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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

Savransky, Martin. Worlds in the making: social sciences and the ontopolitics of knowledge, Postcolonial Studies, (2013) 15:3, 351-368, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2012.753572

Segal, Robert. Are There Modern Myths? In Changing Religious Worlds: The meaning and end of Mircea Eliade, Edited by Bryan Rennie, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001, 25-34

Strenski, Ivan, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Levi-Strauss, and Malinowski. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 1987

Michiaki, Okuyama, Camouflage and Epiphany: The Discovery of the Sacred in Mircea Eliade and Oe Kenzaburo,  In The International Eliade, Ed Bryan Rennie, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007,  229-246

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Part II: Learn how to Learn/ Recursive Epistemology

10/21/2013

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...“apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it” (Ingold 1996, 121; Poirier 2004, 61). 
Picturehttp://art-educ4kids.weebly.com/aboriginal-art-and-patterning.html
The idea of statue consecration revolutionized my  own relationship to the Buddha. It invokes what Poirer and others have called a "relational ontology" though not quite as they intend it. This  links Henny to  Gotama  so we should investigate it further - open our own eyes - before returning to the Buddha's likenesses. 

Our entanglement with technology has revolutionized the way social theorists reflect on human relationship to things.  

One of the best full investigations of this is via archeology, a field devoted to interpreting things.
In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects by Bjørnar Olsen  painstakingly theorizes how through mass culture and manufacturing, critical theorists called for a rejection of things and now have reconciled human relationships to things by de-centering the human. 

This central argument is a material-semiotic relationship among humans and non humans in which what is real is reliant on its relationship, an actor network in which all elements of the network are actors - or rather actants to replace the assumption that humans were the only agents of any event.  Latour argues that action is ‘not a property of humans but of an association of actants’ (Latour, 1999: 182; emphasis in original). 
  
As Latour, Cellon and Law describe what has been called Actor Network Theory (ANT), relationships as a central feature of a cosmological upturn - humans, animals, objects assembled to create an event or action. Latour should be credited with turning objects as ‘matters-of-fact’ into uncertain and disputed ‘matters-of-concern’ (Latour, 1996a; 2000; 2002)

Folding 

Bringing a thing to life
So, then, who or what - brings a thing to life?

Anthropologists have long encountered indigenous community's theories of being, but recently there has been a stronger trend to take these ontologies as a challenge to the substantive Western notion of being.  

What methodologies help us encounter worlds unlike ours in their relationship to the unseen? These Others are usually aboriginal, or poor and "superstitious" or variously "non-rational."  They are historically an irresistible target for economic integration,  educational assistance and civilizational uplift. 

Deborah Rose Bird's reflexive epistemology allows her to be open to Other intersubjectivities.  Rose Bird is one of a number of ecologically reflective ethnographers  who have studied aboriginal communities in Canada and Australia.  Goulet and Miller as editors of Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field propose that anthropologists move out of their "taken-for-granted body of knowledge (academically and worldy) and truly enter the realm of the Other's lifeworld."  Bird Rose's article is among the  contributors in this volume who refer to "extraordinary" experiences that shook their original skepticism. These occurred as religious conversions, in visions, often in dreams. Goulet and Miller are not concerned with "becoming native," a charge intended to discipline anthropologists who have lost perspective of their project and are no longer "objective."  More often than not, the anthropologist's  "extraordinary" experiences in the field do not appear in their monographs.  In this sense, this collection and Goulet's earlier Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters (1994) refuse to "reverse the charge" as we used to say in the old days when there were collect calls. (For millennials this means a phone call that you bill to the people you are calling.)  They take responsibility for their engagement - often unbidden- in someone else's world.  Bird Rose's reflection on recursive methodology is one of many (often referring to Fabian's Out of our Minds)  who are changed by encounter.  

