Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa 9780226825939

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 EP and the Problem of Other Worlds
Chapter 2 Thinking with Ngangas about Transplant Surgery, Personhood, and the Limits of “Objectively Necessary Appearances”
Chapter 3 Thinking with Ifá about Genomic Ancestry Profiles and “Racecraft”
Chapter 4 Thinking with Abakuá about Early Analog Acoustic Technology and the “Dialectics of Ensoniment”
Chapter 5 Thinking with the Cajón pa’ los Muertos about Historicist Knowledge and Its Conditions of Impossibility
Chapter 6 Thinking with Otanes about Mid- Twentieth- Century American Anthropology
Epilogue Thinking with Tomás about My Own Work
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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thinking with ngangas

Thinking with Ngangas What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa

Stephan Palmié

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2023 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2023 Printed in the United States of America 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23  1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82592-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82594-6 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82593-9 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226825939.001.0001 The author gratefully acknowledges a generous subsidy from the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology’s Marion R. & Adolph J. Lichtstern Fund for the publication of this work. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Palmié, Stephan, author. Title: Thinking with ngangas : what Afro-Cuban ritual can tell us about scientific practice and vice versa / Stephan Palmié. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023001532 | ISBN 9780226825922 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226825946 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226825939 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Black people—Cuba—Religion. | Anthropology of religion. | Religion and science. Classification: LCC BL2530.C9 P35 2023 | DDC 299.6/897291— dc23/eng20230323 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001532 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

preface vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds

∙ 19

Chapter 2

Thinking with Ngangas about Transplant Surgery, Personhood, and the Limits of “Objectively Necessary Appearances” ∙ 37 Chapter 3

Thinking with Ifá about Genomic Ancestry Profiles and “Racecraft” ∙ 63 Chapter 4

Thinking with Abakuá about Early Analog Acoustic Technology and the “Dialectics of Ensoniment” ∙ 101 Chapter 5

Thinking with the Cajón pa’ los Muertos about Historicist Knowledge and Its Conditions of Impossibility ∙ 139 Chapter 6

Thinking with Otanes about Mid-Twentieth- Century American Anthropology ∙ 161 Epilogue

Thinking with Tomás about My Own Work Acknowledgments 193 References 233

Notes 197

Index 263

∙ 181

Preface

More than a decade in the making, this book is the result of an accidental find. When writing the chapter that gives this book its title (chapter 2), I first realized that my Cuban ethnography seemed to throw unexpected light on issues to do not only with conceptions of modernity and rationality which I had dealt with before (Palmié 2002) but more concretely with science and other Western expert practices. In the case explored in that chapter, I began to wonder—and wonder is the right word here—to what extent questions of personhood thrown up by transplant surgery and the legal and moral quandaries surrounding it could receive illumination by relating them to ideas and practices concerning power objects known as ngangas in the Afro- Cuban ritual tradition of Palo Monte. As I will briefly recount now, such wonderment eventually turned into a project. The reader will, of course, be the judge of the success of such ostensibly preposterous endeavors as I undertake in this book to bring Afro-Cuban ritual and Western expert praxis under one analytical umbrella. But I found that it could be done, and I think I learned something about both terms of the (however ostensibly perverse) relation I so engineered. Other such attempts followed in a series of occasional essays that I wrote over the years. But it really only was when I had completed my last monograph (Palmié 2013a) and embarked on a fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study that I realized I had something entirely unplanned on my hands. Like the other SCAS fellows, I was asked to give a presentation on what I aimed to do while in residence. I got quite a kick out of saying that the collegium’s decision-making process had taken so long that the book I originally had planned to write there was now in proof stage. But I also realized that the essays in which I had tried to render commensurable matters such as, for instance, personal genomic histories and Afro-Cuban divination, academic historiography and spirit possession, or analog electroacoustics and the mysteries of an Afro- Cuban esoteric sodality all cohered around a common intellectual move: the method of reciprocal illu-

viii ∙ preface

mination, arguably first set in place by the Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746) in his Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps (1724). Lafitau was one of the most perceptive early protoethnographers of the Iroquois, with five years of experience in the wilds of New France. In many ways, his project drew from a long-standing tradition of comparisons of non-European peoples to ancient Greece or the Old Testament Hebrews; these had been established since at least José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589) and had come to flourish in the seventeenth century (Hodgen 1964, 295–353). But Lafitau wasn’t satisfied with discovering analogies in ancient paganism that would throw light on the peculiarities of New World savages. Instead, he set his empirical knowledge of the Iroquois to work on what he perceived as lacunae in the knowledge of ancient societies as well. What he realized, we might say, were the affordances (in Gibson’s 1977 sense; cf. Ingold 2000; Keane 2018) that one set of data provided for making sense of the other. Here is what perhaps is the most famous passage grounding what came to be known as the comparative method: I have not limited myself to learning the characteristics of the Indian and informing myself about their customs and practices, I have sought in these practices and customs, vestiges of the most remote antiquity. I have read carefully [the works] of the earliest writers who treated the customs, laws and usages of the peoples of whom they had some knowledge. I made a comparison of these customs with each other. I confess that, if the ancient authors have given me information on which to base happy conjectures about the Indians, the customs of the Indians have given me information on the basis of which I can understand more easily and explain more readily many things in the ancient authors. (Lafitau 1974, 27; emphasis mine)

Of course, nowadays the term comparative method is mostly associated with the smugly ethnocentric progressivist schemes of the nineteenth-century founders of our discipline. Tylor, Morgan, Lennon, Lubbock, Maine, or Frazer all based their various speculative enterprises vaunting late Victorian cultural supremacy on the comparative method. It was the Enlightenment’s version of a time machine: look at yonder savages, behold your own past, and see how far we have come from thence. It was on the tenets of such conjectural history (as Adam Smith’s student Dugald Stewart called it) that Boas (1896), toward the end of the nineteenth century, launched a frontal attack, effectively replacing its pseudoevolu-

preface ∙ ix

tionism with his own brand of historical particularism. The comparative method didn’t survive much into the twentieth century.1 Though earlier critiques by Rivers (1911) or Hocart (1915) remained largely unheeded, by the 1920s Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown had simply brushed genetic explanations away as irrelevant to the concerns of the field science they had come to engineer. When Frazer died in 1941, the comparative method on which his sheer interminable series of tomes on savage belief were based had long predeceased him. It had become a chapter in the history of our discipline, and an unfortunate one at that. In all fairness to Lafitau, however, we should note that it was comparative philology in the wake of Jones, Bopp, the Grimms, and Schleicher that had provided the model for such enterprises (including Darwin’s descent with modification; cf. Alter 1999)—not Father Lafitau’s rather humbler, theologically driven, comparative quest (“my system,” as he called it). What he was after were remnants of a primal revelation among spatiotemporally disparate ancient and American “pagans” whose cultural similarities he never sought to temporalize along an axis of civilizational progress.2 For him, the matrilineal kinship systems of the Lycians and the Iroquois reciprocally illuminated each other but not because the Iroquois were stuck on a cultural level that the Lycians had already attained in antiquity. It was because he thought the Iroquois were descendants of pre-Hellenic barbarians and had perpetuated significant aspects of their ancestral culture. No denial of “co-evalness” here. No attempt at explanation either. Just a heuristic conceit that, I think, may serve us still. I will have a bit more to say about Father Lafitau and his—in many ways preposterous—method. But for now, let me just recall what I told my audience at SCAS: like Lafitau, I may be on a wild goose chase when it comes to the comparisons between Afro- Cuban ritual traditions and Western scientific rationality that I intend to make in this book. But I would venture to say that there’s something to learn even from failed endeavors.3 There was a whole contingent of cognitive scientists among the fellows that year, one of whom introduced himself as a committed reductionist. We eventually learned to respect our differences, and we came to appreciate a common sense of humor. Having been introduced by SCAS’s then principal, Björn Wittrock, as the incoming chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology may have cut me some slack among the cognitivists. Surely, the guy must have somehow earned his spurs, I imagine they must have thought. But I still think that the day we initially presented our projects, the majority of them thought of me as an annoying but largely irrelevant distant cousin who perhaps ought not to have been invited to the party.

x ∙ preface

But that precisely may be the point. While my colleagues were out to mutually reinforce their ideas, my goal was to create, as Kenneth Burke (1964) might have put it, “perspectives by incongruity”: to see how far we might be able to push matters so as to break through what Burke called the “terministic screens” beyond which any further inquiry must stop, because doing otherwise might set the house on fire. Of course, I have no intent to set anyone’s house on fire in what follows. But I do want to play with matches. In that spirit, I have written a few more essays since my stay at SCAS, where this project first germinated. All of them aim to push beyond such limits: break through Burke’s screens. But by the time I wrote those chapters, I had actually known what I was doing. I was elaborating on (or, to put it differently: trying to figure out) the consequences of what I can only describe as an accidental moment for which my ethnographic knowledge of Afro- Cuban ritual had somehow prepared me—just as Lafitau’s classical learning had prepared him for the unexpected illuminations it would receive from his knowledge of Iroquois life. As Wittgenstein (2009; cf. Palmié 2020) might have said, what lit up for both of us was an aspect of what we had already known but never thought of in just this way.4 The point? For me, it was a find, and I suspect it was that for Lafitau as well. A find. Not a discovery.

Introduction

As I elaborated in my previous book The Cooking of History (Palmié 2013a), a find is in many ways the opposite of a discovery. A discovery, as the Mexican historian and philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman (1961) argued, is a matter of foresight: a contemporary astronomer can, given increased telescopic power and imaging software, pretty well foresee the possible discovery of a new galaxy or black hole. It is to do with time and technological affordances: a matter of course for the kinds of pursuits that Thomas Kuhn (1962) designated as normal science. To be sure, preexisting “stocks of knowledge,” to use Alfred Schuetz’s vocabulary, will inevitably play a role. Kekulé did not dream up the benzene ring out of thin air but discovered it on the basis of prior chemical and mythological knowledge. Nor would Lafitau have found much in the wilds of New France had he not been previously acquainted with the literature on ancient Greece. Such is the nature of realized affordances, intellectual or imaginative. But it is the moment of sudden unprecedentedness, and initial unbelievability, that is at issue here. A find, in O’Gorman’s sense, is something altogether different from the results of a methodical pursuit of a problem. It befalls us. Columbus, so O’Gorman argued, never set out to discover a hitherto unknown continent. What he did was to stumble onto just such an unimaginable landmass while trying to discover a westward sea route to Asia. What this find occasioned was a centuries-long process of what O’Gorman called “the invention of America”—a process playing out in heated geographical, political, and certainly theological debates over the course of a number of centuries. Were Native Americans descendants of Adam and Eve? If so, how did they get there? Did they have immortal souls? What theological and political rights ought they to enjoy given whichever way these questions might be answered? Could they be turned into Christian subjects of the Spanish crown? And if so, what methods of harnessing their labor to the ends of empire could be used? Might Roman law be sufficient, or would Thomist doctrines

2 ∙ introduction

of the sovereignty of the non- Christian prince need to be applied? All this intellectual machinery was unleashed on the people nowadays known as Native Americans because of another accident: Columbus happened to them. Or, to put it differently and more realistically, the multiple outcomes of his “find” befell them, to utterly tragic effect. A paradigm change enacted as genocide. Not to minimize the horrific outcomes of the case at hand. But so it goes when a fortuitous and sufficiently portentous find occurs—a massive, game-changing anomaly, as Kuhn (1962) might have said, occasioning the emergence of a world different from, and perhaps incommensurable with, the one we (or really: everyone involved) thought we had inhabited since time immemorial. Even the physical world is apt to change. Instead of the three continents of Strabo and Pliny, now there were four. After such a threshold event, as with (to use Kuhn’s own examples) Copernicus’s proof of heliocentrism or Lavoisier’s belated victory over Priestley,1 those who subscribe to the emergent dogma came to “live in a different world.” Of course, Columbus himself chose to remain in a world with only three continents, which he had connected through imagining a westward sea route. But once the implications of Balboa’s crossing the Isthmus of Panama had suitably sunk in, the Americas, as we now call them, had begun to exist— and to become a problem. This is a specious argument, you might say, constructed to make a— perhaps—historically valid but geologically untenable point (but see Lewis and Wigen 1997). Of course, an American double continent existed all along (or at least since it split off from Pangea, eons ago). While Europeans just didn’t know about it until after circa 1500, the ill-fated Taino whom Columbus encountered in the Caribbean surely weren’t living in thin air! But worlds do change. David Hume perhaps first put his finger on the problem in his skeptical proposal of the problem of induction. How could we ever know that the world will continue to behave as it did in the past? That its furniture will remain stable—and not just stable enough—for us to carry on with business as usual? Anticipating Bourdieu, habituation was Hume’s answer, and it was good enough for him to counter the possibility of miracles. But I am talking not about miracles here but discontinuities in precisely the sense that Kuhn adumbrated. Copernican heliocentrism and Einsteinian relativity notwithstanding, most of us don’t blink an eye when we hear someone speak of a beautiful sunset or see an apple falling from a tree. So let me give you a different and altogether unrelated example of the kind of process I have in mind: the great 1885 cholera controversy, involving not only the eminent scientists of the day but three imperial powers. At

introduction ∙ 3

its center again stands a body of water, the Pacific Ocean, and a couple of continents: this time British India and Europe. Up to that point, Europe had seen four major cholera epidemics since the beginning of the nineteenth century: 1817, 1826–37,1841–59, and 1863–74. In 1881, the disease broke out again in Egypt, connected as it had been with the British sea routes to India since the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869, Britain’s acquisition of its majority shares in 1875, and Britain’s military domination of the canal zone since 1882 (Ogawa 2000; Altaic 2010). By the spring of 1883, three teams of scientists had been dispatched to Egypt by Britain, France, and Germany. Each included, or was directed by, some of the most prominent microbiologists (as we would call them) of the day, and each was equipped with copious amounts of discretionary funds. Headed by the surgeon-general William Hunter, Britain’s expedition arrived in July 1883; the French commission, advised by Pasteur from afar, came in August. Last to arrive was the German one, directed by the still-youthful prodigy of a new “bacteriological” vitalism, Robert Koch. Finding the epidemic on the wane in Cairo (just as the French expedition had), Koch decided to follow the bacteria—which until then were still largely a figment of his own imagination. For really: even given the advances of microscopy, how was one to say that the presence of certain microbes was a mere symptom of cholera rather than its cause? Was the microbe the pathogen, or was its presence caused by some other pathogenic factor? So under Koch’s lead, the Germans set out to follow the trail of cholera (or what they thought it was), arriving in Calcutta in December 1883 to observe endemic states of the disease. There, Koch eventually was able to isolate a comma-shaped microbe in the lower intestines of enough cholera victims to attack one of his rather more famous compatriot hygienists’, Rudolph Pettenkofer’s, so-called groundwater and soil theory of the causation of what they both knew as a disease named cholera. Pettenkofer’s story is a famous case in the history of heroic self-experiments. For in a last-ditch effort to refute Koch’s theory of microbial causation, Pettenkofer—whose ecologically (as we might say) focused theories had already led to the implementation of effective (by post-Kochian standards) measures of sanitation in Munich— submitted himself to the experimentum crucis. Having asked Koch to supply a suitably lethal sample of Vibrio cholerae and having prepared his stomach for maximum receptivity by ingesting sodium bicarbonate, he swallowed a vial containing a high concentration of Koch’s bacterium in front of an audience of students. As a result, he suffered a week of diarrhea, but he survived as a denizen of a world in which disease-inducing microorganisms didn’t exist.2 But

4 ∙ introduction

Pettenkofer’s heroic experiment didn’t halt the transformation of his world. Koch’s ideas—and the superior efficacy they came to enjoy, at least until the advent of antibiotics and the near-immediate evolution of resistant bacterial strains (Landecker 2016)—became how nature was and always had been. The “comma” bacillus turned from a mere symptom of cholera into its cause. Just as Balboa’s tipping his toes in Pacific waters proved that Columbus had been wrong. Never mind Australia, or the question of whether it was Lesseps whose Suez Canal produced “Africa” and the “Middle East” as we know them today (providing a novel epidemiological pathway for Vibrio cholerae in the process). What we need to account for are the productivity and stability (in Daston’s [2000] sense) of the “worlds” so brought into being. That Verdi would be commissioned to compose an opera to celebrate the occasion was part of all this. How intriguing, then, that one of the first genuine field-workers among British anthropologists, Arthur M. Hocart (1915), decided to hitch a ride on what had become medical and increasingly public common sense at the time of his writing. Hocart was reacting to the armchair psychologizing of cultural difference that Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard would later come to call the “intellectualist interpretation” of non-Western thought exemplified by the likes of Tylor and Frazer. Both men insisted on a qualitative difference between savage and civilized modes of cogitation based on stipulations about individual reasoning from ill-understood facts. But Hocart poured equal scorn on the radical twist given to the idea by the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1910) in his theory of a “prelogical mentality” allegedly common to members of “inferior societies” informed by the “collective representations” of their social time and place.3 Hocart (1915, 125) disagreed; there is no qualitative difference between savage and civilized thought: “It is precisely because savages think in the same manner that we do that they think different things; for the same processes working on different inherited material must lead to different results.” The material on which the savage mind works is inherited tradition and social organization. We imagine indeed that we proceed differently, that we, White Folk, each individually derive our knowledge directly from objective reality, that we believe a thing only because it has objective reality and that we can see it each for himself. We conclude that our knowledge is rational, objective, and obvious, and are at a loss to account how the savage can be blind to facts and truths that are staring us in the face; we have to suppose that the eyes of his soul are closed and that he lives in a world of dreams and vague feelings. (125)

introduction ∙ 5

This indeed was standard issue at the time of Hocart’s writing: whether it be the associationist psychology that underlay both Tylor’s and Frazer’s speculations about category mistakes in magical thinking, or Lévy-Bruhl’s more fanciful, but also more interesting, notion of “mystical participation.” Hocart (125–26) would have none of either, and he put his finger deftly on the problem missing in both—a robust sociology of knowledge. Men of all races and all generations are equally convinced they individually draw their knowledge from reality. A savage will defend his beliefs by an appeal to experience. . . . We think that we believe in atoms because they really exist; a Fijian thinks that he believes in ghosts because he has seen them with his own eyes, and after all if he does claim to have seen a ghost, what have we to oppose to the testimony of his eyes but a skepticism which has no reason but that ghosts do not fit in with European conceptions of the world and are to us an unnecessary hypothesis? Every one agrees that savages do not believe in ghosts because they see them, but that they see them because they believe in them. But it occurs to few to say that we do not believe in our principle of inertia because it is self-evident, but that it is self-evident because we believe in it, or that the economic law of supply and demand is to a great extent created by our belief in it, and not our belief created by the law.

And so Hocart launches into a Fijian version of Lettres persanes to drive home his point about the social nature of any knowledge of reality, parodying his eminent Oxford colleague R. R. Marett in the process. He imagines (Hocart 1915, 128–29) an analysis of European bacteriological beliefs by a Fijian philosopher-ethnologist: “With civilized man [says the imagined Fijian savant] the bacterio-medical side of everything is always uppermost. When he is at business, or playing, or marrying, he is intensely keen on what he is about. What he is about primarily, however, is to control the process from first to last by bacterio-medical means, so as to be master of health for all times.” Next comes the parody of Marett’s (1912, 252) entry, “The Study of Magico-Religious Facts,” in the Notes and Queries of the British Association (a fieldwork manual widely in use at the time): “Just like a dog lives in a world of smells that we cannot perceive, so the White Man lives in a world of bacterio-medical infection and contagion that we cannot perceive” (Hocart 1915, 129).4 Hocart is being facetious—but not without taking care to make his invented Fijian savant replicate exactly the logic on which Hocart’s

6 ∙ introduction

disciplinary contemporaries based their diagnoses of savage irrationality: “Everywhere he [i.e., the white man] sees microbes and germs and bacilli, disease-bringing agents. . . . Living in such a perpetual state of fear, the [White man’s] community cannot allow the individual to expose himself to contagion that might endanger the existence of all. Hence that extraordinary tyranny of custom we note among them, under which individuality cannot develop” (129). After describing logically inconsistent white man taboos (putting fork but not knife to one’s mouth, apologies for passing slices of bread by hand), the Fijian anthropologist concludes: “Needless to say, the European theory of bacilli does not get at the psychological root of the matter, which is that their high-strung natures everywhere see the workings of a mysterious power called Contagion, with which the whole world is loaded as with electricity. The theory of bacilli is merely the European way of justifying these feelings” (Hocart 1915, 130). Since the occasion is a sort of seminar, a colleague of Hocart’s Fijian anthropologist with a rather more Frazerian bent of mind interjects. As for the invisible force Contagion, or whatever it may be called, pervading things that once were in contact, and operating at a distance, which civilized men believe in, it is easy to point to facts of experience, light, sound, odour, epidemics from which it had been extracted. But surely, so refined a notion cannot lie at the foundation of Bacteriology: we must begin the explanation with some much simpler mental process, which seems to need no further explanation, such as the habit of drawing inferences from analogy. (Hocart 1915, 130)

And that, of course, is astonishingly close to what the Polish physician Ludwik Fleck (1981) would come to argue in his monograph Die Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (1935), with a view toward Western epistemology: the symptomatology of what he and his fellow clinicians called syphilis during the first third of the twentieth century had been known and worried over since at least the early sixteenth century, in line with theological, Galenic, metallurgic, or other conceptual schemes. But it was only the serodiagnostic Wassermann reaction (with its own complexly serendipitous history) that ultimately generated the disease as it came to be known ever since. Key here is that Fleck chose not to disparage earlier theories about the nature and nosology of the disease but put them under a new, radically historicist description. His “comparative epistemology” hinged on the fundamentally social nature of facts and facticity. As for Hocart,

introduction ∙ 7

for Fleck (1981, 38–39), knowing was a “social activity,” and the relation between subjects and objects of knowledge had to be understood as relative to historically specific “funds of knowledge,” membership in a certain “cultural environment,” and the “thought style” of particular, socially specific “thought collectives.” He wrote, “Cognition is the most socially- conditioned activity of man, and knowledge is the paramount social creation [Gebilde]. The very structure of language presents a compelling philosophy characteristic of that community, and even a single word can represent a complex theory. To whom do these philosophies and theories belong?” (42). Fleck had read his Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl, and he quotes with approval Ludwig Gumplowicz, who as early as 1885 had argued, “What actually thinks within a person is not the individual himself but his social community. The source of his thinking is not within himself but is to be found in his social environment and in the very social atmosphere he ‘breathes.’ His mind is structured, and necessarily so, under the influence of his ever-present social environment, and he cannot think in any other way” (Gumplowicz 1905, cited in Fleck 1981, 47; Fleck’s italics). As Durkheim had already hinted at in the last pages of The Elementary Forms of Religion, science—no less than religion—is “an eminently social thing.” And Fleck’s history of the thought collectives gathering, over the centuries, around a sexually transmitted disease left little doubt about just that. Of course, the impact of Fleck’s inductive historical sociology of medical knowledge didn’t register much until his book was translated into English some forty-five years later (Kuhn admitted to having read it around 1949–50 but to have struggled with Fleck’s German). By then, in the early 1980s, a new history and philosophy of science driven by Kuhn’s and Paul Feyerabend’s iconoclastic attacks on logical positivist falsificationism and related dogmas had already irreparably damaged the claims to universal, context-free rationality that Fleck’s contemporaries such as Popper or Carnap had so successfully hammered into Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Writing in the second volume of essays devoted to what by then had become known as the rationality debate, Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (1982, 1) thus deplored that “recent upheavals in the philosophy of science have turned the historian or sociologist of science into something of an anthropologist, an explorer of alien cultures.” What, we might ask, with almost half a century of hindsight, was their problem? Isn’t this precisely what empirical science and technology studies (STS)—ever since Latour, Callon, Knorr- Cetina, Pickering, Haraway, Law, or Mol—have led us to regard as the problem at hand? (cf. Herrnstein-Smith 2005 for the contrived nature of that particular issue). Might we not say that “our”

8 ∙ introduction

practices are as deserving of explanations as “theirs” appeared to be two generations ago? But this is to jump ahead. By the early 1930s, Wittgenstein had begun to read Frazer with distinct disapproval (Palmié 2020), thereby arguably advancing toward his “second philosophy” of the incommensurability of “language games,” “forms of life,” and their axiomatic presuppositions, as expounded in the Philosophical Investigations or On Certainty (Wittgenstein 2009, 1969). In 1935, Fleck’s “comparative epistemology” homed in on the fundamentally social nature of facts and facticity. Toward the end of that decade, R. G. Collingwood (1938, 1939) issued his first salvoes against Viennese and British logical positivism that were to culminate in his conception of metaphysics as a historical science of (changing) “absolute presuppositions” from which scientific and other propositions issue forth (1940). Soon after, Michael Polanyi (1946, 1952, 1964) began to embark on his postcritical philosophical project that scandalously centered on the notion of “scientific beliefs” (rather than knowledge) and the factors stabilizing such beliefs as (historically mutable) descriptions of reality. This is a notion that would reappear as a cornerstone of the Edinburgh school of the sociology of science’s “strong programme” (where its main proponents, Barry Barnes and David Bloor [1982], would argue for the need to “symmetricalize” both discarded science and its accepted successors in terms of their social and historical conditions of credibility). Yet the crucial impetus was perhaps to come from anthropology: only two years after Fleck published his book on the historicity (as we would say today) of scientific facts, a strapping young Welsh anthropologist with a taste for military adventure named E. E. Evans-Pritchard planted an ethnographic time bomb that would radically change the terms of the debate. Before we proceed to a discussion of EP’s (as he is affectionately known to anthropologists) signature contribution to such lines of thought in chapter 1, let us pause here for a moment and draw together the strings uniting what so far may have seemed to be a rather rambling argument ranging across geographic discoveries, biomedical aspects of late nineteenthcentury geopolitics, questions of disease causation, and the protosociology of knowledge presented by Hocart in the Fijian case and Fleck in the medical one. What I have tried to give you is a taste of are the kinds of “perspectives by incongruity” that I aim to entertain in the rest of this book. Was there an American continent before Balboa? Did Koch and Pettenkofer live in the same world or in radically incommensurable ones? What was syphilis before the Wassermann reaction? Could we ever know? And if so, how might we generate such insights except by attending to the historical

introduction ∙ 9

transformations in social thought worlds that made it possible, say, for Marx to pierce through the mystification of the mode of production dominating his lifeworld; Fleming to generalize from the antibiotic effects of penicillin spores that had accidentally contaminated his bacterial cultures; Crick and Watson to extrapolate from Rosalind Franklin’s Photo 51 toward the structure of DNA; or indeed for Durkheim to think up the effects of collective representations on our everyday cognitive and behavioral options and constraints? In many ways, these questions strike at the heart of the project of which this book is an outcome—however tentative, provisional, and, I hope, not immodest it may be. On several occasions, I’ve been told— including in print (e.g., Weiss 2007)—that comparing scientific endeavors such as attempts at immunosuppression or genomic analysis to Afro-Cuban rituals, Zande oracles, or whatever is to take a cheap shot at the former and assume a frivolously relativist position. As my anthropologist friend Verena Stolcke asked me on one such occasion: doesn’t the atomic bomb work? It does, of course. But the destructive effectiveness of nuclear warheads doesn’t tell us much about the world that spawned the Manhattan Project, or about how nuclear threat became routinized in American society (or elsewhere) during the Cold War and its aftermath (Masco 2006).5 Besides, we needn’t go back to 1944 and Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1982) grim reflections in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to see that rational productivity is a questionable criterion in the age of the so-called Anthropocene, climate change, and COVID-19. This book, in other words, is not an attempt at antiscientific obscurantism. It is an attempt at understanding, to use Descola’s (2013) terminology, the extent to which practices precipitating from a post-Cartesian “naturalist ontology” can be illuminated by a principled comparison to practices rooted in ostensibly rather different ways of being and acting in the world. In the case at hand, the point of comparison will be the rationality—or not, this is up to the reader to decide—of Afro- Cuban ritual. There is a wrinkle to that too. For, as I will explain in chapter 2 (and have argued at some length in Palmié 2002), I am not engineering an entirely arbitrary comparison here. Rather—and again in Father Lafitau’s spirit—I am comparing forms of reasoning and action that I think belong to a single historic stream: not, of course, one based in biblical visions of common human origins but one based in a violent Atlantic modernity that first began to assert itself on the colonial periphery of slave-labor-driven Caribbean plantation economies before it came to transform “traditional” lifeways in the industrializing European core itself (Mintz 1985; C. L. R. James 1963).6 So indulge me in inducing one more story from the annals of science

10 ∙ introduction

to make my goals in this volume as clear as I can. When Isaac Newton left Cambridge’s Trinity College to embark on a political career at the Royal Mint in 1696 (during which he, not incidentally, became an investor in the Atlantic slave trade), he left behind a large chest containing at least a quarter century’s worth of his writings. After Newton’s death, this chest was repeatedly opened, inspected, and promptly shut again, its contents declared to be of no scientific value. It wasn’t until 1936—when John Maynard Keynes acquired some of the contents at auction—that it became clear why a vast amount of manuscripts by a man regarded as the greatest scientist of all time had been studiously kept from both scholarly and lay publics. What came to light were Newton’s prolific writings on alchemy, natural magic, and biblical prophecy; and they revealed that the arch rationalist, enshrined as such by his enlightened successors, was “not the first of the age of reason” but instead “the last of the magicians,” as Keynes famously argued in his contribution to the celebrations of the tercentenary of Newton’s birth in 1946. Everyone, it seemed, had gotten Newton wrong—from Voltaire, who lionized him as the paragon of rationality, to Blake, who railed against him as the epitome of Urizen! Keynes’s reflections on the skeletons that Newton himself had taken care to keep in the closet were deeply sympathetic—not just in regard to Newton’s heretical anti-Trinitarian religious views, but even more so when it came to the ultimately mystical motives underwriting his work on the Principia. But Sir John Maynard himself may have been wrong in one important respect. He, too, had unwittingly fallen into a trap opened by the same project of purification (in Latour’s [1993] sense) that made the opposition between the noumenal and the phenomenal, magic and science, religion and technology, thinkable in the first place. There was no “first of the age of reason,” nor was there a “last of the magicians.” The distinction itself is an artifact of this project—productive as it still is of the kind of modernistic “structural amnesia,” so reminiscent of unilineal kinship systems, that elevates Galileo, Descartes, and Newton to the status of legitimate ancestors while banishing, say, Athanasius Kircher, Robert Fludd, or John Dee to the realm of non-kin and barely recognizes the roaming courtiermagus Giordano Bruno as a genealogical ascendant because of his death at the hands of religious “forces of unreason.” But to point to the origins of science and the technologies that it both spawned and was spurred on by (Galileo’s telescope, Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, Leyden jars, Lavoisier’s calorimeter, etc.) in profoundly irrational projects, and so to revel in the fact that ghosts had been lurking in the machine all along, is not enough. It’s all too easily forgotten that Max Weber

introduction ∙ 11

balanced his so-called disenchantment thesis with the much less celebrated caveat that the increasing opacity of technoscientific rationalization itself dialectically breeds enchanted interpretations. As Alfred Gell (1998) puts it in the case of works of art, there’s no reason for technology and enchantment not to coexist—for techne and poiesis to be mutually constitutive. But to even put it this way may be to already reaffirm ostensible discontinuities that are ultimately the products of what Keane (2003, 2018) might call a historically and culturally specific, though nowadays near-universalized “semiotic ideology” that cues us into certain ways of thinking about what kinds of agencies operate in our world (be they computer programs, fellow humans, global warming, or divine actors). Difficult as it is to try to disengage oneself from such operational instructions about what can be read as an index of which kind of presence and agency in one’s world, it seems to me worth pondering how exactly enchantment and rationality (if we even want to continue using such terminology) coexist in the kinds of ritual complexes that I have been studying ethnographically for some thirty-five years now. The question thus becomes not, Do they deliver an accurate enough picture of the world? But, What ways of world-making do they afford? Hence my interest in Father Lafitau’s “method of reciprocal illumination” that arguably lies at the historical core of comparative social theory. To that end, Thinking with Ngangas aims to engineer “symmetries”—both epistemological and ontological—between a variety of Afro- Cuban ritual and Western scientific expert practices so as to see what perspectives by incongruity may be gained that way. To set the stage for such an endeavor, chapter 1 revisits a famous case of failed reciprocal illumination, EP’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), that will nonetheless continue to guide my analysis. Arguably one of the finest ethnographies of the twentieth century, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic also probably is the single anthropological monograph that attracted sustained attention from the Anglophone philosophical elite. Aimed as it was at a rehabilitation of the intrinsic rationality of non-Western systems of knowledge and practice (exemplified by the Zande poison oracle) as based on good logic but bad premises, by the 1960s EP’s monograph had become grist for the mill of a decades-long and quite polarized philosophical conversation about epistemological relativism (the so-called rationality debate). Ultimately remaining inconclusive, this debate eventually petered out in the course of the 1980s—and, one suspects, under the impact of poststructuralist philosophy, on the one hand, and the so-called crisis of representation” in anthropology, on the other. However, in light of newer developments in the philosophy and sociology of science, let alone

12 ∙ introduction

the burgeoning literature in ethnographically oriented science and technology studies, it may be worth revisiting what had been at stake then—and has come to be at stake now.7 Perhaps ironically, one of the conclusions to draw here is that not only EP’s initial assessment of science as a socially unconstrained idiom of thought but the ensuing philosophical debate as well was based (and no more or less than the Azande poison oracle!) on what we now think are false premises. False insofar as they not only artificially disembedded science from the social process (one recalls Karl Polanyi’s [1968] famous argument about the rise of economics). But false also in regard to how science operates as a set of social practices: contrary to the view of science prevailing during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (i.e., as based in a strict impersonal logic of deductive hypothesis and experimental falsification operating on a pre-given but insufficiently known world), it is what Pickering (1995), for instance, called the multiply overdetermined “mangle of practice” from which both scientific knowledge and its “object” emerge in a continuous dialectic of mutual transformation. Viewed as an ongoing, temporally emergent form of world-making, science (including social science) thus operates in what Charles Sanders Peirce called “abductive” fashion. And rather than merely “representing” the world “as it is” (or progressing toward ever-better representations), it intervenes in it, populating it with novel entities—gravity, bacteria, subatomic particles, economic indicators, DNA, demographic projections, segmentary lineage systems, and so forth—which, to the extent that they become part of its furniture and so have to be reckoned with, are themselves historical in nature (Hacking 1983, 2002; Daston 2000; Palmié 2013a). Having thus set the stage for my own ethnographic casuistry and my version of Lafitau’s “system,” chapter 2 looks at old questions concerning the relation of personhood to embodiment, property, and the autonomous self as it came to consolidate in what C. B. MacPherson (1962) called an ideology of possessive individualism from the seventeenth century onward. It does so by viewing these questions through the lens of the Afro-Cuban ritual traditions known as the Reglas de Congo and the manipulation of power objects known as ngangas that characterize them. Ngangas are complex assemblages of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials and human remains that serve as the embodiment of spirits of the dead who enter into such new forms of existence through a relationship with ritual specialists modeled on contract and seizure, wage labor and slavery. But such relationships also involve not just mutual exchange obligations but ongoing—and always precarious—acts of mutual recognition and co- constitutivity, riddled as

introduction ∙ 13

they are with their potential (and potentially violent) subversion. Casting a glance at the histories from which both human objectification (slavery) and legal personhood emerged from the seventeenth century onward, I transpose these questions to moral and legal quandaries that have emerged in transplant surgery since the advent of immune-suppressive drugs that subvert the body’s seemingly “natural” (but, in fact, inevitably “cultural”) ability to effect biotic non-self-recognition. Chapter 3 centers on genomics and its increasing role in the arbitration of social identities. In facilitating the transcription of older notions of heritable substances held to determine identity and relatedness into a novel biotic idiom supposedly beyond social maneuver, molecular-biological knowledge stakes out claims in the domain of the historical. Arguing from the highly publicized case of the genomic “resolution” of the question of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of his slave Sally Hemings’s children and the emergence of commercial personal genomic history services targeting African American consumers, this chapter seeks to expose the epistemological and methodological problems inherent in biotechnologically driven “ancestry projects” (however oppositional and empowering they may be in certain cases). It also aims to show how the divinatory logic of such applications of genomic technologies of knowledge production to the validation of modes of social identification replicates racial essentialisms such as North American ideologies of hypodescent in a manner oddly reminiscent of the “invisible essences” characterizing classic ethnographic descriptions of witchcraft detection systems. Chapter 4 takes its initial cue from a 1908 newspaper report about a Philadelphia storefront church headed by two Black Cubans who evidently used Edisonian technology (converging as it had been by then with Spiritualist uses of sound projection, telephony, and phonography) to project “spirit voices” onto the street. The details of the report leave no doubt that the leaders of this temple had drawn inspiration from (or were members of) the male esoteric sodality of Abakuá. Focusing on Abakuá’s central conception of the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named écue, and its multiply mediated ritual reproduction and transmission across space and time, this chapter aims to cast new light on (by now largely naturalized) ideologies of an auditory modernity that, in appearing to make the voices of the dead accessible to the sensorium, seemed to radically reconfigure the ontology of early twentieth-century Western societies. I suggest that once we conceive of the biotechnological assemblages that allow for the unmediated presence of écue’s voice in contemporary Abakuá ritual as a sonic mask, then the choice of Edisonian technologies of phonic transduction on

14 ∙ introduction

the Philadelphia temple leaders’ part—while probably inconsequential in the long run—might have been a logical but not innovative one: given that the early history of phonography shows the crucial role of similar mergers of the human and the material/technological in the discovery of tympanic transduction, we might say that the leaders of the Philadelphia temple, Bell and Edison, and Spiritists in search of “direct voice manifestations” inhabited one and the same structure of a technotheological conjuncture. Chapter 5 aims at the reciprocal illumination of historical knowledge production and spirit possession. Ever since the emergence of modern forms of historicism in the course of the nineteenth century, historical knowledge has become premised on the assumption of an objectively given past distanced from the present across measurable, irreversible time, and the potential for its recovery through an evidentiary regime that transforms aspects of the phenomenologically given world (objects, texts, photographs, etc.) into indexically conceived signs or traces of the past. But it has also come to be determined by a set of conditions—largely of legal and politicaleconomic origins—that define the proper subject of genuinely “historical” agency (properly individuated, i.e., continuous in space and time, possessed of autonomous volition, and capable of shouldering responsibility for his or her actions). By looking at a case of spirit possession in a relatively new genre of Afro- Cuban ritual praxis (the cajón pa’ los muertos), I discuss how the semiotic ideologies underlying contemporary academic historiography and Afro- Cuban spirit possession constitute a limiting case for what we might take to be “historical knowledge.” The final chapter trains its lens on the discipline of anthropology itself. It does so by revisiting William R. Bascom’s 1948 ethnographic field notes on Afro-Cuban religious practices in Jovellanos (a semiurban site in Cuba’s province of Matanzas) in light of current theoretical concerns in our discipline. As a thought experiment, the chapter seeks to redescribe some of Bascom’s data in terms of actor-network theory, to see whether his patent puzzlement over his interlocutors’ statements concerning the liveliness and even personhood of mineral objects—stones that embody rather than represent deities—can be resolved in such a way. At the same time, I aim to offer a critique of current attempts to redefine our discipline’s mission under the sign of an “ontological turn” (Holbraad 2012; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) recurring to notions of “radical alterity” that strike me as potentially essentialist and certainly profoundly ahistorical. Turning to Karen Barad’s (2007) theories of “agential realism,” I suggest that contemporary concerns with posthumanist antirepresentationalism be tempered by a view of our epistemic pursuits, including those of anthropology, as embedded in thoroughly

introduction ∙ 15

historical—and so fundamentally emergent—ontologies. In light of such considerations, the chapter concludes on a vision of anthropology as a form of knowledge that can afford to evade neither the historical transformations of the social worlds it aims to illuminate nor the concurrent transformations in its own epistemic orientations. Instead, it must reframe its goals in terms of conjunctures of ontologies and epistemologies of mutually relational and, most important, emergent scope. In the epilogue, I attempt to unleash Father Lafitau’s epistemic machinery on my own thought. In staging an exercise in what Heinz von Foerster (2003) calls “second order cybernetics”—that is, understanding the mutable basis of one’s own understanding—I return to a set of data from my first fieldwork in 1985 concerning my interlocutors’ proposition that the spirit of a dead African was guiding my work. I do so to render my thinking about this unexpected find in the prologue to my book Wizards and Scientists (Palmié 2002) commensurable with how I have come to think of it some twenty years later. Enlisting Wittgenstein, Collingwood, Fleck, and Polanyi as my allies, I aim to probe, not just the extent to which the ethnographic gesture can guide us into worlds furnished rather differently from our own, but what it might mean to bring pieces of such “alien” furniture “home”— not as quaint ethnographic souvenirs but as more or less integral parts of one’s own form of life. I conclude that much like the many dead social theorists with whom we continue to routinely dialogue and wrestle, that spirit has become what João de Pina Cabral (2019) calls a “metaperson” toward whom I exercise (however incomplete) forms of intersubjective transcendence, and on whom I thereby confer a continuing sense of existence—as manifested, among other things, in this book. His “necrography,” as Panagiotopoulos (2017) calls it, has fused to my biography, and—if you buy my argument—your reading this book prolongs his lease on the afterlife. Just as it does that of Lafitau, Marx, Wittgenstein, Evans-Pritchard, or whoever else. We all may be standing on the shoulders of giants. But our climbing onto their shoulders— continuing to think with them—has much to do with what makes them giants. Their gift to us, in Maussian terms, demands a return. And we render it by continuing to engage them as metapersons long after death. So it is with my African muerto. I imagine that both Father Lafitau (since his life coincided with the Jesuit Counter-Reformation) and Derrida might agree.

∙ ∙ ∙ Ranging from the legal and political economy of personhood to transplant surgery, electroaccoustics, genomics, academic history, and mid-twentieth-

16 ∙ introduction

century American anthropology, the case studies constituting the six substantial chapters of the book may seem to be a random assortment. But what unifies them is their becoming understandable in fresh and illuminating ways by running the questions they present through an analytic “mangle” (Pickering 1995), the processing parameters of which are calibrated to the ethnographic casuistry of the so-called Afro- Cuban ritual traditions. This is what I mean by “thinking with ngangas” (the name for a type of power object in one such tradition): this book is not about Afro-Cuban religion (a concept I hope I have suitably demolished in my previous monograph, The Cooking of History). I don’t wish to think and write about ngangas, the voice of écue, spirit possession, or Ifá divination as such. I want to write about such matters in their relation, engineered by me, to what “we” (and that “we” needs interrogation) think of as Western scientific expert practices and the rationalities that, to the degree laypeople understand them, appear to lie behind them. Nor is this a book informed by an Anthropology as Cultural Critique project. On the contrary, my aim is to see whether we can extend to ourselves the same anthropological charity that EP once offered to the Azande—while not ignoring the violent histories that engendered the entanglement of our ethnographic interlocutors’ worlds with the one we currently imagine to inhabit. In doing so, I will argue both against naïve relativist realism of the mid-twentieth-century kind and against the revival—strange as it seems to me—of notions of “radical alterity” by which some of my colleagues aim to reinvigorate our discipline’s mission as providing posthumanistic therapeutic interventions (in Wittgenstein’s sense) in the maladies occasioned by the language of Western—subject-centered, naturalist—philosophies. With Father Lafitau and Kenneth Burke as my guides, I aim to counteract a trend in contemporary anthropological thought that to my mind comes close to denying a crucial aspect of humanity in celebrating the intellectual virtues of notions of radical incommensurability. Expounded most recently by Holbraad and Pedersen (2017), that trend—known as the ontological turn for some time now—stands the terms of the so-called rationality debate of the 1960s and 1970s on their head. Not that this isn’t a salutary effort in principle. That debate was marred by serious problems, to put it mildly. But, as I want to argue, the so-called ontological turn overshoots its aim. Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously—Holbraad and Pedersen’s book opens with an example drawn from EP’s Zande ethnography. Like the other famous cases of the blurring of the boundaries between people and things, subjects and objects in Mauss’s Essai sur le don, or Geertz’s elucidation of seemingly odd Balinese conceptions of time, the Azande of the 1920s Anglo-

introduction ∙ 17

Egyptian Sudan and their ostensibly queer notions of causality are key cases in point for why, in Holbraad and Pedersen’s view, attempts at “cultural translation” can ultimately only be self-referential, and self-reinforcing, tautological enterprises. Though not meant as a systematic critique of the ontological turn (and there are many such critiques),8 this book is nevertheless a rebuttal of this proposition.

Chapter 1

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds So let me turn to the ethnographic time bomb, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), that a young aristocratic Welshman named Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard—perhaps somewhat inadvertently—lobbed into Anglo-American philosophy departments. EP started out reading history at Oxford, where he came into the orbit of R. R. Marett, one of the last of the great British armchair anthropologists to survive institutionally; all the while Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were reorienting the discipline from its origins in a pseudoevolutionistic comparativism toward an empirical field science. Eminently charismatic, and influential in his day, Marett is largely a forgotten figure now, though his theories of what we might call affect today might be worth revisiting (cf. Meyer 2016). At any rate, as EP reflected late in his life (1976), given his own attraction to the adventure of fieldwork over archival research, he came to switch from history at Oxford to anthropology at the London School of Economics, where C. G. Seligman became his mentor. Seligman eventually passed the baton of Sudanese studies on to him after becoming too ill to continue the southern Sudanese ethnographic survey work financed by the government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In 1926, EP shipped out to the southern Sudan and in 1927 defended a rather conventional dissertation on the social organization of the Azande, the ethnic group to whom he had been assigned.1 The point to be made here is that he didn’t choose his field. It was assigned to him. And as he himself reflected years later (1976, 242), the problem to which he devoted his intellectual energies in the mid-1930s hadn’t been chosen by him either: “I had no interest in witchcraft when I went to Zandeland; but the Azande did; so I let myself be guided by them.” That was what the Zande commoners he knew apparently talked about much of the time, not unlike contemporary Americans, who will spontaneously reflect on the status of their 401(k)s or health care costs. But mangu—a term for which the English gloss “witchcraft,” EP admitted, was a very poor translation—was to become the abiding concern of his Zande ethnography.2

20 ∙ chapter one

Mangu and Benge What EP makes clear from the start in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic is that for the Azande, mangu is nothing extraordinary. In fact, rather than being surrounded by an aura of awe, mystery, or terror, it is a mundane daily concern. The Azande are pragmatists: things are known to go wrong. A potter’s kiln may be found full of broken pieces because he hasn’t taken care to remove pebbles from the clay. A boy may stub his toe because he wasn’t careful in navigating the savannah. People seek shade under elevated wooden granaries in the midday heat, and they all know that since termites gnaw away at their support posts, sooner or later someone will get badly hurt or killed by the granary collapsing on his or her head. Tough luck, we might say. But not the Azande. For them, the question why the otherwise meticulously careful potter, the boy who knows his path, or the victim of a granary collapse met their adverse fate has nothing accidental about it. Ineptitude, stupidity, or simple physical causality are recognized as precipitating factors in cases of misfortune. But in the majority of cases, the answer to the question, Why did this befall me when it did? boils down to the working of mangu. Mangu is a force emanating from a substance or organ in the bellies of otherwise unsuspecting and socially inconspicuous consociates. It is heritable patrilaterally: technically, all Azande ought to have considered themselves potential witches in the late 1920s. Mangu acts from a distance but is limited in spatial reach—which is why the British resettlement policies turned Zandeland into a veritable pressure cooker of witchcraft accusations. And it only becomes activated when possession of the witchcraft organ combines with ill will directed toward specific individuals. Since there are established procedures for confronting a witch and making him or her cease and desist, knowing whether mangu is at the root of present or future misfortune is a perpetual concern. Such knowledge is provided by administering a substance known as benge to a chicken and asking questions which will be answered in the form of the chicken’s death or survival. EP glossed this procedure as the “poison oracle.” But for the Azande, benge is neither a poison nor an oracle (1937, 314). Gathered under ritual precautions from a creeper (found at the time mainly in the forests of the Belgian Congo), it is a reddish powder that, once mixed with water, is forced down the chicken’s throat while the person EP called the operator asks benge carefully crafted questions of the sort “Benge, if x is true, kill the chicken; if not, spare it.” Depending on the chicken’s fate, the question has received its answer. Benge, chickens, and the operator are an apparatus, in Barad’s (2007) sense.

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds ∙ 21

A delicate epistemic instrument prone to all kinds of explicable interference (break of taboos on the part of the operator, spoilage, witchcraft, etc.), benge, EP (1937, 321) tells us, “hears like a person and settles cases like a king, but it is neither a person nor a king, being simply a red powder” that acts on the chickens only when addressed in dialogic fashion. As the Azande told him, “The poison oracle does not err, it is our paper. What your paper is to you the poison oracle is to us,” for they see in the art of writing the source of the European’s knowledge, accuracy, memory of events, and predictions of the future. The oracle tells a Zande what to do at every crisis of life. It reveals his enemies, tells him where he might seek safety from danger, shows him hidden mystical forces, and discloses past and future. Truly a Zande cannot live without his benge. (263)

Fascinating as such a comparison between epistemic technologies might have been, EP let it slide. But, as it turns out, while the Azande had learned to live with paper long before EP entered their lives, the anthropologist can learn to live with benge too. Notes EP (270), “I always kept a supply of poison for the use of my household and neighbours and we regulated our affairs in accordance with the oracle’s verdicts. I may remark that I found it as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of.” This was so, because even though “I found it strange at first to live among the Azande and listen to naïve explanations of misfortune which, to our minds, have apparent causes . . . after a while I learned the idiom of their thought and applied notions of witchcraft as spontaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant” (65). What is more, “in no department of [Zande] life was I more successful in ‘thinking black,’ or as it should more correctly be said ‘feeling black,’ than in the sphere of witchcraft. I, too, used to react to misfortunes in the idiom of witchcraft” (99). But then he adds, “And it was often an effort to check this lapse into unreason” (99). Indeed, EP recounts at some length how he once saw witchcraft flying through the night sky in the form of a ball of light settling on a homestead where, as he found out the next morning, someone had died that night. Yet he is quick to rationalize the event away (34). As he categorically states early on in the book, “Witches, as Azande conceive them, cannot exist” (63). Benge, too, is a mirage. The Azande do not see that their oracles tell them nothing! Their blindness is not due to stupidity, for they display great ingenuity in explaining

22 ∙ chapter one

away the failures and inequalities of the poison oracle and experimental keenness in testing it. It is rather due to the fact that their intellectual ingenuity and experimental keenness are conditioned by patterns of ritual behavior and mystical belief. Within the limits set by these patterns they show great intelligence, but it cannot operate beyond these limits. Or, to put it in another way: they reason excellently in the idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason outside, or against, their beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts. (337–38)

Note here that—reasonable Englishman as he portrays himself throughout the book—EP doesn’t say that witchcraft does not exist but rather that it cannot exist. It’s impossible. To be sure, “the concept of witchcraft [provides the Azande] with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained” (63) with remarkable internal logic and experiential consistency. It simply rests on false premises, and so the Azande resort to a host of what EP calls “secondary elaborations of belief” to achieve experiential coherence in the face of what, for a reasonable Englishman like EP, are glaring contradictions.3

EP’s Glorious Failure Why did EP write a whopping 558 pages just about witchcraft, oracles, and magic in a stratified society of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan? To be sure, we learn a good number of things about domination of commoners by princes and women by men. We also catch occasional glimpses of the kind of functionalist interpretations of witchcraft as a social strain gauge and/or mechanism enforcing value conformity that were to dominate Anglophone anthropology from the 1950s onward. But EP’s main goal in this truly magnificent book lay elsewhere. Though he never spells out his theoretical investments and epistemic stakes in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic itself, during his stint as a lecturer at Egypt’s Fuad I University in the early 1930s he published three essays in the university’s Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts in which he explicitly raises the theoretical questions his Zande research aimed to address. The first of these essays, entitled “The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic” (EP 1973), targeted Tylor and Frazer; the second, “Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality” (1970), was devoted to the French philosopher; and the last concerned the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto’s writings on irrationality in Greek and Roman antiquity (EP 1974). But while EP has many a clever thing to say

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds ∙ 23

about his British and Italian predecessors, it was clearly Lévy-Bruhl who provided both inspiration and critical foil for EP’s Zande project.4 Up until a recent resurgence of interest in the resonances of LévyBruhl’s theories of “mystical participation” with current concerns about relationality and transcendence (cf. Goldman 2019; Sahlins 2013; Pina Cabral 2017, 2019), the French philosopher’s work was more easily dismissed or caricatured than properly engaged. Which post-Malinowski anthropologist, after all, would take seriously a book with the repugnant title Les fonctions mentales dans les societies inferieurs (Lévy-Bruhl 1910), written by a moral philosopher turned armchair anthropologist? But EP did, and the Azande provided him with excellent empirical material with which to both appraise and refute Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas about an allegedly “prelogical mentality” whose adherence to a “law of participation” appeared to render members of “inferior societies” immune to the problem of the excluded middle in a wide variety of situations. This “prelogical mentality” was what supposedly made them say things like “We [Bororo] are red parrots,” to use one of Lévy-Bruhl’s favorite Amerindian examples. It had them ignore distances in space (e.g., bilocalism), differences in time (e.g., presence of the dead), or in this case incompatibilities in form of being (humans and birds)—all in apparently blatant disregard of those categories which, since Aristotle and Kant, had come to orient Western metaphysics. In short, if today’s proponents of the idea of “radical alterity” even cared to look for precursors to their analytical conceits (and they usually don’t), they would surely find one in that French philosopher’s thought.5 But, and this was EP’s entry point, different from Tylor or Frazer, who derived similar solutions from their speculations about individual mental processes (modeled after the associationist psychology established by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), Lévy-Bruhl—a renegade Durkheimian—sought the missing link in a sociological theory of cognition. And this, it seems, fired up EP’s interest in his senior French contemporary’s increasingly sprawling, brilliant, but often sorely error-ridden work.6 “Like Durkheim,” EP wrote (1970, 39), Levy-Bruhl defines social facts by their generality, by their transmission from generation to generation, and by their compulsive character. The English School [meaning Tylor, Frazer, and their followers] make the mistake of trying to explain social facts by processes of individual thought, and, worse still, by analogy with their own patterns of thought which are the product of different environmental conditions from those which have molded the minds which they seek to understand.

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In the former’s view, “collective representations explain individual thought, and these collective representations are functions of institutions,” so that— and these are EP’s stipulations, not Lévy-Bruhl’s—“we may suppose as social structures vary the collective representations will show concomitant variations” (40). “When Levy-Bruhl says that that a representation is collective he means that it is a socially determined mode of thought” (48). Thus, when Lévy-Bruhl sets up a series of oppositions between the savage’s “mystical” and “prelogical” thought patterns and the “scientific” and “logical” ones of the members of “civilized” societies, for EP the imputation of a defective logic of reasoning on the part of the savage is nothing but a red herring. If the mystical thought of a savage is socially determined so also is the scientific thought of a civilized person. Therefore, any evaluation between the savage’s capacity for “logical thinking” and the civilized man’s capacity for “logical thinking” is irrelevant to the question at issue which is whether patterns of thought are orientated mystically in primitive societies and orientated scientifically in civilized societies. (48)7

Regardless of EP’s all but unproblematic retention of Lévy-Bruhl’s categories of mystical and scientific, the alleged prelogical nature of primitive thought is thus easily dispensed with. The fact that we attribute rain to meteorological causes alone while savages believe that Gods or ghosts or magic can influence the rainfall is no evidence that our brains function differently from their brains. It does not show that we “think more logically” than savages, at least not if this expression suggests some kind of hereditary psychic superiority. It is no sign of superior intelligence on my part that I attribute rain to physical causes. I did not come to this conclusion myself by observation and inference and have, in fact, little knowledge of the meteorological processes that lead to rain. I merely accept what everybody in my society accepts, namely that rain is due to natural causes. This particular idea formed part of my culture long before I was born into it and little more was required of me than sufficient linguistic ability to learn it. (48–49)

Hence: “It would be absurd to say that the savage is thinking mystically and that we are thinking scientifically about rainfall. In either case like mental processes are involved and, moreover, the content of thought is similarly derived” (49). As we have seen, EP would soon come to demonstrate that one can enter alien thought worlds to the degree that Zande notions of witch-

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds ∙ 25

craft began to structure the ethnographer’s own spontaneous reactions to misfortune—thus granting a space to what Pina Cabral (2017, 2019) calls the potential for transcendence inherent in the “ethnographic gesture.” And yet he immediately follows the above passage with a weighty disclaimer. Of course, the content of every human being’s thought is, to a great extent, socially derived. We couldn’t agree on what time it is, wouldn’t know where we find ourselves at any moment, let alone how we might engage our consociates in mutually meaningful interchanges. But, or so goes EP’s troubling profession of faith in an ultimate standard of commensuration, “we can say that the social content of our thought about rainfall is scientific, is in accordance with objective facts, whereas the social content of savage thought is unscientific since it is not in accord with reality and may also be mystical where it assumes the existence of supra-sensible forces” (EP 1970, 49; emphasis mine). Hence it is not that witches as the Azande conceive them don’t exist. Rather, they literally cannot exist, because a suprasensible malevolent force like mangu is not in accordance with “objective facts,” or even more damaging, “with reality.” All his brilliant ethnographic insights to the contrary, EP thus ultimately engineered a normative cop-out. Having himself chided Lévy-Bruhl for failing to “describe the collective representations of Englishmen and Frenchmen with the same impartiality and minuteness with which anthropologists describe the collective representations of Polynesians, Melanesians, and the aborigines of Central and Northern Australia” (EP 1970, 44), and having even questioned the second-person plural which he himself frequently uses when comparing Zande and European thought,8 he foregoes the possibility of mutual illumination and settles for the authority of science as a socially unconstrained idiom of thought, capable of delivering true representations of the world. EP seemed unable to let go of what Wittgenstein (1969, § 341) would call a “hinge proposition” of his own form of life: a proposition on which doubt can turn but which can never fall into doubt itself. That proposition was that science (whatever that is) delivers descriptions of the world that, unless falsified by better science, are universally true. In fact, in Collingwood’s (1940) more precise sense it wasn’t even a proposition but an “absolute presupposition”: a nonfalsifiable foundation on which falsifiable propositions can build.9 In the end, the last word belonged not to the ethnographer who had learned to live in a world whose furniture included mangu and benge but to the “reasonable Englishman” who knows a category mistake when he sees one. A terrible conclusion, we might say—albeit with much hindsight—to one of the greatest ethnographies of the twentieth century. We will shortly see how the Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch

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drove a sharp wedge into this argument. But let us first consider what EP had actually done. Contrary to the then prevailing notions of “primitive thought,” he had shown that the Azande were neither prey to illusions deriving from magical versions of mistaken science nor victims of socially inculcated illusions rendering them uncritical dupes of their society’s representations of the world and how it works. In his view, the Azande exercised high standards of rationality within their own idiom of thought, but they remained trapped within a quagmire of contradictions—remedied by secondary elaborations of belief—because of their incapacity to step outside their system of what Collingwood (1940) soon after would call the absolute presuppositions necessarily determining what is conceivable within a given epistemic formation (or: Fleckian “thought collective,” in a more sociological sense). On the other hand, is it an accident that more or less bowdlerized versions of EP’s Azande ethnography came to occupy the thought of analytical philosophers (a thought collective, if there ever was one) and philosophically minded social scientists in the years to come? I think not. For whether EP had realized it or not (and he never appears to have commented on the issue), his 1937 book seemed to present, however understatedly, a formidable challenge to much that mid-twentieth-century logical positivist philosophy of science had come to adumbrate in its insistence on universal, context-free standards of reason and rationality. Here was a case of “savages” following logically defensible procedures of rational inference in elaborating a distinctly implausible vision of the world, its furniture, and its moving parts (implausible, that is, for “reasonable Englishmen” and their analytical philosopher allies). EP’s own plea for the superiority of science notwithstanding, the whiff of relativism in all this was painfully unmistakable. Was rationality a universal capacity of the human mind, realized to varying degrees in different societies? Could there be plural rationalities? If so, could scientific standards of truth be upheld without qualification? Or were the Azande living in a world so radically at odds with that of Oxbridge philosophers that the styles of reasoning of the latter might have to be downgraded to just another variety of human ways of world-making (in Nelson Goodman’s 1978 sense)? Was Western science just one among other forms of local knowledge?

