NOTES

 

 

 

1. PREAMBLE

Chapter epigraph: Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Itinerary of a Thought,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Matthews (London: Verso, 1983), 42.

1. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, vol. 2 (New York: Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1942), 3. Also relevant here is Émile Durkheim's argument in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, that episodes of emotional intensity, delirium, “collective effervescence,” and transgression are essential to social viability. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 258–59. The critical point is that such forms of uninhibited union allow “people to transcend the limits of their own personality and become part of a larger and more power—ful whole.” Sébastien Tutenges, “Louder! Wilder! Danish Youth at an International Nightlife Resort” (PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2010), 28–29, emphasis added. These observations also bring to mind Elias Canetti's comments on the potential of a crowd to transcend difference. “Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd. During the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal.” Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 18, emphasis in original.

2. Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character, 3.

3. Ibid., 68.

4. Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 497.

5. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 74–75. Ed Tronick's more recent summary of ongoing research on primary intersubjectivity emphasizes the collaboration of infant and parent in regulating interaction and laying down the neuro-behavioral foundations of a “dyadic consciousness”—incorporating complex information, experience, and mutual mappings into a relatively coherent whole that functions as a self-regulating system, effectively expanding the consciousness of one person into the consciousness of another. Dyadic consciousness begins in the stage of primary intersubjectivity, and, should an infant be “deprived of the experience of expanding his or her states of consciousness in collaboration with the other…this limits the infant's experience and forces the infant into self-regulatory patterns that eventually compromise the child's development.” Ed Tronick, The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 292. See also Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 37–41.

6. Karl Jaspers's axiom is crucial: “To analyze existence is to analyze consciousness.” Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 49.

7. Laing's account of this dynamic and anxious relationship between being separate from and being connected to others echoes Otto Rank's conception of human existence as a perpetual oscillation between a highly individuated consciousness of oneself and a generalized consciousness of one's connectedness to others. These modes of awareness reflect the will to separate and the will to unite. Otto Rank, Will Therapy: An Analysis of the Therapeutic Process in Terms of Relationship (New York: Knopf, 1936), 31. Deeply influenced by Rank's thinking, Ernest Becker summarized the human dilemma as follows: “Man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof.” The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 155.

8. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 26, emphasis in original. One of the most compelling ethnographic explorations of this tension between autonomy and interdependence is Robert Desjarlais's study of the Yolmo of Nepal. Desjarlais speaks of “two contradictory cultural values: those of independence and interdependence. Yolmo wa, though deeply communal beings, also profess a strong notion of individuality, with this dialectic fostering a conflict between the desire for autonomy and the need for independence.” This sociocultural dynamic, he adds, is “common to Tibeto-Burman peoples of the Himalayan region.” Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 47.

9. As Maurice Natanson puts it, “the paradox of the individual within the social [is] a ‘metaphysical constant’ of mundane existence.” Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 143–44.

10. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 1968): 1243–48.

11. John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 440–41.

12. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958), William James cites Alphonse Daudet's recollections of his brother's death in support of the hypothesis that our tendency to apprehend the world in diametrically opposite ways drives us to seek experiences of unification. “The first time I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother, Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.’ I was fourteen at the time” (141). I cannot agree with either Daudet or James that such different attitudes imply psychological disharmony, discord, or “duplexity” since they are both modes of consciousness common to everyone and should not be ontologized as alternative personality types.

13. Philip M. Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation (New York: Psychology Press, 2001), 57.

14. Henry James, Roderick Hudson (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 27.

15. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), 7. More recently Pierre Hadot has made a similar case for philosophy as a way of life, “a preparatory exercise for wisdom,” involving “spiritual exercises” that might include dietary or discursive regimes, meditations or conversations, or practical action or intellectual reflection. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

16. This ethnographic method was, however, employed earlier by the American anthropologists Frank Hamilton Cushing and Franz Boas.

17. Hortense Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966).

18. Paul Ricoeur regards the dialectic between different modes of thought—detachment and involvement—as grounded in the ontological contrast between having a unique identity (ipse) and being identical with all other human beings (idem). Hence, the “dialectical tie between selfhood and otherness [is] more fundamental than the articulation between reflection and analysis.” Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 317.

19. Ibid., 3.

20. Theodor Adorno observes: “Only at a remove from life can the mental life exist, and truly engage the empirical.” But, he adds, “Distance is not a safety-zone but a field of tension” since thought can never attain the complete detachment that it longs for, and its vitality will always depend on its faithfulness to the complexity of the life it cannot contain in concepts or grasp in its entirety. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 128.

21. See Basil Bernstein's work on “primary socialization” in Class, Codes and Control (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

22. John Dewey, How We Think (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 138.

23. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 13.

24. Ibid., 3.

25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 158–59. My own fieldwork among the Kuku Yalanji of southeast Cape York, Australia, provides a second example. Two intermarrying moieties, Dabu and Walla, are named after two kinds of bees—one yellow-bodied and the other black-bodied—thus establishing their simultaneous identity and difference. Michael Jackson, Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 180.

26. That philological and unconscious connections may be traced among words such as “knee,” “know,” “narrate,” “generate,” “generation,” and “can” suggests that an ability to go out into the world, independently, “on one's own two feet,” is basic to knowing how to exist socially and to reproduce one's kind. H. A. Bunker and B. D. Lewis, “A Psychoanalytic Notation on the Root GN, KN, CN,” in Psychoanalysis and Culture, ed. G. B. Wilbur and W. Muensterberger (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), 363–67.

