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Boy who finds the buddhas

2/13/2016

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Sochea, at the mouth of the cave. I have been in the cave myself with his story and this summer, we need to retrieve these treasures and set them out. 
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http://readinglists.ucl.ac.uk/lists/78388AD4-DD65-17CD-8BA0-3EEE7C6EACFE.html​Notes from the story of the Boy who finds the Buddhas

The search
This is a story of discovery, a story seeking the child, the dreamer.  We are at Hotel Anise in Phnom Penh talking about statues, and Samnang offers me an adventure I can’t resist – go up to Stung Treng to find the boy. He puts this together. He gets us the tickets, meets me at the bus station early the next morning. I was just down from Siem Reap that weekend, so I wear the dress I brought to Phnom Penh.
 
The bus takes ten hours.  Stung Treng is in the wild northeast, the edge of the world, at the covergence of rivers, as the Mekong swings down from Laos. Next day, we bargain for a ferry across the confluence of rivers to the far side,  On that side, find a group of guys hanging out by the port, waiting to take riders. Motodops are motorcycle taxis.  Samnang bargains again.  We hoist up on the backs of two and buzz off. All we have is a name and a place,  no address, no number, no other information. But Samnang is calm and confident.
 
We travel the red-dust highway, a new national construction project that will spin a trail of concrete across northern Cambodia.  In the meantime, red dust plumes with every passing motorcyle and gravel flings up at us.  One in a while, we come to a construction team pouring concrete.  For the hour both sides of the highway reveal acres of clearcut land, only stumps, sad grass.  It is a devastation. 
 
After a hot, dusty hour, pit-marked by gravel,  we moto into the town.  It's a new frontier town, popped up along the hiway with housing that uses all that fresh wood.  New roads, new settlers who have moved north. We go to a family the motodops know.  They don’t have any idea about the family.
We try the neighbor, No.
We stop a driver, who does know the family – over there through the path.
Down over the cropping, onto a hard clay path through the fields.
Along the way, fields have been razed by settlers. The stumps smolder.
Here is a new generation of colonization.
 
The discovery
We find them, then, in their own home on settled land.  Sochea comes with his father and brother, and uncle. After some urging by his mother, he tells his story. He's shy, quiet, guileless. His mother, not so much.

Her version:
Sochea wakes when it is still dark, his mother is already cooking rice. He asks for his sling shot and heads out. His mother thinks he is checking the traps he leaves for birds and small animals. But he doesn't return until 11am, and then he shows her a small statue of the Buddha. Stricken with fear, she says, she beats him - where did he get it, did he steal it? There is nothing like this for miles. There is not even a wat in their village, and anyway, it's too far to walk there.  No, he says, he found it from his dream.  So he tells her.

Sochea:
After New Year's night (April 16), they sleep, all 7 of them, together, and he dreams that two monks wake him, tell him to follow them, and lead him to a cave in Peacock mountain. It's easy to find now that all the trees are cut.  (Before, says a neighbor, two naga - snakes - protected the cave and people were afraid to go. Also because the forest, prei, is a wild place full of neak ta prei, forest guardians.)  He follows them into the cave, scrambling the stones. They turn and tell him to take the statues to the Royal Palace. Then they show him a small space in the rock and he crawls through into a high small white-stone chamber. They point up, on the right. They disappear. He wakes up, asks for his cham peam, his sling shot, and walks out in the dark along the rutted moto path before the dawn arrives, retracing his dream to the cave. 

Mine:
Maybe there is a slight bird song as he walks. Maybe he feels light weaken the thick dark, maybe he's walking the dream, we don't know.  But we do know that when he reaches the mouth of the cave, it is full of light (like day, he says) all the way to the chamber. And once in the chamber, light pours down from one indentation high above. He climbs the calcium carbonite encrusted wall that hides a small loft and yes, it is littered with small buddhas - some on a chearng pean, a ritual portal, some in two jars, some on the floor. 
 
We know he was gone for five hours. We wonder what he did there.

The interval
This is my public record of the pain of writing about immaterial things that matter. It's rife with uncertainty. How do statues cajole humans to rescue them? What's the exchange?

What is the social world within which these two interact?

Latour has "reassembled" the social. In his controversial critique of the fundamental basis of sociology, he defines the social as “not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (2005, 7).  For Latour, the social is a basis for associations. It does not exist a priori to that exchange and is not limited to humans. Latour's "critical sociology" has three traits: 
  1.  it doesn’t only limit itself to the social but replaces the object to be studied by another matter made of social relations;
  2. it claims that this substitution is unbearable for the social actors who need to live under the illusion that there is something ‘other’ than social there; and
  3.  it considers that the actors’ objections to their social explanations offer the best proof that those explanations are right.” (9)
 Here's a course that lists sources like this for more explanation of ANT.

Bjørnar Olsen, proponent of ‘nonanthropocentric’ archaeology takes Latour, among others, as a reference point  In Defense of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects.  Objects and humans operate not as separate entities but assemblages.  I find this theorizing on the part of archeaologists helpful on new ways of tracing the life of strange objects, tracking entities to heterogenous worlds that are hidden, not (yet) visible.  If entities are actants, I track statues seeking to be found from the water, mud and mountains,  who use intermediate realms for a human-entity détente. 

Latour offers five sources of uncertainty, controversies about the social realm that I will reconstruct later. In sum:

First Source of Uncertainty:  Groups: If we reassemble the social so that group formation are constructed by actors reports, then groups confirm to a  "performative definition” (Latour 2005, 34).

Second Source of Uncertainty: Actions:   “Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled” (Latour 2005, 43). 

Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects: They have agency too, so we diversify the types of actors in any social event.
 
Fourth Source of Uncertainty:  Nature of facts: Matters of fact vs. matters of concern.

Fifth Source of Uncertainty:  How to study the science of the social if we aren't clear what we mean by empirical. Such that writing is a risky account, and there are already so many uncertainties.   But the purpose of this risky account is, in Latour’s words to “extend the exploration of the social connections a little bit further” (Latour 2005, 128).


References

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Olsen, Bjørnar  2010,  In Defense of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham: Altamira Press.

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Jeju Island, Goddess Yeongdeun and Catholic priests

11/8/2015

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 SEOUL, March 2 (Yonhap) — The Navy conducted its first military exercise near its new base on the southern island of Jeju on Wednesday to improve readiness to intercept suspicious vessels and submarine infiltration by North Korea....After 23 years of preparations and having spent more than 1 trillion won (US$810 million), the Navy opened the seaport base last week on the southern coast of Jeju.
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At first glance, Jeju Island is not remarkable as an island. But when in 2013,  our network, Peace for Life held the People's Forum on Jeju, assembled at GangJeong village, I was transfixed by the counter-assemblages of the construction of the naval base and resistance to this.

