CHAPTER 9

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

“Szhivat” is a derivative from the verb “zhit,” to live. There are two verbs with this root that connote gradual retreat from life, the stealthy approach of “non-life,” contrived through someone's care. One can be squeezed out of the living space of one's apartment or one's workplace…[or one can be] squeezed or edged out, not only of one's dwelling place, but of life itself.

—Galina Lindquist

 

 

In 1999 the anthropologist Galina Lindquist returned to Moscow after ten years away. She walked around the city as a revenant, finding it familiar yet utterly strange. This was not only because she had changed; Russia itself was no longer the country she had known during the years of perestroika. The late 1980s had been a time of jubilant expectation; the despised Soviet sistema had collapsed, you could buy books in subway kiosks that only recently you could have been sent to the Gulag for possessing, and you were ostensibly free. Ten years later, this mood of abundant possibility had vanished, replaced by a sense of anarchic limitlessness (bespredel) that called to mind the savage ruthlessness of the jungle. “Faith in the new institutions of the market and banking [was] crushed; people lost the money they had been saving for decades, the numerous businesses that had sprung up in the preceding years went to the wall, and the tokens of plenty that started to appear on the store shelves after the emptiness of the early 1990s became unaffordable for most of the people.”¹ The prevailing mood of disillusionment and despair deepened as evidence emerged with every passing day of corruption at all levels of government, criminality in business, growing unemployment, and the atrophy of state welfare for the old, the sick, and the disabled. In this desperate situation, Galina became fascinated by the strategies people adopted to cope with the dire predicament in which they found themselves. She observed, both in her old friends and in herself, a longing for a lost time, a kind of aphasia in which one lacked a language to articulate one's sense of a vanishing life, and with it the eclipse of one's own sense of self. At the same time, Galina noticed how this space of dissolution and absence was being filled with pornography, pulp fiction, escapist videos, and cheap magazines, as well as New Age paraphernalia that offered magical, paranormal, and occult possibilities of healing and renewal. Working closely with an occult practitioner (magus) and one of her clients, Galina began to see that magic was a way in which people sought to regain a sense of control over their own lives in circumstances where normal socioeconomic avenues had been blocked.

In her first account of her fieldwork in Moscow,² Galina emphasizes the complementarity of markets and magic. When the market (or banking system) becomes a place of danger that one can no longer trust, “business magic” becomes an alternative strategy for making money, obtaining a loan, succeeding in business, or keeping a job. This switch from the material to the ethereal—from market to magic—is predicated upon a Western New Age cosmology that imagines the physical body to be surrounded by a “biofield” that holds information about a person's past, present, and future life and connects a human being to higher realms of astral power and divine influence. When one's physical or financial situation seems hopeless, channeling this mysterious biofield may bring a windfall or begin a flow of regenerative power.

Six years later, in her monograph Conjuring Hope, Galina's emphasis is less on business magic per se than the occult search for the “lost sense of tomorrow,” and for increased hope.³ Objective transformations are less significant than subjective transformations in which a person's confidence is bolstered, despair is assuaged, and hope is restored. Rather than being stuck, a person is able to feel that he or she is getting somewhere. This emphasis on magical action as a transformation in the way the world appears to a person echoes Sartre's famous essay on the emotions and is evidence of Galina's attempt to reconcile her early attachment to Peirce's semiology with a growing interest in phenomenology. At the same time, she seems to be seeking a mode of analysis that can encompass both the macropolitics of the state and the micropolitics of individual lifeworlds at the margins of state power. This search for a rapprochement between models of secular and sacred power—politics and religion, market and magic—preoccupied Galina as well as me, and in the course of numerous conversations in Stockholm and Copenhagen between 2000 and 2005, Galina pressed me to explain how phenomenology could possibly speak to issues of political economy. She found some answers to this quandary in Bourdieu's later work, where he argues that forms of symbolic capital (well-being, hope, and recognition), though unequally distributed in any social system, never derive entirely from external sources but reflect inner resources that are difficult to pin down and cannot be explained sociologically. Galina's determination to do justice to the mysteries of subjectivity and intersubjectivity helps us understand why, in Conjuring Hope, she often suspends the question of diagnostic or analytical meaning in order to explore an “indexical mode of transformation” in which a person is changed, or healed, through direct sensory experience rather than objective knowledge and through ritual rather than political action.⁴ In such instances, the charismatic power and caring presence of a healer may count for more than his or her medical qualifications, just as a client's faith in a healer's power counts for more than his or her understanding of how a seance or healing session actually works. What is at stake is not so much a cure—for we cannot be cured of being-in-the-world—but an uplifting of the spirit, a replenishment of the will, a resuscitation of hope. “For the people I talked to, hope was an existential doorway out of the deadliest of deadlocks, the light at the end of the longest of tunnels; a tool for expanding the horizons of the life world, for intentionality to unfold, for will to return: the will to life, no matter what.”⁵

