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Magic, metaphysics, and methods

2023; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/725382

2575-1433

Raminder Kaur, Louisa Lombard, Luiz Costa, Andrew B. Kipnis, Adeline Masquelier,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Previous articleNext article FreeEditorial NoteMagic, metaphysics, and methodsRaminder Kaur, Louisa Lombard, Luiz Costa, Andrew B. Kipnis, and Adeline M. MasquelierRaminder KaurUniversity of Sussex Search for more articles by this author , Louisa LombardYale University Search for more articles by this author , Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author , Andrew B. KipnisChinese University of Hong Kong Search for more articles by this author , and Adeline M. MasquelierTulane University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreOn a gloomy dark stage, Yerma sits on the floor mourning her fate as onlookers move, stare, and gossip. In Gabriel Federico Garcia Lorca’s brutal drama, the pressure of social judgment on a childless marriage leads Yerma to commit an awful act. On the cover of this issue is the British Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer, Amina Khayyam, who in 2014 transposed this nineteenth-century story set in patriarchal Spain to the inner city of contemporary Britain, with an innovative adaptation of north Indian neoclassical dance, Kathak. In the process, the Amina Khayyam Dance Company made Garcia Lorca’s rural narrative relevant to many women in marginalized communities in urban settings today.On her style of rendition, Khayyam reflects on how dancing is “always intrinsically to tell a story” where Kathak literally means “the person who tells a story.”1 The use of a white mask helps in lifting the visual performance away from the superficiality of the look of the dancer to the bare force of the story in motion. Khayyam explains: “I use Abhinaya—the gestural facial expressions—as the central movement within it, but I subvert it by negating it—so that my Yerma wears a face of death—there is no prettiness, no jewels, no shine.”2 Abhinaya draws inspiration from both Asian and European traditions, as is also apparent in another work, Stage of Blood, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Khayyam performed with Lokendra Arambam, a theater director from Manipur in India. Staged on the River Thames in West London in 1997, the performance skillfully deployed “shamanistic” techniques. Through intensive workshops to develop their performance, dancers had to harness emotions in order to almost magically drive their movements, an approach that Khayyam develops in her own works.3 With similar techniques, the performance of Yerma is counterposed with rhythms of the tabla “portraying the fun, flirtatious and hopeful side of Yerma,” the poignant dark strains of cello with “its emotional quality, the torment, staccato,” and the use of vocals “conveying Yerma’s conviction to finally take matters into her own hands and decide her own destiny.”4 But even in this decisive reckoning of taking action, Yerma is acted upon by forces beyond her control. From euphoria to malice, whether the social pressure of real-life events, the enchanting logic of a drama, or the entrancing and poetic retelling through Kathak, multifarious dynamics of acting and being-acted-upon proliferate. These themes bring us to the predominant chords of this issue, to do with magic, metaphysics, and methods.When analyzing his ethnography on magic in south Italy, Ernesto de Martino stated:The experience of being-acted-upon is the risk of crisis for which this horizon offers arrest and configuration. Being in the world—maintaining oneself as an individual presence in society and history—means acting [agire] as a power of decision and choice according to values; it means always performing anew the never-definitive detachment from the immediacy of mere natural vitality and rising to cultural life. The loss of this power and even the spiritual possibility of exercising it, represents a radical risk for a presence unsuccessfully engaged in resisting an attack in the form of the experience of being-acted-upon, where being-acted involves the personality as a whole and the operative powers grounding and supporting it.