Deborah Bird Rose's work among Australian Aborigines promotes an ethical ecological anthropology.  She argues that an epistemological transformation was a necessary aspect of her learning process as an ethnographer.  But one must "learn how to learn."  For this, she cites Bateson's call for "detero-learning,"  a reflexive process of participant observation that requires one's whole being.  "This openness leads to an anthropology that is dialogical, reflexive, and attentive to process, and that ex- tends beyond the human and into the lives of plants, animals, and all manner of extraordinary beings and modes of communication." (89) 

For Bird Rose, a recursive epistemology is a "situated connectivity," a process of knowledge production that occurs when both knower and known are mutually embedded in an encounter and knowledge is exchanged and changes both parties.  She defines it via Bateson as 

...events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe” (Harries-Jones 1995, 3). Recursions are iterations and entanglements; they are “rampant” in ecological systems (Harries-Jones 1995, 183) within which human societies are embedded. ...The anthropologist’s thought is shaped by her teachers as her life shifts more deeply into relationships with people, places, and concepts that become increasingly constitutive of her own thought and being. While fostering porous proximities, a recursive epistemology does not lead toward homogeneity. Rather, it works productively with difference, change, and exchange.  (91-92)
Picture
http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~rclayton/web-pages/s11-503/recursion.jpg

This photo is clever trick on the nature of recursion, but it does not express the rich connectedness that Rose Bird via Bateson describes.  Recursion in this case is an important feature of computer programming. (You notice that the regress will continue unless you direct it to STOP.)  But in Bateson's  cybernetics,  recursion is not so geometrical.1   It is "entangled" and the knowledge one gains informs the knowledge one gleans. This requires an openness to mystery, and a responsibility to what we learn. 

Rose Bird situates this in Northern Territory of Australia and "friend and teacher Jessie Wirrpa." Already, then, the "informant" is the teacher.  Jessie's world included the dead, the living, and other creatures. On a walkabout, Jessie "called out" to her ancestors, 

“Give us fish,” she would call out, “the kids are hungry.”.... When the cockatoos squawked and flew away, Jessie laughed because they were making a fuss about nothing. When the march flies bit us, we knew the crocs were laying their eggs, and Jessie began to think about taking walks to those places....The world was always communicating, and Jessie was a skilled listener and observer. (91)

Bird Rose speaks to root principles that involve an acceptance of a world of patterns, filled with both human and non-human sentience based on an "ethic of intersubjective attention in a sentient world where life happens because living things take notice." This "taking notice" is the most important part of her work as a participant observer who is learning to learn.  And ask Bird Rose "takes notice," the questions, perceptions, hypothesis she came with transform. (92)

In time, Jessie dies, and Bird Rose tries to act on the practices she has learned. She wants to visit a river to honor Jessie, but the first times she goes, she does not "call out". Only later, when she visits a river that she and Jessie visited together, can she "call out" with clarity. When she reflects on this, she believes it is because the  "world at that time was not just a place, it was a presence. I could hear awareness, and so I could call out." (94)

But this profound moment, ironically made her feel voiceless in the academy. 

These boundaries, these limits to what is sayable, are made evident primarily by being breached, and that rarely happens, so usually it may not be apparent that in an academic context that is founded in seminars, lectures, letters, articles, books, and coffee breaks, there are actually some terrible silences.

For Rose Bird,  recursive epistemology has transformed her way of noticing and being.  Normative anthropology's reductionist approach to other worlds is now a double death.  She continues to argue from here to the ways this double death leads to the devaluation of the environment.  This process then, is not only epistemological. It is an ethical response to the other, and a method that changes one's positionally altogether.  What began as a doctoral study becomes an call for engagement. The hidden anthropologist's hand is now visible and sometimes it is not clear who is writing whom, Jessie or Deborah. But this work on epistemology - on knowing - has shifted of late to ontology, being. And we shall take the figures Rose Bird invokes at the start of her article when we consider relational ontology. 


Endnote
1. Norbert Weiner defines cybernetics as the control and communication in the animal and machine; it is a study of how systems function through feedback and control.

Cited
Bird Rose,  Deborah. Recursive Epistemologies and an Ethics of Attention, In Extraordinary Anthropology. Transformations in the Field, Eds Jean-Guy  Goutlet and Bruce Granville Miller,  University of Nebraska Press, 2007, 88-102

Bird-David, Urit

Harries-Jones, P.  A recursive vision: Ecological understanding and Gregory Bateson. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995

Poirer, Sylvie, Reflections on Indigenous Cosmopolitics - Poetics, Anthropologica, Vol 50, No. 1, L'experience et la problematique de la (de)colonisation: Autour de l'oeuvre d'Eric Schwimmer. (De)colonization as Experience and Field of Enquiry: The Work of Eric Schwimmer (2008), pp 75-85 

Schwimmer, Eric, John Clammer, Sylvie Poirer, Figured Worlds, Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations 2004,  Tim Ingold 2000: 149

Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Paris, Hermann et Cie - MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1948
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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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