their freshness and will have fallen among the abject ranks of objects in a collection” (letter to Zette, 201).As for the nonsacred objects that they bought, requisitioned, or stole, in a 1987 interview Leiris said, “The notion that anthropology had a usefulness that was in some sense moral led to the belief that, since the ends justified the means, there were some situations in which it was permissible to do almost anything in order to obtain objects that would demonstrate, once they were installed in a Parisian museum, the beauty of the civilizations in question” (Price and Jamin 1988: 170). But in 1931 he had qualms: “As much as adventures like the taking of the kono finally leave me without remorse, because there is no other way to obtain such objects and because sacrilege itself is a rather grandiose notion, still all the constant buying leaves me perplexed, because I have the strong impression that we are going in a vicious circle: we pillage the Negroes under the pretext of teaching people to understand and appreciate them—that is, ultimately in order to mold other ethnographers who will go in turn to ‘appreciate’ and pillage them” (letter to Zette, 163). We can add that the exhibitions of African objects in museums engender a commercial market for African “art,” pillaging the sources and replacing them with tourist versions of them.The mission was not only to collect objects; it was also anthropological field research. Griaule’s conception is unlike the dominant Anglo-American conception of field research as participant-observation by a single researcher who learns the language and lives an extended time in the community being researched. The researcher will ordinarily concentrate on only one aspect of a society, under the presupposition that the organization and significance of a part reflects the whole society and culture. Griaule aimed to study the language, habitat, oral tradition, myth, technology, and aesthetics of a society that constitute a coherent whole; he brought a diverse team of specialists, including linguist, musicologist, and artist, and set out at once to intensely interview paid informants through translators. Griaule recognized that the subjects interviewed resist: “By turns an affable comrade of the person put to cross-examination, a distant friend, a severe stranger, compassionate father, a concerned patron; a trader paying for revelations one by one, a listener affecting distraction before the open gates of the most dangerous mysteries, an obliging friend showing lively interest for the most insipid family stories—the ethnographer parades across his face as pretty a collection of masks as that possessed by any museum” (Griaule 1933: 10).Today anthropologists recognize that the entry of the field researcher into a community alters the network of social relations in that community. What an informant tells the ethnographer is selected and oriented by the political and psychological relations the informant has with other members of the community and with the researcher. The informant is motivated by ambition, pride, cupidity, suspicion, affection, a longing to be recognized and admired. There may be much dishonesty in the relationship the researcher has with her informants; the researcher often conceals what she knows in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance and does not reveal her research goals. Her relationship with her informant is shaped by her curiosity, fascination, protectiveness, lust, frustration, anger, vindictiveness, disdain, craving for privacy, homesickness.Leiris participated in field research by interrogating paid informants. He especially conducted research on circumcision among the Bambara in the French Sudan, the secret language of the Dogon,6 and zar spirit possession in Abyssinia.7 For most of the trip, Leiris seemed to think that it was enough to pay the informer and the informer would tell all he knows. As he became increasingly aware that this was not happening, he reacted with irritation, anger, and even outbursts of violence, accusing his informants of disloyalty, laziness, lying. “Old Ambibe has lied to from start to finish of my work with him, giving me a mass of details, certainly, but deliberately withholding the essential things. I could almost wring his neck” (197). Leiris soon became disenchanted with anthropologic research. “Why does ethnographic inquiry often make me think of police interrogation? We do not come much closer to men by approaching their customs” (316). “The terrible thing, and this is why I feel like a stranger among my companions and almost to the point of hostility, is that I don’t care at all about the very goal of the Mission; the advancement of the ethnographic sciences leaves me utterly cold” (97).In Gondar in Abyssinia, Leiris had an ideal translator in Abba Jerome Gabra Mussié, highly cultivated, a Catholic priest under an interdict from Rome, who was working in the Abyssinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Leiris is from the first suspicious: “Why is he suddenly coming here? Whom is he going to spy on: us and our purchase of manuscripts? or the activities of the Italians?” (450). Abba Jerome proved invaluable, locating informants, interceding in disputes, translating the interviews, collecting songs and poems, and writing down zar trance ceremonies minute by minute as they unfold. In the end Leiris soured on him: “I can’t stand Abba Jerome anymore. If I speak up during the violent tirades against the Abyssinians, which we now indulge in every evening, it is always against him. He is easygoing enough to take it well, and this is what exasperates me” (636). The reader cannot be more shocked to read that as they leave Abyssinia, Abba Jerome asked for a passport into Eritrea, but they abandoned him at the river crossing into Eritrea. “We had a good laugh at the thought of Abba Jerome stranded on the other bank in his shirtsleeves with only his helmet, cane, and umbrella, all his other belongings still stored here” (663). Leiris opened Abba Jerome’s baggage, gave a sweater from it to a servant. The