Jeju Island is South Korea's tourist island and also named an island of peace after a disastrous massacre of 10 percent of its population -- 30,000 women, children, and elderly people were shot down and villages were burned -- after a revolt in 1948. The assault was conducted by a rightist regime with the cooperation of occupying US military.  If the Jeju tourist trade requires some amnesia of this catastrophe, it also needs blinkers for this return to militarization.


This January, 2016 the South Korean government opened their new 
deep water naval base at the southernmost part, displacing the sleepy Gangjeong Village. The Joon Gang Daily calls this new base,  “the spearhead of the country’s defense line." The base already hosts US Aegis missile destroyers, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines. The government had lost two other sites due to citizen resistance and they were not going to be deflected again.  If you look on a map, you can understand the strategic location.  This Catholic comic, sets up the story.

In Vibrant Matter, Bennett argues along with others that we need a  political economy of things, that  "thing power" offers a new ethical imperative.   We need to discard the subject-object relationship of humans to nonhuman others..  If we understand assemblage as a mix of human-object actants, and that smaller parts make up the larger, we move away from a human-object binary to a more enmeshed system of action.  We are constituted by multiplicities – colonies of life forms make up our biome, our bone, ideas lodged in gray mushy matter, nerve trackings. The smallest things have dangerous power: memes, pixelated surveillance maps, the fine flour of eucharist host, the sonorous bell of awakening.

Why does this matter in the case of Jeju Island? Because this is a trans-figuration, a dis-figurement in discourse and practice in a hypermilitarized zone.  Note that above that the base opens with an "exercise,"   a praxis of dis-figuring.

If there is an assemblage of dis-figuration, this is it. Samsung's massive machines dredge the sea,  destroying coral reefs and blast the Geurombi a kilometer-long porous volcanic shelf at the lip of the sea, displacing the human population for its naval operation.
  That Geurombi, the sacred rock shore, pourous and soft, destroyed.  Everyone who referred to this were sad and wistful, as if about a passing friend.  And deeper down, Bronze age artifacts unearthed.

There is an assemblage of story-telling.  One might wonder whether the Jeju sacreds retrieved by the Gen X, Y & Z activists who have gathered to resist are contemporary bricolage of goddess, earth-tales, seawall, hegemon and loss. Those nature gods looked crippled and sad. One guide ushers us through a wooded area to a volcanic crop of rocks overlooking a bilious green stagnant pool.  This is a sacred pool, they say.  You wonder what they mean by that.  Sacred should make a show for itself.  It hasn’t rained, it’s lower than it’s ever been, and it used to be fresh.  Some of us climb around on the rocks for a while.  Then he takes us a few minutes the other way to a 1,000 year old tree.  People come here to pray, he says.  But that old tree doesn't have the face of devotion.  She wears a saggy string of stained faded white and pink prayer flags, dusty candles stubs sunk in the busom of the tree. A few parts of the trunk plastered with cement. It sinks into the hard earth like crusty old elephant.  Humph. Hard to feel the power of this place. I think: if there is a goddess power acting on this place, she's been denuded.

But Yeoungdeun the goddess has more storm in her than she first conveys. The navy didn't count on the wind. Wild typhoons whip this point each year.  One left $35 in damages, ripping out the casings sunken into the seafloor to create a port for the submarines. They have to be rebuilt. Rock is blasted, coral shattered,  red crab scuttled.  So the transformation of coral bed to concrete slab offers just new forms of organic and inorganic- nuclear fuel, steel, casings, uranium - are also matters of meaning.

The convergence at GangJeong village brought together an assemblage of resistances – of people, police, priests, hosts, kayaks, water, coral, tree, rock, concrete, sea water, wind all acting against the construction of the base, and Samsung, US and Korean construction workers pushing against each other.  Seven years.  Four year without help, last three with activists, last two with Catholics.  Skeletons of the massacre amidst tangerine orchards, a steady line of Chinese tourist buses passing a steady cluster of international, ecumenical, environmentalist, anti-militarist activists, Peace for Life among them. 

So many went protests, arrests, incarcerations. 

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And also rituals of resistance. Each day: 7am 100 bows of gray-garbed monks and then at 11am, Fr. Moon's vigil Mass - wine, host and dancing at the construction site.  If there was an collectivity of spiritual forces, it was palpable those mornings.   

What next?  Here, read Save Jeju Now.


Declaration of Catholic Priests and Monks for peace on Jeju Island



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  1. Under the instruction of the God of Life and of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, we oppose the construction of the Naval Base in Jeju. This is the desperate desire of the residents of Gangjeong Village, who have lost their livelihoods, the decision of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea, and the unchanging wish of those citizens of Korea who love life and peace on earth.
  2. First of all, we want to know why the Naval Base has be constructed by destroying Korea’s cleanest and clearest ocean, around Jeju Island, while advertising the intent to protect the natural heritage of Jeju. While they boast of Jeju’s status as a preservation area, world natural heritage, and GEO park designated by UNESCO, and even they are internationally advertising that it be selected as one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature, they have blasted Gureombi Rock, a gift of nature, with explosives to construct a large-scale port for navy ships, and are attempting to build a concrete bank. This is the result of punishment incurred from uncontrolled greed and ignorance.
  3. The reason why we are against the construction of Naval Base starts from the illegality and non-democracy. The Government announced that they will respect opinions of residents, but this is not true. 725 residents participated in a survey on ‘Voting For or Against the Naval Base,’ and 680 (or 94%) of the total village residents are opposed to the construction of the Naval Base. Nevertheless, the Navy and Jeju government continued the construction and have suppressed the opposition of the residents with physical force.
  4. The Government insists that the Naval Base is necessary to deter North Korea’s provocations, protect our marine territory, and secure the ocean route and underwater resources. However, the substantial power to reduce conflicts between countries and maintain peace comes from neither military bases nor weapons, but from wise diplomacy pursuing co-existence and the level of policy and economy. This has been continuously proved throughout the history of the world.
Many experts say that the Naval Base in Jeju will become a US base to maintain the supremacy in Northeast Asia, unlike our expectations, and it even provokes tension around the Korean peninsula. This consideration is very practical. The conflict between China and Japan in the South China Sea and the Senkaku Islands predicted the unfortunate future of Jeju.
  1. The moment the construction began, artifacts from the Bronze Age were excavated. So the National Assembly and the Cultural Heritage Administration suggested that the Navy stop the construction. However, the Navy disregarded the suggestion and continued with the blasting. We cannot understand why they are in a hurry, although this is not urgent matter. In particular, the violent power exercised by the Police reminds us of that terrible historical event, ‘The 4.3 Massacre.’ We declare that if these acts of violent suppression, arrests, and captivity are repeated, then we will rise against it with an even more powerful disobedience movement.
  2. Today we established the ‘Catholic Church Solidarity to Make Peace on Jeju Island’ according to the Gospels of Christ, which requests that we defend lives and peace, and we declare and require the following in the names of 4,567 Catholic priests and monks.

