against belief? || afterword: returning to cosmology—thoughts on the positioning of belief
TRANSCRIPT
Berghahn Books
Afterword: Returning to Cosmology—Thoughts on the Positioning of BeliefAuthor(s): Don HandelmanSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 52, No.1, AGAINST BELIEF? (SPRING 2008), pp. 181-195Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23182454 .
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Afterword Returning to Cosmology—Thoughts on the
Positioning of Belief
Don Hanaelman
Abstract: Cosmology may be helpful in positioning belief. I suggest, through discussing the contributions to this collection, that belief,
especially prepositional belief, is integral to monotheistic cosmoses
that are constituted through gigantic fractures (like that between God
and human being). Such fractures distinguish between cosmic interior
and cosmic exterior. The fracture as boundary is absolute, paradoxical, not to be breached. Thus, the infinite Hebrew God integrates His finite
cosmos by holding it together from its outside. The absolute boundary
signifies cosmic discontinuity. Here belief in the unfathomable may be
central to overcoming such discontinuity and, so, to integrating cos
mos. By contrast, an organic cosmos is held together within itself, is
more continuous within itself, is more holistic, and, in flowing through
itself, obviates any centrality of belief.
Keywords: boundaries, cosmology, monotheism, paradox, phenomenal
ity, representation
Some four decades ago, the Native American shaman, Henry Rupert, told me
directly, succinctly, as was his wont, "You don't know what I am talking about, and the same is true for anybody who reads this thing you write. What is real for me is not real for you" (Handelman 1967: 457). Henry—whom Robert Lowie (1939: 321) had described after their meeting in 1926 as a sophisticated young Washo, and who was that and so much more—in his pointed comments
to me was not referring to our differences as cultural relativism. Although we were sitting close and conversing, each existing momentarily through the
other, each of us gathered his trajectories of being-in-the-world from different
cosmologies, different logics of how the universe is constituted, is put together,
í Social Analysis, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2008, 181-195 doi: 10.3167/sa.2008.520111
® Berghahn Journals
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182 I Don Hanaelman
is active. Cosmology, as I use the word here, is necessarily ontological. Kap
ferer (1988: 79), in a useful delineation, understands ontology as, "the funda mental principles of a being in the world and the orientation of such a being toward the horizons of its experience." For my purposes, I emphasize that
these "principles" refer less to the content of cosmos than to the logic or logics of connectedness and separation that organize cosmos. In this regard, ontology
is the potentiation of cosmos through its logic(s) of organization, perhaps a Deleuzian virtuality from which actualities emerge (Handelman, forthcoming). I am arguing for a return to cosmology in anthropology, suggesting here that
thinking through cosmology may be helpful in positioning the phenomenality of belief. Though I want to lay out some partial contrasts between cosmologies
and their relation to the potential positioning of belief, here I have to use broad,
simple strokes without nuance and qualification, and so interpenetration and
overlap may appear (without design) as clear-cut distinction.
Cosmic Logics, Cosmic Boundaries
Henry inhabited a cosmos in which much that is inert in my cosmos (e.g., water) is sentient and perhaps conscious in some sense. In his cosmos, all sentience is
densely interrelated, and, so, beings effect one another—a change in one is likely to generate changes in others. Put in another way, a greater proportion of existence
in his cosmos (when compared to mine) is that of beings who are more subject than object to one another. More to the point, these connectivities in his cosmos are
more ¿nfra-connectivities than they are ¿nfer-connectivities, in the following sense: to a high degree, his cosmos is held together, as it were, through connectivities
themselves, within themselves. These connectivities and relationships constitute
'integration' in his cosmos. I do not think this is assuming 'intellectual coherence',
which Simon Coleman and Galina Lindquist question in their introduction to this
volume, but rather continuing with what Henry said and discovering that this
path involuted, turning into and through itself instead of going elsewhere.
If this sounds cryptic, let me add that a corollary of this intra-connectivity
in Henry's cosmos—and in many others (see., e.g., Handelman and Shulman
1997, 2004)—is that the boundaries of cosmos are fuzzy, not only indistinct but
perhaps also open-ended. Cosmos, so long as its entities are interrelated, can go
on and on without meeting its own boundedness, its own limits, since it is not held together from outside itself.1 What, in the most general of ways, should this sort of cosmos be called? Perhaps organic (harking back to the overly maligned Sir James Frazer)? Especially interesting at this point is that in the English lan
guage there is no word that I can find to describe how something is integrated from within itself (perhaps intra-grated?). In English, the word made prominent by Louis Dumont (1970) to describe how something is held together from out side itself is 'encompassment'. And it is this kind of being held together that is crucial to the monotheistic cosmos, to which I will turn shortly.
