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.
Sorry for being late to the party! I think this is your clearest post yet on these topics. I like your idea of the hyperobject. I've got an essay coming up in which I describe my own encounter with what might be called a hyperobject. I'm also tagging you and your previous essay in it as part of the "debate" I'm having with you (also with Janisse Ray and Julie Gabrielli, among others). I hope that's okay! I tagged you in a previous one and didn't hear anything, so I wondered if it ticked you off. I could send the essay to you in advance if you want. It drops July 9. Also, looking forward to Part 2!
damn, i must have missed something! summer break for the kids just started last week and i had some day-job projects to get across the finish line. sorry if i overlooked something somewhere. i'd very much like to be involved; it's just a question of finding the time. i'll take a look as soon as i get a chance.
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!)
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!
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!
Sorry for being late to the party! I think this is your clearest post yet on these topics. I like your idea of the hyperobject. I've got an essay coming up in which I describe my own encounter with what might be called a hyperobject. I'm also tagging you and your previous essay in it as part of the "debate" I'm having with you (also with Janisse Ray and Julie Gabrielli, among others). I hope that's okay! I tagged you in a previous one and didn't hear anything, so I wondered if it ticked you off. I could send the essay to you in advance if you want. It drops July 9. Also, looking forward to Part 2!
damn, i must have missed something! summer break for the kids just started last week and i had some day-job projects to get across the finish line. sorry if i overlooked something somewhere. i'd very much like to be involved; it's just a question of finding the time. i'll take a look as soon as i get a chance.
Oh, and I have several friends in the Coachella Valley who would agree completely with what you didn’t suggest in footnote 7.
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!)
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!