The Philosophers’ Reaction R. G. Collingwood probably read EP’s Zande manuscript for publication by Oxford’s Clarendon Press. He certainly expressed severe disdain for both

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds ∙ 27

Tylor’s and Frazer’s as well as Lévy-Bruhl’s conceptions of magic soon after (Collingwood 1938) and was to develop anti-logical positivist heresies of his own (Collingwood 1939, 1940), for which EP’s ethnography may have provided inspiration. But the earliest explicit reaction to Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by a philosopher seems to have come from Michael Polanyi (1950, 1952, 1964), who perhaps not insignificantly was a trained chemist and so not lacking in credentials in the form of knowledge production whose ultimately “fiduciary” basis he aimed to expose. Unsurprisingly, EP’s ethnography featured prominently in Polanyi’s attack on logical positivism and scientific reductionism. Indeed, in many ways Polanyi’s exposition of “the very substantial flaws which the rigorously positivistic conception of science contains” (M. Polanyi 1950, 27) virtually replicates some of EP’s strictures on what the otherwise highly rational Azande take on faith. But in Polanyi’s case, his account concerns the “fiducial elements—which I shall call ‘scientific beliefs’” (27)—without which scientific practice could not proceed but which are fundamentally social in nature and origin. “We acquire our naturalistic system of explanations as we first acquire speech, uncritically absorbing the idiom of our elders. . . . We are born into a language, and we are also born into a set of beliefs” (32). Hence in order to transcend positivistic conceptions of science, “we must openly declare the beliefs which we hold about the nature of things, which guide our pursuit of science” (31): “It is not required of us [scientists] that we should decide our problems on the supposition that we were born in no particular place, in no particular time, and endowed with no particular personal judgment of our own” (34), only that we make ourselves aware of the changing nature of the “constitutive beliefs” to which we, including scientists, commit ourselves as members of human, including scientific, communities. Enter EP’s Zande case: “It is unquestionable that if you or I had been brought up among Azande, we would think as they do and be impervious to the evidence which now convinces us of the foolishness of their beliefs.” Of course, the argument can be made that beliefs accepted uncritically on the strength of a local authority will always testify to their own validity but that such testimony is worthless and that therefore such beliefs are unfounded. Yet we do not accept this argument in respect to the different beliefs which Azande and ourselves hold with regard to the nature of things. I at any rate am prepared to congratulate myself on not having been brought up in a system of beliefs, such as those held by the Azande, which I should otherwise falsely believe in. This is admittedly like saying that I am glad I dislike spinach,

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as otherwise I would eat it, though I hate it. When we pat ourselves on the back for being more enlightened than Azande, we rely on the same authority to which we blindly submitted in acquiring the supposed enlightenment. (32–33)

Polanyi had quite a bit more to say about such matters, including an incisive discussion (M. Polanyi 1952) of how scientific communities—no less than the Azande—resist the “impact of adverse evidence” on their conceptual framework by circular recursion and what he calls (with a nod to Ptolemy and Copernicus) a body of epicyclical elaborations which “supplies a reserve of subsidiary explanations for difficult situations” (224). Rejecting the label knowledge in favor of implicit beliefs, he contrasts his own fiduciary investment in the Western science of his day not only with the Azande but with Freudian psychoanalysis and Soviet science during the heyday of Stalinism as examples of coherent systems of thought whose premises he personally rejected. His conclusions uncannily seem to presage what Richard Rorty (1991) would say about the hardness of facts, from an American pragmatist point of view, some thirty years later: facticity simply can’t be read from pure data. It demands a prior consensus of what can count as a “fact” within the conceptual scheme of a specific community of interpretation, and it will also depend on a consensus within such a community about what agreeing to bestow “facticity” on some set of data might portend for the future of such a community and the world they care about. But Polanyi’s strongest statement came in his magnum opus of 1958, Personal Knowledge (1964). To give you only a taste of the scathing indictment of his logical positivist colleagues, let me quote a key passage concerning what he calls the “logical antecedents of science” (and Polanyi takes great care to develop his argument along impeccably logical lines). “Nobody has ever affirmed the presuppositions of science by themselves,” he argues (171). Instead, the discoveries of science have been achieved by the passionately sustained efforts of succeeding generations of great men, who overwhelmed the whole of modern humanity by the power of their convictions. Thus has our scientific outlook been molded, of which the logical rules give a highly attenuated summary. If we ask why we accept this summary, the answer lies in the body of knowledge of which they are the summary. We must reply by recalling the way each of us has come to accept that knowledge and the reasons for why we continue to do so. Science will appear then as a vast system of beliefs, deeply rooted

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in our history and cultivated today by a specially organized part of our society. (171; emphasis mine)

Polanyi was no relativist. Neither was EP. But what Polanyi saw, and EP did not, was that “science,” a “scientific outlook,” or even a normative scientific orientation constituted inadequate standards for judging what came to be known as the apparently irrational beliefs of members of human communities who happened not to share what Polanyi would have called the implicit beliefs of whoever might pass such judgment. Reflections on EP’s Zande ethnography seem to have spread widely in Polanyi’s Mancunian milieu (Gluckman 1972; Werbner 2013; Jacons and Mullins 2017). But it really wasn’t until 1964, when the Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosopher Peter Winch published an essay entitled “Understanding a Primitive Society,” that all hell appeared to break loose. Luminaries like Ernest Gellner, Alasdair MacIntyre, Steven Lukes, Robin Horton, Martin Hollis, Charles Taylor, and others were prompted to close ranks against an ill-understood (as we can probably say now) threat of rampant epistemological relativism. In the first volume surveying what by then had come to be known as the rationality debate, Bryan Wilson’s (1970) anthology Rationality, Winch became the bête noir of a cadre of rationalists. Earlier, Winch (1958) had written a critique of the “scientific” aspirations of social science, but he now seemed to make matters worse by launching a respectful but nonetheless incisive attack on EP’s ultimately naïve insistence that science gets it right (and the Azande wrong). What had Winch done to (among other things) be anthologized in a volume devoted to proving him mistaken? The answer comes easily: though he may not have been aware of Polanyi’s critique of EP, he took it to its logical conclusion. What allowed him to do so was a Wittgensteinian commensuration of Azande oracular praxis and the praxis of Western science as differently structured “language games” pertaining to different, partly incompatible “forms of life.” In a manner reminiscent of Hocart’s imagined Fijian seminar, Winch resorted to a philosophical hat trick to bring out the inconsistencies in EP’s privileging of science as a socially unconstrained idiom of thought. Switching out Europeans for Azande, scientific for mystical, and so forth, Winch (1970, 89) gives us the following parody (as he calls it) of a passage on page 319 of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic: Europeans observe the action of the poison oracle just as Azande observe it, but their observations are always subordinated to their beliefs and are incorporated into their beliefs and made to explain them and

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justify them. Let a Zande consider any argument that would utterly refute all European skepticism about the power of the oracle. If it were translated into European modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief. For their scientific notions are eminently coherent, being interrelated by a network of logical ties, and are so ordered that they never too crudely contradict mystical experience but, instead, experience seems to justify them. The European is immersed in a sea of scientific notions, and if he speaks about the Zande poison oracle he must speak in a scientific idiom.10

Key here is that in Wittgenstein’s sense, both Zande and Europeans are following rules of games that occupy a constituent, even indispensable, role in their respective form of life. It just so happens that the games in question are structured by different rules. Hence it is, in fact, EP who is committing a category mistake: “Zande notions of witchcraft do not constitute a theoretical system in terms of which Azande try to gain a quasi-scientific understanding of the world. This, in turn, suggests that it is the European, obsessed with pressing Zande thought where it would not naturally go—to a contradiction—who is guilty of misunderstanding, not the Zande” (Winch 1970, 93). Thus when EP (1937, 12) early on in the book, and largely in accord with Lévy-Bruhl, distinguishes between “mystical,” “common sense,” and “scientific” notions, and vaunts that “our body of scientific knowledge and logic are the sole arbiters of what are mystical, common sense and scientific notions,” he has already stacked the cards in favor of a vision of science that, as we now know, is distinctly unrealistic. Of course, the transformation of such a vision had to await the first genuine lab ethnographies, such as the early work of Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar, Karen Knorr-Cetina, Michel Callon, and Donna Haraway as well as the experimental histories of Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch, John Law, Simon Schaefer, and Andrew Pickering, among others. For what they demonstrated was that scientific practice (as opposed to an ideology of science in place since Bacon, Descartes, and Laplace) is, first and foremost, one among other forms of situated social endeavor. It is what people who call one another scientists do and assent to in agreement or disagreement with one another—not a language-independent window on an ultimate reality. But in acceding to a lay version of the logicalpositivist ideology of science of his day, EP also preemptively closed the door on his other French predecessor’s, Father Lafitau’s, method of reciprocal illumination. Already during his lifetime, Fleck, Polanyi, and Kuhn, among others, could have told him as much. Might EP not have wasted a unique

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds ∙ 31

chance to use his Azande ethnography to throw light on his British contemporaries’ own epistemic practices? What was the “reality” they supposedly were in better accord with? What sublunary standard might there be to decide this question one way or the other? Could there be a context-free, stable, transhistorical criterion of “reality correspondence” (a proposition even Popper might have denied)? As it was, Winch’s by no means immodest critique occasioned a storm of angry rear-guard action on the part of committed rationalists. EP’s time bomb had finally exploded.11 This is not the place to survey the details of the ensuing debate. Suffice it to note that it remained inconclusive, gradually fizzling out over the course of three more edited collections (Finnegan and Horton 1973; Hollis and Lukes 1982; Overing 1985) and a good dozen freestanding essays. As Mark Hobart (1992, 2) wrote in a postmortem inspection of the debate, partly this was so because “rarely has there been written so much by so many on so little evidence.” True. With the exception of Gellner and Horton, none of the participants in the earliest rounds of debate had any ethnographic experience in non-Western societies, and even Gellner and Horton tended to recur to EP’s Zande and Nuer ethnographies to defend a universal standard of rationality. But one suspects that what truly killed off the rationality debate was a larger intellectual-historical conjuncture, including the “recent upheavals in the philosophy of science” that Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (1982, 1) had bemoaned on the first page of their introduction to Rationality and Relativism. What Hollis and Lukes had been referring to were, of course, Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s scandalous proposals about the “other worlds” generated by scientific paradigm shifts—a kind of equivalent in historical time to what EP had done in ethnographic space. But we should also consider the impact of poststructuralist philosophy on naïve empiricist notions of linguistic transparency: if historically mutable “discursive regimes” defined the limits of possible truth claims (Foucault), and if discourse was all there was (Derrida), then pretensions to universal rationality in the West were a (no less discursively induced) mirage. The much-vaunted crisis of representation (officially inaugurated in anthropology by Clifford and Marcus [1986]) may have played a role in this as well. To be sure, the problem of asymmetries in the power to represent the Other had occurred to neither EP nor the philosophical discussants of his work. As Marilyn Strathern (1987) might have argued, perhaps the Zande’s cogent reasoning on the basis of false premises—as delivered by EP—was just another “persuasive fiction”? More in tune with the spirit of a bygone time when the problem of “other minds” (Wisdom, Austen, and Ayer 1946) was occupying analytical philosophers, and when phenomeno-

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logical sociologists were pondering the question of “multiple realities” and “finite provinces of meaning” (Schuetz 1945)? As Bob Scholte (1984, 963) put it in a perceptive review of Hollis and Lukes’s Rationality and Relativism, was it not true that “in a certain sense, anthropology is not about the ‘other’ at all; it is more properly about ‘us’—a metaphorical extension of our own cultural resources”? And finally, we need to count the emergence of the new sociology of scientific knowledge along with science and technology studies (known as SSK and STS, respectively) as further nails in the coffin of that debate. In 1993, Bruno Latour triumphantly declared an end to what he called the Modern Constitution and concluded that all that modernist projects for purifying “nature” and “culture” had achieved was the unintentional proliferation of “hybrids” belying their conceptual separation. At this point, the question of positive standards of universal rationality had become a casualty of epistemological symmetricalization.12 It is not only that, as Barnes and Bloor (1982) argued in the major dissident essay in Hollis and Lukes’s (1982) volume, “accepted” and “rejected” ideas about the world and its furniture need to be treated on an equal footing in regard to their historically situated sources of credibility, not in relation to any transhistorical standard of accuracy between the world and our representations of it. But, as a host of STS scholars came to argue from the 1980s onward, collapsing “nature” into “society” in this way—as Marx already had done in his famous and highly perspicuous comment about Darwin’s transfer of Victorian folk sociology into the biotic realm—was not enough. “Nature” and “culture,” “society” and “knowledge” had to be rethought jointly.

Out of the Hall of Mirrors or Down the Rabbit Hole? If so, might one not argue that the entire debate, fueled as it had been by EP’s Zande ethnography, was—and no less than the Zande poison oracle itself—eminently rational but based on false premises? In the latter case, these were the taken-for-granted tenets of an unproblematized ahistorical representationalism. What Hocart and Fleck realized and EP hinted at, sometimes in spite of himself, was not a difference in congruence of representations of the world with “how it is,” really and truly. It was a difference in engaging it: not just on the basis of different conceptual schemes or even language games and the forms of life of which they are part, but in realizing that subjects and objects of knowledge were part and parcel of the same (however contingent) constellations. What even EP saw was that his and the Azande’s ways of living with both paper and the poison oracle rep-

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds ∙ 33

resented different, but (at least partly) mutually accessible, local and temporary entanglements of intention, knowledge, agency, morality, and the ever-recalcitrant material worlds which they aim to capture and stabilize. Perhaps we might say that using the poison oracle and doing ethnography are, in many ways, equally subject to what Andrew Pickering (1995) calls “the mangle of practice.” What Pickering means is a dialectic between (a) the world’s sheer resistance to our efforts to generate knowledge about it, whether by means of verdicts from a principally infallible but interferenceprone oracular instrument or (and this is Pickering’s example) by means of a bubble chamber exhibiting similar resistance to unequivocably delivering the equivalent of live or dead chickens—that is, tracks of the “strange particles” sought after and (b) human accommodation of that resistance. Unless, that is, such instruments (and the rationalizations associated with their functioning) are properly tinkered with—in keeping with whatever Wittgenstein’s “hinges” and Collingwood’s “absolute presuppositions” in operation in the case at hand might allow for. The results are mangled, in either case: they are momentary inscriptions of unsteady entanglements of provisional knowledge with a recalcitrant material world, including the material devices—be they benge, ethnographic notebooks, or xenon gas— that allow competent operators (in EP’s sense) to perform credible readouts. What is more, such entanglements have a history. By the time EP got to know them, the Azande, for example, had long learned to live with British courts that operated on strangely incomprehensible principles, with roadwork, Western medicine, and other such matters—all of which impinged on the workings of what EP called their poison oracle. They had come to inhabit what Descola (2014) readily concedes was a hybrid ontology. That a blond-haired, pipe-smoking Welsh anthropologist with a penchant for military adventure became part of this apparatus (in Barad’s [2007] sense) was little else than a contingency. Among other things, this was so because mangu, benge, and chickens weren’t all there was to the world EP briefly came to share with his Zande interlocutors in the late 1920s. And his very own presence in Zandeland was a symptom of just that: as Wyatt MacGaffey (1986) once argued, no anthropologist has ever seen a native society in its presumably precontact state. Slave traders, missionaries, colonial agents, and the whole lot had always already “closed the frontier” before “we” ever got there. So in Latour’s, Pickering’s, or Law’s sense, for example, what EP saw in Zandeland was not just an entanglement between Zande commoners, a suprasensible evil force, an oracular substance, and the dead or alive chickens the oracular substance delivered. The entanglement also was one that included multiple

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“agencements” between bacteriology, sleeping sickness, British resettlement policies, paper, guns, colonial courts, boundaries between the Belgian Congo and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, roadwork, dead kings, district commissioners, resident anthropologists, British armchair anthropologists, French moral philosophers, European physicians who made people sick,13 and the whole lot. A veritable mangle of ethnographic practice. What EP simply didn’t see was that his observations in 1920s Zandeland admitted to no simple “naturalist” description of “the facts”: the latter already were a complex network of all that (a hybrid, in Latour’s [1993] sense)—and a rather volatile one to boot (as the calamitous later history of the Sudan would amply prove). But then again, we can look at such matters in yet another way: As Annemarie Mol (2002) might put it, just as clinicians, radiologists, and vascular specialists might produce widely disparate “ontologies” of arteriosclerosis, efforts to engineer experiential (not necessarily theoretical) overlap so as to guarantee livable worlds,14 so is ethnographic translation not an all-or-nothing game. It’s a matter of however-incomplete socialization in ways of world-making not one’s own, a deliberate attempt at transcending one’s own social and ontological absolute presuppositions (cf. Pina Cabral 2017, 2019). What EP chose in this respect was to “do social science” rather than to extrapolate from his genuine, and genuinely experience-driven, insights into Zande life toward his own society—hence Winch’s categorical misgivings about EP’s stunning naïveté regarding his own society (Sharrock 2009). Yet that the two came to overlap is patently clear from his ethnography: a genuine understanding of a good part of the language games of an alien form of life, combined with a principled rejection of the games’ rules jarringly characterizes the whole of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic. Whether EP liked it or not, he had been drawn into, and learned to inhabit, an alien life-form—or actor-network, if you will—of which he had come to be an unintended part: one where he could see mangu flying through the African night, one where organizing his life in accordance with benge’s verdicts delivered excellent results, despite his possessing “better knowledge.” A matter of mobilizing a bunch of actors and actants different from those one is accustomed to mobilize in one’s native habitat, we might say (some of which—like the connection between British resettlement policies and witchcraft accusations—EP just chose to analytically sideline). Which ethnographer hasn’t had similar experiences? I, at least, have no problems admitting that some things that make perfect sense to me in Cuba more or less cease to do so when I am back in Chicago. And finally, we might try to dissolve the underlying dualisms altogether.

EP and the Problem of Other Worlds ∙ 35

Karen Barad’s (2007) “agential realism” seems to me a handy guide here, and I will make extended use of it in the final chapter of this book. Did Azande witchcraft and the poison oracle even exist before EP inscribed it into Western canons of social science and philosophy? Arguably not. To be sure, EP himself took pains to dissociate mangu from the “weird witchcraft” that “disgusted and haunted our credulous forefathers” (EvansPritchard 1937, 64) and rather likened the use of benge to the perusal of the daily weather report by his Oxford baker, butcher, or publican (at least in assigning similar sources of credibility to each). But it was he—and not the Azande—who engineered what Andrew Pickering (1995, 2017) might call lasting inscriptions of the multiple “entanglements” between a reddish powder, Sudanese chickens, British colonialism, social anthropology, and the implications of social anthropology for analytical philosophy. Importantly, the results of this endeavor were decidedly not just a proliferation of “chicken stories,” as Clifford Geertz (1988) once sarcastically remarked. Instead, they comprise a sort of morality tale about what Barad (2007) calls intra-agency. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2012, 61) sums up the resulting state of affairs with a generous dose of sarcasm. Great Divide theories, i.e. polarities and other “othering” comparative devices, have had a bad press lately. The place of the other, however, can never remain vacant for too long. As far as contemporary anthropology is concerned, the most popular candidate for the position appears to be anthropology itself. Firstly, in its formative phase (never completely outgrown), anthropology’s main task was to explain how and why the primitive or traditional other was wrong: savages mistook ideal connections for real ones and animistically projected social relations onto nature. Secondly, in the discipline’s classical phase (which lingers on), the other is Western society/culture. Somewhere along the line—with the Greeks? Christianity? The Reformation? The Enlightenment? Capitalism?—the West got everything wrong, positing substances, individuals, separations, and oppositions wherever all other societies/ cultures rightly see relations, totalities, connections, and embeddedness. Because it is both anthropologically anomalous and ontologically mistaken, it is the West, rather than “primitive” cultures that requires explanation: the Occident was an Accident.

Viveiros de Castro (61–62) extols the dawning of a “still very much desirable” “post-positivist phase of anthropology” that might attend to the “real

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practical/embodied life of everyone, Western or otherwise”; naturally, I am all in accord with this. What I disagree with are recensions of this program (including some of his own) that, in a curious reversal of the old rationality debate, now seriously privilege the radical alterity of non-Western ways of being in the world as a remedy to allegedly “Western” obsessions with comparative epistemology (in Fleck’s sense). Obsessions they may well be. If they weren’t, our discipline—founded as it was on a post-seventeenthcentury naturalist ontology, in Descola’s (2013) sense—might not exist. But here again, I would urge a humbler approach. One more in line with Father Lafitau’s—however historically outrageous—speculations than with a notion of radical incommensurability that would render V. O. Quine’s (1960) fictitious anthropologist’s hopeless toil to distinguish rabbits from undetached rabbit parts or temporal slices of rabbitness the measure of what ethnography might afford as a mode of transcendence of one’s own social and cultural conditioning in aiming to catch glimpses into other worlds. So let me now crank up my version of Lafitau’s old analytical mangle and see what my ethnography of Afro- Cuban ritual tradition can tell us about Western scientific expert practice—and vice versa. I will begin by thinking with ngangas about transplant surgery, move on to viewing genomics through the lens of divination, then confront Edisonian phonography with Abakuá ritual, consider academic history in light of spirit possession, and end with a consideration of Regla de Ocha’s lively stones and midtwentieth-century American anthropology inspired by actor-network theory. An epilogue will turn the table on me. But wait until we get there.

Chapter 2

Thinking with Ngangas about Transplant Surgery, Personhood, and the Limits of “Objectively Necessary Appearances” As Marcel Mauss (1967, 46) famously remarked, Western societies draw a “marked distinction . . . between real and personal law, between things and persons.” Writing at the height of self-conscious early twentieth-century Western modernism, Mauss took pains to point out that it was “only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal” (74), and that such a distinction was, historically speaking, a contingent elaboration.1 Commenting on Mauss’s insights, James Carrier (1995, 30) thus speaks of “an increasing de-socialization of objects, their growing cultural separation from people and their social relationships” and the development of conceptions of “alienability and impersonality of objects and people in commodity relations” as characterizing this moment.2 But Carrier isn’t entirely happy with the uses made of such insights by students of Western societies. His intent, rather, is to qualify Mauss’s famous distinction between forms of enacting object relations as social relations shaped by sharply contrasting modes of gift or commodity exchange. Thus, Carrier expends much energy in expounding the extent to which “blocked exchanges” (Walzer 1983), “singularized goods” (Kopytoff 1986), conceptions of “market inalienability” (Radin 1987), and “inalienable possessions” (Weiner 1992) aren’t random precapitalist survivals fortuitously lingering on within Western cultures but constitutive of forms of sociality indispensable to them. Of course, Carrier is largely concerned with dispelling the economistic fictions of forms of “occidentalist” discourse that systematically project a normative language of market functions and failures onto social practices which regularly produce, rather than merely accidentally throw up, what economists call externalities inhibiting optimal market allocations. Nevertheless, it’s striking that both Mauss and most of his critics

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(Carrier being merely an example) take for granted a principal, ontological distinction between people and things. As a result, we are treated to sets of contrasting representations of how cultures (capitalist or other) construe such fundamental realities into different configurations of subjects and objects, so that the mystifications of one social formation or cultural order illuminate those of the other—to ultimately prove a Cartesian point. This moment is just as obvious in another famous set of explorations of the boundaries between people and things—the theory of fetishism. Whether in Marx’s or Freud’s terms, whatever else the fetish may be, it’s made to perform the work of an epistemological crowbar by means of which the analyst pries apart and unhinges the fictions directing and channeling the circulation of value (or desire) between subjects and objects in the world of the fetishist. Whether routinized in individual neurotic practice or institutionalized in social forms of reification, the fetishist illusion is based in systematic forms of misrecognition that analytically can be exposed as instances of category mistakes, so that it’s clear that the shoe is not (or “not really”) the absent female phallus or that the commodity represents a mere mystification of objectified and expropriated human labor, forgotten as such, and instead circulating as exchange value. The products of such analytics are obvious and well known. Just as the sexual fetishist erotically invests the wrong (namely, inanimate) type of object with inappropriate (namely, personalized) value, so does the commodity fetishist erroneously treat relations between people as relations between things. No less obvious, however, are the assumptions underlying such fetish criticism, perhaps the most crucial one being that there exists a bright ontological dividing line between things and people which merely has gotten obscured or distorted in fetishistic reasoning and desire. Many objections can and have been raised against such appeals to a fundamental reality beneath the surface of fetishistic representations, and it would be futile to rehearse them here. For in the present instance, I am more interested in the productivity of the distinction common to both critique and countercritique—namely, the notion that we somehow ought to be able to tell where things end and people begin (cf. Bynum 1991; Charo 1999; Sharp 2000). Like Bruno Latour (1993), I am inclined to think that this notion—as well as the discursive strategies of categorical purification that render gifts and commodities, people and things mutually contradictory and exclusive—is at the core of the problem that makes the fetish thinkable as a problematic in the first place. And I would like to explore this issue by focusing on not what the fetish obscures but what it brings to light in regard to certain contradictions in the management of persons and

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their bodies in early twenty-first-century economics, law, and medicine. Such contradictions, I will argue, become patently visible in the case of an Afro-Cuban ritual complex centered on the manipulation of personalized objects. But they also increasingly irrupt into more ostensibly rationalized contexts in the very concrete and often palpable reality of conceptual hybrids turned flesh and bone. What both cases would seem to problematize is the thoroughly naturalized notion of a coincidence of bodies (material units) and persons (bundles of rights). This notion is not just constitutive of those commonsense understandings of selfhood and embodiment on which routine social praxis builds in contemporary Western societies. Rather, it is central to those social and economic theories which, since at least the eighteenth century, have sought to rationalize, enable, and direct such practice. What I will argue is that reading these practices and rationalizations through the lens of what at first glance would appear to be a richly exotic instance of “fetishistic” thought and agency reveals not just their remarkable compatibility across a seemingly deep divide between different forms of rationality (a classic ethnographic sleight of hand). More important, I believe it also throws into sharp relief their common origin in a singular historical constellation from which both emerged in tandem, as it were. As a host of scholars including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, William Pietz, and Paul Gilroy have pointed out (albeit in very different ways), there are good grounds for arguing that notions of Western modernity, reason, individual autonomy, and so forth didn’t just become thinkable only in contrast to emerging conceptual antitheses—nonWestern tradition, irrationality, dependence, and so forth. Rather, and by the same token, the concrete historical conditions of possibility for such distinctions lie decidedly not in abstract philosophical reflections but in those violent Atlantic scenarios where the systematic dehumanization and commodification of non-Western Others generated truly novel notions of Western selfhood, individuation, and subjectivity as well as non-Western systems of analyzing and rationalizing precisely the same kinds of historical moments and experiences (Palmié 2002). The two, or so I argue, were cut from the same cloth; both revolved, at least in part, around a truly phantasmic object: the human being who is, to use Aristotle’s language, “a thing possessed” by an alien power—a body seized and transformed into a slave, possibly the most uncanny commodity of all. That said, let me turn to a few cursory remarks about bodies and selves in the intellectual tradition of which this chapter necessarily forms a part, and look at the body as the primary fetish as which it emerges in classical economic theory—a thing possessed by a mind and a self.

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Market Agency, Self-Possession, and the “Skinbound Individual” Let me begin by suggesting that the notion of the body as an integral, objective locus of individualized identity, self-control, and personhood—rather than as an example of a volatile and even partible nexus of social relations and practices (Strathern 1988)—isn’t an idea that René Descartes merely dreamed up in a seventeenth-century German boardinghouse. Were that the case, we might not even know his name, or we would merely regard him as a mathematician. However, that this isn’t so, that we can speak of Cartesian distinctions between subjects and objects, bodies and minds, has less to do with the brilliance of his insights than with the conditions under which such a configuration that both disenchanted and desocialized the body as a mere vehicle and tool of the autonomous mindful self became culturally salient and—one should add—economically meaningful in European societies. This transition, of course, was anything but uneven and protracted (e.g., Sahlins 1996). And it was less a precondition for than a symptom of a new economic order dawning on the horizon of societies in which transactions in commodified objects were beginning to reshape the contours of selfhood and legal subjectivity. Its conditions of possibility—and credibility—were strongly tied to the emergence and successful institutionalization of the conception of society as a market (Agnew 1986). As the historian J. G. A. Pocock (1978, 153) puts it in respect to eighteenthcentury quandaries about the nature of “economic” man, before what Karl Polanyi (1968, 75) polemically described as the transformation of human society into a notional accessory of the economic system, the market was all but the domain of the triumphant “masculine conquering hero” fantasized in the nineteenth-century imagination as having superseded dependency and achieved unconditional individuation.3 Rather, in a very important sense, such a creature was talked into being in the course of the development of a particular form of “rhetorics of self-making” centered on isolating “the skinbound individual as the primary site of moral control” (Battaglia 1995, 5) and investing it with what Locke (1963, 328ff.; i.e., bk. 2, § 27) identified as “every Man’s” primary and inalienable property: a rationally structured, interest-maximizing, and, most important of all, autonomously embodied self—or self-controlled body. The primacy for this formulation of concepts of bodily self-possession and the subject’s rational control over an objectified body that is sui juris can hardly be overemphasized. This concerns not just the issue of the proper management of bodily needs and desires (including foregoing their

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satisfaction for reasons of political obligation or economic self-interest).4 Rather, the prerequisite for personhood in Lockean (or Hegelian, for that matter) conceptions of civil society is inhabiting a body capable of removing objects out of a “State that Nature has provided,” mixing one’s labor with them, and so incorporating them into one’s self as additional qualifiers of social personhood—that is, property—or, alternatively, disposing of them in an equally self-interested, self-chosen—that is, contractual—manner. The body thus becomes the primary tool of the properly individuated self, an objectified means of production of further property, and the archetypical motor of the generation of utility and the satisfaction that possession brings to the self.5 This proposition of bodily self-possession implies a conceptual separation between mind and matter, subject and object, self and body. It’s fundamental to any idea of free labor—that is, the voluntary entrance into a contractual arrangement consisting in the hiring out of embodied capacities for value creation for a specified time and price.6 But it’s also a proposition without which most modern conceptions of human individuality and social personhood remain incomprehensible. So indispensable is this proposition to Western economic and political philosophy and indeed common sense that the idea of self-possessed embodiment as a prerequisite of the capacity for appropriation as a determinant of social personhood has come to provide the foundations of most classical theories of civic rights—including, importantly, the right to alienate one’s property (cf. Radin 1982; Engelhardt 1996, 154–66).7 Hence, the Wittgensteinian “hinge”—that element in a language game on which doubt turns but which itself is not open to doubt—of modern (bourgeois, if you will) subject formation ultimately was not the abstract Descartian cogito merely accidentally cast in an individual (literally speaking) physical shell socially capacitated to produce and appropriate. It was a need-afflicted and desire-ridden (as in classical and neoclassical theories of utility), or at least embodied (as in Marxist labor theories of value), and certainly gendered and racially marked type of social person that might have consisted of more than one human being.8 If this strikes us as peculiar today, it’s because nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic and political liberalism gradually, but rather thoroughly, freed previously illembodied populations from the “categorical unfitness” (Appleby 1993, 166) and consequent legal disabilities to engage in market relations. However long it took to attain hegemonic status, what MacPherson (1962) called possessive individualism has nowadays become thinkable as a condition to which all adult members of the human species can (or should be enabled to) rightfully aspire.

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By the same token, as Nancy Fraser (1997) argues, if the market has come to engulf categories of people inhabiting bodies which previously marked them as non-self-possessed (women, enslaved nonwhite people, etc.), the continued operation of a discourse of agonistic individuation has rendered economic identities not predicated on full market participation (but, say, welfare dependency) liable to extraordinarily heavy burdens of self-justification. Indeed, a threat incurred by those failing to live up to such discourses of individual autonomy in late-capitalist Western societies is outright pathologization. Through the increasingly systematic hypostasis of economic disprivilege as a personal proclivity to forego full social individuation by relying on a state-administered livelihood, what Sen (1981) might call social deprivation of opportunities to generate exchange entitlements— that is, structural poverty—transforms into a disease not just affecting unself-controlled bodies but afflicting society at large through state-organized income redistribution. Paradoxically, then, as a discourse on individual rights has proliferated outward from its eighteenth-century white male elite core, self-making is no longer a privilege conferred by citizenship. Instead it must, perhaps more realistically, be viewed as an obligation incurred through formal membership in the body politic of “postsocialist” Western welfare states.9 Of course, as Fraser makes clear, such late twentieth-century “amendments to Hobbes’ problem” (as MacPherson might put it), like their predecessors, have a normative rather than a mimetic relation to the realities they purport to reflect. As their foremost organizer, the idea of the market exists primarily in a systemically empowered discourse that evokes rather than depicts (cf. Heinzelmann 1980). That its reality effects tend to socialize individuals constituted through its operation into their proper roles as executors of its functions is, logically, a secondary consideration.10 As Žižek (1997) might have it, such executive subject positions, and the palpable havoc its incumbents may wreak, rest on systemic (rather than individual) disavowal. If, as Sahlins (1976, 211) argues, “in Western culture the economy is the main site of symbolic production,” we should expect no less.11 Still, conceptions of “skinbound” individuality are tricky ground on which to establish moral and legal personhood. For the “prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas,” which Frederic Jameson (1991, 36) identifies as a crucial element of the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” has once more rendered the relation between embodiment, individuality, and personhood tenuous, to say the least. As a result, and in good keeping with what some of us think is a postmodern predicament, the old Western philosophical issue of having and being a body is being revisited

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in a variety of practices for which no coherent (or at least hegemonic) intellectual and moral justification exists or even appears in sight in Western culture. If the naturalization of autonomously embodied, individual market agency was a consequence of the massive diffusion of previously marginal (or, at least, ideologically marginalized) monetized “exchange technologies” capable of setting, as Kopytoff (1986, 72) puts it, “dramatically wider limits to maximum feasible commoditization,” then technological change is nowadays once more suggesting the need for a novel vocabulary for claims to personhood and expressions of sociality in an economy that has become technologically enabled to define the human body as a resource capable of being processed into a consumable good. Put differently, what we face is a return of the repressed that centers on an unexpected interference of embodiment with projects centered on conceptions of abstract economic individuality.12 The results are novel and rather thoroughgoing forms of ambiguation of the boundaries between people and things.

Ngangas in the Closet An example from my own work may serve to introduce the kinds of muddles between people and things which, rather than receding into the past or toward the ethnographic horizon, are becoming more rather than less prevalent, both in Western social reality and in the discourses aimed at reflecting or reshaping it. When I began my fieldwork on Afro- Cuban religion in Miami in 1985, I soon met one of the local authorities on the grislier aspects of Afro-Cuban ritual practices: Dade County’s deputy chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles Wetli. A suave pipe-smoking expert in matters of death, he introduced me to a rather remarkable collection of objects that had been confiscated during police investigations. Brown-bagged and tucked away in closets and filing cabinets were piles of Afro-Cuban ritual paraphernalia as well as a profusion of photographs of domestic altar displays taken at crime scenes. For Wetli, the prime pieces in his collection of forensic ethnographica were a number of human skulls and long bones recovered from a type of Afro-Cuban ritual object known as nganga.13 These had been collected in the course of routine police operations (drug busts, searches of suspects’ premises, even child custody investigations, if I remember correctly) and brought to the attention of Wetli’s office—usually amid vociferous public clamor about the subversion of American values through the savage Africanderived practices of Caribbean immigrant populations.14 Obviously, Wetli’s position in the American justice system obliges him to routinely investigate the origins of any human remains found outside

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publicly regulated settings such as hospitals, funeral parlors, or cemeteries.15 Still, for him and Rafael Martínez (his coauthor in a number of publications), the rather unusual contexts of the finds made them a category apart. Consider the following case description: A farmer had an altercation with a Cuban tenant concerning the upkeep of the property and the lack of care rendered the tenant’s animals (goats, pigs, and chickens). The next morning, the farmer found on his front porch a decapitated chicken (the head was shoved into the cloaca), a split coconut, and 14 pennies all wrapped in cloth. The farmer immediately went to the tenant’s shack where he beheld a bizarre altar. In the center was an iron cauldron filled with dirt. On top of that was a goat skull that supported a blood-drenched human skull that in turn supported a chicken head. A chain was draped across the front of the skull. To the left of the skull was a small doll with an appropriately sized sword piercing its chest. Behind the skull were deer antlers (draped with a red ribbon), an antique-appearing sword, and a machete. Two knives were also thrust into the dirt of the cauldron. Candles were burning in and around the cauldron, and some (on the floor) had the depiction of Saint Barbara. In front was a plywood board with a glyph drawn in chalk, a decapitated chicken, and a section of railroad track. (Wetli and Martínez 1981, 507)

And on their description goes in a bewildering litany of juxtapositions of seemingly disparate objects arranged in an utterly strange and seemingly ominous fashion: there are things that hang from the ceiling, more cauldrons, other glyph-inscribed boards, plastic skeletons, more beads, antlers, knives, blood, and dirt. The scene, we might say with Mary Douglas (1970), brims with matter seriously “out of place” in respect to the aesthetic norms governing the North American public sphere. The mere visual effect of such tableaux vivants (or morts?) composed of human and animal remains mixed with natural substances and industrially produced objects not only confounds standards of propriety and cleanliness but scrambles a commodity aesthetics that builds on images of orderly separation of object domains. Visually, at least, for most nonpractitioners of Palo Monte, a nganga suggests the violent, even sinister subversion of conventional Western conceptions of what kinds of substances and objects ought to be encountered in immediate proximity to each other. In Douglas’s terms, it exemplifies pollution raised to the status of method.16 An ethnographic reading of this description, of course, suggests a rather

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different interpretation. What the police beheld at the scene was not an ominous mess but an intricate ritual landscape or, better perhaps, a functionally differentiated, man-made environment inhabited by a powerful being: a life-form constituted through ritual action. Surrounded by objects documenting or directing its past or future actions (trabajos, i.e., “works”), the entity dwelling in this environment—an Afro-Cuban nganga or prenda (lit., “jewel”)—takes its origin in complex rituals by which practitioners of Palo Monte, Mayombe, or other Afro-Cuban religious traditions collectively known as Reglas de Congo, gain control over the spirits of dead human beings in order to harness their powers to curative or destructive ends. “A nganga,” writes Lydia Cabrera (1983, 118), is constructed, “mounted,” or “charged” by the brujo [literally “sorcerer,” i.e., ritual specialist] with a dead [spirit of a dead person], a kiyumba [skull], branches from the bush, vines, nfita or bikanda [herbs], earth, and animals. By rule of association, the vessel containing the supernatural forces concentrated in the bones, sticks, plants, earths and animals, and which are utilized by the ritual specialist is called nganga, nkiso, or prenda. It is into this mixture of diverse materials that the spirit enters when called upon. It is where he lives.

The entire assemblage constitutes more than the sum of its parts. Inside the total object, its various and variegated parts enter into synergetic relations. The “work” performed by a nganga is a function of the interaction of its animated—and mutually animating—parts. It recalls conceptions of organismic functional interdependence or even images of human sociality, including relations of dominance and subalternity. As I have argued elsewhere (Palmié 2002), such imagery, for historical reasons, plays on the trope of plantation production, an enterprise that rests on the productive coupling of objectified humans with dehumanizing objects such as the steam-driven sugar works, whose grinders and boiling equipment literally devoured fixed human capital17—overworked, ill-nourished slaves and, later, contractual workers who consented to such hyperexploitative arrangements absent viable economic alternatives (cf. Martinez 1995). Priestly manipulators of such objects, practitioners of Palo Monte, are popularly known as paleros but are more properly called tata nganga. They avail themselves of the service of such spirits because they have come into possession of bodily remains or substances connected with the body that the spirit once inhabited, such as soil from a grave. Establishing such possession involves negotiations with the spirit and results in a relationship with

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it that is, at least in a formal sense, explicitly contractual. Crucial to this conception are two unquestioned suppositions. The first is that there is an indissoluble bond between the spirit (nfumbí) and the remains of the body it formerly inhabited. This alone, however, doesn’t allow for the classically Frazerian pars pro toto syllogism whereby the mere appropriation of human remains would eo ipso confer power over the spirit connected to such remains. For the second factor that comes into play is a notion that such appropriation of bodily parts remains futile unless the spirit has expressed consent. A Miami palero told me that the key to the making of a nganga object is to “con a spirit who wants to get out of his grave.”18 Irrespective of whether human remains have been extracted from a grave or bought from a commercial retailer, one will have to chant to even a mere spoonful of grave dirt to elicit a response (by oracular means). Offerings of liquor, tobacco, money, and blood must be made even to a skull anonymously obtained through the services of a medical supplier. For, pace Frazer, there is nothing mechanical about this operation of gaining control over a nfumbí. Unless the spirit willingly comes under the command of a priestly operator, the resulting assemblage of materials will remain just what the police officers in the case reported by Wetli and Martínez thought they had before them: a senseless jumble, a bloody mess. In the understanding of practitioners of Palo Monte, a nganga object thus originates in the conclusion of a contract (trata) between the spirit and the person whose familiar it is to become. To achieve this end, the palero, in essence, ritually simulates a market situation in which he makes the spirit an offer it can’t refuse. The idea is that the spirit sells itself for a price negotiated with a future employer of its capacity to empower trabajos undertaken in the service of the priestly owner/manipulator of the object assemblage the spirit consents to inhabit. It is an arrangement compatible, on one semantic level, with understandings of wage labor as the voluntary conveyance of title over one’s personal embodied capacities to a second party under market conditions. Accordingly, once specific “works” have been completed, the spirit is paid by appropriate sacrifices of blood, alcohol, food, or tobacco. However, since the spirit becomes embodied (and, thereby, capable of performing such labors) only through ritual action, the ritual specialist constructing the nganga object also acts in accordance with classical liberal principles of appropriation. That is, in mixing his will with otherwise unutilized resources, the palero transforms the spirit who consented to being objectified in a nganga into a species of property. In line with the semantic ambiguities of Hegel’s concept of Besitzergreifung (that is, the seizure of something as property), the seemingly contractual trata

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constitutes a moment of capture.19 This creates a paradoxical situation, for the resulting hybrid being is in fact a slave. Not only is the spirit incapable of separating itself from the embodiment it has received through the palero’s ritual action. The spirit also becomes an extension of its owner’s self to a point where the tata nganga can become possessed (montado, literally “mounted”) by the nfumbí in order to see through the spirit’s numinous eyes. Thereby, the palero attains knowledge of his (or a client’s) enemies’ moves, or he observes the destruction the spirit visits on these foes in averting or returning their mystical attacks. Furthermore, the strange mixture of objectified person and spiritanimated object a nganga represents not only figures in the constitution of its owner’s cult group through initiation of human neophytes who thereby become enabled to incorporate its force by becoming possessed. It is also rendered capable of the (assisted) reproduction of similar possessions: in constructing new ngangas for junior members of his cult group, a palero will “seed” such objects with parts of the contents of the original object (which usually had similar precedents). He will rub materials derived from his nganga object into incisions made on the shoulders, chest, and wrists of the future possessor of a new nganga. Once constructed, ngangas thus assimilate new spirits into relationships with new human “possessors,” who in turn can become possessed by them. Over time, they ramify through a form of social space conceived as extending to both sides of the grave in a rhizomatic pattern.20 This gives ideological (though not necessarily historical) credence to the words of an informant of Lydia Cabrera’s (1983, 147) who claimed, “Since the first slave ship landed there . . . the first congo who stepped on Cuban soil cut branches, disinterred the dead, and began to work with his [nganga] and to teach his descendants to do so as well.” Nganga objects, in other words, condense and express branching histories of social relations growing within and against what Marx called a monstrous world of commodities,21 originally constituted by one of capitalism’s most blatantly violent appropriative mechanisms, slavery. In fact, the awesome power and potential violence emanating from these objects bespeak a vision of depersonalization through the agency of things that turns the fantasy of total control over human objects back on itself (Palmié 2002). Viewed from this angle, the skulls on Wetli’s shelves document what paleros would consider acts so perverse, and of such horrendous consequences for virtually everyone involved, as to render them almost inconceivable. Normally, ngangas are disassembled only upon the death of their owner and only if the spirit assents to being “set free” (the phrase usually employed is dale camino al nfumbí). They are emancipated to forms

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of obliteration of their identity and powers that recall—like so much of what I have elsewhere called the Afro-Cuban nganga complex—a violent past of dehumanization under forms of plantation production driven by slave labor. Extending this metaphorical skein downward in time to the brown-bagged skulls extracted from “live” ngangas in the course of police investigations, their fate recalls that of superannuated slaves manumitted precisely because the cost of their physical maintenance exceeded their capacities for surplus production. For just as elderly freed people would have found themselves largely devoid of the means to secure their sustenance in rural areas dominated by a production mode centered on a near-absolute division between productive activities performed by enslaved Black bodies and acts of appropriation performed by free white persons, so—one might argue—do the skulls in Dade County’s medical examiner’s office represent a tragic categorical anomaly. They are not restituted to either a purposive (if alienated) existence, nor are they consigned to the generalized oblivion notionally prescribed for the spirits formerly inhabiting dismantled nganga objects. Their plight is to perennially hover between cultural templates: that of Palo Monte and that of the American legal system, which has now become their involuntary master—unconscious of their wants and incapable of fulfilling them. Clearly, none of these considerations can enter into the legal discourse informing how Dade County’s police force and Wetli’s office can fashion such “finds” into evidence. On the terms of US civil or criminal law, little of what the police report cited above revealed could be construed as legally actionable. Though they are in the custody of the American legal system and its executive institutions, Wetli’s skulls are patently beyond their semantic reach. As Wetli and Martínez (1981, 509) summarize the results of the investigation performed subsequent to the initial find in the case quoted above, The skull appeared to be that of a middle-aged Black male. The tenant (dressed all in white, which is typical of a santero [a practitioner of AfroCuban religion]) produced a receipt for the skull. It was purchased at a local botánica [a store selling ritual paraphernalia] for $110. The receipt further indicated that it was from a 39-year old African male and was sold for educational purposes. Although the State of Florida does not prohibit the owning of a skull, it does have statutes prohibiting the trafficking in human remains.

The outcome thus affirmed the maxim “ex turpi causa non oritur actio”: the Cuban tenant eventually was charged with cruelty against animals for

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reasons totally unrelated to the presence of human remains on the leased property. Live animals belonging to the tenant were judged to be badly cared for. No charges were pressed against the botánica, nor was there any sustained investigation into the ultimate origins of the skull. I don’t know whether the skull in question wound up on the shelves in Wetli’s office along with the half dozen other crania and similar “unknown human remains” that had accumulated there by 1985. After his department members had examined it for any traces indicating a violent death, they were satisfied that—like most human bone material used as medical specimens in the United States—it was, in all likelihood, of foreign origin. As Wetli pointed out to me,22 from a legal standpoint most human remains discovered in Afro- Cuban religious settings never come to constitute forensic evidence. Though grave robbings have been linked to Afro-Cuban religious practices, the vast majority of “unknown human remains” found on sites associated with such practices and brought to his attention had been provably purchased or at least bore visible marks of what Wetli regards as origin in the Global South (such as extensive unrepaired dental decay in adult skulls or bone deformations induced by deficiency disease). For Wetli, even in the absence of proof of purchase, such signs plausibly indicate the remains’ origin in the practice of importing medical specimens. The matter then becomes a question of federal laws regarding international commerce rather than local statutes concerning forensic evidence, the regulation of the storage or disposal of unburied human remains, or the controlled elimination of biomedical waste.23 Gathering dust in Wetli’s office, the skulls extracted from ritual contexts seem to fall under a peculiar and patently hybrid category of objects. Along with other unclaimed body parts or tissue permanently separated from the person in whose body they originated, they don’t legally constitute anyone’s property.24 Since death extinguishes the person as a subject of law in most Western legal systems, such objects are left in limbo. Indeed, as US laws dating to 1872 have held again and again (T. Murray 1987, 1061), Hegel’s theory of property as one of occupancy (Besitzergreifung)—demanding proof of the admixture with, or presence in, the object of its owner’s will (cf. Radin 1982, 973)—can in the case of corpses lead to a “fiction of property” at best (T. Murray 1987) and at worst to a “no-property rule” (Richardson 1988, 58; Renteln 2001) applying to objects which can neither “be owned nor stolen” (Jackson 1937, 113–75; cf. Michigan Law Review 1974; Skegg 1984, 232; Gottlieb 1998).25 However, as the case of Wetli’s skulls patently shows, such objects can nevertheless become subject to reappropriation,legally established in this case through direct proof of, or plausible evidence for, the operation of market mechanisms (such as sales receipts

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or signs of origin in the Global South). Irrespective of whatever else such objects may be said to be or represent, their commercial valuation effected through sale constitutes them as fungible utilities, therefore revealing their social character as commodities.26 This decidedly exotic case might well be taken to merely indicate a peculiar loophole in an American legal system unprepared to deal with the ritual antics of Caribbean immigrants. But think again, and with Father Lafitau’s “method” in mind: such commonsense reasoning only mystifies the fundamental imbrication of the legal sign in a discourse on personhood and agency that has solid economic roots. For rather than facing a mere anomaly, we arrive here at one of the limits of the “objectively necessary appearances” (as Marx would say) of personhood as a state of self-possessed embodiment demanded by, and normalized through, market transactions.27 This becomes immediately clear once we consider the legal dilemmas generated by increasingly routine medical and biotechnological practices involving the social circulation of human bodily materials. For the language appropriate to the historical project of naturalizing a conception of social personhood centered on the utility-maximizing skinbound individual as the primary locus of both market agency and moral control is plainly collapsing: certain forms of medical-economic semiosis destabilize not just the boundaries of the body but the very categories through which Western modernities have characteristically established hegemonic forms of difference and identity. Though various examples might come to mind, the moral quandaries engendered by the medically engineered excorporation and/or recombination of human tissue provide a particularly striking case in point.

Uncanny Hybrids and Shylockean Bargains Consider, for example, that the first four cases of heart transplantation performed by Christiaan Barnard at the Groote Schuur Hospital in 1967 and 1968 involved the transgression not just of everyday conceptions of individually embodied selfhood but of boundaries of gender, race, and species as well. While the fact that Barnard’s first patient, Louis Warshansky, received the heart of a young woman went largely unnoticed, Barnard’s first moderately successful cardiac allograft performed on the white dentist Philip Blaiberg caused public consternation to a degree that the South African state saw fit to declare that the donor’s identity as a “Cape- Coloured” would in no way affect Dr. Blaiberg’s legal status as a white citizen of the republic (Michigan Law Review 1974, 1217n242; Lock 2002, 81–84). What apparently went unnoticed in the uproar over the medical breach of apart-

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heid was that Barnard had also (unsuccessfully) transplanted simian hearts into human bodies that year (Fox and Swazey 1992, 213n6). Now, whatever this may tell us about South Africa in the 1960s,28 it points to a problem that has haunted Western cultures at least since the medieval debate about universals (Bynum 1991). Here, however, the problem was given a rather specific shape in liberal economic theory: if possessive individuality rests on an objectification of the body as a person’s primary possession, and if all rights to appropriate or alienate further objects in accordance with one’s self-interests originate in this proposition, then to what extent can human bodies (or parts thereof) become subject to appropriation and alienation without endangering the continuity and homogeneity of the individual self? This question is an old one. Marx, for one, exploited it to the hilt in exposing that Hegel’s theory of personhood as self-objectification in willcontaining things, once combined with his theory of the right to alienate such objectifications, yielded a fetish world where things come to act not just in lieu of persons but on them. Rephrasing the matter in terms of the example at hand, if the body is an object external to the self (for how else could one conceive of it as a possession?), to what extent can bodies or parts thereof become fungible—that is, interchangeable—without jeopardizing the individual nature, let alone social identity, of the self? Paraphrasing Haraway (1991, 216), we might say that if “the individuality of worms was not achieved even at the height of bourgeois liberalism,” there now exist forms of biotechnological commensuration that render the subject of bourgeois liberalism increasingly wormlike in its newfound capacity for partition and artificial recombination.29 Harking back to the example at hand, we are thus faced with a series of unpleasant questions: Was Blaiberg still the white South African he was before Barnard temporarily relieved him of his cardiac problems? Had he taken possession of a Black heart, or might that piece of alien human tissue have taken possession of him by sustaining his selfhood beyond the point where cardiac arrest would have terminated his identity as a white South African dentist? Did Blaiberg’s body sustain an alien heart for some eighteen months beyond the original “owner’s” death? Or did a piece of alien, racially marked flesh prolong Blaiberg’s life for that period of time by taking possession of his body, thus threatening to alter his social personhood? What (or who) was “the thing possessed” in this case? And who was its possessor? Apart from the rapid discursive submergence of such quandaries in the general euphoria over the subsequent explosion of transplant surgery, the conundrum of Blaiberg’s postoperative identity is only the tip of a rapidly emerging iceberg. For it mirrors another conceptual malaise encapsulated

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in the painful but no less indicative legal debate over fetal personhood—to wit, the question of whether a pregnant woman is an individual undergoing a physiological process, or the mother of an as yet unborn child. That is, is she the gestatrix of a potential person whose individual interests and rights, for example, can come into conflict with those of the fetus?30 Along with Strathern (1992, 140ff.), we might argue that in both cases the conjunction of semantic domains pertaining to social entities (persons) and organic tissue (matter) necessarily throws up questions about the conditions under which “one can recognize in a natural form the presence of a social one.” The same problem necessarily crops up in the semantic meltdown of legal language occasioned by surrogate motherhood: here, remunerated “gestational services” secured through surrogacy contracts become a form of objective physiological production. Not surprisingly, however, the alienation of the product generally necessitates legal adoption procedures as a kind of last-minute rescue operation returning the gestatrix to social personhood by answering the question, Is there a woman in the body? in the affirmative.31 Biotic morphology, in other words, is a treacherous guide to moral status: where things end and people begin is hardly as evident in Western cultures as the logic of possessive individualism would predict.32 A Shylockean bargain, it seems, is always just around a farther bend in the road, threatening to expose the misrecognition of people as so many pounds of flesh at the command of the impersonal logic of market allocation. The question revolves around the properties of the script we choose to narrate embodiment. It is a matter of emplotment.33 Hence, for example, the legal scholar Margaret Radin’s (1987, 1896ff.) caveats about constructing “metaphysical bright lines” between persons and things in symbolic universes where “individuating characteristics and personal attributes are conceptualized as possessions situated in the object realm.” Once that step is taken, a plot begins to form: “it is another easy step to conceive of them as separable from the person through alienation.” Once more, however, having one’s cake means eating it as well. For the counterintuitive but medically pervasive construction of socially dead bodies (“cadaveric organ sources”) into Maussian gift givers (“donors”) is surely indicative of the existence of what Radin might conceive of as a vast gray zone but one we can safely designate as a “fantasy space” (Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering 1988) or, in a different theoretical inflection, a contact area between orders of value ripe with the potential for novel fetish formations (Pietz 1985; Spyer 1998; Sharp 2000).34 In societies where, according to entrenched common sense (and, until recently, according to law), a white woman could give birth to a Black child but a Black woman

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could never give birth to a white child, and where—as in the case of the United States—commercial blood supplies were subject to legal segregation until the late 1960s (Starr 1998, 170), the question of whether Dr. Blaiberg’s new heart was merely a piece of human tissue or part of a Black person’s body—capable of semantically impregnating Blaiberg’s social personhood— isn’t easily dispensed with. Rather, it opens up what Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering (1988) would call a “complex theater of the emotions,” redolent with irreconcilable scripts suggesting a variety of rather unspeakable story lines. Surely, we wouldn’t want to see Blaiberg’s eventual death as the spontaneous abortion of the alien heart his body had been nurturing for an eighteen-month term; yet neither had Barnard’s initial labors, and Blaiberg’s remaining capacities for physiological reproduction, effected a rebirth. Still, it’s not just the semantic weight of concrete possibilities of bodily fragmentation and artificial recombination that’s eroding the semantic functionality of the economic construct of individual embodiment and self-possession as the hegemonic signifier of social personhood. For, to give yet another example, it’s precisely the vocabulary of contemporary immunology—rife as it is with metaphors of high-tech military defense systems and postindustrial flexible accumulation (cf. Haraway 1991, 203–30; Martin 1994)—which undermines the cultural salience of the definitions of biotic individuality on which it focuses to a degree where biological and social “nonself recognition” are no longer easily reconcilable. As Renée Fox (1996, 255ff.) reports, increasing biomedical control over the “rejection reaction” in transplant surgery (commonly conceived as based in the body’s “natural” capacity to distinguish between “self” and “nonself”) suggests that “the capacity of immunosuppressive, anti-rejection drugs to induce the recipient’s body to ‘tolerate’ and retain whole- organ grafts rests on a process of cell-migration and systemic chimerism.” What occurs is that “a population of donor cells (leukocytes) from the transplanted organ migrates to and ‘seeds’ other tissue of the recipient’s body; simultaneously, a ‘reverse traffic’ of similar recipient cells flows into the graft.” This eventually produces a relatively stable, chimerical unit: a heterogeneous individual in which both the biological and the social boundaries between “donor” and “recipient” have become blurred. What language (other than that of Greek mythology) might be appropriate to these processes? What imagery or narrative might reconcile such technobiotic events with market-inculcated understandings of skinbound individuality? Surely, the joining of gametes in sexual reproduction would seem a rather troubling analogy. Yet would we rather speak of alien tissue colonizing its new milieu? Might slave labor or the more benign image of

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the naturalization of economically vital immigrants provide an adequate metaphor? Or would we follow the physician and psychiatrist Stuart Youngner (1996, 49), who provocatively speaks of transplantation as “a form of non-oral cannibalism, that is, the taking of the flesh and blood of one person into another”? Were we to agree with the philosopher and prominent bioethics advocate H. Tristram Engelhardt, this indeed might be our conclusion: expounding on Hegel’s theories of property, he argues, “There is nothing we can more fully grasp [in the sense of a Hegelian seizure] or use [in Locke’s sense] than ourselves. We render things ours by eating and devouring them, by incorporating them into ourselves. They become part of us, such that an action against them is an act against us as persons and therefore a violation of the morality of mutual respect” (1996, 155). What Youngner calls cannibalism can be justified, in other words, as long as it presumes a form of consent modeled on the mercantile transactions which—for Engelhardt’s intellectual ancestors—provided the basis of the individual’s “natural” freedom to carry aspects or even physical parts of himself or herself to the market. Nor should we forget here that for both Locke and Hegel, an essentially economic rationale provided the justification for colonialism: in the first case, the simple logic of establishing dominion by bringing natural resources (i.e., uncultivated land) to economically higher uses; in the second case, the inevitable course of history conceived as a process of progressive rationalization that maximized value through seizure and subsequent contractual exchange. Such reasoning obviously lends itself to both the conception of bodies as underutilized matter capable of redefinition as productive resources (as, e.g., in international flows of labor) and that of “body goods” as transactable according to conventional theories of social wealth maximization through market allocation: the principle by which a kidney might have a lower utility to its starving producer than the five thousand dollars a prospective buyer afflicted with renal failure might be willing to offer.35 Youngner’s purposely outrageous rephrasing of what essentially appears to be a medically engineered capacity of human bodies to metabolize alien body matter36 thus returns us both to the terrain of the market and to the psychological space occupied in Western societies by the fantasy “to slash and suture our way to eternal life”—as the theologian Paul Ramsey (cited in Fox 1996, 259) phrased what economists such as Richard Ehrlich and Hiroyuki Chuma (1987) theorized as a question of more or less effective demand for quantity of life. For medically engineered forms of individual “consumption” of “body goods” produced by other individuals irresistibly point back to the contradictions inherent in most classical conceptions of

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individual bodily self-possession as the model case for both personal property holding and property acquisition. If human body parts have become technically exchangeable, and if maximizing utility through market transactions is a natural propensity of our species, surely the logical conclusion must be that such objects be rendered saleable. This, at any rate, is the opinion of several medical and legal experts who are intent on solving the problem of market failure evident in the dramatic inability of organ supply to meet medically feasible as well as economically effective demand.37 The problem, however, is that in order to facilitate such transactions, embodiment and personhood must be rendered unambiguously distinguishable—a grave decision, given the foundational fictions of capitalist societies. Speaking with Appadurai (1986), what Western legal systems called in to police distinctions between persons (subjects of recognizable capacities and rights) and things (objects of their exercise) increasingly face today are thus emergent “regimes of value” that blatantly expose what Judith Butler (1990, 17) puts in a different but related context: “the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytical features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility.”38

Marx’s Ungeheure Warenwelt Revisited So far, most recent legal proceedings involving the question of property rights in human body parts have centered on medically extracted materials over which patients subsequently tried to establish—or, in their view, reassert—ownership. Cases in point are blood extracted for future autologous transfusions, ova removed from a woman’s body for in vitro fertilization, and “nondonated” sperm stored for future “self-interested” use. Such human bodily materials tend to be construed as property of the persons in whose bodies they originated. Death, however, legally depersonalizes the individual’s body to a degree where his or her biological residuum winds up in a limbo somewhere between the legal categories of personal property, potentially hazardous “biomedical waste” (the disposal of which is not an individual but a public concern), and a natural resource of eminent utility. Since the advent of cyclosporin and similar immunosuppressants, parts of such “unoccupied” bodies can become elements of the medically enhanced biological makeup of entirely different persons.39 Hence a problem that has particularly occupied those who oppose abandoning legal constraints on the monetization of human body parts obtained from what transplant-surgery language defines as “live cadavers,” “heart-beating cadaver donors” (Fox 1996, 261, 264), or

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“neomorts” (Youngner 1996, 48): though the former owner (or perhaps better: incumbent) of such biomatter is no longer legally capacitated to create, hold, or alienate value, the corpse produced through his or her demise may well come to attain marketable value. This semantic construction has led to massive border skirmishes between advocates of cardiopulmonary or cerebral definitions of the precise moment when (given “presumed consent”) people turn from economically empowered “persons” into raw materials for the medical reconstitution of other bodies—that is, quarries for transplantable organs. The result is not just conceptual gerrymandering at the borders of life and death but the chilling reality of the brain-dead individual whose body is kept on life support and “comfort measures” until the hour when a suitable recipient has been “prepped” for transplantation (S. Kaufman 2000). At least as envisioned by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s controversial transplant protocol in the early 1990s, the medically supervised phasing out of life support can then seamlessly lead into eviscerating surgery, followed by the plunging of freshly “harvested” organs into appropriate cavities carved into their prospective consumer’s body (Fox 1996, 264ff.): a (chimerically enhanced, it is to be hoped) being, uniting the producer of forcefully alienated body matter with the consumer of parts of his or her body; a hybrid (in)dividual who in turn gives personal continuity to a piece of flesh captured (or salvaged, if you will) from the biologically failing embodiment of another person under rationally controlled conditions securing maximum utility. It surely wouldn’t be farfetched to construe such forms of “death by protocol” (Fox 1996, 264ff.) under conditions of presumed consent into a ritual analogous to how practitioners of the Afro-Cuban Reglas de Congo enlist spirits of the deceased into the construction of life-forms transcending Western commonsense conceptions of life and death, personhood, and objectivity. In both cases, the animation of composite bodies of matter, anthropomorphic or not, depends on the generation of a culturally effective sense of consent to what, in essence, are irrevocable contracts. In both cases, the powers of the dead—whether conned out of their graves or produced according to medical protocol—are pressed into the service of the living, resulting in a precarious blurring between persons and things, agency and its object. But the analogy bears further extension. Just as the biotic “work” performed by a surgically alienated piece of human tissue (but is it really just that?) can be easily construed into surplus value medically appropriable from an “owner” unable to realize it while vegetating on ICU life support, so do the spirits seized and objectified in ngangas by paleros perform their “works” (trabajos) under constraints conforming to

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“market conditions” while invalidating the conception of personhood the market’s logic aims to routinize.40 If there was value in the contractions of a South African colored person’s heart in Philip Blaiberg’s chest, it was all surplus; and in barring noisome cultural externalities, the South African government’s legal communiqué to the press made sure it stayed that way. Once more, we can take the matter one step further: just as the successful suppression of the “rejection reaction” is crucial to transplant surgery, so do similar forms of inhibiting the reassertion of repressed forms of personality safeguard the palero’s dominion over a nganga. In neither case does the appropriation of human objects lead to unalloyed forms of commodified consumption. Something appears to linger on or to shade into the consumer’s personhood (Sharp 1995; Palmié 2002). However much paleros might shower their ngangas with verbal abuse, tie them with chains, or whip them into action in order to ritually explicate the irrevocability of the trata establishing mastery over them, in true keeping with the metaphor of slavery underlying such transactions, the spirits contained in these objects remain dangerous possessions. They may turn rebellious. Refusing to fulfill the ghastly errands of vengeance they are sent on, they may be bought over by their owner’s enemies, or they may decide to turn against him on their own. In a mystical version of the immunological rejection reaction, ngangas “gone awry” are known to have destroyed their owners through violent accidents or the slow and painful wasting of their owners’ vital substance, which the ngangas—once they have acquired a taste—begin to corrupt or consume. If, as I have argued elsewhere (Palmié 2002), the ambivalent attitude of tata ngangas toward their familiars may represent a recension of the historical fantasy of total control emulated in New World plantation slavery, the cultural problems generated by medical technologies capable of assigning utility to socially dead bodies might indicate no less than a permutation of the pervasive fears of revolt that the denial of personhood to people under chattel slavery entailed for their masters throughout the slaveholding Americas. Far from becoming extensions of the self, alien body parts can come to subvert the orderly functioning of the economic unit that is the subject of market agency, returning that person to the status of an entrepreneur faced with a noncompliant labor force or a broken-down technology of selfproduction. In line with my previous remarks about the muted presence of the slave in conceptions of Western personhood, we might, for example— and I don’t think the analogy is in any way outrageous—think of transplant failure as the incomplete physiological appropriation of alienated tissue or, phrased differently, a reassertion of biotic individuality on the part of that

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tissue’s (by then disembodied) former “owner.” The rejection reaction, in other words, may be seen as a form of slave flight, or marronage; a revolt against productive consumption, so far only inadequately controlled by medical means.41 Might we then speak of “marooned body parts,” or am I merely setting up a language game that artificially subverts medical reality to inappropriate ethnographic analogies? In a pragmatic sense, I certainly am. But given that contemporary philosophers of selfhood, identity, and embodiment worry about brain transplants, teletransportation, and other seemingly bizarre questions concerning the linkages between selfhood and embodiment (cf. Bynum 1991, 244–52; Hauskeller 2012), I think I’m in good company. In a more crucial sense, it’s clear that immunological discourse in transplant surgery has long moved from what Lawrence Cohen (2001, 11) calls “an unwieldy biopolitics of recognition” centered on identifying mutually assimilable tissues to a “more pragmatic biopolitics of suppression, disabling the recognition apparatus so that operability and not sameness/difference becomes the criterion of the match.” In fact, the oddly “cannibalistic” connotations that Youngner and others attribute to nonautologous transmissions of body matter bear comparison to the logics of predatory desubjectification that Viveiros de Castro (1998) and others have documented for Amazonian contexts.42 At any rate, in principle, though not necessarily in practice, there is thus no longer a need to consider the “individuality” of what Landecker (2000, 54), adopting James Loeb’s late nineteenth- century formulation, calls “technologies of living substance,” provided they can legally be “freed” from lingering suspicions of potential personhood and sufficiently dominated by pharmacological means. Hence the precarious and shifting nature of the boundaries between what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998) calls sovereignty and the “bare life” that contemporary fetuses and neomorts share with those other “strangers” (Z. Bauman 1997) whom an essentially “occult” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999) regime of value can come to assign the status of resources awaiting productive consumption. The dialectic of violent domination and rebellion foregrounded in the case of the Afro-Cuban nganga merely highlights and concretizes what contemporary biotechnological discourse systematically abstracts and obscures. And here I think the particular slant my casuistry imparts to current discussion about people and things opens up a dimension rarely considered when philosophers, bioethicists, and medical or legal practitioners engage the terrain of scientifically enhanced existential questions. That dimension pertains to both history and political economy, and once engaged seriously it opens up

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profoundly unsettling vistas on the promises and pitfalls of postindividual personhood in capitalist societies. Nowhere have these vistas emerged in clearer relief, so far, than in the case of the so-called Mo- Cell Line (Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 1990). Here, surgically extracted cell material from the spleen of a cancer patient named Moore was turned into an artificially immortalized cell line producing a therapeutically significant type of lymphokines and commercially patented as a “Unique T-Lymphocyte Line” under US law in 1984. Moore survived the splenectomy and sued his physicians for the illegal conversion of his property for profit. His property claims over the cell line produced from his spleen tissue were eventually rejected in favor of public interest in medical research, which the court, at least implicitly, recognized as being driven by commercial interests.43 His cancer temporarily at bay, Moore remained alive as a US citizen until he finally succumbed to the disease in October 2001 (Washington Post, November 24, 2001). Yet notwithstanding the State of California’s evident recognition of his legal personhood, and the fact that the Washington Post’s obituary was based on the assumption that his life had ended, after the dismissal of his case in 1990 Moore’s body no longer constituted him as a self-possessed individual. Nor has his earthly existence ended. Sufficiently enhanced by the will and biotechnological ingenuity of his physicians at UCLA Medical Center, descendants of his tumor cells are available for further pharmaceutical research at the National Institutes of Health in the form of patented biomatter. Although their commercial potential apparently proved to be rather less than a bonanza, in all likelihood they will survive Moore for decades to come. Were it not for the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, in other words, Moore would be the first human person to have been enslaved in the United States since 1865. Obviously, this can’t well be an interpretative option. But in a somewhat weaker sense, we might well call the Mo-Cell Line a nganga. We return here to a question I purposively underplayed in my discussion of Wetli’s collection. For the patently utilitarian ring of the California Supreme Court ruling in Moore’s case reveals a moment of commodification that defines human bodies as natural resources that can become commodities once someone—such as Moore’s physicians—sufficiently mixes his or her will with their physical substance. Wetli’s construction of the legality of the possession of skulls or bone fragments for ritual purposes given either proof of purchase or plausible origin in the Global South indicates no less. Just as a res nullius construction allowed the Mo-Cell Line to turn into a commercial good, so did the prior facts of the skulls’ provable

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sale or likely commercial importation into the United States indicate their fundamental status as commodities. Misquoting Marx, we might say that by the time they arrive on Wetli’s desk, they already had their description as social hieroglyphics branded on them. For their presence in South Florida is no less than an indication of market allocation: however the ghastly supply mechanisms might work, the shape of the trajectory these objects traversed obeyed a variety of geographically differentiated forms and stages of effective demand—from the initial sale of skulls to exporters in the Global South to their eventual purchase by medical schools or paleros. Quite clearly, the movement of skulls from Africa or India to the United States describes a curve of increasing utility. If we accept Richard Posner’s (1972, 4) textbook definition of efficiency as the exploitation of “economic resources in such a way that human satisfaction as measured by aggregate consumer willingness to pay for goods and services is maximized,” then they have no business disintegrating in non-Western graves (cf. Clay and Block 2002). By the same token, however, the travels of such body parts also indicate the global operation of a rather sinister Malthusian political-economic logic, according to which some bodies are worth more dead than alive, particularly if geographically reallocated through market mechanisms. Ruth Richardson (1988) has meticulously retraced the emergence and operation of this logic in the nineteenth-century British case where Tudor laws relating to the anatomical dissection of executed criminals as an aggravated punishment were transformed into a privilege of the state to appropriate and apportion to anatomists the corpses of paupers who had come to be its wards, either during their lifetime or because they failed to provide for their burial.44 Arguably, her point bears extension, for Wetli’s skulls document only one aspect of the operation of this particular form of logic on an international if not a global scale. The market increasingly regulates a medically enhanced political economy of life and death. As Elizabeth Abbott (1988, 171ff.) has documented, before 1972, “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s henchman Luckner Cambronne’s company, Hemocaribian, not only shipped some five tons of Haitian blood plasma per month to US laboratories such as Cutter or Dow Chemical. He also supplied American medical schools with Haitian cadavers that had been legally obtained from Port-au-Prince’s general hospital at three dollars apiece, surreptitiously removed from funeral parlors, or allegedly even “produced on demand.” Haitian cadavers, Abbott adds, were much appreciated among Cambronne’s customers, because they “had the distinct advantage of being thin, so the student had not layers of fat to slice through before reaching the subject of the lesson” (cf. Farmer 1994, 49ff.).45

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The Haitian case is not an isolated one (cf. Starr 1998, 231–49; ScheperHughes 2000). Nor is the logic by which the technical supervisor of Hemocaribian, Werner A. Thrill, expressed the company’s efficiency in an interview with a French newspaper: “If the Haitians don’t sell their blood,” he is reported to have said (quoted in Farmer 1994, 51), “what do you want them to do with it?” Indeed, what to do when you are stuck with a body whose property-creating capacities you can’t realize for historical reasons, but whose parts are of eminent utility on a global market for human commodities? As Veena Das (2000, 283–84) puts it in a chilling variation on the Marxian theme of the body as an instrument of value creation argued from the case of India, The conferring of autonomy on the poor in order that they may be enabled to sell their organs from bodies already wasted from poverty, is a convenient fiction that masks new ways of recycling for the benefit of the rich what has always been conceptualized as social waste. A vocabulary of rights here simply masks the facts of social suffering—such techniques of survival are seen by the poor not as acts of autonomy but a part of their everyday life in which all kinds of violence has to be turned into opportunity.