A few months before Conjuring Hope was published, in 2006, I attended a conference in Oxford on “The Anthropology and Psychology of Fieldwork Experience.” Galina was also there, and we spent time together, over lunch and during breaks between sessions, catching up on news. But Galina was under a cloud, waiting for the results of medical tests and fearing the worst. Although she had little appetite for food, she talked passionately about her recent stint of fieldwork in Tuva, southern Siberia, where she had been working closely with Tuvan healers since 2001, studying the shifting balance of religious power between Tibetan Buddhism and traditional shamanism. In the course of her fieldwork in Moscow, Galina had become very close to her key informants. This involvement seemed to me even more intense with her Tuvan collaborators. Drawn deeply into their religious life, she had become unsettled, like many ethnographers before her, by the impossibility of drawing a line between participation and observation. But Galina's ability to dwell in the ambiguity of the ethnographic method reflected a personal disposition as well as an intellectual commitment to joining “objective analysis to lived experience.” Indeed, she shared Merleau-Ponty's view that this process was “the most proper task of anthropology, the one which distinguishes it from other social sciences.”⁶ It was her refusal to assimilate instant experience to extant knowledge that made her skeptical of institutional religion, biomedicine, and academic fashions. Perhaps this was why, when she first fell ill, she relied on homeopathy and acupuncture and travelled to Tuva in the summer of 2006 not only for further fieldwork but for healing.

Back in Sweden, she submitted to chemotherapy, and for a while it appeared to be working. Then the blow fell. “I am ill again,” she wrote to me in November 2007. “It all came very quickly and in a month developed into an inoperable tumor. They are now giving me more chemotherapy, hoping it will shrink, but i can neither eat nor move, almost. I'm not sure what will happen to me; the optimistic prognosis is that i'll remain chronically ill, for whatever length of time, living on chemos. Whatever else it means, one thing is that i can no longer make any plans and can't have people depending on me. My teaching this and next semester was cancelled; a conference on ‘institutional transformations of suffering’ that i have been working on organizing for three years is now going on without me.”

Galina had roped me into organizing a workshop at the European Association of Social Anthropologists' conference at Ljubliana, scheduled for the summer of 2008. It was a way of addressing some of the personal issues of fieldwork that we had discussed at length during our occasional meetings. One of our concerns was to broach the question of putting other people's epistemologies on a par with our own, of breaking the historical habit of privileging European worldviews. In our draft proposal we wrote:

Despite the fact that ethnographers often spend many years in societies other than their own, acquiring conversancy in local languages, becoming familiar with very different ways of understanding the world, sometimes advocating politically on behalf of their host society and espousing respect and affection for individual collaborators, it is rare that an anthropologist adopts a non-western epistemology in his or her work or even places such an epistemology on the same footing as theories derived from his or her own intellectual traditions. Invidious distinctions between “scientific” and “folk” models or reason and faith continue to hold sway over our thinking, so that while we may venture to speak, say, of African “philosophy” or “religion,” these Eurocentric and logocentric rubrics determine which phenomenon we will include under or exclude from such headings and how we will approach the subject we define in these ways. Assumptions drawn from classical Greek thought, or Judeo-Christian teleology and soteriology, or from Euro-American preoccupations with politico-economic power and instrumental rationality continue to constitute the dominant paradigms whereby we decide meaning, assign cause, and explain human behavior. But if we are going to critique the power inequalities between West and East, North and South, we must also critique the discursive inequalities associated with these geopolitical divisions, and this means taking other worldviews seriously, and seeing our own epistemologies from the vantage point of the other. This does not mean, however, that we cease to be skeptical of the epistemological claims and pretensions of the views of the world that various people espouse. It simply means abandoning the notion that the veracity of any worldview lies in its correspondence to objective reality or its logical coherence, and exploring, instead, the real entailments of any worldview for human lives. A corollary of this pragmatist turn is that we see beliefs and worldviews not as scripts that actors faithfully follow or principles that guide their actions but as ways that people give legitimacy to their actions or rationalize, after the event, the often unforeseen and unintended consequences of what they have done. Moreover, in a reflexive vein, we want to explore our own familiar experience of physical and social reality from the standpoint of unfamiliar philosophies, to see what aspects of our social existence they might illuminate, and what alternative solutions to our existential quandaries and political dilemmas they might offer.