Much of what I have said so far is well-known to anthropologists. Yet I won
der whether the implications are understood that well. Our cosmos, as Jacobsen
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Afterword: Returning to Cosmology | 183
[1963: 142) puts it, "is made up largely of things, of dead matter of neither life nor will." Much of the cosmos I was born into consists of the inorganic, without life, or, if alive, then with little self-reflective sentience compared to human being. The distinction between subject and object is regnant—human
beings in the main are subjects (and others) to one another. All else is classi fied pretty much as an object of one sort or another, following Enlightenment
values, largely dependent for its future, its fate, on the will of the sentient
human. In their introduction, Coleman and Lindquist comment that the ontic
differentiation between 'the natural world' (of humans, animals, plants) and 'the world beyond' (of deities, spirits, souls) is no less the distinction between
objective knowledge and subjective belief that has been generated by Western culture. Indeed, Bruno Latour (1993: 23) argues presciently that in early West ern modernity, science, the prime creator of object knowledge of 'the natural
world', and therefore ipso facto objective, discovered that the cosmos is replete
with non-humans, "inert bodies, incapable of will and bias, but capable of
showing, signing, writing, and scribbling on laboratory instruments before
trustworthy witnesses. These nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with
meaning, are even more reliable than ordinary mortals." Science continues to
discover non-humans in their cosmic hosts and multitudes, no less working
to domesticate many in the service of human beings.2 This cosmos replete with objectively delineated non-humans is well-suited, of course, to modernity
(which in our terms must be Western, at least for now) and its aftermaths, yet it is unlikely ever to become one of interactive subjects. Nonetheless, beyond and
in back of this cosmos is the generative crucible of monotheism that insisted in the first ontological instance on the boundary, indeed, the near impenetrable
barrier, between God and human being, and in doing so organized the ground for the prominent significance of belief.
Although Henry Rupert occasionally used the terminology of belief, this was not propositional but rather a way of communicating with me in a summating
language I could understand in commonsense terms. My cosmos overlapped with his, but not his with mine. In his cosmos, belief had a minor role, that of
supporting experiential knowledge, but knowledge in an intra-relating, interi
orly intra-grating cosmos within which topological boundaries with exteriority were not especially significant. His cosmos was directly known, experientially so, and was the ongoing synthesizer of his experience, the grounds for practice.
Mine, my monotheist cultural heritage, mainly contained dead objects and non-reflective sentience. Do qualities of reflective sentience, of intra-related ness and integration-from-within in a cosmos lessen the likelihood that belief as a nexus of propositions will be so important in people's living of their lives? I am suggesting that it does, and that propositional belief becomes especially outstanding in a cosmos that is put together to contain or reflect gigantic frac tures in its constitution. In historical terms, the surviving monotheisms have been the prime molders and purveyors of belief to the world.
I am suggesting that at least one way in which belief rose in significance was
through the emergence of monotheism. Monotheism in its slow development
(see Wright 2000) eventually came to posit the absolute separation of God and
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184 I Don Handelman
human being, and, in so doing, fractured the dominance of organic cosmos and the interiority of its holding together from-within-itself. If we understand monotheism today both as religion and as the (often non-religious) culture(s) of monotheism, then this fragmentation and destruction of organic cosmoses
continues apace. That which survives in the Hebrew Bible (after all the ancient
quarrels, exclusions, redactions) is a cosmos constituted through the abso
lute separation of, and uncompromising difference between, God and human
being. The boundary of separation is monothetic. The monothetic separates
levels, domains, categories, in an either-or way of inclusion and exclusion.3 Fuzziness in difference and, so, too, difference that is graduated but continu ous are generally abhorred in this epistemology.4
The Hebrew Bible creates a boundary and barrier between God and human
being, one that does not exist for God (He enters or departs from His cosmos
whenever He wants to, especially evident in this volume in the articles by Elisha and the Mitchells), but one that human being cannot penetrate. Terry Evens's (1995: 122-136) brilliant analysis of Genesis, chapters 2 and 3, shows how the Fall from Paradise creates this boundary. Before the Fall, although Adam is not aware of this, he is continuous with God (made in His image), perhaps a gradation of God, while the boundary of absolute difference between God and human being exists as potential in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil. With the Fall, this absolute difference comes into existence. Human being is separated reflexively from God, and with this distancing, belief of human
being in God becomes an issue in this cosmos. "The dominant tenet of Hebrew thought," write Henri and H. A. Frankfort
(1963: 241-244), "is the absolute transcendence of God. Yahweh is not in nature ... The God of the Hebrews is pure being, unqualified, ineffable. He is holy. That means he is sui generis ... It means that all values are ultimately attributes of
God alone. Hence all concrete phenomena are devaluated ... It has rightly been
pointed out that the monotheism of the Hebrews is a correlate of their insis
tence on the unconditional nature of God. Only a God who transcends every
phenomenon, who is not conditioned by any mode of manifestation—only an
unqualified God can be the one and only ground of all existence."