No less than in the case of the properly ventilated “cadaveric organ donor,” we are dealing here with a systemic fiction—a form of what Marx (1977, 128, 189; Žižek 1997) called “objective”—and objectively necessary— “appearances”: “phantom-like” objectivities upholding a fetishistic regime of valuation and value extraction. That the ancestors of Cambronne’s Haitian victims would have coined the image of the zonbi—the living dead who mindlessly labor away in the service of an alien master—has often been noted as an “African survival” or a quaint outgrowth of the formation of local belief systems in environments of extreme scarcity. What it has rarely been taken for is an astute folk analytic of precisely the problems that contemporary First World bioethicists belatedly find themselves pondering in their own social worlds. Is it a mere coincidence that conceptions of the Haitian zonbi or the case of the Afro-Cuban nganga would so closely mirror the dilemmas and contradictions engendered by the technoscientific blurring between humans and things? I certainly can’t prove my point—it’s unprovable.46 But what I do believe I can assert is that thinking with ngangas (or zonbis, for that matter) allows us access to an analytic dimension that radically exposes rather than merely metaphorizes a dimension of the nowglobalized moral disorder that first emerged, in stunningly drastic form,

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on those New World production sites where a novel regime of value made it possible to productively merge depersonalized humans with machines, treat their bodies as sheer sources of extractable value, and terminate their lives solely in regard to considerations of utility. Obviously, this may sound like a gross overstatement. But alas, the market keeps being haunted by the returning specter of externalities. One of the key incidents eventually leading to the passing of the 1984 US National Organ Transplantation Act (US Public Law 98–507) was the initiative taken by Dr. H. Barry Jacobs, founder and director of International Kidney Exchange, Inc., in propagating a plan to set up a commercial clearinghouse for human kidneys. As Fox and Swazey (1992, 65) note, what Jacobs “proposed was commissioning kidneys from persons living in the Global South or in disadvantaged circumstance in the United States for whatever price would induce them to sell their organs, and then negotiating their acquisition, for a fee, by Americans who could afford to purchase them.”47 There is no need here to turn to the by now long-standing efforts of the United States Information Agency to control or defuse rumors of organ stealing in Central America or other regions where US security interests generate ample amounts of potential donors through the operation of death squads armed or trained by the United States.48 Though Jacobs’s project was foiled by legislative action, the vision of organs (and therefore life chances) circulating upward along a scale of rising efficiency and utility speaks to an increasingly precarious political economy of embodiment—one that thrives on the market’s ability not just to allocate in accordance with effective demand but to limit human personhood in accordance with geopolitical considerations. What returns, then, is the vision of deficient embodiment—this time not in a legal but in a political- economic sense. Just as proslavery advocates never tired of arguing that New World dehumanization was vastly superior to personhood in Africa, so we might envision a future where the distinctions between the Global North and South fully dissolve into an ungeheure Warensammlung; and the final free reign of those aspects of the market’s “natural” operations that are still artificially suppressed will enable us to have the cannibalistic feast that might have been our destiny all along. Perhaps then will we truly be flesh of one flesh. The fetish, at least, will be no more—if only because its mode of being will have fully engulfed our existence.

Chapter 3

Thinking with Ifá about Genomic Ancestry Profiles and “Racecraft” The Holocaust did happen. Elvis is gone. And Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children. Mary Jefferson as cited in U.S. News and World Report (2001)

As to who is a Negro in the United States, I have come to the conclusion after long and careful thought that to be an expert on that subject the first qualification is to be crazy. Only those who are able to throw all logic, all reasoning to the winds, can ever hope to be authorities on that matter. J. A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color (1972)

Somehow, to aver that we [humans] are over one-quarter genetically banana sounds more inane than profound; but it does illustrate the cultural assumptions behind “natural” similarities. Jonathan Marks, “Contemporary Bio-anthropology: Where the Trailing Edge of Anthropology Meets the Leading Edge of Bioethics,” Anthropology Today (2002)

Do social identities have a basis in nature? Most anthropologists would answer with a resounding no. Originating with Boas’s attempts to discredit any clearly delimited relation between human biological morphology, sociality, and culture, anthropological antiracism consolidated into an international consensus between World War II and the late 1960s. Since then, and especially under the impact of feminist theory, the view that categories such as race, sex, and gender are historically as well as locally variable constructs has dominated our discipline, and it arguably represents one of the key intellectual contributions of twentieth-century anthropology to Western public discourses. Ironically, perhaps, this consensus appears to be fracturing today, and it does so along the lines of a discourse enabled by new genomic technologies.

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Part of the reason for this may well lie in the fact that all legal reforms— and constructionist rhetoric—to the contrary, race has simply not gone away. At least in the United States, disparities in health, wealth, and social inclusion among racially defined populations have widened rather than narrowed in the post– Civil Rights era, eroding as they did so both the credibility of the idea of a “raceless” meritocratic society and the experiential salience of the notion that race is a mere social construction. The question, “Can we all get along?” that Rodney King famously posed to the media after having been manhandled by the LAPD in 1992 clearly can’t be written off as the result of a category mistake.1 Still, as I will argue, category mistakes— though ones of a systemic nature—play an important part in this story. For while race has not only not withered away as a social phenomenon, nowadays it also appears to be acquiring a new lease on life as a biological one. The two aspects are obviously intertwined. And they relate to a logic that, borrowing a set of important insights from Karen Fields (2001), I will describe as “racecraft.” Fields’s concept intends to evoke the time-hallowed anthropological question of the rationality of beliefs in witchcraft and the oracular means by which it becomes detectable. I intend to evoke the question of the rationality of genomic means of identity arbitration and how their revelations of “invisible essences” of relatedness and difference confirm, rather than challenge, the operation of a very real moment of “racemaking” or “racecraft.” Since the essay on which this chapter is based was written, this moment has come into even more troubling focus. Jenny Reardon’s (e.g., 2007, 2012), Sandra Soo-Jin Lee’s (2013), and Duana Fullwiley’s (2008, 2014) extrapolations from their long-term ethnographic research on institutional efforts to democratize genomic science (such as the International Haplotype Map Project, the genomics company 23andMe, and the University of California, San Francisco’s GALA project) have encouraged me to think that my initial assessment was right. What all of them document in sometimes excruciating empirical detail is a luxuriant tangle of contradiction arising from the fact that paradoxically, even the best-intended efforts to incorporate genomic knowledge into liberal social projects aiming to address long-standing inequalities fall dramatically short of their goals by giving consumers of genomic knowledge goods (or voluntarily consenting subjects) an individual stake in their own racialization. But let me turn first to the rather simpler question that, in many ways, stands at the beginning of this inquiry.

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Have You Ever Met a White Person Named Washington? A few months after my wife and I moved into an apartment in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, DC, in the summer of 1997, our neighbor Donald Washington asked us whether we had ever met a white person with the last name Washington.2 After some hesitation, and somewhat to our own surprise, we found ourselves answering in the negative. Having anticipated our reply, our neighbor then began to enlighten us about what he thought was an incontrovertible fact—namely, that the majority of the Washingtons in the District of Columbia were Black descendants of the first president of the United States. Upon the end of slavery, they simply appropriated the name of the man who had denied legitimacy to the children he had sired with enslaved women, thus depriving them not only of the immediate privileges of free birth but of the lasting ones of presidential descent as well.3 Were one to give credence to my neighbor’s theory,4 the more than 350 entries for the surname Washington in the DC phone book— of which at least two-thirds could then be localized in notionally “Black” neighborhoods—would not only bespeak the existence of a tradition of systematically disqualified knowledge but (and equally, in Foucault’s sense) testify to the heterogeneity of those fictions that tend to represent themselves as facts of monolithic origins, and so as legitimations of the privileges derivative thereof. At the same time, however, this anecdote illustrates a classical anthropological issue that continues to weigh heavily on the minds of students in anthropological introductory classes. This is so because it provides a striking demonstration of the fact that the notion of biological (i.e., principally folk-Mendelian, cognatic) descent, common and legally operative as it is in most Western societies today, represents only one among a multitude of known cultural mechanisms by which human individuals are recruited into social categories and collectivities. At least in the case at hand, the so-called principle of hypodescent, the exclusion of individuals with known African (or perhaps better: Black) ancestry from collectivities self-defined as white, crucial as it historically was for the formation of “racial” collectivities in North America, continues to inform the public genealogical imagination; and it does so by guaranteeing the unthinkability, for most self-identified white Americans, of kinship relations between George Washington and individuals socially classified as Black. This is, of course, not just a taxonomic issue. Rather, what we are facing is an instance of those truly imponderable, indeed axiomatic forms of social “memory loss” that anthropologists have long been wont to both describe

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as the results of “structural amnesia” and assign considerable importance to in the reproduction of kinship-based social formations.5 For in contrast to phenotypically oriented or situative practices of allocating racial identities (said to be characteristic for Latin American societies), in the United States the social phenomenon of whiteness—of which “presidentiality” formed a subcategory until 2008, when Barack Obama was elected as the country’s first Black president—reproduces itself not just in accordance with strictly dichotomous descent ideologies but through steady processes of outdefining or disenrollment. Hence the common wisdom, largely valid in the United States until the advent of gestational surrogacy, that a white woman could give birth to a Black child, whereas a Black woman could never give birth to a white one (cf. Jacobson 1998, 1ff.)—a cultural fact too obviously recalling the ostensibly paradoxical manner in which members of societies with unilineal kinship systems are apt to banish from their genealogies people whom our first-year students, on the basis of Euro-American genealogical common sense, would readily regard as their biological ascendants. In both cases, we might say with Bowker and Star (1999), the “informational infrastructures” underwriting and enabling such conceptions of relatedness have disappeared into a black hole of naturalization. That this is not merely a cognitive but a political problem is easy to demonstrate in both cases. As Stuckert (1976) pointed out in an ingenious statistical extrapolation from historical records, by the time of the 1970 US census, some 24 percent of all persons listed as “white” might reasonably have been presumed to have had African ancestors, while more than 80 percent of all “Blacks” would have had non-African ancestors. Transformed into numerical values, this means nothing less than that the overwhelming majority of all Americans of African ancestry—that is, about 42 million at the time—had not been counted into the Black population (which then stood at 22 million) but classified as white. Put differently, there were (and surely still are) almost double the number of “white” Americans of African descent as “Black” ones.6 The introduction of the “mark one or more” option in the census of 2000 notwithstanding, this, however, is no less admissible to current US folk demographics (including those statistical representations to which lay demographic consciousness tends to react) than it would be for members of, say, a society with a matrilineal kinship system to grant paternal title or inheritance rights to one of its members on juridically principled (and so, among other things, structural) grounds.7 What speaks for such an interpretation in the case of my neighbor’s theories is that in the United States, such (systemically necessary) blind spots or dark zones of genealogical consciousness can be illuminated only

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in individual cases and even then only by means of the seemingly extrapolitical authority of scientific expert discourse. As I will argue below, this moment recalls another time-hallowed anthropological theme—namely, the rationality of divination. Much like the classical oracular systems on ethnographic record, certain genomically enhanced practices of genealogical identity arbitration in contemporary American society, particularly the pursuit of what has come to be called personalized genetic histories (Shriver and Kittles 2004), perform their cultural work by establishing Wittgensteinian “hinges”: propositions around which doubt can turn but which can never be subject to doubt themselves. In the case at hand, such hinges pivot on the idea of racial identity as an objectively occurring phenomenon, the reality of which ultimately resides in the realm of the biotic, history and social conventions notwithstanding. In particular, I want to suggest that in establishing such hinges, genomics, like divination, gives material shape to, and thereby reproduces as social reality, the ideologies of invisible essences and agencies on which they are based—for example, the notion of witchcraft as an embodied, hereditary trait in the Azande case or, in the case under discussion, that of race as an embodied, hereditary trait in contemporary US society.8 In so arguing, my intention is not to reinvent the wheel. It’s to put a by now well-established anthropological discourse on “geneticization” (a term coined by Lippman [1991]) to work in an area where it has been conspicuously underdeployed: that of the construction of “genomic pasts” rather than “genomic futures.” By now, we know much about the impact of predictive genomics on the emergence of lifeworlds characterized by “horizons of expectation” (Koselleck 2004) that come to express futurity in the form of a prognostic of statistical risk (e.g., Rabinow 1996; Rapp 1999; Fullwiley 2004; Lock 2005). But as yet, we don’t have a clear understanding of the kind of genomically enhanced retrodictive diagnostics that have begun to reconfigure the past in a fashion that may well affect the relational structure of contemporary “spaces of experience” and “horizons of expectation” that supervene on them, to again use Koselleck’s (2004) apt terminology. The case I will focus on concerns a group of US citizens long barred from full participation in a characteristically North American ideology of genealogical “rootedness” (ideally in translocal “Old World pasts”) as a requisite for full cultural citizenship—that is, persons who, whether by default or by design, inhabit social identities once associated with the violent genealogical rupture of slave descent, and nowadays most often framed in terms of an African ancestry beyond documentary recovery. As will become clear in the following section, at least in a few highly publicized instances, the

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prestige of genomic technologies of knowledge production has forced the retrospective realignment of official historiography with previously disqualified forms of historical knowledge that have long circulated in North America’s Black community.9 Part of my goal in this chapter is thus to gauge the degree to which personal genetic histories may empower oppositional modes of genomic revisionism. At the same time, however, I also aim to probe the looping social and cultural effects of fundamentally antihistorical technologies promising to ratify such previously systematically denied modes of African American “historical self-enracination,” or else cast light on suppressed forms of transracial genomic relationality. Indeed, it’s all but clear at what costs such discoveries are achieved. Arguably at least, since they are based on the notion of ostensibly hyperdeterminative invisible genomic “essences” beyond individual control or social manipulation, the knowledge so produced will simultaneously feed back into the system it took off from—American forms of racial classification. Potentially, therefore, such knowledge may lead to further naturalization of racial categories and the increasing (re-) biologicization of the human stuff they purport to mark. If I am right, what’s at play in the genomic ratification of social identities is, at least in part, a biopolitical “cunning of recognition” (Povinelli 2002) that—far from destabilizing racial constructs—merely reinscribes (fractally, if you will) the terms of exclusionary ideologies of hypodescent on a deeper, more effectively naturalized level (Marks 2002b). Particularly in this regard, I want to suggest that technologies of genomic historicization and identity arbitration—no matter to what extent they may promise to disrupt foundational forms of American structural amnesia in an incidental, case-by-case fashion (Nelson 2016)—paradoxically perform their cultural work in systemically reproducing fundamentally racist modes and models of sociality. If so, classical anthropological theories of divination and witchcraft in (allegedly) epistemologically closed systems would seem to provide an analytic we might do well to critically reconsider.

Molecular Revisionism While the Clinton-Lewinski scandal rocked the nation in the fall of 1998, Donald Washington’s theories thus found surprising, if indirect, reinforcement in an article in Nature, a journal not normally suspected of pandering to daily news interests. There, the pathologist Eugene Foster and a team of researchers reported that comparative analyses of Y-chromosome polymorphisms had enabled them to establish a relatively plausible gene-

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alogical linkage between the descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle and the male descendants of Eston Hemings, the youngest son of Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings (Foster et al. 1998). This isn’t the place to rehearse the multiple ironies uncovered—as well as entailed!—in Foster’s findings. The most glaring ones, however, bear mentioning. For although Foster and his collaborators managed to effectively launch a genealogical relation between Fields Jefferson (i.e., the president’s Fb [father’s brother]) and Eston Hemings into the realm of the journalistically plausible, the descendants of Eston Hemings seemingly disappeared into the same definitional chiaroscuro that, to this day, has enabled Thomas Jefferson’s white progeny to monopolize burial rights in the cemetery of Jefferson’s former plantation, Monticello. Thus, when Eston Hemings was freed along with his brother Madison upon Jefferson’s death, he moved to Ohio and then Madison, Wisconsin, changed his name to Eston H. Jefferson, and took on a “white” identity—as did two of his sisters. We know that Eston’s red-haired son, John W. Jefferson, was wounded at Vicksburg while a lieutenant colonel of the Union troops (Brody 1976; B. Murray and Duffy 1998; Stanton and Wright 1999, 169), but he and his other siblings were soon to disappear into what white Americans would nowadays be inclined to call the mainstream. In keeping with the logic of a peculiarly North American culture of race, his descendants, whom Foster laboriously tracked down, had not only forgotten their slave ancestry but—and necessarily so—their presidential one as well. Not so in the case of the fourteen hundred self-identified Black members of the Thomas Woodson Association, founded in 1978 and named for Sally Hemings’s oldest son. Yet while the association had actively supported the Foster team’s research, its results severely disappointed members’ expectations, which had rested on more than a century and a half of intrafamilial oral tradition. The results provided incontrovertible evidence for the noncorrespondence of the DNA of their male members and the crucial haplotype of the Jeffersonian Y chromosome. But what exactly did that mean? What was Foster and associates’ evidence evidence of? Why the disappointment on the part of both the Woodson Association and the Monticello Association, an incorporated group of descendants of Thomas and Martha Jefferson who likewise, if for different reasons, publicly deplored the outcome of Foster’s efforts (Chang 1998)? Why the journalistic furor over a bunch of amino acids? What role might the correspondence (or lack thereof) between seven bi-allelic markers, eleven microsatellites, and the minisatellite MSY1 in the DNA samples taken from five descendants of Jefferson’s paternal uncle, one descendant of Eston Hem-

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ings, and five of Thomas Woodson have possibly played in the decision of the Monticello Association to continue denying members of the Thomas Woodson Association the privilege of burial in Monticello’s graveyard (Smith 1999; Lord 2001)? How could such genomic data have motivated, as Staples (2001) implies, Eston Hemings’s “white” descendant Julia Westerinen to check the category Black on the 2000 census forms? And most strikingly, perhaps, in what ways might they have influenced the Bush administration’s invitation of a Woodson descendant, Mary Jefferson, to the White House’s celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s 258th birthday (Lord 2001)? Perhaps expectably, Foster and associates quickly backpedaled. In a letter to the New York Times on November 9, Foster (1998) wrote that the “genetic findings my collaborators and I reported . . . do not prove that Thomas Jefferson was the father of one of Sally Hemings’ children. We never made that claim.” In a rejoinder to his critics in Nature, he added, [While] it is true that men of Randolph Jefferson’s family could have fathered Sally Hemings’ later children . . . [w]e know from the historical and the DNA data that Thomas Jefferson can neither be definitively excluded nor solely implicated in the paternity of illegitimate children with his slave Sally Hemings. When we embarked upon the study, we knew that the results could not be conclusive, but we hoped to obtain some objective data that would tilt the weight of evidence in one direction or another. We think we have provided such data and that the modest, probabilistic interpretations we have made are tenable at present. (Foster et al. 1999; emphasis mine)

The genie, however, was out of the bottle. Seeming to cut a bright path through the murky terrain of a voluminous literature produced by biographers and historical Jefferson scholars; storehouses of uncollected and unanalyzed public documents relating to what today must be tens of thousands of bearers of Thomas Jefferson’s and/or Sally Hemings’s genetic material; and the webs spun by family traditions and other insubstantiable forms of knowing, Foster’s amino acids appeared to prove so much precisely because they themselves were the artifacts of a research design that beautifully illustrates David Schneider’s (1984, 111) maxim that “biological kinship is always and everywhere a set of cultural conceptions,” along with Marilyn Strathern’s (1992) more general point that the natural is always—and everywhere, including in genomic laboratories—a cultural construction. For what, if anything, might Foster and associates have uncovered, had they not previously defined their sample universe and variables in accor-

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dance with a hypothesis they derived from the historiographical literature and popular imagination? Probably nothing of great public interest. For who knows: chances are that another research design (focused, e.g., on a different set of haplotype markers, or different universes of comparison) might have unearthed correspondences to the Jeffersonian DNA in male residents of Ulan Bator, Ibadan, or Bogotá (or, given what we know about transspecies genomic continuities, in mice, fruit flies, bananas, or yeast cells). This possibility proves not only the methodological point; it also goes to show that discriminatory folk epistemologies—in this case, a US-style racial will to knowledge—pick up and give diagnostic value to principally opaque data, not just because such data issue from discursive locations associated with unquestionable (in this case scientific) authority, but because they already fit—and were designed to fit—into preexisting “discourses of heritable identities” (Austin-Broos 1994; cf. Marks 2002b). Although the specific historical origins of such discourses in regimes of slavery and segregation may have become subject to public disavowal, their knowledgeproducing modus operandi obviously still serves to conjoin new epistemic means with an old epistemic end: that of arbitrating “racial” identity and difference by recourse to empirical data interpreted as diagnostic signs of the presence or absence of traits or qualities, thought to constitute indicators of racial essences, in the bodies of those judged in this fashion (cf. Guillaumin 1995).10 Whichever other conclusions we may thus be inclined to draw from Foster’s findings, and quite apart from the immediate political relevance of such constructions of “racial knowledge” at the time,11 what interests me here is not just the ease with which molecular-biological data, principally meaningless by themselves, were translated into weighty “social facts” but how they simultaneously transformed into the key elements of a form of historical revisionism based on essentially extrahistorical—in fact, antihistorical—forms of knowledge production. All methodological quandaries aside, such shuttling between the episteme of probabilistic high-tech bioscience and a historically constituted social logic of asking and answering questions about “racial identity” not just elides “discontinuities and ruptures” across fundamentally incommensurate “knowledge domains” (Lock 2005, S48) but in fact mutually hybridizes them. Consider the following remarks by a Denver Post writer, Diane Carman (1998), who gleefully implied that the task to uncover wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it really was), which Leopold von Ranke famously assigned the historical profession, would soon be taken over by “sturdier” forms of epistemic practice. “One discovery that historians ignore at their peril,” she wrote under the

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headline “Truth, Justice, and DNA” amid the media spectacle unleashed by Foster’s study in the fall of 1998, “is the scientific breakthrough by Francis Harry Compton Crick and James D. Watson in 1953 to identify the molecular structure of genes. By unlocking this storehouse of information, they not only changed history for the future, they have made it possible to change the past. They have allowed us to seek truth even after centuries have elapsed. And they made a whole passel of effete scholars look like complete bozos.” Whatever half-baked theories and useless subjectivisms social scientists may be mongering for reasons we can only guess at, according to Carman there is hope that truth will eventually be revealed to us—by genomic sequencing and other robust molecular-biological means.12 And indeed there is increasing evidence for just that. Think, for example, about the stir caused by the discovery (Thomas et al. 2001) that the Lemba, an ethnographically little-known ethnic group in northeastern South Africa whose members had “always” believed—much like scores of other African social formations with access to the colonial literature on them—to be related to the biblical Jews, actually “bore” what has become known as the Cohen modal haplotype (cf. Azoulay 2003). Of course, as Marks (2001, 370) notes regarding the original discovery of that haplotype, there’s no telling what might have resulted had that study’s research design not been based on an ingenuous correlation between the book of Exodus and the kind of isonymic first-principle logic that led Skorecki et al. (1997) to disregard the fact that “in the absence of information on the distribution of Y chromosome haplotypes of a sample of Horowitzes or Steinbergs,” any inference from genetic data shared by their sample of self-designated Hebrew priests (many of whom, of course, were Cohens or Cohns) must be dubious. Or consider the somewhat less well-publicized but equally remarkable studies by Alves-Silva et al. (2000), “The Ancestry of Brazilian mtDNA Lineages”; Carvalho-Silva et al. (2001), “The Phylogeography of Brazilian Y- Chromosome Lineages”; and Parra et al. (2003), “Color and Genomic Ancestry in Brazilians,” which essentially replicated in genomic language, and thereby ratified in the form of carbon molecule distributions, the founding myths of the ideology of Brazilian racial democracy. For lo and behold, what Gilberto Freyre once called miscibilidade and defined as a historically long-standing and eminently preadaptive proclivity on the part of male Portuguese colonizers not to spurn opportunities for having sex with “racially alien” women under their domination shows up in their mtDNA and Y-chromosome analyses as well. Good for the Lemba, perhaps (cf. Parfitt 2003).13 But probably bad for the racialized subjects of

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a lasting internal—as well as international (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999)—ideological consensus about the merits of Brazil’s “racism in the absence of corporate races,” as Roger Lancaster (1992) once characterized the situation in the (largely analogous) Nicaraguan case.14 Yet what is it that makes a person a Cohen, a Lemba, or someone with burial rights in Monticello if not historically mutable patterns of recruitment into social categories and groups of variable inclusiveness? Clearly, excepting “situations where common socioeconomic factors have so insulted the biology of development and daily existence [of specific groups] as to cause convergence” (Keita and Boyce 2001, 574; cf. Gravlee 2009) between genomic patterns and socially recognized group boundaries, what makes a person “Black” or “white” in the United States—but maybe not in Brazil or Nicaragua—or a Lemba, or a publicly acknowledged descendant of Thomas Jefferson, simply can’t be predicted from a person’s biological endowment, however defined. It’s the product of the thoroughly conventional, eminently changeable rules of recognition by which societies selectively allocate their members to specific subject positions. In some instances, such rules are based on considerations pertaining to genealogical conceits, however arbitrary these may appear from a biologist’s point of view (think of unilineal kinship systems or marriage to commoners among European nobility). In many others, the rules simply recur to socially routinized perceptual markers—be their diagnostic value grounded in (genotypically entirely underdetermined) appearances or simply a set of culturally overdetermined performative capacities and acquired dispositions. Obviously, in most human societies descent (though, of course, in widely divergent elaborations) functions as a powerful technos of recruitment— evoking, as it does, at least among Europeans and Americans, notions of unwilled, nonnegotiable consubstantiality to a degree where the truth of identities (and here the pathetic story of Rachel Dolezal comes to mind) becomes popularly pegged not just to “where you’re at” but “where you’re coming from.”15 Given the deep roots of arboreal images in the Western “knowledge of begetting” (genealogy), and given also its deep linkages with the transmission of property and properties (i.e., not just estates but membership in estates), this perhaps shouldn’t surprise us.16

Rules of Recognition Part of the trouble here is that already in their research design, studies such as the ones cited above pull all the wrong switches. For they tend to define their units of analysis by mapping population concepts capable of allowing

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biologists to genomically distinguish regional subspecies of drosophila, for instance, onto what in the case of human collectivities are the self-naming, self-delimiting artifacts of culture and political maneuver (Ardener 1989; cf. Keita and Boyce 2001; Bamshad et al. 2003; Gannett 2003, 2004; Duster 2005). More often than not, the result is sheer nonsense on logical grounds, or what Jonathan Kahn (2003) calls instances of “statistical mischief.” As Duster (2003, 265; emphasis mine) notes, from a strictly genomic point of view, It is possible to make arbitrary groupings of populations (geographic, linguistic, self-identified by faith, identified by others by physiognomy, etc.) and still find statistically significant allelic variations between those groupings. For example, we could examine all the people in Chicago, and all those in Los Angeles, and find statistically significant differences in allele frequency at some loci. Of course, at many loci, even at most loci, we would not find statistically significant differences. When researchers claim to be able to assign people to groups based on allele frequency at a certain number of loci, they have chosen loci that show differences between the groups they are trying to distinguish.

Much as in the case of Marx’s (1979, 157) famous criticism of Darwin for “discern[ing] anew among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, elucidation of new markets, ‘discoveries,’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence,’” here the discovery of natural forms in the social is prestructured by antecedent projection of social forms onto the natural. Of course, much of what one might say in regard to this would be contingent on whether one countenances the epistemological possibility of accessing a “realm of nature” free of discursive entanglements or other man-made encumbrances. Yet even were we to bracket this rather fundamental question, the sheer possibility that practices of genomic knowledge production could, in principle, very well authorize such otherwise counterintuitive entities as “biologically identifiable” Chicagoans or Angelenos—entities that on a moment’s reflection reveal themselves as the products of elementary category mistakes—should give us reason to ask about the nature of the collective representations they generate and endow, in the public imagination, with uncanny degrees of legitimacy and truth-value. Why, in short, do the models of “biosociality” (Rabinow 1996) that genomics appears to place at our disposal seem so good to think and— possibly—act on? The answer I would like to venture in the remainder of this chapter is

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simple, and it hinges on the proposition, defensible as it seems to me in light of the above, that genomic forms of identity arbitration ultimately partake of the ethnographically well-known logic of systems of divination. These systems, in disclosing the “hidden” agencies and essences that seem to shape particular social arrangements and events, stabilize and reproduce the cultural order that throws up the question such oracular systems purport to answer in the first place. My aim in suggesting this is not, or not primarily, polemical—though it has largely been taken as such.17 If we can accept that divination (particularly what is known as “inductive” divination—i.e., varieties of technike) is a principally rational procedure to uncover previously unknown facts about the world by placing known facts under novel descriptions allowable within a specific epistemic order, then there’s little reason to reject, a priori, a formal comparison with science as logically inappropriate or outrageous.18 On the contrary, what’s logically inappropriate and outrageous in the case at hand is the short- circuiting of epistemic orders through the tacit but pervasive and ongoing transcription of questions formulated within a “commonsense” order of epistemic rationality into a scientific one, and vice versa (cf. Schuetz 1973).19 But logical consistency is, of course, only part of what’s at issue here. Contrary to Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) bracketing of science as a seemingly socially unconstrained idiom of thought, both Zande divination and contemporary molecular biology are first and foremost situated social practices. As such, both answer not just to abstract standards of internal consistency but to the thoroughly socialized existential concerns of their practitioners and clients as well.20 Once we consider this proposition, it should no longer surprise us that genomic practices of knowledge production (much like other systems of divination) can easily engender happy tautologies—as when, for example, Cohen genes are found in a population whose members already self-identify with “priestly descent” or think they are a lost tribe of Israel to begin with.21 Nor should it be overly puzzling that historians have, by and large, not protested how geneticists are replicating their findings by methodologically as well as epistemologically dubious (let alone ethically troubling) interpolations of the ontolog(ies) of post-1950s biological population genetics into the realm of human sociality.22 For much genomic research proceeds from assumptions it culls from ostensibly “unscientific” constructions of the past (including historians’ writings) and eventually restates them in the form of tabulations of allele frequencies—thereby oddly lending “scientific” legitimacy to what everyone (or at least some people) had already been arguing before. An obvious case in point concerns the belated “rediscovery,”

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in the wake of Foster’s genomic revelations, of the legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed’s (1997) painstakingly researched historical argument for Jefferson’s paternity of one or more of Hemings’s children or the fact that most African Americans never doubted that this was so: here, genomics appeared to disambiguate what was previously thinkable as rumor or circumstantial evidence, and it did so by way of what Strathern (2005) calls the “discovery” of what was principally “knowable” within a given system of coimplications.23 More contentious cases, however, aren’t hard to imagine. Although it may still be too early to tell, the impact of the rapidly multiplying, webbased commercial purveyors of “personalized genetic histories” (PGHs) targeting African Americans in the United States may well result in substantive controversy between consumers of such products and scholars aiming to preserve their public authority in the face of molecular-biological forms of historical revisionism applauded by journalists and avidly consumed in the United States by an increasingly broader, increasingly web-based public (cf. Bolnick et al. 2007; Abel and Schroeder 2020). The question here, or so I would argue, is not at all whether or not such genomic revisionisms are open to falsification (a classical, if blatantly mistaken, criterion for distinguishing between “science” and “nonscientific” modes of knowledge production). The question is how the knowledge so produced figures into processes of social reproduction. And in that regard, it is rapidly becoming clear that historians and other social scientists ought to consider weighing in with some urgency, lest they risk missing the boat altogether.

Genomic Pasts Since the late 1990s, commercial PGH services have been widely hailed in the press as a key to unlock the African past of contemporary African Americans. The services have been in the news as an important resource for undoing the psychological and social damage done to Black people in the course of slavery and its aftermath of racist oppression by obliterating the kind of genealogical linkages to extra-American ancestral origins crucial for any group aiming to place itself within the US national narrative. With PGHs, African Americans can reclaim their dignity as distinct and distinguishable contributors to what is nowadays termed American diversity (e.g., Goldberg 2000; Kristof 2003; Joiner 2003; Franklin 2004; Karkabi 2005; Harmon 2005; Hamilton 2005; Glanton 2005). Now whether these journalistic claims hold water remains a fascinating, but to my knowledge unexplored, ethnographic question.24 Nonetheless, given the current interest in

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identity and heritage as scarce and potent symbolic resources in the politics of recognition often held to characterize patterns of “multicultural” sociality in liberal Western societies (e.g., Handler 1994; Hall 1997; Harrison 1999, 2002, 2003; Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Essed and Goldberg 2002; Comaroff and Comaroff 2003), it’s surprising that anthropologists have largely seemed to steer clear of addressing the epistemological and political implications of what Brodwin (2002, 327) aptly calls “African American ancestry projects” enabled through commercial PGH services.25 One of the clearest statements of some of the problems involved comes from the Nigerian-born geneticist Charles Rotimi (2003), based at Howard University’s National Human Genome Center (cf. Bolnick et al. 2007). Predictably, methodological concerns figure high on Rotimi’s list for why African Americans should exercise caution when aiming to ground their contemporary sense of self and social relations in the kinds of services provided by commercial DNA labs. Yet for Rotimi (2003, 153–54), the conundrum that “the nature or appearance of genetic clustering (grouping) of people is a function of how populations are sampled, of how criteria for boundaries between clusters are set, and of the level of resolution used” together with the well- established fact “that African populations have more genetic variation between them (estimates are as high as 95%) than when Africans are compared to other peoples who migrated out of Africa thousands of years ago (estimates are as low as 3%)” are merely the tip of an iceberg of unexamined presuppositions about the possibility of bringing units of genetic analysis into concordance with units of human social identification. For apart from the fact that relatively safe levels of analytical scale and resolution may not generate much public interest (ultimately, we’re all “phylogenetically” Africans, though only some of us continue to reside on that continent), the closer the focus, the more nonbiological factors begin to overwhelm the models population genetics are capable of generating. This, in Rotimi’s view, not only pertains to the dubious nature of establishing genomic profiles for named African demographic entities whose patterns of self-identification are the result of recent geopolitical events. It also concerns the existence of a plethora of mechanisms of recruitment into named social collectivities that have nothing to do with genetic relatedness (cf. Keita and Boyce 2001; Gannett 2004). While no one would thus aim to come up with the idea of establishing ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) for populations generated by the naturalization laws of even only modern microstates (think of Liechtenstein, Tonga, or Antigua), the maps of contemporary DNA databases for Africa are full of ill-sampled entities

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(aka aboriginal populations or even tribes) that have long been known not only not to be bounded by “natural barriers to interbreeding” but to have liberally assimilated, genetically unrelated personnel through mechanisms such as exogamous marriage, initiation, or enslavement.26 Yet it’s not only that deeply flawed conceptions of units of analysis mar genomic ancestry searches from the very outset. For Rotimi, the models of identification and belonging created by such means are similarly problematic. Indeed, to anyone familiar with the historical and ethnographic literature on the Yoruba, his conclusion that “it cannot really be said that a Diasporan African with genetic affinity to the Yoruba [of today] is more ‘Yoruba’ than, for example, Suzanne Wenger, an Austrian Anthropologist who is also Chief Priestess of the Oshun Goddess, the keeper of the Beaded Comb in Yoruba land” (Rotimi 2003, 156) will probably not seem overly far-fetched. Note here that Rotimi doesn’t deny “Africanity” to “Diasporan Africans” (or “Austrianness” to Suzanne Wenger, for that matter). What he worries about is collapsing the very real complexities of history and social maneuver into the spurious transparencies afforded by statistical notions of “genetic affinity.” This, however, would seem to be precisely the kind of “cultural work” PHG analyses are geared to perform. Despite the caution proponents of commercial PGH services display in their publications directed toward scholarly audiences (e.g., Kittles and Royal 2003; Shriver and Kittles 2004), what is available on the web would thus seem to support Rotimi’s (2003, 156) plea “to avoid cosmetic and euphoric linkages that may prove, in the long run, to be unsatisfactory for everyone involved.” The explanations of the genetic findings for a fictive client in a sample “African DNA Ancestry Report” posted on Santa Fe–based DNA Consulting’s website27 may serve to exemplify this point. There, the prospective consumer—who presumably has flipped over the technical details of the genetic analysis—will get the following explanation: L-Haplogroups The subject’s likely haplotype L2 is associated with the so-called Bantu expansion from West and Central sub-Saharan Africa east and south, dated 2,000–4,000 years ago. . . . Between the 15th and the 19th centuries C.E., the Atlantic slave trade resulted in the forced movement of approximately 13 million people from Africa, mainly to the Americas. Only approximately 11 million survived the passage, and many more died in the early years of captivity. Many of these slaves were traded to the West African Cape Verde ports of embarkation through Portuguese and Arab middlemen and came from as far east as the Horn of

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Africa and as far south as Angola. Among the African tribal groups, all Bantu-speaking, in which L2 is common are: Hausa, Kanuri, Fulfe [sic], Songhai, Malunjin (Angola), Yoruba, Senegalese, Serer and Wolof.

This fanciful condensation of garbled African historical geography and ethnolinguistics28 is followed by a section entitled “About the Bantu,” culled in its entirety from the 1911 (!) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Next is the report’s conclusion. The subject’s mother descends from an L2 African female who lived in West Africa between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, and whose descendants joined the Bantu culture. Possibly, one of her female-linked descendants was a slave traded to the Spanish or Portuguese colonies in America from Sierra Leone in the 17th–19th century. A SNP test and sequencing of HVS2 would provide more information on the subject’s particular sub-group of L2 and its geographic origins in Africa before the Bantu expansion.

Yet what in the world might it mean to be related to someone who lived twenty thousand to thirty thousand years ago (let alone “before the Bantu expansion”—whatever that phrase may be taken to mean)? Even though one would have to reckon with what geneticists call lineage convergence in the increasingly distant past, given that (biologically speaking) ascendants multiply exponentially, and given also that currently available mtDNA and Y-chromosome tests pick up only one out of literally thousands of ancestral lines, the propositional value of a statement such as “I am related to this particular African woman” might be of the order of statements such as “The Queen of England and I share a distant ancestor”—a proposition that is, after all, true for every human being on this planet, including me, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, my former neighbor Donald Washington, and both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But ascendants and the relationships we construct to—and through!—them are, of course, not biological but cultural facts. What is problematic here is thus not that facile applications of genomic technologies might come to underwrite historically spurious strategies of self-enracination and identity management. All forms of ancestry tracing do—if only because they inevitably operate in highly selective fashions. For who could—let alone might want to—base his or her sense of contemporary selfhood on any but a semantically marked minimal set of the thousands of ancestors one acquires once reckoning beyond the fourth of fifth gen-

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eration? Recurring once more to the travails of students in the anthropology introductory lecture on kinship and descent, the crucial issue here is not just that genealogies are always and everywhere cultural contrivances but that—and no matter how much at times they may approximate what biologists might be inclined to tell us about the “natural facts” of sexual reproduction—they always and everywhere are, or at least can be made to perform the work of, political charters as well. What better case to adduce to illustrate this basic anthropological fact than the case of North American “races,” which, for the longest time and despite all common sense regarding historically documentable mating patterns, have demographically behaved as if they constituted mutually exclusive corporate groups that reproduce themselves by simply disenrolling individuals with conceptually inconvenient ascendants from their membership rosters.29

Contesting “Anti-kinship” Hence the utility of genomically enhanced projections of alternative— even oppositional—descent lines capable of occasional subversions of the reigning genealogical consensus by, for instance, bringing Blackness and presidential descent into spectacular alignment. More important, perhaps, such pronouncements enable “ancestry projects” promising to fill the void created by the condition of ultimate social deracination—the brutal “antikinship” (C. Meillassoux 1991) of slavery—that to this day casts its shadow on the narratives of collective origin which US public culture tends to prescribe for people recruited (by birth, appearance, or, more recently, individual choice) into that nation’s “Black minority.” No doubt, surmounting (by whatever means) the oppressive conceit of genealogical erasure rationalized as having been effected by enslavement and the slave trade constitutes a political act—a fact that became amply evident in the late 1970s in the aftermath of the TV miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s best-selling novel by the same name (cf. Gardner 2003; Nelson 2016). But note here the retooling of discovery (Strathern 2005) as an exploration of “coimplications” in a given system of relationality (a classic divinatory move):30 that genomic technologies allow Black people to participate in an American ideology of genealogical “rootedness” (by making it possible to bypass documentary obliteration by molecular-biological means) doesn’t make their investment in Old World origins less “American” (or less ideological, for that matter). However, these technologies place at Black consumers’ disposal a genealogically based form of historical subjectivity that had long been denied to them and that—as in the case of Jefferson’s

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Black descendants—turns on precisely that categorical hinge (or classificatory infrastructure) which, by definition, can’t become subject to doubt itself and so needs to be discursively submerged.31 Nonetheless, given North American everyday conceptions of race and relatedness, PGH service providers would seem to have little to offer in this respect that substantially improves on what adherents of the American Yoruba Movement call “roots readings”—oracular ceremonies performed to discover African ancestries occluded by slavery (cf. Clarke 2004).32 Based in the notionally infallible authority of the Ifá oracle,33 though open to mistaken or biased interpretations on the part of the oracle’s human manipulators, “roots readings” are perhaps the closest functional equivalent to PGHs— except that while genomic ancestry searches displace the source of divinatory authority downward from the social toward the realm of the biotic, roots readings do so by upward allocation toward the realm of the divine. In doing so, they deprive their users of much of the legitimacy the American public tends to invest in forms of knowledge production that manage to sail under the label of science (even when they concern matters such as intelligent design). But credibility, public or other, is hardly the issue here. If all ancestry is ultimately a cultural contrivance, and all genealogies “cooked” in one way or the other, why should it even matter? But of course it does. And since this is so, what’s genuinely troubling about the explosion of a market in PGH services geared toward African American ancestry projects is that two of the major technologies involved— mtDNA- and NRY- chromosome tracing—not just construct curiously “unilinear” forms of relatedness but, once taken on their own, reproduce the forms of structural amnesia that long underwrote the operation of the principle of hypodescent in North American patterns of racial exclusion. For they not only allow for but actually invite patterns of racial profiling along upwardly constricting—rather than branching—lines of descent, which population geneticists, in a terminology that ought to particularly irk social anthropologists, are wont to call lineages.34 In other words, the consumer choice between mtDNA- and NRY-chromosome tracing (each tends to be offered separately) ironically tends to provide justification for further naturalizing the conceit of exclusive racial membership that my neighbor Donald Washington’s theories about why the name Washington is not distributed in a pattern of (racially) random isonymy aimed to expose as fictitious. What is worse, these technologies do so not because they could not in principle “prove” the contrary—as Foster and associates’ (1998) research amply demonstrated. Rather, such is the case because they partake of, and biotechnologically reinforce, a peculiarly all-American racial volonté

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de savoir that tends to predefine structurally necessary forms of genealogical amnesia—so that even in the face of better knowledge, present social arrangements would seem to suggest that “Black” people ought to have “Black” ancestors, and “white” people “white” ones.35 Naturally, there are no a priori reasons whatsoever why self-identified African Americans ought to identify with those among their forebears socially classified as white (or, at least, any more reason than self-identified Caucasians might have for remembering socially Black forebears). Indeed, morally cogent arguments might be ventured for why the former might want to refrain from choosing to engage in such patterns of identification. But there is also no reason why commercial genomic service providers, let along academic geneticists, should translate the complex histories and social arrangements from which such social choices likely spring into the language of (by definition) absolute and seemingly transparent biological “realities.”36

“Racecraft” Here we seem to have the high-tech equivalent of that particular mode of circular reasoning Karen Fields (2001) has described as characterizing the cultural moment she—in a particularly apt turn of phrase— calls “racecraft.” Fields is concerned with the question of the rationality of belief in the reality of “race,” and in an ingenious theoretical move she pulls in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) famous defense of the rationality of Zande witchcraft beliefs. I can’t engage here Field’s arguments about a philosophical double standard that readily concedes the irrationality of “race” beliefs in the United States but fudges the issue when it comes to propositions concerning mystical agents in the ethnographic world. Still, what I think is eminently pertinent to the issues under discussion in this chapter is the function of DNA testing as a divinatory practice designed to visualize and give materiality by evidentiary proxy to entities whose ontological characteristics include the crucial feature of invisibility (Fields 2001; Lock 2005). For no less than the famous hereditary organic substance hidden in the belly of otherwise seemingly ordinary and indeed entirely unsuspecting Zande condemning them to (however unwitting) nefariousness, the subcutaneous “biological facts” made visible in personal and collective genomic profiles (however constructed) can assign their bearers to specific and potentially highly pernicious identitary positions.37 Moreover, just as in everyday practice the Zande can live with—that is, conveniently disregard—the idea that since the witchcraft substance is heritable, all members of the clan of a detected witch ought to be regarded as witches, so do early twenty-first-

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century Americans not normally worry about the potential biotic alterity of people whom they routinely interact with on the presumption of shared racial identity. In fact, such convenient disregard is once more structurally necessary in order for such “moral artifacts” (Fields 1985) as witchcraft or race to remain operative in daily social practice (including the routine operation of what Kuhn called normal science).38 For just as it would make no sense to propose that given the rate of witchcraft detection EP observed in Zandeland in the 1920s, all male Zande must (if not then, at least nowadays) routinely regard one another as witches, so the recognition of the continuous, clinal nature of all human biological difference (including the embodied differences on which gender identities are notionally based; cf. Epstein 2004) ought to make individual distinctions based on ideas of biological race (or sex, for that matter) seem eminently absurd. This, as we know, is not the case. And not just because Hurricanes Katrina and Maria or the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that in contemporary America misfortune strikes in patterns that are all but “racially” random, or because—as it turned out—the pharmacogenetic “science” behind the FDA’s approval of BiDil as the first- ever race-specific drug was geared more toward salvaging an expiring patent than changing the epidemiological incidence of hypertension or congestive heart failure in American society (Jonathan Kahn 2003, 2005, 2013; Fausto-Sterling 2004; Duster 2005; Jones and Goodman 2005). Such instances, involving as they do forms of voluntarism detectable in overtly racially inflected policies, arguably only represent excess performances generated by a far more insidious logic. In fact, we might say that they obscure rather than illuminate the workings of a process that’s not driven by individual or collective decisions that we might readily identify as informed by racist considerations or objectives. Instead, the process is perpetuated through the force of structurally ingrained doxa concerning the racialized nature of American sociality that, since they define the conditions of possibility for social praxis, effectively represent imponderables to most actors involved, even if they themselves may not believe in the reality of race. As a result, and oftentimes against better knowledge, population geneticists, medical researchers and clinicians, demographers, state agencies of various sorts, and hosts of private enterprises actively produce the forms of structural amnesia which underwrite the operation of racecraft in American life (Fullwiley 2014). They do so by, for example, setting up clearly demarcated, discontinuous “racial” population series for control in medical and other research, or by using US Bureau of the Census data to design actuarial tables, apportion school districts, or administer affirmative-

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action funds, to name just a few domains to which a handful of “races” (and “pseudoraces,” such as Hispanics) are stubbornly endemic.39 That many of those who routinely use racial data may sincerely deplore the pernicious effects of racial discrimination and indeed may perceive their efforts as directed toward the amelioration or even undoing of persistent social inequalities based in racial discrimination does nothing to change that fundamental fact (Fullwiley 2007, 2008, 2014; Reardon 2012; S. Lee 2013). This is so because the context in which they operate systematically forces them to disregard that race—like witchcraft, kinship class, or indeed capital—is not a thing but a social relation. Just as no investment banker or stockbroker who wants to stay in business will belatedly join Marx in exposing the erroneous nature of the assumption that value is a substantial quality inherent in commodities, so is the conceit of race indispensable to anyone aiming to make a difference in the fields of, say, American public policy, health care, education, or law enforcement. Even the best-intentioned antiracists (or strategic essentialists, for that matter) may thus find themselves unwittingly joining the likes of those notorious police officers positioned along the New Jersey Turnpike whose racist ill will in stopping and searching motorists they considered “nonwhite” produced a good deal of falsely race-positive crime statistics before the scandal about what came to be known as “driving while Black” eventually broke (Harris 1999). Such convergences are not fortuitous. They occur because essentializing vocabularies of anthropological difference—such as those provided by idioms of race or witchcraft—can come to structure and semantically saturate everyday lifeworlds to a degree that the effects of race (or witchcraft) are experienced as differentials in the chance of being caught underneath collapsing termite-infested granaries, getting laid off from work, being incarcerated, getting accidentally shot in the course of a nearby drug raid, having your neighborhood flood, prematurely dying of prostate cancer or indeed congestive heart disease due to hypertension (and so forth). Once this is the case, the search for alternate, perhaps multifactorial, perhaps historicizing explanations may no longer be a particularly attractive or even only reasonable choice.40 Putting the matter in the bluntest of terms, given that “race” not only will not, but literally cannot, “go away” on account of its embeddedness in what Edwin Ardener (1989) might have called the “world structure” of American society, neither the victims of its operation nor those concerned with undoing its pernicious effects can have much of a stake in abandoning the belief in its existence.41 If anything, the geneticization of “race” with which I have been concerned here will in all likelihood only provide an alternative (if powerful) ideological technos for dehistoriciz-

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ing and obscuring the social relations that “race” conceals. And it will do so by systematically removing such attributes as witchcraft substances or individually embodied racial biology from the sphere of contestable social construction—by relegating them not to the shady realms of mystical forces (where one might argue they belong) but to that ever-changing cultural contrivance we tend to call nature. As in the case of kinship, with which—as the Jefferson-Hemings issue amply illustrated—racecraft closely articulates, nature will simply change its shape. If, as David Schneider (1980, 23) once wrote, Americans define kinship in accordance with biogenetic relationships, and if “kinship is whatever the biogenetic relationship is,” then it is clear that “if science discovers new facts about biogenetic relationships, then that is what kinship is and was all along, although it may not have been known at the time.” The same, or so it seems, would hold for race.42 It would, of course, be grossly insufficient to reduce racial domination to a mere category mistake—however socially pervasive and indeed “structurally necessary” for the maintenance and reproduction of specific social arrangements such a mistake may be. Yet by the same token, unless we realize that race may be conceptually indispensable to the maintenance of an ideology positing that society does (or at any rate should) represent the sum of choices freely made by unequally endowed but otherwise unencumbered individuals in the marketplace—as indispensable, in fact, as the concept of witchcraft may have been to EP’s Zande—we will delude ourselves in treating racism as a tragic flaw or irrational historical residue marring the project of a democratic society of free and equal individuals where poor Rodney King’s question, “Can we all get along?” would and could have no (racial) meaning, and where my former neighbor’s question, “Have you ever met a white person named Washington?” would make no sense at all.

Genomic Moonlighting, “Jewish Cyborgs,” Peircean Abduction: A Postscript When American Ethnologist published an earlier version of this chapter (Palmié 2007a), it was accompanied by a set of seven commentaries generously offered by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Katya Gibel Mevorach, Alan H. Goodman, Stefan Helmreich, Jonathan Marks, Carolyn Martin Shaw, and Kenneth Weiss. I replied to their comments on two occasions (Palmié 2007b, 2011). Here, I would like to once more draw from their critiques to further elaborate, in light of the concerns of this book, on some of the issues they raised. What particularly intrigued and puzzled me when I first read these comments is that even some of my most sympathetic critics

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mistook a good part of my argument as a purely polemical analogy between the rationality of divination as described in classical ethnographies and that of present-day genomic analyses, especially the genomically enhanced ancestry searches known as personal genomic histories, or PGHs. Given that my chief witness, EP’s, declared goal in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) was to emphasize the essential rationality of a social world based on a system of decidedly strange (from a 1930s British perspective, that is) ontological assumptions, I simply was surprised to have been understood as if I had wanted to take a cheap shot at genomic science by tarnishing it (or some of its applications) with the metaphorical brush of witchcraft and oracular irrationality. This surprise certainly has provided me with a good deal of the reasons to write this book. In what follows, I will address the critiques my 2007 article received, hoping to clarify why my evocation of divinatory forms of knowledge production and the logic of the Azande concept of mangu—which EP himself conceded was only poorly translated by the English gloss “witchcraft”—was not an analogy or metaphorical figure of speech but an attempt at suggesting possibilities for establishing what Latour (1993) might call an epistemological symmetry that makes short shrift of a supposedly science-driven disenchantment of the world. In doing so, my goal is once more not to disparage genomic science. It is to use “what we [as anthropologists] already know . . . to open our eyes to what we should have been seeing” all along when looking at our contemporary “Western” worlds, as Carolyn Martin Shaw (2007, 237) commented, perhaps echoing Wittgenstein. “Can genes connect individuals to a cultural history?” she asked (Martin Shaw 2007, 237). “What credence should be given to projects that propose to construct social units through biological inheritance?” These questions aren’t new. In some form, their grammar, if not their vocabulary, has been around since at least the nineteenth century, when older folk conceptions of human difference and relatedness were recast in a novel biological idiom. These days, however, it stands to argue that we need to watch out for another phase of relexification: one that no longer draws from scientifically discredited vocabularies of gross morphological anatomy but rather draws from an emerging molecular-biological semiotics that, although hermetic to most laypeople, is nonetheless capable of making a difference in the world (Gibel Mevorach 2007; Fullwiley 2014). In the instances with which I am concerned, it does so by reconfiguring the painful experience of phenotypically and/or descent-based exclusion from the imagined US national community into one of genotypical inclusion in a community of fellow bearers of, say, L-2 haplotypes. By transcribing the empirical phenome-

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non of US Blackness into a molecular code accorded unique and publicly unrivaled authority, genomics inducts into alternative units of significant relatedness those who—to use Stefan Helmreich’s (2007) language—have been deducted from normative ones. Part of the success of such transcriptions relates to long-standing ambiguities to do with the ostensibly paradoxical question of how a notionally cognatic kinship system could possibly support the maintenance and reproduction of what Americans call races: a structure of corporatively imagined descent groups in which, thanks to the principle of hypodescent, the politically dominant group reproduces itself by perpetually disenrolling people of supposedly “African” (or perhaps better: “Black”) descent from its genealogies. But, as we know, it works very well—if only because (contrary to widespread belief) membership in American racial collectivities has in principle very little to do with bodily surfaces. Phenotypes do work as handy props for visualizing “race.” So do various techniques of the body or other learned capacities. But deep down, “race” is a matter of invisible essences conceived as heritable—though by no means in the kind of limitless bilateral fashion corresponding to most Americans’ basically folk-Mendelian view of heredity and relatedness in the abstract. Nothing particularly biological here, of course. This was nicely driven home when genomic analyses appeared to reveal that none other than the Nobel Prize winner and belatedly self-outed white supremacist James D. Watson possessed, as the journalist Robert Verkaik (2007) put it in London’s Independent, “a DNA profile with up to 16 times more genes of black [sic] origin than the average white European.” Now, bracketing the question of what in the world “genes of black origin” might be,43 who in this instance cares what Jim Watson thinks he is or, for that matter, looks like? Clearly, as in the case of Franz Josef Gall, the famously pea-brained founder of phrenology (Gould 1981), poetic justice was at work, we might say, for in an utterly perverse sense Watson’s disparaging pontifications concerning the intellectual endowments of people of African descent simply came home to roost. Although we still would ask why socially “Black” people of African descent are rarely accorded the same kind of attention when they spout off comparable views, we can’t help but note that the attraction of the Watson story involved a distinctly subcutaneous moment.44 As in the Jefferson-Hemings case, what was at issue was the significance of the idea of shared biotic substance for the commitment to and maintenance of ancestry-based “racial” identities, and the reshuffling of rights and obligations—or at least moral allegiances—that the acknowledgment of kin relations across the conceptual boundaries of such identities might engen-

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der. As we have seen, the disappearance of such transracial kin relations obeys a logic that anthropologists know quite well—if mostly in the context of unilineal kinship systems, where we have long been wont to regard the phenomenon of structural amnesia as a key to the reproduction of such social orders. But of course, it isn’t really hard to see that the reproduction of American “races”—and so the enduring racialization of American social life—requires the production of no less systemically necessary dark zones of genealogical consciousness. As the Jefferson-Hemings and Watson cases demonstrate, these can normally be illuminated only in individual instances and even then only by the seemingly extrapolitical authority of an expert discourse capable of removing the source of such authority from the realm of social maneuver—for example, by projecting it onto the “facts of nature” that this discourse merely claims to render legible. This, of course, immediately returns me to divination. Regardless of the scale of technology mobilized: if we can accept that inductive (as opposed to inspired, or mantic, in the original sense) forms of divinatory revelation are based on principally rational procedures (technike) aiming to uncover previously unknown facts about the world by putting known facts under novel descriptions allowable within a specific epistemic order, then there should be little reason to reject a priori comparing ethnographically known oracles with the modes of knowledge production underlying contemporary forms of genomic identity arbitration in public consultative praxis. But there’s more to it than mere formal symmetry. No less than, say, the Zande poison oracle, contemporary genomics can’t but import into its highly technical operations a set of assumptions about the world it aims to elucidate as well as a code for translating the signs it produces—dead chicken in one case, allele frequencies in the other—into a language rendering these “findings” comprehensible in terms of the questions the knowledge-producing instrument is supposed to answer. This is so because, contrary to EP’s famously misguided bracketing of science as a socially unconstrained idiom of thought in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic, both the Zande poison oracle and contemporary molecular biology are first and foremost instruments of situated social praxis. As such, they both answer not just to abstract standards of internal logical consistency but to the thoroughly socialized concerns of their practitioners and clients. Thus, in disclosing the “hidden” or “invisible” agencies and essences that—again, in the eyes of both clients and practitioners—seem to shape particular social arrangements and events, they stabilize and reproduce the cultural order which threw up the questions such oracular systems purport to answer in the first place. It’s no matter, then, how much practitioners of genomics may protest

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their nonbelief in the biological existence of races and tend to define their samples in terms of “biogeographical variation” or “continental ancestries” (e.g., Weiss 2007). As soon as the findings so produced are translated back into the language in which the question they are supposed to answer was originally formulated, we return to the thoroughly racialized social world all of us—including molecular biologists and population geneticists—inhabit day in and day out.45 This is a world where race is no less real and just as embodied in the biotic substance of American citizens as the witchcraft substance is in the bellies of otherwise seemingly normal and indeed potentially unsuspecting Zande kinsmen. Once we leave the realm of probabilistic reasoning and begin to identify—say, K2 Y-chromosome haplotypes as evidence of Arab or East African ancestry—we are back in the world where place begins to connote race. The latter example is not arbitrary. For this is precisely how the results of a British study of Thomas Jefferson’s Y-STR haplotype (King et al. 2007) were immediately read by the American press (Wade 2007). Interestingly, however, interpretations drifted not toward East African (i.e., “Black”) or Arab descent but toward Jewishness—though all these (biogeographically equally plausible) solutions would have effectively barred Thomas Jefferson himself from burial in Monticello only a half century ago. But such highly mediated genomic trivia are really the tip of a rapidly emerging iceberg of genuine nastiness. This is so because vast sums of money are currently being poured into genomic investigations that proceed from sample populations defined by recourse to the conventional, census-based racial classifications46—only to restate them in molecular-biological language as, for instance, medical risk distributions among named racial groups in the United States. Harking back to a brilliant formulation by Karen Fields (2001; cf. Fields and Fields 2012), I called this moment racecraft—a principle operative in various, oftentimes entirely well-meant, even intentionally antiracist endeavors that nonetheless come to underwrite the experiential if not conceptual reality of race. They do so by suggesting that race (like value, capital, or indeed witchcraft) has a substantial rather than a relative ontological status; that it can be found in individual bodies and objects rather than in the relations obtaining between them. As I have argued, figuring among the vectors of racecraft are personal genomic histories—individualized genomic ancestry profiles offered nowadays in direct-to-consumer fashion by an increasingly large number of usually web-based providers. PGH providers promise their African American customers otherwise unattainable options for identification and affiliative self-fashioning. The website of the PGH company of my former University of Chicago colleague Rick Kittles may not post all

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the responses it receives. Still, it would be cynical not to take seriously the heartfelt sense of satisfaction and relief some of Kittles’s customers express at being hailed by a set of allele frequencies into what North American racism had long denied them: a rooted Old World identity underwritten by a powerful expert discourse capable of undoing the genealogical erasure effected by the slave trade—even enabling efforts at restorative justice by genomically engineering legal standing for descendants of the victims of American slavery (Nelson 2008, 2016). However, such “knowledge goods” as PGH ancestry services place at the disposal of roots seekers come at more than just a monetary price. As Reardon (2012, 28ff.) persuasively argues, while genomics “might indeed promote human connection and expand human choices . . . it does so not through freeing human beings from institutional frameworks of power or racial forms of discrimination. Instead, human genomics exemplifies what Foucault called ‘technologies of the self’: technologies that enable subjects to define and constitute themselves while at the same time subjecting them to, and interlacing them with, regimes of power.” As in the case of the International Haplotype Map Project’s entirely well-meant attempt to democratize research through the constitution of Community Advisory Boards (Reardon 2007, 2012), what ensues is a “looping effect” (Hacking 1999) where people are encouraged to sort and inscribe themselves in “biogeographical ancestry” categories operationalized by a project’s research design or—in the case of commercial PGH services—constituted on the basis of proprietary databases (Fullwiley 2008; Bliss 2011; Reardon 2011). But not only do consumers of such genomic revelations thereby submit to a regime of truth that—as a cohort of scholars (Bolnick et al. 2007, 400) argued in the October 19, 2007, issue of Science—promotes “the popular understanding that race is rooted in one’s DNA—rather than being an artefact of sampling strategies, contrasting geographical extremes, and the imposition of qualitative boundaries on human variation.” They also consent to a thoroughly racialized logic of American (cultural) citizenship. What, then, to make of all this? More than a decade ago, one of my original critics, Kenneth Weiss (2007, 243), appeared content to regard genomically enhanced African American ancestry projects as voluntary snake-oil purchasing behavior on the part of genealogically curious but otherwise ostensibly unencumbered consumers in “our market-centered society.” And indeed in one sense he was right: different from the case of twentieth-century US eugenic sterilization laws, Nazi Germany’s Aryan ancestry passes, or the tortuous calculus of descent the South African apartheid state occasionally went through to legally assign phenotypically

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ambiguous people to their “proper” place, there’s surely no involvement of organized force in the case at hand. It’s all a matter of consumer choice— however one might want to define that phrase. But can we really shrug off the explosion of commercial genomic ancestry services as a phenomenon principally separate from, and ultimately irrelevant to, properly scientific molecular population genetics? Unlike Weiss, I think that the structure not only of the demand for but also of the supply of the “ancestry goods” PGH providers market can tell us much about the operation of American racecraft—as much, in fact, as the rhetorics of “color blindness” among the American political Right that Weiss (2007, 243) evokes as a counterexample (cf. Brubaker 2016). Once we define racecraft as the ontological certitude (belief?) that biological differences ultimately inform social differences (in however imperfect and imperfectly known fashion) and color blindness as the ontological certitude (belief?) that, in a capitalist democracy, free and unregulated competition between individual market actors will ultimately override such differences (in however imperfect and imperfectly known fashion), then the two reveal themselves as faces of the same coin. Hence I’m not prepared to exonerate geneticists for “trying to persuade [African American customers] to part with their $200” (Weiss 2007, 243) per mouth swab analysis in exchange for a desired ancestry. Instead, any serious geneticist who proclaims the biological unreality of the folk concept of race in his or her academic writing but nonetheless performs such well-remunerated public outreach services ought to be faulted on ethical grounds—unless he or she believes that PGH can establish scientifically defensible, nature-based “identities” that withstand sociological or historical scrutiny (in which case, Weiss might not call that person a serious geneticist—at least not on the basis of the literature he cites). What’s at issue here is not genomic moonlighting but the question of whether PGHs are genomic moonshine. One can’t have it both ways. Note that the original invocation of a double standard was Weiss’s, not mine. He seems to think that scientists do no harm in pandering to extrascientific interests in a capitalist society as long as they also continue to produce “real science.” To me, this amounts to saying that Lysenkoism was based on Stalin’s ignorance of genetics and a good deal of wishful thinking. Although probably true, this explains nothing. Worse, it trivializes a set of important issues by misrepresenting the difference between an ethical double standard (which plays a role in my argument) and an epistemological one (which stands at its core). Because Lysenko’s brand of genetics can be fairly said to have devastated Soviet agriculture (and landed hundreds of practitioners of “bourgeois Mendelianism” like poor Vavilov in prisons