27. Dewey, How We Think, 12.

28. Tronick, Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development, 289.

29. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (London: Flamingo, 1994), 3.

30. Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 400.

31. The phrase is from the title of F. Mathias Alexander's Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (London: Methuen, 1924).

32. Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, 235.

33. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Holt, 1922), 30.

34.Ibid., 35–37.

35. Derek Freeman, “Totem and Taboo: A Reappraisal,” in Man and His Culture: Psychoanalytic Anthropology after “Totem and Taboo,” ed. W. Muensterberger (New York: Taplinger, 1969), 53–78.

36. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 141–42.

37. Ibid., 143.

38. Freeman, “Totem and Taboo,” 66–78.

39. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Mono the ism: Three Essays (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1939), 131. Cited by Derek Freeman, 74.

40. Henry Miller, The Books in My Life (New York: New Directions, 1969), 75, emphasis in original.

41. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), 387.

42. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 379.

43. Ibid., 355.

44. Ibid., 366–70. Foucault's discovery of the fascist in himself recalls Adorno's recollections of five school yard bullies “who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him and, when he complained to the teacher, defamed him a traitor to the class.” These were, Adorno writes, “the warning signs of the German awakening [and] I recognized them all in the features of Hitler's dictatorship.” Adorno, Minima Moralia, 192–93.

45. Lionel Trilling, “Introduction” to Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952), xi-x; quotation from p. x.

46. Ibid., xvi.

47. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–36.

48. Henry Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 537.

49. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 57–58. Cf. Heidegger's adaptation of the Greek notion of aletheia (“unconcealment”) as philosophical method. Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Heidegger is careful not to claim that what one discloses is necessarily the truth. “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 386–92.

50. Carla Stang, A Walk to the River in Amazonia: Ordinary Reality for the Mehinaku Indians (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 48–52.

51. The English word “mask” derives from the Arabic maskhara, which also gives us, via the Italian, the word “mascara” and, via the French, the word “masque” (a theatrical or musical entertainment), with its connotations of dissimulation, assumed appearance, disguise, pretense, and false-seeming.

52. Foucault, Order of Things, 326.

53. Plato, The Republic, 2d ed., trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 264.

54. Ibid., 370–71.

55. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50, 51–52.

56. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

57. Das Man signifies people in the abstract: “the they,” “the others,” the undifferentiated crowd.

58. Cited by Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 209–10.

59. This image echoes the final scene of Marcel Carné's great film Les Enfants du Paradis (1945).

60. Natsume Soseki, Kusamakura, trans. Meredith McKinney (Harmond sworth: Penguin, 2008), 143–44.

61. Otto Rank, Will Therapy: An Analysis of the Therapeutic Process in Terms of Relationship (New York: Knopf, 1936), 31.

62. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 155.

2. THE PHILOSOPHER WHO WOULD NOT BE KING

Chapter epigraph: Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 11.

1. Not so, in the view of Stanley Cavell, who has long acknowledged the ways in which his philosophizing “tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical,” observing that Wittgenstein, more than any other philosopher of the twentieth century, has shown “how it happens that a certain strain of philosophy inescapably takes on autobiography, or…an abstraction of autobiography.” Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2, 6.

2. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

3. Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 6.

4. Ibid., 7–8.

5. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Wild Orchids and Trotsky, ed. Mark Edmundson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 29–50; quotation from pp. 34–35.

6. Philosophy and Social Hope, 266.

7. Published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry magazine.

8. Bruce Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1.

9. Kapferer, Feast of the Sorcerer, 48–50.

10. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv.

11. Ibid., xvi.

12. Philosophy and Social Hope, 227.

13. Ibid.

3. HERMIT IN THE WATER OF LIFE

The chapter title is taken from the fifth volume of Thomas Merton's journals, Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage, ed. Robert E. Daggy (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), 243.

The chapter epigraph is from an untitled, unpublished poem by Brijen K. Gupta.

1. Brijen K. Gupta was born on September 17, 1929.

2. For many years I thought the poem was Brijen's, but it was written by Winifred Rawlins, a Quaker friend. The Fire Within (New York: Golden Quill Press, 1959), 36.

3. Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

4. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 140–41.

5. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), 10–11.

6. In 1964, though not yet a U.S. citizen, Brijen was arrested for civil disobedience in Tougaloo, Mississippi, an incident that led, ironically, “to a lifelong friendship with the deputy sheriff,” who Brijen described as “a rabid racist.”

7. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 90.

8. Agehananda Bharati, The Ochre Robe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 244. See also The Tantric Tradition (London: Rider, 1965).

9. See William A. Gerhard and Brijen K. Gupta, “Literature: The Phenomenological Art,” Man and World 3, no. 2 (1970): 102–15.

10. Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–1967) was an Indian freedom fighter and a Socialist political leader who helped establish the Congress Socialist Party in 1934 and wrote numerous articles on the feasibility of a Socialist India.

11. Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) was an Indian philosopher and statesman. One of India's most acclaimed scholars of comparative religion and philosophy, he tried to build a bridge between East and West by showing that their philosophical systems were mutually intelligible. He was the first vice president of India (1952–1962) and the second president of India (1962–1967).

12. R. L. Nigam joined the DAV English faculty while Brijen was at Benares Hindu University. They became lifelong friends.

13. Crvka (also known as Lokyata) is a materialist, skeptical Indian philosophy that eschews religious foundations. It is named after its founder, Crvka, author of the Brhaspatya-stras.