Declaration and Requests
  1. We oppose the construction of the Naval Base which threatens the peace of the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia.
  2. The Government must fully revoke the plans to construct a Naval Base on Jeju, and politely apologize to the residents of Gangjeong Village and Jeju Island for the illegal means by which the location of the Naval Base was selected!
  3. The navy must immediately stop the construction according to the advice of the Cultural Heritage Administration, and actively cooperate in the excavation of cultural heritages.
  4. The National Assembly must cut the budget for the construction of the Naval Base on Jeju Island.
  5. The Government must consider the wounds of the residents of Jeju, worry about repeating the 4.3 massacre, and apologize for the misuse of the state power!
  6. The Government must make full efforts to restore the natural environment which was been seriously damaged by the construction!
October. 31. 2011

The Committee of Justice & Peace Archdiocese of SEOUL / The Committee of Justice & Peace Archdiocese of DAEGU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Archdiocese of GWANGJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of ANDONG / Justice & Peace Committee of BUSAN Diocese / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese CHEONGJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of CHUNCHEON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of DAEJEON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of INCHEON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of JEJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese JEONJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of MASAN / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese SUWON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of WONJU / The Solidarity of priest Diocese of UIJEONGBU / Association of Major Superiors of Women Religious in Korea / Korean Conference of Major Superiors of Men’s Religious Institutes and Societies of Apostilic Life

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Choosing a Witness

11/8/2015

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Cambodia, 2003
I wrote this after an evaluation trip to Khmer Rouge "reintegration areas" in western Cambodia. I consider the idea of witness and narrative. 


For more than a decade, I'd been a tutor in Minneapolis,  staff at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center,  worked with at-risk Cambodian boys and girls in projects of West Oakland, or a researcher in the bright new offices of hyphenated Cambodians—American, French,
 Australian, Swiss, who had returned to Phnom Penh to participate in its transition to democracy. 

For them, I was an ambivalent figure, a compatriot of sorts, witness to their
 discursive feat defending hybrid citizenship as a necessary aspect of new Khmer nationalism. (Within the Cambodian domain of peacemaking, local Cambodians treated foreigners with more equanimity than former refugees who had to negotiate twice for authenticity—with both homeland and naturalized countries.)

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It might have been our close call with ex-Rogue soldiers that inspired Kennaro to talk.


He was translator for interviews with former Khmer Rouge soldiers and their experience in new “integration zones” since the massive KR defection in 1998.  We'd bounced along deeply rutted roads from Battambang to the infamous Sampot, the Khmer Rouge stronghold in far western Cambodia.
 
Sampot was desolate, wide swathes of parched plots devastated by rampant logging, and cut off from the world. 
When we got to the ramshackle town,  it took some time to rustle up the "focus group"  of toughened Khmer men and women to talk about their plans for integrating into a contentious Khmer "democracy".  I cast a glance at the dingy cots and decided we would drive back to Battambang that night. Kennaro agreed. But he knew better than me what came in the dark.  

Slowy, painfully, the van heaved over potholes along the former KR highway. It was as black as the belly of a whale. 

The headlight five
men wildly waving.  Then I saw the rifles, then in one sickened moment, I realized what it meant. Kennaro had already gripped the driver’s shoulder, speaking urgently in Khmer.  The driver pumped down on the old car. It tumbled foward.  They called out, garbled drunk and angry. But they didn't shoot. And they waved us past.

We sat in a blank silence
.  Then Kennaro began to talk. He was a Khmer Rouge soldier, he'd chosen to survive. At the end, when the Vietnamese arrived, he fled with two buddies to the Thai border. It was a moonless rainy night.  "We walked on to a muddy minefield," Kennaro's voice dangled in the dark. Tripping over mangled bodies, they realized too late.  There was one explosion. The two waited, called out, waited. Then, inching forward,  one step, next. Kennaro heard a second blast. His second friend, weak with shock, cried that his legs were gone. "I crawled across the border." He landed in the hands of casually cruel Thai border police who conscripted him as their servant.

There were a thousand thousand stories. In the Philippine camp, we'd collected them from families enroute to America. Each story its own horror.

But this story was a painful particular gift,  this testamony in the dark. I remember this story as I stared at the headlight tunnel before us.   Maybe Kennaro told it because of the afternoon among Khmer Rouge, maybe the near escape from a KR bandit’s “jackpot”– a foreign woman with no body guard in a car on a dark passage in the poorest and least patrolled part of Cambodia.

What we escape and how we retell it.  What it means to witness.

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Lederach offers a way to think of "the past that lies before us" through a set of embedded circles to explore the cycles of violent conflict.   Lederach offers us this:  a group's ability to survive is woven through the chosen narratives. Which stories we embed our in  lived histories and inside remembered histories, can determine the path we walk through the conflict minefield and thereafter.  Sometimes a group, an individual, chooses a witness to hear that story, and to help them "re-story," re-frame the story, to imagine a different future.

This is a reflection on those who tell the story. But not those who are chosen to receive it.

Sisterhood after Terrorism

 My return to the Philippines on a Fulbright in 2003 reoriented my placement as a witness. Bush had declared the Philippines a “second front” of the war on terror. I was investigating how an ecumenical women’s group theologically framed the relationship between the Philippines main two insurgencies — Muslim and Communist— and the US war on terror.

I wanted to know about "sisterhood after terrorism."

Here, I was subject to my own interviews, a Taglish-speaking “Manila girl,”  my first seventeen years raised there (see Manila Days, blog memoir) with "fraternal workers" on church and social justice.  I was also white, an American,  aligned with one or more divides of the left.  Here, my parents, my credentials, and who had “spoken for me” barred or opened access.  

While in Cambodia interviewing Cambodian Americans, I was an authoritative citizen. In the Philippines, I was, as I sometimes ruefully put it, “target practice.”  I was standing in for the enemy.
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Chiasm, what to do with it

11/7/2015

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What do we mean by Chiasm? 