The Hebrew God, boundless, infinite, unnameable, unfathomable, creates
his finite cosmos, yet once it is fully formed through the Fall from Eden, He is outside His finite cosmos, entering or departing at will, God's Will. More to the point here, God holds His cosmos together from its outside—this is
the meaning of encompassment—as historical time unfolds until the End of
Days. This is that which constitutes cosmic integration in this set-up. Regard less of how His will and feeling are interpreted, the end of cosmos is not the end of God. The Mesopotamian cosmos that Frankfort investigated with such
insight, like the great bulk of cosmoses in the history of the world that we know of (including the South Indian Saiva cosmos studied by David Shulman and myself), was more one of continuousness, of gradation, between gods and
human beings, the deities integral to the ongoing existence of cosmos that was
organic, alive, integrated from within itself, through itself, as 1 have referred to this above. The Frankforts (1963: 244-245) argue that in the Hebrew cosmos,
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Afterword: Returning to Cosmology \ 185
harmony, eudaimonia, disappears, given God's requirement that human being
become morally perfected—unending efforts doomed to fail over and again.
The revolution of Christianity, the revolution of Islam, the revolution of the
Reformation, despite their radical formations of monotheism and individual ism (Dumont 1986), never altered the logic of the cosmic design of the infi nite God encompassing, holding together, the cosmos of His creation from its
exterior. Despite modifications, the rupture forming the exterior and interior of cosmos, the absolute boundary of this rupture, of separation, endures with
consequence and affects the presence (and absence) of belief.
The above intimates that the character of this boundary should be looked
at more closely, for it may supply a clue to the positioning of belief in this
sort of cosmos. In the Judaic cosmos, the boundary between God and human
being often is constituted by the imminence of logical paradox. God is God. As he says to Moses (Exodus iii, 14): "I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." And man is
man. The two cannot be confuted: human being is excluded from the infinite;
the reality of each is utterly different from that of the other (see Bateson 1972; Handelman 1992). If the boundary between these distinct levels of encompass ing (God) and encompassed (human being) is breached from below (and only from below), then 'logical paradox' results. Logical paradox confutes levels and the relationship between encompassing and encompassed. Entering such
paradox entails being caught and trapped within its self-sustaining contrary
dynamic (Epimenides' paradoxes are prime examples), that which Gregory Bateson called the 'double bind'. Therefore, such paradox does not permit pas
sage unless the parameters, the values, of the boundary are altered.
Logical paradoxes that invoke the absolute separation of levels or domains
abounded in the cosmoses of the world. Yet since so many of these universes
were not grounded in such absolute distinctions between divine and human
and the like, such paradox was not the barrier or block that it certainly is in
monotheistic cosmoses. In the latter, the boundary itself, dividing the divine
from the human, came to be constituted as logical paradox. Since the divine
encompasses the human level, the former can always enter the latter—but the
reverse rarely is so. Evens (1995: 133) makes the crucial point that in Genesis the boundary separating the divine from the human after the expulsion not only is paradoxical but is ontologically so. The boundary ultimately is a moral one.
