On Belaboring the Less Than Obvious: Notes on the Two Posts Preceding the Preceding Two Posts, If You Get My Drift
“…all knowledge is interdisciplinary. At the same time, disciplines, like tools, are useful, because you can’t explain everything at once.” —James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology
I frequently come to dazzling revelations arrived at after much personal observation, only to realize that my insight is one of the standard maxims of an existing academic discipline. But this is why we learn the disciplines in the first place: they provide useful confirmation that we are on the right track if the trail we are trying to blaze is not one with already approved maps.
If we get a disconfirmation, of course, we have the choice of mending our ways or saying, “What do the experts know?”
Even if one is only getting a firm grasp on the obvious, at least it’s akin to having a student learn through experiment one of the standard axioms of physics: One replicates the experience of astonishment that, oh, this is how the world works.
At least this is how the world works in this particular instance, which extends out until one reaches the realms of discourse in which it seems not to operate that way at all. And the shallow-minded, on discovering this, try to use this new information to prove that the world never did operate we thought it did. (I am making mischief with the misadventures of pop writers about physics, because the parallels with the anthropological matters I wish to discuss are self-evident. What one needs is not a—name your poison in terms of writers—ecstatic exclaiming that all reality is non-Newtonian, but a Richard Feynman explaining why the strangenesses of twentieth century physics can be considered as not at all strange extensions or confirmations of laws that were simply framed the wrong way until all the cases and evidence could be considered.)
I didn’t name the two travel books I was riffing from earlier because I was still in the process of reading them (still am, in the case of ***********) and because naming a title merely sends the reader off to look up everything about it instead of attending to the argument at hand.
And of course books teach, so often, the lessons we bring to them. This is why we re-read novels several times over the course of a lifetime, to find that, if they don’t bore us as much as they did the first time round, they have such different dimensions that we wonder if we are reading the same book.
Nevertheless, the books’ content obviously is determined by the consciousness of the writer, no matter what unexpected maps of misreading we extract from them.
So it’s particularly interesting to be perusing the lifetime experience of a 70 year old researcher in the case of the book I won’t name here, and a book written by a gentleman who was not yet thirty in the case of Toby Green’s 2001 Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa. Green understands the basics, and has done his reading; he sets out on an adventure as a unbelieving skeptic, discovers much about the overlays of culture in the region from the Senegalese Casamance through large parts of Guinea-Bissau, and encounters, among the many spurious offerings of gris-gris, two events that he cannot satisfactorily explain no matter how many variables he considers. The only drugs he does en route are antibiotics, and the aching bruises on his unpierced skin convince him of the reality of the knife whose sharpness he had tested before it was used to demonstrate the gris-gris conferring invulnerability against knife attacks.
He cites some eighteenth century travelers who saw even stranger things, and offered the explanation that it was all done by a series of sleight of hand operations, though not ones that could ever be caught out by the observer.
Green may be on to something when he notes that if there really were things that worked every once in a great while, for reasons other than those imposed upon the phenomena by the percipients, there would be great profit in pretending that one could make such things happen all the time. Eventually there would be whole segments of culture based on the belief that the things could be made to happen on order, and elaborate explanations for failure every time they didn’t.
(For phenomena that seem to happen, only not very reliably or very often, I refer you back to my post months ago about the gold-leaf lady and other phenomena discussed at length by Stephen Braude; also some of the topics discussed historically by Jeffrey Kripal in his magnum opus that I have also discussed at length, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.)
Like some reviewers of Green’s book, I was much more startled by his descriptions of historically traumatized regions of the earth, comparable to Peter Levi’s descriptions of regions of Afghanistan that have been similarly traumatized for centuries or millennia, or the much more recent observations of those regions by Brian Murphy in The Root of Wild Madder.