As an organ of sight:
1. The optic chiasm or optic chiasma is an X-shaped space just in front of the pituitary gland where optic nerve fibers pass through to the brain. Fibers from the nasal half of the left eye and the temporal half of the right eye form the right optic tract; and the fibers from the nasal half of the right eye and the temporal half of the left form the left optic tract.

As a literary device:
2. A chiasm (or chiasmus if you rather) is a writing style that uses a unique repetition pattern for clarification and/or emphasis: Two parallel clauses, in which the order of elements in the second clause inverts the order of the first.

3. As Merleau-Ponty's  notion of the body as flesh, the intertwining of touch and vision,  in The Intertwining—The Chiasm (find Here) crossing over of both objective and subjective experience.   You must read and read again to understand what M-P is trying to do in his posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, a dense phenomenology of sensibility.  Given my interest in the invisible, I first wanted to understand Merleau-Ponty's characterization of this "intertwining" in phenomenology.  But I was lost in the chiasm, and turned to feminists to help me out.

So, what is feminist phenomenology? (Think Butler, Marion Young, Grosz, Irigaray) Merleau-Ponty counters Descarte's split body/ consciousness with an affirmation of the  interconnectedness of body-mind.  If this sounds so corporeal, is there a feminist cautionary? Elizabeth Grosz notes that feminists find in Merleau-Ponty first an ally and then a disappointment in his avoidance of sexual difference and specificity. Only Irigaray takes on the Chiasm, his last work on The Visible and the Invisible which turns to the flesh and its reversability.  Cecilia Sjöholm's  reading-of-Irigaray-reading-Merleau-Ponty on the "chiasm" is a way to think through human  perception, which is, after all, M-P's project. 1 

For M-P, we are sensible to the world through touch and vision, an interactive process of reversals. The most familiar example of M-P is the hand that touches its other hand. One hand as subject touches; the other as object experiences the touch. Though both are part of the same body, they do not merge. They are mutually constituted. And so it is with the look, he argues. The look "envelops, palpates, espouses visible things: So sight has the same ambiguous nature as touch, and it is from its own 'objective' side that the objectivity of the visible world is generated.”  These reversals constitute the flesh which Sjöholm describes as  "an excess produced in the intertwining, introducing otherness in relation to the corporeal subject's selfsameness." One sees and is seen but cannot see how this occurs. One cannot see oneself seeing, is only be aware of this though the way things become visible; they in some manner look back at me. This is a kind of narcissism of the flesh, says M-P, 

Once again, the flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 146)

French feminist Irigaray's argument, even when charted by Sjoholm, is difficult to track. But ultimately she argues that M-P's self-sustaining body represses the presence of bodies it chooses not to see. It creates the invisible. Irigaray challenges the notion that subject and object can hold reversible positions.  Sjöholm reminds us, "the subject engulfs or envelops, receives or rejects, caresses or eats the object, but never replaces it."  

Irigaray argues that Merleau-Ponty's metaphors, though sexual, do not refer to a sexualized ontology. Thus the sexualized relationship hides sex and since the male (through the vision, the gaze) is dominant, the female (through the tactile). Thus M-P's flesh has implicitly endowed with attributes of the female, and M-P does not claim any debt to maternity. (Grosz 1994) Merleau-Ponty's concern about the invisibility of the flesh sends him into increasing regressions that end in the womb. Sjohom argues what we suspect already: this regressive chiasm is linked to the exclusion of the female body, which cannot foreclose sexual difference. "What Merleau-Ponty's chiasm lacks is a distinct, symbolic division between self and other. 2  Irigaray problematizes the alterity that one makes visible.

1. Cecilia Sjöholm  "Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions” Hypatia 15.3 (2000) 92-112

Evans, F., & Lawlor, L, Eds, Chiasms. Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000
Grosz, Elizabeth,  “Lived Bodies: Phenomenology and the Flesh" in Volatile Bodies. Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, 1994
Merleau-Ponty, M The Visible and the Invisible, Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin, Routledge, 2004.  
130-55 
Olkowski, Dorothea, and Gail Weiss, Eds. Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, Penn State Press,  2010

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solitary entities and the ontological turn 

11/7/2015

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Pictureby Betul Donmez
Garcia Marquez's story of the shipwrecked sailor is supposed to be journalism, but it reads like a preface to a terrible magic. (Garcia Marquez 1986)

Luis Alejandro Velasco was the "shipwrecked sailor" Garcia Marquez interviewed for El Espectador of Bogota.  He survived a ten day ordeal at sea without food or water before landing at Categena.  Their naval vessel was so overladen with contraband, it shifted badly in a swell, sending him and seven mates overboard.  He landed on a raft with no provisions, while the other men drowned. Luis Rengifo, one mate  barely close enough to catch hold, was caught in a wave. His specter appeared to Luis as he drifted on the raft.  

The hallucinatory details of Velasco's story  require a fuller telling than I can offer here. It includes his encounter with prescient sea gulls, the ghost of his mate, and towards the 10th day, his best friend Jaime Majarrés converses with him through the night. Do these visitations haunt the young sailor as testifies against corruption despite pressure from the military? This solitary tale is not unlike Gabriel Marquez' novels that depict magical appearances, heroes tormented by guilt, and a corrupt magical state.  

According to Gabriele Marquez, his stories are not examples of magical realism. Consider them "fantastically accurate."   Rushdie cautions us not to forget about magic in the service of truth (2014).  The point Gabriel Marquez also makes in his Nobel Prize speech,  "The Solitude of Latin America," is more about the blurry line between magic and truth.  The distinction is a matter of perspective: what is the difference between a hallucination and a spectral visit?  What are the politics of either? It is the West's insistence on maintaining this divide that drives Savransky to call  ‘solitary’ the "entities whose epistemological and ontological status" remains ambivalent." (2012, 352)

Some time ago, on Facebook I posted this lovely quote from Savransky     

Unlike the more familiar ‘politics of knowledge’ which, in its emphasis on epistemology and representation, ends up implicitly picturing knowledge-practices as more or less unjust representations of a common, fixed, stable, yet inaccessible, nature, thinking an ontopolitics of knowledge attempts to make present the extent to which the historical controversies between Western and non-Western knowledge-practices constitute a veritable politics of reality.
"Politics of knowledge" refers to the way our knowledge claims are justified. Feminist, post-colonial and post structuralist critiques of the 1990's challenged a neutral Archemidean point outside reality, a God's eye view of the world.   Feminist philosopher Sarah Harding (1991:109) indicates that conventional epistemological questions must be tethered to their historical situatedness, so we must ask
  • who can be the subjects or agents of socially legitimate knowledge? what kinds of tests must beliefs pass in order to be legitimate knowledge? what kinds of things can be known?
  • can historical truths or socially situated truths count as knowledge?
  • what is the nature of objectivity?
  • what is the appropriate relationship between the researcher and his or her research subject?
  • must the researcher be disinterested, dispassioniate and socially invisible to the subject?
  • can there be 'disinterested knowledge' in a society that is deeply stratified by gender, race and class.