14. Maharishi Ramana (1879–1950) inspired Paul Brunton's In Search of Secret India (London: Rider & Co.,1934).

15. J. A. Chadwick (1899–1939) was educated at Cambridge and became a Fellow of Trinity College.

16. Gertrude Emerson Sen (1892–1982) was also a geographer and explorer and the author of Voiceless India (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931).

17. Born in 1898, Nixon joined the Royal Flying Corps and served in a fighting squadron during the First World War. “His direct experiences with the death and destruction of warfare filled him with a sense of futility and meaninglessness…. After the war Nixon enrolled in King's College at Cambridge University to study English literature. There he discovered Buddhism, being particularly attracted to the life story of the Buddha. Like many others interested in Buddhism at that time, Nixon became involved with the Theosophical Society.” David Haberman, “A Cross-Cultural Adventure: The Transformation of Ronald Nixon,” Religion 23 (1993): 217–27.

18. As George Orwell observes, Gandhi's struggle was not against sexuality per se but against intimate and preferential attachments that, by their passionate and exclusive nature, prove inimical to the service of God and humanity. “Reflections on Gandhi,” Partisan Review 6, no. 1 (1949): 85–92.

19. Horace G. Alexander (1889–1989) was a teacher and writer who headed the British Quaker relief effort in India. A champion of Indian independence from Britain, he was a friend of Gandhi and was Gandhi's host on a visit to England when negotiations for independence began in the mid-1940s.

20. Anandamayi Ma (1896–1981) was a visionary, renowned for her spiritual powers (siddhis) and intense religious emotionality. She described herself as bereft or empty of any sense of personal identity, completely at one with the great void (mahasunya) to which she ascribed her actions, emotions, and yogic abilities.

21. Brijen cannot recall how he came to know Gwen Catchpool. “She and her husband Corder (who was to fall to his death mountain climbing in 1952) had been Quaker representatives in Nazi Germany. They now lived at 49 Parliament Hill, Hampstead, which was for years to come my second home. At some point she wrote to Horace Alexander asking him if I was real, and Alexander, surprised that I was in correspondence with her, suggested that I seek her advice in getting to England/ Eu rope.”

22. T. R. V. Murti's (1902–1986) great work is The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of Madhyamika System (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1955).

23. After graduating from Benares Hindu University, Beena Banerjee went to Calcutta, where she and her husband, the distinguished journalist Hamdi Bey, enriched the city's intellectual life.

24. Abraham Johannes Muste (1885–1967) was a Christian Socialist, active in the pacifist movement, the labor movement, and the U.S. civil rights movement. Author of Non-Violence in an Aggressive World (New York: Harper & Bros., 1940), Muste was also a minister of the Religious Society of Friends and genreal secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America from 1920 to 1921. As executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he became an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr.

25. The Catholic Worker was both the name of a newspaper and a movement aimed at realizing in the individual and in society the teachings of Christ. “The principles of the movement called for the rejection of capitalism as far as that is possible and the establishment of a ‘distributist’ economy” in which workers owned the means of production and distribution. William O. Paulsell, Tough Minds, Tender Hearts: Six Prophets of Social Justice (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 92.

26. Thomas Merton, Turning toward the World: The Pivotal Years, ed. Victor A. Kramer (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 291.

27. Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage, ed. Robert E. Daggy (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 259.

28. Bernard McGinn, “Withdrawal and Return: Reflections on Monastic Retreat from the World,” Spiritus 6, no. 2 (2006): 149–72.

29. Pendle Hill was established in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, in 1930 as a Quaker study center designed to prepare its adult students for service both in the Religious Society of Friends and in the world. The founders envisioned a new Quaker School of Social and Religious Education that would be “a vital center of spiritual culture” and “a place for training leaders” [Rufus Jones, Preliminary Announcement, 1929].

30. Perhaps the most renowned historian of his time, Toynbee's focus was the rise and fall of civilizations. Unlike Spengler, who regarded decline as inevitable, Toynbee argued that a society's longevity and vitality depended on how creatively it responded to physical and social challenges. That civilizations so often sink into a slough of nationalism, militarism, and despotism led him to argue that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

31. The line is from Merton's Dancing in the Water of Life, 243.

32. Scott Milross Buchanan (1895–1968) was an American educator, philosopher, and foundation consultant, renowned as the founder of the Great Books program at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland. Brijen first met Buchanan in 1954 and was introduced to the Toynbee seminar by him. Brijen regarded Buchanan as one of his greatest mentors.

33. Milton Mayer, “The Christer,” Fellowship 18, no. 1 (1952): 1–10.

34. With other members of the Socialist Workers Party, Brijen distanced him self from Schachtman in 1959, when he became a neoconservative, cold war warrior.

35. The date of Brijen wife's, Ginny's, nervous breakdown.

36. Sirajuddaullah and the East India Company, 1756–1757: Background to the Foundation of British Rule in India (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962, rev. ed., 1966).

37. Val was my brother-in-law, and it was through him that I was introduced to Brijen.

38. McGinn, “Withdrawal and Return,” 153.

39. Ochre Robe, 10.

40. In anthropological parlance, a kindred is a group of individuals related to one another not through descent alone but through a person's chosen affiliations to a pivotal figure. Derek Freeman, “On the Concept of the Kindred,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 91 (1961): 192–220.

4. WRITING WORKSHOP

Chapter epigraph: David Mamet, On Directing Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 6.