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or labor camps), it simply won’t do to say that dupes will be dupes and true science stands above it all in its value-free approach to the truth of nature.47 Among other things, this is so because nature simply isn’t an indifferent repository of laws beyond society but the screen for all kinds of projections about its social domination (or, in inverse terms, about the “natural” grounding of sociality).48 The natural “facts” pertaining to socially relevant aspects of human nature (such as genomically ascertainable patterns of human variation) inevitably are not only facts under a specific description; rather, the specifics of such descriptions are—fundamentally—historical in nature (Latour 2005; Rheinberger 2000). More important, the distinctions thereby derived (whether nineteenth-century “race” or twenty-first-century “admixture profiles” or “genomic lineages”) don’t just circumscribe what Ian Hacking (1999) calls “indifferent kinds”: instead, they feed back into the very social matrices that gave origin to them (or, at least, made them “good to think”) in the first place. Whether we’ve ever been modern or not, nature has long ceased to be “natural.” I make this detour through a case of discarded science and more philosophically oriented considerations for two reasons: first, to remind critics like Weiss that, like phlogiston or miasmatic vapors, Lysenkoist genetics was true as long as it lasted, and it engendered highly unfortunate results in the “real world.”49 Second, and more important, I raise such issues to counter the misperception, seemingly shared by a number of my critics, that I invoked analogies to oracles and witchcraft for mere polemical reasons (to disparage genomics or “science” in general, get a cheap shot at rationalism, promote rampant epistemological relativism, etc.). Nothing could have been farther from my intentions. I merely tried to harken back to a timehallowed ethnographic case the implications of which I presumed would be familiar to my readers. So let me now spell out some of the assumptions I thought I could safely relegate to notes and bibliographic references. As elsewhere in this book, my recourse to EP’s Azande ethnography was motivated by the hope that readers would appreciate its uniquely privileged role in mid-twentieth-century debates about the nature of rationality and the question of relativism. As we have seen in chapter 1, EP wrote Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) partly to debunk the idea that “primitive peoples” were (g)raced by a “prelogical” mindset (and were therefore somehow unlike their colonizers—less evolved, racially inferior, etc.). He achieved much of this goal: for decades, highly respectable thinkers in Oxbridge and elsewhere pondered the philosophical implications of the logical coherence and inherent rationality of Zande thought. To repeat: although EP refrained from participating in these debates, in

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a nutshell the problem he had posed was this: his Azande interlocutors may have proceeded from assumptions about the world and its furniture that he (and his intended audience of other like-minded, well-educated Europeans) would have been unwilling to regard as true. But the conclusions they drew from them seemed all but misguided. The fact is that rationality and truth are two very different kettles of fish—especially once certain ideas about the world come to so thoroughly inform routinized practice that questioning them is bound to bring down the house: as in the case of “proletarian biology” (or market-driven genomic science), rationality per se isn’t the issue here (Hacking 1983).50 Neither is truth in the abstract (few scientists—or cultural anthropologists—normally worry much about questions of metaphysics). And if logic were at stake, surely what we’re facing are the kinds of “logics of practice” that, as Pierre Bourdieu might put it, reveal the world as thoroughly “habituated” second nature whose historicity has been—and must be—forgotten if business as usual (Kuhn’s normal science) is to ensue. Weiss’s own protestations would seem to bear this out. “Race,” he says, “is at best a statistical correlate for many measured and unmeasured genetic and nongenetic variables,” and we do not yet know, “if we ever will, exactly to what extent” social categories like race are “informative” of extrasocial (i.e., “purely” biotic) differences (Weiss 2007, 243). If so, might not yoking US census categories to clinical research on the assumption that, “although such categories are not vacuous, they are imperfect and very imperfectly known” (243) bespeak the same kind of practical rationality that the Zande invest in their poison oracle? After all, although the oracle was infallible in principle, EP’s interlocutors readily admitted that it was prone to occasional erroneous verdicts because of methodological slips and other inadvertent shortcomings on the part of its human operators. Moreover, like Weiss’s geneticists, EP’s Zande were keenly aware of the possibility of fraud being perpetrated on gullible clients. And they employed the same barrage of “secondary elaborations” that geneticists do today when they find results to be glaringly inconsistent with empirical reality (Fullwiley 2008). In explaining failure of their endeavors by, for example, the interference of unaccountedfor (but plausible) variables, both Zande and genomic scientists are conscious that they are dealing with “imperfect and very imperfectly known” information—known as well as unknown unknowns, in the late former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s famous phrase. But they both would seem to take comfort in knowing that “in cases where [such information] is true,” its implications “can be easily and replicably demonstrated” (Weiss 2007, 243). In so taking recourse to the tautological certainty that something known in advance to be true (however imperfectly) can always

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(somehow) be proved, they stabilize the supraempirical ontologies that underpin witchcraft in the former case and race in the latter. If the preceding has, as I hope, taken some of the (unintended) sting out of my comparisons, let me add another—ethnographically equally well-known—source of analogies: that of initiatory cults of affliction. As in the case of some African American PGH consumers, my own work on the Afro-Cuban ritual tradition Regla de Ocha suggests that divinatory diagnostics can reveal persistent, otherwise inexplicable misery and suffering to be grounded in wrong ideas about one’s identity. Think here of W. E. B. DuBois’s famous 1903 indictment of the dilemma produced by trying to regard oneself as “a Negro” and “an American” at the same time, and think of the resolution afforded by revelatory technologies capable of rearticulating one’s notions of belonging (e.g., Noble Drew Ali’s refiguration of “the Negro” as “the Afro-Asiatic” or Marcus Garvey’s brilliant play on the trope of exodus and return to a Zionistic African transnation of the future). Here is the story repeated again and again by Cuban practitioners of Regla de Ocha: After terrible things happened to you for inexplicable reasons, and you have exhausted all other remedies at your disposal, you have recourse to divination. What it reveals is that you have been hailed by an oricha (deity) and need to undergo initiatory rites into its cult. These will not only transform your body into a vessel of the divine but induct you into a new line of ritual kinship and descent. Once you undergo the expensive and time-consuming ceremonies and are reborn into an identity that you should have been inhabiting all along, the deity relents—and will open the roads to good fortune—provided you serve it by engaging in a lifelong series of sacrificial prestations. This is what Afro-Cuban divination does: it “opens the road” to a future by putting the past under a new description. But the remedies it prescribes also bind you into a cycle of mutual affirmation: by submitting to the “rule of the oricha” (whence the name Regla de Ocha), you make your sense of selfhood contingent on the reality of the gods. Much of the same, I would argue, holds true for the embrace of genomically determined identities and relationships. Given that followers of Yoruba-inspired New World religions tend to be Durkheimians in the strong sense,51 this mutually contingent relation, I think, says more about Cuban and US society than it says about either the genome or the gods, both of whose reality is beyond empirical verification in the everyday worlds inhabited by those who avail themselves of the transformative services of their interpreters. But we aren’t quite done with Durkheim yet: just as religion is an “eminently social matter,” so is race. And just as secularist hand-wringing does

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little good in wishing away the reality of the former, so does social constructionist piety little serve us in combatting the latter. As Katya Gibel Mevorach (2007) rightly noted, scholarly attempts to domesticate the beast of race by aiming to disaggregate it from the folk biologies that made it perform all kinds of cultural and political work never amounted to much. Instead of undoing rampant biologicization, ethnicity and culture failed as nonbiological proxies for socially relevant “differences.” Instead, they duly became anthropology’s contribution to a postracial discourse justifying all kinds of cryptocultural essentializations, from “It’s a Black Thing, you wouldn’t understand” T-shirts to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” If race ought not to be used in a nominal sense, as Gibel Mevorach suggests, then ethnicity and culture should not be either. Here, speakers of Spanish or other Romance languages might be envied for their ability to come up with terms such as lo cultural or even lo racial— literally, “that which is cultural” and “that which is racial,” leaving open whether the predication refers to the nature of whatever is so qualified or to the utterance’s own classificatory intent. If only I and my critics could have put matters this way, we might as well have put to rest issues that relate to tendencies toward a false nominalism. But we still would have been stuck with issues arising from practice—and only find a name a posteriori (such as #BlackLivesMatter!). Who or what agentively races, cultures, ethnicizes, and relates people is awkward to say, grammatically, in most Western languages. It’s also, by and large, commonsensically ineffable. In fact, it must be so for the “moral artefacts” (Fields 1985) of race and kinship to retain their uncanny powers. Here, Jonathan Marks’s (2007) comments raised a crucial issue: it’s precisely when legal or political processes expose their operation—as in the case of gay marriage and its implications for US kinship ideologies—that such “objectively necessary appearances” (as Marx would put it) tend to elicit the most viscerally naturalizing responses from those whose worlds would suddenly appear uniquely imperiled. A simple thought experiment suffices to bear this out: We know of course that sociologically speaking, gender or even sex is by no means determined by matters of gross morphological anatomy, or phenotype (a fact of which international sports federations seem only too aware). But—or so I wrote back in 2007 in response to my critics—“imagine a category in the 2010 census that gives a ‘mark one or more’ for the ‘male’ or ‘female’ box.” We aren’t there yet, and this isn’t the occasion to address the issue. Let me just say: look what a difference a decade makes. The outrage all this nonetheless occasioned (think: bathroom wars, pronoun conundrums, legal action against trans people’s accommodations,

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etc.) takes us straight to the heart of the sterility of the “this-or-that-is-asocial-construction” debate. However much anyone may aspire to what Paul Gilroy (2000) calls “planetary humanism,” each of us is daily interpellated into thoroughly institutionalized—and experientially no less routinized— forms of “raced” (and “gendered”) sociality and subjectivity: ways of acting and believing (probably in that order) that hinge on the idea that others might—at any moment—act on the belief that race is real, irrespective of however mistaken we might find that belief to be. Either way, the experienced effects will be the same, as anyone who drove along the New Jersey Turnpike “while Black” in the 1990s would have seen. For some “raced” purposes, biology—whatever that may mean—simply doesn’t matter. The lifelong struggle of scholars such as Antenor Firmin, Franz Boas, W. E. B. DuBois, or Ashley Montague to expose race as “man’s most dangerous myth” did little to change that—perhaps because, as Marshall Sahlins might have put it, myths have a vexing tendency to reproduce themselves as history. Hence I disagree with Nadia Abu El-Haj (2007), who argues that what I called “genomic strategies of identity arbitration” and she “genetic anthropology” have become unfettered from the search for qualitative distinctions between named human collectivities. She is certainly right in urging us to watch out for the work done by the “natural-cultural artifacts” that science introduces into the rationality of everyday practice. Hence the need for sustained ethnographic investigations of what genomic ancestry projects do—not on a level of mediated sensationalism but in the lives of those for whom the public legitimacy of, for example, Eugene Foster’s genomic recasting of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as an unassailable fact (rather than an interest-group-specific rumor) confirmed the experience that there is always more to race than meets the eye (which, after all, is one of the key tenets of US racial ontology). But for the same reason, I don’t share Abu El-Haj’s vision that descent ideologies can be uncoupled from a (scientifically) superseded view of gene expression. Particularly in light of Weiss’s (2007, 244) astounding assertion that contemporary genetics “has added very little to what scientists, or indeed any observant people, have already known for centuries about human groups,” I’m not convinced that Abu El-Haj’s distinction between “old-style racial determinism” and being neutrally “marked” by noncoding (i.e., phenotypically invisible) genomic differences can easily be maintained (for what is neutral about a “biological difference” that can make a difference socially?). Nor am I ready to face the implications of her apparent willingness to collapse embodied molecular biology into history and religious praxis (and vice versa).

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This is not the place to further critique the science behind the Cohen modal haplotype. Let me instead refer to Susan Martha Kahn’s (2005) work on rabbinical deliberations of the extent to which Jewishness is physiologically (rather than socially) embodied. “If a non-Jewish man donates sperm to a Jewish woman, is the child so conceived considered to be Jewish?” Kahn (185) asks. More troubling, even, is a child “conceived with an egg donated by a non-Jewish woman” Jewish? Kahn’s answer is unambiguous: in both cases, “the majority of contemporary Orthodox rabbis would agree,” because “the key component necessary for the reproduction of a Jewish child is not the genetic identity of the embryo, but the Jewishness of the womb— for a child conceived with a non-Jewish egg and a non-Jewish sperm is considered fully Jewish as long as it is gestated in a Jewish womb” (184). What Kahn calls attention to is not just the historically mutable nature of the mechanisms by which individuals are recruited into Jewish identities (conversion being one of them—and one wonders what that might do to the Y chromosomes of the descendants of male converts!). Rather, what she goes after is a far more fundamental question: “Do you have to have a Jewish body to be a Jew?” (188). And what are the ethical consequences of any one answer to this question? “For example, how will a secular Jew who was conceived with non-Jewish sperm, who lives with a pig valve inserted in her heart and a liver donated by a Presbyterian, understand the essence of her Jewishness? Is her Jewishness still grounded in her body? Or must her Jewishness now be clearly articulated as an outlook, a moral sensibility, or a condition of the soul that is distinct from her body?” (188). What would the implications of the creation of such “Jewish cyborgs” (189) be for conceptions of Jewishness as a heritable identity? Surely, these aren’t the grounds on which translations of Jewish historical claims to Palestine into genomic language would easily rest. Abu El-Haj might counter that Kahn and I are confusing genomic evidence with a “real” history of practices of reproduction and relatedness that expresses itself in biological form, with mere narratives purporting to ground present social arrangements in a time-hallowed past. The trouble, however, is that the former—molecular-biological data—are opaque in the absence of the latter! I entirely agree that causal vectors may well run from culture to biology in more than just this case.52 But how would we ever know this if we didn’t load our questions by interpolations from the thoroughly nonbiological epistemic realm of sacred texts, oral traditions, academic historiography, or indeed present-day “racial” or “ethnic” common sense? Once we have done so—that is, formulated an appropriate research design whose origin in contemporary social arrangements and ideologies can then

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be submerged in methodological intricacies—what would keep us from crossing epistemological boundaries once more and inferring “the truth of oral tradition, of religious and kinship practices, from [the] biological data” so produced? (Abu El-Haj 2007, 225). Imagine someone who knows nothing about Jewish conceptions of relatedness or US ideologies of hypodescent going around the world to randomly collect and analyze DNA samples. After years and years of arduous toil, she sees two sets of sufficiently unusual and distinct patterns emerging among a significant number of the sample population. She goes back to the files and discovers that the individuals in question are all called Cohen in the one case and Black people in the other. A genuinely inductive find. But what to do with it in the absence of knowledge about Mosaic tradition or the history of the Atlantic slave trade and US hypodescent? And even then, what to do with all the named Cohens in the sample who, it turns out, are the biological descendants of non-Jewish sperm donors? Or those Black people who, on closer inspection, turn out to self-identify as a lost tribe of Israel? But let me conclude with a highly publicized “racial” fable from the mid-aughts. It illustrates the logical operators at work in divination, genomic ancestry profiling, and more conventional semiotic practices. Amid the heated runoff for the 2006 congressional midterm elections, at a televised debate between Virginia incumbent Republican senator George Allen and Democratic contender Jim Webb, “WUSA-TV reporter Peggy Fox asked Allen, the tobacco-chewing, cowboy-boot-wearing son of a pro-football coach, if his Tunisian-born mother [had] Jewish blood” (Millbank 2006). Allen first angrily denied such allegations but later admitted to the Richmond Times-Dispatch reporters Peter Hardin and Jeff E. Schapiro (2006) that his maternal grandfather, Felix Lumbroso, an Italian liquor importer in Tunis who had been arrested by the Nazis, was Jewish. Declared Allen, “I embrace and take pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line’s Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed.” Of course, Allen also saw fit to point out, “I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother makes great pork chops.” The press soon dredged up juicy detail, such as Allen’s youthful penchant for flying the Confederate flag and using the N-word (e.g., Chait 2006), his opposition to a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. in 1984, and his issuance in 1994 of a proclamation declaring April Virginia’s Confederate History and Heritage month (Lizza 2006). Now all this would have been quite unremarkable had it not been for the “magazine article” from which Allen said he had first learned about his Jew-

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ish ancestry: E. J. Kessler’s (2006) “Alleged Slur Casts Spotlight on Senator’s (Jewish?) Roots,” published online a month before Fox had raised her question. The slur Kessler referred to occurred during a campaign stop in August 2006. Allen had repeatedly pointed at an Indian American cameraman for his opponent’s campaign, calling him “Macaca, or whatever his name is” and welcoming him “to America and the real world of Virginia” (Shear and Craig 2006). After a video clip of the scene surfaced on many websites, Allen initially claimed that “Macaca” was a play on “Mohawk” hairstyles. But then he officially declared that he “had made up a nickname for the cameraman, which was in no way intended to be racially derogatory. Any insinuations to the contrary are completely false” (Shear and Craig 2006). Not so, thought Kessler, who pieced together an intriguing chain of evidence starting with the observation that macaca likely derived from the French macaque (monkey) and is used by Francophone North Africans to disparage dark-skinned people. Kessler then noted that not only does Allen speak French but also his mother, Henriette (Etty), had been born in Tunisia, and her maiden name was Lumbroso. Kessler (2006) concluded (watch the crucial abductive moment!) that Etty Allen likely hails from “the august Sephardic Jewish Lumbroso family,” which “originated in Portugal but made its way to Livorno, or Leghorn, in Italy after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century.” Kessler’s research further revealed that although the Lumbrosos had been forced to convert to Christianity in Portugal, they returned to Judaism in Livorno, where they became powerful merchants under the protection of the Medicis and eventually branched out to Tunis. Among the most famous of the Tunisian line of the family were Itzhak Lumbroso, an eighteenth- century rabbi and rabbinical judge, whose commentary on the Talmud was the first book in Hebrew published in Tunis, and Sylvain Lumbroso, a highly decorated leader of the Resistance movement against the Vichy regime in Tunis (Rosner 2006). The beauty of Kessler’s case is that although it proceeds entirely within a commonsense rationality, its logic is clear: it starts with an unexplained empirical fact—Allen’s use of the word macaca—and works its way back along a chain of evidence toward a causal explanation. This is a pattern of “ratiocination” (or abduction) that has long been heralded as characteristic of hunting, divination, historiography, medical diagnostics, juridical factfinding, connoisseurship, psychoanalysis, the representation of detection in popular crime fiction (Ginzburg 1983), and modern semiotics (Peirce, after all, took pride in once having solved a crime himself!). Of course, Etty Allen likely would have denied that her son had learned a bad word like macaque from her, and Kessler’s case probably wouldn’t hold up in court. Neither

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would I make too much of Kessler’s (2006; my emphasis) intriguing assertion that “Allen’s own African heritage casts a different light on” his penchant for Confederate flags. But it bears pointing out that even if Allen really descends from a line of distinguished rabbis, no genomic analysis would ever unearth a Cohen modal haplotype in his Y chromosome, which he, after all, derived from his Christian football-coach father. And that is that.53 Am I arguing that (mother Etty’s pork chops notwithstanding) George Allen is “really” a Jew? Of course not. I am not a rabbi. Socially viable identities in the contemporary United States are, after all, neither fully self-selected nor entirely ascribed—at least not unless the popular imagination unambiguously links them to visible bodily surfaces and certain performative markers (so that, like pornography, “one knows ‘them’ when one sees ‘them’”). On the contrary, my point is that the question itself is a symptom of the workings of a peculiarly US form of racecraft that, by its very nature, makes use of biology as a handy prop. Which is why I think that well-meant calls for a nonreductive biocultural anthropology in the age of genomics may not only have come rather late in the game but will also likely not constitute an effective remedy. Unless, that is, we first manage to sort out among ourselves which epistemologies pertain to what sorts of data. A daunting but certainly worthwhile task.

Chapter 4

Thinking with Abakuá about Early Analog Acoustic Technology and the “Dialectics of Ensoniment” “Step into the second floor front room of 21[32] Fairmount avenue and get initiated into the strangest form of worship in Philadelphia.” So begins an article featured prominently on page 1 of the newspaper the North American of May 4, 1908. And indeed its author describes what even by the standards of early twentieth-century Philadelphia’s exuberantly diversified religious landscape must have been quite a remarkable scene. [This is] a wonderful place filled with altars, war drums, speaking tubes and trumpets. Over in one corner hangs a figure dressed in white satin and crowned with a garish crown of glittering imitation gems. That’s the Queen of Ethiopia and she is worshipped with due solemnity. On the walls are robes of purple and yellow, masks of strange design, and brushes to sweep away the evil spirits. A battered photograph of the slain President Garfield, mounted on a stick, in the form of a cross, also figures in the ceremonies.

Speaking in nearly unaccented English, the journalist’s interlocutor, a “powerfully built” Black Cuban “of about 45 years” named Timothy Leay, amiably explains: “I am Ejamba, the leader. I show the true way; our symbol is the rooster, and we pray to him and dance in his honor. How we worship is a secret, and only the initiated dare to join in. We also believe in the Great God, and we dance to please him.” The Ejamba continues, “I talk with the spirits. I talk with the spirits and they talk with me. See my echo?” This is something Timoteo Leal (which likely was his name)1 seems genuinely proud of. The journalist expresses amazement. “There’s something worth the while [sic] that echo,” he wrote. It starts in the middle of the room in a sort of pagoda filled with water. Things that look like painted spools float around gaily. A tiny bell is

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suspended from the roof of the pagoda and when any spirits happen around [sic] they always notify Ejamba Leay by ringing this bell. From under the water a speaking tube stretches across the room to a converter. It is filled with wheels, has a glass front, and a bit of stovepipe sticks out the top. Leading into the converter, from the western end of the room, is another speaking tube. Still another tube finds its way into the converter from a kettle drum in the east. This kettle drum is made of a china washbowl covered with skin. A final tube is carried out into Fairmount avenue. This has a megaphone exit, and it is from this megaphone that the people in the neighborhood get notice that the spirits are busy.

The unnamed journalist further tells us that the masks are made from jute. What at first glance seem to be feather dusters turn out to be ceremonial staffs adorned with “the sacred feathers of the rooster which we sacrifice,” according to Leal. A woman present reports having heard the drums “beating on their own accord” and that the “echo . . . made a noise like this— Whoo-o-o!” Leal further assures the reporter that they pray not only to the plumed staffs but also “to the echo. We pray to the big drum in the corner. That represents the seven constellations. We pray to the bow and arrows. We pray to the sun.” A group of women chimes in assertively when Leal declares that “we have a beautiful and inspiring ceremony.” “We have indeed,” they declare. “Why, when the candles are lit and the men get on their robes and masks and the spirits commence talking, it’s simply grand.” What I have just excerpted here is likely the only record we have on the “Temple of the Ancient Grace” that the two Afro- Cuban brothers, “Timothy and Edward Leay,” were operating in Philadelphia in the first decade of the twentieth century. I don’t know how contemporary Philadelphians—most important, the residents of the 2100 block of North Fairmount Avenue— may have reacted to the sounds the Leal brothers and their flock broadcast onto the street. But I do know what the pioneer of Afro-Cuban studies, Fernando Ortiz, made of a contemporary Cuban journalistic recension of this very article: he filed it away in what eventually became the folder entitled “Negros—ñáñigos” in his vast and sprawling archive—which is where I first encountered it in the late 1990s. Clearly, what must have drawn Don Fernando’s interest were a number of intriguing features of the report—most prominently, perhaps, Leal’s use of the term Ejamba to designate his ritual office. For it points to a connection between the Leal brothers’ temple and an Afro- Cuban male esoteric sodality known as Abakuá that emerged in Cuba in the 1830s and had, by

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Figure 1. The Leal brothers featured in the pages of the North American (Philadelphia) on May 4, 1908. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

the early twentieth century, become a vital force in Havana’s dockside social worlds. To this day, the term Illamba2 designates one of the four preeminent titles in Abakuá; as we shall see, one of the major ritual functions of the incumbent of this office lies in the activation and transmission of a numinous voice. What is more, as Ortiz knew, the social dislocations effected by two of the wars of Cuban independence (1868–78, 1895–98) had led to a truly Atlantic dispersal of the form of association and ritual characteristic of Abakuá. As I have argued elsewhere, by the time Ortiz clipped this article, not only had Abakuá-inspired practices surfaced among Cuban deportees to Spanish presidios in North Africa and on the island of Fernando Po; they also seem to have taken hold in the United States among émigré tobacco workers in Key West, Florida, and it’s not unreasonable to presume that the growing Cuban exile communities in the urban Northeast were harboring members of Abakuá as well (Palmié 2008; Aranzadi 2014). Surely, as Ortiz seems to have surmised in filing this clipping under “Negros—ñáñigos,”3 at least some of the Leals’ ritual practices might well

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have looked familiar, if perhaps somewhat heterodox, to members of Havana’s Abakuá lodges: the robes and jute masks thus might have turned out to be sacos or afoíreme, the characteristic body masks giving visual shape to spiritual presences known as íreme who are drawn into human lifeworlds during Abakuá barocos or plantes (large-scale public ceremonies). From such a perspective, the “feather dusters” would become readable as plumeros or muñones, plumed adornments that crown Illamba’s iton, or sacred staff, and also figure on the drums of the holders of the Empegó and Ecueñón titles as well as on the mute ceremonial drum sese eribó wielded by the holder of the Isué title. Male initiatory esotericism fits such an interpretation, as do Leal’s remarks about the symbolic centrality of the sun (ebión) and the ritual designs resembling bows and arrows (firmas, gandos, or anaforuana). The article’s photograph depicting a cross in the temple’s window might be taken to evoke the high god Abasí (represented by the Christian crucifix in many contemporary Abakuá temples). Leal’s repeated mention of the rooster (enquico) as both object of worship and sacrificial victim would make good sense. Also fitting would be his reference to “seven constellations,” which might be taken to connote the seven ancestral personages involved in the discovery of the mystery from which Abakuá was born. These personages subsequently transformed into the seven major titles integrating every Abakuá potencia (chapter or lodge).4 Even such ostensibly peculiar objects as the figure glossed as “the Queen of Ethiopia” or the photo of the slain President Garfield mounted on a cruciform stick might be subjected to such interpretations. We know that even before the end of the Spanish colonial period, Cuban Abakuá potencias had begun to incorporate political emblems into their altars (cf. Palmié 2002). And it might not be unimaginable that the Queen of Ethiopia could have represented a visual rendering of Sikan, the woman who first encountered Abakuá’s central cult agency in the mythical time space known as Enllenisón—embellished, whether for the reporter’s benefit or the temple’s Afro–North American adherents, by Ethiopianist references. Such guesswork could be extended. Yet this isn’t what I’m after in this chapter.5 Instead, I want to present one more tantalizing detail from the reporter’s account and then proceed to a more theoretically focused discussion of the rather extraordinary technology that, in the Leals’ Temple of the Ancient Grace, might have come to mediate what I would like to call an acoustic mask, following Edward Lifschitz (1988). In particular, I want to foreground what appears to be a remarkable convergence between the phonic and the auditory ideologies underwriting the mediation of the divine in Abakuá and the technologies of acoustic transmission across space

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and time that had begun to reconfigure Western auditory worlds since the second half of the nineteenth century. What I will try to argue is that just as Abakuá’s sacramental technologies of sound transmission—activating the disembodied voice of the mystery—in real-world space and historical time generate numinous sound envelopes that defy precisely those timespace coordinates, so did the rational technologies of sound propagation and acoustic disembodiment of the mundane human voice that began to flourish in the second half of the nineteenth century engender their own numinous penumbra and sacramental logics. If indeed the two did converge on Philadelphia’s North Fairmount Avenue in 1908, this must surely be judged as sheer contingency. But that such convergence between the phonic ideologies of an African-derived esoteric sodality and those beginning to regiment the indexicalities of electroacoustic transmission and reproduction in North America would have occurred at all may not be much of a surprise. Such an argument, however, demands a discussion of both the conceptions of phonation and audition in contemporary Abakuá ritual praxis and the mysteries of sound recording and reproduction in early twentieth-century America.6

Conceptio per Aurem: Phonation and Audition in Contemporary Abakuá In several crucial respects, Abakuá ritual shares in the anamnestic and iterative qualities of the Christian Eucharist. It is a rite of re-presentation in the literal rather than the figurative sense. Its goal is to fuse the ritual present with a sacred past by weaving a notionally unbroken metonymical chain from an originary sequence of events that is both foundational and authorizing to their successive reinstantiations in increasingly distant time. Just as scripturally grounded charisma of office enables a Roman Catholic priest to effect the mysterium tremendum of transubstantiation during the Mass, so do their offices enable Abakuá titleholders to collectively bring into being a “real presence.” What they re-presence in the course of a plante or baroco—ceremonies lasting upward of twelve hours—is the mystery of the voice of écue that once hailed a set of human actors and subsequently transformed them into everlasting ritual personae. Such rituals unleash the mystery’s transformative powers by once more hailing those within earshot in the instant in (linear, historical) time that has become an occasion for its sounding. Just as the Catholic Mass materializes the mystical body of the Christian church by drawing the congregants into physical communion with Christ, so does the sounding of écue’s voice beckon its hearers to assist

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in and attest to the changes it is to effect within the present confines of a sonically delimited ritual space. Much has been written about Abakuá’s founding myth. But for my present purposes, the barest schematic account of its structure of eventuation will suffice. A good starting point may be to emphasize one more resonant parallel between contemporary ethnography and the 1908 Philadelphia North American report. Let’s note the stunning irony—for anyone familiar with contemporary Abakuá lore and ritual praxis—that in the journalist’s account, it’s a woman who gives an approximation of the phonetic qualities of what she and Leal call “the echo.” “Do the spirits really talk?” asks the journalist. “Why,” answers she, “I have been in there alone and the drums have started beating on their own account, and the echo made a noise like this—Whoo-o-o!—and then I got away.” Which is what the mythical woman Sikan failed to do when she first heard the voice of Tance—the piscine ancestral presence she had accidentally scooped up in her calabash when drawing water at the embankment of Usagaré from the river Oldán, the river bisecting the territory of Bekura Mendó in the Efó region of Abakuá’s mythical homeland, Enllenisón. It is the end of a starry night. Enquico, the rooster, sings on the hilltop where Ecueñón, the hunter, waits for his prey, bow and arrow poised for the kill. A caiman initially blocks Sikan’s path to the river, but the man soon to experience transformation into the íreme Eribangandó clears her way with a ritual brush. She bows down, then scoops up a calabash of water. But when she hoists the vessel onto her head, a tremendous roar issues forth from it. It is Obon Tance—a numinous presence in the shape of a fish—who speaks to her in his otherworldly voice. Having been the first to hear Tance’s awesome logos—described in much of the literature on Abakuá as the growl of the leopard7—Sikan is variously said to have confided her terror to her father, Mocongo, or her husband, Isunécue. Either or both betray her to the supreme chief Illamba and the sorcerer Nasacó, who had been tracing Tance’s movement and vocalizations—camá ororó (“speaking in the center”)—in the lagoon for days. Ecueñón, whose name is glossed as “slave to écue,” is ordered to kill her. However, even before Sikan meets her violent end, Tance is dead as well. His voice has fallen silent. Horrified, Nasacó, Illamba, and the other obones (founding figures, soon to become titleholders) try to revive and recuperate Tance’s awesome, lawgiving sonic capacities. What ensues is a strangely phonocentric version of the search for a male social contract: Seated on three stones, Sikan is awaiting her immolation when she begins to menstruate, thus foreshadowing the feeding of the three-footed friction drum around which the ritual

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Figure 2. Mural in Regla depicting Abakuá’s founding myth. Photo by the author.

technos enabling men to cause other men to be “born over the drum skin” (ecória ñene abakuá) will soon congeal. Following Sikan’s execution, Nasacó fuses her skin to that of Tance but to no avail. He and the other obones will sacrifice the snake (ñangabión) that had coiled itself around the palm tree that night; erombe, the Congo slave “captured by the sound of the voice”; erón, the ram; and llebengó, the tiger—again to no avail. Much blood (efión) is shed in vain in the obones’ frantic experiments. It’s only when they resort to sacrificing embori—the goat—that el parche (the drum skin) eventually takes shape. Then, once it becomes fused to ocanco—the hollowed- out trunk of úcano beconsí, the ceiba tree—the skin becomes operative as nambe erí, the “flesh of the voice.” What results is a technology capable of transmitting la voz across time, materializing its awesome sound onward from baroco to baroco. This is the moment from whence, as contemporary Cuban obonécues envision it, an unbroken chain of transmisiones of the voice links the cuarto fambá (interior sanctum) of their temples and the ritual exterior spaces (isaroco)—often simple alleyways—to the primal embarcadero of Usagaré, where the sound approximated by the onomatopoeic phrase “el uyó” was first materialized in, and mediated by, an esoteric biotechnological phonic device: el écue. But écue itself is only an agent within a larger network that forms as

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soon as the original thirteen obones of the tierra efó—now turned into ancestral personae with names designating their future offices (plazas)— transact the secret of the voice across the river to a group of men soon to constitute the first potencia of the tierra efí. Reviving the voice is only the first step in its reproduction. It now begins to spread in space and time. Here, we can omit much of the mythological detail and switch to the sequence informing contemporary barocos in all their multimediated splendor. Hours of predawn work go into the fabricación (production or, perhaps better: assembly) of the conditions under which écue’s voice can be transferred to a medium that will carry it forward in time and social space by enabling men “born over the drumskin” to perform assisted reproduction in bringing into being other such men. Even before midnight, the titleholders of a potencia will assemble in the fambá to conduct a rigorous schedule of ritual work. Nasacó begins to concoct la wemba and the basic ingredients of la mocuba, the former a cleansing fluid, the latter a liquid conducer of écue’s extrasonic powers; Empegó will begin to write authorizing glyphs (firmas or anaforuana) with yellow chalk on all major ritual implements as well as on the ground leading from the innermost sanctum (fo écue, iriongo, or famballín) toward the door of the temple, charting the path the voice will travel hours from then.8 In all this, as David Brown (2003a, 58) notes, “the physical temple” is only a space through which écue “maintains its relationship to the world.” The voice itself “lives” in the waters from whence it must be summoned and to which it eventually returns. To this end, a potencia activates a ritual infrastructure composed of an elaborate network of human, man-made, and natural agents: a sacramental machinery designed to conduct or, perhaps better, transduce, a numinous energy into a variety of worldly forms available to the human sensorium. The altars, drums, staff, and insignia, the hieroglyphic writing, even the baroco’s ritual personnel are mediators that need to be brought to a vanishing point of im-mediation that is reached when the plazas have once more become the ancestral presences who bring about the sounding of écue’s voice (Peters 1999; Sterne 2003; Mazzarella 2004). Once the fabricación nears its completion after hours of performing esoteric ritual “works” (obras), Nasacó will trace a line of gunpowder along the elaborate diagrammatic firma that will mark the path for écue to once more emerge and sonically transform the world within its acoustic range— for those capable of heeding its call.9 By then, Ecueñón will step out into the first light of daybreak, announcing the impending sonic incarnation to the profane world. “Jelley baribá, bencamá . . .—attention/admiration, I/it will speak . . .”—so begins the lengthy chant he intones before Nasacó lights

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the gunpowder, and the door of the sanctuary flings open in an explosive visual and auditory blast. What emerges from the temple’s door is the first stage of la procesión, the major plazas (titleholders) followed by a full drum orchestra: guided by the íreme Eribangandó, who once more clears the path, they go in search of the voice.10 Only when they return will Illamba, who has stayed behind in the fo écue (a corner of the fambá secluded by a curtain), begin to apply his fingers, moistened with drops of mocuba, to the llin—a plumed piece of caña brava (bamboo)—poised on the resonant surface of a small, threefooted friction drum that is the source of écue’s vocalizations. But just as the procession is a mere effect of an as yet unrevealed cause, so is Illamba himself (or perhaps better: the human body that has become his office) a mere instrumentality. Blindfolded, he himself only hears but does not see how the llin in his hands induces the vibrations on the drumskin that activates écue’s voice (figure 3). “How is this possible,” Ortiz (1952–55, 5:237) reports having asked an Illamba who agreed to cooperate with his research. “How can you deny that an initiate, namely you, passes the yin through his own fingers every time the uyu speaks?” To which Ortiz’s interlocutor replied, “Well, accepting that this may be so, who is it that inspires him who handles the güín but a mysterious being through an action of Abasí who is god?” Ortiz rightly goes on to qualify his informant as a theologian. But the principle itself—transductive mediation from one form of energy into another—suffuses the entire event. Strictly speaking, the baroco is no “reproduction” of an originary moment of revelation. There is no later or earlier. It is an instantiation of presence beyond time. Illamba’s fingers merely carry écue’s numinous energy over into the phenomenal (that is, auditory) world, where it will pass through and bring into being further chains of transduction. From the moment it begins to resonate from within the temple, the drone of écue’s vocalizations notionally both effects and directs every one of the twists and turns of the exoteric part of a plante that unfolds in the isaroco’s public space over the next six to eight hours. What ensues is a synesthetic riot involving elaborate conversaciones between écue and la música (i.e., a five-piece drum orchestra); the íremes, though mute themselves, will react to modulation in écue’s volume and timbre in a gestural language of their own, and the officiating plazas will judge from the sound emerging from the cuarto fambá whether or not the ritual steps they just executed were pleasing to la voz or badly executed. Even the movement of nontitled obonécues, who during intervals between major phases of the ritual line up in two rows (la valla), between which one after the other displays

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Figure 3. Illamba applying the llin to the ecué as depicted in Fernando Ortiz, Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana (Havana: Cárdenas y Cía, 1955), 231.

his prowess at dancing, is inspired by écue. The obonécues are said to be roused and energized by “the voice,” which, emanating from the potencia’s inner sanctum, envelops the exoteric space of the isaroco in a dense cloud of sound. Transmitted to nambe erí—the drum skin—by the motions of the llin in Illamba’s hand, écue’s power shifts from numinous to auditory to kinetic and—as Ortiz (1952–55, 5:234) recognized—not just aesthetic but ethical modalities.

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In a baroco llansao that involves the initiation and swearing in (juramento) of new obonécues or plazas into an existing potencia, it is écue who calls the íreme Aberisún to deal a deadly blow to the sacrificial goat embori, and it initially does so by deceiving the íreme: attracted to the scene of the ritual by the voice, Aberisún shrinks back in horror as he hears écue’s command and beholds embori, whose body has received the same chalk markings as the indísime (candidates for initiation). And just as écue’s voice will gain urgency every time Aberisún recoils until he finally strikes embori down with a cudgel, so will it rejoice when the goat’s skin, sucu bacariongo, is finally presented to the waning stars in the early morning hours as the potencia’s banner (estandarte) (figures 4 and 5). Écue jubilates when the indísime, marked as “dead” by white rather than yellow chalk writings on their bodies, are led into the fambá. And it will give birth to new ecória ñene abacuá soon after, when in the course of a series of esoteric procedures the head of a new initiate is placed on top of the sese eribó—the mute drum which only moments before had supported the severed head of the sacrificial victim embori—and is “crowned” with the powerfully vibrating presence of écue herself. Conversely, during the type of funerary rite known as enlloro or llanto that marks the end of a period after the death of a potencia member when the potencia is considered defiled (sucio) and thus barred from any other ritual action, écue’s initial joyous vocalizations turn into lamentations when, in the course of the ritual’s commencement, news of the death of one of “her sons” is relayed to “her” by the íreme of death, Anamanguí. Just as the powerful sound of écue’s voice was necessary to transform his body into a medium of her propagation—a conceptio per aurem, if ever there was one—so can that body not be expedited to the grave without écue’s taking leave of him. Écue, in other words, has intentionality and sensory powers, and is capable of expressing affect—all the while affecting ritual actors within its phonic reach, sacralizing and directing their actions. It is, in sum, a mask—just not a visual one that subsumes the body of its wearer under its power, but an acoustic one whose sacralizing capacities extend to all who know how to experience and heed its call (Lifschitz 1988; Napier 1988; cf. Brown 2003a, 37). In this sense, the acoustic mask that is écue is a complex assemblage of human and nonhuman agencies. And I think I’m cleaving rather close to the views of contemporary ecória ñene abakuá when I qualify it as a biotechnology that, while capable of exerting powerful agency on its own, needs to enlist human actors not only to compose its material instrumentalities but to transduce its mystical energy from the numinous to the phenomenal realms, thereby reproducing its agency across secular space and time as well. This is even more obvious in some of the activities entailed in a

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Figure 4. Aberisún about to strike the sacrificial goat embori. Photo by the author.

baroco ninllao—the type of ritual in the course of which not only individual members but new chapters of Abakuá are “born.” Here, the challenge is not so much to reinstantiate the foundational conditions in Enllenisón under which Obon Tance’s voice was first transferred to the technology composed from parts of Sikan’s and embori’s bodies and ocanco’s wooden receptacle. It is, rather, to once more bring into being the moment when enslaved titleholders who had regrouped within Regla’s Cabildo de los Carabalí Bricamó

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Figure 5. Indísime awaiting initiation and presentation of the goat’s skin as the potencia’s banner. Photo by the author.

Ápapa Efí in 1836 succeeded in achieving the first audible transduction, on Cuban soil, of écue’s numinous presence.11 Here is the barest account of what ecória ñene abacuá have been calling la mecánica (de la transmisión) since at least the 1950s when Cabrera (1969, 157) recorded that term in a comparable instance. Different from the juramento of individual new obonécues or even plazas in existing potencias whose écue is already capacitated to extend itself in time and social space by birthing new members, the coming into being of a new potencia involves more than just the ritual work necessary to effect the vanishing of mediators and media into the message. It demands a different type of fabricación: one that involves recreating the mecánica originally deployed by the African slaves who found themselves “swaying back and forth like the waves” (quende máriba quende) upon disembarkation at the dockside of the town of Regla (Itía Ororó Cande) in the first decades of the nineteenth century (figure 6). Few will venture to speculate on how this event actually occurred. But there’s wide agreement that the original group of Cuban founders couldn’t have been in possession of a consecrated écue brought with them from Africa. How, then, to reactivate the voice? The solution was found in sub-

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Figure 6. Embarcadero of Regla. Photo by the author.

stituting the interior shell of a coconut now known as el coco de efique butón (named after the first potencia of Abakuá, founded in Regla in 1836). To this day, a coconut shell figures as the primary transmitter of el uyó to any new écue drum and the piezas or atributos (staffs, drums, afoíreme, etc.) of a potencia in statu nascendi. Such transmission is (and is imagined to have originally been) a complex and protracted process, during which a full set of seven different voices must be brought into successive mystical resonance

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to prepare every single ritual implement for activation. In order to effect this, the coco is sounded as if it were écue, while the functioning écue drum of the potencia sponsoring the “birth” of a new one is suspended in a tub (batea or palangana) of water from where the transfer is being effected by the phonic emissions of four further objects and two animals.12 Lengthy encames (orations) accompany the process, but even though its details remain highly esoteric, it’s once more clear that its goal consists in a form of mediation that results in “pure presence” or immediacy. Yet while the baroco llansao could be viewed as repeating or even commemorating a foundational series of events (in this case the transmission of écue’s voice from Enllenison into nineteenth-century Cuban geotemporality, and so from myth into history), to call this a repetition would be as misguided as to view the Eucharist as mere commemoration. What strict adherence to the mecánica of la transmisión is supposed to ensure is no repetition at all. Or if it is a repetition, it’s one in which the copy proves the prior original—an event, in other words, that not only occurs over and over again, but that attains significance precisely in indexical iterations rather than in some form of iconic recall. If in the contemporary baroco llansao Cuban alleyways facing an Abakuá temple collapse into a chronotope coextensive with the mythical embarcadero of Usagaré where Sikan first encountered the mystery, so the baroco ninllao collapses the historical distance between the founding of the first Cuban potencia efique buton and the present occasion of the birth of its latest progeny. In both cases, this is the result of extensive and highly methodical ritual mediation involving the systematic erasure of its own traces: while genealogical relations between older and younger potencias are certainly recognized (Palmié 2006), they are modeled on godparenthood or perhaps midwifery, such as when obonécues speak of an older potencia that sponsored the inception of theirs as their padrino, who “has pulled us out” (nos ha sacado). Their nacimiento (birth or better: coming into the world), however, is unmediated—except in the sense that écue itself has given birth to them, thus enlisting them as the human component of the media of its own propagation.

Ghosts in the Machine: Making Things Talk, ca. 1908 Was the “echo” at 2132 North Fairmount Avenue el écue? Chances are good that the journalist simply misheard what Leal and the unnamed woman had said. Clearly, under such a description even more details of the report seem to fall into place:13 the drum in the corner, the washbasin, perhaps even the pagoda-like structure. Leal’s remark “I talk with the spirits and they talk

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with me” would make perfect sense. As would his showing the journalist around in what might have been a curiously modified cuarto fambá. “See my écue?” not “See my echo”! Or so he may have prodded the journalist, who of course had no idea what he was seeing or what Leal was talking about. Yet what about all the tubes, the aquatic “converter,” the painted spools, the speaking trumpets, the megaphone? Hard as it is to tell from the journalist’s account what exactly the Leals had set up at their Temple of the Ancient Grace, and to what degree the “echo” was propagated by electroacoustic means, there clearly were forms of mediation involved in the Leals’ temple that contemporary Cuban obonécues would regard as inappropriate, unacceptable, even potentially sacrilegious. Any attempt to assimilate these to contemporary Cuban ethnography will likely go nowhere. And that is as it should be. In fact, it might be as ostensibly preposterous to suggest that the contraptions at 2132 North Fairmount Avenue were a precursor to Caribbean sound systems technology as to judge them to be an offshoot of Abakuá. Ostensibly preposterous: for both contemporary Cuban Abakuá and Jamaican sound systems, in fact, share the use of interfaces between humans and technologies to effect what Henriques (2003) calls “sonic dominance”—that is, the creation of social contexts in which the sheer physical volume or the semiotic weight of sound begins to privilege audition as the preeminent sensory modality over and above other aspects of the sensorium. But this would have to be the subject of another publication.14 What interests me instead is the kind of cultural threshold the Leals and the unnamed Philadelphia North American journalist jointly inhabited at the beginning of the twentieth century. More specifically, I want to ask how this juncture—the dawn of electroacoustic analog media—may have brought what one might call Abakuá’s sonic and auditory ideologies15 into a momentary alignment with regimes of sonic semiosis that were then still far from becoming fully rationalized, let alone naturalized in the way contemporary Western hearers routinely consume mechanically reproduced sound. As Jonathan Sterne (2003, 2) so well puts it, just as “there was an Enlightenment, so too was there an ‘Ensoniment’” that paralleled the rise of visualism in the West to a degree that until recently has largely remained unappreciated, or even actively consigned to what Charles Hirschkind (2006) calls a subterranean status. Though one could debate Sterne’s (2003, 2) periodization, he’s certainly right when he argues that “between about 1750 and 1925, sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been conceptualized in particular idealized instances like voice or music. Hearing was reconstructed as a physiological process, a kind of receptivity and capacity based on physics, biology, and mechanics.

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Through techniques of listening, people harnessed, modified, and shaped their powers of auditory perception in the service of rationality.” By the same token, as Leigh Eric Schmidt (2000) has argued, the secularization of hearing that paralleled this process in the constitution of “modern subjects” disciplined into no longer “hearing things” (for which there was no rational explanation) not only remained woefully incomplete—as evidenced in, for example, nineteenth-century evangelical revivalism or contemporary Pentecostalism. Rather, as it turned out, Walter J. Ong’s (1982) technologically induced “secondary orality” carried the day—if not exactly in the sense intended by him16—through a rather oddly Weberian enchantment of the very technological means of rational sound propagation and reproduction evolving in curious “dialectics of ensoniment.” Attempts to control and manipulate sonation, of course, go back far beyond the threshold set by Sterne. When Athanasius Kircher and Samuel Morland fought over the precedent of developing devices of sound amplification in the second half of the seventeenth century, both referred not only to supposedly ancient hermetic wisdom but to the practical knowledge that mariners, herdsmen, and soldiers had deployed for millennia to effect “action at a distance” through amplification and broadcasting of vocal utterances. Morland (1671) intended his “Tuba Stentoro-Phonica or Speaking Trumpet” (a trumpet-shaped megaphone) mainly for nautical and military purposes. Yet Kircher’s speaking trumpets and panacoustic technologies17 were directly inspired by the baroque magia naturalis that informed his theories of cosmic harmonies. In line with his theories of the capability of musica pathetica to induce affective states, Kircher also designed hailing technologies in the form of giant speaking trumpets that, once projected from hillside shrines, would beckon the faithful to hear the word and the universal harmony projected by the Divine Organist (one of Kircher’s favorite metaphors) reverberating through His creation.18 Aside from studies of ecclesiastic acoustic architecture (Gouk 1999), a systematic history of the use of amplification in the production of what Hirschkind (2006) calls “pious soundscapes” in the West remains to be written.19 We do know, however, that sonic technologies were contemplated for secular disciplinary purposes and forms of affective manipulation and control. Foucault’s overinterpretation of its visual aspects notwithstanding, Bentham’s original plan for the panopticon included tin tubes connecting individual prison cells with the inspector’s lodge to allow for both eavesdropping and targeted reprimands (Schmidt 2000, 117). Charles Babbage—ever ready to exploit a disciplinary technology when he saw its potential—also recommended the use of tin tubes in the implementation of

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industrial and even domestic command structures (Mills 2009). Yet before the development of electroacoustic technologies, these remained relatively isolated efforts. By the eighteenth century, interest on the part of the emerging sciences of acoustics and phonology had come to focus not so much on the extension of sonic reach than on the artificial production of human vocalizations. This was the age of automata and speaking machines, which reached its height between 1770 and 1790 when the abbé Mical, Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, Wolfgang von Kempelen, and none other than Erasmus Darwin (afflicted as he was with a terrible stutter) constructed apparently working but rather cumbersome “speaking machines” modeled on the mechanics of the human vocal tract (Hankins and Silverman 1995, 186–98). Late improvements of this genre of technologies modeled on the human larynx and mouth persisted throughout the nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries.20 By the mid-nineteenth century, however, a massive sea change in the conception of sound and practices of sonic manipulation was already well under way. Though understandings of sound as oscillatory pulsations transmitted through media such as air can be traced back as far as Aristotle, the primary focus of post-Enlightenment acoustic and phonetic research had been on the production rather than the reception of audible phonation— on the mouth rather than the ear, on the origins of sound rather than on its effect in the world. The reorientation of thought about sound and practices of its manipulation that enabled electroacoustic technologies as they started to proliferate in the second half of the nineteenth century was based on multiple knowledge transfers between domains that had barely begun to differentiate institutionally—physics, physiology, and phonetics. And it was driven less by the system-building ambitions of the Baroque than by the kind of experimental tinkering that led Volta to galvanize frogs’ legs or Benjamin Franklin to ascend rooftops with metal rod in hand. The latter examples aren’t arbitrary. The gradual secularization of electricity (one recalls the elderly Franklin’s role in Franz Mesmer’s downfall), indeed the diffusion of practical knowledge about electromagnetism (as well as its popular display in electrical showmanship), paved the way for what—following Sterne (2003)—we might call a largely unheralded transductive revolution. That is, a protracted if eventually principled revaluation of sonation and audition as a joint phenomenon—and one that revolved around the transduction of one source of energy, sonic vibrations, into electromagnetic impulses and back into auditory frequencies. The key, as it turned out, was not the physiological mechanics of vocalization but that of audition. While Samuel Morse and his many precursors had certainly managed

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to reduce linguistic signage to a code of binary electrical impulses enabled by mechanical circuit breakers, telegraphy remained, despite its truly amazing—and amazingly rapid—impact on global information flows, just what its name suggested: writing at or across a distance.21 To be sure, the truly dramatic departure telegraphy represented in regard to older communication technologies aiming to supersede the limited capacities of speech and handwriting to bind time and space (such as the printing press and publishing networks) can hardly be overemphasized (e.g., Peters 1999, 138– 43). Hence, it may come as no surprise that the spirit rappings purportedly coming from inside the home of the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, which contributed to the creation of Spiritualism, commenced a mere four years after Morse had successfully demonstrated in nearby Rochester that his system of transducing mechanical into electrical impulses could carry coherent semantic weight (Sollors 1983; Connor 1999; Stolow 2009; Sconce 2000).22 Yet while the birth of Spiritualism from the technology of electromechanical telegraphy nicely exemplifies the convergence of a much older “electrical sublime” with a novel technological interface allowing for disembodied communication in (almost) real time, the birth of telephony from the spirit of anatomical praxis—though much less noticed, publicly— already brings us closer to some of the mysteries that may have animated the voices emanating from the Temple of the Ancient Grace at 2132 North Fairmount Avenue. As Alexander Graham Bell himself told the story in the massive transcript of the 1892 Massachusetts Circuit Court lawsuit threatening annulment of his patents, in the spring and summer of 1874 he had been intermittently working on devising a telegraphy method capable of transmitting several sets of impulses at the same time, thus ideally enabling vocal rather than mere code transmission. But he was also experimenting with the phonautograph. An apparatus for translating sound waves into graphic traces invented in 1857 by Leon Scott, it was being researched by Bell to further his goals in devising a logopedagogical tool for deaf persons.23 “I was struck,” he says (Bell Telephone Company 1908, 29), “by the likeness between the mechanism of the phonautograph and the mechanism of the human ear, the membrane of the one being loaded by a lever of wood, and the membrane of the other by levers of bone. It appeared to me that a phonautograph modeled after the pattern of the human ear would probably produce more accurate tracings of speech-vibrations than the imperfect instrument with which I was operating. For this purpose,” Bell continues (29), “I consulted a distinguished aurist,” his friend Dr. Clarence J. Blake, a pioneer in American otology who was then affiliated with

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Figure 7. Ear phonautograph as depicted in Clarence J. Blake, The Use of the Membrana Tympani as a Phonautograph and Logograph (1876), 7. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School (Snyder 1974). “He seemed much interested in my experiments, and suggested that, instead of trying to make a phonautograph modeled after the pattern of the human ear, I should attempt to use a human ear itself, taken from a dead subject, as a phonautograph” (Bell Telephone Company 1908, 29). And so the two men did. Well connected to the source of corpses provided to Harvard Medical School, made possible by the 1832 Massachusetts Anatomical Act, Blake supplied two middle ears—whose extraction

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and resection he describes in loving detail in his own publications on the matter (Blake 1878)—one for his own experiments and one for Bell to take to his summer home in Nova Scotia. For all we know, the results were eminently satisfying (figure 7). Much as in the case of Nasacó’s experiments with various membranes cut from sacrificial victims in his attempts to revive Tance’s voice, the tympani of middle ears cut from the corpses of paupers or criminals from the medical school led to a breakthrough: once mounted on a microscope stand, moistened with glycerin and water, and outfitted with a stylus that transferred to a plate of smoked glass the vibrations registered by an eardrum no longer connected to a living human being but recruited into auditory science as an agent of what Sterne (2003) calls “tympanic transduction,” Bell and Blake’s so-called ear phonautograph graphically rendered sound like no other device had ever before. Previously, Bell had experimented with applying electricity to his own ears (Bell Telephone Company 1908, 45), and he had been tinkering with electromagnetic devices for what he envisioned as a “harmonic”—that is, multifrequency conducting, hence potentially voice-conferring—telegraph. But it struck him that the disproportion between the eardrum’s diaphragm and the bones moved by it suggested that “a larger and stouter membrane be capable to move a piece of steel” (39)—in other words, a conduit for electromagnetic “undulations”: “At once the conception of a membrane speaking telephone became complete in my mind; for I saw that a similar instrument to that used as a transmitter could also be employed as a receiver” (39). In an instant, emulation of the vocal tract in the reproduction of the human voice—which the youthful Bell had engaged in after seeing Charles Wheatstone’s reconstruction of von Kempelen’s speaking machine—had been obliterated as a viable principle of sonic propagation, the mouth forever displaced by the ear. Sound became an effect registered by the human sensorium rather than an independent cause in the world. It has remained so ever since. Later, Bell repeatedly voiced regret over not having invented the phonograph at one and the same time, leaving its no less uncanny inauguration to the future (self-promoted) Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Alva Edison. Edison’s discovery of phonography has been described as involving a similar logic of human sacrifice, this time not that of the ears of cadaveric organ donors but that of his own blood. The count de Monceil (1879, 237), himself a pioneer of electrified communication, recounts the episode. In the course of some experiments Mr. Edison was making with the telephone, a stylus attached to the diaphragm pierced his finger at the

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moment when the diaphragm began to vibrate under the influence of the voice, and the prick was enough to draw blood. It then occurred to him that if the vibrations of the diaphragm enabled the stylus to pierce his skin, they might produce on a flexible surface such distinct outlines as to represent all the undulations produced by the voice, and even that the same outlines might mechanically reproduce the vibrations which had caused them, by reacting on a plate capable of vibrating in the same way as that which he had already used for the reproduction of the Morse signals.

De Monceil himself goes on to express skepticism about this particular myth of origin (and there indeed are other versions). Yet the blood sacrifice occasioned by the transduction of sound to Edison’s own flesh has its equivalent in Edison’s physical engagement with the sonic technologies he was bringing into being. If Bell had inherited his father’s lifelong concern with the hard of hearing, one reason for why Edison applied the stylus to his finger in the first place was that a childhood bout with scarlet fever24 had left him partially deaf himself. As he himself publicly recounted on several occasions, it was his deafness which had led him to telegraphy, his fateful experiment with Bell’s telephone, and the subsequent “perfection of the phonograph.” This was so because his auditory disability forced him to analogize between different sensory modalities and their receptivity to sound waves as a form of energy (Edison 1948, 47–48, 53–54). A 1913 advertisement thus quotes him as saying, “I hear through my teeth . . . and through my skull. Ordinarily I merely place my head against the phonograph. But if there is some faint sound that I don’t quite catch this way, I bite my teeth into the wood, and then I get it good and strong” (cited in Peters 2004, 191).25 The uncanny nature of such merging of body and machine into the conduit of an absent presence—previously recorded sound—wasn’t lost on Edison’s contemporaries. As an anonymous reviewer of Edison’s first phonograph noted in the December 22, 1877, edition of Scientific American (“Talking Phonograph,” 385), it was “a little curious” that in the test recordings (such as “How do you do?” and “Do you like the phonograph?”), the “machine pronounces its own name with especial clearness.” But it wasn’t just that the medium—“a little affair of a few pieces of metal, set up roughly on an iron stand about a foot square”—seemingly disappeared into a self-naming message that appears to hail the listener. Rather, “no matter how familiar a person will be with modern machinery and its wonderful performances, or how clear in his mind the principle underlying this strange device may be, it is impossible

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to listen to the mechanical speech without his experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him” (385). Given its capacity to arrest time itself by capturing acoustic data flows in a series of mechanical traces—analog indices of past sonic events—the phonograph’s necromantic potential was immediately obvious. What particularly astonished the reviewer was “the startling possibility of the voices of the dead being reheard through this device,” thus producing “the illusion of real presence” (385)—the dream of transcendence and mediation come true in the human voice permanently separated from the speaking body. In Edison’s (1878, 530) own words, the “captivity of all manner of soundwaves hitherto designated as ‘fugitive’”—including human vocalizations— “their permanent retention,” and their “reproduction with all their original characteristics at will, without the presence or consent of the original source, and after any length of time,” could now be considered as “faits accomplis.” While much of his statement was hyperbole, given the miserable sound quality of early tinfoil recordings as well as their rapid deterioration in the course of very few replays, Peters (1999, 160) is correct when he argues that right from the start, the phonograph was “a more shocking emblem of modernity than the photograph,” which, after all, recurred to realistic conventions of iconic representation reaching back at least to Renaissance perspectivism. If the telephone had seemed to cut distance out of communicative processes, as the Scientific American reviewer’s evocation of Eucharistic language suggests, phonographic recording seemed to not only undermine time’s status as an a priori dimension of human life but relativize mortality itself. Though not—at least not then—given to explicit statements about the spirit world, Edison more than hinted at this when, in response to the “abundance of conjectural and prophetic opinions which have been disseminated by the press,” he outlined a series of rational uses of the phonograph that included, significantly, “preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family—as of great men” or saving speeches by “our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Gladstones” so as to have them once more “give us their ‘greatest effort’ in every town and hamlet of the country, upon our holidays” (Edison 1878, 533–34). Ten years later, he still spoke of “speeches of orators” and “discourses of clergymen” that could “be had ‘on tap,’ in every house that owns a phonograph.” Yet venturing into what at the time was becoming known as psychophysics, Edison made an even more ominous comment about the subsumption of the original into—or its sublation by?—the copy. While in his earlier essay he had hinted at future forensic uses of the phonograph, he now (Edison

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1888, 649–50) argued that “the phonograph, in one sense, knows more than we do ourselves. For it will retain a perfect mechanical memory of many things which we may forget, even though we have said them.” Edison’s initial prosthetic device designed to overcome the temporally evanescent nature of the human voice had turned into a Derridean supplement to the kind of personhood that had hinged on the continuity of memory since Aristotle, and had been hitched to forensic notions of individual accountability by John Locke. No doubt, biting into his phonograph late in his life would have confirmed Edison’s sense of having changed the world of sonic communication. But the new regime of hearing that his invention inaugurated spread across the globe as quickly as it began to reverberate through a whole variety of cultural domains. Some of them were highly receptive to the enchanted potentialities the phonograph helped usher in.

