Things as concepts: anthropology and pragmatology

Things as concepts: anthropology and pragmatology Martin Holbraad Within anthropology, much has been written about the possibility of a posthumanist critical social science that is able to emancipate things (objects, artefacts, materiality, etc.) from the ensnaring epistemological and ontological bonds of humanism, logicentrism and other modernist imaginaries. 1 The aim of this essay is to take this project further by exploring the possibilities for an anthropological analytics that is able to allow things by which I mean something akin to things themselves, though only in the strict heuristic sense that I shall specify presently to generate their own terms of analytical engagement. Might the feted posthumanist emancipation of the thing be shown to consist in its peculiar capacity to unsettle whatever ontological assumptions we, as analysts, might make about it (including, perhaps, the ontological premises of a posthumanist turn itself)? Might things decide for themselves what they are, and in so doing emancipate themselves from us who would presume 1 E.g. Marilyn Strathern, "Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of images", in Culture and History in the Pacific, ed. J. Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions of the Finish Anthropological Society, 1990), 25-44; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel Miller, "Materiality: an introduction", in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50. 17

to tell them? Might they, if you like, become their own thing-theorists, acting as the originators (rather than the objects) of our analytical conceptualisations? 2 Such questions, I take it, would consummate the promise of a properly savage thought : objects acting not merely as conduits for the thinking of the people anthropologist study (those they used to call savages ), but rather as a conduit for anthropological thinking itself. Objects, then, become the basis not only for savages science of the concrete, as Lévi-Strauss himself would have it, 3 but also for thoughts that are savage enough to unsettle the conceptual economy of analysis itself, including anthropological analysis (which I shall take here as my point of departure). Let me illustrate what such a savage concretion of anthropology might look like with reference to aché one of the most basic notions involved in the prestigious Afro-Cuban tradition of divination of Ifá, which I have been studying ethnographically in Cuba since 1998. The power of powder Much like the notorious notion of mana in Oceania, aché is a term that babalawos, which is what men who are initiated into the cult of Ifá are called, use in a wide variety of contexts. Most salienty, they use it to refer both in the abstract to their power (poder) or capacity (facultad) to divine, for which they are most renown ( to divine you must have aché, as they say); and, much 2 Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, And (Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology, 2002). 3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). more concretely, to certain powders that they consider to be a prime ritual ingredient for making divinities appear and speak during divination. Among the many ways in which specially prepared powders are deemed necessary to Ifá ritual, perhaps the most striking is its role as a register (registro) for the divinatory configurations through which Orula, the god of divination, is said to be able to speak during the ritual. Spread on the surface of the consecrated diving-tray that babalawos use for the most ceremonious divinations they conduct for their clients (particularly during the initiation of neophytes), this powder becomes the medium through which Orula s words appear. This they do in the form of a series of signs (signos, also referred to in the original Yoruba as oddu) that are marked (marcar) by the babalawo on the surface of the powder, following a complex divinatory procedure in which consecrated palm-nuts are used to generate distinct divinatory configurations, each corresponding to its own sign. Sometimes considered as guises of Orula himself (or his paths or representatives ), these figures, comprising eight single or double lines drawn by the babalawo with his middle and ring finger in the powder, are considered as potent divinities in their own right that come out (salen) in the divination: crouching around the divining board as they mark the sign, the babalawos and their consultants are in the presence of a divine being, a symbol that stands for itself if ever there was one. 4 Crucially, babalawos emphasise that the powder itself is an indispensable ingredient for effecting these elicitations of the divine. Properly prepared according to secret recipes that only 4 Sensu Roy Wagner, Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 18 19