 If knowledge is historically situated, then our representations are also. By representation we mean a production of meaning through language. (Hall 1997)  A radical reformulation of the "disinterested knowledge" requires the inclusion of what Foucault has called "subjugated knowledges,"  other ways of knowing, and the 'epistemic disobedience'  towards those who, in the West, claim universal knowledge. 

This has worked to open a space for non-human entities (spirits, ghosts, gods) speaking in the realm of knowledge.  I've noted in the introduction to Invisible Aid, Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued for a space for gods spirits in the depiction of subaltern Indian history. But, as Savransky notes, the argument in post colonial theory is based primarily on representation. The problem of posing the existence of ghosts and gods is that there is no space in Western epistemologies, so the representational argument may not be adequate for different religious and cultural modes of being. Savransky thus takes these figures (mythological, ghostly, superhuman) to be postcolonial “solitary entities,” whose “solitude” is a result of their absence from Western epistemologies.

This shift from representation turns us to ontology, what anthropologists have called the "ontological turn."   There is thus a collapse of symbolism, not separate from the object but "concepts and things are one and these same." (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 13 cited in Paleck and Risjord 2012)  In this extended mind hypothesis considers a wider ambit for the the mind - beyond the brain and by extension to objects and bodily actions. Paleck and Risjord refer to using the abacus as the same as calculating in one's head. 

​Thus, they argue, objects create relationships, power and persons. We are to assess not what we think the objects are doing, but what they do. 

Cited
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Translated by Randolph Hogan, Knopf, 1986

Hall, Stuart.  Representation, meaning, and language. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, pp. 15–30. Thousand Oaks: Sage. 1997

Harding, Sandra Whose Science/ Whose Knowledge? Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991

____________, “Standpoint Theories: Productively Controversial”,  Hypatia 24(4) 2009: 192-200.

Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds). Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 2007

Palecek, Martin and Mark Risjord, Relativism and the Ontological Turn within Anthropology, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2013 43: 3 originally published online 17 October 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0048393112463335

Martin Savransky (2012) Worlds in the making: social sciences and the ontopolitics of knowledge, Postcolonial Studies, 15:3, 351-368, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2012.753572 

Rushdie, Salman, Magic in the Service of Truth, Sunday Book Review, New York Times, April 21, 2014

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November 07th, 2015

11/7/2015

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Irish wonder

11/7/2015

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When medieval historian Carolyn Walker Bynum writes about medieval wonder (2001), she quotes a wall slogan from the Paris student revolution of 1968 tacked up in her office: “Toute vue des choses qui n’est pas étrange est fausse.” (Every view of things that is not strange [i.e., bizarre or foreign] is false.) (2012)  Her work on medieval wonder is wonder-ful in that it questions what those communities, already so familiar with the unfamiliar, thought of the miraculous, a subject that tests our own boundaries of the real, the natural and what is "un" or "super" to it.  I would love to teach a class on a "genealogy of supernatural" -- here's one delicious medieval version.

I've since found myself wandering about in early Celtic religiousity. There is quite a bit on Celtic spirituality these days, mostly romanticizing it.  These posts below are post-its from saint stories of early monastics in rural Ireland 400-700s as Patrick and others arrived to Christianize.  The monastic movement was sweeping through Egypt, Palestine and Asia Minor at the time, better known to us the "desert fathers" and mothers. I'd never connected the clover of St Patrick with the desert sands of St. Anthony. Since Ireland had not been absorbed into the Roman empire and was so rural, it did not easily conform to the episcopate model of Roman Britain. Instead, monasticism flourished so that abbots and monks were leaders of the church, entangling saint-stories with pre-Christian practices.

Thought this might help situate these texts as forms of wonder, or at least wonder-ful for us: animal converts. I particularly love the delicate piety of the bees. 
I paste these stories from A Book of Saints and Wonders, Lady Gregory, 1902 More here

Ciaran and his vegetarian monks
St Kieran 516AD-540AD was founder of the great teaching monastery at Clonmacnoise.  Died of the yellow plague, his feast day is Sept 9. He is also remembered for having a number of colorful legends associated with his life. 

Blessed Ciaran and his Scholars
The first of the saints to be born in Ireland of the saints was Ciaran, that was of the blood of the nobles of Leinster. And the first of the wonders he did was in the island of Cleire, and he but a young child at the time. There came a hawk in the air over his head, and it stooped down before him and took up a little bird that was sitting on a nest. And pity for the little bird came on Ciaran and it was bad to him the way it was. And the hawk turned back and left the bird before him, and it half. dead and trembling; and Ciaran bade it to rise up and it rose and went up safe and well to its nest, by the grace of God.

It was Patrick bade Ciaran after that to go to the Well of Uaran, the mering where the north meets with the south in the middle part of Ireland. "And bring my little bell with you" he said "and it will be without speaking till you come to the Well." So Ciaran did that and when he reached to the Well of Uaran, for God brought him there, the little bell spoke out on the moment in a bright clear voice. And Ciaran settled himself there, and he alone, and great woods all around the place; and he began to make a little cell for himself, that was weak enough.

And one time as he was sitting under the shadow of a tree a wild boar rose up on the other side Of it; but when it saw Ciaran it ran from him, and then it turned back again as a quiet servant to him, being made gentle by God. And that boar was the first scholar and the first monk Ciaran had; and it used to be going into the wood and to be plucking rods and thatch between its teeth as if to help towards the building. And there came wild creatures to Ciaran out of the places where they were, a fox and a badger and a wolf and a doe; and they were tame with him and humbled themselves to his teach ing the same as brothers, and did all he bade them to do.

But one day the fox, that was greedy and cunning and full of malice, met with Ciaran's brogues and he stole them and went away shunning the rest of the company to his own old den, for he had a mind to eat the brogues. But that was showed to Ciaran, and he sent another monk of the monks of his family, that was the badger, to bring back the fox to the place where they all were. So the badger went to the cave where the fox was and found him, and he after eating the thongs and the ears of the brogues. And the badger would not let him off coming back with him to Ciaran, and they came to him in the evening bringing the brogues with them. And Ciaran said to the fox "O brother" he said "why did you do this robbery that was not right for a monk to do? And there was no need for you to do it" he said "for we all have food and water in common, that there is no harm in. But if your nature told you it was better for you to use flesh, God would have made it for you from the bark of those trees that are about you." Then the fox asked Ciaran to forgive him and to put a penance on him; and Ciaran did that, and the fox used no food till such time as he got leave from Ciaran; and from that out he was as honest as the rest.