Phonurgia Pathetica: Mr. Edison’s Transductive Cosmology Ever since Edison’s announcement of the “perfection” of the phonograph, much advertisement and newspaper copy was expended on extolling the magic worked by the transductive agency—a sympathy of vibrations, from sound waves to electromagnetic impulses and back again—of the phonographic diaphragm or the similarly magical hold the recorded trace seemed to exert in conjuring the original. In what may well be one of the most wildly enchanted, even spooky tributes the phonograph ever received, the Reverend Horatio N. Powers thus rhapsodized after hearing Edison’s original machine: I seize the palpitating air. I hoard music and speech. All lips that speak are mine. I speak; and the inviolate word authenticates its origin and sign! I am a tomb, a paradise, a throne, and angel, prophet, slave, immortal friend! My living record in their native tone convicts the knaves and disputations end. In me are souls embalmed. I am an ear, flawless as truth, and truth’s own tongue am I. I am a resurrection, and men hear the quick and the dead converse as I reply. (Cited in Hughbanks 1945, 13)

If Powers didn’t go quite as far as to suggest a phonographic theogony, the ominously apocalyptic tone of his adoption of the phonograph’s persona

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amply bears out how ghosts came rushing into the machine as soon as its perceived functions came to resonate with themes that had occupied Western thinkers from Plato and Aristotle on to Saint Augustine (Peters 1999; Schmidt 2000). These themes had all but been effectively dispelled by the enlightened rationality that had brought forth the material technos that now spoke with the captured logos of its creator: a mechanical angel and slave, promising justice, redemption, and everlasting replication to those who entered into a covenant with the apparatus bodying forth the ear and tongue of truth. Not infrequently, early writers on the wonders of phonography readily speculated that had Edison’s invention occurred in less enlightened times, its simulacral work would have been perceived as witchcraft.26 An equally popular topos was the displacement of self-consciously “modern” ambivalences toward electroacoustic technology, not onto one’s own unenlightened ancestors but onto the primitive Other elsewhere. In what Pietz (1987) aptly describes as a technocolonial fantasy, an 1885 New York Times article about two travelers’ plan to journey to Africa equipped with a phonograph (to record African languages!) thus mused that not only would the native Kings have an unbounded respect for the proprietors of such a wonderful fetich [sic], but they could be induced or entrapped into making remarks in the presence of the phonograph which could afterward be reproduced with excellent effect. For example, no African would venture to disobey the voice of his King ordering him to “bring the white men food,” and the fact of the voice issuing from the phonograph instead of the King’s own lips would add, if anything, additional force to the order. (Cited in Pietz 1987, 268)

What is more, in an even more ingenious political move, the travelers could describe the phonograph as a new and improved portable speaking god, and call upon the native Kings to obey it. A god capable of speaking, and even of carrying on a conversation in the presence of swarms of hearers could be something entirely new in Central Africa, where the local gods are constructed of billets of wood, and are hopelessly dumb. There is not a Central African who would not obey the Phonograph god. (269)

Of course, if anything, this was American, not African, fetishism—“a fantasy about the capacity of modern language technology to acquire the power

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of the ‘fetish’ of primitives and despots without the need to participate in the forms of subjectivity imagined to be proper to pre-civilized ‘fetishism’” (269). Indeed, as Taussig (1993) and Brady (1999) have noted, Western attempts to imbue the phonograph with mystical attributes deliberately played on acoustic sensibilities and semiotic ideologies characterizing the Victorian world that tended to quickly break down into sheer fantasy when projected elsewhere. As Brady (1999, 46) puts it, that the voice of the phonograph would have initially been invested with “quasi-supernatural authority” was by no means an effect that exposure to this technology would have “naturally” produced among human listeners. Instead, it had everything to do with Western notions of the semiotics of sound and audition.27 As a matter of fact, the phonograph often failed to elicit much wonderment among non-Westerners upon first exposure to the technology. Much to the surprise of Jesse Walter Fewkes, the first anthropologist to make use of Edisonian technology in the field, the Hopi whom he exposed to this selfconscious marvel of modernity in 1890 thus not only failed to be impressed but promptly incorporated a parody of Fewkes and his recording apparatus in the ritual clowning of their Basket Dance (Brady 1999, 31). Frances Densmore similarly encountered not awestruck admiration but straightforward instrumentalism when in 1917 she managed, after considerable trouble, to get the Northern Ute chief Red Cap to sing into her phonograph tube. “After the recording was finished,” she writes, Red Cap said, “I have done as you wished. Now I want to ask a favor. I do not sing, as I said, but I would like to talk into your phonograph. Will it record talking?” Guilelessly I said it would record any song. “Well” said the wily old chief, “Then I will talk and I want you to play the record for the Indian Commissioner in Washington. I want to tell him that we do not like this Agent. We want him sent somewhere else. We don’t like the things he does. What we tell him does not get to the Commissioner but I want the Commissioner to hear my voice.” (As cited in Brady 1999, 93)28

But while the phonograph may not have made much of an impression on people accustomed to communicating with disembodied Others—in vision quests, oracles, shamanistic trances, or spirit possession—it amply worked its magic on the Western imagination. Not the least this was so because the phonograph raised what Engelke (2007) calls “the problem of presence” in a fashion that had hitherto been largely unthinkable, but immediately

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seemed to resonate with long-standing metaphysical questions in Western religious as well as secular thought. Foremost among these was the question of life after death. Perhaps not ironically, the time-transcendent epistemic superiority of the mechanical copy over the biotic original that Edison’s 1888 remarks had aimed to convey thus was to take its recursive toll even on the creator himself.29 Evidence for Edison’s own curious electrobiotic monadology goes back to his brief collaboration with George Miller Beard, a physician, founding editor of the short-lived Archives of Electrology and Neurology, and author of the massive tomes American Nervousness and Sexual Neurasthenia who came to Edison’s rescue in the controversy over Edison’s premature announcement of his discovery of an “etheric force” in 1875 (Wills 2009).30 By 1878, Edison had taken up correspondence with Madame Blavatsky and become a member of the Theosophical Society. But it wasn’t until a series of interviews he gave in 1910 and 1911 that the wider public seems to have become aware of his own branch of enchanted hyper- Cartesian materialism. The initial occasion, as the journalist Edward Marshall (1910) put it, was “the recent death of Prof. William James, Harvard’s distinguished psychologist, and the alleged reappearance or ‘manifestation’ of Prof. James’s soul on earth.” “The newspapers have been teeming with the subject,” Marshall wrote. “The psychic researchers are even now quarreling bitterly over it. The public is puzzled.” Might the “Wizard of Menlo Park” have an answer? Edison did. Yet unlike Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, who in his autobiography happily rambles on about asking the spirits for help in bringing Bell’s telephonic experiments to a successful conclusion (Watson 1926, 100), Edison flatly (and scandalously) denied “immortality” as envisioned by contemporary “creedists.” Instead, he offered his own biomechanistic vision of the universe. Like cities such as New York (Edison’s favorite example), human individuals were really aggregates of myriads of life units, their bodies shedding cells just as social aggregates were shedding members upon the death of individuals. And just as memory in the individual brain (“a queer and wonderful machine”) was “like the phonograph cylinder” in preserving “things which have been impressed upon it by the mysterious power that actuates it,” the brain, like any machine, could not be conceived of as “immortal.” Machines, after all, break down. As Edison phrased the matter even more succinctly in an interview with the Columbian Magazine a year later, There is no dodging the plain fact that we are mere machines. . . . I used the term “mere meat machines” when we were talking on these

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lines before. I like the term. It is a good one. We are machines made up of an infinity of parts, each one made up of an infinity of cells. Life lies within the cells, and the cells are the real individuals. Our intelligence is the aggregate intelligence of the cells which make us up. There is no soul, distinct from mind, and what we speak of as the mind is just the aggregate intelligence of cells. (Marshall 1911)

From such a perspective—one that Edison (much like Athanasius Kircher) thought capable of being scaled up or down, from micro- to macrocosmic dimensions—death seemed to lose its sting. Just as the individual “meat machine” endowed with a mental phonograph that ensured the coherence of its mortal identity was a replaceable part in the New York City–like cosmos, so were its individual cell-borne “life units” part and parcel of a larger cosmic drama conceived, in terms both strikingly Durkheimian and Spencerian, as unraveling under the impact of new technology impinging on the human body and sensorium, challenging its “life units” to reaggregate in novel adaptations. The inventions produced by mortal “meat machines” like Thomas Edison himself, in other words, advanced the perfection of the human race. It was along such lines that late in his life, Edison finally outed himself as a proponent of a rather more than casually spiritualized materialism. “I am working on the theory that our personality exists after what we call life leaves our present material bodies,” he told Bertie C. Forbes (1920, 11). “Take our bodies. I believe they are composed of myriads and myriads of infinitesimally small individuals, each in itself a unit of life, and that these units work in squads—or swarms, as I prefer to call them, and that these infinitesimally small units live forever.” Though “reluctant to discuss the machine he was reported to be building for the apprehension of messages from the dead,” as the New York Times’ A. D. Rothman (1921) reported a few months later, Edison “did admit that he was engaged—had been engaged for a number of years—in the construction of such an apparatus.” When a man dies, Edison told Rothman, “the life units which have formed that man do not die. They merely pass out of the unimportant mechanism which they have been inhabiting, which has been called a man and has been mistaken for an individual, and select some other habitat or habitats. . . . These little entities of personality which I hope to detect with my apparatus are still animal entities” (ibid.). Nor were these reports mere journalistic exaggeration. The excerpts from Edison’s own notebooks posthumously published in 1948 show that between 1920 and 1925, the aging Wizard of Menlo Park repeatedly re-

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turned to his swarming life units and the possibility of registering their energetic signatures by means of an apparatus “perhaps most readily . . . described as a sort of valve. In exactly the same way in which a megaphone increases many times the volume and carrying power of the human voice, so with my ‘valve,’ whatever original force is used upon it is increased enormously for purposes of registration of the phenomena behind it” (Edison 1948, 205). “If my theory is correct,” he writes elsewhere (215–16), and if on the breakage of “the machine called man” the individual life units that had composed it “keep together, including those which have charge of memory (which is our personality)—then I think it is possible to devise apparatus [sic] to receive communications, if they desire to make them.” Such an apparatus “would rid the world of harmful superstitions such as spiritualism” (224)—though we might add that it would have done so by proving them right. Did Edison ever build such an apparatus? As Wainwright Evans (1963) claims, he did. Writing for Fate Magazine, Evans recalls an interview he had with Edison’s private secretary William A. Meadowcroft in 1921. Meadowcroft told him that according to Edison’s theory, what survived death would be an electronic replica, so to speak, of the body as it was in life—a sort of electronic ghost, made up of an aggregate of the “entities” or “electrons.” This collective entity, Edison reasoned, would be able to put forth physical energy, and could presumably manifest its presence through a mechanism if one sufficiently sensitive were available. Therefore he set himself the problem of designing something that would respond to the wispy physical impulses such a very attenuated organism might provide. (Cited in Streiff 2009)

In the remainder of the article, Evans unravels an intricate story about how in 1941 (i.e., ten years after Edison’s death) J. Gilbert Wright, a General Electric researcher and inventor of silicone rubber, and his associate Harry C. Gardner received communications from Edison through a spirit medium. As a result, they laboriously set about locating the blueprints for Edison’s apparatus, and then they tried to reconstruct it. It eventually took the form of an aluminum trumpet mounted on top of a microphone enclosed in a sound box. The trumpet was filled with a potassium permanganate solution that acted as an electrolyte once connected to an antenna, the base of which was submerged in the solution at one pole and connected to the microphone at the other. Alas, the contraption didn’t seem to successfully

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transmit any life units. And so, and in a beautiful exemplification of the dialectics of ensoniment, Wright and Gardner eventually resorted to the by then rather old-fashioned solution of having a human medium project an ectoplasmic larynx into the sound box, through which spirits would speak into the microphone. Edison apparently “came through,” and he recommended the use of Wright’s silicone putty as a lining for the sound box. But while one would doubt that he approved of such hybridization of his plan for what psychic researchers would nowadays call a “transcommunicative” device, his spirit remains active to this day in furthering the electromechanics of future telephonic communication between the living and the dead (Streiff 2009).31

The Phonograph Unmasked: High Fidelity Edison’s enchanted musings may seem to have come rather too late to give us a handle on how to judge the impact of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sonic technologies on the world that the tenants at 2132 North Fairmount Avenue might have inhabited. But his increasingly mystical pronouncements on the technologies he had helped bring into being were themselves only symptomatic of a larger dialectic that enchanted technology in the service of rationalizing the numinous. Ironically, it was precisely this moment that had already characterized, even driven, much of nineteenth-century Spiritualism. If Comte had suggested sociology as the religion to end all religions, his countryman Allan Kardec had thrown the afterlife open to positivistic investigation.32 Indeed, it should come as no surprise that the member lists of British and American Spiritualist societies soon featured some of the most prominent scientists of the second half of the nineteenth century who were dedicating themselves to the rational pursuit of the irrational.33 In turn, Spiritualism itself became a veritable vortex, sucking up new communication technologies almost as soon as their invention became public knowledge.34 If spirits somewhat belatedly appropriated photography as a medium for manifestation,35 they began using Morse code shortly after their initial 1848 rappings at Hydesville. As Thomas Watson (1926, 42–43), Bell’s assistant, spells out the logic in his autobiography, “Mediums are endowed with the power to transform subtle, bodily radiation into a mechanical force that produces the raps, movements, and slate writings as a steam engine changes heat into mechanical motion or a telegraph transforms pulsations of electricity into the taps of the Morse code.” Small wonder, then, that the spirits were eagerly poised to make themselves heard in what came to

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be known as direct voice manifestations once telephony and phonography made hearing disembodied speech a matter of increasingly common experience. As Connor describes the practice that seems to have originated in the 1850s (Schmidt 2000, 238) but attained its heyday just after the turn of the twentieth century, direct voice manifestations involved a voice which speaks independently of the medium’s vocal organs. Often in “direct voice” manifestations, the spirits would employ a trumpet (resembling a speaking trumpet or megaphone rather than the musical instrument), or even a series of trumpets, which might be placed in the room at a distance from the medium. The trumpet served both to amplify the voice, and to change its position: trumpets would be moved telekinetically through the air and around the room. (Connor 1999, 212–13)

Electromagnetic transduction seems to have been a widespread model for direct voice mediumship. The Spiritualist W. W. Aber’s instructions for producing trumpet manifestations thus recommend: “Place a trumpet in a basin of water in the center of the floor; form a circle around it, and connect the battery by touching feet all around the circle” (Aber 1909; cited in Enns 2005, 14). The trumpet medium Mrs. Cecil M. Cook likewise favored the use of electrolytes: “Somehow, the voices seem to come clearer when the trumpets are moist. There is something about the forces that resembles electrical energy” (Cook 1919; cited in Enns 2005, 14). His frequent diatribes against Spiritualism notwithstanding, Edison couldn’t but have agreed on matters of principle. After all, both he and Bell had experimented with placing induction coils over their heads to effect sound transference (Conot 1979, 428; Enns 2005). After sticking wires connected to an electromagnet in his water-filled ears and experimenting with various substances to increase resistance (“Water, especially when lightly acidulated . . . retort carbon, plumbago, animal and vegetable tissues, and other substances . . . answer the purpose” [Bell Telephone Company 1908, 86]), Bell in 1876 invented the Centennial Liquid Transmitter, a transduction device curiously akin to a speaking trumpet mounted on top of a liquidfilled vessel (99)— or, for that matter, to the central element of the Leal brothers’ contraption: a speaking tube sticking out from a glass-encased container of liquid, stretching across to a converter that features a bit of stovepipe on its top and another tube leading into it from a kettledrum made of a skin-covered china washbowl!36

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Different from earlier, more agitated mediumistic performances such as those pioneered by the Fox sisters themselves, trumpet mediums were characteristically passive, their mouths closed, their bodies mere conduits (tympanic membranes?) for the transmission of spiritual emanations that would take on audible form in and through the trumpet. Connor suggests the switchboard operator as a social model: the passive female human element throwing switches within increasingly widening telephonic communication circuits. Yet while eminently plausible, this analogy may not go far enough. Instead, direct voice mediums became a human adjunct to what increasingly seems to have been envisioned as a technology very much akin to the transduction components of the telephone or phonograph—a membrane and electrolytic conduit of variable impedance connected to a battery-powered circuit rather than an operator in her own right. While spirit trumpets were manufactured in a variety of forms and designs (such as telescoping ones for busy traveling mediums), many of them bore more than an incidental resemblance to the Victrola horn or, for that matter, the horns sticking out the window of 2132 North Fairmount Avenue in 1908. Had écue’s voice and its material instrumentalities—nambe erí (the flesh of the drum) and Illamba’s llin—found a new medium for its sonic propagation? Might the Leals’ contraption perhaps even have provided a worldly storage for its numinous energies? If so, such convergences alone would tell us little. Surely, ideas about the electroacoustic transduction of numinous energies into the sublunar phenomenal sphere were swirling around in the social worlds that the Ejamba of North Fairmount Avenue, to some degree, shared with the Wizard of Menlo Park. Still, as in phonography, so in Spiritualism and Abakuá: with Friedrich Kittler (1999, 55), we might say that “technological media guarantee the similarity of the dead to stored data by turning them into the latter’s stored products.” Yet such mediated guarantees aren’t technological but social outcomes. They are the result of variable social agreements about which sonic phenomena can be taken to indicate what forms of presence. In fact, they became thinkable as transparent technological achievements only after thorough social routinization had naturalized them as part of an auditory habitus. Initially at least, such “guarantees” very much depended on the growth and social diffusion of a technological imaginary concerning what machines could and could not do in the world (such as speak with the voices of the dead—or, for that matter, the voice of écue). Put differently, perceptions of audio technologies as conduits for the numinous were contingent on the increasing social pervasiveness of semiotic ideologies that metapragmatically regimented how specific types of mediated sonic data

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output could be indexically construed as iterable forms of collectively salient semiotic input—rather than sheer variations of meaningless noise or individual auditory hallucinations.37 No matter the extent to which analog recordings—such as the traces left on wax cylinders by a stylus moved by electroacoustic transduction— do carry the material traces of an original event (Rothenbuhler and Peters 1997; Kittler 1999), indexical recognition, as we might say with Keane (2003, 419; cf. Keane 2008, 2018), comes at a price: it needs to be furnished with socially routinized instructions so as to occur at all. Such rules of recognition for technologically mediated indices of the numinous were, of course, proliferating in luxurious heterogeneity in late nineteenth-century urban America. By the time the Philadelphia North American journalist described the Leal brothers’ curious apparatus, the use of speaking tubes for religious purposes was no longer particularly new. Already in 1860, the New York Times had reported on a local church’s adoption of a megaphonic device involving tubes presumably much like those depicted in the photographs in the 1908 Philadelphia North American.38 But while it’s hard to guess from the journalist’s account how exactly the Leal brothers’ sound system functioned and to what degree it was electrified,39 it’s not at all unimaginable that the pair may have been engaging in their own brand of enchanted engineering. At the very least, they seem to have managed to convince a social collectivity (of what size we don’t know) that their contraption activated “the echo”/el écue in a way some of its hearers found believable. In doing so, they might have fought to overcome the same barriers to the willing suspension of disbelief that early pioneers of electroacoustic media struggled with. Sticking speaking trumpets or phonograph tubes out your window is one thing. Convincing others of the numinous immediacy of the sounds projected from them would have been another. After all, as Sterne (2003, 308) puts it, “any medium requires a modicum of faith in the social relations that constitute it.” This is an issue that pertains to contemporary Abakuá rituals just as much as it would have pertained to the Leals’ contraption in 1908, precisely because it has its bearing on any socially meaningful form mediation. Could you or I, with a bit of practice, apply a piece of bamboo to a friction drum and make it emit sounds closely approximating écue’s awesome uyó? You bet we could. But would such exercises yield more than fairly meaningless, perhaps even debased, replications of an “original” sound? Just as my singing of a Verdi aria, however well executed, will not substitute for the scratchy excess of the best turn-of-the-twentieth-century analog recordings of Caruso’s voice, the copy will remain haunted by the original—or, and this

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is the crucial point, an idea of it. But this idea is one that, as Sterne (2003) persuasively argues, only became thinkable as the basis for an ontology of mediation once Western listeners became accustomed to the notion that there could be an “original sound” absent the potential for its artificially mediated reproduction across space and time.40 The very notion of sonic “fidelity” betrays a social absence of faith in the medium. And in this sense, the challenge the Leals might have faced was not whether their technology faithfully rendered the sound of écue’s voice or not. It was to ensure that their sacramental actions believably collapsed into each other what Charles Sanders Peirce might have called the “interpretant” with its “representamen”: the idea of écue’s voice and the sonic vibrations emerging from the tubes, trumpets, and other gadgetry as they affect the human sensorium. To reiterate Sterne’s important point, just as the sonic impact of écue’s voice will register as a mere drone among uninitiated bystanders at contemporary Abakuá rituals, so can early audio technologies in no way be said to have capitalized on mere technologically achievable mimesis. What people heard on Edison’s tinfoil recordings or, for that matter, over Bell’s first telephones was largely noise. That they actively forged a culture of hearing in which copy and original could become habitually understandable as “naturally” commensurate, even equivalent in the strong sense, has now been duly forgotten as history, as Bourdieu might have put it. But such forgetting wasn’t a process of fading or attrition, nor was it a mere response to improved technological means. It was “cultural work.”41 What stands at the threshold of such forgetting are icons such as RCA’s Nipper—the faithful dog not just listening for, but being hailed by, “His [dead] Master’s Voice” emanating from a Victrola horn (figure 8). Nipper’s quizzical look notwithstanding, the very image reminds us just how much investment of belief was necessary to cross the threshold beyond which Edison’s phonograph (or even its acoustically much-improved successors) really did come to convey the recorded copy’s permanent fidelity to the hitherto evanescent “original.” What a triumph for a correspondence theory of representational truth this was! But what a hollow victory, at one and the same time. If my conjectures are right, it’s this very threshold at which the technology the Leal brothers installed at 2132 North Fairmount Avenue must be situated. The emerging American social faith in technological “fidelity,” the Leals’ experiments with technologically enhancing what members of Abakuá nowadays call la fabricación, and their potentially electrifying la mecánica of sounding écue’s voice would have been part and parcel of one and the same “structure of the conjuncture” (Sahlins 1981) between two

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Figure 8. “His Master’s Voice”: Nipper, an iconic trademark of RCA.

different historical streams and semiotic systems. That early phonograph companies would have adorned their logos with recording angels (the Christian dream figure of communicative immediacy; cf. Peters 1999, 74– 80) or faithful dogs listening to dead masters (Hegel’s abject animal bondsman affirming his lord mastery even beyond the grave) were integral to a “dialectics of ensoniment”—and not just because capitalist entrepreneurs sought to foster the fetishization of a novel commodity. On the contrary, different from Marx’s industrial machinery and dancing tables—dead labor acting on the living—the phonographic machinery pressed the voices of the dead into the service of the living not by concealing a reality beyond appearances but by enveloping both in a cloud of paradoxical undecidability. In this sense, the technology itself took on a good number of the ambiguities usually ascribed to ritual masks. Ever since Lévy-Bruhl, the anthropology of ritual masking has uneasily (and often quite illogically) vacillated between suppositions that the wearer of a mask is either believed to undergo an actual transformation into the numinous presence the mask is supposed to bring into world, or that maskers and/or their audiences are well aware that masquerades are based in histrionics and the kind of pious suspension of disbelief they maintain in the course of masked performances (Napier 1986; Pernet 1992). As Henry Pernet (1992) rightly argues, both horns of this somewhat artificial dilemma are ultimately traceable to modernistic

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Western imputations—namely, on the one hand, the kind of radical alterity of non-Western thought that E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1937) had sought to empirically refute, and, on the other, the unwarrantedly charitable suggestion that at least the smarter natives are well aware of the “symbolic” or, at best, iconic nature of the performatively instantiated illusion. If so, however, might not the necromantic frisson cultivated in the writings of early commentators on and promoters of phonography bespeak exactly the same dilemma? Did American and European hearers of the phonograph really believe that they were hearing the dead, we might ask—or did they willingly collude in crafting a set of collective representations suggesting the equivalence of the audible copy to the absent original? Forever inscribed into and conjurable at will from the analog grooves cut into a wax cylinder by transductive force, had what Peirce (1940, 249) called “the man sign” become a function of the technical reproducibility of its traces left in a suitably pliable material? Was hearing believing? To spell it out, was early phonography a modernistic acoustic mask? By the same token: might not Ejamba Leal have perfectly understood what was at stake in phonographic re-presentation? Different from their American contemporaries, the Leals—whether they had been exposed to phonographic technologies back in Cuba or not—might have seen nothing intrinsically mysterious or surprising in “tympanic transduction” or analog recording. This would have been so precisely because Abakuá ritual had revolved around this principle (or become understood in its terms) ever since the members of the Cabildo de los Carabalí Bricamó Ápapa Efí managed to swear in the first Cuban chapter of Abakuá in 1836. While they may well have come to appreciate, and possibly capitalize on, the mystical charge Edisonian technology had acquired within their American host society (and among contemporary Cuban elites back home as well), the Leals might well have perceived analog sound technology as a fairly straightforwardly rational enhancement of the means to the end of sacred immediation. If so, this would have been because the multiple human and material media activated, harnessed to, and fused with one another in the course of a baroco constitute what I have earlier called a complex biotechnology that does not represent but rather facilitates the emanation of pure presence. Transducing écue’s voice from one ontological sphere (the waters where it “lives”) to another—the cuarto fambá from which it emerges and the isaroco which it sonically envelops—so curiously parallels the telephonic and phonographic transduction of the human voice by electroacoustic means that the Leals may well have immediately grasped these technologies’ “poietic” potential.42 If, to reiterate Brown’s (2003a) felicitous phrase, the “physical

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space of the temple” and its ritual personnel are merely a conduit through which the voice “maintains its relationship to the world,” and if it is écue itself that enlists the agency of men born over the drum skin in order to give birth to new ecória ñene abakuá, then we arrive at a point where harnessing a “found” (but already amply enchanted) technology to the propagation of the acoustic mask that is écue could have made eminent sense. Just as any contemporary alleyway in Havana is transformed into the embarcadero of Usagaré in the course of a baroco, so might the vicinity of 2132 North Fairmount Avenue have been enveloped and thus transformed into an instantiation of Enllenisón by “the echo’s”/écue’s “Whoo hoo” (or uyó, depending on interpretation) of the Leal brothers’ sacred machinery. Assuming that the Leals did employ electroacoustic technology to transduce écue’s voice, would they have shared in their American contemporaries’ ambivalently reverent investments in Edisonian media? This, of course, is anyone’s guess, and I’ve already indicated that I don’t necessarily think so. Still, spinning my conjectures—and this chapter—to a conclusion, it remains to be asked for what reasons they might have taken over elements of the sonic ideologies of their immediate social environment. Robert Lowie (1959; as cited in Brady 1999, 31) offers an anecdote about the effects—or lack thereof—of Clark Wissler’s paeans to Edisonian technology among the Blackfeet that may shed limited light on this final hypothetical question. [Wissler] had procured some phonograph record from the lips of an aged Blackfoot, and by way of making conversation, enlarged on the wonderful ability of the man who invented this marvelous apparatus. The old man would have none of this; the inventor was not a whit abler than anyone else he contended, he merely had the good fortune of having the machine, with all of its details, revealed to him by a supernatural being.

Contrary to Wissler himself, his elderly informant, or so it seems, felt no need to fetishize the mysteries of a “modernity” that neither dazzled nor impressed him much. If technological innovations are bestowed on those who realize them by supernatural agencies through dreams or visions, for instance, then that’s how the phonograph he was asked to speak into had come into the world. Techne and poiesis collapse into each other. Means and ends have become coextensive. The mediator that refurnishes the world has vanished into the furniture. So it may have been the case in the Leal brothers’ Temple of the Ancient Grace. The medium would have been the message—and vice versa.

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But this is as far as my conjectures can take us. In the end, at any rate, the Leals’ technoreligious experiments remained fruitless—at least as far as I can tell. Nothing socially enduring ever came of their efforts. As everywhere else—excepting the three Cuban port cities of Havana, Matanzas, and Cárdenas—attempts at transplanting Abakuá’s organizational format and mode of reproduction failed. As in Spain, North Africa, Fernando Po, or South Florida, and other sites to which the political dislocations of the Cuban anticolonial struggle may have propelled late nineteenth-century obonécues, the Leals’ Philadelphia potencia (if it was that) faded away, never achieving the stage where holding a baroco ninllao, and so birthing and authorizing independent daughter cells, became possible. But if I’m right in surmising that their elaborate contraption fused Abakuá ritualism with state-of-the-art electroacoustic technology, this may tell us quite a bit about the rationality, indeed the modernity, of Abakuá, and the irrationality, indeed the multiply enchanted nature, of the auditory regimes that Bell, Edison, and others helped usher in at the turn of the twentieth century. If for a time écue’s voice did in fact ring out from the Leals’ trumpets onto North Fairmount Avenue, perhaps we could do better than treat this as a curious episode in the history of the public reception of electroacoustic technology or, for that matter, in the history of the acoustic mask that is écue. More could be said about how audio-electric technologies have changed the world since 1908. But possibly, the lasting irony is that while sonic analog media have virtually vanished from the Western world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Leals’ attempts at technoritual innovation never made a lasting impact on the fabricación and mecánica by which contemporary members of Abakuá continue to transmit écue’s voice across space and time.

Chapter 5

Thinking with the Cajón pa’ los Muertos about Historicist Knowledge and Its Conditions of Impossibility Ño Carlos is in a foul mood. “Que cosa de pinga!” he fumes, squarely facing the drummers. “Que barbaridad! Tocar rumba a mi oricha. Es una falta de respeto.” Then he asks, “Y quien es el?”1 pointing toward Tata Francisco, who until a few minutes ago had been dancing with as much agility as his crippled leg allowed for. The drummers now cease playing and look somewhat annoyed at Carmen, the hostess of the ceremony for which they had been hired. Alas, no help is to be expected from her, since Ño Carlos now angrily wags his finger at her—or rather at her body, which she shares for the time being with Tata Francisco, who has taken possession of her and is now getting angry himself. “Who told you to stop the music?” he mumbles in bozal, the thick ritual register thought to reflect the mangling of Spanish phonology and grammar by native speakers of African languages. Tata Francisco, of course, speaks bozal and limps because he is a dead African slave who in life had been maimed by his master as punishment for running away. As a congo, he enjoys a style of liturgical drumming close to the fast and energetic rhythm of Guaguanco. Not so Ño Carlos. Having arrived at a later point in the ceremony, his indignation and surprise become clear once we realize that he is a dead priest of Yemayá, expecting to find himself at a Lucumí tambor (I am told he’s made that mistake before). Not only does he resent the style of drumming, so inappropriate to the stately presence of the deities he worshipped in life. He might also, or so I ask myself, be bothered by the presence of spirits of the dead at what he thinks is a ceremony for the oricha—something practitioners of Regla de Ocha strenuously try to avoid, since it can portend all kinds of tragic outcomes. But of course, Ño Carlos himself has been dead for about one hundred years! This awkward situation might not have been thinkable thirty years ago.

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It’s the product of a novel ritual formation known today as cajón pa’ los muertos (after the characteristic use of a box drum and its focus on spirits of the dead). The cajón, as some argue, emerged in Havana in the course of Cuba’s Special Period—and it has finally broken down the previous boundaries internal to a heterogeneous formation of ideologically parallel but practically long-intertwined streams of religious tradition.2 But this isn’t what I want to address here. Instead, I would like to use the episode recounted just now as a device to illuminate the possibility, or perhaps the necessity, of submitting Western forms of historicism to the kind of anthropological analysis that, for the past forty years or so, our discipline has successfully trained on non-Western forms of establishing what J. G. A. Pocock (1962) rather felicitously called “past-relationships.” What I will try to argue is that—much as anthropology can’t afford to rid itself of the nowadays well-established impulse to historicize—we need to recognize that how we have brought a historical dimension into our work remains beholden, not just methodologically but epistemologically, to the terms of a set of North Atlantic particulars that have paraded as human universals since the second half of the eighteenth century (Palmié and Stewart 2016, 2019). To this end, I shall enlist the help of spirits like those of Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos.3 I do so not just because nothing brings out positivism (historical or other) more quickly than talk about ghosts, as Françoise Meltzer (1994) so nicely puts it, but also because Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos’s misunderstandings of their present get me to three issues right at the heart of the matter: first, the constitutive nature of radical temporal alterity or anachronism for any form of historicism; second, a notion of accountability that defines properly individuated human subjects, or to use the more appropriate forensic term, persons, as authors of their actions; and third, a highly specific regime of evidentiality that underwrites what Reinhart Koselleck (2004) calls the “fiction of facticity” of properly historical data as indexical signs of past eventuation. Once taken together, these three—or so I would argue—operate as key guarantees of the idea of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 29) calls “historicity 1” and glosses as the “materiality of the sociohistorical process.”4 It’s this idea that I intend to submit to what David Bloor (1991) and Bruno Latour (1993, 2005), albeit in different ways, conceive of as symmetrical forms of scrutiny. In line with Bloor, my goal is thus not to explain or otherwise rationalize the seemingly odd fashion in which the past is “presentized” when the spirits of the dead interact with the living in Afro- Cuban possession rituals; rather, I want to bracket this classic anthropological maneuver and instead focus on how properly disciplined historiography

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“historicizes” the past. While we certainly could describe what knowledge is produced on the grounds of which assumptions in the contemporary Cuban cajón pa’l muerto, my concern is a different one—namely, can we come up with similar descriptions in the case of Western historiography? At the same time, I want to go beyond the “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge. Taking a page from Latour, I shall argue for a view of historicism as a form of knowledge that literally produces its own imponderabilia and aporia. These become visible as such in particular clarity when we confront “historicity 1” and its guarantees with the mumbling and ranting of the likes of Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos.

The Weltanschauung of Modernity That said, what exactly is going on in the ethnographic vignette I just recounted? Clearly, Tata Francisco, Ño Carlos, and I (or, for that matter, the other participants) inhabited an extraordinary moment of temporal hybridization effected by the copresence of agents belonging to three different positions along a chronological continuum. Setting aside the problem that the two spirits involved seem to have entertained different notions about the nature of the event—they understood themselves as acting within different religious traditions, as it were—we might still say that their encounter posed a problem akin to those that Pocock called “problems that produce historians.” Only that far from producing the sense of discontinuity vital to the emergence of this species of thinker, it did nothing of the sort. Obviously, no one rose up to say, “Wait a minute—you don’t belong here! You’re dead. Go back to your finite province of meaning.” Yet Pocock’s insights into the origins of historical problem awareness notwithstanding, we still might ask, Why should this event even have engendered such reactions— except on the basis of a highly specific semiotic ideology that constructs certain segments of the phenomenologically given world (but not others) as indices of an ultimately absent reality: that of the past?5 As Marc Bloch (1953, 55) pointed out long ago, historical knowledge is knowledge from “tracks”—the marks “perceptible to the senses, which some phenomenon inaccessible to the senses has left behind.” Carlo Ginzburg (1983) thus speaks of an “evidentiary paradigm” informing modern historiography. He sees its origins in hunting, medical diagnostics, divination, and other semiotic endeavors aiming to elucidate current states of affairs by scouring the surface of the present world for signs of transcendence—in this case, past eventuation. To borrow Michael Oakeshott’s (1933) terminology, such efforts are contingent on an organization of the phenome-

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nology of the experienced world “sub specie preteritorum.” Viewed thus, symptoms of the past abound, awaiting diagnostic interpretation. In principle, everything can be put under a past-referring description. The tree that grows outside the window was once an acorn. That you’re reading this book may be taken to indicate that someone wrote it. The sheer existence of the University of Chicago’s architecture might be held to bespeak the past expenditure of human labor.6 And so forth. All this is potential evidence for past eventuation.7 Still, a sign is only a sign if it’s recognized as such. As Collingwood’s (1993, 281) reminds us, “Question and evidence, in history, are correlative.” How exactly the surface of the contemporary world is to be carved up in regard to what Arthur Danto (1965) might call candidates for past-referring predicates is far from self-evident.8 As I will argue, this question points toward what, in semiotic terms, we might call a metapragmatic regimentation of indexicality characteristic of historicist practices of knowledge production. And this is where anachronism and temporal heterogeneity enter the picture with particular force—once we try to leave the world where, ceteris paribus, Trouillot’s North Atlantic Universals continue to hold sway. As Trouillot (1995, 15) points out, “pastness” is a position—and it’s the hallmark of historicist forms of consciousness that such positionality becomes premised on perceptions of temporal heterogeneity: the imaginative imputation of a distance between an objectifiable “then” and an equally objectifiable “now” conceived of as two unambiguously specifiable points in a serial continuum of linear time. “Historical evidence,” says Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 238), “is produced by our capacity to see something that is contemporaneous with us—ranging from practices, humans, institutions, and stone-inscriptions to documents—as a relic of another time or place.” This capacity, however, rests on an epistemology precipitated by, and predicated on, the kind of linear, irreversible time established in the course of the “temporalization of history” (Koselleck 2004) in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As Trouillot (2002, 850) puts it, the moment involved “a fundamental shift in regimes of historicity, most notably the perception of a past radically different from the present, and the perception of a future that becomes both attainable (because secular) and yet indefinitely postponed (because removed from eschatology).”9 What this shift opened up was a space of experience and a horizon of expectations that we continue to inhabit. The effect is akin to what Ernest Gellner (1973) once likened to a “self-writing game”: we know that the present constellation reflects a succession of moves; but since we are aware that some moves change the rules of the game itself, we can neither predict future outcomes nor really

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reconstruct with any certainty how past moves led to the present situation. All we know is that recurrence is highly improbable, stable rules are suspect, and linear succession is inevitable. The name of Gellner’s self-writing game is history—and to agree to play it is to be a historicist. As Karl Mannheim (1952, 85) wrote in 1924, “Historicism, and historicism alone . . . today provides us with a world view of the same universality as that of the religious world view of the past.”10 As Mannheim clearly saw, this had nothing to do with any advancement, methodological or other, in the discipline of history. On the contrary, it is not historiography which brought us historicism, but the historic process through which we lived has turned us into historicists. Historicism, therefore is a Weltanschauung, and at the present stage of the development of consciousness it is characteristic of Weltanschauung that it should not only dominate our inner reactions and our external responses, but also determine our forms of thought. Thus, at the present stage, science and scientific methodology, logic, epistemology, and ontology are all moulded by the historicist approach. (85–86)

If Mannheim’s diagnosis was right—and it certainly held true for the educated Western bourgeoisie at the time—then we have all become historicists by now, swimming in history like fish in water. Ever ready to measure contemporary worlds by reference to the degree to which they differ from the past, as historicists we conceive of our future in relation to the degree that our present actions are, at least ideally, unencumbered by what we have come to consider—or consign to—the realm of the past (Latour 1993, 67–72).11 As Mannheim makes clear, the temporal regime he analyzed at the moment when it had fully come to saturate not only intellectual debate but ordinary Western common sense was in itself a historical phenomenon. Yet while it may have held for a good two centuries, it was—somewhat ironically—thrown into disarray in the waning twentieth century. Here I’m not so much talking about the demise of the secular eschatology of the world revolution which, alas, never came. Instead, such a state of affairs became apparent piecemeal and in a variety of syndromic constellations— such as in the emergence of a vast amount of discursive production about “memory” as a metahistorical category; the increasing entanglement of historical and juridical regimes of knowledge production in the case of truth and reconciliation commissions and the North American Reparations Movement; or, if in a different register, the kind of “spectrological” rumi-

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nations about the persistence of the past in the present inspired by Jacques Derrida (1994). All this is patently standing historicism on its head—and in the sense that any attempt to analyze why some pasts nowadays seem to resist yielding to anachronism (“that was then, it’s over now”) and instead linger and haunt the present must imply a critique of historicist conceptions of time and the metaphysical and ontological commitments such conceptions implicate us in.12

Historicism’s Undocumented Immigrants But speaking for a moment in Derridean terms: what exactly is so unsettling about the idea of time being out of (chronological) joint? Medieval Europe survived on nonlinear forms of temporality long enough to engender the Renaissance (whose understanding of time wasn’t exactly linear either). Or think of contemporary physicists, who might well scoff at the scientifically thoroughly ungrounded but eminently commonsensical Newtonianisms that Western historians regularly peddle.13 Why such investment, on the part of contemporary Western historians, in the notion of an objective (and objectifiable) past irreversably sealed off from the very present, off whose surface the trained diagnostician must nevertheless read symptoms of the absent past in the form of indexically construed “evidence” of temporal Otherness? Might not the seemingly strange proliferation of temporal hybrids nowadays sailing under rapidly multiplying labels such as haunting, unsettled pasts, historical reckoning, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or the devoir de memoire bespeak a very different “crisis of historicism”? One that paradoxically represents the result of its sucess—that is, the labors of purification expended in its name over the past two centuries or so (Latour 1993)?14 For consider this: if historicism depends on the notion that material survivals from the past can be construed as indexical signs of the past, then might we not run into the somewhat embarrassing snag that such remnants (Überreste, in the classical German historicist sense) come dangerously close in their semiotic potential to that of superstitiones in the original ecclesiastical sense (i.e., equally indexical construed signs of insufficently superseded past pagan beliefs and practices that persist in the Christian present [cf. Keane 2007])? Although we are clearly dealing with two very different projects of purification (or metapragmatic regimentation, if you will), the very notion of “spectral evidence” proffered by the likes of Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos would seem to trouble both. Which naturally brings me back to my ethnographic vignette. Might Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos help us craft an answer to this quandary?

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Perhaps not. But they do illustrate some of the issues involved in its making. Clearly, the problem isn’t so much that the archival process itself has silenced their history, rendering them undocumented aliens from the foreign country that is the past—sans papiers, as it were—and so lost to any attempt to reconstruct their life “like it really was” (von Ranke’s famous “wie es eigentlich gewesen”). To be sure, the past is full of such unevidenced dead, and I have previously tried to address the ethical and moral challenges posed by our knowledge that this is so (Palmié 2002). But this isn’t what I mean here, and it’s not really what’s at stake in this particular instance. For consider this: I might go and scour the records of the slave trade from western Central Africa, pore over plantation account books and baptismal records in Cuban parish archives, and who knows? I might find a slave shipped to Havana from Luanda, designated as a congo and given the baptismal name Francisco. There may be record of his running away and the punishment he received when recaptured. He may appear on the list of incapacitated slaves, and so forth. Would this change a thing? The problem clearly lies elsewhere: exceedingly well-documented individuals like Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Napoleon, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Albert Einstein (to name just a few) have not only continued to communicate with the living in Spiritist circles but have—much to the dismay of professional bibliographers—continued to author copious writings long after the end of their earthly existence.15 Would the information gleaned from their messages lead historians to enlarge the corpus of evidence for their lives and times and so, for example, acknowledge that in the afterlife, Washington had become an ardent opponent of slavery, the very institution he himself had helped write into the US Constitution? It’s doubtful. Or imagine Jefferson dictating his regrets for ever having penned the crucial phrase about a “wall of separation” between church and state to an entranced scribe! Although (given the 2010 Texas school board decisions) K–12 school history curricula all over the United States hang in the balance (Shorto 2010; Birnbaum 2010; McKinley 2009, 2010), would we not suspect such evidence to be tainted by present issues and concerns? Of course, the historian may well accept all this as some kind of evidence. But not for what it purports to index—namely, Washington’s changing his mind about slavery some half century after his death, or Jefferson’s having second thoughts about a secular state more than two hundred years after its founding. Neither is the matter settled by arguing that we simply can’t be sure of the reality of Tata Francisco’s and Ño Carlos’s presence—as denizens of the past—in our present. In fact, this is a pseudoproblem quickly dispensed

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with. I, for one, am not troubled at all by entertaining a healthy dose of skepticism regarding the notion that Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos were as real that evening in Habana Vieja as, say, the box drum that called them there. Moreover, I take courage in thinking that many of the participants in that ritual occasion would have agreed. Not unlike conscientious Western historians, practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion do not accept on mere face value evidence of the past—in this case, the reality of the presence of dead people. Much in the spirit of the kind of historical criticism that emerged in the seventeenth century from the scrutiny of forensic documents, they, too, probe the reliability and validity of the evidence of the past in front of their eyes. Faked possession, after all, is not uncommon. But, as in historical criticism, it’s the expectable occurrence of forgeries or unreliable witnesses that establishes the value of the “real”—truthfully indexical rather than merely iconic signs of the past. Once such criteria are satisfied—and they really are only after what often are lengthy post hoc debates—participants in Afro-Cuban rituals tend to agree that they were in the presence of denizens of the past.16 Reasonable as such stipulations and procedures may seem on their own terms, we can’t really follow them. Why? The simplest reason, in light of the foregoing, is that admitting the spirits of dead people to our present so as to give testimony of and for the past that was their life violates the principle of anachronism. The minute they arrive, they would seem to contaminate the present with the past. In something of an inversion of the historian’s cardinal sin of presentism, the unwitting backward projection of present concerns into the past, they throw the semiotics of historicism into disarray. Without temporal distance, the (present) historical sign and its (absent) referent simply collapse into each other. As a result, whatever the spirits of dead people may choose to tell us about their past lives is inadmissible on evidentiary grounds. That Tata Francisco was maimed by his master because he ran away is no historical datum—even though we know very well that slaves were maimed as punishment for doing so. From the historian’s perspective, his marked limp that evening in Havana was at best iconic, perhaps symbolic, but certainly not indexical of a past that any concrete (rather than imaginable) human being might have endured. Like protagonists in historical novels, spirits (however tangibly embodied) may be recast as fictions: ritually enacted thought experiments, if you will. We could look at them as products of some historical imaginary, even a social one, designed to work through essentially ambiguous or troubling past-relationships in the form of morally edifying fables or allegories. More charitably but somewhat illogically, Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos might be

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judged to be expressions of “popular memory” that purports to present the past but really only produces the “iconically” retrojected misrecognitions of its own present concerns.17 In either case, Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos simply can’t be taken at face value for what they purport to be—visitors from, and so immediate sources of information about, the actual past. They violate the first guarantee of the idea of “historicity 1”—the notion that there is an “actual past” back there, in the past that historians need to reconstruct as best they can through diagnostic readings of present evidence identified as indexical of now absent conditions and events. In a nutshell, any endorsement of Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos as irreducible witnesses to their own lives threatens to put historians out of business in an instant.

Agents of History No less damaging, however, is that they violate a second guarantee of the idea of “historicity 1”—namely, the postulate of the temporally coherent, skinbound, self-possessed, and self-identical human subject as the author of his or her actions—or, in a forensic sense, the individual person capable not only of exercising choice in terms of goal-directed behavior but also of shouldering responsibility for the consequences, intended or not, of those actions. This second guarantee is part and parcel of what Mary Douglas (1979) calls a highly specific accountability system hinging on a conception of personhood without which the very notion of “historical agency” becomes tenuous, to say the least. As Dame Mary (1992) notes, one of its earlier clear expressions was given by John Locke in his discussion of identity.18 Examining a whole range of fascinating cases to do with other time-transcending entities, including plants, animals, and machines, and having concluded that continuity of substance needs to be distinguished from continuity of organization, Locke considers and rejects pegging identity to the soul as separable from material embodiment.19 He then goes on to famously dismiss the prince’s soul transposed into the cobbler’s body as well as the philosophizing cat or parrot and the dull, irrational man.20 The conclusion he arrives at is that human identity can’t be grounded other than on personal terms—that is, forensically. It isn’t enough that we imagine ourselves to be the same individual from one day to the next, sleeping or waking, young or old, whole or missing a limb. It’s our capacity for reflexive self-identification coupled with, or rather upheld by, our sense of responsibility for our past actions that generates the sense of biographically coherent individual identity. We might claim that we were temporarily “beside ourselves,” “out of our

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minds.” No matter, though. A sternly individualistic accountability system will hold us responsible on the grounds of our continued forensic personhood.21 Even the thought experiment of alternating consciousness—being Plato by day, Socrates at night with no memory of preceding episodes— won’t pass Locke’s muster. Why? The answer is clear: agency and accountability must not be ambiguously distributed. No matter what you claim as your identity, then or now, either you are the personal author of your actions, or you are not.22 In the end, Locke settles on the same formula that, in a duly secularized fashion, enabled the young Fidel Castro to fling his defiant proposition “History will absolve me” in the face of the court commissioned by Fulgencio Batista. Locke, of course, was talking about the Final Judgment, “when the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open,” and all sublunar juridical conjecture about subjective states of mind would become moot. But that was fast becoming a figure of speech even then.23 Let me return here for a moment to my little ethnographic device. Clearly, unlike classic Lockean individuals, held together by a mortal frame of skin but possessed of a consciousness and memory that render them not only self-identical over time but juridically responsible for any deeds freely done or obligations freely contracted, Carmen—or Tata Francisco, if we even want to venture that distinction in the case at hand—were neither unitary selves nor temporally coherent. I’m sure Carmen learned only in the aftermath that her muerto caused trouble again, and that further encounters between Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos were to be avoided at all costs. Just think of the poor drummers, people will have told her. How would they ever know what to play if you get possessed right away and can no longer tell them what to do! That’s embarrassing, isn’t it? Next time Tata Francisco tries to come, go outside and have a smoke. Be responsible. But how could she—when she’s not herself? I know these idiots are always fighting, I can imagine her saying. But how could I keep them from doing so, when I am mounted (montado) by Tata Francisco? He enjoys his little rumba, you know? This, then, brings me back to historicism and another context of its full-blown emergence—namely, the “cultural conventions of political selflegitimation in modern nation states” (Greenhouse 1996, 2) or, in Trouillot’s (2002, 853) terms, the insertion of a specific form of subjectivity into “a particular regime of historicity and sociopolitical management.” Among other things, this entailed, as Henry Maine (1963, 163–65) famously stipulated, a move from status to contract which, not incidentally, became fully enshrined in Anglo-American forensic operationalizations of legal personhood just as the abolition of heritable slavery was being accomplished

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(though of course, plenty of “legally entailed” people such as women, children, and the mentally unsound remained in status-bound conditions [cf. Haskell 1998; Stanley 1998]).24 Such seemingly inconsequential exceptions notwithstanding, at least in the realm of legal fictions, the alienation of one’s labor power could henceforth finally and fully proceed on the terms of the socially unencumbered individual’s free will, just as the exercise of such will could guarantee one’s self-realization in a world of objects or, in a different inflection yet, the appropriation of the rewards and liabilities arising from one’s self-willed and self-embodied agency. Such a move, of course, was contingent on the kind of linear eventuation in open-ended time constitutive of historicism and, at the same time, on a specific distribution of agency and accountability in social space. Together, these defined an order which eventually became naturalized to a degree where nowadays, unstable personhood and nonindividuated agency reek of madness, unnatural dependency, or utter cultural incommensurability to most of those who have fully become engulfed by it (vigorous debates about fetal personhood, addiction, codependency, or corporate free speech notwithstanding). Now whether law became modeled after a conception of personhood ultimately arising from the transformation of a politicaleconomic and intellectual order or vice versa is a question too complex and controversial to attempt to address here.25 What counts for my present purposes is the final ascendance of the contractually capacitated, unambiguously embodied, self-aware, rationally willful, and morally self-regulating individual as the locus of historical agency. Obviously, such a being is of relatively recent vintage. Before the advent of historicism, Marx’s famous dictum that men make their history but not under conditions of their own choosing might not have made much sense, even to those devoted to the transformation of the res gestae into historiae rerum gestarum (and the plural was important!) in the very heart of Europe (Koselleck 2004; Fasolt 2004). Contrary to a prior order in which actors were largely animators rather than authors, let alone principals (in Goffman’s [1981] sense) of their contributions to the unfolding of a divine plan, the very idea of “making history” presupposes not only an essentially undetermined, open future but a multiply overdetermined (economically, legally, politically, etc.) notion of agency. Such agency is premised on a relation between authentically individual volition and the possibility of choice in the course of action. In other words, it presupposes the idea of a coincidence of principal, author, and animator in the individual subject of historical agency. Western common sense immediately recognizes this as “the way things are (barring exceptional circumstances).”26 But such

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complications introduced by sociolinguistic theory notwithstanding, this says more about the historical and cultural particularity of such “default” assumptions than about their transtemporal, panhuman validity. Joan of Arc may certainly be said to have played a historical role. But was she the subject of her agency? I’m not sure she or her contemporaries would even have understood the question. If for different reasons, to them agency was no more predicable on personally individuated volition than it was for the audiences of Greek tragedy or, for that matter, the subjects of Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) Mount Hagen ethnography.

Problematic Principals More important, perhaps, and irrespective of where we want to locate its domain of initial cultivation (philosophy, economics, or the law), the “modern” individual (and its conspecifics, rational and reasonable man) has proved to be an invasive species. Though of provincial origin (in Chakrabarty’s sense), this being and the “deep collusion between ‘history’ and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private [spheres], and the nation state” (Chakrabarty 2000, 41) on which it thrives have both come to extend themselves across much of the globe.27 Chakrabarty, for one, is keenly aware of this problem, and he devotes a whole chapter of Provincializing Europe (2000) to why, for example, the idea that the Santal Hool, a nineteenth-century Bengali insurrection, was organized under divine command might point to the limits of historicism. In particular, he takes issue with his colleague Ranajit Guha for concluding his famous interpretation of this case by writing off the fact that the rebels looked “upon their project as predicated on a will other than their own” as a “massive demonstration of self- estrangement” (Guha 1988; cited in Chakrabarty 2000, 105). “Historians,” says Chakrabarty (104), “will grant the supernatural a place in somebody’s belief system or ritual practices, but to ascribe to it any real agency in historical events will go against the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures to settle disputes about the past.”28 Bracketing Chakrabarty’s somewhat disingenuous use of the patently loaded term supernatural,29 and bracketing also the possible recourse to W. I. Thomas’s famous postulate that if a situation is defined as real, then it is real in its consequences, we might still recognize the rootedness of Chakrabarty’s historians’ objections in a specific set of North Atlantic Universals. This is so because the rise of the very idea of “historicity 1” was also tied to the emergence of a particular political project, and Guha’s invocation of self-estrangement and false consciousness amply bears this out.

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To be sure, neither Hobbes’s nor Locke’s conceptions of the nature of the parties constituent to the social contract, Hume’s enlightened skepticism about the unitary nature of the self, or Adam Smith’s mercantile theodicy had fully banished transcendental considerations from the purview of the course of human history. Still, the conception of the consciousness of history’s agents came to increasingly contract to states of interiority presumably based on a rational hedonic calculus modified by an awareness of forensic responsibility for one’s own action. At the same time, the medium for the expression of a conception of free will, once released from its Christian moorings in sin and salvation, shifted toward the rationality of what Hegel identified as civil society and the state—that is, the supraindividual union between the objective “idea” and the “personal subject that wills it.” This is, of course, Hegel’s condition of possibility for the making rather than the mere enduring of History. But it’s also the foundation of secular liberalism. Democracy, equality before the law, property rights, civic responsibility—all these would seem to flow from it, at least in theory. They are dependent on the notion that human beings are, or at least should be, not just individuals but autonomous and self- determining forensic persons: authors of their own actions who are unambiguously legible to the state and its institutions, including—we might add—the discipline of history. But again, might we not take a Latourean perspective on this and say that “we have never been authentically individual, just as our projects have never truly been predicated on a will wholly of our own”?30 It would be hard, I think, to conclusively wipe such an objection off the table. One need not attend Afro- Cuban possession rituals to see that “individuals” and their “wills,” “agency,” and “responsibility” are all highly functional fictions that underwrite a specific and historical rather than a universal and timeless order. This is an order animated by a particular rather than a universal type of agentive subject, and it is rendered intelligible by a regime of indexicality (among many possible ones) in which responsibility for present states of affairs can be assigned to the past actions of such subjects on the basis of proper evidence that they freely chose such courses of action. Little indeed seems recognizable as historical agency unless these conditions are fulfilled. To be sure, Marx never tired of denouncing individuality, free will, and contractual liberty as ideological figments serving materially specifiable class interests, and productive of characteristic forms of individual and collective self-estrangement. Still, for a number of reasons Marx isn’t the best of allies in gaining a purchase on the puzzles posed by Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos, and I doubt whether many of us would be inclined to take the above considerations beyond the point of ideological criticism. Of course, anyone

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can say: it is perfectly obvious that the “traditions of dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living—that’s precisely what rigorous historicism can liberate us from.” But who would dare to turn this around and say that historicism weighs on our brains like a nightmare? This, however, is an argument Constantin Fasolt (2004, 2005) comes close to adumbrating in positing that what Chakrabarty calls “the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures to settle disputes about the past” might themselves not so much offer a solution than indicate the root of the problem. Following a path suggested by Quentin Skinner (1969, 1970), Fasolt poses the ostensibly simple question of what might happen to our view of history if we attended less to the propositional content of historiographical utterances and more to their pragmatic functions and metapragmatic regimentation (or, in his own, more Austinian/Skinnerian terms: their illocutionary force and perlocutionary consequences). Like Skinner before him, Fasolt expresses some surprise at the fact that philosophers of history got bogged down for most of the twentieth century in sheer endless debates about how history “explains” (if at all), but rarely attended to the pragmatics of what historical explanations are supposed to “do” in the world. Skinner largely remained concerned with the implications of speech act theory and Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy for the epistemology of historical interpretation (and did so on much the same grounds as the so-called rationality debate in anthropology). But Fasolt is after something quite more radical, and his starting point lies in a distinction between history as a form of knowledge and history as a social practice—one that continuously shores up the notion of an unbridgeable gap between the present and the past while at the same time naturalizing the notion of the autonomous subject of historical agency. “So long as history is viewed as theory of the past,” he writes (Fasolt 2004, 14), “the distinction between past and present looks like a fact; the past, like an object to be studied; the study of the past, like the proper task of the historian; the evidence, like the source from which historians obtain their knowledge; and the prohibition on anachronism, like the basic point of method that keeps knowledge pure.” However, Fasolt asks: What if we took into account that the very distinction between past and present is the product of a restless proliferation of performatives whose locutionary content may well look like knowledge, but whose illocutionary force is directed toward a project of purification aiming to put the furniture of the world in a specific—shall we say historicist?— order? What if the discipline of history did not arrive on the scene après coup to merely rationalize past worlds and their relation to the present but created, or at least reordered, both from the very moment of its inception

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(including the recursive insertion of a charter of its own rationale, backdated to Thucydides or some such mythical ancestor)? “Things look different,” says Fasolt (2004, 14–15), “just as soon as it is recognized that history is also a form of action. From that perspective,” he continues, “the distinction between past and present looks like an act of self-determination by which the sovereign subject assumes her rightful place in time; the knowledge historians draw from evidence, like the means by which historians make the past lie still; and the prohibition on anachronism like marching orders for a mission to make the world safe for autonomy.” Here, the very notion of “evidence” devolves toward its matrix of origin: the forensics of modern personhood and the “particular regime of historicity and sociopolitical management,” to quote Trouillot once more, within which this form of subjectivity achieved near-global normativity. It is in the service of this regime that the so-called critical method, developing from the seventeenth century onward, has come to metapragmatically police the order of indexicality from which historians nowadays stray only at their peril.

Why Historians and Spirits Don’t Get Along There are implications of violence in all this, and not just on an epistemic level. Like Chakrabarty (2000), who worries about the compulsory historicization of local worlds in the context of a forced globalization of Western normativities,31 or Clark (1983), who similarly decries the mistranslation of premodern rural French thought worlds into the reductive sociological language of the Annales school, Fasolt speaks of historians “invading the foreign country of the past, conquering its inhabitants, subjecting them to their discipline, and annexing their possessions to the possessions of the present as any imperialist who ever sought to impose his power on colonies abroad” (2004, xviii). They do so, armed with a conception of human beings as “free and independent agents with the ability to shape their fate, the obligation to act on that ability, and responsibility for the consequences” (xvi). What they drive from purview of properly rationalized (in the Weberian sense) forms of history are the likes of Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos, particularly if they refuse to stay put in the past and instead act and speak through the bodies of present-day citizens of modern (in this case socialist) nation-states. Historians tend to do so by a double maneuver that asserts the truth of properly disciplined history by exposing the untenability (within the evidentiary canon of historicism) of other ways of establishing “pastrelationships.” These other ways of figuring forth the past thus turn, in Chakrabarty’s (2000, 112) terms, into a Derridean supplement to historicist knowledge production: enabling the ongoing operation of the discipline

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of history and its search for “proper evidence” while simultaneously (and somewhat ominously) demarcating its limits—the point beyond which historicism loses its purchase on experientially salient social worlds, and the historian his standing within the discipline. Still, and this is an important caveat, like his colleagues Clark and Chakrabarty, Fasolt isn’t after some facile relativism. It isn’t that the stories Tata Francisco might tell us about his life as a slave are “just as good as,” or could serve as an edifying supplement or corrective to, for instance, Manuel Moreno Fraginals’s (1978) magisterial but near-agentless history of Cuban slavery, as some proponents of ideas of “social memory” might argue.32 Instead, what they indicate are the limits of historicism—as an “order of things” served by the social institution of the discipline of history and serving, in turn, a historically contingent notion of personhood and distribution of agency in social space on which the (modern) world “as we know it” has come to rest. None of them call for the closing of the history departments where they earn their living; and none of them advocate—in what surely would be a curious reversal of EP’s famous misquote of Maitland—that “by and by history will have the choice of being anthropology or being nothing.”33 But all of them, I would argue, aim to open a space for what one might call an anthropology of historicism as a locally specific, if nowadays near globally diffused, contingent though seemingly inevitable—in short, culturally particular but ostensibly universal—fashion of constructing “past-relationships.” Might there be room in this space for Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos—let alone for the practices that recall them into the bodies of present citizens of the Cuban nation-state (or any other, for that matter)? Might they assist us in “re-provincializing” (in Bauman and Briggs’s [2003] terms) the semiotic regime that drove them into a conceptually “remote” (Ardener 1989) corner of a world dominated by historicism?34 As Fasolt (2005) suggests in a paper that remains unpublished, the answer might be yes. Although he doesn’t frame matters in the language of either the Edinburgh school of the sociology of science’s strong programme or Latour,35 what Fasolt comes close to here is the kind of symmetrical approach that has formed a subtext of this chapter all along. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fasolt (2005) argues that knowledge production about the past is incidental rather than essential to the service the discipline renders to the social order that sustains it. “The knowledge is never certain,” he writes. Far more important is the service historians render to the faith in human liberty on which the modern world was built. For that service

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does not require their knowledge to be sound. It does not even require that they intend to give it. All it requires is that they turn to evidence when they attempt to make their case. For every time they turn to the evidence in order to advance some historical debate, they hold a human being responsible for the evidence on which they base themselves.

This, however, is not just any human being. It’s the kind of forensic person that arose in tandem with historicism and is stabilized by its operations, and it’s clear where the kind of reductionism Chakrabarty worries about in his attempt to salvage the Santals’ concept of selfhood and agency would inevitably find its point of entry—namely, at the moment such attributions of responsibility break down. But Fasolt (2005) goes further down the road toward commensuration. From this point of view the study of history can be regarded as the performance of a ritual. The ritual is sacred. Its purpose is to maintain the faith in the proposition that human beings are free and independent agents. That proposition is built into the foundations of the modern world. It cannot be allowed to fall into doubt without threatening social order. It cannot be proved by reason or experience. But it can be protected against the possibility of doubt by the performance of an appropriate ritual. The study of history is such a ritual.

As such, he continues, it shares eminent commonalities not just with the anamnestic functions of the Roman Catholic Eucharist but with its doctrinary logic as well. If the priest’s action not just iconically re-calls the Last Supper but indexes the real presence of Christ in the Host, the historian’s action similarly not just re-calls the modern person’s free will into his or her text but indexically re-instantiates it in the present. Both, it would seem, do so by foisting their ritual action on semiotically intensely charged parts of their present phenomenal world (so charged, of course, by their own ritual activities). And both achieve felicity on the basis of socially distributed convictions and their attendant modes of doubt (of course, Catholic theologians have debated the supreme mystery of transubstantiation for centuries). If so, however, what might keep us from analogizing the historians’ role to that of the drummers in my (by now seriously overtaxed) ethnographic device? Could we, to spell it out, call these drummers historians? And if the answer were yes, would this tell us anything worth knowing about the respective disciplines to which Afro-Cuban ritual drummers and academic historians subscribe?

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The issue, or so it seems at first glance, would hinge on the contextual “conventions” of legibility (in Skinner’s terms), or “rules of recognition,” that might afford Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos citizenship in the modern world and the historicist accountability system that regulates the conditions of its intelligibility. But maybe they don’t aspire to such. While perhaps occupying the role of dangerous supplements (specters, if you will) within the representational economy of disciplined history, they have no intrinsic truck with it, standing outside looking in, as it were. All historicism can offer them is to banish them to a shady existence—from where they nevertheless continue to haunt history in the form of a past that doesn’t go away because it refuses historical objectification. But that’s the historian’s problem—not that of Afro- Cuban ritual drummers.

Why Worry about the Past? As my ethnographic device announced right from the start, Tata Francisco’s and Ño Carlos’s presence in the present was the product of ritual activity— call it a conjuring with the past rather than a properly disciplined representation of it, if you will. Nor was the aim of the procedure to attain truthful knowledge about the past. A cajón is held and appreciated for all kinds of reasons: for one thing, not unlike academic historians, drummers earn their living that way—though the former do so in authoring representations of the past, while the latter create the conditions for it to present itself. But there are other parties involved. Patrons of cajones may sponsor such ceremonies in order to renew or improve personal relationships with spirits of dead people who demand their attention and whose blessings they desire. The mediums in turn cultivate lifelong relations with the dead, periodically lending their bodies to the past, which becomes materially present when a spirit mounts (montar) them; such relationships then evolve in a history of mutual recognition and co-constitution.36 Some of the attendees will expect spirits to offer advice in regard to personal problems or difficult decisions; others will say they attend cajones pa’ los muertos because they enjoy the music and dancing, much like we might say we enjoy reading a particularly well-written historical monograph. Yet others may have come simply because it’s free entertainment, because they live across the street and can’t concentrate on the TV novela due to the din of the drums, or because they want a taste of the caldoza (soup) that’s invariably dished out in the aftermath of a cajón. In any case, the past that Tata Francisco or Ño Carlos present would seem to come unsolicited, if you will. It’s the baggage they carry as they seek recognition from the living and, in turn, recognize

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the various desires and motivations on account of which the living seek their company.37 But by and large, picking up a historical monograph from a library shelf may be driven by roughly comparable motivations, and may engender roughly similar outcomes. And if I read Fasolt correctly, this is exactly what is to be expected. If the production of knowledge about the past is incidental to the services that history renders to the world “as we know it,” why should it be different in a world where historiography coexists with spirit possession? For make no mistake here: given the nature of Cuba’s educational system, there’s no doubt that all the participants in the ethnographic scenario on which I hung this chapter went through a (thoroughly materialistic) education in Cuban and world history. Of course, we might settle for a solution dividing attendance of spirit possession rituals qualitatively from the casual perusal of the latest biography of Abraham Lincoln or a new scholarly interpretation of the causes of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48) so as to salvage the rationality of historicism (and its rituals) in contrast to other practices of engaging the past. Yet if so, would we not still have to concede that different from purely individual fantasies, dreams, or spontaneous remembrances (right or wrong, by whoever’s standard), any ritual form must be premised on collective conditions under which it becomes recognizable and, even more important, iterable as such, across various instantiations? What is at stake in both instances are socially imaginable worlds produced by specific knowledge practices that configure the types of semiotic data that may enter into their canons of verification. Will Tata Francisco demand his cigar and a big swig of rum when he arrives the next time? Will Ño Carlos become upset again when he hears the wrong rhythms played to his oricha? Chances are good. That’s what they do because of who they were. Notions of realism play a role in both instances. But they have their limits. Write a high school textbook representing Abraham Lincoln as a die-hard racist who would have happily endorsed slavery if he could have saved the Union, and who busily explored locations in Central America and the Caribbean to which the emancipated might be deported, and you’ll see what I mean. Just as the contemporary American secularist might worry over the Texas school board’s revisions when it comes to the faith of the Founding Fathers, so practitioners of Afro- Cuban religion worry about the truth of the utterances of the likes of Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos. In both cases, matters revolve not so much around issues of falsifiability (though they do that too). Instead, they revolve around what can be recognized as history or spirit possession. And they come down to what constitutes a proper instance of a history textbook, and what constitutes a proper instance of

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a spirit who has taken over a human body (Irvine 1982). In either case, however, the underlying concern is not a socially unencumbered notion of truth or factuality. Rather, it’s what any answer to such questions might mean for the world “as we know it.” The “hardness of facts,” Richard Rorty (1991, 80) reminds us, is first and foremost a reflection of a social consensus among those who will henceforth live with the truths so produced. No matter, then, that in my tired old ethnographic device, the conventional guarantees of Trouillot’s “historicity 1” flew out the window; no matter that chronology melted down into an amalgam of past and present; that personhood disintegrated; that agency became diffuse; that ostensible evidence of the past now seemed to point toward the present; or that, much as in the case of the Santal Hool, improbable principals and authors came to animate people’s actions: we still were dealing with socially distributed versions of the past, and ones that were open to no less than social dispute and conditional social ratification. All this proves is Trouillot’s basic point: although some of us find the idea of historicity 1 good to think with, all we will ever know is historicity 2: the past in its inevitably mediated form, for better or for worse. That said, then: do we really need to take this instance of incommensurability between historicism and its multiple and multifarious Others as an irrefutable invitation to reductionism? As an anthropologist, I don’t think so. And Fasolt’s rather sacrilegious intervention—launched from within his discipline rather than mine—would seem to underscore my hunch. Obviously, no less than any historian, the participants in a cajón pa’l muerto and the spirits whom they conjure engage in illocutionary acts, the felicity conditions of which are based in the contextual legibility of the performatives they enunciate. But can the perlocutionary effects of the one be brought into any alignment with those of the other? That, it would seem, depends both on how we configure the field of what we might call the historical and on how we conceive of the historical enterprise itself. If to historicize is to ritualize—no matter what particular set of assumptions about the world is served by doing so—then there’s no reason to write off Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos, the Santal Thakur, Joan of Arc’s angels, or indeed the Franklins, Washingtons, Einsteins, or Jeffersons dictating their posthumous messages to their mediums as irrational delusions awaiting proper “anthropologization,” as Chakrabarty might put it. They all may serve different social mandates and rationalities. That, or so it seems, is the fate of those whose lives are “in the past.” As Walter Benjamin might put it, the dead are at the mercy of the living and their struggles over the past. But for precisely that reason, the spirits of dead

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slaves and priests of Afro-Cuban religions are no less constitutive of socially inhabitable and legible present and future worlds than the Texas school board’s invocations of the faith (or agnosticism) of the framers (authors!) of the Constitution of the United States. Given that a generation of Americans may now be taught to inhabit a world where “Made by God” plaques affixed to Kodak-worthy spots at the rim of the Grand Canyon are becoming a distinct possibility, I have no problem whatsoever in thinking that I observed a Congolese slave and a dead priest of Yemayá arguing over the style of drumming appropriate to their presence in early twenty-first-century Havana. On the contrary: although I don’t know what became of Carmen, the host compromised by the spirits she entertained that evening, she has my full and unqualified sympathy.