In italicizing the last sentence, I remind myself how deeply Galina's experiences in Siberia, and her own consultations with shamans, influenced her attitude to her cancer, delaying her reliance on orthodox medical treatment.⁷ And in retaining her quirky use of the lowercase “i” in her e-mail, I remind myself of how her personal world shrank as her tumor grew, and how the hope she ascribes to her Swedish doctors was something she could not share.

Three months passed before I found the time and means to travel to Sweden, and as I waited at our agreed-upon rendezvous in the concourse of Stockholm-Arlanda Airport, I felt nervous and fearful, expecting to face a diminished and unrecognizable version of my friend. But Galina looked her old self, and confident enough to drive to a nearby lake, where we strolled for an hour before finding a lakeside restaurant for lunch. It was like old times, though we now talked of mortality rather than anthropology. I remember Galina commenting on the unseasonal thaw, the unpredictability of our times, and her own experience of reaching a point where there is no future. “One lives from day to day, not knowing whether there will be two more weeks, two more months, two more years,” she said. “But I no longer cling to life, and therefore I do not suffer. Suffering is resistance, not wanting to die, not wanting the pain. But I have let go, and in this yielding I have found peace.”

Paradoxically, it is more often the living than the dying who cannot bear the thought of death. And I had to tread carefully as I pressed Galina for details of her treatment, lest I appear unsympathetic to the course of action she had decided upon. There was an alternative therapy, Galina said, but as a result of the lack of communication between hospitals and laboratories, she had had to do all the hard work liaising with the lab and working with the doctors who could administer the experimental drugs. It was too much to ask of a patient, and she had reached the point where the effort was costing her what little energy she had. Besides, she was feeling better than she had in many months, miraculously so.

I confessed surprise at how well she looked. But Galina set no store by appearances. Nor did she hold out any hope of a medical breakthrough or divine intervention. “Unfortunately, none of my family or friends can accept this,” she said. “Nobility lies in fighting the cancer, not giving in to it. My mother tells me not to be selfish. My friends urge me to seek treatment abroad. My ex-husband, who is devoutly Russian Orthodox, implores me to embrace the faith. But God is indifferent to me, and I will live without God, though still believing God exists, His ways beyond our understanding.”

In Galina's “reckoning with life” I was reminded of Gillian Rose's memoir, written during her dying days,⁸ the co-presence of a profound vulnerability and an extraordinary strength. “I am dying,” Galina said. Her voice quavered for a second, and then she recovered. And I saw that she had attained a state of grace where death and life cancelled each other out, and the ego has been transcended.

I went to Uppsala for a few days and then returned to Stockholm to see Galina one last time. There were no good-byes, though we both knew we would not see each other again.

OTHER EPISTEMOLOGIES / OTHER ONTOLOGIES

To face the prospect of life in a world abruptly bereft of someone whose presence sustained the very reality of that world is also to be confronted by the question as to whether one really knew the person whose absence one now mourns. Clearly, our knowledge of other people is unlike our knowledge of things. It can be neither fathomed nor summarized, for this “cloude of unknowyng”⁹ encompasses senses, emotions, and intuitions that lie on the outskirts of consciousness. One may readily list a person's deeds or describe her appearance. One may recount the story of her life, dating critical moments, naming places where she lived and worked, mentioning significant others. But one is left with the mystery of what it was that made her presence felt. Her aura and influence slip away from the substantives with which one compiles a resume, writes an obituary, or charts a career. A death sharpens, often unbearably, one's sense of being deeply a part of another person's existence while remaining a stranger to it.

It is all too easy at such times to doubt that one can know others at all and to conclude that one's own life runs parallel to the lives of others with only the illusion of overlap, interplay, or empathy. What one thinks one knows of the other seems as unstable as memory, a mere approximation, or a single arrested moment, like a snapshot, that one wishfully believes to have captured the whole.