1. Glenn Kurtz, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 209.

2. Ibid., 204.

3. Ibid., 211.

4. Ibid., 179–80.

5. Keith Egan, “Walking Back to Happiness? Modern Pilgrimage and the Expression of Suffering on Spain's Camino de Santiago,” The International Journal of Travel and Travel; Writing ii, no. i (20m): 107–32; quotation from p. 115.

6. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1958), 268.

7. Donald Schell, cited in Egan, “Walking Back,” 113.

8. “Stream and Sun at Glendalough,” in Yeats, Collected Poems, 288–89.

9. Seamus Heaney, “St. Kevin and the Blackbird,” in The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), 24.

10. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 76.

11. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Preface to the 1982 paperback edition of Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xviii.

12. Cited by Michael Viney, “The Yank in the Corner,” The Irish Times, August 6, 1983.

13. Joan Didion, Slouching toward Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), xvi.

14. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Ire in Ireland,” Ethnography i, no. i (2000): H7–40; quotations from pp. 120, 127.

15. Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, 311.

16. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Patton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 98 and passim.

5. HOW MUCH HOME DOES A PERSON NEED?

The title is from Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (London: Granta Books, 1999), 41.

Chapter epigraph: John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (London: Writers and Readers, 1984), 67.

1. The terms are Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman's. “Suffering and Its Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 15, no. 3 (1991): 275–30!

2. Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography on the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

3. Identity connotes both equality and distinction; while idem suggests that one is the same as others, ipse suggests that one is unique in contrast to others. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 175. See also Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2–3, 116.

4. Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002).

5. Maxine Gordon, “Dexter Gordon in Europe,” liner notes from Dexter Gordon Live in '63 & '64 (DVD Jazz Icons, cat. no. 19002: Naxos), 4–5.

6. Though intellectuals and musicians were open to the African American expatriates, other Danes were not. When Louis Armstrong first came to Denmark in 1933, he was referred to in the local press as “the ape from the jungle” and “nothing to do with music.” Jørgen Pedersen, personal communication, May 15, 2009.

7. Justin B. Richland, “On Neoliberalism and Other Social Diseases: The 2008 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review,” American Anthropologist iii, no. 2 (June 2009): 170–76.

8. Jeroen de Valk, Ben Webster: His Life and Music (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2001), 139. Also see Frank Büchmann Møller, Someone to Watch Over Me: The Life and Music of Ben Webster (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 273.

9. Vincent Crapanzano writes eloquently of how a Moroccan friend compared the “in-between” (barzakh and barzakh) to the “silence between words and to dreams.” Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 57. See also Paul Stoller's comments on the “between” in medieval Sufism, as well as in his own research experiences with Songhay spirit possession. The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), i-ii.

10. George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” Partisan Review 16 (January 1949), 85–92.

11. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 47.

12. Albert Camus, American Journals, trans. Hugh Levick (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 60.

13. Camus, American Journals, 69.

14. Cited in Oliver Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (New York: Vintage, 1998), 194.

15. Ibid., 404.

16. Nella Larsen, Quicksand, ed. Thadious M. Davis (New York: Penguin, 2002), 64.

17. George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 25.

18. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 240.

19. Cited in Lena Ahlin, The “New Negro” in the Old World: Culture and Performance in James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen (Lund: Department of English, Lund University, 2006), 103.

20. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “White Like Me,” New Yorker, June 17, 1996, 66–81.

21. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1979), 153.

22. Published in Ms., March 3, 1975, 74–79, 84–89.

23. Hurston, “How It Feels,” 154–55, emphasis in original. In arguing that her interest lay “in what makes a man or a woman do such and such-and-so, regardless of his color,” Zora Hurston was at pains to avoid self-defensiveness and self-pity. But by celebrating her own belligerent individualism at the expense of describing racial discrimination, she risks bracketing out experiences that were central to the everyday reality of life for other African Americans living under the regime of Jim Crow. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 281.

24. “I was born in the nightmare of the white man's mind.” Kalamu ya Salaam and James Baldwin, “James Baldwin: Looking towards the Eighties,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 177–85, especially p. 181.

25. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dell, 1961), 17; emphasis in original.

6. CLEARINGS IN THE BUSH

Chapter epigraph: From T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Essays, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: Wiley, 1926), 26, emphasis in original.

2. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 321.

3. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Similes, Parables and Fables,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, 651–52.

4. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959), 33.

5. Dominque Zahan, The Bambara (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 5.

6. Parerga and Paralipomena, vols. 2, 3.

7. Primo Levi, Other People's Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), vii.

8. Given the evidence of police abuse of Aboriginal detainees, it may be irrelevant to distinguish between real or imaginary voices. What is significant is the grave danger, dissociation, and disorientation that come from being isolated from one's own kith and kin, at the mercy of strangers with a reputation for racist brutality, and subject to the terrors of the dark.

9. A “reformed Aboriginal alcoholic” quoted in Ernest M. Hunter, “Aboriginal Suicides in Custody: A View from the Kimberley,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 22 (1988): 273–82; quotation from p. 279.

10. Peter's parents survived the Nazi years by migrating to South America.

11. As “enemy aliens,” the German refugees were not allowed to handle weapons.

12. Patricia Dobrez and Peter Herbst, The Art of the Boyds: Generations of Artistic Achievement (Sydney: Bay Books, 1990), 198.