babalawos know, aché de Orula, as the powder is referred to in this context, has the power to render divinities present. Achépowder does this not only by providing the surface on which they can appear on the divining-tray, but also because it constitutes a necessary ingredient in the consecration of each of the various objects used in the divination, including the divining tray, the palm-nuts and various other items babalawos must have consecrated for divinatory use during their own initiation. As they explain, none of these items work unless they are properly consecrated, and this must involve charging them with acheses, i.e. with aché-powders, according to secret procedures. Concepts versus things Elsewhere I have explained ways in which the notion of aché so blatantly exemplifies some of the central preoccupations that inform Lévi-Strauss s theorization of savage thought, such as the antinomies he associated with floating signifiers that can signify anything e.g. both power and powder because, in themselves, they mean nothing. 5 Here we may draw attention only to the fact that, viewed from within the prism of the kinds anthropological preoccupations Lévi-Strauss s argument on floating 5 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. F. Barker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). See Martin Holbraad, " The power of powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or mana again)", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed. A. Henare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 189-225. See also Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). signifiers itself exemplifies, the case of aché raises classical anthropological conundrums about the rationality credentials of what he playfully called savage thought. Much as with classic anthropological controversies about so-called apparently irrational beliefs (Nuer twins being birds, Bororo men being red macaws, and so on), we seem here to be confronted with a series of notions that are counter-intuitive to say the least. Certainly, it would appear that the terminological coincidence of aché as both power and powder corresponds to an ontological one, since, as babalawos affirm, a diviner s power to elicit divinities into presence is irreducibly a function of his capacity to use the consecrated powders at his disposal as an initiate. Powder, in this sense, is power. And this would seem to raise the classical anthropological question: why might Cuban diviners and their clients believe such a notion? How do we explain this apparently irrational belief anthropologically? It should be noted, however, that this classical way of posing the question draws its power from what one might call its own inherent perversity. In order even to ask why certain people might believe that a certain form of powder has the power to elicit certain divinities into presence, one has first to take for granted that this could not (or should not) be the case in the first place. In particular, assuming that the pertinent anthropological question is why people might believe in this way that powder is power turns on the corollary assumption that such a belief can be parsed as the particular way in which the people in question represent the objects in their midst, namely, in this case, representing (signifying, imagining, socially constructing etc.) powder as power. And this in turn relies on that foundational ontological axiom of straight-thinking modernism, namely the distinction 20 21

between things as they are in the world and the various and variable concepts that people may attach to them. Indeed, as long as the analysis of aché remains within the terms of an axiomatic distinction between things and concepts, it cannot but ask the question in terms of representations, beliefs, social constructions and so on. Since we know that powder is just that dusty thing there on the diviner s tray, the question cannot but be why Cubans might think that it is also a form of power. The move to posthumanist analyses of things in anthropology has been motivated partly by a desire to avoid precisely this way of raising questions, and in particular to overcome the blatant perversity of seeking to parse alternatives to our own metaphysic of concepts versus things in terms of just that metaphysic (for Cuban diviners powder is power; we, on the other hand, ask why they might believe it to be so, since, from first metaphysical principles, it can t). Hence the penchant in recent writings on material culture (and note the telling ontological oxymoron) for so-called relational ontological premises which seek, in one way or other, to erase or otherwise compromise the concept versus thing divide. 6 Still, rather than placating the conceptual imperialism of modernist metaphysics by binding things to an alter- 6 E.g. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Tim Ingold, " Materials against materiality", Archaeological Dialogues 14, no.1 (2007): 1-16; Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Langham: AltaMira Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010). native (e.g. relational, symmetrical, vital, vibrant ) ontological order, my interest here is in the possibility of freeing things from any a priori ontological determination whatsoever, so as to allow them to dictate, as it were, their own terms of analytical engagement. As I propose to show, this most crucially involves eliding the concept/thing divide, not as a matter of substantive ontological revision, but rather as point only of analytical methodology. Given space constraints, I present such a prospect as a series of three methodological moves. 7 Step I: thing-as-heuristic If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered, somehow, also as non-things (e.g. a putatively material powder that is also a putatively immaterial power, as in our example), 8 then, anthropologically speaking, the notion of a thing can at most have a heuristic, rather than an analytical, role. The initial 7 For more detailed discussion see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, "Introduction", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically, ed. Wenare et al (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-31; Martin Holbraad, "Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography of things", Cambridge Archaeological Journal v19 n3 (2009 10 01): 431-441; Martin Holbraad, Can the Thing Speak?, OAP Press, Working Paper Series #7 (2011), available at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wpcontent/uploads/2011/01/holbraad-can-the-thing-speak2.pdf 8 For classic arguments to this effect with reference to the things anthropologists call gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Cf. Amiria Henare et al.,, Introduction, 16-23. 22 23