D. W. Winnicott coins the term “potential space”¹⁰ to describe a hypothetical area between the infant and the mother at a stage when the infant is exploring the existential difference between being apart from and being a part of the world of another. In bereavement, one's sense of separateness is not chosen, but traumatically thrust upon one. To lose someone you love is to pass from a space in which you and the other coexisted to one in which you exist in relation to a memory, an afterimage, a shadow, a simulacrum. Insofar as being-in-potentia implies a reaching out for another that is reciprocated by the other's openness and responsiveness, the experience of bereavement is one of unrequited and unconsummated longing, analogous to the phantom limb phenomenon of the amputee.

Curiously enough, the experience of separation and loss may shock one into realizing how deeply human existence is intersubjective—the being of another comprehended through one's own being, and vice versa. “In reality,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “the other is not shut up inside my perspective of the world, because this perspective itself has no definite limits, because it slips spontaneously into the other's, and because both are brought together in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception.”¹¹ Accordingly, solitude and sociality are not the two horns of a dilemma, “but two ‘moments’ of one phenomenon”¹² in which self and other are always co-present, even though the other is reduced to an object, or momentarily disappears from sight and mind. Bereavement is traumatic because the significant other now appears to us as a being in-itself rather than for-itself. Since it is no longer for-itself, it cannot be there for us, connected to us as a collaborator in “consummate reciprocity.”¹³

This brings us to the alarming thought that positivist social science addresses the world as if it were dead, since it is only in this guise that we can presume to have knowledge of it, as it is in-itself.

What writers like Winnicott and Merleau-Ponty are persuading us to do is move away from constituting the other as an object of knowledge and, as a corollary, from constituting ourselves as possessing superior skills for acquiring knowledge of others. This means placing both oneself and the other on the same existential footing, and seeing all worldviews not as theories of knowledge about the world but as existential means of achieving viable ways of living in and with the world.

 

In the months after Galina's death, I sought a way of furthering her fascination with non-Western ontologies, and addressing the question as to how we might evaluate radically different worldviews without invoking the pejorative dichotomies of premodern versus modern, religious versus scientific, mythic versus real. Moreover, how far could one follow Heidegger in speaking of a “fundamental ontology”¹⁴ rather than focus, as Husserl had done, on the numerous “regional ontologies” that appeared to preclude the possibility of postulating “being-in-the-world” as a universal human condition? Could one argue that all the variant forms of cultural or personal experience, belief and action, were simply alternative means of addressing existential questions and quandaries that were shared by all humanity—aspects of what might be called “the human condition”?

For an ethnographer, context is crucial. The truth value of a belief has to be measured not against some abstract standard such as rationality or logical coherence but in terms of how the belief is put to use, what sensible effects it has, and what practical transformations it enables. Without such detailed descriptions of how our ideas about the world emerge in the course of our interactions in the world, we are likely to fall into the fallacy of inferring experience from codified beliefs and failing to see the extent to which beliefs follow from what we do—stepchildren rather than parents of the activity in which they figure.¹⁵ It was such considerations that drew Galina to Levinas, for whom life is to be lived and enjoyed before it is a matter to be understood.¹⁶ In other words, the alleged rationality or irrationality of a practice is beside the point; what matters is the positive difference it makes to our lives, personal and collective. Consider the Christian doctrine of Virgin Birth and the Australian Aboriginal denial of paternity—beliefs that contradict our scientific knowledge of the facts of human procreation. In both cases, a logical problem is posed: how to simultaneously stress Christ's humanity and divinity in the first example, and how to simultaneously stress that one's human identity is determined by where you are conceived and born as well as who physically nurtures you in the womb and brings you into the world. In the Christian example, God displaces Joseph as genitor; in the Aboriginal case, patrilineal country is genitor, though in both cases, the pater is the person who provides for the child and helps raise him or her to adulthood. Let us consider another example, in which ontological assumptions that we might consider irrational nonetheless do better justice to lived experience than assumptions regarded as scientific. Such is the case of karma—which succeeds in capturing the experience with which most human beings are familiar, of life's radical discontinuities.¹⁷ To speak of these ruptures, passages, or critical events in terms of death and rebirth may be scientifically unwarranted, yet it is symbolically appropriate, for it answers the human need to give voice to how things appear to be, even though our metaphors may fail the test of analytical adequacy. While sympathetic to such edifying descriptions of life as lived, Richard Rorty wants to reject the epistemological claims that tend to be made for them. But can we sustain such a hard and fast distinction between “edifying” worldviews that don't have to correspond to the facts or obey the rules of Aristotelian logic and “systematizing” worldviews that do? And is it not the case that even the systematic language of science is steeped in metaphor?