One may argue that the revolution of Christianity modified this absolute
separation of divine and human through the descent of the Godhead, Jesus
Christ the God ~ man, and his sacrifice for human being. The descent accords
fully with the encompassment of cosmos by God, as does the resurrection and
return of Christ to the Godhead. The theological biography of his mother, Mary, in Roman Catholicism nonetheless has shown the difficulties of modifying the
boundary-as-paradox between divine and human. Mary, the Mother of God,
entered by the Holy Spirit, gave birth to Christ, the Son of God, but remained on earth. This kind of procreation, the so-called virgin birth, would rarely pose a problem in, say, a Hindu cosmos or in hosts of others. In Catholicism, the issue of whether Mary was more divine than human or more human than
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186 I DonHandelman
divine posed problems of theology. This is discussed with cogency and insight by Marina Warner (1978). Before the Council of Trent in the fifth century, Mary had many human attributes—she menstruated, her breasts gave milk, she wept
tears. Little by little through the centuries the Church took away her human
attributes, and today she weeps and little more in Roman Catholic theology. The trajectory of these changes has been to make her more divine, less human,
slowly resolving the paradoxical character of her being.5 In the monotheisms, the boundary between Divine and human is one of onto
logical absolutism and is no less moral in this. Monotheism exhibits difficulty in
cosmic organization when the ontological boundary-as-paradox between Divine and human is shifted and relocated within the domain of the human, so that the human, qua human, directly approaches the divine (rather than the Divine
approaching or entering the human, as Omri Elisha discusses). This is evident, for example, in the way that the Church is changing the grounds for consider
ing sainthood, de-emphasizing the miraculous and focusing on good works.6
The structure of the Catholic Mass demonstrates the proper positioning of the
boundary-as-paradox. The rite is intended to accomplish "access to the inacces sible God" (Murphy 1979: 320). The first half of the ritual prepares participants to approach the divine, while remaining on the level of the human. But in the second half, it is the Divine Presence that approaches and encompasses the
worshipers. The climactic culmination of the ritual is the transformation of the bread and wine into the sacrificial Body and Blood of Christ, taken into their bodies by the worshipers. The penetration is that of the Divine, not of the wor
shiper. With the presence of the Divine within the worshiper, the separation of
heaven and earth, the boundary-as-paradox, is momentarily effaced (ibid.: 337).
Again, the agency is that of the Divine, not of the human. Even on the encompassing level of the Divine, the paradoxical hints at
difficulty. The Lutheran bishop, Berkeley, himself a logician, discussed the
strangeness of trying to understand the relatedness within the Trinity. When a
participant in the Mass, he had no difficulty comprehending their relationships. But outside the ritual, as a logician, he could not understand how the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit are each one another and are each not one another.
I am suggesting that belief (particularly as proposition) comes especially to
the fore when cosmos is created as rupture, or is ruptured, such that the divine
(that may become Divine in the process) is, or becomes, entirely its own refer
ent. In this sort of cosmos, belief may be crucial to cosmic integration, crucial to sustaining cosmos in the face of the rupture posed by the boundary-as-para
dox that separates divine from human. Let me try to show this potentiality in the following way, through Gregory Bateson's understanding of the Theory of
Logical Types formulated by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. The Theory, despite its claims to universal validity, was created from and reso
nates with the matrices of monotheistic cosmologies and their often monothetic
premises, and one of the intentions of the Theory was to do away with logical
paradox through hierarchical organization. To my knowledge, the Theory was
introduced into anthropology by Gregory Bateson (1953), who linked it to the
early rudiments of cybernetics and complexity theory. Bateson's thesis proposed
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Afterword: Returning to Cosmology | 187
that the processing of information, upon which all organization depends, is put together through levels of increasing subsumation, such that each higher level,
in order to be aware of the level below, is in a relation of meta-communication
with the lower. If levels are confuted, logical paradox results, and information
processing is disrupted and blocked. In other words, if levels are confused, the
resulting logical paradox becomes an impassable barrier or boundary. Bateson's
ideas resonate strongly with premises of monotheistic cosmologies, discussed earlier. I argue that this kind of organization opens a particular positioning for
belief that no less resonates with monotheistic cosmologies. Take a simple recursive loop constituted through information—say, a loop
between an utterance in a ritual and the being toward whom the utterance is
directed. In terms of the Theory of Logical Types, the utterance does what it does, but it cannot describe itself or subsume itself. To describe itself would
create a paradox of the utterance being simultaneously a class or set of utter
ances (a 'level' of utterances) and a member of that class or set. In other words,
the loop does what it does but cannot be aware or reflective about itself—it
cannot account for itself. Therefore, a higher level is needed to describe the utterance, a level of the class or set that encompasses the utterance. This higher
level is a meta-level of communication about the lower level. This higher level describes and instantiates the utterance as 'prayer'. Yet this meta-level cannot
describe its own instantiation of the provenance, attributes, and qualities of
prayer. Therefore, a still higher meta-level is needed to describe the prayer as
a class of prayer, say, of 'supplication', and then as a prayer of supplication 'directed toward the Almighty', and so on.
This cosmic set-up has no way of closing itself, of encompassing itself, except by continuing to pyramid meta-levels that still have no way of closing themselves off. This thinking approaches that of Kurt Godel's formulation that no system can describe itself—to which 1 must add, yes, a system cannot describe itself from outside itself if it cannot close itself (that which I am call
ing 'organic' cosmos is another kind of problematic.). Nonetheless, the mono
theistic cosmoses are encompassed (by God) through their outer limits, their closures, their boundary. Here belief plays a crucial role. God encompasses cosmos from outside itself. Cosmos cannot know itself fully except through its
outside-itself, through God the boundless, the infinite. Yet human being cannot
know the Being or Mind of God, cannot know the highest order of sentience,
for human being is separated from God by the ontological boundary that does not permit penetration without creating paradox, paradox that blocks passage.