13. Ibid.

14. Peter writes that, in the 1940S and 1950S, artists and academics enjoyed “an easy fellowship” with professional people, trade unionists, writers, radicals, and public servants in the pubs. “Such unconstrained and pleasurable interchange of ideas in the vernacular is now only a memory. Neither the art scene nor the desperately defensive modern university favours such openness. The phi loso phers have become so technical, so ‘professional,’ that few people outside the seminar-room have much hope of understanding them.” Art of the Boyds, 201.

15. Ibid., 206.

16. Ibid., 108.

17. Ibid., 112.

18. Ibid., 115.

19. Ibid., 162.

7. THE GULF OF CORINTH

Chapter epigraph: Lawrence Durrell, “The Tree of Idleness,” in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 51.

1. Perhaps the most powerful and eloquent of these critiques is Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978).

2. Ibid., 5.

3. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Enquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 237.

4. Ibid., 96, emphasis added.

5. Ibid., 129, emphasis in original.

6. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, act i, scene 3.

7. I had been living in Menton since late August 1982 with my first wife Pauline and my daughter Heidi. Heidi, my firstborn daughter, was thirteen at this time.

8. Billy Moss, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, was Leigh Fermor's collaborator in the kidnapping.

9. Deborah Devonshire, “Patrick Leigh Fermor,” in In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Charlotte Mosley (London: John Murray, 2008), xv-xvi. There are two minor errors in this account: the guerillas reached Mt. Ida three days after the kidnapping, and Leigh Fermor read five stanzas of Horace's Ad Thaliarchum 1. ix.

10. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 86.

11. Maurice Cardiff, Friend Abroad: Memories of Lawrence Durrell, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Peggy Guggenheim and Others (London: The Radcliffe Press, 1997), 19.

12. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (New York: New York Review of Books, 1982), xvii. Even in his youth, Leigh Fermor had experienced the attraction of monastic life, describing in A Time of Gifts his visit to the Benedictine Abbey at Gottweig, where an Irish monk “of immense age and great charm” showed the young wayfarer around. “I envied his airy and comfortable cell, his desk laden with books, and his view over the mountains and the river” (A Time of Gifts, 187).

13. These details are culled from Sofka's Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens (London: Granta Books, 2004), 13.

14. Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), 151.

15. Neni Panourgia, Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 56.

16. Ibid., 57.

17. Ibid., 19.

18. Ibid., 92–93.

19. “Exiles on the Greek islands where concentration camps were established for the Leftists in 1947, as Civil War was raging, saw Oedipus from a different light, so to speak. Beaten, tortured, and pressured to sign declarations that they were not what they maintained to be (Leftists) but something that they were not (Christian nationalists), they found themselves somatically in the place of Oedipus: with swollen feet from bastinado, gouged eyes from strikes on the head, being asked to answer the unanswerable question, are you (with us) or are you not? —all the while being told the same thing, you will become human (dnthropoi) or you will die” (iii). See Neni Panourgia, “Fragments of Oedipus: Anthropology at the Edges of History,” in Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology, ed. Neni Panourgia and George Marcus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 97-H2.

20. The term is J. M. Coetzee's. See “All Autobiography Is ‘Autre-biography’: J. M. Coetzee Interviewed by David Atwell,” in Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/Biography, ed. J. L. Coullie et al. (Honolulu, 2006).

21. As Neni remarks often in her book, storytelling is dangerous. Even close family would tell her to be careful what she wrote, what was necessary to remember, and what was wisest to suppress. “You know better than I do,” an uncle told her, “scripta manet and there are still a lot of people alive from that time” (Dangerous Citizens, 20).

22. Simon Critchley, “Have a Happy Afterlife,” International Herald Tribune, June 25, 2009.

23. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. i (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 41.

24. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 209.

25. Michael Jackson, “The Gulf of Corinth,” in Being of Two Minds (Wellington: Steele Roberts Publishers, 2011), 15–16.

26. Sofka, Eurydice Street, 27.

27. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (London: Heinemann, 1960), 79.

28. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 9–50.

29. Miller, Colossus, 82.

8. IT'S OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE MY OLD AGE

Chapter epigraph: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1989), 347.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, trans. Adrian Van Den Houten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 72.

2. Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 14–15.

3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), 91.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Itinerary of a Thought,” New Left Review 58 (1969): 43–66; quotation from p. 45.

5. “The mixed Maori population of Pukekohe have given themselves a name—Nga Hau E Wha (The Four Winds)—which expresses their varied backgrounds. The Four Winds of Maoridom appear to have been caught in the stronger current of change, and it is worthwhile considering the direction in which they are blowing.” B. Kernot, “Which Way Are the Winds Blowing,” Te Ao Hou 42 (March 1963): 20.

6. By contrast, Joan Metge, who studied under Piddington several years earlier, recalls him as a “gifted teacher [whose] carefully crafted lectures were made memorable by a fund of jokes.” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 5 (Wellington, N.Z.: Allen & Unwin; Dept. of Internal Affairs, 1990–2000), 411.

7. Ralph Piddington, An Introduction to Social Anthropology, vol. 1 (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1952), 14.

8. Piddington, An Introduction to Social Anthropology, vol. 2 (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1952), 543.

9. Ibid., 546.

10. Ibid., 549.

11. Ibid., 781.

12. D. J. Mulvaney, “Australian Anthropology: Foundations and Funding,” Aboriginal History 17, no. 2 (1993): 105–28. See also Geoffrey Gray, “‘Piddington's Indiscretion’: Ralph Piddington, the Australian National Research Council and Academic Freedom.” Oceania 64, no. 3 (1994): 217–45.