Oh those blessed bees...
St. Modomnoc was a special patron of the bees. Not sure if this is his story.

The Priest and the Bees
There was a good honourable well-born priest, God's darling he was, a man holding to the yoke of Christ; and it happened he went one day to attend on a sick man. And as he was going a swarm of bees came towards him, and he having the Blessed Body of Christ with him there. And when he saw the swarm he laid the Blessed Body on the ground and gathered the swarm into his bosom, and went on in that way upon his journey, and forgot the Blessed Body where he had laid it. And after a while the bees went back from him again, and they found the Blessed Body and carried it away between them to their own dwelling place, and they gave honour to it kindly and made a good chapel of wax for it, and an altar and a chalice and a pair of priests, shaping them well out of wax to stand before Christ's Body. But as for the priest, when he remembered it he went looking for it carefully, penitently, and could not find it in any place. And it went badly with him and he went to confession, and with the weight of the trouble that took hold of him he was fretting through the length of a year. And there came an angel to him at the end of the year and told him the way the Body of Christ was sheltered and honoured. And the angel bade him to bring all the people to see that wonder; and they went there and when they saw it a great many of them believed.

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second naivite

11/7/2015

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I'm attracted to French philosopher Paul Ricoeur by association. First, because I love Irish philosopher Richard Kearney's work on the imagination influenced by Ricoeur, and second because Ricoeur taught at U of Chicago when I was there, and hallowed the halls with his erudition.  He is so prolific that his ouvre overwhelms. His focus, quite simply, is an anthropology of the self. He argues for  narrative unity of a human life, and responsible action. By the 1970's he was developing a hermeneutic phenomenology. (The link offers a good  explanation.)

Ah, UofC, symbolized by gargoyles leering down at us from those greystone arches. I endured both terror at the intellectual arrogance and boredom mining ponderous texts. There was also ecstasy when you finally understood a concept that set your brain on fire. I first heard of  "second naiveté" in a class I was auditing at the Divinity School.  I try it on from time to time. Ricoeur's second naiveté offers a way of "re-reading" the world. He deals with sacred text. Ricoeur offers a hermeneutics where one understands ones' self "in front of" the text, and learns to taken in new possibilities of being.

In order to get to these postures, Riceour travels through the "philosophy of suspicion."  Since hermeneutics is a search for the hidden, beyond manifest content, Riceour reviews strategies of demystification of this "philosophy of suspicion" from its three masters: Marx, Nietzche, and Freud.  They consider "surface" reality as false. They address the problem of false consciousness of the self, society, and religion. But this suspicion turns on its head, because "The lie of consciousness, of consciousness as a lie, suspicious as to consciousness claiming absolute knowledge...the genuine Cogito must be gained by the false cogito that masks it." (1970, 161)   This move only deconstructs; it does not rebuild.  What is the opposite of suspicion? According to Ricoeur, it is faith.

Ricoeur turns to a "hermeneutics of metaphor" to find a way out of suspicion, but a hermeneutics of sacred text, itself a minefield for the protagonists of suspicion.  He take up (because he's only considering the bible), the mythopoetic language of psalm, proverb, parable.  He offers us two approaches to sacred text, both set as naivetés.  In the first naiveté, the text is taken at face value.  This naiveté cannot stand the onslaught of suspicion. Ultimately, the reader  steps back, takes a "critical distance" from the supernatural affirmations of the story.  We often do stay there.. "Beyond the desert  of criticism, we wish to be called again." (1967, 349).  The hermeneutics of the second naiveté is “a retrieval of the original meaning of the symbol.”  (1978, XX)

For Ricoeur metaphor is the nature of language where literal meaning has collapsed. This is the tension between the  "is" and "is not" of metaphor. The second naivete is a way to embrace both elements.  Now reading the text symbolically,  we attend to its meaning "in the full responsibility of autonomous thought." (1967, 350) We engage the texts for ourselves, not mediated by religious authority. This is a hermeneutics of testimony. By this he means a two-fold act of self-consciousness and "historical understanding based on the signs the absolute gives of itself. The signs of the absolute's self-disclosure are at the same time signs in which consciousness recognizes itself." (cf Hall, 2012, p78)

This second naiveté is a “hermeneutics of restoration.”  I'm planning to walk into that. 

Ricoeur, Paul.
______The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
______Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 (1965).
______The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978 (1975).
Hall, David, Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Imperative: The Creative Tension between Love and Justice, SUNY Press, 2012


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Celtic Twilight..

9/7/2014

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We are ending 2015, the year of Yeats. Irish nationalist poet Yates believed in fairies and he spent many hours interviewing Irish peasants who also did.  In Celtic Twilight, Yates asks, "Have you ever seen a fairy or such like?" The reply:  "Amn't I annoyed with them."   Yates thus embarks on his mission to capture the remnants of "Irish fairy folk-faith."  The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue [sidheóg], a diminutive of "shee" in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee [daoine sidhe] (fairy people). Do they die? Blake saw a fairy's funeral; but in Ireland we say they are immortal.

So, Yates is among the believers.  In an odd choice of allies, he offers an interchange between Socrates and Phaedrus as they amble beside a stream.  Phaedrus wants to know if there really is a place where "Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia from the banks of the Ilissus." Socrates is coy, "that's the tradition."  But when Phaedrus asks for the "exact spot," you can imagine Socrates waves casually to a place  "about a quarter-of-a-mile lower down, where you cross to the temple of Artemis, and I think that there is some sort of an altar of Boreas at the place."  So, is this encounter real, Phaedrus asks, " I beseech you to tell me, Socrates, do you believe this tale?

And Socrates' answer, does it disappoint Phaedrus -- and Yates? The wise doubt, he first says, and I could find a rational explanation for Orithyia's death.  He returns to the problem of place - the place where she is said to have been carried off by Boreas. It could be this one or another, since there are other speculations.  But he dismisses the story,  since the "inventor" of the tale, once begun, "must go on and rehabilitate centaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace and numberless other inconceivable and portentous monsters." Socrates doesn't care where.  "Shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my business, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous."