Belief passes through the boundary and its paradox by accepting as given the unfathomable, encompassing Being on the other side, as it were. Belief
accepts (indeed, invokes) cosmic closure by believing in boundless, infinite God beyond the radical, paradoxical rupture between the infinite and the finite. Put otherwise, belief connects and relates the impossible, the impassable, and human being, as the monotheisms have always known, and as believers accept as taken-for-granted, as common sense (as Stephen Glazier refers to in his con
tribution). Without some mode of passage through the boundary from below
to above—from the finite to the infinite—the monotheistic cosmos will lack
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188 I Don Handelman
integrity, since its holding together is done from outside itself, to which the levels of the finite have highly limited access. Belief accomplishes this access. In this formulation, belief is crucial to monotheistic cosmology.
Yet note that in reaching this positioning, I did not begin the formulation
with belief, its presence and absence. Rather, 1 came to see belief as an out come of monotheistic cosmic logic, as the outcome of cosmos organized in terms of absolute hierarchy through the gaping, impassable rupture between
finite and infinite, the finite encompassed from its exterior. Perhaps it was in this spirit that Gregory Bateson considered that "through human history ...
religion has been the only kind of cognitive system that could provide a model
for the integration and complexity of the natural world, because these are the
characteristics that must persistently elude even the most meticulous efforts to
describe" (Bateson and Bateson 1988: 200). A corollary of this formulation is that in monotheistic set-ups, wherever and
whenever human being encounters impassable cosmic paradox, he and she will have reached the boundaries of the set-up, such that what lies beyond is
impenetrable to human understanding, although it is graspable through belief that embraces that which is on the other side. Put otherwise, the ontological limits of monotheistic set-ups are paradoxical—believers (and I do not use the word lightly) perceive the impassability of the paradox from their side,
although of course it is gossamer to God.
Positioning Belief
If the presence of belief is related to logics of cosmos, then what of cosmos
whose logic of integrity does not depend on its own exterior? If the logic of
cosmic integration points to the interiority of how things hold together, per haps to an organic cosmos in which everything is intra-related (as in Henry
Rupert's micro-cosmos), then what of belief? Galina Lindquist's contribution
in particular offers much for food for thought on this problematic. In my view,
Lindquist is discussing cosmologies whose logics of organization are distinct
yet share qualities that make both together different again, radically so, from monotheistic cosmos. The Tuvan shamanic cosmos is full of self-aware beings who are highly interactive. So, too, is the lamaist Mahayana cosmos. However,
the lamaist cosmos is strongly vertical and hierarchical, while the shamanic cosmos is less so and might be called lateral in its topology and slanted in its
hierarchy. Yet both do not contain ontological ruptures within themselves, are
not encompassed, and are integrated through their interiors. The different log ics of cosmos are quite evident in how shaman and lama respectively conduct the ritual of blessing the family shrine (ovaa) by addressing and feeding the masters of the place (eeler).
Tuvan shamans are experiential beings. Much of their knowledge of cosmos is self-learned through their experiences in traveling, healing, doing ritual, dream
ing. And there is substantial variation in their conceptions of cosmos, although these overlap, often substantially. The shamanic cosmos spreads laterally across
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Afterword: Returning to Cosmology | 189
the vast Tuvan landscape, following the shape of rivers, streams, steppe, taiga,
mountains, with concentrations of varieties of beings here and there, like swirls
in the horizontal landscape. This cosmos is continuous, its exterior boundaries
(if there are such) fuzzy, porous, and its logic continues across the landscape
through wherever Tuvans live and move. Continuous too are the negotiations
between shamans and beings of cosmos, often with their ongoing give-and take. This cosmos, in all its variations, is held together first and foremost by
its interactivity (again, more to the point, its ¡nfra-activity within and through itself), its continuousness within itself, all of this continuously practiced into
experience through ritual. Belief as proposition has little role in holding this
cosmos together from within itself.
The Buddhist cosmos is strongly hierarchical yet fully continuous within itself. Transformations are to be carefully controlled. Disorder occurs when
beings go out of their place, entering where and when they should not, upset
ting the dynamics of order and health. The Buddhist ritual of blessing the ovaa
puts the masters of place in their place, relating to them distantly, severely, parsimoniously, paring down their space, situating them in the Buddhist cos mos as more minor beings.7 Much of this is done through the reading of sutras.