Chapter 6

Thinking with Otanes about Mid-Twentieth-Century American Anthropology Nos itaque qui fruimur et ultilimur aliis rebus, res aliquae sumus. (We, however, who enjoy and use other things, are some kind of things ourselves.) Saint Augustine, De doctrina christiana 1:22

There was a time in our discipline when we thought we knew how to talk about subjects and objects, people and things, and the use the former made of the latter, materially or imaginatively.1 This may no longer so be so. As anthropology has come to undo its own intellectual legacies— Christian, Cartesian, Hegelian, and what have you—“matter” has come to matter in largely unanticipated ways. This clearly isn’t just a default question arising from the belated realization that subjectivity isn’t all that it was once vaunted to be, as Foucault and others have told us. Nor is it merely an issue that relates to a newfound interest in the non- or posthuman (e.g., Cerullo 2009; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 2011). It’s a question that cuts to the core of a discipline that has long staked its claims on its capacity to illuminate worlds in which apparently irrational beliefs appear to blur the conceptual bright lines that modern Western ontological predications tend to draw, as we have seen in chapter 2, between subjects and objects, agents and patients, people and things (not always consistently, to be sure). The problem itself is by no means new. Largely inspired by E. E. EvansPritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), the socalled rationality debate of the 1960s and 1970s centered on whether worlds whose furniture, for instance, included agentive forces such as mangu could be described as possessing a rationality of their own. As we have seen, it was EP’s merit to have argued that such worlds could be shown to have their

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internal logical consistency and, yes, rationality.2 Rather than coming to a genuine conclusion, the debate simply fizzled out in the 1980s—not, however, without having generated surrogate solutions in, for instance, symbolic interpretations (statements such as “Twins are birds” or “Cucumbers are oxen” are true once subjected to the right kinds of hermeneutics), or in a resurgent universalism based, by and large, in gestures of ethnographic charity executed with varying degrees of good faith. How interesting, then, that this debate has recently been retrieved from the dustbin of disciplinary history and repurposed in various manifestos that virtually invert its very terms: as Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (2007; cf. Holbraad 2009, 2012; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) have argued in a massive and deliberate reversal of the premises of the original debate, it’s “us” rather than “them” who got things wrong—and not because (as the original argument championed by Gellner, Lukes, Hollis, Horton, or even EP himself went) “we” proceed from premises capable of being backed up by scientific truth claims, and “they” don’t. Rather, or so the argument for an “ontological turn” goes, we’re the ones who have proceeded from arrogantly universalized “provincial” conceptual premises (sensu Chakrabarty 2000; cf. Trouillot 2003) which simply precluded us from comprehending worlds structured by forms of radical alterity. The result, or so I understand their argument, is that the anthropologist’s onus is now no longer to interpretatively account for statements such as “Stones are persons” but to see what transformations taking them at face value might wreak on our own conceptual apparatus. To my idea, there ought to be an alternative to this peculiar revival of the very concept of radical alterity, and I take courage from Descola’s (2013, 2014) elaborations on what he calls “ontological hybridities”—that is, the locally and historically specifiable coexistence and partial overlap of divergently composed systems of inferences about the world and its furniture. I have no investment in Descola’s by now well-known and certainly debatable terminology concerning four ideal types of such largely prediscursive modes of “ontological predication,” and I won’t refer to it in what follows. But what I would say is that the following thought experiment—in Holbraad’s (2009) very own sense—concerning an American anthropologist’s perplexities in mid-twentieth-century Cuba might throw into relief what happens when highly divergent “modes of ontological predication”3 about the nature of matter, personhood, animacy, agency, and sociality coincided in an ethnographic space neither fully modern (as Latour [1993] might have it) nor traditional in any self-evidently defensible sense.

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Bascom’s Bewilderment Let me begin with a bit of historical background and some ethnographica. In the summer of 1948, William R. Bascom was dispatched by his mentor Melville Herskovits to test the strength of African survivals in Cuba. It was an obvious choice on the part of Herskovits: Bascom had done doctoral work in British Yorubaland in 1937–38, and he was married to a Cuban woman, Berta Montero, who could be counted on to help her spouse ease his way into the field. After a brief time in Havana and some crisscrossing of the island in search of a field site, the Bascoms settled in the small town of Jovellanos in the province of Matanzas for just under four months (an entirely acceptable period, by Herskovits’s own ethnographic standards).4 It certainly was an interesting choice: contrary to Herskovits’s emphasis on rural locations (as—presumably—sites of “traditionality”), Jovellanos was a relatively new settlement that had grown out of Cuba’s belated nineteenthcentury sugar boom (it had been incorporated as a municipality only in 1866), and its economic mainstay was not just agro-industrial sugar production but the manufacture of industrial equipment. Moreover, as Bill Bascom himself noted, by the time of his fieldwork a toothpaste and cosmetics factory (Laboratórios Gravi, S.A.) had become not only one of the largest employers in its urban core but—as he had been repeatedly told (e.g., August 13 or 16, 1948)—a site of rampant mutual witchcraft suspicions among its employees. Jovellanos also already figured a Baptist and a Methodist church (both presumably American sponsored). It was, in sum, a rather peculiar place to conduct fieldwork on Cuba’s “African traditions.” Bascom’s mission was to parse out what was Roman Catholic and what was African about the religious practices he would find there; and since Herskovits had argued that religion was a focus of African cultures (and so more resistant to “acculturative pressure” than other domains of social life), Bascom sort of knew what he wanted to find. Things didn’t go as easily as Bascom had imagined, and not the least because the locals had been aware of anthropological interests in their practices for quite some time (García 2014). That’s a longer story, which I hope to be able to tell some other time in appropriate detail. Suffice it to say for now that Bascom found what he had come to “discover” (Palmié 2013a): while everyone was baptized in church, and Catholic statuary and chromolithographs of saints certainly abounded, the true “focus of Cuban Santería,” or so Bascom argued two years later, consisted in the ritual use of stones, herbs, and blood (Bascom 1950). The herbs and blood seemed to present no problem for someone who had conducted fieldwork in Nigeria. But the stones did. Not only was

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Bascom not aware of a Yoruba antecedent (or parallel, as one might be inclined to argue), but how these stones were described to him seemed unusual. Here’s a quote: The fundamental importance of the stones in Cuban santería was stressed consistently by informants. While chromolithographs and plaster images of the Catholic saints are prominently displayed in the shrines and houses of the santeros [practitioners of Afro- Cuban ritual traditions], they are regarded only as empty ornaments or decorations, which may be dispensed with. The real power of the santos resides in the stones, hidden beneath a curtain in the lower part of the altar, without which no santería shrine could exist. The stones of the saints are believed to have life. Some stones can walk and grow, and some can even have children. (65)

Bascom noted that this “miraculous power is given to the stones by treating them with the two other essentials of santería, herbs and blood,” and that stones that haven’t been treated this way—which his informants referred to as a baptism—were said to be “Jewish,” completely powerless. But he had little more to add, except to hypothesize that either the ritual importance of stones had been overlooked among the Yoruba5 or “the focal elements of Cuban Santería may not represent a carry-over of the focus of West African religion, but a shift in emphasis which has occurred as a result of culture contact” (Bascom 1950, 68). Since all “informants, without exception, stated unqualifiedly that they were Catholics, yet . . . stressed the importance of those very elements of their faith and ritual which set it apart from that of the Catholic Church,” this, Bascom surmised in conclusion, “would seem to be another illustration of Herskovits’ concept of ambivalence in New World Negro cultures” (68).6 Clearly, Bascom didn’t quite know what to make of such walking, growing, progeny-producing, and otherwise “lively” stones, especially since his own previous experience in Yorubaland didn’t provide any ready-made “origin” for conception about the animacy, even sociality of mineral objects. But he was right. Some stones were certainly very much alive in prerevolutionary Cuba, and so they are today in Cuba and its religious diaspora. They live, eat, work, propagate, are born, and even die. Fortunately, Bascom’s field notes from Jovellanos are rather more instructive than what he chose to publish. As a woman named Florencia Baró thus told him in August 1948, the stones active in Jovellanos around the mid-twentieth century had a history.7

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There was a Lucumi who came here from Guinea as a slave, and swallowed his stones . . . and brought them here in his stomach. That is how the other Lucumis had stones from these two stones. He died and he gave the stone to another Lucumi, and to another and to another. This is the biggest house [i.e., cult group] in Jovellanos. The Lucumi was a slave of the ingenio Luisa [owned by], Luisa Baro. All of the slaves were relatives and he founded the religion; her [i.e., Florencia’s] family came from there. This man had even the little babies [initiated] as soon as they were born; washed their heads [i.e., initiated them]. . . . All the slaves at ingenio Luisa were ahijados [ritual kin] of this Lucumi, Casimiro Lucumi. Had other name in Africa. Adekpe˛le˛ a Lucumi name at this ingenio Colonia. (Bascom 1948, 180)8

Perhaps as little as a century had thus transpired between Casimiro/Adekpe˛le˛’s and Bascom’s advent on the island.9 As to the continued liveliness, willfulness, and even recalcitrance of these stones, a woman named Benita told Bascom on August 21, 1948, how one morning she entered the saints room and found a stone of Oshun [a female oricha] on her palangana [washtub]. She talked to it, something like “What are you doing here? I have enough stones now, and I don’t need any more. I don’t want any more to take care of.” She threw it out onto the street. In a week or so she found it back on the palangana again, and she talked to it again (as she does to the chickens that come into the house “You know how to come into my house, but you don’t know how to get out. You are just trying to tease me . . . .” Again she threw it out into the street, but the next day it was back on her palangana again. This time she said, “You have been here long enough. You can stay if you want.” And she put it in a drawer in her sewing machine. A few days later she had a dream. (Bascom 1948, 191)

As Benita and others told Bascom, such dreams were communications from the gods, adding oneiric data to what would otherwise—or subsequently— be confirmed by divination. Sometimes, for example upon the death of their previous owners, Benita said, “you ask the gods with dilogun [cowrie divination] whether the stones are to be taken, put out in the field, or given to someone else to carry on and who it should be. When the stones are told to be thrown away, the gods already know who will come along and find them and take care of them” (191). In terms of her own predicament, Benita, in other words, had no choice

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in the matter. It was the stone who found her and returned—not the other way around: not a case of an objet trouvé but a femme trouvée. Even more puzzling, as Pedro Peñalver, known as Ito and one of Bascom’s most theoretically minded informants, said on August 23, “the stone is not just a stone, it is an alive thing. The first thing that God fed Christ was a stone; the bible says so. San Juan was the godfather of Jesus, (Dios he said), because he baptized him” (199). And Ito continued with a rather peculiar theory of presence and representation that (if Bascom understood him right) may go some way toward explaining why God would have fed a stone to Jesus. The stone is not the same as the fleche [sic] of Oshosi [a bow and arrow representing this hunter deity]; in this sense it is not the symbol. The stone is like our body in that we can talk and see and act, and the stone has all the power of Yemaya and other saints. It is not like the home of the saint, but more like its body. More like the body than like the image, home, or symbol. (199)

How Stones Are Born I will return to Bascom’s notes and Ito’s theory below. But let me first adduce some more contemporary evidence. Writing some forty years after Bascom, David Brown (1989, 253) thus noted a rather remarkable practice among the members of a New Jersey casa de santo or ilé ocha (cult group) named Templo Bonifacio Valdés. Again, it involved stones. Cutting Brown’s ethnographically rich story short, what many Anglophone santeros nowadays refer to as the “birthing process”—a gloss on the logic of the initiatory process whereby a new initiate and the objects of his or her orichas “come into the world” (nacen) simultaneously—was anything but metaphorical for Brown’s informants in the 1980s. Hence, if for any reason the approaching asiento [initiation ceremony] is cancelled during the “gestation” period, after the orichas have been “conceived” but before they are born in the asiento [initiation ceremony], they cannot come to term. An itutu [funerary rite] must be performed for them, the funerary ceremony in which, in ordinary cases, the orichas of the deceased priest are [to] be sent from this world, or inherited by another. Here, however, the itutu carries connotations not of a funeral but of an abortion. (Brown 1989, 253–54)

To be sure, this is highly idiosyncratic. No one seems to have documented a comparable praxis anywhere else. While practitioners of Regla de Ocha

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will readily speak of the birth of objects—or even situations (in signs of the Ifá oracle that speak to, or rather document, the coming into the world—or birth—of matters such as, say, fraternal strife or adultery), a failed cominginto-being demanding funeral rites for “unborn” orichas seems unique. But it’s the logic that should interest us. What Brown’s informants called orichas in gestation were ultimately a set of objects, including the kinds of stones that so puzzled Bascom. In my first book (Palmié 1991, 241–340), I devoted considerable space to what practitioners call the fundamentos of their orichas (a term only poorly glossed as “materializations,” or perhaps better, “groundings” of their orichas). These are usually housed in porcelain soup tureens (known as soperas) and invariably consist of such stones (otanes) as well as a variety of other objects called herramientas (tools).10 It is there, in such fundamentos, that the orichas eat—that is, receive sacrifices—and become agentively manifest in two other ways: they “work” (trabajan) in the natural, social, or bodily domains and qualia over which an oricha rules (such as when, e.g., Ochun’s power becomes evident in fresh water, sweetness, money circulation, sexual pleasure, the color yellow, and so forth). And they manifest through their sporadic indwelling in another vessel prepared during the initiatory process in a fashion paralleling the ritual manufacture of the fundamento. That vessel is the head of the oricha’s initiate, which during possession will be similarly filled with the deity’s presence. Dramatically abbreviating matters, such fundamentos, the otanes contained in them, and the possessed practitioner’s body may be said to constitute material tokens of an immaterial type: the oricha.11 Here comes another story about such stones, this time from my own fieldwork in Cuba in the first decade of the twenty-first century: the stones in question are obviously not any old stones. On the contrary, in order to effectively come to be inhabited by/be the oricha, they must reveal themselves as such through divinatory procedures. They need to tell you what—or rather, who—they are. Some must be found in rivers—and once they are, they will be asked by oracular means if they are what everyone hopes they are. On one of the days of the three-day-long initiation ceremony, the neophyte (iyawo) is sent on a mission to find stones that “are” the oricha he or she is going to be initiated for. The problem is that the Almendares, as much as the other rivulets emptying into the Bay of Havana, are so silted up that no stones could possibly be found in them. So, I was told, “we go to the river the night before, and we carefully drop the stones, so they can speak to the iyawo the next day”—which, at least in theory, doesn’t preclude the possibility that the stones may refuse to speak, thereby remaining mere stones rather than

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stones that might come to act in the ways that Bascom described. In Gell’s (1998) terms, plenty of divinatory abduction needs to precede the confirmation of any old stone as an index of divine presence. But speaking about indexes: at first glance, this case appears as one that might qualify for treatment as an ethnographic index of the failure of (Western) epistemology to come to terms with the radical alterity that, or so Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (2007) argue, ought to override the old relativist knee-jerk reaction (one world, many representations) and instead force us to face up to the existence of ontologies (worlds, not worldviews!) in which “powder is power” (Holbraad 2007, 2012) or where stones are alive (or can turn out to be so). But is this really the case? I sympathize with the congeries of projects nowadays rather self- consciously subsumed under the moniker ontological turn—but only to a degree. And I would like to use the rest of this chapter not so much to critique the presuppositions and potential consequences of such a “turn” (there already is a plethora of such critiques) than to suggest an alternative scenario for confronting what current pluri-ontological disquisitions have made into latter-day pseudoethnographic surrogates for the subject matters driving the so-called multiple realities, other minds, and rationality debates among philosophers between the 1940s and the 1970s (Schuetz 1945; Wisdom, Austen, and Ayer 1946; Wilson 1970; Hollis and Lukes 1982). Bascom’s field notes are as fine an entry point into such a discussion as there could be, and this is so because they allow us not only to conceive Afro-Cuban religious worlds as far from self-enclosed ontologies unto their own but to expose anthropology’s complicity in making them so—even if in the service of radical critiques of Western humanism and representationalism. It’s here that I once more find myself in sympathy with Descola’s (2014) argument that anthropology as such is, or at least has long been, part and parcel of a set of instituted practices growing out of a “naturalistic” (hence also humanistic, if not anthropocentric) mode of apprehending and generating knowledge about the world that gained ground in the West from the seventeenth century onward. As I have tried to point out in chapter 2, this was so for not just intellectual but political-economic reasons. Bacon and Descartes, we might say, were as much instigators of a novel, post-medieval separation between nature and human society, mind and matter, as their thought was symptomatic of a political-economic sea change that had been under way by the time that Descartes wrote. The result was an epistemic order well established by the time that Locke, Montesquieu, and other profiteers of the Atlantic slave trade penned the foundational documents not just of what Latour (1993) calls the “modern constitution” but of our disci-

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pline as well. Thus, if Descola is right (and I could think of no compelling argument against his position), then what I have called “the ethnographic interface” (Palmié 2013a) is also the interface between potentially rather different ways of composing worlds (rather than a barrier of incomprehension at the border of incommensurable ontologies). More so, it is—or at least long was—the point of cancellation of ways of worldmaking that were written off as based in beliefs rather than knowledge of what politicaleconomic processes radiating outward from an emerging West came to stabilize as—decidedly enormously productive—descriptions of a unitary world conceived along “naturalistic” lines (Blaser 2013; De la Cadena 2015). To elucidate this point, let me now turn to a different body of thought— actor-network theory—if only to see what cargo it delivers in the case at hand. I should emphasize here that I don’t take recourse to ANT to solve the riddle of Bascom’s animated stones, but merely to experiment with an approach I happen to find illuminating. I should add another caveat: contrary to Pels (2015), I fail to see how Latour, Callon, Law, Mol, and others could have been mistaken in extending the Edinburgh school’s strong programme into a methodology (mind you: not epistemology) of “generalized symmetry”: a building up from the ground of how, for instance, anthrax spores, farms and state bureaucrats, scallops, scientists and fishermen—and for that matter, American anthropologists, Cuban santeros, chromolithographs, stones, blood, and herbs—are recruited into more or less stable, more or less enduring assemblages that, if successful, produce palpable effects in the world.12 Or how, in another inflection, different sets of clinicians carve up—and reconnect—the human body in specific ways and to different but equally inescapably real effects. In Mol’s (2002) terms, the question is not what the world is like—really and truly—but how it is done, how practices intersect (or not), and how the resulting ontologies are stabilized (or fade away). And that, I think, is entirely appropriate to the empirical case I am dealing with—that is, the process of hacer santo: to make the oricha.

Actor-Network Theory among the Santeros The fact is that lots of agents and actants must be mobilized in order for stones thrown into a river to become abodes for indwelling deities, and lots must be done—at one and the same time—to turn the heads of humans into equivalent receptacles. A cast of ritual actors and witnesses must be mobilized; financial resources and esoteric competences pooled; sacred potions prepared to wash both the otanes and the novice’s body; ancestors of a line of ritual descent invoked; libations poured; animals sacrificed; chickens

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plucked; their intestines roasted; heads shaved and painted; incantations made—all to render the novice’s body and the fundamentos he or she will receive functionally equivalent or even partially consubstantial. The success or failure of each and every step in the procedure has to be determined by divination. Depending on the tradition of the casa de santo or ilé ocha (cult group) in question, the Obí, the Diloggun, or the Ifá oracle calibrates and ratifies the outcome. Failure can occur at any step. Remedies can be sought, and compromises made, albeit within limits. If madness there were in any of it, it would still be highly methodical and subject to its own modes of proof and falsification. What this process brings into being is a set of linkages or nodes that extend the network that we might call Santería or Regla de Ocha in both social space and historical time. It does so first, by placing the initiate into a genealogy of ritual descent (rama) ideally reaching back to a relatively small set of fundamentos, African or first-generation Creole initiators active before or around the turn of the twentieth century—such as Florencia Baró’s enslaved bringer of lively, procreative stones, Adekpe˛le˛ (note the use of the term fundamentos!); second, by reproducing the casa de santo or ilé ocha as a social formation (that nowadays can span several continents and has moved to the internet);13 third, by potentially enabling initiates to become vectors of its further extension, should they participate in or direct initiations themselves; and fourth, by prolonging the deities’ own lease on life. It’s in regard to the latter set of nodes that my ANT thought experiment might, at first glance, seem to begin to grow tenuous. But to view matters this way would be to remain beholden to what Fennella Cannell (2005) rightly calls the “Christianity of anthropology”—that is, a suitably secularized vision of instances of “the religious” that nonetheless carries the weighty intellectual burden of distinctly Christian ideas of immanence and transcendence, body and spirit, the phenomenal and the numinous. This, of course, is just the worst perspective from which to approach Afro-Cuban ritual formations: though immensely powerful, the oricha are decidedly not transcendent. On the contrary, they are as dependent on material “immanence” (and mediation) as you and I when we go about our business of preparing dinner, mailing a letter, or writing an essay. Mythology tells us why this is so: after the oricha decided to no longer live among humans (a long story, that one), there came a time when humans stopped paying attention to them. The consequences were disastrous. Rain stopped falling; fields bore no fruit, nor women children; men quarreled; nothing ever got done; people died in droves; and all was very bad.

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But the gods went hungry too. Finally, they decided to send one of them— Elegguá—down to earth to teach humans how to ascertain the orichas’ needs by divination. Ever since, humans have known how to respond to the orichas’ wishes—which they express by visiting calamities on us: people fall ill, have accidents, run into trouble with the law or their spouses, fail to obtain exit visas to the United States, or are denounced by their neighbors for black market activities. All kinds of rational remedies are sought but to no avail. It’s only when a visit to your friendly neighborhood babalao (priest of the Ifá oracle) discloses, by divinatory means, that the gods want you to become initiated into their cult that effective steps can be taken to alleviate the situation. This is so because—as Marcio Goldman (2009) argues in the largely analogous Brazilian case—since the gods had already claimed you and the stones that will come to fill your soperas all along (you simply didn’t know it),14 you—and these stones—become what you were always meant to be: vessels and vectors of the oricha. If I may mention the name of the arch relativist/representationalist in this context, then I would say that practitioners of Regla de Ocha are Durkheimians in the strong sense. They know, in other words, that they are dependent (or codependent, as contemporary American psychobabble would have it) on what Durkheim might have called the collective representations that rule their world and consequently decide their destinies, whether they like it or not. Indeed, the whole ritual tradition of Regla de Ocha—and hence the oricha themselves—only exists because humans and their gods are joined at the hip.15 One can do without the other only at their own peril. Diana Espírito Santo (2013, 40) puts it well when she argues that “Cuban spirits expect to be ‘made.’” By this she means “not just that a person’s relation to a spiritual entity must be discerned and achieved— temporally, materially, phenomenologically—but also that this relation is in some way constitutive of the entity itself, which paradoxically both preexists its relationship to people and depends on it for continuous efficacy, presence, and importantly, substance” (40; emphasis in the original). The logical corollary to this is that unless “made and remade” over again—materialized, if you will, but better: extended in time and social space—the gods themselves may lose their grip on the world. And while many fundamentos are inherited, people know that some oricha nowadays are merely vague memories: even though objects embodying them may still exist, since elderly priests took their knowledge of how to interact with them to their graves, no one even knows how to properly feed them, let alone initiate anyone into their cult. They are former nodes in the network that have failed to be activated and extended. As a result, their influence

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is no longer felt or diagnosed in divination (at least not with prescriptions for appropriate remedies)—which pretty much amounts to the same thing. They have lost their anchorage in human praxis, and so their claim on materiality and worldly efficacy as well.16 Dead gods indeed. This brings me to one more analytical point I want to make in this chapter, and I’d like to preface it by saying that unlike colleagues who have become santeros, and santeros who have become colleagues, I have no particular stakes in the matter (Palmié 2013a). In fact, I can’t know what they may know about what it is to live—and here’s the point: to share one’s body—with the awesome but needy entities which may well rule our world as long as we play along (personally, I happen not to, but that doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things). This last point directly speaks to the title of this chapter: when is a thing a human, a deity, a stone, or what? Bascom clearly didn’t even think to approach that question. In fact, I’m sure it never crossed his mind. For him, people believed that stones walked, grew, and had children—and what counted was whether he could find an African precedent for such beliefs. What Bascom worried about is the extent to which the circulation of chromolithographs of Catholic saints had come to induce a “confusion of theological concept” such as his mentor Herskovits (1937a) had diagnosed in his Haitian research (after reading Arthur Ramos’s psychologizing [1934] take on “syncretism” in Brazil). To his credit, Bascom satisfied himself that this wasn’t so in provincial Matanzas. None of his informants would have dreamt of sacrificing a chicken or goat to a statue of Saint Barbara. It would have been Changó’s stones over which the blood was poured. And how could he have thought otherwise? Every one of his informants seemed to have some opinion or other regarding an iconic or symbolic (in Peircean terms) relation between orichas and saints (not unlikely elicited by Bascom’s—for them rather counterintuitive— questions). Yet they all insisted that the images (whether pictures or statues) were mere adornos to their shrines, had no animacy or efficacy in themselves, had been adopted only fairly recently, and indexed nothing. Once more, the most sophisticated and most puzzling statement on this comes from “Ito” Peñalver, who told Bascom on August 23 that when he thinks of Yemaja he thinks of a woman, a saint, and not of a stone. Like when he looks at the photograph of his wife’s mother, deceased, he says that it is the image; it is not his wife’s mother, who is dead; just something to remind him. The stone is the same thing; it is alive, but they have to have an image of what is alive; the thing that is alive

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is a woman. The stone is a representation, like a photograph. You look at the stone and if you believe well you can see things in it. Bring the image in your thoughts, the image of the saint. Worship the saint [i.e., oricha], and not the stone. (Bascom 1948, 199)

Ostensibly, Ito seemed to contradict himself (see the preceding quotation, which comes from the same interview) when he said that the stone was the saint’s body, suddenly giving the impression of veering toward a theory of presence and representation that at first seems oddly Protestant (Keane 2007; Engelke 2007)17 or, from a different perspective, even outright Derridean. Bascom, unfortunately, let the matter go, and there’s no telling whether Ito might have cooked up this theory just in a desperate attempt to give Bascom an analogy that the Yanquí ethnographer, obsessed as he seemed to be with Catholic saints,18 might finally understand. Surely, a photograph is only an index of its subject (say, a deceased mother-in-law) when regimented by a specific semiotic ideology (Keane 2003; but see Gunning 2004); just so, a stone is only a portal to the divine under certain specifications. And these for Ito might have included a sense in which individual otanes—as with the heads and bodies of initiates—were merely material tokens (akin to datable and locatable photographic indexes) of a type the reality of which ultimately escapes such predications: the divine “woman” Yemaya.19 Bascom, in turn, seems to have been satisfied that Ito drew any kind of distinction that would affirm what he wanted to hear—namely, the nonidentity between statuary, chromos, and the stones that so fascinated him. And so Bascom broke, however unwittingly and inconsequentially, the stranglehold on the ethnographic imagination that Ramos’s and Herskovits’s theories of syncretism as an essentially “unconscious” by-product of religious culture contact had lastingly imparted to an emergent African Americanist anthropology of religion. Whatever Ito meant to tell Bascom, there was nothing unreflexive about it.

An Intra-active Continuum Fair enough, I’d say. But not enough. In fact, the whole reason for my little ANT thought experiment is to suggest that what Bascom saw as a form of attenuated cultural transmission and hence transformation of belief (then known as acculturation) was, in fact, evidence of and for what I would like to call an ongoing process of transduction within a relational network configured in a way that divine input would trigger human output, though always precariously so. I mean transduction here in a fairly simple, straight-

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forward way—such as when mechanical energy is transformed into heat or electricity.20 Central to this is a “mana-like” (or electricity-like) notion subsumed under the term aché. If you have read Holbraad (2007, 2012) on “powder and power,” you already know what I mean. It’s the stuff that makes things happen (and it’s a substance that can be accumulated, transferred, dissipated, and so on). It is, if you like, Regla de Ocha’s reply to the laws of thermodynamics. But, as in the latter case, energy—or aché—manifests in distributed form: material states of actualization, if you will, that can become subject to mediated transduction into other states, manifestations, or distributions. This, of course, is nothing less than what the initiation ceremonies known as kari ocha, asiento, or hacer santo aim to achieve. Like a relay or switch that is thrown here or there, these ceremonies direct the processes by which aché is variously manifested in media such as stones or bodies possessed by the oricha. To some degree, this is the case in public possession ceremonies (tambores or bembés) as well. As Bascom’s informant Candito Pérez put it on August 14, 1948, In a ceremony, the gods are all around the house. When a santo has a caballo Viejo [experienced medium], they know how to do it very well, they pick up the god from the stone and dances with it, and when it goes away, it goes back to the stone. The sube [from Spanish subir, i.e., “mounting,” a gloss for “taking possession”] is from the stone into the head of the person. (Bascom 1948, 144)

Note here how attributions of agency shift back and forth as if it were a current oscillating between two poles: it’s the deity which has a caballo (not the other way around), but it’s the medium who picks up the god from the stone and dances with the oricha in his or her head, until the god returns to the stone. What effects such transductions is a network of multiply articulated mediators: a ceremonial display (trono) of the orichas’ soperas luxuriously draped in cloth, a spread of food offerings (plaza), the sound of batá drums (themselves consecrated containers of a divinity), an order of chants (suyeres) that must be sung in order to coax the oricha to manifest, the presence of’ subidores (possession mediums), dancing crowds, colors, sweat, tobacco smoke, noise, heat. Once all agents and actants have been mobilized, all circuits connected, and all conditions met—which, of course, is neither a mechanical process nor a foregone conclusion—what results is the visible, audible, and haptic presence of a god.21 Yet this isn’t a matter of “belief.” As Paul Johnson (2014, 9) puts it, from a phenomenological

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angle, we are dealing with “the bundling in ritual practice of an interwoven sensory load that is named, when done according to code, ‘a spirit.’” “Ver para creer,” santeros will say. But such “seeing” is conditional both on a sensorium responsive to cues of the workings of aché (what Wirtz [2014] in a related context calls perspicuity) and on what Johnson calls code: the meeting of conditions under which mundane perceptual signs transduce into indices of the divine. Santeros speak of meeting such conditions as expending “work”— trabajar or trabajar ocha. And much expenditure of time, labor, money, and savoir faire goes into staging a successful tambor. But once done correctly, ritual not only renews the world but potentially transforms it by adding to its furniture, refurbishing it, or presenting what was already there in a new light. Was this what Bascom’s organic intellectual informant Ito Peñalver meant when he told the American anthropologist that the Bible said that Jesus was ritually consecrated (“baptized”) by San Juan bautista, then fed a stone by God? Was this the key to the supreme Catholic mystery of incarnation? Did Saint John the Baptist wash and prepare (“make”) the body of Christ so it became a human conduit for the aché of Dios? Wasn’t San Juan quite literally the padrino (initiator) of Christ?22 But whatever else such ceremonies may achieve (or help explain): most of all, they establish the connectivity that drives onward the whole system of mutual entanglements, exchanges, and transductions that we might call a closed circuit or, more sociologically, a human-divine commonwealth. Tambores or bembés are history in the making—and as such they are perennially open to “structures of the conjuncture” (Sahlins 1981) that may allow for replication or transformation, including the transformations that may have introduced a new iconic register, that of Catholic chromolithographs, into the relation between humans and their gods in Jovellanos. Who knows? At one point or another, the human vessels of the orichas Changó or Ogún may have expressed a wish to be iconized as Santa Barbara or San Juan (which would be all but inconceivable, from a contemporary ethnographic vantage point). Divination may have confirmed it. What counts, at any rate, is that it is here—namely, in the scope of such ritual encounters—that deities, human bodies, and stones meet on equal ground, symmetricalized to one another, as it were, and in mutual states of becoming under one another’s influence. Paraphrasing both Marx and Durkheim, we might say that men and gods make each other, though not under conditions of their own choosing. No wonder, then, that the stones and the people who have been ritually fused to them are what Lucy Suchman (2011), in the context of robotics,

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calls “subject-objects,” neither unqualified humans nor unqualified things but terms of a relation. What Bascom didn’t realize was that his informants and the stones about which they told him were part and parcel of just such a relation, one in which people, things, and deities are labile potentialities rather than starting points. Such relationality, we might say, is constituted by a kind of intra-activity, in the sense of Karen Barad’s “agential realism”—a perspective that instead of assuming “that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction . . . recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.” As such, Barad continues, “‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Barad 2007, 33; emphasis in the original). And so it was in Jovellanos in the summer of 1948. Gods, stones, and people, herbs, blood, plaster statues, and chromolithographs, were all part and parcel of an “intra-active” continuum that had begun to unfold from the moment that Adekpe˛le˛ had put his stones to work on Cuban soil, causing them to bring new stones—and newly consecrated heads—into the world, and so giving the oricha a new lease on life on another continent. We might call this a massively hybridized ontology, in Descola’s sense (including witchcraft accusations flying in a toothpaste factory). But I don’t really see what would be gained by such a description. Guided by some rather wrongheaded preconceived questions, Bascom just tried to cut up the continuum in front of his face along a line that was dictated more by his epistemological priorities than by what he heard and saw.23 Much like avatars in evolving multiplayer online games, the people and orichas that Bill Bascom encountered in semirural Matanzas in 1948 were making and remaking one another. They were “running,” as it were, “on the same platform,” and so driving forward in time the rather serious game of Afro- Cuban religion. Bascom, in turn, was making his social and intellectual moves within a different game. The name of that latter game was Herskovitsian acculturation research, and while the two games came to intersect for a few months in the summer of 1948, it may well be just now that we may have the media—and the analytics afforded by them (Peters 2015)—at our disposal that allow us to fathom the connection (and multiple disconnections) between them. Minerva’s owl, after all, takes wing at dusk: once “old” media are superseded by “new” ones, we suddenly realize how thoroughly naturalized the former had been.24 The same, one might say, holds for dead theories—on which more below. At any rate, stones and initiated bodies were and are the vehicles and

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vectors through which tokens of the oricha materially reproduce the abstract type, in the very same way that concrete instances of parole come to constitute, reproduce, and potentially transform la langue. None can be prior to the other. A becoming-together, if you will, that reaches into the past as it reaches into the future, brimming with contingency all across the spectrum of time. And so, among other things, a solution to the pseudoproblem of acculturation that had clouded Bascom’s mind in that summer of 1948.

Of Platforms and Program Codes This is not the place to hazard more than a guess about the underlying epistemic infrastructure that guided (or misguided) Bascom’s research during that summer in 1948. But chances are that what made for his ambivalence were the linguistic ideologies underlying the analogy with comparative philology that he had inherited from his teacher Herskovits’s teacher Franz Boas (R. Bauman and Briggs 2003). To be sure, Boas’s program was effective in combatting the racism of his time by demonstrating the fundamentally historical—and so radically contingent, physiologically entirely undetermined—nature of human lifeways. But it retained the scientistic objectivism within which Boas or Herskovits simply had to operate at the time, thus unwittingly reifying “cultures” and their “traits” as they sought to install the concept of culture as a politically relativist antidote to racial determinism in the American public sphere (Trouillot 2003). What they did not and indeed could not see was that the ontological (never mind psychological) weight they attributed to what all of them occasionally acknowledged to be a pure abstraction—that is, “culture”—was in itself integral to a moment in the social and intellectual history of their discipline (Wagner 1981).25 It thrived on a historically specific semiotic ideology (in Keane’s [2003] sense) that was part and parcel of a no less historical language game or form of life (in Wittgenstein’s sense) in its own right. And so we might as well turn the tables once more and speak of the actants and agencies with which mid-twentieth-century American anthropology populated local ethnographic worlds in order to reproduce itself. “Factishes,” as we now realize they were, entities like “cultural traits and patterns” or “foci of culture,” mysterious processes like “enculturation” or “culture contact,” forces of “acculturation,” or postulated tendencies such as “cultural conservatism” or “reinterpretation”26 functioned like primitive search engines, crawling local webs of social relations and picking up ethnographic data in accordance with their built-in algorithmic specifications

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so as to recursively describe such webs as “a culture” under observation. In all this, care had to be taken so as to isolate the “cultural signal” from its surrounding social noise and amplify its redundancy at a certain (not always clearly specified) bandwidth. And: all this had to be accomplished in accordance with a protocol that aimed to render the ethnographer a seemingly discrete inscriptive device, and the ethnographic interlocutor a similarly unrelated producer of streams of code about—in this case—stones, gods, chromolithographs, blood, herbs, and spirit possession rather than, say, wage levels in the cane fields and at the toothpaste factory, baseball scores, games of dominoes, historical structures of racial inequality, and the dawn of the Cold War; or the election of Carlos Prío Socarras27 to the presidency of the Republic of Cuba in 1948 after the failed (or US-foiled) revolution of 1933, the end of the first Batista regime, and so on. Of course, in parsing this complex stream of information (so many things happening at once and at so many scales!), William Bascom and other users of programs like “Herskovitsian Acculturation Research” needed to mobilize a host of actors and actants: not just santeros, oracles, and deities but grant monies, tape recorders, typewriters, payments to informants, field notes, Africanist ethnographies, language skills in Yoruba, a Spanish-speaking wife, Cuba’s neocolonial relations to the United States, national and local political and scholarly patronage in Cuba, hotel rooms, automobiles and drivers, letters to Northwestern University, theories of culture and personality, concepts such as syncretism or socialized ambivalence, cooks and maids, and so on. What a staggering amount of “interessments” and “enrolments” (Callon 1986) to be engineered!28 When all these came together, what resulted were a couple of articles and sometimes a monograph: life transduced into and materialized as text; behavior and speech transformed into data; data coded into patterns; patterns abstracted as “culture.” This was the closest, we might say, that ethnography comes to spirit possession in creating a (however painstakingly mediated) sense of immediacy that effectively masked all the labor that went into making the mediators vanish into the manifest message constituted by an entity otherwise as rarefied as the oricha: “culture” (Keane 2013).29 And to pretty much the same effect: as with hierophanies, ethnographies are always open to post facto critique. The point, however, is that just as successful “materializations” of the oricha in human bodies drive the game of Afro- Cuban religion onward into the future, so do successful “materializations” of culture in ethnographic texts reproduce and advance the no less serious game of anthropology.30 In both cases, transduction is the name of the game. The result, at any rate and in the case at hand, was Bascom’s utterly

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nonsensical proposition that his interlocutors in Jovellanos were suffering from what Herskovits (1937b) had diagnosed as “socialized ambivalence” resulting from “culture contact.”31 That this would strike us as wrongheaded today may have something to do with the fact that Bascom couldn’t run the program for long enough to work out the bugs inherent to it, or he’d earlier failed to note the presence of stones in Nigeria and thus was working off the wrong algorithm in Cuba. But in a deeper and theoretically more interesting sense, it reveals how “history cooks us all” (Palmié 2013a), subjects and objects of ethnography, programs and platforms, concepts, theories, and social worlds alike. Mightn’t we say that our contemporary discomfort with the entire project that Bascom’s notes and scant publications attest to is that the search engine and inscriptive program on which it relied now look to us like an app whose platform has become obsolete? Unsupported by any operating system still available to us, the paper-borne traces—indexes in the true sense— of Bascom’s intellectual labors are still available in a few journal articles or in his papers housed at University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. A bit like the records of the 1969 Apollo moon landing that languish on obsolete hardware that no current computer system is equipped to process—or, for that matter, like the otanes of an oricha whom no one knows how to properly feed anymore.32 All we can do with them now, it seems, is to marvel at their radical (or perhaps not so radical) alterity and reconcile ourselves with the fact that all ontologies, including whatever we think of as “ours,” are inescapably historical entanglements of matter, praxis, and language. Reason, perhaps, for a sigh of relief. In sum, what none of the anthropologists at the time realized—and this may be one lesson to take home from my little thought experiment—is that the ethnographic “naturalism” within which they framed their questions was just one (necessarily historical) cultural formation among others (Viveiros de Castro 2003; Descola 2013). The ambivalence was on the American anthropologists’ side, not that of the people they encountered in Cuba or Haiti. Some of Bascom’s Cuban interlocutors tried their best to teach him otherwise during that summer break from Northwestern back in 1948. But so it goes. Might it not behoove the proponents of an ontological turn—and indeed us all—to take just that lesson to heart?

Epilogue

Thinking with Tomás about My Own Work What, then, have we learned from all this? With Father Lafitau and Kenneth Burke, Hocart and Fleck, Collingwood and Wittgenstein, Polanyi and Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard as my guides, I have tried to engineer an ethnographically informed “mangle” through which I processed transplant surgery, genomic identity arbitrations, analog electroacoustics, historiography, and mid-twentieth-century anthropology. The reader will be the judge of whether my ethnographic data on nganga-making, divination, spirit possession, Abakuá ceremonies, and the personhood of objects in Regla de Ocha led to mutual illumination in the cases at hand, remained frivolous exercises, or failed to live up to the standards set (in however wrongheaded a spirit) by Lafitau. Let me return here briefly to his original conceit: for what Lafitau’s “system” involved were neither frontal nor lateral comparisons, in Candea’s (2019) sense. On the contrary, in Marilyn Strathern’s terms, the old Jesuit codger set himself the methodologically impossible but heuristically eminently fruitful task of comparing the terms of a relation that his ethnographic experience and his classical learning told him was a foregone conclusion. Without this mistake, his Moeurs would have remained a more or less useful primary source on the eighteenth-century Iroquois, but he surely wouldn’t have hit upon—found—the data that would have allowed him to become the intellectual ancestor of unilineal (matrilineal) kinship theory (gynecocracy, as he called it) and much else. A case of aspect seeing, in Wittgenstein’s sense: the Greek aspects of the Iroquois lit up for Lafitau, and so did the Iroquoian aspects of the ancient Greek. Or take someone as brilliant and wrongheaded, at one and the same time, as EP. What would the twentiethcentury history of anthropology— or even analytical philosophy—have looked like, had it not been for the provocations (glorious failures, as I have called them) of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande? I may well not have succeeded in vindicating either of them. But at least I have been up front in not claiming to have devised “yet another system.” As Wittgenstein

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might have said, what I tried to do is merely to put in front of us all that we already know but hadn’t considered together.1 One task remains: run my own thought through the mangle of my own making. To do so, let me revisit a set of ethnographic data based on my first fieldwork among exiled Cuban santeros in Miami. Quite a long time ago (Palmié 2002), I harnessed these data to a very different set of questions. But they still provide a good illustration of the problem at hand, and I should emphasize that in keeping with the project of this book, I have come to rethink those questions themselves. Here, the challenge is not to bridge seemingly incommensurable worlds. It’s to see whether, and to what degree, I can render commensurable—symmetricalize, if you will—a German graduate student’s ethnographic experience with the thought of an anthropologist coming up for tenure in an American history department, and that of my present self as a University of Chicago anthropology professor a generation after my first attempts at what Wittgenstein would have called “finding my feet” among exiled Cuban santeros in Miami. I hasten to add here that, like all chapters in this volume, this epilogue is yet another thought experiment. Moreover, I don’t entertain the illusion that it will necessarily hold up to the test of time. I learned a lot over the years, surely forgot a good many things, and certainly changed my mind. Dare I ask you, dear reader: haven’t you done so yourself? But the world I— and you—live in has changed a lot as well. I never went back for fieldwork in Miami; just to chronicle the changes that Cuba—and its African-inspired ritual traditions—underwent since I started fieldwork in La Habana in 19932 would be an endeavor in itself. The point is this: it isn’t only the ethnographer’s world that inexorably changes. The ethnographer’s view on it does as well—and in decisive but often inscrutable alignment not only with realities on the ground but with his or her biography, intellectual or other. But enough said. Let me now turn to one of my fledgling ethnographic finds in the summer of 1985.

Tomás Rebooted Practitioners of the ritual formation known as Regla de Ocha entertain what we might call a soft notion of predestination: our path in life (camino)—that is, the best possible outcome of our earthly existence—is chosen at birth; it is due to our personal frailties and follies that we deviate from it and fall into unnecessary adversity. Deities and spirits of the dead may watch over us as we plod along, and they may goad us toward the right decisions— which may or may not include strengthening our relationship with them

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through acquiring ritual protections or undergoing initiations into a deity’s cult. All this can be revealed to us through divination. Since Orúnmila, the oracular deity, has been witness to the creation of the world, he knows all there ever was and will be. To the oracle, our lives are an open book: a divination session is called a registro (investigation), or, even more tellingly, a “reading” in English. As a doctoral student with a precariously small amount of funding, I quickly realized that apart from public possession ceremonies to which I could get myself invited if people took a liking to me, the rest of Regla de Ocha’s ritual apparatus would not be observable unless I had the rituals performed for me. Focusing on divination thus turned out to be a no-brainer: it was cheap (fifteen dollars for anywhere between forty-five minutes and an hour), and it could be repeated in the back rooms of many Miami botánicas (stores selling ritual paraphernalia) or diviners’ homes virtually as often as I could afford it. In the understanding of my interlocutors, this of course would have been an entirely unacceptable way of proceeding, irreverent to both the diviners and the gods. I did it anyway, and I thought I learned something about how the divination process works. The client is indeed “read like a book”: you can’t ask questions—at most, the oracle asks you questions, such as “The deities say this and that. Is it true?” What’s more, I quickly learned how this method can be used to extract information from the client and then feed it back to him or her. And I received a lot of dire prognostications by diviners who wanted to rope me into more expensive ritual procedures, or so I thought. But I also got some entirely unexpected results. Using the language of my previous book (Palmié 2013a) and the introduction to the present one, these weren’t matters that I had aimed to discover (remember: given the “absolute presuppositions” of her discipline, an astronomer can always discover a new star when handed a more powerful telescope). Different from the logic of divinatory praxis that my graduate education had prepared me to “discover,” these unexpected results were true “finds”—in the sense that Edmundo O’Gorman (1961) qualified Columbus’s stumbling onto a hitherto unknown continent in his quest to discover a westward sea route to China as a problematic “find” that prompted a centuries-long process of what he calls the “invention of America.”3 One of my unexpected finds was this: at some point in the summer of 1985, two of my diviner-interlocutors, who had no knowledge of, or contact with, each other (Miami is a big city, after all), independently told me of the spirit of a dead slave (muerto) who was hovering behind me, as spirits are wont to do—watching my back, as it were. Both Carlos (a laundromat

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attendant who claimed to be a private eye) and Cecilia (a full-time ritual practitioner) described him to me as a tall and slender but powerfully built and very dark-skinned enslaved African who had lived and died in the Cuban cane fields. He wore a white shirt and trousers and had a red sash around his waist. Cecilia even supplied me with his name: Tomás. Since neither I nor my forebears seemed to have any palpable connection with Africa or Cuba, it was clear to them that it was Tomás who had nudged me toward doing fieldwork on Afro- Cuban religion. Carlos advised me that on a day that I felt somewhat depressed (and as every ethnographer knows, there are quite a few of them), I should sit down in front of a mirror, smoke a cigar, drink a glass of rum, and then I would surely see him. I certainly tried but never did. Fast forward to the late 1990s, when I was on my first job in the United States in a fairly traditionalist history department. The better part of my colleagues were social historians averse to any form of theory that didn’t involve class conflict, let alone bore the slightest whiff of poststructuralism. For them, the suggestion that the spirit of a dead slave had brought me to my field site in Miami would have been as preposterous as the claim that the tempest unleashed by Shakespeare’s exiled duke of Milan had blown me there. Perhaps perversely, I still felt compelled to stick Tomás—or at least the idea of someone like him—into the prologue of the book that, a bit to my own surprise, led to my being granted tenure there (Palmié 2002) before I moved on to Chicago and back into anthropology.4 This is the argument to which I hitched my muerto Tomás back then: obviously, for Cecilia and Carlos, the idea that Tomás had driven me to their doorsteps was an entirely reasonable explanation for why a young German would be barging into their lives. For me—and note the strange symmetry—it was a way to resolve my positionality too. The stances we took toward Tomás were proportional to each other. In their case. it was a matter of what Peirce might have called abductive reasoning. In mine, it was that of the author of a book denouncing the violent Atlantic modernity whose unwitting heir I, like all “moderns,” unquestionably am. Horkheimer and Adorno’s grim reflections in the Dialectic of Enlightenment helped bring this thought into a kind of postcolonial focus: if Fernando Ortiz (1940), C. L. R. James (1963), Sidney Mintz (1985), Paul Gilroy (1992), and Edouard Glissant (1997) were right in positing the Caribbean as both the primary focus and the subsequent fulcrum of processes of global capitalist modernity, then the thought of someone like Tomás might not only provide me with a theory of my own implication in the subject of my investigations but set a signpost for the limits of historical representation. For the truly shocking anonymity of millions of enslaved lives systematically wasted on Caribbean

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sugar plantations literally demands spectral forms of evidence to document the undocumentable.5 Tomás, in other words, became an analytic device, if you will. Though I hope I’ve made it clear that recalling him into my book was also integral to an ethical project: to give the unknown dead a space in the world whose heir I am.6 But I left it at that back then, and I’ve been rightly criticized for doing so by a younger cohort of ethnographers of Afro-Cuban ritual practices (e.g., Espírito Santo, Kerestetzi, and Panagiotopoulos 2013). For at the core of my mobilization of Tomás in Wizards and Scientists still lay the idea that he really stood for something else: for one thing, a reminder of the haunted nature of a global capitalist modernity that strains to disavow its victims. Not that I think that this interpretation was wrong. Still, this “aboutness” is a bit of a red herring if we simply leave it at that.7

Back to Wittgenstein’s Hinges But there may be another way of dealing with Tomás in light of the above, and I will turn to it now. For didn’t even the mere hypothesis that “someone or something like Tomás exists and has a bearing on my life” jar with EP’s cavalier assertions that the poison oracle was satisfactory enough in running his own household in Azandeland? After sufficiently long stints of fieldwork, many of us, I am sure, have learned to inhabit worlds furnished rather differently from our own. Our native interlocutors may still think of us as bumbling fools, but we think we’ve learned some of the ropes. Something in human nature seems to predispose us to such a capacity that enables the ethnographic gesture in the first place. João de Pina Cabral (2017, 2019) calls this our species-specific capacity for transcendence: something we all acquire in the process of ontogenetic intersubjective attunement that turns human organisms into persons and so makes social life possible to begin with. The furniture of our worlds isn’t simply there for us to inhabit—we furnish our worlds together. As Collingwood (1938, 258) rightly put it, Self- consciousness makes a person of what, apart from that, would simply be a sentient organism. . . . The discovery of myself as a person is the discovery that I can speak and am thus a persona, or speaker; in speaking, I am both a speaker and a hearer; and since the discovery of myself as a person is also the discovery of other persons around me, it is the discovery of speakers and hearers other than myself.

It’s the discovery of a World,8 which for us can only be a social, intersubjective one. As the classicist and astute contributor to anthropological de-

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bates, G. E. R. Lloyd, likes to point out (e.g., 2014, 222), just as no “student of Ancient Greek philosophy admits to understanding Plato not at all,” so no “ethnographer returns from the field to say that he or she understood nothing of the society that was the subject of investigation.” But if so, here’s the ethnographer’s real dilemma: we can learn to sit on the Other’s chairs, turn the handle of his or her door, use their implements, even learn their metaphysical ideas (e.g., about personalized causality), alien as they seem to us, and appreciate their specific affordances and limitations. But can we ever bring the furniture of other peoples’ worlds “home”? And home intact? And what would “home” then look like? Or, in more Wittgensteinian terms, can we accommodate more than one language game in our own form of life by holding the temptation to prioritize the rules of ours in abeyance? Can we, in Wittgenstein’s sense, become unhinged? EP clearly didn’t think so. And that’s too bad, perhaps. Arguably, the whole nonsense of the so-called rationality debate could have been avoided, had he been more reflexive about the world that he inhabited as an Oxford don. As Isabelle Stengers (2005) might say, until Needham (1972) devastated the analytical value of the concept of belief and Ardener (1989, 120) began ruminating about “that fuzzy cloud of unknowing which is a society’s image of its own world structure,” the “habitat” or “ecology of practices” (Stengers’s terms) that had been Oxford anthropology during EP’s time simply didn’t admit to such questions. Now proponents of the so-called ontological turn have been arguing that it’s precisely in such questions that the future of our discipline must lie: the goal no longer being to “grasp the native’s point of view” on Malinowskian terms but to be “grasped by it” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 7). To me that’s all fine, and most of the better ethnographers among us, EP included, ought to be presumed to have done so all along. Would Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic have generated the furor among logical positivist philosophers that it did, had this not been the case? As for me: I didn’t experience any cognitive dissonance at all when writing Tomás into my book. On the contrary. The idea made tremendous sense to me. After all, most of us—including our interlocutors—have been living in what Descola (2013) calls “hybridized ontologies” for the longest time.9 Why shouldn’t I voluntarily accept what they were often forced to? But is it only “the idea of someone like Tomás” that’s at issue here? Here we come to a difficult juncture. For in rendering Tomás (not just the idea of him, mind you) part and parcel of the scaffolding of that very mind that wrote my book Wizards and Scientists, did I not, in some form or other, give him reality as a part of my own being in the world? Were I to take seriously the implications of the ideas of my Miami interlocutors,

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then I could even rephrase this question more radically: for under such a description, I might well not truly be the sole author of whatever I wrote about Tomás and about a whole lot else, including this book. And that’s where things might become unhinged, in Wittgenstein’s sense, as when it comes to the form of life or ecology of practices that earns me my living. In a very real sense, entertaining this supposition negates a good part of how, say, Duke University Press or the University of Chicago Press treat me as an unproblematically self-contained, skinbound author when it comes to their catalogues or royalty and tax issues. On such terms, in other words, “Palmié”—perhaps really an assemblage of sorts—might come undone and reveal itself instead as a precariously maintained “island of stability” (Pickering 2017) carved out of a multiplicity of emergent and transforming relations; in that case, it would be the result of a “cut into the network” of distributed minds and agencies, as Marilyn Strathern (1996) might put it. How can that be? I’m not, as you’ve seen, rehearsing here the tired old “death of the author” argument once championed by Foucault or Barthes. We’ve heard enough of that. It might be more interesting to follow Durkheim in arguing that individuation can occur only in society; George Herbert Mead in saying that the self is a product of the kind of perspectival reflexivity that can arise only through taking the Other’s stance; or Alfred Schuetz’s reformulation of Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity as the precondition for any coming to terms with other minds. Bakhtin’s inescapable “organic” hybridity of any utterance in a living language belongs in this picture, as does his vision of dialogically emergent heteroglossia and, for that matter, Austin’s notion of performativity in the sense that every speech act carries the potential to transform the world of utterer and listener alike. But this would be another, far more extensive project. What I want to get at instead here is the core of the ethnographic enterprise itself—namely, the entailments of inviting Tomás, as delivered to me by Cecilia and Carlos, to occupy the position of a “metaperson” (Pina Cabral 2019) in the kind of intersubjective relationality that, as Donald Davidson (1991) persuasively argues, constitutes the bottom ground of any kind of knowledge of our own thinking, let alone our knowledge of any external world or of other minds. As Davidson puts it (160), “It takes two to triangulate” between self, world, and other. And then he adds, “Two, or, of course, more.” It’s Davidson’s “or more” that should interest us—especially if their form of life is structured by language games significantly different from our own. If Davidson is right, then can I say that I’ve come to know any more

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about any or all of this—myself, the world, other minds—after Cecilia and Carlos inserted Tomás into my world? I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. I haven’t made their absolute presuppositions my own—and I certainly haven’t sought initiation, as a good number of my age-mates among students of such matters have done for reasons ranging from reasonably good to genuinely bad faith.10 Whatever that may have done for them, it wasn’t for me. Instead, my accepting Tomás as a metaperson toward which I oriented myself—if initially only as an intriguing hypothesis—eventually allowed me to exchange perspectives on, and so participate in (to however uncertain a degree but a certain degree nonetheless), the reality of something distinctly not a part of the world I inhabit as a member of the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology, a green card holder in the United States, a person under lockdown because of COVID-19, or other such aspects of my day-to-day social being. Despite my above-stated reluctance to properly engage Bakhtin here, what I certainly can say is that entertaining Cecilia’s and Carlos’s point of view in crafting the intentional hybrid that is this epilogue allowed me to achieve a degree of mutual “inter-illumination of languages”—theirs and mine. As Bakhtin (cited in Morson and Emerson 1990, 55; italics in the original) wrote late in his long and troubled life, such an attempt does not and need not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, space, and culture. For one cannot even see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors and photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside of us in space and because they are others.

Without the “other”—be it your mother, spouse, child, neighbor, colleague, disciplinary forebear, Cuban santero, or (why not?) dead African11—the world remains opaque, as does your own sense of self. As it turns out, the problem lies not in acknowledging Descartes’s deceptive demon but in resisting his siren’s song for epistemic atomism. In the end, perhaps we all are ethnographers of our own worlds, whether we like the idea or not. And, as Winch (1997) added late in his life, can we even be so sure that we can understand ourselves? Is this a problem? Perhaps yes, but only if we stick to a philosophically ill-founded and ethically troubling volunté de savoir.

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What, Then, of It All? All 1980s worries about textual authority and lack of dialogicality in ethnographic writing notwithstanding, a post-representationalist stance reveals these to be utterly misconstrued answers to a problem still very much in search of what William James (1907) once called the truth that “happens to” a sentence. Going back to James’s younger contemporaries Collingwood and Wittgenstein, we might say that such “happenings of truth” don’t occur when a supposedly superior form of cogitation or analysis reveals how things “really are” (truly and universally). They occur when shifts in temporally mutable sets of absolute presuppositions (dialogically) generate new sets of temporally and culturally variable “hinges.” Of course, Wittgenstein never bothered to present any coherent considerations about how such hinges might change within one and the same language game,12 and Collingwood (1940, 48) devoted little more than a (rather famous, and much-discussed) footnote to the question of how exactly his vision of “metaphysics as a historical science of changing absolute presuppositions” might conceive of the causes of such change.13 His vague remarks about “pressures” on or “strains” in received “constellations of absolute presuppositions” have often been taken to presage Michael Polanyi’s, Thomas Kuhn’s, or Paul Feyerabend’s stronger theses about incommensurability. But while the history and philosophy of science may be a guide to the changing platforms on which ethnographic games of doubt and certainty evolve and sometimes radically transform over time, they don’t take the sting out of the necessarily unstable nature of the absolute presuppositions informing our relations to our interlocutors—and the worlds they find themselves inhabiting (see chapter 6 for an example). Of course, I have no good evidence about how Wittgensteinian hinges are discoverable. Perhaps we always just find them serendipitously or discover them with hindsight in the debris that, as media archaeologists argue, is left behind by superseded forms of mediation that were once taken for granted. Perhaps, as Heinz von Foerster (2003) suggests, such finds grow out of the realization that the observer doesn’t singularly discover a world “out there” but aims to “invent” it along with those with whom she shares a common world waiting to be jointly transformed by both of them. In von Foerster’s sense, this is a matter of second- order cybernetics: an attempt at understanding the (mutable) bases of one’s own understanding. EP expended heroic efforts in describing that very—ultimately inscrutable— problem on a synchronic scale, and when it comes down to it, I think we owe him tribute for alerting us to the matter. By the very same token, we

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ought to extend our charity—and I mean this in the early Davidsonian (1974) way—when it comes to understanding the intellectual cul-de-sac that not just EP but his philosophical interpreters led us into a generation or two ago. Just as Thomas Kuhn had no problem describing pre- Copernican views of the world in a language saturated not only with heliocentrism but postNewtonian mechanics, we can look back at classic ethnographies—or even our own—and wonder how our disciplinary forebears or indeed we ourselves could have ever thought that way. The answer is deceptively simple: our predecessors in the game of ethnographic certainty and doubt—and we—inherited worlds brought to us by those who made us into what we are, with all the doubts and certainties that such worlds afforded them then, and afford us now. The point is: such worlds—and their attendant concerns—do change, and if we can take a page from Collingwood’s and Wittgenstein’s book, then we might as well consider our task as ethnographers as providing the best possible description of human worlds or forms of life in reflexive relation to ours, given the horizon of our present (but changing) absolute presupposition. Chances are we might make some unexpected finds and so contribute to changing the game.

Of Hinges and Doors As is my practice ever so often, I sent a draft of the paper that eventually became part of this epilogue to several colleagues and friends to see whether I could profitably marinate my thoughts in theirs. As we all know, it often helps to distribute one’s thoughts a bit, and pull other minds into a conversation with one’s own, before settling on an argument. One of my interlocutors, Ramón Sarró (personal communication, April 25, 2020), made me wonder whether Wittgenstein’s metaphor of hinges had not, in fact, led to my being bewitched by Wittgenstein’s own language: hinges, Ramón pointed out, are commonly found on doors; and apart from the unwelcome ahistorical fixity of this image (which Collingwood helps us put into motion), what Ramón pointed me to is that doors commonly lead somewhere. Unless we’re dealing with revolving doors, which can take us back, full circle, to where we started (which, I think, is usually the case), this implies that the hinge may do its work in either opening or closing the door. If so, we get a new configuration of both certainty and doubt. Long ago, Michael Polanyi had already put his finger on this issue when he spoke of a “logical gap” that true scientific discovery—that is, a game-changing reconceptualization of a particular problem—must overcome. This gap, he says, can’t be bridged by logical procedure, only by “illumination,” sudden and

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Figure 9. Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1603).

spontaneous, as it often seems to have occurred in the history of science:14 “it is,” as he says (M. Polanyi 1964, 123), “the plunge by which we gain a foothold on another shore of reality.” We step through Wittgenstein’s door. In a second email later that same evening, written after I had replied to his first, Ramón helped me open one such door by reminding me of the significance of the name that would have been given to my muerto upon his Cuban baptism (integral to the enslavement ritual). Cecilia surely didn’t think of it when she revealed that name to me (or did she? I can’t know). But isn’t the very name Tomás an invitation to skepticism, and its conversion— empirically, as it were—into certainty? Ramón included a copy of the painting of the scene by that brilliant savage Caravaggio where the unbelieving apostle Thomas sticks his grubby finger into the risen Jesus’s side wound, and it literally made the scales fall from my eyes, to use another biblical image. Talk about indexicality! And indeed, “Ver para creer,” practitioners of Afro- Cuban ritual traditions like to say. Seeing is believing. Sooner or later, truth will happen to the oracle’s pronouncements. Doubt, as I pointed out some time ago, is not at all alien to santeros’ engagement with one another and the divine (Palmié 2004). The widely acknowledged occurrence of “fake possession” is a case in point. But, as we all know (e.g., from the case of counterfeit money), nothing does more for

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the certainty of our investment in “the real” than the possibility of its simulation. Reality thrives on the belief in its being faked (or misunderstood, as in EP’s case with the mistaken metaphysical premises of Azande witchcraft). Our current obsession with “fake news” is only a belated addition to that story. And this may go a long way toward explaining how my scandalous ethnographic testing procedures of divinatory praxis back then in Miami might have led me to Tomás. I had it coming, you might say. Is Tomás my ethnographic persona thrown back in my face? In a sense, this is certainly so. At the very least, it’s a reminder of the hubris that goes into every research project that ignores—and must ignore, if only to attain funding—the multiple contingencies that the “ethnographic gesture” entails and inevitably builds on. But what we make of it, ultimately, is our business—and responsibility. Perhaps Santo Tomás is the patron of ethnographers who, after all, forever being torn between foreign worlds and their own, might wish to but never really can confirm the reality of what they may have learned to experience but can’t get themselves to believe in? But to so argue might be to lapse back into a facile representationalism. I’d rather think of my muerto as a door opened to me. One that I still haven’t stopped believing that I, or “the idea of someone like me,” might be able to step through, even if none of us ever really will succeed in doing so. A lesson not about radical alterity as theorized by proponents of the ontological turn (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) but—I emphasize—a lesson in humility. This, if anything, forms my conclusion to Thinking with Ngangas. You, my reader, will have to be the judge of whether I managed to productively subvert that old eighteenth-century Jesuit’s ostensibly crazy “method” and set it on a more productive—dialectical—footing. At stake here is what, following Fernando Ortiz (2014), I once called the “cooking of history” that affects us all: observers and observed alike, and in mutual entanglement. Karen Barad (2007) calls this the inevitable condition of “intra-activity” that we, as the looming climate catastrophe implies, ignore only at our own peril. It also will be your decision if I managed to convince you that radical alterity is a bad choice on which to base future inquiries into human nature and diversity. As a child of the twentieth century and all its horrors, it strikes me as a deplorable—but not necessarily odd or wrongheaded—choice to turn away from humanism as if it were a toxic pest. For that it may well turn out to be, in the end. In the meantime, however, I imagine that the world will give us plenty of occasions to change our minds, and that new aspects lighting up in our view of it will make a difference that makes a difference.