(de Martino 2015: 97, emphasis in the original)As age-old anthropological debates have shown, these insights have wider relevance than just a compartmentalized realm of magic, which can infiltrate all aspects of everyday life wherever they are located. They may well apply to the cultures of changing economies where “emulation” becomes a primary dynamic to appreciate how the effervescence of sacra acts upon people, fizzles out, and/or is resurrected by people in other ways. These phenomena are apparent in the Gudeman lecture delivered by Chris Hann on March 21, 2022 that begins the issue. Hann’s paper delves into how life has changed in rural Hungary over the past century, a century that brought socialism, post-socialism, and now a turn toward populism. Drawing on the insights of Stephen Gudeman and Thorstein Veblen, Hann posits that a useful entry point into the broader field of “the economy” is the changing dynamics of equality and emulation. Under socialism, a time when class differences were not as pronounced as they later became, emulation was most often expressed in the form of collective rituals that ignited a feeling of effervescence for the villagers who participated in them. Under capitalism, in contrast, inequality has risen and the organization of rural life has transformed as well. Where once each family had a cow, now any family who can afford it has a close-cropped lawn and a swing set, and aspires to a better bathroom. In other words, the outlet for emulation has changed from one that was achieved collectively to one that is achieved on the household level, as a function of material consumption. Alongside the shift away from social equality, status through consumerism has become more prominent, similar to Thorstein Veblen’s critique of conspicuous consumption in America. What has been lost amid these shifts is the effervescence, the sacra, that acted upon Hann while he was doing research in these locales in the 1970s. He posits that people turn to populism in part in an effort to reignite that effervescent sacred fire in their lives.The issue’s research articles begin with one by Marcus McGee, who provides an anthropological lens on a philosopher’s remarks on a classic text. Albeit an exercise in armchair anthropology with a compendium of missionary accounts and folklore, Frazer’s The golden bough: A study in magic and religion is also a theory of mind “from the ‘logical error’ of magical reasoning into the exemplary clarity of contemporary European scientific thought.” McGee attempts an “ethnographic” examination of Wittgenstein’s engagement with the text, raising questions about what it means to explain something anthropologically. Wittgenstein had argued that Frazer’s “explanation” of magical thought is “wrong-headed” for making it appear rational, and proposes metaphysics too is another kind of magic. Along with a look at other anthropological texts, McGee reflects on the “mercurial edges” between anthropology and philosophy and opens up questions about the possibilities, developments, and limits of thoughts. Even though primarily focused on a contextual reading of historical texts, pertinent questions are raised about how anthropology informed philosophy, and how we interpret, translate, and theorize ethnographic material in the contemporary era.Considering the “magic” of transformation of the self and of the world, Edgar Tasia focuses on home organizers and their clients in Belgium. In the process of decluttering a person’s home, and through analogy and technical know-how, the act of tidying begins to take on enchanting qualities bigger than the act itself. The author elaborates on the “ethnomethod” of diagnosis in which the home organizer moves around the house with the client taking photographs and notes about the disorder or clutter in their home. She later draws up a personalized analysis of home and client along with a series of “remedies.” Tasia maintains that the process of examining the home and the body entails magical thinking in the classic Tylorian sense of the “association of ideas” and the Frazerian “laws of sympathy” but applied to a modern context that these early anthropologists might assume to be the realm of rationality. Extending the analogical thinking further, the body and home are connected to the Earth in the drive against excessive consumption and hoarding to produce new moralities and realities.Indira Arumugam moves to the nonmaterial that has agentive presence in social realities. With a focus on the force of sacralities, Arumugam elaborates on insatiability and excess as part of “uncanny metaphysics” that refute ethnographic or anthropomorphic theorizing: “this sacred asserts its own agenda.” With fieldwork based on rituals around a Tamil Hindu folk deity, Muniswarar, in a south Indian village, she makes a compelling case for how sacralities assert their own will and act through spirits called minis that dwell in and around ponds and the branches of trees. Their presence is so strong that they may lead to drastic effects in the perceivable world through disruption and death. In an endeavor to defy humanistic metaphysics, the article attempts to decenter human intentions and actions in order to get to “the heart of religious experience.”Ritambhara Hebbar revisits a South Asianist fetish of the past—village India—but this time through a lens on migration. It is the constant flow of migration that has shaped village life and history, the author argues, not conceptions of fixity and unity. Underlying these dynamic social processes is mistrust, a