Yates does consider it his business, and he does care: not only where, but who, and when, and what they say.  In Celtic Twilight he collects short stories among "inventors", the story-tellers of fairy encounters,  and in it he intersperses his own encounters. In one collection,  Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Edited and Selected by W. B. Yeats, 1888 he offers various stories, an in Celtic Twilight, an encounter of his own:

One day I was walking over a bit of marshy ground close to Inchy Wood when I felt, all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had swept over me a sense of weakness, of dependence on a great personal Being somewhere far off yet near at hand. No thought of mine had prepared me for this emotion, for I had been pre-occupied with Ængus and Edain, and with Mannanan, son of the sea. That night I awoke lying upon my back and hearing a voice speaking above me and saying, 'No human soul is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any human soul is infinite, for no other soul can satisfy the same need in God.' A few nights after this I awoke to see the loveliest people I have ever seen. A young man and a young girl dressed in olive-green raiment, cut like old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside. I looked at the girl and noticed that her dress was gathered about her neck into a kind of chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff embroidery which represented ivy-leaves. But what filled me with wonder was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now. It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful, but it had neither, one would think, the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or in speculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad. I thought for a moment that she might be the beloved of Ængus, but how could that hunted, alluring, happy, immortal wretch have a face like this? Doubtless she was from among the children of the Moon, but who among them I shall never know. (The Celtic Twilight, by William Butler Yeats, [1893, 1902], 115)
NOTE: So here's an article on Yates and new animism. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, “Yeats, Fairies, and the new Animism,” New Literary History, Volume 43, Number 1, Winter 2012, pp. 137-157

Where do we go now for our own investigations? There is so much Ontological Spin among American anthropologists these days. In search of new forms of being. Certainly the claim of multiple ontologies is a cosmopolitic as others a lot smarter than I have claimed.   But I keep turning to this question: Is there retrieval, re-entry into plural worlds? Is there a way to re-spacialize and re-populate post-post modern life with non-ordinary worlds and overlapping ontologies intersecting with our own and laying various claims on us?  Is there a way past the tired dismissals of superstitious, esoteric, primitive? Despite Latour as Robin Hood and his lusty ontological bandits,  I can't feel the lived world of it. It remains a  philosophical jibe.
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unrecognizability of the miracle

5/11/2014

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I am intrigued by Eliade's notion of the camouflage of the sacred.1  He refers to surviving beliefs and practices as camouflaged in the banality of a modern world at the ultimate stage of desacralization. Eliade and Henry Corbin offer us a way back to the hidden, what Bateson calls the "epistemology of the sacred," though it was never clear why.2  I am interested in the way the sacred reveals itself, acts on its own recognizance. 

We must first understand that for Eliade, religion was an independent category and the irreducibility of  "the sacred" that was its "essence." Following Otto, Eliade sees religion as an aspect of consciousness and the sacred an ahistorical component of world.  For something to be sacred, it must manifest itself as a hierophany.  This is the  function of myth.  First, myth narrates sacred history; it explains origins of current world traced back to primordial beginnings  (Eliade 1963, 181).  Second, myth serves as a model for human action, and third, humans reenacting exemplary acts of the gods, "magically reenter the Great Time, the sacred time."  According to Eliade, this encounter with the divine rejuvenates humans.  

Among the many manifestations of hierophant,  Eliade was most concerned about the "dialectic of hierophanies."  This is where the sacred expresses itself in something other than itself (26).  It is an earlier version of his concept of camouflaged myths, ancient stories retold in contemporary plays, movies, and books. (Segal 2001)  Modern versions include Superman or the eschatology of Marxists who reproduce the motif of the original golden age, the fall, the battle between good and evil, triumph of good, and restoration of the golden age.  Eliade argues that an eternal mythic power must be religious, unlike Jung and Campbell who allow for secular myths. 

Eliade's work has been dismissed --even eviscerated  -- by many scholars, but I am intrigued by his notion of camouflage of the sacred.  As a prolific novelist of magical realist tales drawn from the myths he gathered, he offers us the "unrecognizability of the miracle,"  how mythological interventions in profane reality are not seen. (Calinescu, 1982 157) Okuyama Michiaki tracks Eliade's preoccupation with the “camouflage of miracle in history"  in Oe Kenzaburo's novels and uncovers along the way an "Autobiographical Fragment" of Eliade. It is here Eliade addresses the problem of the "unrecognizability of the miracle" and how to find the hidden miracle among "manifestations which do not apparently differ in any way from millions of cosmic or historical manifestations (a sacred stone is not different, apparently, from any other stone, etc.)." (cf Michiaki 123-124) 

All those stones, so little time. How do we find the sacred one?  Gregory Bateson tells us not to try.  Don't divulge the secret, he warns us.  He argues about this with his daughter Catherine Bateson in Angels Fear. Epistemology of the Sacred.

Bateson argues that the sacred is usually protected through secrecy and not communicating is important so as to contain this powerful knowledge. He reminds us that the ancients (mostly Greek) considered discovery, invention or knowledge dangerous (Prometheus' punishment for stealing fire, or Adam and Eve for eating the apple).

Here is a Balinese tale he tells in which the folk figure must conceal knowledge and the fact that he is concealing.
Adji Darma (literally “Father Patient” or “Father Long Suffering”) was walking in the forest one day and there he found two snakes copulating. The male snake was just an ordinary viper but the female was a cobra princess: they were breaking caste rules. So Adji Darma got a stick and beat them. They slithered off into the bushes. The cobra girl went straight to her daddy, the king of all the cobras, and told him: “That old man, he’s no good. He tried to rape me in the forest.”

The snake king said, “Oh, did he?” and called for Adji Darma. When the old man came before him, the king said, “What did happen in the bushes?” and Adji told him.
The king said, “Yes. Just what I thought. You did right to beat them an you shall be rewarded. Henceforth you shall understand the language of the animals. But there is one condition: If you ever tell anybody that you know the language of the animals, this gift will be taken from you.”

So Adji went home and in bed that night, as he lay beside his wife, he listened to the gecko lizards up in the thatch. The geckos say “heh! heh!” with a sound like the laughter of people who laugh at dirty stories. Indeed it was dirty stories that they laughed at, and Adji Darma with his new knowledge was able to hear and understand the stories. He laughed too.

His wife said, “Adji, what are you laughing at?”
“Oh ... oh ... nothing, dear.”
“But you were laughing. You were laughing at something.”
“No. It was just a thought I had, dear, it wasn’t important.”
“Adji, you were laughing at me. You don’t love me anymore.” And so on.
But still he did not tell her what he was laughing at, because he was not willing to lose the language of the animals.
His wife worried at this more and more and finally became sick, went into a decline, and died.

Then the old man began to feel terribly guilty and remorseful. He [[p_079]] had killed his wife just because he selfishly wanted to go on knowing the language of the animals.