analytical task, in other words, cannot be to add to the theoretical purchase of the term thing by proposing new ways to think of it e.g. as a site of human beings objectification, 9 an index of agency, 10 an on-going event of assemblage, 11 or what have you. Rather it must be effectively to de-theorise it, by emptying it out of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a pure ethnographic form ready to be filled out contingently according only to its own ethnographic exigencies. To return to our example: if calling the powder babalawos use a thing implies that it could not, properly speaking, also be a form of metaphysical power, then let us not call it a thing in any sense other than merely as an ontologically and analytically vacuous heuristic identifier merely a tag for identifying it as an object of study, with no metaphysical prejudice, and particularly with no prejudice as to what it might be, including questions of what it being a thing might even mean. Step II: concept = thing If the first step towards letting things set their own terms of analytical engagement involves emptying them out of any a priori 9 Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Daniel Miller, Materiality: an introduction, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50. 10 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 11 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). metaphysical contents, the second is geared towards allowing them to be filled by (potentially) alternative ones in each ethnographic instance. We may brand this methodological injunction by way of a further heuristic formula, namely concepts = things. According to this methodological edict, instead of treating all the things that people say of and do to or with things as modes of representing them (i.e. as manners of attaching various concepts to the things in question by way of social construction, as per the standard anthropological way of thinking), we may treat them as modes of defining what these things are. This renders wide open precisely questions about what kinds of things things might be: what materiality might be, objectification, agency all that is now up for grabs, as a matter of ethnographic contingency and the analytical work it forces upon us. So, to return again to the Cuban example, the idea here is to treat all the things babalawos and their clients supposedly believe about their aché-powders as elements of a conceptual definition of what such a thing might actually be: Cuban diviners do not believe that powder is a form of power, but rather define it as such. To the extent that our own default assumption is that powder is not to be defined as power (it s just a dusty thing, we assume), the challenge then must be to reconceptualise those very notions and their many empirical and analytical corollaries (powder, power, deity etc. but also thing, concept, divinity etc.) in a way that would render the ethnographically-given definition of powder as power reasonable, rather than an absurd belief. I have sought at length elsewhere to specify the full gamut of ways in which different kinds of data may enter into the efforts of analytical conceptualization that problems of the powder-is- 24 25

power necessitate for anthropologists. 12 Crucially, a sound ethnographic understanding is necessary in order even to formulate such problems in the first place, let alone solve them. For example, since what powder might be in Ifá divination depends on the notion of power that is at stake in this ritual activity, part of an attempt to articulate the question involves developing the cosmological conundrum that lies at its core: if power, in this ethnographic context, refers to babalawos ability to render divinities present as signs during divination, then are we not in some pertinent sense dealing here with a version of the ageold theo-ontological conundrum, so familiar in the anthropology of religion, 13 of how entities that are imagined as transcendent might under certain conditions in this case by ritual means that involve the use of powder as an indispensable component be rendered immanent? Conceptualising powder as power, then, requires us to understand how Afro-Cuban divination effectively solves something akin to the so-called problem of transcendence in Judeo-Christian theology although immediately one wants to add that this may well be a misnomer, at least insofar as the very notions of transcendence and immanence may themselves have to be reconceptualised in this context. 12 Martin Holbraad, "Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion", Debate & Discussion at the GDAT 2008, Critique of Anthropology 30, 2 (2010): 179-185, 185-200 passim; Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 13 E.g. Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreducible contribution that, heuristically understood, things themselves can make to this work of conceptualization. Indeed, with reference to the case of powder in Ifá, one might say that while ethnographic information derived from babalawos serves to set up the anthropological conundrum that aché in its dual aspect, so to speak, poses, it is what I shall call the pragmatographic information culled from its peculiar qualities as a thing (viz. as powder) that delivers the most crucial elements for its solution. Step III: thing = concept Consider what powder actually odes in the diviner s hands. As we saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, it provides the backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, come out. So powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, where that power is understood as the capacity to make divinities come out and speak. Now, note that, considered prosaically as a thing, powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collection of unstructured particles its pure multiplicity, one might say. In marking the oddu on the board, the diviner s fingers are able to draw the configuration just to the extent that the intensive capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the oddu as it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is registered. In this way powder renders the premise of the oddu s revelation explicit, as a matter of these signs inherent motility: by way of figure/ground reversal, oddu figures are revealed as a temporary displacement of their ground, the powder. 26 27

