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Authors: Harry G. West
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to prove their capacities to overcome such treatments. Nonetheless, within hours of our sessions, I caught Marcos—and even our healers themselves—speaking in hushed tones with acquaintances about our having been treated. “Don’t tell anyone, but Andiliki has been treated.” These people, in turn, told others; “Don’t tell anyone, but . . .”
Word spread quickly and soon, it seemed, everyone knew. Later, Marcos commented to me that this spreading of the news actually benefited us: people (including potential sorcerers) found out about the treatment, he explained, and then “respected” its recipients for fear of the medicinal specialist who had healed them. 2 In this way, Mandia and Kalamatatu made my illness and recovery a meaningful event to Muedans, thereby producing tangible social effects. Indeed, knowing that others knew I had been treated, I had the sense that I was afforded more “respect.” My anxieties diminished accordingly.
What is more, Mandia and Kalamatatu made my experience comprehensible, in Muedan terms, to me—effectively redefining the world around me. As they defined for me a role that made sense to Muedans, I began to experience Mueda differently than before. To be sure, I had collected valuable “data” as Mandia’s and Kalamatatu’s patient. But now, instead of trying to “get things into perspective” by finding a place from which to observe the Muedan social landscape—including the terrain of sorcery— from the outside, as Jackson (1989: 8) has put it, I found myself trying to comprehend and engage with the Muedan world of sorcery from a perspectival space within it created for me by my own vakulaula. 3
M AKING M EANING, M AKING THE W ORLD
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms—in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
« FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense" (1976: 46-47) »
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
« ALFRED TENNYSON, The Higher Pantheism, line 4 »
According to Emile Durkheim (to whom "symbolist" anthropologists trace their roots), religion is essentially symbolic (Morris 1987: 119). "God is only a figurative expression of . . . society," Durkheim wrote ([1915] 1964: 226); elsewhere he called religion a metaphor for the social group (Morris 1987: 119-120). 1 On this point, Karl Marx agreed with Durkheim: "Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself" (Marx [1843-1844] 1978: 54). "Illusory" is the key word here, for Marx was concerned that, althoughhumans made their gods, they came to believe that their gods had made them. Where, to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Edward Schieffelin, people “create the meaning[s] they discover” through religious ritual (Schieffelin 1985: 719), Marx worried that they failed to discover that they had, indeed, created these meanings. For Marx, the illusory symbols of religion masked “the truth of this world”— a singular reality that lay behind whatever mask people placed upon it (Marx [1843-1844] 1978: 54).
Philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition have taken issue, however, with Marx’s conception of the relationship between reality and meaning. From the phenomenological perspective, reality exists only through its apperception. “Symbolic forms,” Ernst Cassirer wrote, “are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension” (1946: 8). From the phenomenologist’s
Word spread quickly and soon, it seemed, everyone knew. Later, Marcos commented to me that this spreading of the news actually benefited us: people (including potential sorcerers) found out about the treatment, he explained, and then “respected” its recipients for fear of the medicinal specialist who had healed them. 2 In this way, Mandia and Kalamatatu made my illness and recovery a meaningful event to Muedans, thereby producing tangible social effects. Indeed, knowing that others knew I had been treated, I had the sense that I was afforded more “respect.” My anxieties diminished accordingly.
What is more, Mandia and Kalamatatu made my experience comprehensible, in Muedan terms, to me—effectively redefining the world around me. As they defined for me a role that made sense to Muedans, I began to experience Mueda differently than before. To be sure, I had collected valuable “data” as Mandia’s and Kalamatatu’s patient. But now, instead of trying to “get things into perspective” by finding a place from which to observe the Muedan social landscape—including the terrain of sorcery— from the outside, as Jackson (1989: 8) has put it, I found myself trying to comprehend and engage with the Muedan world of sorcery from a perspectival space within it created for me by my own vakulaula. 3
M AKING M EANING, M AKING THE W ORLD
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms—in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
« FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense" (1976: 46-47) »
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
« ALFRED TENNYSON, The Higher Pantheism, line 4 »
According to Emile Durkheim (to whom "symbolist" anthropologists trace their roots), religion is essentially symbolic (Morris 1987: 119). "God is only a figurative expression of . . . society," Durkheim wrote ([1915] 1964: 226); elsewhere he called religion a metaphor for the social group (Morris 1987: 119-120). 1 On this point, Karl Marx agreed with Durkheim: "Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself" (Marx [1843-1844] 1978: 54). "Illusory" is the key word here, for Marx was concerned that, althoughhumans made their gods, they came to believe that their gods had made them. Where, to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Edward Schieffelin, people “create the meaning[s] they discover” through religious ritual (Schieffelin 1985: 719), Marx worried that they failed to discover that they had, indeed, created these meanings. For Marx, the illusory symbols of religion masked “the truth of this world”— a singular reality that lay behind whatever mask people placed upon it (Marx [1843-1844] 1978: 54).
Philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition have taken issue, however, with Marx’s conception of the relationship between reality and meaning. From the phenomenological perspective, reality exists only through its apperception. “Symbolic forms,” Ernst Cassirer wrote, “are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension” (1946: 8). From the phenomenologist’s
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