13. Ralph Piddington, “Aborigines on Cattle Stations Are in Slavery: Anthropologist Piddington Backs World's Probe Demand.” The World, January 14, 1932, 1.

14. Ralph Piddington, “Treatment of Aborigines: World's Plea for Better Conditions Receives Attention Abroad.” The World, July 7, 1932, 6–7.

15. A. O. Neville, the chief protector at this time, may be familiar to some readers from his portrayal in the 2002 film Rabbit Proof Fence. A diehard paternalist, Neville believed that biological absorption was the key to “uplifting the Native race.” In defense of policies of forced settlement, removing children from parents, surveillance, discipline, and punishment, Neville argued that Aboriginals had to be protected from themselves whether they liked it or not. “They cannot remain as they are. The sore spot requires the application of the surgeon's knife for the good of the patient, and probably against the patient's will.” Cited in Stephen Kinnane, Shadow Lines (Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003), 253.

16. Geoffrey G. Gray, A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 113.

17. Mulvaney, “Australian Anthropology,” 122–23.

9. OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

Chapter title is taken from words stenciled on the rearview mirrors of most modern cars.

Chapter epigraph: Galina Lindquist, Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 192.

1. Galina Lindquist, Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia (New York: Berghahn, 2006), xiv.

2. Galina Lindquist, “In Search of the Magical Flow: Magic and Market in Contemporary Russia,” Urban Anthropology 29, no. 4 (2000): 315–57.

3. Lindquist, Conjuring Hope, 199.

4. Ibid., 80.

5. Ibid., 229.

6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “From Mauss to Levi-Strauss,” in Signs, trans. R. C. McLeary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 119.

7. During Galina's last field trip in Tuva, she was brutally informed by a local woman healer that she had cancer. Feigning great distress, the healer offered not only to cure Galina's cancer but to collaborate in writing a book with her. In a posthumously published paper, Galina describes the overwhelming dread this diagnosis caused her and how—when she had recovered her equilibrium—she came to value the insights this traumatic episode had given her into how healers work by intimidating their clients, asserting their authority, and inspiring belief in their powers. But as for accepting the healer's offer, Galina speaks of this moment as a baptism of fire: “I must admit that I was not prepared to go that far: the face of the Other as the face of death was too much for me.” Galina Lindquist, personal communication, 2007.

8. Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).

9. The Cloude of Unknowyng is an anonymous fourteenth century work of Christian mysticism that emphasizes spiritual union with God through contemplative prayer and love rather than thought and knowledge.

10. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 126–27.

11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 353.

12. Ibid., 359.

13. Ibid., 354.

14. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 226–27.

15. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), 119.

16. Galina Lindquist, “‘Being a Hostage to the Other’: Levinas's Ethical Epistemology and Dysphoric Fieldwork Experiences.” In Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process, ed. Dimitrina Spencers and James Davies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 195–203.

17. In his magisterial comparative study of doctrines of rebirth in Buddhist, Greek, and Amerindian traditions, Gananath Obeyesekere shows that despite “vast differences” these doctrines have “important structural similarities and variations based on a shared belief in reincarnation.” Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformations in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press 2002), xiv. Obeyesekere's preoccupation with deductive models and “elementary structures” unfortunately precludes explorations of the experiential bases of such eschatologies.

18. Norbert Elias, Involvement and Detachment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), xviii.

19. Meyer Fortes, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15.

20. Ibid., 23.

21. Robin Horton even suggests that West African cosmologies “probably represent attempts by other people to conceptualize motivational conflicts in an essentially Freudian way,” as if Freud's analysis is analytically more sophisticated and therapeutically more useful than these primitive precursors. Robin Horton, “Destiny and the Unconscious in West Africa,” Africa 31, no. 2 (1961): 115.

22. Alma Gottlieb, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 79.

23. Ibid., 80.

24. Ibid., 79.

25. “The appallingly high mortality rate for infants and young children…looms large in the consciousness of every Beng mother,” writes Alma Gottlieb (Afterlife, 93).

26. Ibid., 88.

27. Ibid., 98.

28. Ibid., 273–76.

29. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 358.

30. Nicolas Wood, “Strains of a Balkan Ballad,” International Herald Tribune, November 14, 2004.

31. Rose, Love's Work, 135–36.

32. Ibid., 139.

33. Ibid., 98, emphasis added.

34. Michael Foucault, “First Howison Lecture on ‘Truth and Subjectivity,’” October 20, 1980. Cited by James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 321–22.

10. I AM AN OTHER

“Je est un autre” is Arthur Rimbaud's famous declaration of his determination to become other than the person he has been raised to be. In “Letter to Paul Demeny,” Charlesville, May 15, 1871.

Chapter epigraph: René Devisch, “The Human Body as a Vehicle for Emotions among the Yaka of Zaire,” in Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures, ed. Michael Jackson and Ivan Karp (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1990), H5–33; quotation from p. 127.

1. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 5.

2. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Zande Therapeutics,” in Essays Presented to C. G. Seligman, ed. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth, and Bronislaw Malinowski (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1934), 49–61, especially p. 59.

3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), 85–90.

4. On the “mixing of voluntary and involuntary elements” in possession cults, see Ivan Karp, “Power and Capacity in Iteso Rituals of Possession,” in Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures, ed. Michael Jackson and Ivan Karp (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1990), 79–93, quotation from p. 84.

5. That the appearance of the world is a product of the means whereby we observe is, of course, a central tenet of quantum mechanics, as spelled out in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

6. George Devereux, Ethnopsychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology as Complementary Frames of Reference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 125.