key trope that Hebbar proposes for understanding the complexities and ambivalences of village life. Factionalism, hierarchies, and other fissures breed mistrust and a palpable premise for village out-migration. Through revisiting earlier ethnographies while drawing upon her own fieldwork in Jharkhand and Maharashtra, Hebbar highlights how caste, class, kinship, and gender tensions and conflicts are a mainstay of village life. The vesting of rural life with a homogenous unity says more about a sense of loss experienced by town and city dwellers than it does about the village itself.Moving to the Indian city, Sumbul Farah asks what is ordinary ethics when nothing is ordinary nor indeed everyday, especially salient during the “uncanny” period of the COVID-19 pandemic. When ethnography had to, on the one hand, retreat into the home however that is imagined and actualized, and to media and social media, on the other hand, the ethical morphs into new and disruptive forms. Based largely on an autoethnography and reflections on her parents’ lifeworlds in India, Farah reflects on what and where is the social in “social distancing.” Building upon Foucauldian notions of “care,” the author elaborates on the Islamic concept of ehtyaat, a phenomenon that is similar to “precaution/care/vigilance/circumspection” and how this affects one’s navigation of known and unknown worlds.Pandemic times, and the persisting postpandemic, have forced ethnographers to be creative and improvisational with their methods. Indeed, with the term postpandemic, we are reminded of Stuart Hall’s ([1996] 2021) questions as to what and where the “post” is in the postcolonial. Similarly, we may ask where and when is the post in the postpandemic? The pandemic had no clear beginnings nor any clear ending. Instead it lurks and lingers in varied forms, affecting our decisions, plans, and actions in extraordinary ways that have now become quite ordinary. While drawing upon her previous fieldwork, Maruška Svašek improvises new methods in response to lockdown and social distancing regulations in Northern Ireland in 2020 and 2021. With a focus on the lives of a few migrant women who were unable to be with family members living overseas, sometimes not even through the postal system, Svašek adopts exploratory approaches to fieldwork, which include long-distance painting where the author and sometimes also the women she Skyped with were artists of each other’s lives; online walking interviews traversing neighborhoods on Google Street View; and discussions based on photo diaries composed by her interlocutors. The improvisational methods for uncanny times also led to discussions and visualization of emerging research themes referenced in the article.Continuing themes of visuality and methodology, Charles Zuckerman examines the potential of video as a tool for ethnographic note-taking. Beginning with a video recording of a wedding in Laos, Zuckerman notes how little of the footage corresponds with local cultural accounts of how people are supposed to act and feel at weddings. Rather than expressing joy, the participants spend much of the time playing with their phones, forgetting the words to their wedding song, and looking bored. Such recorded details illustrate the “being-acted-upon” quality of events. Zuckerman goes on to question Geertz’s famous analysis of a Balinese cockfight, where the ethnographic details of local practice fit into a coherent “cultural gestalt.” The advent of smartphones with video capability means that we can make video-recording a part of ethnographic practice, not necessarily using the footage to make a film, but simply as part of our note-taking practice. Such “field notes” can steer us away from facile assertions of cultural holism, and force us to acknowledge the contradictory multiplicity of any event. Zuckerman applies both this method and this form of analysis to local practices of gambling, and analyzes both the magic and the limitations of video as an ethnographic tool.Michael Schnegg is also interested in changing technologies of the present, and specifically how they alter people’s understanding of time. He brings readers to rural Namibia, where Damara pastoralists are adapting both to climate change and to the increasing encroachment of capitalist ways of organizing life. Schnegg uses the way people talk about and use key objects as material markers to gauge how they think about time. In the past, under pastoral rhythms, people thought about time in terms of objects that were moving toward them: rain, cattle, etc. Today, that understanding is blended with one oriented toward a more capitalist worldview in which people move toward or move with the key objects. In this latter way of thinking, people’s ability to speak about and conceptualize the future changes, because their own role in helping it spool out has changed as well. There is a kind of freedom or aspiration in this