Does this involve belief and symbolism, as Lindquist argues? My sense is that
this is more the invocation of Mahayana order, the invocation of points of
orientation for higher-order beings to intervene in ordering the relationship
between the master of place and his Tuvan supplicants. Especially telling is that according to Tuvan lamas, the eeler can be converted to Buddhism during
Buddhist ritual. The eeler can be absorbed into the Mahayana cosmos (which is
highly elastic, like the Hindu) as all beings can, a proper place found for them.
Shamans, on the other hand, ignore the Buddhist cosmos. To introduce that
cosmic logic into their own cosmology would not be to absorb it but to be thor
oughly reorganized by it. Nonetheless, the shamanic and the lamaist overlap
considerably. Perhaps there is a sensuous, aesthetic dimension in experienc
ing and practicing cosmos that we are overlooking? In this instance, I wonder
whether Tuvans feel any different sorts of, say, 'stretching' (and 'contracting'?)
as they shift between the shamanic and the lamaist. In Lindquist's terms, this is something that is closer in sensuousness and aesthetics to the indexical rela
tionship between Tuvan and cosmic being rather than closer to the symbolic.
The sensuous aesthetics of practice may have a stronger affinity to the indexi
cal, just as belief has a stronger affinity to the symbolic. I have this sense of the indexical once more in Koen Stroeken's discursus on
magic and divination. Stroeken writes that the "emphasis on practical purpose is precisely what distinguishes magical belief from religious credo ... Magic is a this-worldly affair, as ethnographers know ... Contrary to religious credo,
[magical recipes] are expected to work, to intervene with natural events, but with the added condition that empirical verification of their efficacy is hard to achieve."8 In these terms, much ritual is no less this-worldly. The other
worldly, the affairs of credo, the 'leap of faith' toward the other-worldly are related more to cosmos shaped through and around ruptures, to cosmos of
impassable boundaries, to cosmos encompassed.
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190 I Don Handelman
To work, magical recipes synchronize with and enter the intra-connectivities that hold cosmos together through its interiority. This is where causation is
positioned. This is the sense ! get from Stroeken's discussion of the magic, liikago, that his host used to protect the land before he sowed. "The recipe thus
talks to the environment," writes Stroeken. In both magic and divination, con tinues Stroeken, "we are dealing with this-worldly practices of a special kind:
they present certainty within a frame (or structure) of uncertainty." These
practices are made to be continuous with cosmos that is continuous within and through itself, and therefore these practices are no less continuous with
the uncertainty that permeates existence. When Frits Staal (1979, 1986) wrote of ritual as without meaning, he implicated the indexicality of ritual, in my terms, the logic of ritual design (Handelman 2004), its acting on cosmos with out the prominent relevance of belief. The Sukuma shingila, the excess added to magic, may be something like an opening, a metaphoric bridge that enables the magic to synchronize with and enter into cosmic dynamics.
I have long felt that what is often called 'magic' may be in its logics highly condensed and coded rituals of transformation whose dense concentration
speaks to their portability and to the flexibility through which these can be inserted into the dynamics of existence, unlike the often more ponderous
forms of what usually is called 'ritual'. (Then, perhaps, 'magic' may be yet another superfluous term in anthropology?) Magic, like ritual, like divination, folds (in Deleuzian-like terms) dynamics of existence into itself in order to work on those dynamics within their folding. So as these dynamics change
among Sukuma, as dynamics do (they are dynamic, after all), as new forms of
witchcraft appear, so, too, does the magic change. Innovation of magic does
not cease. What could speak more powerfully to the continuousness of cosmos
within which magic is inserted? Mira Amiras's contribution curves back into a more monotheistic world
within which the creators of Integral Transformative Practice set out to shape
a micro-cosmos with a different logic, a micro-cosmos that is integrated inte
riorly, that is continuous within itself, and that is aimed through practice to
develop the human potential of its members, even to triggering extraordinary
meta-normal capacities—that is, a micro-cosmos explicitly designed to eschew
belief in favor of practice in the dynamics of self-emergence. Think of the
participants as shamans or healers-in-training, or better yet as self-shamans in
training in a micro-cosmos that, in the terms 1 am using here, is not monotheis tic in its logic. Did these people create a cosmic rupture, a cosmic boundary of this sort, to achieve the extraordinary? And if so, did they need a leap of faith, of belief, to span this rupture? The results are fascinating. Practice (indeed, the
practice that makes perfect) gets good results until the transformation to the
extraordinary is potentially at hand, and then it does not. If practice is insuf ficient at that stage, then what else is missing?