7. A person who is too self-enclosed is compared to “fermenting cassava paste that is indissolubly bound in a bushel,” while someone who is overly effusive and spontaneous is censured as socially dead to the world. Among the Kuranko, a selfabsorbed individual is compared to a fat grub called “sonson,” which is so oily that it can be fried without additional oil being added to the pan, “stewing in its own juice,” while one who cannot contain one's emotions, control one's mouth, or curb one's appetite is similarly “deaf” to the protocols of social life and said to be equally “crazy.”

8. For details of Reade's travels in Sierra Leone I have drawn on the following sources: W. Winwood Reade, Savage Africa, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1864); W. Winwood Reade, The African Sketch-Book, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873); and F. Legge, introduction to W. Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1872).

11. YONDER

Chapter epigraph: Ian Fairweather's sister, Nourma Abbot-Smith, in Ian Fair-weather: Profile of a Painter (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978), 1. Cited in Murray Bail, Fairweather (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 1981), 11.

1. Siri Hustvedt, “Yonder,” in A Plea for Eros (New York: Picador, 2006), 2.

2. I discovered, years later, that Patrick White acquired Fairweather's Gethsemane in 1958, the year it was painted. It hung over White's writing desk on Martin Road, in Centennial Park, for many years, until he gave it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1974. White visited Fairweather on Bribie Island in 1961, and his fictionalized version of Fairweather (Hurtle Duffield) is the central figure in his 1970 novel The Vivisector.

3. Cited in Murray Bail, Fairweather (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 1981), 29.

4. Later, in Darwin, he lived in a concrete mixer and then in an abandoned, ratinfested railway wagon, showing, as Murray Bail puts it, “a peculiar preference for discomfort, difficulty” (ibid., 94).

5. Patricia Anderson, “Ian Fairweather: A Web of Memory and Feeling,” Art & Australia (Summer 2006): 252–56.

6. “Ian Fairweather: A Reclusive Australian Painter,” The Economist (April 16, 2009).

7. In Roman mythology, maenads were the female followers of Dionysus. Their name literally translates as “raving ones,” for Dionysus inspired the maenads to ecstasy through dancing and drunken intoxication. As they lost self-control, they would shout excitedly, engage in uncontrolled sexual behavior, and ritualistically hunt and tear animals to pieces, devouring the raw flesh.

8. “Blessed is he who has the good fortune to know the mysteries of the gods, who sanctifies his life and initiates his soul, a bacchant on the mountains, in holy purifications.” See Norman O. Brown, “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” Harper's Magazine (May 1961): 47.

9. The same questions inform Patrick White's account of Hurtle Duffield, for whom his paintings are more real than the people he paints. White prefaces The Vivisector with quotations from Rimbaud, Blake, Saint Augustine, and Ben Nicholson to suggest the intimate links between art and the mysterium tremendum of religious experience.

10. Patrick White, The Vivisector (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 9.

11. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 144–45.

12. White, Vivisector, 197.

13. Cited in Bail, Fairweather, 68.

14. Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1957), xii.

15. See, for example, Robert Redfield, “Thinker and Intellectual in Primitive Society,” in Primitive Views of the World, ed. Stanley Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 33–48.

16. On Malinowski's pragmatic and ethnographic theory of language, see “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” Supplement i, in The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, ed. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953), 296–336.

17. Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 114.

18. Walter van Beek, “Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule,” Current Anthropoloiogy 32, no. 2 (1991): 139–67.

19. Barry Hallen, “A Philosopher's Approach to Traditional Culture,” Theoria to Theory 9 (1975): 259–72, 261.

20. Ibid., 264. See also Barry Hallen and J. O. Sodipo, Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy (London: Ethnographica, 1986), 8–9.

21. John Dewey, How We Think (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 12.

22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 17, 19.

23. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 146–51.

24. Paul Ricoeur, Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17.

25. These foregoing points are fully explored and amply illustrated in my study of Kuranko storytelling. Michael Jackson, Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

26. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

12. READING SIDDHARTHA TO FREYA AT FOREST LAKE

Chapter epigraph: The Yoga-Sutra of Patajali, trans. Chip Hartranft (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), 37.

1. I would later share these reflections with my colleague Charlie Hallisey. In Charlie's view, Hesse's narrative was both Eurocentric and simplistic. It echoed Victorian narratives of a questing hero, as well as the perennial adolescent search for a path or true vocation. Hesse's Siddhartha is like Goldilocks, Charlie said. Someone venturing out into the world, testing and tasting other people's food and furniture, looking for what works for her, what feels “just right.” And he mentioned the Danish writer Karl Gjellerup who, like Hermann Hesse, fell under the spell of Buddhism, and published Pilgrimen Kamanita (“The Pilgrim Kamanita”) in 1906, a fictional journey of an Indian merchant's son from a youthful life of prosperity and carnal pleasure to death, rebirth, and nirvana.

2. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 50.

3. B. K. S. Iyengar, The Tree of Yoga (Boston: Shambhala, 1989), 10.

4. Ibid., ii.

5. Ibid., 27.

6. Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 7–9.

7. B. K. S. Iyengar, Body the Shrine, Yoga Thy Light (Bombay: B. I. Taraporewala, 1978), 15–16, 29, 61. Also see Iyengar, Tree of Yoga, 89–92.