conception of the self as moving toward the future, as opposed to the future moving toward the self, but it is accompanied by greater stress in the context of how difficult it is to realize capitalist life-goals like higher education and salaried employment. “The future” has become a discrete time, as opposed to how, in the words of one of his interlocutors, “there was no future in the past,” when the present consisted of a rhythmic reiteration of known needs and practices, rather than now, when it is a bricolage of different ways of understanding present, future, and the role of individuals and objects in creating both.The Altaian Princess, a 2500-year-old mummy from Siberia, gives us different insights into time, heritage, and values. In 2012, the princess’s remains were “repatriated” to Gorno-Altaisk, the capital of the Altai Republic. For years, they had been jealously held in a “museum of Others” (one that exists to display exotica) in the Russian Western Siberian capital of Novosibirsk, where archaeologists argued the remains could be best studied and cared for. The mummy is now held at the Anokhin National Museum, which is a “museum of Selves” focused on the indigenous people who live in the area. While indigenous people in Gorno-Altaisk saw the mummy’s return as a hard-fought victory, Pimenova shows that the power relations between sending and receiving institutions are complex, and that employees’ “backstage” ways of relating to the mummy in both museums used similar idioms of respect. By closely tracking the relationships between living people and the mummy and the values that can be discerned from the ways the mummy has been displayed, Pimenova shows both differences but also important affective overlaps between indigenous people and scientists. Tracking the processes of decision-making that go into how heritage, including human remains, are displayed, shows the value conflicts and compromises that are inherent to these issues, as opposed to the simple David/Goliath power struggles that they are sometimes represented as.The joint contribution by Rodrigo Perez Toledo and L. L. Wynn is concerned with the indigenous Diidxazá term, ti binni ruyubi—meaning “a person who searches”—they make an argument that complicates “binaries and median points” when reflecting on the topology of “brownness” in Australia. Their ethnography mainly revolves around a researcher of color engaging with research participants from another minority community which leads to a series of awkward encounters. Transposing Homi Bhabha’s classic case of colonial mimicry, the authors maintain that despite the ethnographer’s Mexican ethnicity, his position in academia conveys an “uncanny whiteness” associated with privilege and status. Moving beyond dualistic framings of reflexivity, they make a case for “intersectional reflexivity”—that is, a means with which to analyze field experiences and encounters that incorporates the changing matrices of “skin tone, indigeneity, sociocultural background, language, sexuality, economic status, and colonial histories” that act upon any encounter.The final research article takes us to Amazonia and lowland Kichwa communities, where María Guzmán-Gallegos analyzes two notions deployed to reflect on a person’s illness: wakllichishka (being harmed) and not being able to see the diagnosis. The former notion is closely linked to widespread Amazonian ideas of the body as co-constituted and transformable, susceptible to the actions and intentions of human and nonhuman others. Wakllichishka is adduced when the myriad entities that constitute bodies are identified and their effects can be traced. Not being able to see the diagnosis, in contrast, rests on a failure to identify and understand the many entities that constitute a specific body at a given time, and it is closely related to the growing presence of biomedical theories that may describe certain symptoms of a disease while being unable to relate these to other conditions—such as the agentive forces of wakllichishka. The partial mismatch between these etiological notions is rooted in vast changes to the Kichwa landscape related to oil extraction and its harmful effects, and to the growing influence of non-Indigenous epistemologies in the region. By taking wakllichishka and not being able to see the diagnosis not just as objects of analysis, but as, themselves, tools for anthropological analysis, Guzmán-Gallegos reflects not only on the metaphysics of disease, but on the methods that can best do justice to local understandings of colonial devastation and epistemic assumptions.This issue’s Book Symposium focuses on Michael Herzfeld’s book Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage (2022). While nation-states have an interest in producing a vision of their heritage and traditions, people on the polity’s edges often claim greater legitimacy and closeness to heritage, and in the process end up subverting the state’s quest for hegemony. The “subversive archaists” do not challenge the state out of antipathy or resistance, but out of a conviction that they are the better exemplars and embodiment of the nation’s telos, and that the state, with its technocratic, legalistic, and often bombastic way of relating to people, is less imbued with that kind of situated legitimacy. As Jatin Dua summarizes in his contribution to the symposium, “By claiming to be authentically national, the subversive archaist reminds the modernist citizens and their technocratic sensibility of the thing they seek to forget amidst the edifice of the nation-state and its lofty ideas of citizenship and rationality. For Herzfeld this challenges the nation-state in ways that are distinct from the challenge of minority belonging or noncitizens”—though also coming from the margins.The book draws on a range of comparative examples, most thoroughly and compellingly from the experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum residents in Thailand. All the contributions note the slippery but generative nature of subversive archaism as a concept, perhaps especially because of the way those pursuing it see themselves as subversives rather than belligerents: not exactly critics (though they are critical) and not engaged in vengeance, but builders of a “form of communitas,” in Dua’s phrasing. James C. Scott offers deep appreciation for the book’s arguments but also notes several “roads not taken” in its analysis. For instance, Herzfeld presents the nation-state as essentially a foreign imposition that can never attain the same kind of fit and adaptation that the subversive anarchists can. But this is a historically shallow way of understanding many nation-states, which developed organically over time as a way of incorporating difference and making space for social plurality—which subversive archaists, for their part, often actively oppose. Similarly, Herzfeld presents the subversive archaists he has gotten to know in Greece and Thailand as underdogs with generally worthy goals. Scott points out that their character might easily change if they were to gain the power they seek. In his response Erik Harms suggests a simultaneous refining and broadening of the concept of subversive archaism; rather than necessarily being about marginal people’s opposition to the state, the opposition can be directed at anyone who the subversive subalterns see as power-holders. That is why, he notes “it remains possible … for many forms of subversive archaism to seem distasteful to mainstream observers” who “see them as dangerous” while the archaists instead see themselves in Herzfeld’s terms, as “subversive.” Harms outlines three modes of what he terms strategic archaism: subversive (in Herzfeld’s model), as well as reactionary (think white nationalists), and hegemonic (perhaps elements of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party in contemporary India).Herzfeld’s subversive archaists challenge the nation-state by claiming for themselves the very traditions that it includes in its purview, by affirming that these traditions are not specific to the nation-state as a form of community and that they may, indeed, be anathema to it. Herzfeld points to a subversion different from that of Amina Khayyam, the dancer and choreographer whose performance opens this editorial note, who subverts the traditional facial expression of Abhinaya by negating its effect, by effectively drawing the audience’s gaze not towards beauty, but towards what she calls “a face of death.” Anthropology has always, of course, been particularly successful at drawing our attention to the most unexpected ways of subverting hegemony, power structures, dominant discourses, dogmas, conventional symbols, or received wisdoms. For us at Hau, a commitment to anthropology’s original strengths is as important as our confidence in its vocation for bold innovations.Notes1. www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20200121180810/http://londondance.com/articles/interviews/amina-khayyam-yerma/. Accessed March 31, 2023.2. https://aminakhayyamdance.co.uk/yerma. Accessed March 31, 2023.3. www.gridheritage.com/uk-amina-khayyam. Accessed March 31, 2023.4. Email from Amina Khayyam, December 12, 2022.Referencesde Martino, Ernesto. 2015. Magic: A theory from the South. Translated by Dorothy Louise Zinn. Chicago: Hau Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHall, Stuart. (1996) 2001. “When was ‘the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit.” In Selected writings on Marxism, edited by Gregor McLennan, 293–315. New York: Duke University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHerzfeld, Michael. 2022. Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 13, Number 1Spring 2023 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725382 © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.