The boundary of cosmic rupture does form, its phrasing contradictory if not
paradoxical: "It's hard to have an experience if you don't think it exists," says
one of the founders of Integral Transformative Practice. This is a boundary to be traversed by the participant and erased. But does one need to believe to enable
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Afterword: Returning to Cosmology | 191
such experience to emerge? Is 'thinking' here no less 'believing'? Is it that
which Stroeken calls 'believed beliefs', belief that one chooses to believe? The
reply is somewhat slippery, yet it is that slippery quality that may potentiate
the participant to demonstrate the porousness of the boundary, or perhaps
show its moebius-like potential, to accept extraordinary experience as it comes, as extraordinary yet not extraordinarily so.
The 'concreteness' of textures of complex, dynamic organization that consti
tutes the entirety of an organic or continuous cosmos held together from within
itself is striking to me. This comes home once more, if perhaps more tangen
tially, in Stephen Glazier's work on the Orisa movement in Trinidad. The Orisa, say their devotees, should be trusted, and so belief is irrelevant. The Orisa exist
within cosmos; they are not ephemeral. Does one trust ephemerality? I suppose
one could, yet it seems much more commonsensical to trust the existing that is
concrete and interactive, and to believe in that which is out of reach. The Orisa
are integral to this Trinidadian cosmos, powerful agents in their own right, act
ing directly on and in their devotees, many of whom co-exist with Christian
deity. What is to believe in? I am not persuaded, for example, that belief is cen tral to why Glazier's friend who is a devotee of Oya puts Chanel No. 5 on her
personal altar to the spirit, and how she understands and feels about the pres
ence and disappearance of the perfume. It seems just as likely that the devotee
is experimenting to find out what works in her relationship with Oya, even if
here the understanding of causality is retrospective. The devotee's relationship
with Oya is then an ongoing voyage of discovery in a cosmos continuous with
itself. Perhaps the devotees of Orisa are not so distant from the self-actualizers
of Integral Transformative Practice. If I follow Wilfred Cantwell Smith's argument (cited by Glazier) that belief
is modern, and think in certain respects through scholars like Aaron Gurevich
(1985, 1988) and Louis Dumont (1977) to comprehend this, then 1 could sur mise the following.9 Gurevich, among historians of the European Middle Ages, argues most powerfully that this duration in everyday popular culture was
characterized by holism and the realism of the continuous existence of deity
and human.10 Dumont contends that this holism fragmented with Enlighten
ment and Reformation, and that from this fragmentation the distinct native
category of 'religion' appeared (along with 'economy', 'polity', 'family', etc.). And perhaps, with the emergence of religion, so, too, there emerged accentu
ated belief in deity holding cosmos together from its exterior, but a cosmos now somewhat diminished in scale and character and in need of belief.
Certain of these processes redound in Andrew Buckser's study of the social
meanings of belief in Jewish Copenhagen over two centuries. In the early
1800s, the Reform faction in the Jewish community, reflecting Enlightenment values, argued for shattering the traditional totality of Jewish orthopraxis by
highlighting a community of belief (rather than one of ritual) in the name of social progress. This harmonized Jewish religiosity with the wider Danish social order and its different religious communities. By the turn of the twenty first century, Jewish distinctiveness has again come to the fore, now related to communal identity rather than to a large-scale return to orthopraxis.
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192 I Don Handelman
Against Representation, for Phenomenality
One of the noteworthy strengths of this collection is the grappling with belief
as phenomenon in many of the contributions. In no cosmos entered into in
these contributions is religion as representation at the forefront. So, too, rep
resentation as such is given minimal play, if any, in those contributions that
emphasize the significance of belief and faith in Christian cosmos. Here the
position taken by Jon and Hildi Mitchell—that "both popular Catholicism and Mormonism are characterized as much by immanence as they are by transcen
dence"—is central. Immanence puts representation to the question. Focusing
on the experiencing body, "as the key site for the acquisition and incorpora tion of religious knowledge and orientation to the world," concretizes belief as
integral to the phenomenal, the bodily, its elusiveness joined to other qualities that infuse body with something inside itself that is really there and elsewhere
(and really there too).11 Belief in such terms is not embodied, as current jargon
on body-as-site might well have it; rather, belief is bodyness, body-as-whole phenomenon in the world.
