Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 12:08:42 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: Communists and Religious Movements?
From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com>


On 8/4/2004 9:35 AM, "David McInerney" <borderlands-AT-optusnet.com.au> wrote:

>> Could you say that in this sort of cosmology there is 'materialism'? Well,
>> there is a pervasive corporeality. But even this word can't escape the
> fact
>> that we determine these categories by reference to otherworldliness and
>> irreality.
> 
> THis is very interesting.  While it is a cosmology - and has certain
> resemblances to the spiritualist systems we are more familiar with - it is
> perhaps not "philosophical" as we would understand it.  There seems to be no
> distinction between the imaginary and the real in this cosmology, and such a
> distinction seems to be inherent to philosophy, even postmodern philosophy
> (try as it might to deny it).  Philosophy could be said to consist in a
> specific - i.e., theoretical - mode of drawing that line of demarcation.


One problem that anthropologists encountered before the 60s (with the advent
of 'practice' theory and structuralism) was that many people in PNG would
not elaborate verbally on what they were doing in rituals. They didn't seem
to show interest in the symbolism, they would sing songs and refuse to
provide any kind of exegesis, which was particularly frustrating as the
songs were often highly suggestive to the anthropologist. Peter Lawrence,
who was possibly one of the two or three central figures of the cargo cult
literature as well as deeply involved in the training of colonial
administrators, made exactly the point you made. The silence indicated that
there was no line of demarcation, hence the difficulty telling 'mythic'
technology from 'actual' technology, eg. when people build a radio out of
gold-lip shells and coconuts, dance around it and call for goods to be
delivered, or more contentiously for us but also more relevant for Lawrence,
when, eg. people organized cults that cleaned up the village, restructured
production and collected money with 'inflated' and 'unrealistic'
expectations...

Now, the trouble I see with this imaginary/real distinction is that you have
to understand it, or its absence, in terms of the lifeworld of the people in
question. The little jump that takes us from its absence to spiritualism and
lack of demarcation foregoes investigation into the ways that these peoples'
worlds are encoded with all kinds of distinctions and tensions that at some
level look as if they mirror our imaginary/real distinction, or the one
between actual and mythological technology. For instance, except in those
instances where 'millenarian' expectactions are at such fever pitch that
people cease to work thinking that a New World will start before they start
to get hungry, people do not substitute magic for work in the gardens. This
was a notorious observation by Malinowski, in fact.

The other direction in which this way of thinking gets us into trouble is
that we shouldn't underestimate the 'mythical', 'symbolic' or for that
matter 'irrational' aspect of our own technology. Hilariously, Peter
Lawrence, when commenting on the apparently static character of Melanesian
economies, pointed out that we could never put up with it - just look at our
cars, he said, the '64 model is so much better than the '63 model. Well,
that turns out to be partly an imaginary gain. Already in the early 60s 25%
of the cost of a new car went into development costs unrelated to
performance. This is one thing, then you have the issue of performance
itself, and the inescapable comment that our technology 'works'. Sure it
does. But that isn't something that exists before a social world...


Thiago










 








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