What these places have in common is that they exist on the edges of culture zones; it’s easy for the latest expansionist empire to tromp over the borders, from the east one time, from the west the next, and from the south the third time (the north being mountains or desert, in the more fortunate cases). With each successive invader the locals become more creolized and more culturally borderline in more ways than one. Fascinating feats of creativity can flow from this, but just as often, places that were once doing at least okay end up saddled with counterproductive methods of agriculture, dysfunctional social orders, and economic expectations from the center that maintain a state of stress even worse than the ones our deep-history friend from a few posts ago was describing.
Green comes to a variety of realizations about why his chosen part of Africa has been particularly subject to what Mircea Eliade called “the terror of history”: history has not been its friend for a very long time.
Now, the problem I was intuiting a couple of posts ago is that it is not good to dwell upon such regions as though they were typical of countries or regions as a whole. They are, precisely, interzones. There are far more people like Green’s friend and traveling companion from the Casamance, El Hadji, who cross borders, come through the transient civil wars just fine, and plan an unrealistically idealized but rationally mapped out escape to Europe in search of financial well-being.
There are also people like the borderline lunatics they encounter along the way who have not done so well in their present historical circumstances. Their cultures are not typical of anything, but they do exist. (The ones of whom I write, unlike their compatriots in happier places, do not write weblogs.) And it is always more wrenching to read about them in context than to encounter even the best written appeal from Doctors Without Borders or World Vision (that particular Christian organization pops up unexpectedly in Muphy’s book about the carpet trade I mentioned—the only aid workers at the time of writing in a particularly difficult bit of Afghan territory).
I bracket, having brought it up, the question of how much good or ill these well-meaning outsiders bring to traumatized regions, or how much such regions are reparable. It depends on too many variables; in the case of individuals, it is astounding how resilient some of the people are whom one meets in Atlanta who have come from having their whole families exterminated in one country or another. (I am, by the way, often brought up short by the realization that I sometimes literally rub shoulders on the MARTA train with people who emigrated from every one of the countries I write about in this journal.)
Actually, if this post is to have any topic at all, as many of mine never quite do, I suppose it should be the creolization of magical practice.
Anyone who has worked through the sources of John Crowley’s Ægypt cycle of novels will know how much of what later occultists separated out as alchemy or kabbala or Gnosticism or what have you actually came into being in straitened historical circumstances, often in interzones like the ones to which I referred above.
Perfectly ordinary knowledge had to be kept secret from authorities who were inclined to kill dissenters, it became difficult to tell what was important and what was not, and there were strong incentives to exaggerate one’s knowledge and powers, in terms of simple survival. Different maxks were worn for differing difficult circumstances.
There were also lots of books and refugees and plain old travelers floating around, swapping tales in the times of peace, and selling off libraries and trading knowledge for shelter and sustenance in less advantageous moments.
Generally happy investigators like Dr. Dee, working their way towards what would become experimental science, found it difficult to sort the chaff from the wheat or get the thistles uprooted from the grain crop, to use two agricultural metaphors with slightly different meanings. They had ample experiences they could not explain, and became slightly unbalanced from the extent of the experience. But that happens.
Having said that, I want to switch back to creolized regions of West Africa and wonder, looking at Green’s descriptions of gris-gris, how much of contemporary magical practice found its way back to African shores from America, having made its way there in slavery days and been brought back, developed and transmuted, in oral reports or printed literature or what have you.
I find it difficult to believe that that would be the case, and would like to assume the parallels between Green’s testimonies and those in Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork are evidence of pure undistorted survivals, but I am constantly astonished at how many cultural practices started in one place, developed somewhere else, and were taken up in their new form by the people who had developed the original form, but who liked the new form better because it was familiar somehow, but also came with the prestige of alien origins. In less serious cases, something trivial becomes popular because it is this fun new idea from far away, as apparently has happened in today’s China with fortune cookies. In more serious cases, syncretism reigns supreme, and I have written of some of these cases before in this journal.
Some anthropologist has surely done the research. So many of the accounts in Green’s book seem to combine genuinely ancient practices with adaptations from the past hundred years or so that I wonder what exactly was happening on a coast that continued to see trans-Atlantic traffic long after human beings ceased to be the export commodity.
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