Acknowledgments

Call me an animist, and you might be right. As I recounted in the acknowledgments of my previous book, our writings—mine at least—have an existence apart from ourselves. Sometimes they sneak up and force themselves on us. Sometimes they display reticence and must be coaxed into being. Sometimes we don’t even know that we have them “in us.” And then, years later, we wonder: was that really me who wrote that book? I’ve always marveled at colleagues who manage to churn out a book every couple of years; colleagues who tell me they write while on planes or with their smartphones. How do they do it? Why can’t I? What is it that allows them to put their thought into language with such apparent ease? Some forty years ago, a teacher of mine, the late Lászlo Vajda, rhetorically asked his class, How do you think that Sir James Frazer managed to write all twelve volumes of The Golden Bough? His answer: not just because he had a fleet of assistants and a diligent and devoted wife. Rather: because there was no TV for him to watch, and nary a telephone call that he would have had to answer himself. What innocent times were those, when you could still blame your distraction on such limited forms of potentially attention-grabbing media! But in the aftermath, I don’t think Vajda was right. Writing books, at least for me, isn’t about having time (though that, of course, plays a considerable role too). It’s about the time being right. How is this ever so? I don’t pretend to know. To resort to my favorite vehicle of metaphor (anything to do with cooking), perhaps it’s akin to thinking about what you could cook for dinner tonight. The first thing to do is to look in your fridge or pantry. And then, as David Sutton (2021) recently pointed out, it all might become a matter of risking it. As I recounted in the preface, I came to realize what dish I wanted to prepare during a fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Some of the ingredients clearly were there already. Published and ready at hand. Others came to be added as I began to strategically revisit my ethnography and read up on the literature on, for instance, early analog electroacoustics or the intellectual environment in which E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote Witchcraft, Oracles and

194 ∙ Acknowledgments

Magic among the Azande, and rethought the quandaries with which spirit possession presents academic historicism, Bill Bascom’s intellectual misadventures in Cuba, or my own first fieldwork in Miami. But the actual cooking of Thinking with Ngangas began in earnest only in 2016 when I spent a chair’s leave in Barcelona, thanks to the invitation of Verena Stolcke and Josep María Fradera. It was there—or more specifically, on shady benches in the beautiful Parque de la Ciutadella, and even more so in my segundo despatxo, the Ale & Hops bar—that this book began to come together over many a buena pinta. And here my thanks go to my departmental chairs, William Mazzarella and Joe Masco, for affording me the liberty of returning to Barcelona for lengthy writing spells (and even an attempt to develop a new project on a city-accredited union of undocumented African street vendors—now indefinitely stalled, like so many other ethnographic endeavors, by the COVID-19 pandemic). I dedicate Thinking with Ngangas to my late friends, colleagues, and mentors Bonno Thoden van Velzen, J. D. Y. Peel, Sidney W. Mintz, and Michael Silverstein: metapersons all, with whom I won’t stop conversing until I, too, join them wherever they may be now. Colleagues (a few of whom I am proud to call my former students) whose input and criticism have been invaluable at various stages include Greg Beckett, Joan Bestard, Ruy Blanes, Yarimar Bonilla, David Brown, Roger Canals, Stefania Capone, Jean Comaroff, Colin Dayan, Diana Espírito Santo, Jim Fernandez, Karen E. Fields, Susan Gal, Marcio Goldman, Olivia Gomes da Cunha, Martin Holbraad, Paul C. Johnson, Michael Lambek, Knut Myhre, João de Pina Cabral, Patrick Polk, Michael Ralph, Jeannie Rutenberg, Ramón Sarró, Charles Stewart, Verena Stolcke, David Sutton, Kristina Wirtz, the three anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press, my editors Mary Al-Sayed, Dylan Joseph Montanari, and Fabiola Enriquez Flores, and my copyeditor Sandy Hazel. My debts incurred to my friends in La Habana over many years are incalculable. Let me mention just three of them: Andrés Balaez Chenicle, Rosario Díaz, and her former schoolmate at the Escuela Lenin, Ernesto Valdés Janet. Joan Bestard, Roger Canals, Mohamed Doudou, Antoni Miralda, Karo Moret Miranda, Marién Ríos, Verena Stolcke, and Martina Villareal made Barcelona a new intellectual and personal home to me. The bartenders at the Ale & Hops—Baba, Martina, Nayara, Sophie, and Tom—were kind enough to make an article-printout-flipping giri part of their early evenings. You guys have no idea what I learned while making casual conversation with you about the newest beers that had just come in, the state of the proceso in Catalonia, or politics in your own countries of origin, Venezuela, Senegal, Scotland, or Argentina.

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Last but not least to mention is my wife, Doris, who has been with me through thick and thin for forty years, and whom the US election results of 2016 threw into a deep, dark depression. As Germans who grew up in the Marshall Plan–financed Cold War bubble of the 1960s and ’70s, neither of us would have dreamed of a return of fascism, let alone on a global scale. But here we are. Writing these lines on the anniversary of the January 6, 2021, US Capitol insurrection, I worry about the value of the book that you have read. But I don’t want to be apologetic. I spent the last thirty years of my life teaching students that their own naturalized common sense isn’t all there is to it. But I also think that I have a few words to say to my colleagues—not just in anthropology but, I hope, other disciplines as well. The message might not seem political at first glance. But think twice. I hope you’ll realize that it is. As I detailed in the preface, several chapters or parts thereof have led prior lives as published essays before they came to jell into a book that I intend to be more than the sum of its parts. In every case, I have substantially revised and updated the texts in light of the newer literature and in line with the larger project of Thinking with Ngangas. Chapter 2 draws from “Thinking with Ngangas: Reflections on Embodiment and the Limits of ‘Objectively Necessary Appearances,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 852–86; chapter 3 is an updated combination of “Genomics, Divination, ‘Racecraft,’” American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 203–20 and “Rejoinder: Genomic Moonlighting, Jewish Cyborgs, and Peircian Abduction,” American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 243–249; chapter 4 originally appeared as “The Eyamba of North Fairmount Avenue, the Wizard of Menlo Park, and the Dialectics of Ensoniment: An Episode in the History of an Acoustic Mask,” in Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Black Atlantic Religion, edited by Paul C. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 47–78, 288–93. Chapter 5 draws from my essay “Historicist Knowledge and Its Conditions of Impossibility,” in The Social Life of Spirits, edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Ruy Llera Blanes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 218–39, 258–63. An earlier version of chapter 6 was first published as “When Is a Thing? Transduction and Immediacy in Afro-Cuban Ritual; or, ANT in Matanzas, Summer of 1948,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 4 (2018): 786– 809. The epilogue draws from my essays “Unhinged: On Ethnographic Games of Doubt and Certainty,” Social Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2022):74–90 and “Wittgenstein among the Santeros: Finding My Feet with Tomás,” in Philosophy on Fieldwork, edited by Nils Ole Bubandt and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (New York: Routledge, 2022).

Notes

Preface 1. Except in prehistoric archaeology, where ethnographic analogies continued to serve as dei ex machina until fairly recently. 2. Degenerationist that he was, Lafitau had no interest whatsoever in proving the advanced nature of eighteenth-century French culture and insisted on studying Native American societies on their own terms. 3. Montaigne surely was a lot smarter than Lafitau. He also lived in an age when Descartes had not yet destroyed the conditions of possibility for principled skepticism. But even if Father Lafitau got his Descartes hilariously wrong, and may have detested his fellow Bordelais Montaigne’s irreverence, he did spend five years among the American sauvages and learned their language. Montaigne spent an afternoon in Rouen in the company of both a Brazilian captive presented to Charles IX and an interpreter whose knowledge of Tupi ought to be doubted. That Montaigne got his relativism right—from our contemporary perspective, that is—and Lafitau his migration theories wrong in no way detracts from the ethnographic insights that his decidedly strange comparisons enabled. 4. As he notes in § 109 of Philosophical Investigations (2009), “The problems [of philosophy] are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with.” And again in § 130 of the fragment Philosophy of Psychology: “The expression of a change of aspect is an expression of a new perception and, at the same time, an expression of an unchanged perception.” Introduction 1. A “victory” only in the aftermath: produced by the extraction of the term oxygen from a welter of ideas every bit as dubious as Priestley’s, and its belated operationalization in forms of chemistry in which Lavoisier’s notions of a “caloric substance” and a “principle of acidity” had ceased to play a role. 2. Of course, it has been argued that a childhood bout with cholera may have prepared Pettenkofer’s immune system for the otherwise lethal dosage of Vibrio cholerae that he ingested. But such reasoning is anachronistic. We can be sure that Koch himself puzzled over the outcome of Pettenkofer’s suicide mission. Neither of them had any understanding of what we now routinely call the human immune system. In the thought world of their time, no such thing existed. T lymphocytes, B killer cells, macrophages, and all the rest simply weren’t part of the furniture of their world.

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3. My shorthand here is not meant to conflate the two approaches to “the problem of savage thought” at the turn of the twentieth century. As Evans-Pritchard (1970, 1973) made clear, while both were fatally marred by wild eclecticism in their use of evidence, the first extrapolated from inadmissible models of individual psychology, whereas the second was based in sound sociological presuppositions but still conjured up a fantastic mélange of decontextualized ideas synthesized in empirically indefensible fashion. 4. Marett’s original reads: “Just as a dog lives in a world of smells that we cannot perceive, so the savage lives in a world of magico-religious influences and relations we are apt to miss entirely.” 5. It may be too early here to introduce Karen Barad’s (2007) dissection of the intellectual architecture underlying the idea of atomic fissility in Einstein’s and Bohr’s thought. But her version of the material semiotics that led Fermi to his crucial experiment at my own university is well worth pondering further in this respect. As she puts it (Barad 2007, 40), “The fact that scientific knowledge is constructed doesn’t imply that science ‘doesn’t work,’ and the fact that science ‘works’ does not mean that we have discovered human-independent facts about nature.” 6. No need to point out here that the better part of the architects of liberal visions of the free individual either had their monies in the slave trade or directly profited from slavery. The list is long and goes from Locke and Montesquieu to Newton and Jefferson. That story is all but irrelevant to my present concerns, but it has been treated far more competently than I could even attempt to do here (see, e.g, Davis 1966; Blackburn 1997; or Sala Molins 2006). Edmund Burke put his finger on it when he said that it is always the slaveholders who cry the loudest about the infringement of their liberties. 7. A word here to the reader: as one of the University of Chicago Press’s three anonymous reviewers of this book’s manuscript put it, chapter 1 “presents a veritable blizzard of references and series of debates that may remain hazy or impenetrable to many readers.” Another reviewer, however, found my discussion of the intellectual misadventures occasioned by the mid-twentieth-century encounter between anthropology and analytical philosophy particularly important and astute. So how to steer clear of the Scylla of losing part of my audience before I even begin to make my own case and the Charybdis of opening myself to accusations of a slipshod dissection of an important twentieth-century epistemological controversy? One solution might lie in the following suggestion: should you find yourself lost in chapter 1’s blizzard, dear reader, or should you be more interested in the ethnographically substantial chapters, skip that chapter for now, and return to it after you have read the rest of the book. I wager that it will make sense then. 8. Even a critique of such critiques (Pedersen 2012)! chapter 1 1. EP had arrived in Zandeland at a rather peculiar conjuncture. Some twenty-five years before his setting up shop there, the last Zande king had been killed by the British, and the better part of his interlocutors had been herded into villages constructed along the “government roads”—ostensibly to counteract sleeping sickness but also to break up previously dispersed Azande settlement patterns in the interest of governmental control. As a deeply hierarchical society (a former “primitive state” as opposed to acephalous segmentary societies like the Nuer), Azande commoners seem to have accepted the British

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as yet another invasive ruling group; in fact roadwork, to some extent, may have been assimilated conceptually to prior tribute labor for the Avongara nobility. 2. As I like to remind my undergraduate students, although there are significant differences between mangu and “the economy” (the notionally morally neutral nature of “the market” being key among them), if we listened to our Euro-American interlocutors long enough, we might be forced to make a similar choice in studying contemporary Euro-American societies. As Sahlins (1976) would have it, this is so because far from escaping symbolic determination, the economy is the prime site for symbolic production in what he called bourgeois society. 3. As EP (1937, 319) puts it, the mismatches between Zande belief about benge and their keen observation of the occasional inconsistencies of its results only become a generalized and glaring contradiction when they are recorded side by side in the pages of an ethnographic treatise. I have collected every fact I could discover about the poison oracle for many months of observation and inquiry and have built all these jottings into a chapter on Zande oracles. The contradictions in Zande thought are then readily seen. But in real life these bits of knowledge do not form part of an indivisible concept, so that when a man thinks of benge he must think of all the details I have recorded here. They are functions of different situations and are unco-ordinated. Hence the contradictions so apparent to us do not strike a Zande. If he is conscious of a contradiction it is a particular one which he can easily explain in terms of his own beliefs. 4. EP seems to have read Lévy-Bruhl well before shipping out to Zandeland (Burton 1992, 39), by which time he could have had access to the first two of what eventually were to become Lévy-Bruhl’s six volumes published on the topic of primitive mentality. As he (EP 1976, 241) wrote late in his life, “I am sure that I could not have written my book on Zande witchcraft in the way I did or even made the observations on which it was based had I not read the books written by that noble man Lévy-Bruhl.” A case of realized affordances: discovery mixed with genuine finds. 5. EP must have met Lévy-Bruhl when the latter delivered his Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1931, and in 1952 EP belatedly published a letter Lévy-Bruhl had written to him in response to EP’s sending him his 1934 critique. The two greatly respected each other, and even though Lévy-Bruhl’s (1975) posthumously published notebooks do not mention EP’s Zande work, it’s more than imaginable that it may have played a role in Lévy-Bruhl’s eventual renunciation of the notion of a “prelogical mentality.” 6. As in his essay on Tylor and Frazer (EP 1973), in his critique of Lévy-Bruhl EP (1970, 42–47) devotes considerable attention to the methodological deficiencies of his predecessors’ reliance on biased reports, their oversystematicization of the most bizarre examples of native thought and behavior, and—nota bene—the influence of the “collective representations” of their own cultures on their interpretations of “savage” belief and behavior. 7. As EP clearly saw, any answer to the later question had to revolve around fundamental differences in what R. G. Collingwood (1940) would soon come to call the absolute presuppositions that form the basis for any propositions about the world. Anticipating Descola’s (2013) contrast between “naturalist” and “animist” ontologies, he suggests (EP 1970, 40; cf. 1937, 80–81) that

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We are . . . scientifically orientated, in our thought. Normally we seek the causes of phenomena in natural process and even when we face a phenomenon which we cannot account for scientifically we assume that it appears mysterious to us only because our knowledge is as yet insufficient to explain it. While to primitive minds there is only one world in which causation is normally attributed to mystical influences, even those among us who accept theological teachings distinguish a world subject to sensory impressions from a spiritual world which is invisible and intangible. We either believe entirely in natural laws or if we admit mystical influences we do not think that they interfere in the workings of an ordered universe. 8. “‘We’ live in an intellectualized world and have banished the supernatural to a vague indefinite horizon where it never obscures the landscape of natural order and uniformity. But who are ‘we’? Are we students of science or unlettered men, urbanized bourgeoisie or remotely situated peasants? Can we group together Russian peasants, English miners, German shopkeepers, French politicians, and Italian priests, and contrast their logical thought with the mystical thought of Zulu warriors, Melanesian fishermen, Bedouin nomads, and Chinese peasants?” (EP 1970, 43; emphasis mine). 9. Much like—as we could say today—a set of platform codes on which right or wrong moves within a multiplayer online game can unfold. Unless we were the programmers of our own games—a most unlikely situation in our offline social worlds— skepticism simply gets us nowhere. 10. EP’s (1937, 319) original text reads as follows: Azande observe the action of the poison oracle just as we observe it, but their observations are always subordinated to their beliefs and are incorporated into their beliefs and made to explain them and justify them. Let the reader consider any argument that would utterly demolish all Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated into Zande modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief. For their mystical notions are eminently coherent, being interrelated by a network of logical ties, and are so ordered that they never too crudely contradict sensory experience but, instead, experience seems to justify them. The Zande is immersed in a sea of mystical notions, and if he speaks about the poison oracle he must speak in a mystical idiom. 11. Speaking about Steven Lukes’s (1970) critique of Winch, Robert Ulin (2001, 95) puts his finger on one of the key flaws in the rationalists’ position, according to which the “reality which the anthropologist and the native share is not created through a mutual effort to understand each other or the social and historical conditions that bring their societies into contact. According to Lukes, the reality shared by anthropologist and native is the unmediated world of nature, of which consciousness is a part because of the constraints of formal logic to which all human thought is subject.” Remains to add: and it is the anthropologist who, thanks to the scientific orientation of her culture, has privileged access to it and so is in a position to explain the sources of the native’s erroneous views! 12. Until, we might say, it crept in through the back door of cognitive science. But this is of no concern to me here. 13. On which see Evans-Pritchard (1937, 490– 91).

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14. Such as the ones that ethnographers can learn to inhabit, be they Dutch hospitals or Azande villages. chapter 2 1. Despite the evolutionistic structure and tone of his famous essay, Mauss clearly didn’t view such a distinction as the final discovery of any “natural” (and therefore “real,” or “truthful”) relation between human and nonhuman forms of existence, society and nature, simply hidden from the view of earlier stages of cultural development, or “contemporary primitives.” 2. “In commodity relationships,” Carrier explains, “the link between the parties is based on alienable attributes, while in gift relationships it is based on inalienable identities” (1995, 33). 3. “Economic man as masculine conquering hero,” Karl Polanyi wrote, is a fantasy of nineteenth century industrialisation (the Communist Manifesto is of course one classic example). His eighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminized, even effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolized by such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most recently, Credit herself. (1968, 153) Compare the now-classic treatment of these issues by Hirschman (1976). 4. The view of human beings as creatures of want and desire is, of course, an ancient element of Western anthropologies (cf. Appleby 1993; Sahlins 1996). 5. This isn’t the place to elaborate how such a conception eventually merged in modern Western cultures with post- Cartesian visions of a mind-body duality, on the one hand, and, on the other, the vision of the body as a functionally optimizable machine for human self-production (stated in its most outrageous form by the enlightened trickster de la Mettrie in his L’Homme Machine [1747; English-language edition 1994]) which continues to inform our present-day popular health culture (cf. Martin 1987, 2000; Farman 2013). But it’s important to note that despite the affinities between political theories of economic individualism and the mechanistic vision of human corporeality—obvious as its various ramifications seem to us today—this merger was a protracted and by no means easy one (cf. Easlea 1980; Merchant 1980). 6. Conversely, when Marx rails against the alienation of objectified labor as a source of self-estrangement in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he likewise argues from a position where “man’s sensuous species being” (Gattungswesen) centers on a conception of embodied capacities for value creation—that is, labor (e.g., in Marx 1964, 106ff.). Quite clearly, neither Marxian conceptions of alienation nor the “idealist” forms of predicating personhood on abstract subjectivity (e.g., in Kant or Marx’s own neo-Hegelian straw man, Max Stirner) were even thinkable before forms of mind-body dualism became the reigning anthropological trope in European intellectual circles (let alone among the general population in Western societies). 7. This becomes immediately clear once one considers the case of categories of people systematically disabled through the operation of such criteria: slaves, children, or women under legal coverture contracted through marriage, for instance, inhabited

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bodies marked as distinctly unfit to hold and exercise such rights. Since the deployment of their bodily capacities for the creation of value was already entailed in someone else’s property rights (masters or husbands, fathers, and legal wardens), their persons were subsumed under the appropriating capacities of others who—legally speaking—represented or “corporately” entailed them. Compare Radcliffe-Brown’s (1952, 32–48) discussion of rights in rem and in personam, on which much corporate lineage theory came to rest but which he, in a significant aside, extended to the claims modern nation-states lay on the persons of their citizens (e.g., in demanding extradition). Rights in rem can of course create their special problems—to wit, the characteristic paradox arduously circumvented in most New World slave codes: the property status of chattel slaves made it impossible for them to commit theft on their master’s estate (cf. Lichtenstein 1988). Another case might be seen in conceptions of female housework as nonremunerated labor originating in customary rights in personam established through marriage, even though husbands’ formal legal rights in rem no longer exist. (But see McClintock 1992 for a perspective that foregrounds the recontextualization of such conceptions in the case of prostitution.) 8. A case illustrative of this issue concerns the so-called three-fifths compromise reached in the debates between delegates from slaveholding and those from nonslaveholding states at the 1787 US Constitutional Convention over the issue of whether slaves should be counted into the general population in order to determine representation in the lower house of Congress. The solution eventually agreed on was to count slaves as “three-fifths of a man.” Of course, since enfranchisement was a priori preempted by property considerations, the absurdity of this construction hardly registered in the language in which these debates were conducted. Similar to the Christian Trinity, a Southern slaveholder owning five slaves would have been represented in Congress as a single citizen consisting of one person and three individuals. The inspiration for this example comes from my late former colleague Jeannie Rutenberg. 9. If the market’s rhetoric of possessive individualism as a natural human disposition has notionally become available to everyone, then there’s really no other language left in which to explain the failure to embody the image of economic man than a medical idiom of individual deficiency of self-control and/or psychological autonomy. As Emily Martin (1987) makes abundantly clear, one of the results is that women—long conditioned to view their bodies as insufficiently self-controlled, or otherwise deficient sites of social and biotic production—are now facing another form of socially imposed reduction. Particularly if they are nonwhite, pregnant, and legally minor, they seem to critically threaten to sap the vitality (if not the virility) of the North American economic body politic, creating seemingly uncontrollable externalities for a welfare state that is increasingly seen as imposing “unnatural” burdens on its “productive” citizens. 10. Nancy Hartsock (1983, 109) takes this issue to its logical conclusion in arguing that “at an epistemological level defined by or even influenced by the exchange of commodities,” assumptions about the nature of the individual and/or social life cannot adequately come to terms with the fact that power inheres not only in structural constraints but in the forms of consciousness produced through practical engagement of such constraints. 11. “The uniqueness of bourgeois society,” Sahlins continues, “lies not in the fact that the economic system escapes symbolic determination, but that the economic symbolism is structurally determining” (1976, 211).

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12. Of course, to even speak of a “return of the repressed” comes dangerously close to implying an ultimate conception of subject-object relationships, personhood, and thingness at the ontological bottom of such historically shifting formations. This, I trust the reader will have gathered by now, is not my aim. Of course, the semiotic configurations I call persons and things (cleaving close to twenty-first-century Western everyday language and legal terminology) demand more thoroughgoing analysis than I can reasonably devote to such matters in this chapter. At the very least, however, I hope to provide some of the historical-critical groundwork for future efforts geared toward a more generalizable theory of subjects and objects as fluid and historically mutable positionalities within specific matrices or networks of contextual intelligibility. 13. It needs to be noted that here (as in the following) the adjective Afro-Cuban is not intended to evoke notions of racial identity. In Cuba, African-derived religious traditions have been documentarily practiced by “socially white” individuals since at least the midnineteenth century (cf. Palmié 2002, 2006, 2013a). 14. Since the essay on which this chapter is based was first written, the analysis of the contents of nganga objects has grown into a cottage industry of sorts among forensic scientists. For a particularly comprehensive recent example, see Winburn, Schoff, and Warren (2016). 15. Florida Statutes (§ 872) nowadays mandate a division of labor between the medical examiner’s office and that of the state archaeologist, who takes over when the former has determined that the remains in question indicate that death occurred more that seventy-five years ago and involved no criminal activity. 16. This is a fact of which most paleros (practitioners of Palo Monte or other AfroCuban ritual traditions) I have come to know—both in the United States and in Cuba— are well aware. As a result, but also in keeping with ritual prohibitions against close proximity between shrines dedicated to the cult of the dead in Palo Monte and those pertaining to the deities (orichas) in Regla de Ocha or Santería (another religious tradition practiced by many paleros), the visually less “transgressive” ritual objects pertaining to the cult of the oricha tend to be proudly displayed in people’s primary spaces of residence, whereas nganga objects tend to be hidden in closets, separate rooms, or sheds in the backyard (cf. Palmié 2002). 17. As Marx phrased it in the Grundrisse (Tucker 1978, 255ff.), as “a totality of forceexpenditure, as labour capacity he [the slave] is a thing [Sache] belonging to another, and hence does not relate as subject to his particular expenditure of force, nor to the act of living labor. . . . In the slave relation, the worker is nothing but a living labor machine, which therefore has a value for others, or rather is a value.” Shackled to the dead labor embodied in the sugar mill’s technology, the slave’s embodied capacities were verwertet rather than verwirklicht (253), wasted in the process of value creation rather than realized. 18. Part of the underlying idea here derives from Spiritist conceptions about the craving of “earthbound spirits”—i.e., spirits of humans who either led a morally corrupt life or died a bad death—for closeness to humans who will give them “peace and light.” Other notions that come into play are that such spirits are sometimes not fully aware that they’re no longer embodied and crave materialization, as it were. 19. Paleros themselves often take precautions against the posthumous appropriation of their remains by any but their closest associates. In Miami, a palero once introduced me to a nganga (they are all treated as individually named “persons” who demand being

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accorded respect from strangers) that—or so my informant claimed—contained the skull of the Chinese man who once initiated him into Palo Monte back in Cuba, and whose remains he had dug up and smuggled into the United States. Appropriately, a plate of fried rice sat in front of the nganga, which, as the palero explained, had been fed just last night. Legends have it that the famous Cuban babalao (priest of the Ifá oracle) and palero Eulogio Rodríguez (Tata Gaitán, 1861–1944), asked his ahijados (junior members of his cult group) to decapitate his corpse and bury his head separately from his properly entombed body so as not to be posthumously enlisted into the services of other paleros. As Pedro Cosme Baños, the former director of the Municipal Museum of Havana’s township of Regla, told me, similar concerns are the reason for why the town of Regla has, to this day, left unmarked the gravesite of Remigio Herrera (Adechina), the last African-born babalao active in Cuba, who died there in 1904 (cf. Palmié 2013b). 20. My thanks go to Erwan Dianteill for suggesting this Deleuzian term to me. 21. “Monstrous world of commodities” is my paraphrase of ungeheure Warensammlung—a term Marx uses on the first page of Das Kapital to characterize his own social formation. The standard translation as “immense collection of commodities” (Marx 1977, 125) fails to convey the sense of monstrosity and uncanniness that is very much part of the semantically far more ambiguous German original. 22. As well as in writing: see Wetli and Martínez (1983). 23. Although the 1987 US Uniform Anatomical Gift Act precludes the sale of human remains by US citizens, it does not seem to restrict the commercial circulation of anatomical specimens originating outside the country. In recent decades, the transcontinental sale of human remains has largely moved online, with eBay emerging as the most prominent source until the platform banned the sale of human skeletal material in 2016 (Huffer and Chappell 2014; Halling and Seidemann 2016). For some historical background on the sale of non-Western human remains, see the website of one of the most long-standing purveyors: https://www.adam-rouilly.co.uk/about-us/our-history (accessed December 13, 2022). 24. Such as, e.g., surgically extracted tonsils, appendixes, or tumors, all of which are legally “biomedical waste,” thus falling under the jurisdiction of public health codes. According to Maynard-Moody (1995, 84), in US clinical practice, legally aborted fetuses are likewise largely treated like other “tissue by-product[s] of legal surgical services,” over which the patient usually abdicates all subsequent rights. As Morgan (2002) argues, this conception evolved out of early twentieth-century pragmatic medical-legal alliances that are now patently breaking down under the impact of the debate unleashed by stem-cell research and nonreproductive cloning, on the one hand (e.g., Sparks 1998; Gottlieb 1998; Outka 2002; Fitzpatrick 2003), and the growing political clout of fetal personhood advocates, on the other. 25. Legally speaking, the term grave robbery is inaccurate if not oxymoronic when applied to the activities some paleros occasionally resort to. For unless objects other than human body matter are extracted from the grave (e.g., jewelry buried with the deceased), such offenses do not constitute theft but tend to be construed either in terms of desecration of a sepulcher (i.e., liability for property damage) or in terms of psychological harm inflicted on the decedent’s relatives. Already, Blackstone was clear on this point: “But though the heir has a property right in the monuments and escutcheons of his ancestors, yet he has none in their bodies or ashes; nor can he bring any civil action against such

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as indecently, at least, if not impiously, violate and disturb their remain when dead and buried” (cited in Iserson 2001, 694). See Feinberg (1985) and Renteln (2001) for how the “mistreatment of dead bodies” (e.g., as dummies for vehicle safety tests) or “corpse mismanagement” (e.g., in unauthorized autopsy) has been dealt with in US law. German law, in contrast, makes “disturbance of the dead” (including taking or doing mischief to a corpse, its ashes, or body parts, including those of a dead fetus) a criminal offense punishable by up to three years of imprisonment (Hogle 1999, 61). 26. As the author of a note in “The Sale of Human Body Parts,” published in the Michigan Law Review (1974, 1248), points out, the 1968 US Uniform Anatomical Gift Act contains “no language that would bar sales.” Hence, a “source [sic] can conceivably make a contract to donate [sic] his body to a specific individual under the Act and can receive compensation for making that contract.” The implication is that such procedure might fall under the Uniform Commercial Code, which defines “the transfer of blood and other human tissues, including organs, as services (rather than sales), whether or not any remuneration is paid.” The 1987 revisions to the act do not seem to preclude commercial exchanges either (see Iserson 2001, 751–56). 27. As I will argue in the following, such forms of reasoning are becoming increasingly foundational to the vast commercial possibilities opened up by recent advances in medical technology and biogenetic engineering, which have come to redefine the “utility,” individual and social, of human tissue. Nevertheless, it should be clear that conceptions explicitly enabling the attachment of monetary value to human bodies are longstanding and vital elements of the models of society generated by economic discourse. A particularly striking example is provided by Dublin and Lotka (1946): in attempting to set life-insurance premium calculations on a mathematically secure footing, these authors define the capital value individuals represent for their dependents as consisting in their embodied (i.e., among other things, age- and sex-related) capacity for generating disposable income. In doing so, they explicitly place themselves in a genealogy of thought that excludes the market-generated value of slaves (which they rather inconsistently consider an arbitrary appraisal), but instead follows the likes of William Petty and Adam Smith in calculating “human capital” as a species of “fixed capital.” However, they seem only too willing to paper over the fact that (as they themselves briefly note) the practice of treating human productive capacities as fully (i.e., not just abstractly) fungible originates nowhere else than in the context of New World chattel slavery (cf. Moreno Fraginals 1978, 1:23; Painter 1994; Ralph 2012, 2018; Berry 2017. See also Ralph’s impressive online resource on slave insurance: http://www.treasuryofwearysouls.com/ (accessed December 6, 2022). That the North American reparations movement crystallized around class action suits against insurance companies such as Aetna, MetLife, or Lloyd’s shouldn’t come as a surprise (Biondi 2003; cf. US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Farmer-Paellmann v. Fleetboston Financial Corporation, Aetna Inc., CSX, 2002). 28. In a truly remarkable case in the United States, some ten years later, questions arose about the “racial identity” of an immortalized, and commercially available, line of cervical cancer cells (originating from a socially “Black” woman) that apparently had “contaminated” other similarly commodified cell lines presumed to have derived from socially “white” donors (Landecker 2000; Skloot 2010). 29. Ironically, it was Trembley’s discovery of the divisibility of freshwater polyps that provided de la Mettrie with prime evidence for extending Descartes’s theory of animals

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as machines to humanity. (His other favorite case in point was the erratic behavior of the human penis: both involuntary erections and impotence, for de la Mettrie, proved the independence of the body’s “springs” from the mind.) To what extent his views of humans as “perpendicular crawling machines” (1994, 71) composed of interchangeable matter acting on its own accord are beginning to approach Western social realities is not as moot a question as it may seem at first glance. 30. Cf. Maynard-Moody (1995, 83– 93). For a searching exploration of the cultural implications of US abortion legislation, see Poovey (1991). But abortion isn’t the only issue at stake here. As Meyers (1990, 13) sums up the legal possibilities opening up through the increasing personalization of fetal tissue represented as an unborn child, “A fetus, once born, has been held [by US courts] entitled to sue his or her mother for prenatal injury negligently caused in an auto accident. The fetus, once born, may also sue third parties for negligently caused personal injury, just as a person recklessly attacking a fullterm pregnant mother may be convicted of murder for the consequent death of her viable fetus. Given this precedent, an action imposing legal liability on the mother for prenatal injury proved to have resulted from poor maternal habits, or drug use, may only depend on clear proof of causation after birth. For example, in Michigan, a child was allowed to sue his mother for tooth damage allegedly caused by the mother’s use of tetracycline during pregnancy.” As Strathern (1992, 136) aptly puts it, “The embryo visualized as a homunculus is a consumer in the making”: the moment of “choice”—retrojected into the uterus—seems crucial to its humanization in late twentieth-century Western cultures. Once this premise is accepted, then that a fetus must be born before he or she can exercise consumer rights (such as paying a lawyer to speak in behalf of an infant victim of maternal neglect during pregnancy) logically becomes a secondary consideration. 31. In the rather dramatic “Baby M” case (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 1988), in which the gestatrix asserted her personhood by claiming the child contrary to previous contractual arrangements, the court went even further: as Chief Justice Wilentz found, the arrangement the prospective adoptees had made with the “natural mother” [sic!] constituted “the sale of a child, or, at the very least, the sale of a mother’s right to her child, the only mitigating factor being that one of the purchasers is the father.” The court found the plaintiffs’ contract with the defendant unenforceable. 32. If anything, the strategies employed by American anti-abortion proponents in recent years have only underscored this point. I won’t go here into the currently much debated question of the stage at which a fetus’s developing central nervous system can be presumed to register pain (Andaya and Campo-Engelstein 2021). But the truly stunning case of Doe v. Obama (2009, 2011) bears mentioning. Once President Obama had lifted his predecessor G. W. Bush’s ban on federally funded stem- cell research by executive order in March 2009, a motley coalition of pro-life activists immediately launched a legal challenge on behalf of a fictive plaintiff, a frozen embryo named Mary Scott Doe (Salehi 2012). The “unborn child’s” / “lump of tissue’s” middle name was strategically chosen: it aimed to generate a reference to Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which had denied the legal personhood of a former slave, thus insidiously implying what Roe v. Wade (1973) had left ambiguous—namely, that not only “persons born in the United States” but also the “unborn” were entitled to Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. Speaking for the fictive embryo, the lawsuit vaunts that “Mary Scott Doe” prays “on behalf of herself as a frozen embryo and all others similarly situated . . . for an injunction against her involuntary enslavement and use for federally funded, human embryo stem cell research

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and/or experimentation, which would result in her and thousands of other human embryos’ certain death and destruction” (Doe v. Obama, 670 F.Supp.2d 435, D.Md., 2009; cited in Cromer 2019, 27). On both the district and the appellate levels, the plaintiffs were denied legal standing. But it is striking nonetheless that the (largely white) American anti-abortion movement would muster the cynicism of racializing frozen embryos and invoking slave property in order to press their “emancipation” from involuntary service rendered to, and calculated destruction by, the National Institutes of Health. 33. Cf. Shell (1982, chap. 3, esp. 81n58), who believes a troubling dialectic between sexual and asexual—viz., linguistic and monetary—generation to be at the core of the ideological tensions exposed in The Merchant of Venice: “Linguistic generation,” he says, “comprises the generation of supplemental meaning from words and the generation of a plot from hypotheses (or first principles). Monetary generation comprises the generation of monetary interest from hypotheses (or principals)” (81n58). 34. As Sharp (1995, 379) shows, transplant patients are routinely disciplined into reifying the organs they received, and they are occasionally pathologized for “personifying” such body goods in regard to knowledge about the “donor’s” social identity. Often, they “experience transplantation as a force that threatens to fragment their sense of self.” See also Lock (2002, 314–44). Perhaps tellingly, however, as Hogle (1999, 145–52) reports, the categories used in US hospitals for compiling donor information in the early 1990s “had little or nothing to do with the medical condition of the body or the cause of death” that could have represented contraindications for transplantation. Instead, information databases included questions such as “‘Has the deceased ever had sex with a male who has ever had sex with another male?’ and ‘Has the deceased ever been to jail?’” (146). 35. This is precisely what the lawyer and economist Lloyd Cohen (1989) suggested in his much-discussed article advocating the legalization of a futures market in human body parts to increase the supply of transplantable organs (cf. Joralemon 2000). For more recent examples of such reasoning, see Clay and Block (2002) and the debate between Mattas and Schnitzler (2003) and Jeffrey Kahn and Delmonico (2004). 36. Recall here, too, Marx’s pervasive metaphor of a metabolic relationship between humanity and nature in the process of production and value creation. 37. See T. Murray (1987, 1996) for an exposition and impassioned criticism of several such proposals. In addition, see Joralemon (1995); the contributions to Caplan and Coelho (1998, pt. 3); Das (2000); and Scheper-Hughes (2000). 38. As Caroline Bynum (1991, 239ff.) points out, it’s not only that Cartesianism reaches its final theoretical limit in the philosophical problem of whether a brain transplant would not better be viewed as a body transplant; rather, in focusing on issues of bodily integrity and partition, twenty-first-century Western popular culture seems far more concerned with (essentially medieval) universals of identity and survival sub specie aeternitatis than a sublunary mind-body dualism. 39. Fox and Swazey (1992); Lock (2002, 2003); and the contributors to Youngner, Fox, and O’Connell (1996); Caplan and Coelho (1998); and Ten Have, Welie, and Spicker (1998) provide a good overview of the various contradictions in Western cultures exposed by organ transplantation practices. 40. Let me just say here that if transplant patients begin to form relationships (however unwanted, from a medical perspective) with the organs of their deceased donors, so do paleros develop intensely personal ties to the beings they have formally “captured” and seek to keep in a relation of submission. Among other things, this is so because their

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own biographies will now come to intersect with what Panagiotopoulos (2017) usefully calls the “necrographies” of the dead they interact with. 41. Compare Joralemon (1995), who analogizes the two reigning discourses aiming to suppress the cultural rejection of organ procurement and transplant surgery (gift giving and property rights) to medical technologies suppressing biotic rejection. Although I sympathize with Joralemon’s treatment of the issue, the analogy itself would seem to underscore my point. 42. See Fausto (2007) for a magisterial overview and analysis of the literature on this issue. 43. For the case and its various legal, medical, and political implications, see, e.g., T. Murray (1987); Stone (1996); Rabinow (1996, 129–52); Gold (1996, 23–40); L. Andrews and Nelkin (1998); and Jonathan Kahn (2000). 44. Compare Linebaugh (1975); Richardson (1996); the contributions to Blakeley and Harrington (1997); Sappol (2002); and Highet (2005). The controversy over Gunther von Hagens’s immensely successful Körperwelten/Body Worlds exhibit and the mechanisms by which the “raw materials” for “plastinated” human specimens are acquired has added another dimension to this issue. For two rather different views on von Hagens’s activities, see Walters (2004) and Linke (2005). 45. Though Cambronne’s career was cut short far earlier, by 1983, when the US Centers for Disease Control declared Haitians a high-risk group in respect to the transmission of HIV, his merchandise would have lost all value even if only on the US market for medical specimens. Though further importation of human remains from this source is not improbable, if it had been detected, then classification as hazardous biomatter would surely have been mandated. 46. A note of caution is in order here: I am not trying to evoke the kind of contrast Taussig (1980) sets up in positing that the perspectives developed by insufficiently “modernized” “neophyte proletarians” (i.e., people not yet fully engulfed by capitalist social relations) on their own predicament might (somehow) afford us an alternative analytical purchase on capitalist modernity. Like other slave populations of the Caribbean, the ancestors of contemporary Haitians were never outside the capitalist world system, and there was little about their vision of the world into which they were thrust that one could easily qualify as “nonmodern” (cf. Palmié 2002). Instead, I would suggest that interpretations of the effects of market forces as mystical aggression (whenever they may have emerged) were entirely coeval with the notions of personal liberty that enlightened speculators on the international market in slavery-related commerce (such as Locke and Montesquieu) saw as the products of such forces. In fact, both are perhaps best seen as standing in a (discursively unrealized) contrapuntal relation: that the market created “modern” forms of individual personhood in the metropole while consigning millions of human beings to hitherto unknown forms of objectification in far-off places need not surprise us. The two processes were—and probably still are—syndromically linked. To diagnose their technoscientifically mediated collapse into each other—as I have tried to do here—unfortunately does not imply their ethical or moral transcendence. 47. Though the geopolitical dimensions of the debate seem to have become muted in recent years, it is, substantially, far from over. See the exchange between Mattas and Schnitzler (2003); Mattas and Daar (2004); and Jeffrey Kahn and Delmonico (2004). 48. See Scheper-Hughes (1996) on such disinformation policies.

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chapter 3 1. Surely, it would be more than absurd to suggest that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin committed a logical error in killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for upward of nine minutes! 2. I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and criticism of George Baca, Greg Beckett, Yarimar Bonilla, Stefania Capone, Jim Fernandez, Greg Mitchell, Jonathan Rosa, Verena Stolcke, and the participants in the University of Chicago’s Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies Workshop (where an earlier version of this essay was first presented in October 2005) as well as those of the anonymous readers for American Ethnologist. Thanks of a special order go to Karen Fields, not only for inspiring the essay on which this chapter is based in the first place but for eventually helping me think some of my own arguments to their appropriate conclusions. Of course, all inconsistencies and errors remain my sole responsibility. 3. See Mia Bay’s (2006) sensitive assessment of the historiographical literature on this issue. 4. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bryant (2004) has added certain weight to it. See also https://www.westfordlegacy.com (accessed November 18, 2022). 5. To pick a famous case, if every Nuer man is potentially the founder of a lineage, and if Nuer lineages are always full of assimilated Dinka, then some mechanism of systematic forgetting (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940, 199–200) must operate to keep the lineage “system” from (a) atomizing and (b) merging into what it (notionally) is not. Cf. J. Barnes (1947); Bohannon (1952); or Turner (1957). 6. As Melville J. Herskovits (1928, 1930) found out (much to the dismay of his mentor Franz Boas, who had hoped that “racial amalgamation” would eventually blur the “color line”), what was then known as racial passing combined with patterns of assortative mating to a degree that the US Black population was actually becoming phenotypically darker, since it constantly leaked its “whitest-looking” members. As a result, we should reckon with a surprisingly high distribution of specific ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) pointing toward African biogeographical origins among vast numbers of Americans who identify as white. 7. Not surprisingly, such classificatory maneuvering becomes most visible in the US legal sphere, where it has generated a vast and growing literature. For examples pertinent to the discussion at hand, see Novit-Evans and Welch (1983); Domínguez (1986); Pascoe (1996); and Kennedy (2001). 8. This comparison owes its inspiration to Fields (2001) and Lock (2005). In response to a comment by one of the readers for American Ethnologist, I should like to note that it seems to me defensible on much of the same grounds that led to the collapse of the so-called rationality debate (Wilson 1970; Hollis and Lukes 1982). Once Western science and technology were opened up to sociological and ethnographic inquiry as fields of social practice, the typological contrast simply dissolved: as we now know, sheer scale of information networks is no guarantee of their “desocialization,” epistemological “openness,” or resistance against pragmatic “naturalization” (e.g., Latour 1993; Bowker and Star 1999). 9. A case in point is Joel A. Rogers’s monumental World’s Great Men of Color (1972; orig. pub. 1946), which reads like a veritable catalogue of test cases for the application

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of genomic methods to questions of American “public history.” Sadly, while Rogers’s work is found in most African American–owned bookstores, one searches in vain for it on the History shelves of academic bookstores. At best, it occasionally surfaces in the Black Studies section. 10. For unless intended as self-validating tautological exercises in what Bourdieu (1977) once called the investigating subject’s transference onto the object of investigation of his or her relation to it, such diagnostics cannot well—but often do!—proceed by, e.g., comparing subjects preassigned to “racial” groups in order to then prove their difference. Obviously, once we take this route we can easily prove that “white men” can’t jump or play the blues (or similar such nonsense) for “genetic” reasons. In either case, we might do well to heed Macbeth’s (1997, 62) injunctions regarding the construction of “units” of genetic (or other) comparisons: “Despite their probable knowledge of genoclines,” she states, human biologists are themselves members of society and socialized into discussing the socially defined ethnic groups as units. Once described as a unit, means and variances of biological variables in any ethnic group can be compared with, and shown to be statistically different from, those in any other ethnic group or in the majority population. Many of these characteristics will be multifactorial and a few may have no genetic component at all, and yet, unless worded carefully, the human biologist may add to the concept that the ethnic group is not only biologically different, but a genetically discrete population. See Fullwiley (2007, 2008) and Reardon (2012) for the operation of this moment, even in projects led by US minority scientists who aim to redress racial/ethnic health disparities. 11. In the fall of 1998, the political significance of Foster et al. (1998) was, of course, hard to overlook. As a Washington Post journalist rightly remarked (B. Murray 1998), the commentary of Eric Lander and Joseph Ellis (1998) printed in the same issue of Nature as Foster’s findings could hardly be classified as disinterested natural science. Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role. The parallels are hardly perfect, but some are striking. Both “improper” relationships involved women about 28 years younger—although there is a world of difference between a slave and master at the close of the eighteenth century, and a White House intern and a married man at the end of the twentieth. Both presidents seem to have engaged in politically reckless conduct; in Jefferson’s case, father Eston six years after allegations appeared in the national press. And both offered evasive denials of the charges. In 1805 the Massachusetts legislature staged a mock impeachment of Jefferson, citing several grievances including the accusations about Sally Hemings. Jefferson acknowledged one charge propositioning a married woman in his youth, but asserted that all the others were false. Otherwise he remained silent, leaving denials to political supporters and family. Nor did the scandals affect Jefferson’s popularity. He won the 1804 elections by a landslide, and his abiding position was that his private life was nobody else’s business, and should have no bearing on his public reputation.

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Given such historical precedent, Lander and Ellis seemed to imply, it would be absurd if the molecular-genetic analysis of a semen stain (and not the “will of the people”) were to prove decisive in the upcoming impeachment proceedings against Clinton. 12. Carman’s hopes, we might say, have since been fulfilled in the form of New York Times senior science reporter Nicholas Wade’s (2014) controversial book Troubled Inheritance, which claims to explain vast swaths of history—including the British Industrial Revolution or Jewish intellectualism—by patently bowdlerized versions of genomic science. See the reviews of the book by a number of prominent geneticists and biological anthropologists in Human Biology 86, no. 3 (2014). 13. Brodwin (2002, 325), however, certainly has a point when he asks what might happen if they were to press for Israeli citizenship and the right to “return” on the basis of their “genomically verified” Jewish descent. 14. On the political implications of these studies in the context of Brazil’s debate about affirmative-action-style quota regulations in higher education, see Santos and Maio (2004) and Fry et al. (2007). Compare Sheriff (2001) on the truly tragic nature of the “silences” with which the victims of such ideological constructions confront their own predicament, and Santos et al. (2009) on the effects (or lack thereof) of AIM tests on the self-identifications of high school students in Rio de Janeiro. For historical background on the issues at hand, see, e.g., Viotti da Costa (1985); Skidmore (1990); Borges (1993); and Needell (1995). Another recent case concerns the genomically mediated expulsion from the Seminole Nation of a good number of the so-called Seminole Freedmen or Black Seminole (descendants of slaves who sided with the Seminole in their wars against the United States). See J. Johnson (2003) and Elliot and Brodwin (2005). For a trenchant analysis of the quandaries posed by Native North American genomic profiling, see TallBear (2013). 15. For a trenchant analysis of the spectacular “outing” of the former president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP as “white,” see Brubaker (2015). 16. Cf. Klapisch-Zuber (1991) and Bouquet (1996) on the evolution and functioning of the family tree imagery in such processes—from biblical and medieval antecedents to Darwin’s transposition of heredity from the social into the biotic realm, and on to W. H. R. Rivers’s genealogical method. As Nash (2003, 181) so aptly puts it, “As a device that historically ordered the transfer of property, genealogy continues to be characterized by the language of ownership, possession and inheritance whether spoken about in terms of bodily substance (genes or blood) or memory, culture, heritage, or genealogical information itself.” 17. See the postscript to this chapter. 18. That the resulting descriptions may be based on assumptions that might, in principle, be proved wrong, that the practitioners may not always actively seek to disconfirm their findings, or that the possibility of fraud and trickery does not lead to massive discreditation of the system as a whole merely distinguishes divination from the idea of science, not necessarily its practice. 19. My thanks go to Karen Fields—both for alerting me to this problem and for suggesting a solution. 20. Again, it strikes me that scale and complexity of the worlds from which such practices arise, and which they seek not only to comprehend but practically master, are not principal issues here. If these were otherwise, bioethicists might as well pack up and go home.

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21. One could, perhaps, write this off as the unfortunate result of research designs currently still forced to rely on biologically underdetermined units of analysis that further research will bring into sharper focus. Yet apart from the fact that in the initial planning stage of the ill-fated Human Genome Diversity Project, a (biologically perfectly rational) pattern of random sampling along a simple geographical grid was rejected in favor of DNA sampling among named human social groups (Lock 1997; Marks 2001; M’Charek 2005), what is taking shape not just in genetic research labs but, e.g., in FBI or NIH databases (Duster 2006; cf. M’Charek, Toom, and Jong 2020 for the European case) are genomic “identity profiles” produced by an unholy alliance between sophisticated molecular-biological methods; a naïve if not willful neglect of the fundamental distinctions obtaining between natural and social kinds; and an equally complacent obliviousness regarding the moral implications of such forms of parameter collapse—such as the ample feedback loops beginning to open up between genomically mediated arbitrations of “identity” and patterns of identification with, recruitment into, and exclusion from named human collectivities that long antedated the advent of molecular genetics. 22. Cf. Santos and Maio (2004) in regard to the politically fraught context of the Brazilian studies cited above. It is, of course, none of my business; but if I were George Reid Andrews, I would think that some public remarks about how Fejerman et al. (2005) transformed his fine study (G. Andrews 1980) of the ideological factors responsible for the “disappearance” of Buenos Aires’s Afro-Argentines into a set of biological “facts” would be in order. 23. As opposed to what she calls the “invention” of novel—i.e., systemically unknowable—forms of meaningful relations. Cf. O’Gorman (1961), with whom this line of reasoning appears to originate, and whose focus on Columbus’s “accidental find” of a previously unknown continent is entirely apposite here: in many ways, we are facing a situation akin to that of the good admiral looking at the coastline of Cuba and thinking he is sailing down that of Cathay! See the preface and Palmié (2013) for an extended exploration of this issue. 24. That TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey happily discovered her Zulu roots by genomic means (and then got them disconfirmed on camera by the geneticists Henry Louis Gates Jr. employed in his PBS television miniseries African American Lives!) doesn’t tell us much about the motivation or expectations of most consumers of such services (cf. Reardon 2012). 25. Apart from Brodwin’s own contributions (Brodwin 2002; Elliot and Brodwin 2005), see Banton (2005); Wailoo, Nelson, and Lee’s (2012) edited collection; Nelson (2016); Roth and Ivemark (2018); and Abel and Schroeder (2020). If Rapp’s (1998, 1999) studies of consumers of prenatal diagnostic services or Edwards’s (2000) ethnography of relatedness and “enracination” practices in northern England are any guide, the results might well surprise us. 26. Compare here Salas et al. (2005), who readily concede the limitations of their ambitious attempt to correlate a database of 4,860 African mtDNA sequences with a genomic sample taken from 1,148 African Americans. While their initial hope was that such a large data set might allow specific regional allocations of “origins,” they note that “even with greatly improved geographical coverage, it remains the case that mtDNAs are very widely distributed throughout the African continent, most likely as a result of the Bantu dispersals . . . , but no doubt also as a result of both earlier and more recent

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movements, including those that are due to the slave trade itself” (679). “This problem,” they conclude, “will continue to hamper the allocation of African American mtDNAs to narrower geographic locations in Africa, even if the resolution of the molecular analyses is increased from the first hypervariable segment (HVS-I) to complete mtDNA genomes” (679). Hence their sobering recommendations, worth quoting at length: “Considerable caution is therefore warranted when dealing with claims in the popular media . . . and those made by genetic ancestry-testing companies about their ability to trace the ancestry of certain American (or, for that matter, European) mtDNAs to a particular locale or population within modern-day Africa. Our analyses stand as a warning to unsuspecting members of the public who may be seduced by such promises” (679). 27. https://www.dnaconsulting.com, accessed February 3, 2005. The ancestry report discussed here has been removed from the site. 28. All other problems aside, the list of “tribal groups” not only includes units of highly different scale and orders of salience (e.g., “Senegalese,” “Serer,” “Wolof”—where the latter might be interpreted as subordinate members of a class of “Senegalese tribal units”) but also curiously does not feature a single unit—excepting perhaps the mysterious “Malunjin (Angola)”—whom linguists would regard as speakers of a (contemporary) Bantu language. On the nonchalance with which geneticists are wont to lump oftentimes entirely incommensurable and generally ill-conceived African “populations” under regional, ethnic, or linguistic rubrics (with oftentimes patently colonialist pedigrees), see MacEachern (2000). 29. Joel A. Rogers (1972, 1:13) saw this clearly as early as the 1940s. To wit: his definition of “the Negro” as “one who, regardless of his complexion, is not entitled by his ancestry to ride in a white coach in the Southern United States.” Of course, Rogers immediately qualified this definition as “idiotic” and useful only for argumentative purposes. Yet it was precisely for this reason that he then went on to employ it to identify Imhotep, Cleopatra, Terence, Saint Augustine, Muhammad, Pushkin, Beethoven, Karl Marx, Thomas Mann, and some five US presidents as “Negroes,” thus instantaneously disenrolling them from the “white race”—by the very criteria for establishing “whiteness” in use at the time. 30. Haley, of course, knew all along that he had an African ancestor—and not just because of oral traditions his family kept alive: given the structure of the American racial imaginary, every person inhabiting a social identity marked as Black knows as much. 31. A caveat is in order here: since we lack, as yet, good ethnographic evidence of how PHG products are being actively integrated into the identity projects of their consumers, chances are that inventions (in Strathern’s [2005] sense) of novel forms of relatedness—e.g., forms of “genomic solidarity” across socially routinized and institutionally embedded racial categories—might occur more frequently than one might suspect (cf. Gardner 2003). Still, for reasons I’ll explore below, it’s doubtful whether such moral pioneering (in Rayna Rapp’s [1998, 1999] sense) will lead to politically effective “infrastructural inversions” (Bowker and Star 1999) that render the historicity and contingent nature of institutionally anchored forms of racial classification visible and open to critique and active resistance. 32. On the American Yoruba Movement more generally, see Hunt (1979); Omari (1991); Brown (2003b); and Palmié (2013a). At the time I wrote the essay on which this chapter is based, the movement’s core, the African Kingdom of Oyotunji Village near

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Sheldon, South Carolina, was experiencing an interregnum (its founder, Oba Osejeman Adefunmi Adelabu I, died in early 2005), and its website no longer featured advertisements for “roots readings” by internet or phone. Since the ascension to the throne of his son Oba Adejuyigbe Egundjobi Alladohonu Oyewole Adefunmi II, roots readings seem to have been discontinued. The kingdom’s website now lists the new service of Ijo Egungun Ceremony, described as follows: Egungun are the collective representations of deceased family members who return to the world in the form of a masquerade; an ancient Yoruba form of ancestor veneration. The priests at Oyotunji African Village utilize this ancient tradition to bridge the gap of African descendants by reconnecting them with their personal Egun or ancestors of specofic [sic] to their familial lineage. This ceremony can be held in either Oyotunji African Village or on location requested by client. Ijo Egungun Ceremonies are family occasions and the client should be prepared to entertain their family and guests, both living and deceased. Families are encouraged to view the ancestral masquerade dance as a family reunion of sorts. If on location, an additional traveling expense would be added to the below listed rate [of $300]. http://www.oyotunji.org/spiritual -services.html (accessed December 6, 2022). Arguably, reuniting with one’s ancestors in “a family reunion of sorts” has not yet been achieved by molecular-biological means. 33. A divinatory system of Yoruba origin but in this instance derived, at least in part, from Cuban sources. 34. Worse yet, African Ancestry Inc., the PGH company run by the trained biologist Rick Kittles, thus issues Certificates of Ancestry based on what Kittles is content to call MatriClanTM and PatriClanTM analyses (see the website, https://www.AfricanAncestry .com [accessed December 6, 2022]). Fortunately, totemic animal ancestors defining the boundaries of human social groups haven’t been found by genomic means—so far, at least. 35. Here, Brazilian studies of the relation between color terms and AIMs (e.g., Parra et al. 2003; Santos et al. 2009) provide an illuminating contrast. Given the Brazilian tendency toward assortative mating based on phenotype rather than (known or imputed) ancestry, in the historically common case of European males mating with enslaved African women, children with more physically African features would be considered black, whereas those with more European features would be considered white, even though they would have exactly the same proportion of [biogeographically] African and European alleles. In the next generation, the light-skinned individuals would assortatively tend to marry other whites and conversely, the darker individuals would marry blacks. The long-term tendency would then be for this pattern to produce a white group and a black group, which would, nonetheless, have a similar proportion of African ancestry. (Parra et al. 2003, 181) 36. For just as we have no clue as to how much African ancestry might be found in the genetic makeup of self-identified Caucasians (not that we could reasonably determine any cutoff point at which individual genomic patterns would cease to carry African

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signatures!), so it is hard to say at which point self-identified African Americans may be too genetically “admixed” to be useful as, e.g., research subjects in clinical studies aiming to control for “race.” 37. This moment has received particular attention in regard to the political and ethical problem posed in the construction of populations at risk through predictive genetics—see, among many others, Lippman (1991); Kenea (1994); Rabinow (1996); Davison (1996); Lock (1997, 2005); Greely (1998); Rapp (1998, 1999); Finkler (2000); A. Goodman (2000); Schwartz (2001); Bestard (2004); Fausto-Sterling (2004); Epstein (2008); and S. Lee (2013). Since heritable disorders such as the sickling trait or Tay-Sachs disease had become conceptually linked to populations presumed to be “racially distinct” long before the advent of genomics (cf. Wailoo 2003), the multiplication of genetic risk factors may well lead to a situation where imputations of biotic Otherness to individuals at risk (e.g., by employers or insurance companies) will induce group formation on the part of those so singled out (cf. Rabinow 1996, 102). 38. A point well made by Tapper (1995) and Wailoo (1996) regarding the truly heroic resistance to reason exhibited by North American clinicians and epidemiologists in the history of the diagnostics of sickle cell anemia, a disease long held to be indicative not just of a hemopathological disorder but of “Blackness” as well. 39. See, e.g., Caldwell and Popenoe (1995); Schwartz (2001); Kaplan and Bennett (2003); and Pearce et al. (2004) for medical practitioners’ critiques of what Schwartz calls “racial profiling” in medical research and practice. One of the more interesting examples of this type of literature comes from a forensic anthropologist who asks, “If races don’t exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?” His answer is as honest as it is astounding: when identifying skeletal or other human remains in the context of, e.g., missing person searches, the use of “race labels” in their description of unidentified human remains “is not a vindication of the traditional notion that there are four human races, rather it is a prediction, based upon skeletal morphology, that a particular label would have been assigned to an individual when that individual was alive” (Sauer 1992, 110). In other words, gross anatomy—coupled with contemporary racial common sense—remained the name of the game at the time of Sauer’s writing and to a degree that even a principled skeptic like him couldn’t help but go along. 40. As Jonathan Kahn (2005, 656) puts it apropos the blatantly market- driven science behind the FDA’s consent to relabel a drug (whose patent was expiring) racespecific, “BiDil . . . is part of a much larger dynamic of reification in which the purported reality of race as genetic is used to obscure the social reality of racism” and, or so I would add, make money in the process of doing so (cf. Duster 2005). There is a larger, and politically highly incendiary, question that looms in this regard—viz., why forms of knowledge production associated, for instance, with what became known in African American communities in the 1980s as “The Plan” (to exterminate Black people by distributing crack cocaine, spreading AIDS, or introducing antifertility drugs into their food), Afrocentric melanin theories, or explanations of the incidence of hypertension among Black Americans as a result of “genetic bottlenecks” generated by the slave trade tend to be disqualified as conspiracy theories, crackpot science, or blatant ideology (e.g., Fine and Turner 2001; Ortiz de Montellano 1993; Curtin 1992; J. Kaufman and Hall 2003). It should be clear here that I endorse neither position. The unanswered question—and it again seems to be an ethnographic one—is why one type of answer to the question,

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Why did the granary collapse at the moment x was seeking shade underneath it? tends to be publicly discarded in favor of another one. 41. Or at least the belief that others believe in its existence, as Žižek (1997) has noted in a somewhat different context. 42. And irrespective of the degree to which such forms of science (in Strathern’s [2005] sense) have been historically preconstructed by race. 43. Obviously, Verkaik couldn’t possibly have meant genomic snippets that code for phenotype. If the good Dr. Watson “looked Black,” chances are that he would never have attained the education, in the 1940s and ’50s United States, that prepared him for his codiscovery of the double helix. And even if so, who would have cared about his genome? Excepting perhaps Watson himself, should he have wondered about the African ancestors who bequeathed to him such a bounty of “genes of black origin.” 44. As the media furor in the summer of 2015 over the “outing as white” of the president of Spokane’s NAACP chapter, Rachel Dolezal, demonstrated, this moment also works in reverse, though one wonders whether the debate might have taken a different turn had some geneticist bothered to submit Dolezal’s autosomal markers to an admixture test. See Brubaker (2016) for a searching analysis of Dolezal’s case in relation to what he calls the “micropolitics of sex/gender and racial/ethnic identity in an era of categorical flux” (415). 45. Part of what is at issue here is that while the inductive reasoning underlying genomic science may work perfectly well when it comes to assigning random samples of quantifiable units (individual DNA profiles) to classes (statistically ascertainable populations sharing certain genomic configurations), the problem—as Charles Sanders Peirce (1940, 152ff.) points out—is that once such findings are translated into what Peirce calls “characters” (i.e., complex properties not amenable to mensuration), induction loses its logical grip. As Peirce puts it in regard to the question of how to test the hypothesis that a man is a Roman Catholic priest—that is, “has the characters common to Catholic priests and peculiar to them”—the problem is that “characters are not units, nor can they be counted, in such a sense that one count is right and every other wrong. Characters have to be estimated according to their significance.” So it is in the case at hand. Even if it were possible to come up with genomic unit features common to inhabitants of Sweden or Zimbabwe and peculiar to them, what makes someone a Swede or a Zimbabwean, or a descendant of Swedes or Zimbabweans, is a matter not of molecular-biological mensuration but of social signification. In fact, Peirce’s example is highly felicitous for my purposes: while there certainly are people who descend from Catholic priests, such ancestry (while genomically provable, e.g., through paternity tests) is irrelevant when it comes to the inheritance of the “characters common to Catholic priests and peculiar to them.” 46. To be sure, most large-scale studies in, e.g., pharmacogenomics or genomic epidemiology recruit their subjects on the basis of ethno-racial self-identification, but they either limit choice to predesigned continental ancestries (“African,” “Asian,” “European,” etc.) or proceed to create statistical cohorts based on US census categories or similar proxy identifiers such as “Mexican” or “Puerto Rican” (cf. Fullwiley 2007, 2008; Reardon 2012; S. Lee 2013). 47. This example of a scientific doctrine that stands discredited beyond any redemption, rather than one on which the jury is still out, should allow us to bracket accusations

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of unreflexive essentialism on the part of “errant scientists” and knee-jerk deconstructionism on that of “ostrichlike” subjectivists (Weiss’s terms). If the Edinburgh school of the sociology of knowledge’s “strong programme” (Bloor 1991) should have taught us anything, it’s that not only failed scientific theories (animal magnetism, phrenology, hysteria, etc.) demand explanation but successful ones as well. In the case at hand, the question is not whether science “mixes” better with capitalism than with socialism or whether the resulting mixtures still qualify as science. It is, What havoc might be wrought by hybridized epistemologies that sail under the flag of science? 48. That some of Galileo’s or Newton’s most important “discoveries” arose from (what we now know were) wrong suppositions about the nature of the world (astrologically informed in the first case, alchemically in the latter) doesn’t make much of a difference on a mathematical level. But it did to the Inquisition—which forced Galileo to recant his insights—as well as to the Royal Society—which canonized Newton by spiriting away his penchant for transmutation and apocalyptical speculations. 49. As Nadia Abu El-Haj (2007, 242) might say, whatever else science does, it can insert “objects” into the world that need to be reckoned with (cf. Palmié 2013a). This, however, is not to prejudge the question about the extrasocial “reality” of such objects. 50. Hence perhaps Weiss’s (2007, 242) misgivings about, e.g., Troy Duster’s (2003) suggestion that rational methods of genomic comparisons might yield such bizarre entities as nucleotide signatures common to all Chicagoans. The problem is not that such results can’t be obtained. It’s that such research would answer questions that both Weiss and I would likely regard as nonsensical. 51. As every practitioner of Regla de Ocha knows, without receiving human attention, the oricha would simply curl up and die—not, however, without leaving the world in a shambles too (cf. Barber 1981). 52. See Gravlee’s (2009) trenchant analysis of how “race” becomes biology. Cf. Fox Keller (2014) for a lucid exposition of the “post genomic” shift toward reactive genomics in living systems. 53. Or is it? Responding to a Washington Post op-ed piece commiserating with Etty Allen for having felt compelled to hide her religion under a Christian façade so that her children might not have to face American anti-Semitism (Marcus 2006), Brian Petty (2006) begged to differ. For Petty, there was “an important distinction between Jews and other religionists: Jews are linked by ethnicity and common DNA.” In his view, the “denial of these blood ties, as if the fact of being born to the ‘tribe’ . . . can be eliminated through baptism in, say, an Episcopalian church,” constituted a “troubling cultural development in the American Jewish community.” Petty concluded, “Sen. George Allen’s Jewish roots have everything to do with his mother’s ethnicity, not her religion. Being Jewish isn’t just a function of religious affinity. It’s in the genes.” chapter 4 1. After I presented a first draft of what eventually became this chapter at the 2011 meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, one of my copanelists, Patrick Polk, managed to track down Timoteo Leal in the 1910 US census. There, he’s listed as a forty-five-year-old married cigar worker, resident in Philadelphia’s 15th Ward, who had immigrated to the United States (presumably with his Cuban parents) at the age of