But this suggests also a logical reversal that goes to the heart of the problem that apparently transcendent oddu might be imagined to pose. If we take seriously babalawos contention that the oddu just are the marks they make on aché-powder (the basic magic of divination), then the constitution of deities as displacements of powder tells us something pretty important about the ontological premises of Ifá cosmology: that these divinities are to be thought of not, say, as entities that may or may not exist in states of transcendence or immanence, but rather as motions. And if the oddu just are motions, then the ontological discontinuity between transcendence and immanence (and with it the onto-theological problem they may be imagined to pose) is resolved. In a logical universe where motion is primitive, what looks like transcendence becomes distance and what looks like immanence becomes proximity. Indeed: qua motions, the divinities have inherent within themselves the capacity immanently to relate to humans, through the potential of directed movement that aché-powder guarantees, as a solution to the genuine problem of the distance deities must traverse in order to be rendered present in divination. Now, what I wish to draw attention to here is the work powder does for this analysis, by virtue specifically of what heuristically (once again!) one would identify as its prosaic, material characteristics. If ethnography carries the weight of the analytical problem, in this argument, it is the material quality of powder that provides the most crucial elements for its solution. If deities are conceptualised as motions to dissolve the problem of transcendence, after all, that is only because their material manifestations are just that, motions. And those motions, in turn, only emerge as analytically significant because of the material constitution of the powder upon which they are physically marked: its pervious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured particles, amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of water, in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviner s fingers, and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres in powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that they can engender conceptual effects, setting the parameters for the anthropological analysis that they afford the argument. As an irreducible element of the analysis of aché, it is powder that brings the pivotal concepts of perviouness, multiplicity, motion, direction, potential and so on into the fray of it own analysis, providing its own answer to its own problem its savage power, if you like, analytically (conceptually, ontologically) to unsettle. So what is at stake in this mode of analysis is the capacity that things have to engender conceptual transformations of themselves, by virtue of the conceptual differences their material characteristics can make. Indeed, this irreducibly pragmatological element, as we may call it, 14 of anthropological analysis is nothing other than the corollary inversion of our earlier concepts = things formula, namely things = concepts. If the formula concept = thing designated the possibility of treating what people say and do around things as ways of defining what those things are, its symmetrical rendition thing = concept raises the prospect of treating things as a way of defining what we as analysts are able to say and do around them. At issue, to coin a term, 14 Cf. Christopher Witmore, in press, The realities of the past: archaeology, objectorientations, pragmatology, in Modern Materials: Proceedings from the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference, ed. B.R. Fortenberry and L. McAtackney (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009). 28 29

are a thing s conceptual affordances: how things material characteristics can give rise to particular forms for their conceptualization. One might even imagine this kind of transformation movement as a form of abstraction, provided that notion is disentangled from habitually corollary distinctions between concrete things and abstract concepts. 15 Indeed, this is just what the thing = concept clause of our analytical method would suggest. Where the analytical ontology of things versus concepts would posit abstraction as the ability of a given concept to comprehend a particular thing, external to itself, in its extension, the heuristic continuity of thing = concept casts this as a movement internal to the thing itself: the thing differentiates itself, no longer as an instantiation of a concept, but a self-transformation as a concept. Savage thought thinking itself. 15 See also Martin Holbraad and Morten A. Pedersen, " Planet M: the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern", Anthropological Theory 9, 4 (2009): 371-94. 30