next day they left his baggage on the Eritrean side of the river and went on without seeing Abba Jerome again.Leiris arrived in Africa with the conception of religion received from Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille. “The fetish appears: it is a formless mass that, when the four men have cautiously brought it out of its lair, proves to be a bag of coarse, patched cloth, covered with a sort of bitumen of coagulated blood, stuffed with what one imagines to be dusty and miscellaneous items” (147). “True religion only begins with blood” (603). “The extreme nobility of debauchery, magic, and charlatanism. All this is religious, and I am decidedly a religious man” (160).In Gondar in Abyssinia Leiris was absorbed in the zar spirit possession over four months. He was personally devoted to and erotically attracted to the zar adept Emawayish: “I would rather be possessed myself than study possessed people, and I would rather have carnal knowledge of a ‘zarine’ rather than know her ins and outs scientifically” (456). Leiris paid for a zar séance in which he participated, drinking blood, but afterward worried whether the séance was really performed completely and correctly, whether it was authentic.I realize . . . that I am too enthusiastic about this research in a dangerous domain. I am beginning to discern, too, . . . a brusque realization of doubt within me about all of this. Poetry probably not quite as beautiful as I had believed. Possession perhaps less profound, confined to vague neurotic phenomena, and serving as a cloak for a lot of other goings-on. But above all, and in contradiction to all this, the piercing sensation of being on the edge of something whose depths I will never touch, among other reasons because I do not have the power to let myself go—as would be necessary—this due to a variety of motives that are very hard to define, but among which there are first of all questions of skin, of civilization, of language. (498)At the end of his stay in Gondor, Leiris has gotten tired and reductionist: “I was becoming less and less capable of seeing Magi and Atrides in those quite simply sordidly avaricious peasants. Emawayish and her mother no longer dazzled me. I was disgusted to find the whole adventure—which for a long time had seemed to me so perfect—foundering brutally in what had always been its more or less secret infrastructure: a question of money. I had become completely cold” (608).Beneath the entries in Leiris’s diary there are epistemological and ontological presuppositions. In one place he became aware of an irreducible gap between two civilizations: “Yesterday Emawayish says in passing that she doesn’t wash her youngest son, out of fear that he will be struck with illness by Rahielo. But Rahielo is one of the principal zar that possess her mother. . . . So everyone, then—Emawayish, her mother, Kahoun the hunter . . . Abba Jerome and myself—has his head peopled with little genies that in all likelihood are commanding all his actions . . . without his being in any way responsible. . . . For me, at least, I am imbued with a civilization that compels me to give everything a moral, rather than a magic, coloring” (499). But is not the task of the anthropologist to take a distance from his or her civilization? Vincent Crapanzano (1992: 142) wrote, “Much of what we in the West call psychological and locate in some sort of internal space (‘in the head,’ ‘in the mind,’ ‘in the brain,’ ‘in consciousness,’ ‘in the psyche’) is understood in many cultures in manifestly nonpsychological terms and located in other ‘Spaces.’ . . . To declare such articulations inadequate, as some Western thinkers . . . have done, is, in my view, an act of intolerable cultural arrogance.” “I came to question the applicability of the concept of projection, which, it seems to me, is based on a particular idiomatically determined conception of man and of his motivations” (Crapanzano 1980: 15).The constitution of anthropology as a science entailed a suspension of belief in the cognitive value of the cognitive systems and narratives of the cultures studied. Psychoanalysis conceded objectivity to the representational systems of contemporary natural sciences alone and attributed all the rest—all the beings and events represented in dreams, religions, other cultures—to projection of unconscious drives and desires. Much that in prior culture and in other cultures was taken to be exterior, that indeed appears to be exterior—chance events and marvelous events, spirits of the dead, ghosts, demons, deities—are relocated within the sphere of unconscious projections. The alien forces that seize control and torment or overwhelm the conscious self are taken to be located within and to be in fact subjective forces. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory figures as a decisive moment in modern metaphysical subjectivism.8 Martin Heidegger explained that the modern period is profoundly an epoch of metaphysical subjectivism, when the ground of understanding and being is taken to be human subjectivity.We find an ontological ambivalence in Leiris’s diary. The surrealists had proclaimed a surreality in which the referents of scientific representations and those of dreams, trances, myths were on the same ontological plane; it was natural for them to ascribe reality to what cultures have taken to be the sacred. We see this tendency in Leiris: he was excited by the theft of the kono because it was a sacrilege, a profanation. He believed that beneath the profane motivations he detects in zar spirit possession there is a depth that he cannot fathom. Several times he felt that he experienced spirit possession. When Leiris was later certified in academic anthropology, he posited paradigms, in theater and in bad faith, to explain the effects of zar possession.Anthropologists today have not confronted the metaphysical subjectivism in their explanations. Reading this book invites such a confrontation.(This translation, conscientious and direct, unfortunately lacks a glossary of foreign terms dispersed everywhere in the text.)