8. Eliade, Yoga, 53.

9. Iyengar, Tree of Yoga, 46.

10. Ibid., 14.

11. Ibid., 16.

12. This probably reflects the origin of yoga in the ancient non-Vedic Natha cult, linked with the worship of Siva as Lord of all the animals (Pasupati Siva). The culture of the body among the Nath Siddhas was also associated with the dynamic interplay of sun and moon. The word “hatha yoga” signified the unification (yoking) of ha (sun) and tha (moon), which itself connoted a ritualistic bringing together of the two primordial elements of which all being, including human being, is composed—variously expressed as the creative and the destructive, Siva and Shakti, male and female. Shashi Bhushan Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962), 229–46.

13. B. K. S. Iyengar, unpublished notes from Yoga Darsana, London, July 1970.

14. Agehananda Bharati, The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (Santa Barbara, CA: Ross Erikson, 1976), 78.

15. Ibid., 66.

16. Agehananda Bharati, The Ochre Robe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 84.

17. Ibid., 83.

18. Iyengar, Tree of Yoga, 37.

19. Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 51.

20. Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2006), 7.

21. Wole Soyinka, “Running to Stand Still,” http://www.pwf.cz/en/archives/interviews/1177.html.

22. The opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's “If.”

23. Karl Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 153.

24. In 1959 thirteen men collaborated in forming the Strategic Army Corps Sport Parachute Team to compete in what was, at the time, a Communist-dominated sport. The skydiving team performed so well that on June 1, 1961, the army officially recognized, designated, and activated the team as the U.S. Army Parachute Team.

25. A few weeks after our encounter on the Icelandair flight, Paul sent me pictures from the eighteen-day cruise that he and his wife had taken. Here he was on a 70-mph, rigidhull inflatable boat ride in Norway, on an aerial assault course 100 feet above the ground in Scotland, rolling down a hill in a ball (zorbing) in Northern Ireland, snorkeling in a dry suit in 35-degree water in Iceland, and kayaking in Greenland. “We also had 80-mph and 21-foot waves part of the trip,” he added. “Some fun.”

26. Karl Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 1–46.

27. Sextus Empiricus, The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus's “Outlines of Pyrrhonism,” trans. Benson Mates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 89.

13. ON THE WORK AND WRITING OF ETHNOGRAPHY

Chapter epigraph: Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2, The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 8–9.

1. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 37.

2. The Kuranko term sundan connotes “guest” or “stranger” and resonates with comparable terms in other West African languages.

3. Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (New York: Dell, 1972), 52.

4. Paul Ricoeur, Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17.

5. George Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), xvi-xvii.

6. This is the central thesis of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). Also see Don Ihde, “Scientific Visualism,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, ed. David M. Kaplan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 469–86.

7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 98, emphasis in original.

8. Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4.

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1974), 73.

10. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), 100.

11. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.

12. See Devereux, Anxiety to Method, xvi-xx.

13. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 51–55.

14. Michael Jackson, Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 32–36.

15. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 5.

16. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), 7. More recently, Pierre Hadot has made a similar case for “philosophy as a way of life”—less a theoretical discourse than a “practice, an askesis, and a transformation of the self.” See What Is Ancient Philosophy, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 275.

17. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

18. Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), xiii.

19. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 65.

20. David Howes speaks of this as “a crisis of intonation” and describes the “dwindling power” of traditional songs in the Trobriand Islands, where older people lament the passing of a “golden age of orality,” when the measure of human greatness was the resounding quality of one's vocal presence. See Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 64–67.

21. J. C. Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word,” Psychiatry 22 (1959): 307–20. Also see Jack Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982); David Riesman, “The Oral and Written Traditions,” in Explorations in Communications, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 109–16.

22. Walter Benjamin, ‘'The Storyteller,’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 83–109.

23. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 61–64. See also Jacques Derrida, “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981), 66–94.

24. “Each culture contains the negation of its manifest pattern and nuclear values, through a tacit affirmation of contrary latent patterns and marginal values. The complete real pattern of a culture is a product of a functional interplay between officially affirmed and officially negated patterns possessing mass.” Devereux, Anxiety to Method, 212.

25. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 13, 5, 8.

26. Ibid., 8. This argument has also been made, eloquently and empirically, by William A. Graham in his study of the vocal and sensual character of scriptural texts, and he cites examples of how scripture is not only written but “recited, read aloud, chanted, sung, quoted in debate, memorized in childhood, meditated upon in murmur and full voice,” its sacrality realized in the life of a vocal community. Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ix, 7–8.

27. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, x-xii.

28. John Blacking argues that “the essential differences between music in one society and another may be social and not musical. If English music may seem to be more complex than Venda music and practiced by a smaller number of people, it is because of the consequences of the division of labor in society, and not because the English are less musical or their music is cognitively more complex.” How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 102.

29. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Vintage, 2007), 232.

30. Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 11.

31. Oliver Sacks provides wonderful examples of musical synesthesia in which musical keys and chords are strongly associated with colors and tastes. See “The Key of Clear Green: Synesthesia and Music,” in Sacks, Musicophilia, chap. 14.

32. Cf. Jacques Derrida's comments on the textual metaphor of language in Margins of Philosophy, 160–61.

33. Ibid., 161.

34. Eugenio Montale, The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays, trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Ecco Press, 1982).

35. The term is no longer current in Portuguese, though it is cognate with the French se debrouiller, meaning to fend for oneself, to get by in a murky situation in which one cannot see far ahead (brouillard = fog). Henrik Vigh, Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 128–30.

36. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), part 1, 16, 23. I deliberately mistranslate “God” as “Reality.”