Let us explore the existential commonalities that underlie very different formulations of belief in very different societies by considering, first, the sense of being a part of what Norbert Elias calls “a pre-existing knowledge stream”¹⁸ rather than existing apart from it, and, second, the sense that our fates are determined from without yet are also the outcomes of our own independent choices.

Such existential dilemmas have figured in West African thought for a long time.

Among the Tallensi, the tension between being an actor and being acted upon finds expression in the dialectic between chosen and preordained destinies. “Life—symbolized for the Tallensi in the breath (novor)—is only the raw material for living,” writes Meyer Fortes. “What one makes of it depends on other spiritual agencies.”¹⁹ These “other spiritual agencies” include the influences of one's mother, father, or other kin (strictly speaking, “the prenatal destiny” of such significant others) and the influence of the prenatal destiny that one chooses for oneself before being born. This prenatal decision may be made against having a spouse, bearing children, or being a farmer—in effect, rejecting a normal moral life. Fortes calls this “Oedipal fate,” contrasting it with the “Jobian fulfillment” that comes from recognizing the superior powers of the ancestors and seeking redemption through them. But just as a bad prenatal choice can be revoked by setting up a shrine and making sacrifices to one's ancestors—ritually submitting to and complying with “the norms and customs instituted by them”²⁰—a person's positive dispositions may be undermined should he or she neglect or ignore the lineage ancestors.

How can such opposed imperatives and competing dispositions be reconciled?

In answering this question from a West African point of view, one must consider in more detail the kinds of complementary forces that may offset or countermand one's prenatal destiny, providing room for intelligent purpose and conscious control in the actual working out of one's social destiny on earth. The Kalabari Ijo of Nigeria recognize that a conflict or division often exists between a side of the personality that is decided before birth and a side of the personality that emerges in the course of a person's social existence. Rather than use Fortes's allusions to Oedipus and Job to describe the tension between the dual aspects of the personality that Kalabari call biomgbo and teme, Robin Horton prefers the Freudian concepts of conscious and unconscious. While the teme refers to prenatal choices, and innate dispositions of which the biomgbo is unaware, it is possible for divination to bring to light the unconscious forces governing a person's fate and suggest a ritual action whereby the wishes of the teme may be resisted.

But why not place Sophocles's drama of Oedipus, Freud's model of the psyche, and Kalabari or Tallensi myths on a par? Why should we translate “their” idioms into “ours” unless we feel that “they” are epistemologically inferior, in the same way that myth is often alleged to be an infantile attempt to create history?²¹ Why not see myth, as Ricoeur suggests, as “always-already there” in what we call history or the human condition, in the same way that stories of beginnings are haunted by a sense of the origin—the precursive reality that makes the very idea of beginnings possible, and that calls into question the discursive cuts we customarily make between religion and reason, myth and science, orality and literacy, tradition and modernity?

My preference is a pragmatist conception of truth, where truth is not evaluated primarily in terms of its logical coherence or its correspondence to objective reality but, rather, in terms of the degree to which it is conducive to life, particularly the fulfillment of our collective capacity for creating some form of community that meets the needs of everyone to roughly the same degree. One of the most compelling recent ethnographies from West Africa not only provides such a perspective; it shows how this entails a critique of Western epistemology.

For the Beng of Cote d'Ivoire, infants are said to “lead profoundly spiritual lives,”²² in part because they are reincarnations of someone who has died, in part because they come into this world not from a void, but “from a rich, social existence in a place that adults call wrugbe.”²³ What is remarkable about Alma Gottlieb's commentary on Beng thought is that rather than simply describe it as a “belief,” she asks a pragmatist question: What “implications” does such a belief have “for how infants and young children are cared for?”²⁴

First, it underscores the importance of reciprocal interactions between the world of one's predecessors and the world of the here and now, emphasizing that if one's present life is to flourish, then one's connections with the afterlife—which is, in Beng thought, the ancestral realm “where we come from”—must be kept alive. Second, if human lives are perpetually moving between this world and wrugbe, then the tragic repercussions of infant mortality are reduced, since children who die early will almost certainly be reborn.²⁵ In recognition of this continuity between contemporaries and predecessors, the names of the dead are recycled. Third, Beng beliefs imply that infants are not incipient or lesser human beings but worthy of the same respect and attention one would accord any adult. Thus, parents are exhorted by diviners to give their crying child jewelry or coins. “At the psychological level,” Gottlieb writes, “the diviner is communicating to the parents the message that the infant needs to be valued more…respected as a fellow person rather than viewed as a suffering, wordless creature. ‘I miss my other home,’ a Beng baby might be trying to communicate while crying wordlessly, ‘please give me something to remind me of home.’”²⁶ In other words, infants have memories, desires, multilingual skills, and a capacity for understanding that adults ignore at their peril.

The proposition that residents of wrugbe represent all the ethnic groups in the world, and have full comprehension of all the world's languages, might seem absurd unless one took into consideration the worldview it underwrites. Here is how Alma Gottlieb makes this point:

One day I was playing This Little Piggy with the toes of Amenan's then six month-old daughter, Amwe. As the last little piggy went home, I laughed aloud at myself, acknowledging that baby Amwe couldn't possibly understand the words of the ditty, all the more because they were in English. To my amazement, Amenan objected strongly to my remark, which she took as an insult to babies. In fact, she insisted that Amwe understood perfectly well all that I was singing. When I asked skeptically “You think so?” Amenan explained her answer by invoking the linguistic situation of wrugbe. Unlike in this world, she pointed out, in the afterlife different ethnic groups do not live apart from one another. Rather, in wrugbe members of all the world's ethnic groups live together harmoniously. Associated with this ethnic mixture is a striking degree of linguistic ecumenism: when the residents of wrugbe speak to each other in their own languages, everyone understands; they have full mutual comprehension.²⁷

Elsewhere, Gottlieb argues for seeing wrugbe as “pol itical allegory”—evoking a place where people enjoy greater well-being, health, and humanity.²⁸ A nostalgic image, perhaps, of the precolonial past, and a reminder to we who extol the virtues of modernity that it is never possible to say that the gains it brings outweigh its losses. One thing is sure, however: our persistent lack of regard for the lifeworlds and worldviews of those we see as being outside the pale of modernity. If we are to take seriously the proposition that beyond cultural difference lies a common humanity, then we have to place our own worldviews on the same footing as all others, even if this means abandoning the antinomies with which we have distinguished “us” from “them”—reason versus faith, science versus religion, modernity versus tradition, knowledge versus belief. We can best do this by not seeing alternative views as epistemologies whose truth may be decided by asking whether or not they cohere logically or mirror reality, but as ways of serving our interests and defining our values. If truth is a matter of whether or not a “belief” enhances the life of a community, then an obsession with identifying it gives ground to a concern for humanizing it.

It is probably true that no human society, no human being, is bereft of some notion of humanity transcending one's own particular humanity. Deliberately masked and distorted though this idea of a common humanity may be, the best evidence of its hold over us is the length we have to go to when we try to deny it. Privileging a conception of the other as oneself in other circumstances rather than as an essentially different kind of being implies, as Terence put it, “being human, nothing human is alien to me” (humani nil a me alienum puto). No matter how different, how abhorrent, how admirable, the other always represents a potentiality in oneself.

Discontinuities within West Africa are small, and echoes of the same my themes are found throughout the region. As one goes further afield, the discontinuities become greater until the lifeworlds of Africa, Asia, Europe, and Polynesia seem far apart. Yet significant continuities conjoin these worlds of thought, just as they unite the people who claim them as their own, and suggest a proto-narrative, a proto-ethic, a prototypical humanity. This common humanity does not simply consist in unconscious structures of the human mind, as Levi-Strauss suggests; it is grounded in such existential aporias as the incompatible destinies and power struggles between the generations, between men and women, between siblings, and between those within a community and those without. Every new society, like every new beginning, conserves traces of the origin, of the abiding human dilemmas to which those new social formations are a response. Which is why, as Sartre noted, our analytic method must be progressive-regressive—fully recognizing that while every event, every experience, is in one sense a new departure, a rebirth, it conserves the ancient, inert, and inescapable conditions that bind us all to a shared humanity and makes each of us a being who carries within ourself “the project of all possible being.”²⁹