This is Omri Elisha's point in his study of American Protestant evangelicals and their concern with faith over and above belief. Faith consciously, delib
erately opens the individual to a radical mter-subjectivity with God, through which the former is subjected (in both meanings) to divine agency. The will of God descends deep into the life of the individual, filling his or her life and
being, and inter-subjectivity becomes intra-subjectivity. As Elisha comments,
this suggests "a radical reconstitution of self that seeks as its outcome a life in which the will of God literally 'dwells' in the life and body of the believer," and enters directly into economic and political processes, the ultimate aim of which is to "Christianize American civil society." At issue, then, are not representa
tions of God's presence, but the very bodyness of this, the very phenomenality
of this presence in and through the faith-founded believer.
The power of representation in Western analytical thought was augmented
greatly by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Now, fused with (especially
text-based) postmodernism, representation threatens to swamp so many of
the phenomenal phenomena that anthropologists study. The great bulk of the
social sciences and of the humanities study representations because that is
all they have (in all of the historical and text-based disciplines) or because of
methodologies they have decided to have (in most of sociology, most of psy chology). Anthropology's turn to fieldwork was a truly radical shift in the his
tory of academic research disciplines, one that can be described as interacting with people as subjects before turning them into objects, rather than following the ongoing academic tradition of beginning with objects, infusing them with
life, and, so, turning objects into subjects, the primary route of representation (Handelman 1994).
Nonetheless, the study of religion through anthropology has been and is
consistently skewed and marred by treating ritual, belief, faith, and so forth as representation—functional, cognitive, aesthetic, symbolic, cultural, social,
political, economic. After all representations have been duly apportioned to
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Afterword: Returning to Cosmology \ 193
their appointed domains, what is left of religion? A numinous cloud? A liminal
phase? A subjunctive mood? A projective fantasy? What of phenomenon qua phenomenon? If the phenomena called 'religion' are phenomenal, then for
heaven's sake relate to them as such. First and foremost, as I argue for the study
of ritual, relate analytically to the phenomenon in its own right—then worry
over its connectivities outside and beyond its own phenomenal coherence and
integrity (Handelman 2004). Facing the phenomenal in its own right, in its own
world, is one of the greatest intellectual challenges of anthropology, even as one
gets it wrong over and over again (Handelman 2006b). Why should religion be
exempted? In the study of religion with its ongoing intimations of the irrational and the imaginary, this challenge was and is daunting, yet no less critical.12
Don Handelman is Shaine Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Hebrew
University and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His
publications include Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events
(1998), Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events (2004),
Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge (2004; co-author,
David Shulman), Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation
(2004; co-editor, Galina Lindquist), and The Manchester School: Practice and Ethno
graphic Praxis in Anthropology (2006; co-editor, T. M. S. Evens).
Notes
1. A recent study of the World Wide Web, reported in the Scientific American, states that
the edges of the Web seem to be curling, curving inward through their own dynamics of connectedness.
2. See the thinking of the evolutionary biologist, Carl Woese (Goldenfeld and Woese 2007;
see also Dyson 2007), on the ancient shift from 'horizontal gene transfer' among microbes
(that generated a 'community' of intra-changing living cells) to the individuation and dif
ferentiation of cells, a shift in the direction of Darwinian evolution and exclusion. Also, on the shift to thinking about the generation of self-other distinctions deep within the
body in the microbiology of the immune system, see Napier (2003) and Tauber (1997). 3. On the logic of monothetic in classification, see Bowker and Star (1999). On monothetic
definitions of 'religion', see Saler (2000). 4. And so 1 began to think of the relevance of fuzzy boundaries, ambiguous boundaries,
using the idea of the moebius surface (see, e.g., Handelman 2006a). 5. Every 'religion' generates trajectories antithetical to its dominant streams. I am not
indexing any of these in the broad strokes used here. Among numerous historical cases,
see, for example, Fogleman (2003) and Graef (1985). 6. In modern anthropology such shifts are attributed to changes in the social, the eco
nomic, the political, and so forth. Yet the logics of cosmos organize and reorganize in
their own ways, in relation to their own constitution, and this deserves attention, espe
cially so in the age of globalization and hybridization when their impact is so devalued
by academics.
7. For a variant of these dynamics, see Kapferer (1983) on Sinhalese healing rituals.
8. See Galina Lindquist's (2006) analysis of magic in contemporary urban Russia.
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194 | Don Handelman
9. Smith (1998: v) argues that, as against having faith, "a great modern heresy of the Church
is the heresy of believing. Not of believing this or that, but of believing as such."
10. For one of many instances, see Nagy (2004). 11. The body as the site of drive, desire, force that is inside and outside the body is brought
out beautifully by Cohen (2006). 12. The consequences of rupturing reality and calling part of the rupture 'fantasy' are dis
cussed with great insight by Bateson (1972) and Vernon (1973).
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