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thirteen in 1878—that is, at the very end of the first war of Cuban independence, the Ten Years’ War. My thanks for this masterly piece of archival sleuthing go to Patrick Polk. 2. A note on spelling: rather than standardizing the orthography of Abakuá terminology, I have chosen to retain the (inconsistent) Hispanicizing spelling found in Abakuá libretas (notebooks) and utilized by my interlocutors in Regla (e.g., abakuá instead of abacuá and Sikan instead of Sican, but enquico instead of enkiko or Nasacó instead of Nasakó). 3. A once-common heteronym for “Abakuá,” nowadays uniformly rejected by its members. 4. These are the four obones (highest titles): Illamba, Mocongo, Isué, and Isunécue, followed by the indiobones (next-high-ranking titles): Empegó, Ecueñón, and Enkrícamo. 5. Obviously, interpreting a North American newspaper account from the turn of the twentieth century in light of the Cuban ethnographic evidence from the turn of the twenty-first comes dangerously close to the kind of ahistorical exercises deriving “African” origins from comparisons of New World data with decontextualized Africanist ethnography that I myself have repeatedly criticized. 6. In the former case, my own fieldwork on Abakuá in Havana’s municipio of Regla since 1996 will serve as the major source of data. In the latter case, I will rely on an eclectic sample of publications that issued forth from the social networks surrounding Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory and Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park research facility as well as a copious secondary literature. 7. Which, of course, makes perfect sense to anyone familiar with the ethnographic literature on Nigeria’s Cross River region and its secret societies—which have been consistently (if somewhat problematically—cf. Palmié 2008) pinpointed as Abakuá’s African “antecedents.” The number of such cognoscenti nowadays includes members of Abakuá who have read, e.g., Fernando Ortiz’s or Lydia Cabrera’s writings on these matters, though they will never have heard a leopard’s voice outside Havana’s Jardín Zoológico. Note also that in both contemporary mythical accounts and visual representations, llebengó, the tiger, has become Ecueñón’s primordial beast of prey. 8. “To attain their supernatural condition,” writes Fernando Ortiz (1952–55, 4:42), all ritual objects “first have to pass through a rite of reanimation. To effect this, at the beginning of a plante, the ritual specialist marks the floor with a magical chalk sign that reaches from the seclusion of écue to the temple’s door, and he puts the four principal drums on the part of the hieroglyph designating [the position of] écue. He places the empegó [drum] on top of écue, above it the ekueñón [drum], then the eribó [a silent drum], and on top of them all the enkríkamo.” The itones (staffs of office) are likewise activated through sacred writing; even the afoíreme (body masks) have to be ritually attended to in order to enable their wearers to not enact the liturgical functions of íremes but to embody them. 9. “Oye la campana pero no sabe donde sueña”—he hears the church bells, but he doesn’t know where they are ringing—an Abakuá proverb has it. Although it aims to distinguish between common obonécues and plazas (the first don’t get to visually apprehend écue, whereas the latter do), it neatly circumscribes Abakuá’s phonic esotericism: women, foreign anthropologists, bystanders, or even the police will hear écue’s voice. But how could they possibly grasp the portent of its utterances? 10. Here, significant ritual differences exist between the ramas (branches) of efó

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and efí. Given that the mystery was originally discovered in the territory of efó and only incompletely transmitted to the efí, Abakuá potencias pertaining to the rama (genealogy of ritual descent) efó don’t need to go out and search for the voice, which “lives” in a tinaja (water-filled jar) on the potencia’s altar. In the efó version of the baroco, the voice begins to sound as soon as Ecueñón begins to chant. 11. Which, or so most of my informants agree, they carried in or on their bodies (e.g., in the form of bracelets that hadn’t been taken from them upon enslavement). 12. Details omitted to respect the esoteric nature of the process. 13. To be sure, contemporary Cuban obonécues strenuously deny the possibility that écue’s voice could have been transmitted across Atlantic waters after its initial arrival at the dockside of Itía Ororó Cande, where African slaves belonging to the Cabildo de los Carabalí Bricamó Ápapa Efí first managed to transmit écue’s voice to New World sonic space. Yet the questions this may raise aren’t particularly interesting for my argument (I have no intention to prove or disprove whether the Leals’ Temple of the Ancient Grace was “really” an Abakuá potencia); nor are they, in fact, accessible to historical verification. Besides, contemporary Cuban obonécues themselves ultimately resort to secondary rationalizations in trying to argue that even photographic evidence (such as, e.g., in the Spanish criminologist Rafael Salillas’s images taken at the turn of the twentieth century in the Spanish presidio of Ceuta; cf. Palmié 2008; Aranzadi 2014) couldn’t prove the presence of a functioning potencia outside Cuba. Who would have authorized its birth? they will ask. How could the transmission of the voice have been achieved? But of course, since écue did come to Cuba, the matter nowadays seems to be conditioned by a fear of unauthorized reproduction—including not only a break in the chain of transmisiones but the possibility that a copy might take the place of the original. Perhaps the paradox at the heart of this matter is best expressed in the negue (ritual question), “If Nasacó swore in the first thirteen obones in Usagaré, who then swore in Nasacó?” to which the answer must be given, “The men he swore in.” 14. But see Corbett (1994); Chude-Sokei (1997); or Eshun (1998) for suggestive analytical leads in such directions. Most intriguingly, Henriques (2003), too, speaks of the sonic dominance characterizing sound systems situations as effecting multiple “transductions”—e.g., from electromagnetic frequencies into sonic and ultimately kinetic and affective modalities. 15. In Webb Keane’s (2003, 2008) sense of a metapragmatics regimenting socially routinized practices of attaching relatively specific sign values to the materiality of semiotic forms, in this case sonic vibrations registered as auditory apperceptions. 16. See Schmidt’s (2000, 19–31) astute but generous critique of the Pauline theology of the word underlying Ong’s lament for the desacralization of audition in the course of the rise of secular visualism, and Sterne (2003, 16–19) on its relation to Derrida’s critique of a metaphysics of presence. 17. Such as an auditory surveillance system aptly designated as a panacousticon by Zielinski (2006, 129). 18. See, e.g., Scharlau (1969) and Ullmann ((2002) for systematic expositions of Kircher’s acoustic and musicological theories. An illustration of this technology from Kircher’s Phonurgia nova (1673) is available at https://diglib.hab.de/drucke/xb-4827/start .htm?image=00163 (accessed November 20, 2022). 19. Francis Bacon reported on the “ear trumpet,” or “otoacousticon,” as early as 1629,

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and Robert Hooke introduced its principle to the Royal Society in 1688 on the analogy of the microscope as a technology to extend sensory reach (Gouk 1982). According to the OED, it was in 1684 that the word microphone first appeared in print in English. Closely intertwined though they historically are, I am concerned with megaphony rather than microphony here. 20. These included (among quite a few others) Charles Wheatstone’s speaking machine, which is said to have inspired the young Bell; Joseph Faber’s “Euphonia”; and as the end point of this series of “dead technologies,” George René Joseph Marie Marage’s artificial larynx siren with buccal resonators in 1911 (Hankins and Silverman 1995). 21. Fernschreiben, as it still is called in the indicative German gloss, Fernsprechen, telephony, or Fernsehen, television, were and are an entirely different matter. Aschoff (1987) provides a lucid history of telegraphy before Morse. 22. Himself a deeply pious man, “convinced that he was a divinely chosen instrument for the furtherance of communication,” Morse had arguably laid the groundwork for the enchantment of telegraphy by selecting a biblical verse (“What hath God wrought,” Num. 23:23) for the first message transmitted from the US Capitol building to Baltimore’s Mount Clare railway station (Harlow 1936, 99). Indeed, within less than ten years, on January 6, 1851, Andrew Jackson Davis, “the Poughkeepsie Seer,” received a lengthy message from the spirit of Benjamin Franklin. The spirit claimed that it was Franklin who, over the course of the good half century since his body had died, had invented the celestial telegraph (Sollors 1983, 988–89) and had merely, as the medium and Spiritualist historian Emma Hardinge later put it, taken time in finding an earthly location “charged with the aura requisite to make it a battery for the working of the telegraph” between the hereafter and the world of the mortals (Sconce 2000, 36). Compare the inaugural moments of the telephone and phonograph: Bell shouting “Watson, come here! I want you,” Edison reciting “Mary had a little lamb.” Of course, it didn’t matter much. Their inventions became “haunted” in no time. 23. A project he had inherited from his father, Alexander Maxwell Bell, who had designed one of the more important early phonetic scripts—“visible speech”—for the same purposes. 24. Or, according to his own rather more colorful version (Edison 1948, 44), a boyhood encounter with an aggressive train conductor. 25. Frow (1982, 21) features a photograph of Edison’s personal disc phonograph with highly visible bite marks. Commenting on the above passage, Peters (2004, 191) notes that “there is a perverse logic in Edison’s chomping on the machine, because the phonograph (as opposed to the gramophone, which is ROM or read-only) also achieved the reversibility of mouth and ear, of recording and playback.” 26. Cf. the examples given in Read and Welch (1959, 18–24). 27. Characterizing the auditory ideology that guided initial receptions of phonography, Brady (1999, 46–47) writes, In European and American cultures, hearing has been poetically and philosophically understood as the most ephemeral and evocative of sensory impressions, retrievable only through the mutable workings of memory. Western writers and thinkers in an unbroken line extending to St. Augustine back through Aristotle portray memory as a voiced entity. Marcel Proust writes figuratively of voices

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trapped in an inanimate object, lost to us unless we unwork the magic. “Then they start and tremble, they call us by their name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice, the spell is broken.” The poignancy of this image lies in Proust’s suggestion that this moment is a fairy-tale instant that for most of us never arrives. . . . But the wax cylinder, crude as it was, challenged the finality of this image, offering just such a spell to release the lost voices. An inanimate object, the cylinder bore the traces of past events in its very grooves and was capable of reanimating the event’s lost voices and wrenching time out of the linear conformation of the Western mind, projecting past into present. This may well have been so, but surely only among those whose prior representational economies and auditory ideologies predisposed them to enchanting the relation between audible sonic copies and their absent “originals”! 28. By the 1920s, the Panamanian Cuna (who never seem to have been much taken aback by sound recording) were positively resisting its “civilizing” impact foisted on them by the Panama Canal authority, which forced their women to attend dances with canal workers—to the tunes of American phonograph records (Taussig 1993, 196). And even though the phonograph does seem to have played some role in the emergence of the Northern Rhodesian Lozi kingdom under British rule (Strickrodt 2007) by relaying the voice of a suitably collaborative chief to his future subjects, this episode, too, betrays rapid understanding and routinization of the technology’s time- and space-transcending capacities absent any sustained supernatural interpretations. 29. Speaking about the prolific metaphors of male birth and mechanic infancy that permeate both Bell’s and Edison’s early popular (and even private) writings, Sterne (2003, 181) puts his finger on a “the child is father to the man” moment when he notes that once “machines come into the world through singular moments of birth, they can have ‘impacts.’ They take on a little bit of humanity by becoming autonomous agents coming from outside the world of human activity to affect it, even as the birth metaphor deprives them of their greater humanity as products of human endeavor.” 30. Though Edison soon abandoned his theory of “etheric force,” he continued dabbling in electrical medicine, inventing, among other things, a medicinal electrifier (“Edison Therapeutic Sinusoidal Machine”) and a patent medicine (“Edison’s Polyform”) designed to alleviate neuralgia by restoring electrical balance to facial nerves. As Nye (1983, 142) tells us, “[The] Edison formula contained one dram of peppermint oil mixed with small quantities of chloroform, morphine, alcohol, and other substances. Applied externally to the face, it worked on the theory that mucous membranes excrete an alkaline fluid, and serous membranes produce an acid, thus together producing electricity as a kind of battery. Polyform restored normal electrical exchange.” 31. Of course, Edison wouldn’t be the first materialist to change his mind in the afterlife. In 1924 Michael Faraday, perhaps one of the fiercest opponents of Victorian Spiritualism, posthumously dictated an entire book, Evolution of the Universe. 32. See Porter (2005) and Vasconcelos (2008) for particularly lucid expositions of the relationship between Spiritualism and positivism. 33. One thinks of the likes of the eminent chemists Sir William Crookes and Robert Hare; the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Charles Richet; Darwin’s competitor in the development of the theory of evolution Alfred Russell Wallace; the physicist Oliver

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Lodge; the pioneer of transatlantic telegraphy Cromwell Fleetwood Varley; the Italian founder of “positive” criminology Césare Lombroso; the psychologist and philosopher Henry James; the folklorist Andrew Lang; or Comte’s translator and social critic Harriet Martineau, but also such distinguished figures as the US Supreme Court Justice John C. Edmunds; the industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen; the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley; writers as famous as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Mark Twain; the composer Richard Wagner; and the widow of the slain US president, Mary Todd Lincoln. 34. And notionally, sometimes even before then: after all, Ben Franklin had been laboring mightily in the afterlife before he managed to find the right conditions for passing the telegraph from the afterlife to the sublunar world in Rochester, New York! 35. It took a full twenty-two years between the invention of daguerreotype and William H. Mummler’s 1861 announcement that he had successfully photographed a spirit. 36. Compare the reproduction of Bell’s 1876 sketches of the first liquid-based telephone in Bruce (1973, 179, 180, 183). 37. This, of course, is exactly what differentiated both the emergent secularist consumers of phonographic entertainment and Spiritualist users of electroacoustic technology from psychotics who just as eagerly began to harness telephony and (to a perhaps lesser extent) phonography to the expression and elaboration of their personal delusions. See Gitelman (1999, 62– 96), for examples drawn from the correspondence received by Edison’s lab. 38. As the New York Times (March 16, 1860) article described it, [The] instrument was nothing less than a great reservoir for the collection of sound, connected with a series of distributing pipes for conveying to many different ears at once. . . . The funnel-shaped vessel is placed before the pulpit, and catches the words as fast as they drop from the speaker’s lips. From the bottom of the funnel, pipes are laid beneath the floor, to the various parts of the house occupied by those whose hearing is defective, and these terminate in ear-pieces attached to the side of the pew. 39. Were the “spools” gaily floating in the water induction coils? Was the “pagoda” a device to capture and funnel sound? Might the mouthpiece into which Leal is seen speaking in the photograph in the North American have been furnished with a microphonic diaphragm? Was the water acidulated? Would the wemba or mocuba used in contemporary Abakuá work as an electrolyte or medium to vary impedance? While the answer to the last question is an unequivocal yes, the others are historical imponderables. 40. Walter Benjamin (1969, 217–51), of course, famously caught on to this cultural moment: is not the very notion of “auratic loss” an artifact of an ideology of mediation that simply could not have been developed in the absence of technical reproducibility? As he puts it (243n2), “To be sure, at the time of its origin, a medieval picture of the Madonna could not have been said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries and perhaps most strikingly so during the last one.” 41. On this issue, see Thompson’s (1995) analysis of phonographic advertisement copy and her account of how Edison’s “Tone Test Campaign” (concert performances in which audiences were exposed to both “live” singers—the term live music originated in these contexts—and phonographic recordings of their voices) between 1915 and 1922

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systematically cultivated a new culture of (technologically enhanced) auditory “realism” among the American public. Though much less dramatically so than in the case of photographic “realism” (cf. Mnookin 1998), the awareness of staged or otherwise manipulated “copies” without originals was part and parcel of that moment right from the start (Feaster 2001): as early as 1878, Edison himself produced the equivalent of spirit photographs by recording several times over the same strip of tinfoil; and while the phonograph did see battle in Cuba during the so-called Spanish-American War, the Victor record “The Battle of Santiago” made extensive use of sound effects. As Feaster (86) well puts it, “[The] kettle drums in ‘The Battle of Santiago’ do not sound much like the naval cannons used during the Spanish American War, but when prefaced by the command, ‘Fire the starboard thirteen-inch gun at the enemy’s flagship!,’ the striking of a drum can readily be interpreted as the firing of a cannon.” Readily, perhaps, but only once one has been inculcated into the auditory semiotic ideology that was dawning at the time! 42. In Heidegger’s (1977) sense of technology as both techne and poiesis. chapter 5 1. Freely translated: “What bullshit! What barbarism to play a rumba for my oricha. This is a lack of respect. And who is he?” 2. This isn’t the place to tell the little we know of that story. Let me just say here that while Kardecian Spiritism, the Yoruba-inspired Regla de Ocha, and the western Central African–influenced Reglas de Congo have long coexisted in and interacted as part and parcel of a larger Afro- Cuban religious formation in Havana, in dialectical terms we might say that the cajón finally has achieved a synthesis, however ambiguous and unstable it may be. On the other hand, eastern Cuba, where Regla de Ocha arrived only in the 1930s, has long known such mergers between universes of discourse and practice that, at least in Havana, are still regarded as finite, if mutually translatable, “provinces of meaning” (cf. Wirtz 2007, 2014). 3. Unlike Ochoa (2010a), who goes to great lengths in setting me and my past work on such matters up as a Hegelian strawman to his Deleuzian ruminations, I’m not at all troubled by a spirit/matter dichotomy when it comes to looking at disciplinary forms of Western knowledge (or even folk-Cartesian common sense) through the lens of an Afro-Cuban ritual complex. Nor are my—and I would venture to guess his—informants as immune to the infiltrations of such metaphysics into their decidedly differently structured practices as he claims them to be. While the notion of los muertos certainly can only be reduced to the English phrase “spirits of dead people” on the same (exceedingly problematic) grounds that Evans-Pritchard (1937) used to operationalize the Zande term mangu as “witchcraft,” contrary to Ochoa’s protestations that his informants “never” use the term espiritú to refer to “the dead” (in the singular or plural), I wonder whether he ever heard the phrase, exceedingly common as it is in my experience, that humans possessed by such beings or entities are presente solamente en su materia (present only in their [bodily] matter). But this ethnographic quibble is beside the point here anyway. 4. A disclaimer: in the following, I don’t aim to dispute Trouillot’s important insight into the limits that “historicity 1” poses in setting the “stage for” any possible historical narrative (his “historicity 2”). Nor am I concerned with what he calls the production of “silences” as an inevitable aspect of the complex matrix of forces and interests operating

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in the creation, assembly, and narrativization of “historical facts.” Given that the “materiality of the sociohistorical process” is accessible to us only in mediated form (i.e., through semiotic operations), what I’m interested in are the conditions under which something like “historicity 1” becomes both thinkable and good to think. 5. Here and in the following, my use of the term semiotic ideology is indebted to Webb Keane (e.g., 2003, 2005, 2007, 2018) as well as R. Bauman and Briggs (2003). 6. Though its Gothic appearance ought not to be taken as a clue to its erection in the high Middle Ages—that, we might say, is planted evidence. 7. At least on the uniformitarian anthropological grounds of what our own disciplinary forebears established as the “psychic unity” of mankind and the essential and universal, rather than incidental and particular, coevalness of what motivates and shapes instances of human action, i.e., intent and volition as refracted by different and plural cultures. For a classical statement by a historian well read in the anthropological literature of his day, see Bernheim (1908, 190– 97). 8. “History,” says Lévi-Strauss (1966, 231), “does not account for the present, but it makes a selection between its elements, according only some of them the privilege of having a past.” 9. For perspectives that root some of these developments in a far earlier “historical revolt” unwittingly unleashed by humanist scholarship, see Pocock (1962); Fasolt (2004); or Woolard (2004). 10. Not incidentally, he so argued at the tail end of the so-called crisis of historicism in German intellectual life—when the implications of Nietzsche’s “genealogical” turning of history onto itself had sunk in to a degree where the historicization of “ultimate values” was feared to result in rampant moral relativism. A descent into shocking moral chaos indeed was to occur less than a decade after Mannheim’s writing. But qualifying fascism as driven by a historicist ideology is surely to grossly misrepresent both phenomena. 11. After all, ever since Edmund Burke’s strictures against the novelties of the French Revolution, it has been a hallmark of Western political conservatism to try to relegate despised “innovation” to a past that true adherents to “tradition” will have to strive to supersede. Like Burke, contemporary conservatives are wedded to historicism—if only because they need to project the past into a future that progressives are always in the process of colonizing for themselves. 12. See Domanska (2006); Cashell (2007); and Bevernage (2008) for statements of these issues. 13. Surely, what goes on in a hadron collider is hardly linear time, nor is it a clear-cut succession of pasts and presents independent of an observer’s situated vantage point. Cf. Adam (1990); Greenhouse (1996); Chakrabarty (2000, 74–75). 14. See Bauman and Briggs (2003) for similar arguments in the constitution of “language” and “languages,” and Feierman (1993) for the case of “historical synthesis.” 15. Cf. Post (1852) for examples. The secondary literature on their posthumous exploits is large and rapidly growing. See, e.g., Palfreman (1979); Sollors (1983); Cox (2003); Porter (2005); or Vasconcelos (2008). Sword (1999) and Babb (2005) give vivid accounts of the classificatory travails ensuing when standard bibliographic cataloguing practices confront posthumous authorial activities. A particularly apposite case, occasionally cited to this day, occurred in 1923 when the Chancery Division of Britain’s High Court of Justice heard Cummins v. Bond, where a medium sought injunction against a “sitter”

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(attendant of a séance) aiming to publish an automatically written manuscript authored by a spirit named Cleophas. To the court’s dismay, the medium as well as the aspiring publisher expressly denied wanting to be awarded copyright of the text (B. Lee 1926). 16. “Ver para creer”—seeing is believing—the saying goes. And it’s often invoked in ritual contexts. Yet although it doesn’t quite work like that (Wirtz 2007, 2014; Holbraad 2008), one can’t help but notice the parallelism between the realm of hearsay and direct eyewitness testimony in North Atlantic courtrooms (Loftus 1979; Cousins 1989; Philips 1993) or the strange career of photography (as opposed to, e.g., painting) as legal evidence (Mnookin 1998). 17. In yet another analytical inflection, Tata Francisco and Ño Carlos might even be written into stories about “embodied memory” that merely repeats the symbolically coded symptomatology of an originary trauma beyond conscious recall and rational resolution. 18. But see P. Johnson (2011), who in a brilliant move traces key components of this ideological configuration to Hobbes’s considerations of contractual authorship, “personation,” and “Suretyes”—that is, the legal ability to assume debt—in long-distance trade. Though my concern with individuated personhood, will, and agency clearly parallels Johnson’s, his analytical goals are rather different from mine. 19. “Nobody, could he be sure that the soul of Heliogabalus were in one of his hogs, would yet say that that hog were a man or Heliogabalus” (Locke 1964, 210). 20. Surely, “the same successive body, not shifted all at once must, as well as the same immaterial spirit, go into the making of the same man” (Locke 1964, 211). 21. “Human laws punish both [drunks and sleepwalkers], with a justice suitable to their way of knowledge [i.e., incapable of judging states of interiority], because in these cases, they cannot distinguish certainly what is real, what is counterfeit; and so the ignorance in drunkenness or sleep is not admitted as a plea” (Locke 1964, 217). 22. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the necessary flip side of Locke’s (1963) theory of property in the Second Treatise of Government. If proprietorship in one’s person is the basis for the rightful creation of further property by applying one’s embodied capacities to nature, then the self that appropriates his or her actions in the creation of wealth must equally appropriate—own up to—the liabilities that arise from them. 23. “The apostle tells us that, at the great day, when everyone shall receive according to his doings, the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open. The sentence shall be justified by the consciousness all persons shall have that they themselves, in what bodies soever they appear, or what substances soever that consciousness adheres to, are the same that committed those actions, and deserve that punishment for them” (Locke 1964, 220; emphasis in the original). Compare Mark Cousins’s (1989, 135) elaboration on the notion of “historical judgment”: “Routine historical scholarship and the most fantastic philosophies of history can easily slip into a common condition, a privilege accorded to historicity as the one and only proper court for the enactment of a truthful discourse on what has existed. History and truth merge at the point where interrogation and judgment produce a verdict.” This, Cousins says (135), is “a fantasy that,” much like the idea of the Last Judgment, “cancels all other claims so that the concept and referent of history may be joined according to the due processes of law.” 24. Writing less than a generation after the British abolition of slavery and on the eve of the American Civil War, Maine (1963, 164), of course, saw these “apparent exceptions”

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as “exceptions of that stamp which illustrate the rule”—never mind the encumbrances, legal and other, that were placed on the exercise of such will on the part of the freed people in the aftermath of emancipation. 25. See P. Johnson (2011) for a sophisticated exploration along such lines. Cf. the now classic statements by MacPherson (1962), Dumont (1971), Sahlins (1976), and Hirschman (1977). Mauss (1985) remains the distinguished predecessor of anthropological theories of personhood—which he, not incidentally, traces from non-Western masking traditions and Greco-Roman theater. In regard to legal history, Haskell (1998) usefully focuses on the nexus between theories of the market, the rise of contractual law since the end of the eighteenth century, and the ambiguities of nineteenth-century theories of the will, while Sayre (1932) remains a good sketch of the transformations of the intimately related concept of the mens rea in criminal law. 26. Legal categories such as duress, undue influence, diminished responsibility, temporary insanity, or possibly even recklessness (volition without intentionality) come to mind here. Barr (2006) provides intriguing insight into how the rise of the category of legal insanity in late eighteenth-century British law undermined and ultimately destroyed the political potential of “inspired prophecy.” 27. Oftentimes with highly paradoxical results: compare Seidman’s (1965, 1966) vigorous denunciation of the application of the normative standards of “reasonable man” in British common law to African legal systems in the immediate aftermath of decolonization. Seidman, it should be noted, isn’t concerned with relativizing North Atlantic Universals (which he rightly sees as grounded in particular historical experiences, but nonetheless views as superior to other possible standards, in this case of juridical nature). What he decries are the glaring contradictions produced by extending the scope of the “reasonability” of the “man on the Clapham Omnibus” to members of African communities. Citing a classic British legal textbook about the notion that “retribution in punishment is an expression of the community’s disapproval of crime,” he asks, “Which society is expressing its disapproval of crime when a British judge sentences the male population of a Kenya village to death” for having killed an alleged witch (Seidman 1965, 48n14)? 28. Citing a surprisingly Humean formulation by the Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann concerning the undecidability, for the historian, of divine intervention in history, Chakrabarty (2000, 105) sees “anthropologizing” ostensibly irrational “belief” as the discipline of history’s logical default position. Though he’s probably right as far as history is concerned, from the anthropologist’s perspective one can only say, “Wish it were that simple!” 29. Surely, the being instigating the revolt in the Santal’s view can be called such only from a perspective external to theirs. For a stringent analysis of the problems with such predications in regard to the historiography of “popular belief” in early modern France, see Clark (1983). 30. “When we act,” asks Latour (2005, 43), who else is acting? How many agents are also present? How come I never do what I want? Why are we all held by forces that are not of our making? Such is the oldest and most legitimate intuition of those sciences, that which has fascinated since the time when crowds, masses, statistical means, invisible hands, and unconscious drives began to replace the passions and reasons, not

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to mention the angels and demons that had pushed and pulled our humble souls up to then. Cf. Buccafusco (2008) on the distinct threat that Spiritism appeared to pose to late nineteenth-century legal theories of “will” (before similar such threats eventually became channeled into psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and forensic psychiatry, on the other). See also Espírito Santo’s and Llera Blanes’s (2014) strictures against a critique of “bourgeois individuality,” as exemplified by Bourdieu (1986) and Comaroff and Comaroff (1992), that rails against the assumption of the temporally or sociologically coherent self but leaves its (humanistic) core essentially intact. 31. “Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today, including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century” (Chakrabarty 2000, 41)—which, of course, would include most European countries as well. 32. See, e.g., Shaw (2002); Argenti (2007); or Routon (2008). 33. Though Marshall Sahlins (1985, 2004) has come close to such an argument. 34. This, one might argue with Giumbelli (2014), is a question that can turn historicism back on its own products by engendering convergences between marginal (but historically documented) Jesuits, fictional (but entirely plausible) Amerindian chiefs, and the biography of their twentieth- century medium, upon whose death the entity composed of such heterogeneous “flows” “passed on to” a higher plane of existence. Will Abraham Lincoln pass on to such a “plane of existence” once historians and their (so far) ceaselessly biography-buying American public tire of yet more historiographic output on his life and national significance? A good Durkheimian answer would surely be yes. 35. For the former, see Bloor (1991); for the latter, Latour (1993). Cf. Bloor (1999) for a polemic, differentiating the strong programme from Latourean “symmetrical anthropology.” 36. For a vivid example, see Wirtz (2014). In line with Ochoa’s (2010b) conception of the anonymous “ambient” (rather than “responsive”) dead in Palo Monte, we might say mediums and their entities personalize themselves in relation to each other in a manner not all that different from historians, who assert their own historical agency by carving out increasingly coherent historical individualities from a sea of phenomenologically given data that are always potentially construable as indices of an otherwise undifferentiated, “ambient” past—the untold “history” in which subscribers to a historicist ontology swim like fish in an ocean constituted by the past agency of both the living and the dead. 37. Much more could be said here about how spirit communications and the interactions between the dead and the living may attain forms of significance that are in themselves of historical import: such as when people begin to reorient their lives in light of counsel received from the dead; when mediums learn about new aspects of their spirit’s past lives and dispositions (which may change) through dreams or oracular means; or when they are belatedly apprised of what their spirits uttered while they were possessed by them. For sophisticated treatments of such issues, see Lambek (2002, 2003) and Price (2008). chapter 6 1. My thanks go to Olivia Gomez da Cunha for alerting me to Bascom’s letter to Herskovits cited below; to Amanda Villepastour for helping me clarify Bascom’s igno-

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rance of the ritual use of stones in Yorubaland; to Stefania Capone for reminding me of the mysteries of the piedras de ara; to Paul Johnson for sharing manuscripts on the performativity of spirit presences; and to Kristina Wirtz for suggesting that I take on, however briefly, American anthropology as a recursive system. 2. That EP lived through most of the debates his work occasioned among Oxbridge philosophers and philosophically minded anthropologists without ever intervening in them is an interesting datum in its own right. 3. Or semiotic ideologies, in Keane’s (2003, 2018) methodologically rather more hands-on sense. 4. Bascom’s notes (hereafter Bascom 1948) give no clue as to why the Bascoms chose Jovellanos as their primary field site (some interviews were conducted in the nearby port town of Cárdenas). 5. As Amanda Villepastour tells me (personal communication), this may indeed have been the case: in Nigeria, Bascom had worked predominantly with Yoruba babalawos (priests of the Ifá oracle), who do not normally take part in those rituals of òrìs· à cults in which stones do, in fact, play a role. Besides, not knowing about such practices, Bascom may have simply failed to ask his Yoruba interlocutors about the ritual use of stones, and they may not have seen any reason to volunteer such information. 6. Bascom is referring to Herskovits’s (1937b, 299) concept of “socialized ambivalence” arising from the “influence which cultures in contact bring to bear upon the individuals who must meet the demands of two traditions which, in many aspects, are in anything but accord.” 7. In this and the following quotations, I have preserved Bascom’s often elliptical English and sometimes faulty Spanish. 8. See Cabrera (1983, 60) for a similar story of African stones that multiplied, gave birth, grew, etc., gathered at around the time Bascom did his fieldwork. Tales of slaves swallowing African ritual objects (stones, divining instruments, etc.), thus incorporating them during the Middle Passage, are still a common mode of rationalizing the origins of Regla de Ocha. 9. Yet while the former may have genuinely inaugurated a tradition there, as an anthropologist Bascom was a comparative latecomer, having been preceded not only by Fernando Ortiz and Herminio Portell Vilá in 1928 (Portell Vilá 1929) but by Harold Courlander in 1941. All three were recalled with considerable ambivalence by Bascom’s informants in 1948 (García 2014). At any rate, what I have called “the ethnographic interface” (Palmié 2013a)—a kind of membrane on either side of which “Afro- Cuban religion” and the “anthropology thereof” took shape over the course of the twentieth century—had already consolidated in Jovellanos; it would receive further elaboration in the course of later visits by Lydia Cabrera, Josefina Tarafa, and Pierre Verger. 10. Since that book was published in German, the ethnography likely remains unknown. For treatments of these issues in English, see, e.g., Dornbach (1977); Brandon (1993, 153–55); Brown (1996); and Pérez (2016, 57–60). Cf. Sansi Roca (2007, 23–46); Goldman (2009); and Halloy (2013) for comparative material from Brazil. 11. Nor is this an issue of mere iteration: as Capone (2010, 20) puts it in the largely analogous Brazilian case, initiates and their gods become “versions” of each other. As she writes, “The close interaction of the adept with his orixá is reciprocal: The orixá . . . possesses the initiate, but the initiate also metaphorically possesses his god: the incar-

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nated god is referred to as the Oxalá of Maria or the Oxossi of João, while the initiate is identified as being Maria of Oxalá or João of Oxossi.” 12. If I may be allowed a digression here, it seems to me that Pels’s (2008) own work on Victorian Spiritualism could be read in exactly this way. It’s not that Wallace, Crookes, or James, among others, were successfully recruited into an emerging network of remarkable extension, connectivity, and durability—while Huxley, Tylor, or Engels weren’t (because the former were gullible, exercised wishful thinking, or deluded themselves, whereas the latter didn’t “believe” in contact with the afterlife, were staunch materialists, detected fraud, etc., etc.). It’s that the assemblage of technologies (tables, telegraphs, photographic cameras, speaking trumpets, etc.), bodies, and the sensorium of mediums, sitters, and debunkers (one thinks of Houdini), texts (Spiritualist publications), institutions (such as the Society for Psychical Research), invisible forces, and currents such as magnetism and electricity, along with the dead, coalesced during Spiritualism’s heyday into an ontology that existed in parallel with that in which skeptics made their home. Like all ontologies worthy of the name, it not only had a history in Hacking’s (2002; cf. Pina Cabral 2017) sense but laid out the conditions for the making of certain kinds of history (e.g., American prison reform, female suffrage, the independence of India, and other causes championed by Spiritualists). 13. As Brown (2003b, 74) notes, “Casas are the nodes, as it were, of the ramas, and these terms together constitute the sacred genealogical organizing principles of the Lucumí tradition. The rama is constituted by two levels of sacred reproduction and descent: the genealogically related, consecrated ‘heads’ of initiated priests, and the genealogically related ‘secrets’ or fundamentos of the orichas that priests receive in their initiations, that is, sets of consecrated ‘stones’ (otán).” 14. While everyone’s head is ruled by an oricha, not all of us are destined to be initiated into that oricha’s cult. If someone is, then the oricha will sooner or later make its demands known. In Goldman’s (2009) Deleuzian terms, it is then that a virtuality becomes actualized. 15. See Barber (1981) for a pathbreaking essay that made exactly this argument in the case of the Yoruba and their òrìs· à. Perhaps not surprisingly, Latour (2010, 6) opens his reflections on modernist “factishism” with an excerpt from an ethnography of the Candomblé. 16. If I may be permitted a foray into philosophical terrain, I would say that santeros are post-Humean inductivists cleaving close to a sense of metaphysical contingency akin to that adumbrated by Quentin Meillassoux (e.g., Meillassoux and Mackay 2012). 17. Perhaps he had been attending one of Jovellanos’s two Protestant churches, after all? 18. Bascom presented every one of his informants with a list of Catholic saints whose “African equivalents” he aimed to elicit—often by concluding with his own shorthand note “DK”—i.e., “doesn’t know.” 19. Paul Johnson (2020, 161) hints at another possibility: citing Pierre Verger (1998, 83; Johnson’s translation), who compares new initiates in Candomblé to photographic plates imprinted with the “latent image of the god [which] reveals itself when all the right conditions are united,” Johnson (161) notes how “the experience of spirits is intermediated with ideas and images derived from another technology of rendering present, photography.”

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20. Though Keane’s (2013) more extensive elaboration of this metaphor clearly has a bearing on this case as well. 21. The intended circuit can be broken at any point: some tambores or bembés simply fail because no deity ever materializes. Besides, every such ceremony is accompanied by sideline gossip, and invariably followed by criticism among the cognoscenti, concerning whether or not divine possession really did occur, or was simply faked (cf. Wirtz 2007). 22. Here, a fascinating cultural-historical rabbit hole appears to open up: was Ito alluding to the mystical powers of the piedras de ara (i.e., altar stones) containing saintly relics that are found in every Roman Catholic church in accordance with canon law (cf. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P4K.HTM [accessed November 20, 2022]) and are known to have been robbed and used for magical purposes (i.e., other than the Eucharist’s supreme magic) in the New World since the sixteenth century (e.g., Henningsen 1994; pieces of piedras de ara are nowadays being trafficked on the internet— e.g., http://www.esoterismo-tienda.com/2013/08/ralisman-piedra-de-ara.html [accessed December 6, 2022])? If so, could Ito have been aware of the theological grounding of Catholic altar stones in Genesis 28:11–22? In those passages, Jacob beds himself on a stone at Bethel, dreams of the heavenly ladder, and upon waking acknowledges the presence of the Lord in the stone, anoints it with oil, calls it God’s house, and commences the gift exchange with the deity on which the tithe would come to be based. Even more astonishing are the exegetical chains that may link Jacob’s stone to the Son of Man’s blood sacrifice (O’Neill 2003). Bascom obviously was either unaware of—or simply disinterested in—this; and even though biblical literacy among Cuban Catholics/santeros in the 1940s couldn’t possibly have been that extensive, what if Ito was attending Baptist or Methodist services? My thanks go to Stefania Capone for encouraging me to descend a few inches into that particular rabbit hole. 23. The same had already been true during Bascom’s research in Nigeria: as he put it in a letter to Herskovits dating from May 25, 1938, One doesn’t have to go to the new world for religious syncretism; nor to a Catholic country. Here of course Olorun is God Almighty. Moremi is the Virgin Mary; Oluorogbo is Jesus Christ; Odun and Orishanla are Jacob and Esau. Now all this of course makes my task so much more difficult. My informants argue about the orishas by quoting from the Bible, which they regard as a good source or reference work on Yoruba religion. All this comes from the anxieties of the Yoruba to prove that they are directly connected to the Egyptians and the Hebrews of the Old Testament. And it leads them to distort the facts. They quote the Bible for facts pertaining to the Orishas, and then quote these similarities as proof of the contact. For instance. In the Oni’s [of Ifé] mind Olorum and Oramfe are identified. I’m not too sure of this myself. But when the priest of Oramfe said that Oramfe had two wives, Mokuro and Osara, the Oni denied it at once, and wouldn’t let him speak further about it. God Almighty didn’t have any wives according to the Bible. Therefore how could Oramfe??? (Bascom 1938) What Bascom failed to see, we might say in paraphrasing the title of J. D. Y. Peel’s (2000) magisterial monograph, was that the Yoruba were in the process of “making themselves” in “the religious encounter.” Like everyone else, they did so under conditions not of their own choosing (which, in this case, included the increasingly inescapable presence of Islam, Christianity, and the British Colonial Office in their social world). What he ob-

notes to EPILOGUE ∙ 231

served at the Ooni’s court was, we might say with Latour (1993), a “hybrid,” by then long in the making. My thanks go to Olivia Gomes da Cunha for sharing this letter with me. 24. After all, to anyone born before the last two decades of the twentieth century, the idea that we would one day see each other on the telephone used to be simply a pipe dream. Until, that is, we all got our smartphones and downloaded Skype or Zoom. 25. But wait, the reader might say: doesn’t your autopsy of their research constitute just another such moment? To which I would say: yes indeed. Like all human games, the game of anthropology is a “self-writing” one (Gellner 1973). Its rules are written in an intra-active, contingent, and fundamentally open-ended fashion (cf. Palmié 2013a). 26. All discussed at length in Herskovits’s (1948) summary statement of anthropology’s mission and methods. 27. Himself a supporter—perhaps practitioner— of Afro- Cuban religion (Brown 2003b, 84–85). 28. Here, it may be worth noting that proponents of the ontological turn (e.g., Holbraad 2012) haven’t changed the protocol. All they did was tinker with the program code. After all, they haven’t quit their anthropology department jobs. 29. Where, one wonders, is Berta Bascom’s translational agency, e.g., in all this? Did Bascom really conduct most of his interviews in Spanish himself? And why are there so few transcriptions of interviews in Spanish—the language in which they surely must have been conducted? 30. It would be tedious to extend this comparison, but as occasional “re-studies” have shown (e.g., Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis on Tepotzlán or Evans-Pritchard and Sharon Hutchinson on the Nuer), Barad’s (2007) point about the mutual constitution of subjects and objects of inquiry holds for our discipline as well: it’s not only that we can’t step into the same society twice; it’s also that changing epistemic infrastructures lead us to ask questions that may generate different forms of entanglement and knowledge at different points in time (Palmié 2013a). 31. Recall here Herskovits’s definition of “socialized ambivalence” cited earlier: mightn’t we say that Bascom’s qualms arose from the “influence which cultures in contact bring to bear upon the individuals who must meet the demands of two traditions which, in many aspects, are in anything but accord.” The cultures in question would be Cuban Regla de Ocha and American anthropology. 32. In both cases, the necessary connectivity would need to be reverse-engineered at both the hardware and the software levels. Epilogue 1. Think here of his famous duck-rabbit in § 188 of Philosophical Investigations as an illustration of the kind of “aspect-seeing” that I have been after in this book. 2. One of the terrible first years of the Special Period in Time of Peace, announced in 1991. 3. As should be obvious by now, my own participation in the “invention of AfroCuban religion” has not come to an end. The present volume is a mere sequel to my and my Cuban interlocutors’ previous efforts. 4. I’ve always thought that one reason for my relative success in academia has been that I’m rather agreeable, so the mere fact that a good number of my colleagues back then likely never bothered to read the first twenty pages of my book probably saved my neck.

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5. Had I attended more Spiritist séances or ceremonies invoking the dead than I did, chances are that Tomás might have spoken to me through the body of a possessed medium. I didn’t at the time. But muertos like him often do talk at length, and some recount what at times are astonishingly detailed biographies of their life and death under slavery. 6. That Michael Lambek (2008) anthologized that prologue of mine in a reader on the anthropology of religion has probably given Tomás an unexpected lease on life after death among the students who are assigned that volume. A happy thought! 7. Just as mangu is “ultimately about” social control—of women by men, commoners by princes (Ulin 2001, 59– 61)—or about keeping envy and other ill feelings in check on a horizontal level. A good analogy is Thomas Nagel’s (1974) thought experiment about “what it is like” to inhabit an entirely different perceptual apparatus (or conceptual scheme). The Estonian ethologist Jakob von Uexküll’s (2001) reflections (dating from the 1930s) on how the perceptual physiology of animals not just accommodates given environments but actually creates Umwelten takes this antireductionist thought a good deal further. One wonders why none of the proponents of the ontological turn, excepting Eduardo Kohn (2013, 86), who briefly mentions him, have bothered to read von Uexküll’s work. 8. I should probably add: phylogenetically speaking. Ontogenetically, that world is found (in O’Gorman’s [1961] sense) and laboriously acquired by each and every human infant. 9. And that pertains not only to Cecilia and Carlos (what with his laundromat and private eye practice?) but to EP’s Azande interlocutors in the late 1920s as well: didn’t they talk about paper as the white man’s benge? Their ontology had been hybridized long before EP even got to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan! 10. And here I’m not talking about instances where anthropologists reported frightening experiences with the persons, metapersons—or even nonpersons—inserted by their interlocutors into their lives (cf. Espírito Santo 2016). I’ve had my share of worrisome experiences in Cuba, mainly to do with somewhat Kafkaesque matters of surveillance and state security—manifested in human beings like you and me, in other words, even if I often couldn’t tell whether they really existed. But if anything, Tomás—whatever he may be—has exerted nothing but benign influence on my life: he has made me think, and think differently over the years. The dead have been kind to me, consistently. 11. After all, don’t we all still dialogue or argue with dead theorists? Surely, Lafitau, Evans-Pritchard, Polanyi, Wittgenstein, or Winch are just that to me: metapersons whose life beyond the grave my writing this book—and now your reading of it—has prolonged. 12. The closest he seems to have come to it is in § 95–97 and § 99 of On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969), where he speaks of propositions describing a world picture as variously “hardened” or “fluid,” and uses the geological image of a shifting “riverbed of thoughts” to distinguish between “the movement of the waters on the riverbed and the shift of the bed itself.” My thanks go to Knut Myhre for alerting me to this crucial passage. 13. On this issue see, e.g., Toulmin (1972). 14. Think here of Kekulé dreaming up the benzene ring, or Crick and Watson’s extrapolating from Rosalind Franklin’s Photo 51 to the structure of DNA.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abakuá, 13, 36, 101–7, 109, 111–12, 114– 16, 132–33, 134, 136–38, 181, 218n2, 218n3, 218n6, 218n7, 218n9, 218n10, 219n13, 222n39; founding myth, 106–7 abductive reasoning, 12, 85, 99, 168, 184 abortion, 204n24, 206n30, 206n32 absolute presuppositions, 8, 25–26, 33, 34, 183, 188–90 Abu El-Haj, Nadia, 85, 96– 98, 217n49 accountability system, 147–48, 156 aché, 174–75 Acosta, José de, viii acoustic mask, 104, 111, 136–38 actor-network theory (ANT), 14, 34, 36, 169–70, 173–74, 177–78 Adorno, Theodor W., 9, 39, 184 affect, 19. See also Marett, R. R. affordances, viii, 1, 186, 199n4 afoíreme, 104, 114, 218 African American ancestry projects, 77, 81, 90 Afro-Brazilian religions, 171–72, 228n10, 228n11 Afro-Cuban divination, vii, 94 Afro-Cuban nganga complex, 48 Afro-Cuban ritual, vii, ix–x, 9, 11–12, 14, 16, 36, 39, 43, 94, 146, 155, 156, 164, 170, 185, 191, 203n16, 223n3 Agamben, Giorgio, 58 agential realism, 14, 35, 176. See also Barad, Karen

alienation, 51–52, 149, 201n6 Allen, George, 98–100, 217n53 anaforuana, 104, 108 ancestry-informative markers (AIMs), 77, 209n6, 214n35 ancestry projects, 13, 77, 80, 81, 90, 96 Anthropocene era, 9 anthropological antiracism, 63 anti-kinship, 80 apartheid, South African, 90 apparatus, 20, 33. See also Barad, Karen Appleby, Joyce Oldham, 41, 201n4 Aranzadi, Isabela de, 103, 219n13 Ardener, Edwin, 74, 84, 154, 186 Aristotle, 23, 39, 118, 124, 125, 220n27 Austen, J. L., 31, 168 Austin-Broos, Diane, 71 Ayer, A. J., 31, 168 babalao, 171, 203n19 “Baby M” case, 206n31 Bacon, Francis, 30, 168, 219n19 Bahktin, Mikhail, 187–88 Balboa, Vasco Núñes, 2, 4, 8 Barad, Karen, 14, 20, 33, 35, 176, 192, 198n5, 231n30. See also agential realism; apparatus Barber, Karin, 217n51, 229n15 Barnard, Christiaan, 50–51, 53 Barnes, Barry, 8, 32 baroco, 104–9, 111–12, 115, 136–38, 218n10 Barthes, Roland, 187

264 ∙ index

Bascom, William R., 14, 163–69, 172–79, 227n1, 228n4, 228n5, 228n6, 228n7, 228n8, 228n9, 229n18, 230n22, 230n23, 231n29, 231n31 Bauman, Richard, 154, 177, 224n5, 224n14 Bauman, Zygmunt, 58 Beard, George Miller, 127 Bekura Mendó, 106 Bell, Alexander Graham, 14, 119–22, 127, 130, 131, 134, 138, 218n6, 220n20, 220n22, 220n23, 221n29, 222n36 Bell Telephone Company, 119–21, 131 benge, 20–21, 25, 33–35, 199n3, 232n9 Benjamin, Walter, 158, 222n40 Bernheim, Ernst, 224n7 Bevernage, Berber, 224n12 BiDil, 83, 215n40 biosociality, 74. See also Rabinow, Paul biotechnology: baroco as, 136; biotechnological “ancestry projects,” 13; biotechnological assemblage, 13; biotechnological discourse, 58; biotechnological practices, 50 Blaiberg, Philip, 50–51, 53, 57 Blake, Clarence J., 119–21 Blake, William, 10 Blaser, Mario, 169 Blavatsky, Madame, 127 Bloch, Marc, 141 Bloor, David, 8, 32, 140, 216n47, 227n35 Bolnick, Deborah A., 76–77, 90 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 73, 93, 134, 210n10, 226n30 Bowker, Geoffrey C., 66, 209n8, 213n31 bozal, 139 Brady, Erika, 126, 137, 220n27 Brazilian racial democracy, 72, 211n14, 212n22, 214n35 Briggs, Charles L., 154, 177, 224n5, 224n14 Brodwin, Paul, 77, 211n13, 211n14, 212n25 Brown, David, 108, 111, 136, 166–67, 213n32, 228n10, 229n13, 231n27 Brubaker, Rogers, 77, 91, 211n15, 216n44

Burke, Edmund, 198n6, 224n11 Burke, Kenneth, x, 16, 181 Butler, Judith, 55 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 38, 51, 58, 207n38 Cabildo de los Carabalí Bricamó Ápapa Efí, 112, 136, 219 Cabrera, Lydia, 45, 47, 113, 218n7, 228n8, 228n9 cajon pa’ los muertos, 139–41, 156, 158 Callon, Michel, 7, 30, 169, 178 Cambronne, Luckner, 60–61, 208n45 Candea, Matei, 181 Cannell, Fenella, 171 cannibalism, 54, 58 Caplan, Arthur, 207n37, 207n39 Capone, Stefania, 209n2, 228n1, 228n11, 230n22 Caravaggio, 191 Caribbean plantation economies, 9 Carman, Diane, 71–72, 211n12 Carnap, Rudolf, 7 Carrier, James, 37–38, 201n2 cartesianism, 9–10, 30, 38, 40–41, 127, 161, 168, 188, 197n3, 201n5, 205n29, 207n38, 223n3 Carvalho-Silva, Denise R., 72 casa de santo or ilé ocha, 166, 170 Castro, Fidel, 148 category mistakes, 5, 25, 30, 38, 64, 74, 85 Césaire, Aimé, 39 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 142, 150–55, 158, 162, 224n13, 226n28, 227n31 cholera epidemics, 2–4, 197n2 Clark, Stuart, 153–54, 226n29 Clifford, James, 31 climate change, 9, 11, 192 Clinton-Lewinski scandal, 68, 210n11 Cohen modal haplotype, 72, 97, 100 Collingwood, R. G., 8, 15, 25–27, 33, 142, 181, 185, 189–90, 199n7 colonialism, 33–35, 54 Columbus, Christopher, 1–2, 4, 183, 212n23

index ∙ 265

Comaroff, Jean, 58, 77, 226n30 Comaroff, John, 58, 77, 226n30 commodity and commodification, 37– 40, 42–44, 57–59, 201n2, 205n28, 207n34 comparative epistemology, 6–8, 35–36 comparative method, viii–ix, 181 conceptual schemes, 6, 28, 32, 189– 90, 232n7 cooking of history, the, 1, 16 Copernicus Nicolaus, 2, 28, 190 COVID-19, 9, 83, 188, 194 Crick, Francis Harry Compton, 9, 72, 232n14 crisis of representation, 11, 31 Crookes, Sir William, 221n33, 229n12 cuarto fambá, 107, 109, 116, 136 cultural translation, 17 cybernetics, 15, 189 Danto, Arthur, 142 Darwin, Charles, ix, 32, 74, 211n16, 221n33 Das, Veena, 61, 204n21, 207n37 Daston, Lorraine, 4, 12 Davidson, Donald, 187 Davis, Andrew Jackson, 220n22 Davis, David Brion, 198n6 Dee, John, 10 De la Cadena, Marisol, 169 de la Mettrie, Julien Offray, 201n5, 205n29 Deleuze, Gilles, 204n20, 223n3, 229n14 Delmonico, Francis L., 207n35, 208n47 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 31, 144, 219n16 Descartes, René, 10, 30, 40, 168, 188, 197n3, 205n29 descent ideologies, 66, 96 Descola, Philippe, 9, 33, 36, 162, 168–69, 176, 179, 186, 199n7 dialectics of ensoniment, 117, 130, 135 direct voice manifestations, 14, 130–31 discourses of heritable identities, 71 divination, vii, 16, 36, 67–68, 75, 86, 88, 94, 98, 99, 141, 165, 170–72, 175, 181, 183, 211n18

DNA, 9, 12, 69–72, 77–79, 81–82, 87, 90, 98, 210n11, 212n21, 212n26, 216n45, 217n53, 232n14 Dolezal, Rachel, 73, 216n44 Douglas, Mary, 44, 147 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 145, 221n33 driving while black, 84 DuBois, W. E. B., 94, 96 Durkheim, Emile, 7, 9, 23, 94, 128, 171, 175, 187, 227n34 Duster, Troy, 74, 83, 212n21, 215n40, 217n50 economic man, 37, 40, 201n3, 202n9 ecória ñene abakuá, 107, 111, 137 écue, 13, 16, 105–16, 132–38, 218n8, 218n9, 219n13 Ecueñón, the Hunter, 104, 106, 108, 218n4, 218n10 Edinburgh school of the sociology of science, 8, 154, 169, 216n47. See also strong programme Edison, Thomas Alva, 14, 121–23, 127– 31, 138, 220n22, 220n24, 221n30, 221n31, 223n41 Edisonian phonic technology, 13, 36, 121, 126, 136–37 Edison’s conception of “life units,” 127–30 efí region of Enllenisón (tierra efí), 108, 113, 218n10, 219n13 efó region of Enllenisón (tierra efó), 106, 108, 218n10 Ejamba, 101–2, 132, 136 electroacoustics, vii, 15, 105, 116, 119, 125, 132, 133, 137, 138, 181, 193, 222n37. See also phonograph and phonography; telephone and telephony embodiment, 12–14, 36, 39–43, 46–47, 50, 52–53, 55–56, 58, 62, 67, 83, 85, 89, 96–97, 105, 119, 126, 131, 146– 47, 149, 171, 201n6, 203n17, 203n18, 205n27, 225n17, 225n22 embori, 107, 111, 112 Empegó, 104, 108, 218n4, 218n8

266 ∙ index

enchantment and rationality, 11, 86, 117, 220n22 Engelhardt, H. Tristram, 41, 54 Engelke, Matthew, 126, 173 Enkrícamo, 218n4, 218n8 Enllenisón, 104, 106, 112, 115, 137 enquico, 104, 106, 218n2 epistemological relativism, 11, 29, 92. See also rationality debate epistemological symmetry, 86 Eribangandó, 106, 109 Espírito Santo, Diana, 171, 185, 226n30, 232n10 ethnographic gesture, 15, 25, 185, 192. See also Pina Cabral, João de ethnographic interface, 169, 228n9 Eucharist, 105, 115, 123, 155, 230n22 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 4, 8, 15– 16, 19–26, 29–35, 75, 82–83, 86, 92, 136, 161–62, 181, 186, 189– 90, 193, 198n3, 198n1, 199n3, 199n4, 199n5, 199n6, 199n7, 200n8, 200n13, 209n5, 223n3, 228n2, 231n30, 232n9, 232n11 falsification, 7, 12, 25, 76, 157, 170 fambá, 107–9, 111, 116, 136 Fasolt, Constantin, 149, 152–55, 157, 224n9 Fausto, Carlos, 208n42 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 83, 215n37 feminist theory, 63 fetishism, 38–39, 51–52, 62, 90 Feyerabend, Paul, 7, 31, 189 fiction of facticity, 140. See also Koselleck, Reinhart Fields, Karen, 64, 82–83, 89, 95, 209n2, 209n8, 211n19 finds vs. discoveries, x, 1, 48, 76, 80, 182–83, 185, 189– 90, 197n4, 199n4, 217n48 finite provinces of meaning, 32. See also Schuetz, Alfred Firmin, Antenor, 96 Fleck, Ludwik, 6–8, 15, 26, 30, 32, 36, 181

Floyd, George, 209n1 forensic personhood, 148 forensics, 43, 49, 123–24, 140, 146– 48, 151, 153, 155, 203n14, 215n39, 226n30 form of life, 8, 15, 25, 29–30, 32, 34, 177, 186–87, 190 Foster, Eugene, 68–72, 76, 81, 96, 210n11 Foucault, Michel, 31, 65, 90, 117, 161, 187 Fox, Reneé C., 51, 53–56, 62, 207n39 Franklin, Benjamin, 118, 145, 158, 220n22, 222n34 Franklin, Rosalind, 9, 158, 232n14 Frazer, James, vii, ix, 4, 8, 22–23, 46, 193, 199n6 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 38 Freyre, Gilberto, 72 Fullwiley, Duana, 67, 83–84, 86, 90, 93, 210n10, 216n46 functionalism, 22 fundamentos, 167, 170–71, 229n13 furniture of the world, 2, 12, 15, 25–26, 32, 93, 137, 152, 161–62, 175, 185– 86, 197n2 GALA project at UCSF, 64 Galileo, 10, 217n48 García, David F., 163, 228n9 Gardner, Eric, 80, 213n31 Geertz, Clifford, 16, 35 Gell, Alfred, 11, 168 Gellner, Ernst, 29, 31, 142, 162, 231n25 geneticization of race, 84 genomic means of identity arbitration, 64 genomics, vii, 9, 13, 15, 36, 63–64, 67–68, 70–82, 85–94, 96–98, 100, 181, 209n9, 211n12, 211n13, 211n14, 212n21, 212n24, 212n26, 213n31, 214n34, 214n36, 215n37, 216n43, 216n45, 216n46, 217n50, 217n52 Gibel Mevorach, Katya, 85–86, 95 Gibson, Thomas, viii Gilroy, Paul, 39, 96, 184 Ginzburg, Carlo, 99, 141

index ∙ 267

Goffman, Erving, 149 Goldman, Marcio, 23, 171, 228n10, 229n14 Goodman, Alan H., 83, 85, 215n37 Goodman, Nelson, 26 Gordon-Reed, Annette, 76 Gravlee, Clarence C., 73, 217n52 Greenhouse, Carol J., 148, 224n13 Guha, Ranajit, 150 Hacking, Ian, 12, 90, 92– 93, 229n12 Haley, Alex, 80, 213n30 Hankins, Thomas L., 118, 220 Haraway, Donna, 7, 30, 51, 53 hardness of facts, 28, 158 Haskell, Thomas, 149, 226n25 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 41, 54, 151, 161, 201n6, 223n3 Helmreich, Stefan, 85, 161 Hemings, Eston, 69–70, 210n11 Hemings, Sally, 63, 69–70, 79, 96, 210n11 Herskovits, Melville J., 163, 164, 172, 177, 179, 209n6, 227n1, 230n23 hinge propositions, 6, 25, 41, 81, 96, 124, 156, 190. See also Wittgenstein, Ludwig historical agency, 14, 147, 149, 151–52, 227n36 historical criticism, 146 historical self-enracination, 68, 79 historicism,14, 140–41, 143–44, 146, 148–50, 152–58, 224n10, 224n11, 227n34 historicity, 1, 140–41, 147, 150, 158, 223n4. See also Trouillot, MichelRolph historiography, vii, 14, 68, 97, 99, 140– 41, 143, 157 history as ritual, 152–56 Hobbes, Thomas, 42 Hocart, Arthur M., ix, 4–6, 8, 32, 181 Hogle, Linda F., 204n25, 207n34 Holbraad, Martin, 14, 16–17, 162, 168, 174, 186, 192, 225n16, 231n28. See also ontological turn

Hollis, Martin, 7, 29, 31–32, 162, 168, 209n8 horizon of expectations, 142. See also Koselleck, Reinhart Horkheimer, Max, 9, 39, 184 Horton, Robin, 29, 31, 162 Howard University’s National Human Genome Center, 77 Hume, David, 2, 23 Husserl, Edmund, 187 hybrid ontologies, 33. See also Descola, Philippe hybrids, 33–34, 39, 47, 49–50, 56, 188, 231n23. See also Latour, Bruno hypodescent, 13, 65, 68, 81, 87, 98 identity, African, 76–77, 81, 90 idiom of thought, 12, 25–26, 29, 75, 88 Ifá, 16, 63, 81, 167, 170–71, 203n19, 228n5 Illamba, 106, 109, 110, 218n4 incommensurability, 8, 16, 36, 149, 158, 189 indifferent kinds, 92. See also Hacking, Ian individuation, 39–40, 42, 187 induction, 2, 216n45. See also Hume, David informational infrastructure, 66. See also Bowker, Geoffrey C.; Star, Susan Leigh intellectualist interpretation of magic, 4, 22. See also Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan International Haplotype Map Project, 64 invention of America, 1, 183. See also O’Gorman, Edmundo íreme, 104, 106, 109, 111 Iroquois, viii–x, 181 Irvine, Judith, 158 James, C. L. R., 9, 39, 184 Jefferson, Thomas, 63, 69–70, 73, 79, 85, 87, 88, 89, 96, 145, 198n6, 210n11 Joan of Arc, 150, 158 John Locke and identity, 40, 54, 147–48, 168

268 ∙ index

Johnson, Paul C., 174–75, 225n18, 226n25, 228n1, 229n19 Joralemon, Donald, 207n35, 207n37, 208n41 Kahn, Jonathan, 74, 83, 208n43, 215n40 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 201n6 Kardecian Spiritism, 130, 223n2 Keane, Webb, viii, 11, 133, 144, 173, 178, 224n5 Keynes, John Maynard, 10 Kircher, Athanasius, 10, 117, 128, 219n18 Kittler, Friedrich, 132, 133 Kittles, Rick, 67, 78, 89, 214n34 Knorr-Cetina, Karen, 7, 30 knowledge: anthropology as a form of knowledge, 15; historical knowledge, 14, 68, 141–43, 152–58; implicit beliefs, 28; local knowledge, 26; molecular biological knowledge, 13, 72, 76, 86, 89; protosociology of knowledge, 8; scientific knowledge, 30, 198n5; systems of knowledge and practice, 11 Koch, Robert, 3, 8, 197n2 Kopytoff, Igor, 37, 43 Koselleck, Reinhart, 67, 140, 142, 149 Kuhn, Thomas, 1, 2, 7, 30, 83, 190 Lafitau, Joseph-François, viii, ix, x, 1, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 30, 36, 50, 181, 197n2, 197n3, 232n11. See also method of reciprocal illumination Lambek, Michael, 227n37, 232n6 Landecker, Helen, 4, 58, 205n28 Latour, Bruno, 7, 30, 32, 38, 86, 92, 140–41, 143–44, 154, 162, 168–69, 209n8, 226n30, 227n35, 229n15, 231n23 Lavoisier, Antoine, 2, 10, 197n1 Law, John, 7, 30, 169 legal: personhood, 13, 42, 59, 148, 206n32 Lemba, 72–73 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 4–5, 7, 22–25, 27, 30, 135, 199n4, 199n5, 199n6

Llera Blanes, Ruy, 226n30 Lloyd, G. E. R., 186 Lock, Margaret, 50, 67, 71, 82, 207n34, 207n39, 209n8, 212n21, 215n37 Locke, John, 23, 40, 54, 124, 147–48, 168, 198n6, 208n46, 225n19, 225n20, 225n21, 225n23 logical positivism, 7–8, 26–27, 28, 30, 186 looping effects, 90. See also Hacking, Ian Lukes, Steven, 7, 29, 31, 162, 168, 200n11, 209n8 Lysenkoism, 91–92 MacGaffey, Wyatt, 33 Macintyre, Alasdair, 29 MacPherson, C. B., 12, 41, 42, 226n25 Maine, Henry Sumner, viii, 148 Malinowski, Bronislaw, ix, 19, 23 mangle of practice, 12, 33–34. See also Pickering, Andrew mangu, 19–20, 25, 33–35, 86, 161, 199n2, 223n3, 232n7 Mannheim, Karl, 143 Marcus, George E., 31 Marett, R. R., 5, 19 market agency, 40, 43, 50, 57 market mechanisms, 49, 60 Marks, Jonathan, 63, 68, 71–72, 85, 95, 212n21 Martin, Emily, 53, 201n5, 202n9 Martinez, Rafael, 44–46, 48, 204n22 Martin Shaw, Carolyn, 85–86 Marx, Karl, 9, 15, 32, 47, 50, 51, 60–61, 84, 95, 151, 175, 201n6, 203n17, 204n21, 213n29 Masco, Joseph, 9 masks and masking, theories of, 13, 102, 104, 111, 135–38 matrilineal kinship, ix, 66, 181 Mauss, Marcel, 37, 201n1, 226n25 Maynard-Moody, Steven, 204n24, 206n30 M’Charek, Amade, 212n21 memory as a metahistorical category, 143

index ∙ 269

metaperson, 15, 187–88, 232n10, 232n11. See also Pina Cabral, João de metapragmatic regimentation, 142–44, 152 method of reciprocal illumination, vii, 11, 14, 25, 30, 181, 188, 190. See also Lafitau, Joseph-François Mintz, Sidney, 9, 184 Mnookin, Jennifer L., 222n41, 225n16 Mo Cell Line, 59 Mocongo, 106, 218n4 Modern Constitution, 32, 117, 168 Mol, Annemarie, 7, 34, 169 Montague, Ashley, 96 Montaigne, Michel de, 197n3 Montesquieu, 198n6, 208n46 Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 59 Morse, Samuel, 118–19, 122, 130, 220n21, 220n22 muertos, los, 14, 139–40, 156, 223n3, 232n5 multiple realities, 32, 168 Murray, Thomas H., 49, 207n37, 208n43 mystical participation, 5, 23. See also Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien Nagel, