The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822357186 ISBN 13: 9780822357186

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy.

Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh

About this title

About the Author

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University and author of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.

Michael D. Jackson is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Arthur Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Bhrigupati Singh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology Brown University and the author of Gods and Grains: Lives of Desire in Rural India.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Ground Between

Anthropologists Engage Philosophy

By Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Bhrigupati Singh

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5718-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction. Experiments between Anthropology and Philosophy: Affinities and Antagonisms Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, and Bhrigupati Singh, 
1 Ajàlá's Heads: Reflections on Anthropology and Philosophy in a West African Setting Michael Jackson, 
2 The Parallel Lives of Philosophy and Anthropology Didier Fassin, 
3 The Difficulty of Kindness: Boundaries, Time, and the Ordinary Clara Han, 
4 Ethnography in the Way of Theory João Biehl, 
5 The Search for Wisdom: Why William James Still Matters Arthur Kleinman, 
6 Eavesdropping on Bourdieu's Philosophers, Ghassan Hage, 
7 How Concepts Make the World Look Different: Affirmative and Negative Genealogies of Thought Bhrigupati Singh, 
8 Philosophia and Anthropologia: Reading alongside Benjamin in Yazd, Derrida in Qum, Arendt in Tehran Michael M. J. Fischer, 
9 Ritual Disjunctions: Ghosts, Philosophy, and Anthropology Michael Puett, 
10 Henri Bergson in Highland Yemen Steven C. Caton, 
11 Must We Be Bad Epistemologists? Illusions of Transparency, the Opaque Other, and Interpretive Foibles Vincent Crapanzano, 
12 Action, Expression, and Everyday Life: Recounting Household Events Veena Das, 
References, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Ajàlá's Heads: Reflections on Anthropology and Philosophy in a West African Setting

Michael Jackson

Dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a dununia.

—Kuranko adage

In Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Clifford Geertz (2000: ix) observes that anthropology and philosophy share "an ambition to connect just about everything with everything else," leaving both disciplines unsure of their identity and constantly besieged by more specialized sciences that achieve better results by defining their focus and purviews more parsimoniously. Geertz's way of "narrowing the gap" between excessive generalization and overspecialization is to follow Wittgenstein's ([1958] 1973: 46e) exhortation to get ourselves off the "slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk," and to get back "to the rough ground" where our feet, and our thoughts, can gain some purchase. In brief, Geertz sees ethnographic fieldwork as a way of steering a course between the Scylla of empty theorizing and the Charybdis of not being able to see the woods for the trees. But what both Wittgenstein and Geertz seem to overlook is the natural tendency of human consciousness to oscillate between moments of complete absorption in an immediate situation and moments of detachment—when we stand back and take stock of what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why. This dialectic between engagement and disengagement is native to how we experience our being-in-the-world before it is consciously transformed into a scientific method of subjecting a hypothesis to empirical testing, or into the kind of disciplined and systematic reflection (the vita contemplativa) that characterizes the Western philosophical tradition. Scientific methods of induction and deduction also have pedestrian origins. People typically experience themselves as beings to whom life simply happens or feel that the world impresses itself upon their consciousness, disclosing hitherto invisible or underlying causes, motives, rules, or ordering principles. Just as typically, they experience themselves as viewing their lives from afar, as if their very existence could be made an object of contemplation. But neither of these modes of experience necessarily entails scientific methods or philosophical truths. They are simply alternating forms of consciousness, either of which may provide a fleeting and consoling sense that we may comprehend our relationship to the world. They echo a distinction that precedes the development of modern science and is recognized in all human societies: that we are creatures who suffer an existence we have not chosen, fated to exercise patience in the hope that we may, in the fullness of time or by the grace of God, be indemnified for our pains and that we are creators of our own lives, responsible for our actions, and capable of knowing and controlling with increasingly higher degrees of certainty the world in which we move.

Accordingly I construe philosophy not as a method for forming concepts but as a strategy for distancing ourselves from the world of immediate experience—social as well as sensory—in order to gain some kind of perspective or purchase on it. By contrast, ethnography is a strategy for close encounters and intersubjective engagements. Whereas ethnography demands immersion in a world of others or otherness, philosophy saves us from drowning by providing us with means of regaining our sense of comprehension, composure, and command in a world of confusing and confounding experience. As such, the turn to philosophy may be compared with the turn to analogy, whereby we grasp the familiar by way of the strange, or with narrative conventions of framing an account of reality by invoking a place and time distant from our own.

IN NORTHERN SIERRA LEONE

Translated literally, Dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a dununia means "The name of the world is not world; its name is load." The Kuranko adage exploits oxymoron and pun (dunia, "world," and dununia, "load," are near homophones) to imply that the world is like a head-load, the weight of which depends both on the nature of the load and on the way one chooses to carry it. Such an attitude is suggestive of an existential view that human beings are never identical with the conditions that bear upon them; existence is a vital relationship with such conditions, and it is the character of this relationship that it is our task to fathom. This view is also implied by the Kuranko word that most closely translates our words custom and tradition: namui. The word is from na (mother) and the verb ka mui (to give birth), as in the term muinyorgoye, literally "birth partnership," that is, close agnatic kinship, or "the bond between children of the same father and mother." Namui suggests that a person is born into a world of established customs in the same way he or she is born into the father's kin group. While one's social status and name are given through descent, one's temperament and destiny are shaped by one's mother's influence, hence the adage Ke l dan sia; musi don den; ke l dan wo bolo (A man has many children; a woman nurtures them; his children are in her hands) and the frequent attribution in Kuranko life of a person's fortunes to his mother's influence. Because it is the dynamic interplay of formal determinants and informal influences that decides a person's destiny, Kuranko would readily assent to Merleau-Ponty's (1962: 453) view that "to be born is both to be born to the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities."

From this arise many of the existential dilemmas of everyday Kuranko life: reconciling one's duty to uphold custom with the equally strong imperative to realize one's own capacity to make or replicate the world in which one lives; adjusting external constraints to inner desires; negotiating relations with others in ways that balance competing viewpoints and needs.

First Reflection

Following a well-established convention in anthropological essay writing, I have begun not in media res with an ethnographic description but with a set of somewhat summary, quasi-philosophical assertions that give little indication of what intersubjective events, conversations, or actions occasioned them. I have, moreover, rendered invisible the connections between my fieldwork and the general conclusions that my empirical research supposedly entailed. In effect I have left unexplored and unanswered several questions that pertain to the discursive relationship between ethnography and philosophy—a relationship between our experiences of a particular lifeworld and our retrospective analysis of that experience. Why, forinstance, should any fieldwork experience invite, inspire, or require the kind of conceptual thinking we associate with philosophy? What is it about our empirical work that moves us periodically to distance ourselves from it, to have recourse to concepts? And having moved from participation to reflection, what compels the reciprocal and possibly redemptive movement back into the world of immediate experience?

Let me now begin with a specific ethnographic moment, before attempting to retrace the steps that led me to the generalizations with which I began this essay.

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MOMENT

One afternoon in January 2002, as I was walking down a steep road in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a heavy truck, belching black smoke, lumbered up the hill toward me. Painted in large letters above the windshield were the words Hard Work. No sooner had the truck passed than a red poda poda appeared. Its logo spelled Blessings.

Second Reflection

No sooner had the truck and the poda poda passed than I spontaneously translated the words hard work and blessings into Kuranko. It then occurred to me that I might draw an analogy between the two vehicles and two Kuranko friends of mine who happened to be brothers. The elder was always extolling the virtues of hard work; the younger placed far more emphasis on blessings. Pausing on the roadside, I scribbled a note to myself, thinking that this incident (it would be an exaggeration to call it an epiphany) on the road to Lumley Beach might serve to introduce an essay on the complementary relationship between work and blessings in Kuranko thought and experience.

Third Reflection

One's duty (wale) is "that which you have to do"—the actions, obligations, and demeanor that come with one's role as a chief, a praise-singer, a wife, a farmer, or whatever. This is why wale is also work—the work one does in order to enact one's role, uphold custom, and play one's part in the order of things. A common phrase used in greeting a person, acknowledging a gift, approving words well spoken or behavior that conforms to the ideal is in wale (lit. "you and work," meaning you are doing the right thing by your forebears, you are doing the right thing by your wife, husband, brothers, subjects, etc.). But while wale emphasizes a person's agency—his savoirfaire, his social nous, his personal conduct—the notion of duwe denotes the outcome of working well, which is baraka, the state of being blessed. Thus the exemplary conduct of a paternal ancestor bestows good fortune, or blessings, on his descendants. However, these blessings come to a person through his or her mother. If she is a hard-working, faithful, and dutiful wife to her husband, then her children will receive the blessings of their patrilineal forebears, who become duwe dannu (blessed children). If she fails in her duty by being lazy, unfaithful, or disobedient, the path along which the patrilineal blessings flow will become blocked, and her children will be cursed. This is why Kuranko say "One's destiny is in one's mother's hands" and cite several adages in support of this idea: Ke l dan sia; muse don den; ke l den wo bolo (A man has many children; a woman raises them; his children are in her hands), and I na l kedi sebene, i wole karantine kedi (The book your mother wrote is what you are reading now)—which is to say that one's actions and disposition are direct reflections of one's mother's actions and disposition.

Ideally there is a reciprocal relationship between work and blessings. A person who is blessed is disposed to work hard and do his or her duty. A person who works hard and does his or her duty brings blessings to his or her family. But in practice people may give very different existential emphases to these ontological dispositions.

Consider the relationship between what is pregiven, culturally or genetically, and what emerges in the course of a relationship over time. There is a Kuranko adage: Dan soron ma gbele, koni a ma kole (Bearing a child is not hard; raising a child is). The irony here is that nothing would seem to be more difficult (gbele means "hard," "difficult," or "problematic") than bringing a child into the world, especially when infant mortality is high and many women die in childbirth. But the fact remains that the labor of nursing a child through its earliest years, caring for a child through times of famine and illness, protecting a child from the pitfalls of a politically unstable world, and working hard for a hard-hearted or indifferent husband so that one's child is blessed by its patrilineal ancestors amounts to greater hardship than the labor of giving birth. At the same time, this adage implies that although the bond between mother and child begins with birth, it is actually born of the intimate interactions and critical events that characterize primary intersubjectivity. In other words, it is the intense protolinguistic relationship between mother and infant, mediated by synchronous movement and affect attunement, including smell, touch, gaze, sympathetic laughter and tears, cradling, lulling embraces, interactive play, and the rhythmic interchanges of motherese, that creates the primary bond. To speak of kinship as a "natural" bond or to invoke images of shared substances—blood (consanguinity), breast milk, semen, placenta, genes—or of common parentage, names, place, and ancestry seems to explain the strength of kinship ties. But such figurative language is a way of retrospectively and selectively acknowledging those experiences of a relationship that have confirmed a moral ideal. This is what William James (1978: 97) meant when he wrote, "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process; the process of verifying itself."

Fourth Reflection

For the second time in this essay I have drifted from ethnography to philosophy, as if I were incapable of sticking to the facts or simply describing an event and allowing it to speak for itself—as if, indeed, every particular contained, suggested, or even compelled consideration of something more general. This tendency to stray beyond what is empirically given may reflect the intercultural character of my relationship with Kuranko. It is surely inevitable that I should not only be attentive to Kuranko thought but that I should, through a kind of countertransference, project my "foreign" preunderstandings onto theirs. In other words, an impulse to compare and contrast arises from my strangeness to what, for Kuranko, is familiar and taken for granted. My mind searches its memory banks for analogues that will close the gap between what I find bewilderingly new and what I already take for granted. Theodor Adorno provides a slightly different way of understanding this intersubjective interplay between "myself" and "the Kuranko" by arguing that any notion of an individual subject—self or other—entails a more abstract, categorical notion of subject, as in the phrases the subject of anthropological inquiry or I am a Canadian subject. "Neither one can exist without the other, the particular only as determined and thus universal, the universal only as the determination of a particular and thus itself particular. Both of them are and are not. This is one of the strongest motives of a nonidealist dialectics" (Adorno 1998: 257).

Despite its focus on the local and particular, ethnography inevitably entails a set of anthropological questions concerning the relationship between individual and sociocultural modes of being, as well as a set of philosophical questions concerning the grounds on which we can claim a general understanding of others.

Before turning to the philosophical questions, let me address the anthropological ones by invoking what Michael Herzfeld (1997) calls "ethnographic biography" and exploring the interplay between what is determined by birth, how a life is shaped by circumstance, and who a person actually comes to be. This requires moving from a cultural account of the concepts of wale and duwe to a biographical sketch of two particular lives.

Fifth Reflection

Noah Marah was my field assistant during my first fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone between 1969 and 1972. His elder brother, Sewa Marah, had been an MP in the first postindependence government, though at the time I met Noah he was managing the Alitalia agency in Freetown. Although I became close friends with both men, they were never, themselves, at all close, and I was always disconcerted by the way Noah would diligently keep his distance from his elder brother, circumspect, deferential, and taciturn, or how Sewa, despite being aware of how fond I was of his younger brother, would deride him as an idler and wastrel, always looking to others to rescue him from difficulties rather than assume responsibility for himself.

During the war years Noah had lost his sight in one eye and had only limited vision in the other; in January 2002 he was out of work and demoralized. By contrast, Sewa was a powerful figure in the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party and President Tejan Kabbah's right-hand man.

"You are what you make of yourself" was Sewa's constant refrain when upbraiding the young men who fetched his bath water in the mornings, washed and ironed his clothes, helped him dress, carried his bags, and attended him. "If you don't work hard you'll get nothing in this world. You must be honest and straightforward. Young people today want something for nothing. They are not serious. Even my own children," Sewa confided. "I often think about them all night long. I don't sleep for thinking of them." He told me how much he wanted his sons to "do well," to be men of substance, status, and influence. That they were waiters in London filled him with shame. "Would I want people to know my sons are servants?" he asked. "These useless jobs. Living underground because they do not have residence visas." When I pointed out to him that Abu and Chelmanseh were taking courses in hotel management in London and were not simply waiters, Sewa said he wanted to be proud of them, he didn't want his sons to disappoint him. "These things weigh on my mind," he said. "After I am dead, what will happen? I wish Rose [Sewa's wife] would speak to them, urge them, tell them these things."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822357186
• ISBN 13: 9780822357186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Das Veena, Jackson Michael, Kleinman Arthur, Singh Bhrigupati