Another great post, sir - and fun to see Andrew and Rebekah jamming with you here. This bit made me think of Tyson Yunkaporta saying that institutions want the products of Indigenous thought, but not the processes of Indigenous thinking:
"The bigger problem is not theft: it’s the ontological perspective telling us that the symbolic interface—the thing that can be stolen—is the primary source of value, rather than the relationship with the hyperobject it represents."
thank you very much! i've been eager to read Tyson's new book, but my wife insists that i need to start sleeping again. (she's usually right.) life is full of difficult trade-offs, i guess.
They say we hate most the things in others that we struggle with in ourselves. Whatever so-called idol worshipers were doing in their own context, what the Faithful saw was a rigid, unmoving, immutable Thing pretending toward G-d. Just so with tradition stripped of the movement and breath that gave it birth, until it so stripped of mutations that it must try to lock its environment into stasis so that it can survive.
I like your chisel sharpening metaphor. Midrash is the grinding stone I think. Those under the spell of the literal-certain grieve the lost bits of metal filed off in the process because they only recognize the thing they are handling by its exact measurements. All change in form is loss I guess if you lose sight of the actual work at hand.
It interesting that Word can be all the components of your cosmos here: Mystery, Interface, and Enchanter (or according to the fairy tales Dis-enchanter).
Fascinating that Black Elk did his most innovative work blowing his breath into the lungs of the Sundance years after becoming a Catholic catechism. He sharpened the edge of its steel, reorienting the symbolic black away from a certain reveling in violence toward a grief over murder.
One time even G-d comes into Animal at Bethlehem (so they say) and all is innovation and new poetics, every existing interface is, at first , almost unrecognizable to all but those with ears to hear. All followers are instructed to do the same. What you bind/loose on earth will be bound/loosed in heaven. But Word soon becomes Text. Stasis offers a fixity of the species that can be comforting in a cosmos where a wolf can wade further and further out until, one day, its blow-hole is open to the starry sky and, hips empty, it wakes as whale.
Your point on poor design or bad form in innovation is well taken. More so considering the poverty we start from that is only mitigated like you say by the fact that it isn't a closed system. We may be helped past such because poor as we are, Someone might be looking for us right back. Still, hubris and a long history of the species "winging it" unto disaster does draw me toward a Keeping of sorts. Midrash is at its best when the shock of the innovation is brought to marrow by the ancestral familiarity of the conductor. Plus the well Dead. Like Stephen Jenkinson says, best to speak a language they might remember if you need their company, which I suspect we deeply do. And any game worth playing needs limit. Make a whale, but use this wolf to do it because no one should go mammaling in the sea without blood and bone, milk and lung. Even Shekinah started with the deep and Ein Sof the dirt when it came to making someone to interface with.
damn, what a beautiful whirligig of a comment! i really like what you say about Word becoming Text. i have kind of a fraught relationship with text recently, as a writer; i start to be suspicious of these little scratch-marks pretending to be Words, with their musicality stripped away, relying on the reader to imagine the melody instead of hearing it directly. i suspect the (culturally and politically expedient) decision to translate an oral (living, magical) tradition into a fixed Text was where the trouble started in many cultures. if i can get unstuck from the academic mode i've been in lately, i'm hoping to back out of these textual dead ends and uncover the Words hiding in them. thanks for reading and commenting!
Great definition of enchantment, and I like the concept of a "faulty symbolic interface." This echoes many of the thoughts I've had about cultural appropriation and the ways in which modern (really post-modern) attitudes feed disenchantment.
Anthropologists like Alice Beck Kehoe blasted Mircea Eliade for "appropriating" the word shaman and creating grand metanarratives that (in their view) disrespected the spiritual practices of other cultures. According to Kehoe in her book on Shamanism, each culture's spiritual practices are completely different, the meaning they construct is different, and therefore they cannot be said to be alike in any way. To look for commonalities is to impose western concepts. Her descriptions of these meanings and functions collapse into a jargon-y soup of abstract concepts.
While there are certainly critiques to be made of Eliade, at least he takes these spiritual practitioners at their word when they say they are contacting spirits. He believes there is something real, an intelligence that is being mediated, and that, in the end, seems far more respectful than the smug paternalism of Kehoe. Not to mention that Shamanism is a far more respectful and useful concept than the old word that was used for these kinds of practitioners— witch doctors.
exactly! i always thought that was such a weird thing to moralize about. we don't have a parsimonious term for "professional spirit intermediary-seer-healer" in our language because it relies on an ontology that we've shuttered. it's linguistic determinism in its purest form: if we don't have a word for these metaphysical functions, they don't exist. we can't even describe their absence. so we need a loanword—and i very much doubt that anybody would be clutching their pearls about cultural appropriation if we didn't have a word for "engineer" or "dentist" in our language, and were using a word borrowed from a different language. what makes the difference? if "shamanism" is about *belief*, then those beliefs and those symbolic interfaces belong to that particular culture. it's something that they invented. and it only looks that way for materialists who don't recognize spiritual mediators as inhabiting a vital universal role, going back to Paleolithic times, which is culturally inflected but not entirely contingent on any particular group.
This is so interesting - and I'm 100% onboard with your take on the shamanism question, Rebekah. The way Gordon deploys "something like" (in scare quotes) in Ani.mystic feels like a good move beyond the dead end of refusing the possibility of commonalities.
There's something here, too, that takes me back to a frustration with Graeber (may his memory be a blessing), where he seemed to argue almost the opposite: that contemporary academics were being condescending in referring piously to animist ways of inhabiting the world, rather than being honest about their own materialism and that they don't believe this stuff is real. (That's a tangent and I should go back to the interviews I'm thinking of and dig out exactly what he said, but it's the second time your recent posts have brought this to mind, RG!)
Another great post, sir - and fun to see Andrew and Rebekah jamming with you here. This bit made me think of Tyson Yunkaporta saying that institutions want the products of Indigenous thought, but not the processes of Indigenous thinking:
"The bigger problem is not theft: it’s the ontological perspective telling us that the symbolic interface—the thing that can be stolen—is the primary source of value, rather than the relationship with the hyperobject it represents."
thank you very much! i've been eager to read Tyson's new book, but my wife insists that i need to start sleeping again. (she's usually right.) life is full of difficult trade-offs, i guess.
I hear you!
This is really helpful writing here, R.J.
They say we hate most the things in others that we struggle with in ourselves. Whatever so-called idol worshipers were doing in their own context, what the Faithful saw was a rigid, unmoving, immutable Thing pretending toward G-d. Just so with tradition stripped of the movement and breath that gave it birth, until it so stripped of mutations that it must try to lock its environment into stasis so that it can survive.
I like your chisel sharpening metaphor. Midrash is the grinding stone I think. Those under the spell of the literal-certain grieve the lost bits of metal filed off in the process because they only recognize the thing they are handling by its exact measurements. All change in form is loss I guess if you lose sight of the actual work at hand.
It interesting that Word can be all the components of your cosmos here: Mystery, Interface, and Enchanter (or according to the fairy tales Dis-enchanter).
Fascinating that Black Elk did his most innovative work blowing his breath into the lungs of the Sundance years after becoming a Catholic catechism. He sharpened the edge of its steel, reorienting the symbolic black away from a certain reveling in violence toward a grief over murder.
One time even G-d comes into Animal at Bethlehem (so they say) and all is innovation and new poetics, every existing interface is, at first , almost unrecognizable to all but those with ears to hear. All followers are instructed to do the same. What you bind/loose on earth will be bound/loosed in heaven. But Word soon becomes Text. Stasis offers a fixity of the species that can be comforting in a cosmos where a wolf can wade further and further out until, one day, its blow-hole is open to the starry sky and, hips empty, it wakes as whale.
Your point on poor design or bad form in innovation is well taken. More so considering the poverty we start from that is only mitigated like you say by the fact that it isn't a closed system. We may be helped past such because poor as we are, Someone might be looking for us right back. Still, hubris and a long history of the species "winging it" unto disaster does draw me toward a Keeping of sorts. Midrash is at its best when the shock of the innovation is brought to marrow by the ancestral familiarity of the conductor. Plus the well Dead. Like Stephen Jenkinson says, best to speak a language they might remember if you need their company, which I suspect we deeply do. And any game worth playing needs limit. Make a whale, but use this wolf to do it because no one should go mammaling in the sea without blood and bone, milk and lung. Even Shekinah started with the deep and Ein Sof the dirt when it came to making someone to interface with.
Just rattling on. Sorry. Good read.
damn, what a beautiful whirligig of a comment! i really like what you say about Word becoming Text. i have kind of a fraught relationship with text recently, as a writer; i start to be suspicious of these little scratch-marks pretending to be Words, with their musicality stripped away, relying on the reader to imagine the melody instead of hearing it directly. i suspect the (culturally and politically expedient) decision to translate an oral (living, magical) tradition into a fixed Text was where the trouble started in many cultures. if i can get unstuck from the academic mode i've been in lately, i'm hoping to back out of these textual dead ends and uncover the Words hiding in them. thanks for reading and commenting!
Great definition of enchantment, and I like the concept of a "faulty symbolic interface." This echoes many of the thoughts I've had about cultural appropriation and the ways in which modern (really post-modern) attitudes feed disenchantment.
Anthropologists like Alice Beck Kehoe blasted Mircea Eliade for "appropriating" the word shaman and creating grand metanarratives that (in their view) disrespected the spiritual practices of other cultures. According to Kehoe in her book on Shamanism, each culture's spiritual practices are completely different, the meaning they construct is different, and therefore they cannot be said to be alike in any way. To look for commonalities is to impose western concepts. Her descriptions of these meanings and functions collapse into a jargon-y soup of abstract concepts.
While there are certainly critiques to be made of Eliade, at least he takes these spiritual practitioners at their word when they say they are contacting spirits. He believes there is something real, an intelligence that is being mediated, and that, in the end, seems far more respectful than the smug paternalism of Kehoe. Not to mention that Shamanism is a far more respectful and useful concept than the old word that was used for these kinds of practitioners— witch doctors.
exactly! i always thought that was such a weird thing to moralize about. we don't have a parsimonious term for "professional spirit intermediary-seer-healer" in our language because it relies on an ontology that we've shuttered. it's linguistic determinism in its purest form: if we don't have a word for these metaphysical functions, they don't exist. we can't even describe their absence. so we need a loanword—and i very much doubt that anybody would be clutching their pearls about cultural appropriation if we didn't have a word for "engineer" or "dentist" in our language, and were using a word borrowed from a different language. what makes the difference? if "shamanism" is about *belief*, then those beliefs and those symbolic interfaces belong to that particular culture. it's something that they invented. and it only looks that way for materialists who don't recognize spiritual mediators as inhabiting a vital universal role, going back to Paleolithic times, which is culturally inflected but not entirely contingent on any particular group.
This is so interesting - and I'm 100% onboard with your take on the shamanism question, Rebekah. The way Gordon deploys "something like" (in scare quotes) in Ani.mystic feels like a good move beyond the dead end of refusing the possibility of commonalities.
There's something here, too, that takes me back to a frustration with Graeber (may his memory be a blessing), where he seemed to argue almost the opposite: that contemporary academics were being condescending in referring piously to animist ways of inhabiting the world, rather than being honest about their own materialism and that they don't believe this stuff is real. (That's a tangent and I should go back to the interviews I'm thinking of and dig out exactly what he said, but it's the second time your recent posts have brought this to mind, RG!)