So he decided to have a suttee which would be the reverse of the ordinary. In an ordinary suttee, the widow jumps into the pyre on which her husband’s body is being burned. He would jump into the flames of his wife’s cremation.  A great pyre of wood was therefore built and decorated, as was the custom, with flowers and colored leaves; and beside it he had the people build a platform with a ladder up to it so that from this platform he could jump into the flames.

Before the cremation, he went up onto the platform to see that it was as it should be and how it would be to jump. While he was there, two goats came by in the grass below, a billy goat and a pregnant nanny, and they were talking.
Nanny said, “Billy, get me some of those leaves. Those pretty leaves. I must have some to eat.”
But Billy said, “Baaaaaaaa.”
Nanny said, “Billy, please. You don’t love me, Billy. If you loved me, you would get them. You don’t love me anymore.” And so on.
But Billy only said, “Baaa. Baaa.”
Adji Darma listened to this and suddenly he had an idea. He said to himself, “Ha! That’s what I ought to have said to her,” and he practiced saying it two or three times, “Baaa! Baaa!” Then he got down off the platform and went home.

He lived happily ever after.

This story doesn't have the logical storyline we expect in Western texts. There are many tales of humans who understand the language of animals, (see these sources too) and how animals (particularly serpents) understand each other. (Keuhn 2011) They are usually committed to secrecy, and don't turn out well.

But what does it have to do with secrets? His daughter, Catherine Bateson is  less concerned with the inconsistencies of this story, than how secrecy  protects the powerful. She wonders if instead if  "certain kinds of secrecy do in fact function as markers for the sacred"  and that sacred secrets are designed to be revealed. For example, she offers,  initiates are whipped by masked dancers who then unmask and reveal they are just dancers, not gods. At some point, in the ritual process the initiates mask themselves.


DAUGHTER: And you couldn’t have a god in the system, since omniscience would destroy flexibility. You need a different word... unknowing or mystery, preferably a word that would highlight the fact that a lack of self-consciousness is right in the center of this business of noncommunication
...The fact of unknowing as a factor for unity and flexibility in systems. When it is important that systems sustain internal boundaries by a sort of profound reflexive ignorance.

FATHER: I have been talking about the sacred as related to a knowledge of the whole – but the other side of that coin may be a certain necessary gradient of knowledge. The next step will be to look for analogous kinds of noncommunication that are not artifacts of human cultural systems. 

DAUGHTER: Daddy, there’s something else in the Adji Darma story. The question “Do you love me?” doesn’t work, does it, any more than Joe Adam’s instructing you to record spontaneity or photographing prayer or prescribing sea snakes or even getting the violin right one note at a time? The all masquerade as reporting, but they change the context of the interaction.

 
So what do we have here? The importance of the secret, the unknown,  in modulating information in a system premised on uneven distribution.  In an 
era of such pervasive confession, 24/7 reportage, and surveillance, maybe the camouflage is a necessary aspect of modern life in which too much is knowable. Perhaps  "unrecognizability"  preserves the secret for only the initiated.  Secrecy increases the value of sacred knowledge, but only when it is revealed.  And in any case, "camouflaged miracles" are only considered miracles to those who consider them such, who participate in what Hervieu-Leger calls a "chain of memory."  

 One person's miracle is another's unreal. Who is more literal, the believer or the skeptic? And might the literalness of skeptics suffer from a deficit of the unreal?  Eliade borrowed Bachelard's notion of the "function of the unreal," as a way to reflect on his literary bent on magical realism. The unreal has a necessary function, Bachelard, writes, "A person deprived of the function of the unreal is just as neurotic as the one deprived of the reality function.  It could even be said that difficulties with the function of the unreal have repercussions for the reality function. If the imagination's function of openness is insufficient, then perception itself is blunted." (7) 

For Bachelard,  play, make believe, daydreaming, fantasy are necessary elements in imaginative life, a soulful existence. Bateson asks,  "what sorts of ideas create distraction or confusion in the operation of that matrix so that creativity is destroyed?" Perhaps too much talk, the idea that everything must be shared destroys our sense of mystery.  Perhaps we need the imaginative (imaginary) as a necessary mechanism to cultivate the secrets not to tell, the places that evade map quest, and languages we know but do not share.  Perhaps in the age at the end of privacy, the camoflague of the sacred,  its unrecognizability is the only way to preserve it before we find it again.


FOOTNOTES
1. In History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1, Eliade announced that he would deal with the camouflage of the sacred.
2.  Eliade, the demigod of History of Religions, has been legitimately "deconstructed" at the personal, political and philosophical spheres. One might feel a little sympathetic to his demise at the hands of the intellectual red guard's "cultural revolution."  Took earlier demo-gods and put them in dunce-caps.  That's the sentiment of Wasserstrom's Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Only Gershom Scholem escapes the cap. These theorists did contribute to the "myth and symbol" era of religion and anthropology; their work verged on esotericism and a mystical emphasis on transcendence. Though Jungians love Corbin's realm of the "imaginal," he is dismissed by academics, and Wasserstrom condemns him as a fascist.3. Martin Savransky, 'Worlds in The Making: Social Sciences and the Ontopolitics of Knowledge', Postcolonial Studies, 2012, 15, 3, 351-368

Cited
Calinescu, Matei, The function of the unreal: reflections on Mircea Eliade's short fiction, In Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade, Eds, Girardot, N. J., Ricketts, Mac Linscott.Seabury Press, 1982, 

Bachelard, Gaston, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement,  trans Edith and C Frederick Farrell, The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988 

Bateson, Gregory, and Catherine Bateson,  Angels Fear. Epistemology of the Sacred. NJ: Hampton Press, 2004

Eliade, Mircea, Autobiography. Vol 1: 1907-1937. Journey East, Journey West, trans Mac Linscott Ricketts. SF: Harper and Row, 1981
______Myth and Reality, trans Willard R Trask, NY Harper and Row, 1963
______Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, trans Philip Mairet, NY Harper Torchbooks, 1967, 25-26
 ______Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward, 1958 xiii

Chin-Hong, Chung, Mircea Eliade's Dialectic of Sacred and Profane and Creative Hermeneutics,  In The International Eliade, Ed Bryan Rennie, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007, 187-208

Kuehn, Sara, The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Pre-Islamic Art, BRILL, 2011

Murphy, Tim, Eliade, Subjectivity, and Hermeneutics, In Changing Religious Worlds: The meaning and end of Mircea Eliade, Edited by Bryan Rennie, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001, 35-48

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    Kathryn (Kerry) Poethig 

    I teach Global Studies in California, study feminism, religion and peacemaking in SEAsia,  I've taken on this Invisible Aid project and decided to blog it as I go.  This work sits in the intersection of political, metaphysical and personal imaginal worlds.

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