It goes without saying that the truth of this view is one thing; living it is another. It is often too daunting to recognize that what we consider unique to ourselves is part of a common human heritage, or that what is foregrounded in one society lies in the background of another, much as our egos are simply the visible aspects of personalities whose depths contain potentialities we prefer not to acknowledge. Against this balkanization of being, the most an intellectual or artist can accomplish is a kind of subversive irony that strips away the masks whereby people lay claim to singular or pure identities, that reveals the illusion of bounded selves or polities, and that indicates how intermingled all human beings have been, from their origins, whether they like it or not.

In 2004 Bulgarian filmmaker Adela Peeva released a documentary entitled Whose Is This Song? about her travels through Macedonia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, tracing the social biography of a Balkan ballad. In most places, the ballad is known as a love song, though the lyrics vary. In Turkey and Bosnia it is, however, a call to arms. Despite the ubiquity of the ballad and its ancient, untraceable origins, Peeva was confronted by shocked, angry, and incredulous reactions wherever she travelled, as people laid claim to the song as their own. “The Turks took it from us,” cried an Albanian in Tirana. In Vranje, a town in southern Serbia, Peeva's Serbian hosts stormed out of a restaurant when she played a Bosnian version of the song. “This is theft!” one man shouted as he rushed away.

“We tend not to accept we have a common identity,” Peeva later commented, with disarming understatement.³⁰ But Peeva is also warning us against identity thinking and an obsession with control, as well as an infatuation with revealed truths that confirm these proclivities.

In Gillian Rose's last book, Love's Work, I glimpse a vision that Galina might well have developed had she lived. Rather than focus on revealed religion, Rose explores what she calls unrevealed religion, “which has hold of us without any evidences, natural or supernatural, without any credos or dogmas, liturgies or services.” It is, she goes on to say, “the very religion that makes us protest, ‘But I have no religion,’ the very Protestantism against modernity that fuels our inner self-relation.”³¹ Rose claims that “this very protest founded modernity, an ethic without ethics, a religion without salvation,” and that enlightenment rationality is “the dependant, the cousin german” of this unrevealed religion, as is “reason's offspring, postmodern relativism.”³² I take these remarks as ironic commentaries on the impossibility of ever attaining a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of the world, or of our ever being completely in control of it. In all experience—personal, social, scientific, or religious—there is a tension between two conceptions of control. The first implies management and mastery, in which the world bends to our will, and our knowledge promises to light up the darkness, offering us greater certainty in our relationships with objects and others. The second is dramatically different. In this more elusive vein, Rose writes “of a sense which, nevertheless, saves my life and which, once achieved, may induce the relinquishing of ‘control’ in the first sense—'control’ means that when something untoward happens, some trauma or damage, whether inflicted by the commissions or omissions of others, or some cosmic force, one makes the initially unwelcome event one's own inner occupation. You work to adopt the most loveless, forlorn, aggressive child as your own, and do not leave her to develop into an even more vengeful monster, who constantly wishes you ill. In ill-health as in unhappy love, this is the hardest work: it requires taking in before letting be.”³³

In Galina's last writings on the politics of religion, there is, curiously, no hint of this second notion of control as acceptance and yielding. Yet, even as she reprised Peter Berger's image of the sacred canopy, she was, as those closest to her knew, embracing a view of power born of the experience of powerlessness, a technique of the self that, as Foucault noted toward the end of his life, implied a shift away from the study of competing ideologies or identity politics to the study of how people can “effect a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their souls, on their own thoughts,” modifying themselves or acting “in a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power.”³⁴ Perhaps we can understand the gradual shift from the more reflexive tone of Conjuring Hope to the more conventionally academic style of Galina's final essays as a gesture toward a profession than demanded masks and jargons as the price of initiation. Perhaps it was a bid for greater presence at a time when her world was falling away, and even the project of understanding appeared irrelevant. This may also be the case for those who survive bereavement, for in the face of the overwhelming love that, paradoxically, wells up in us when we are thrown open to the ultimate, we pass beyond understanding, with our work of words, having reached the limit of what can be said, redeemed by our silence.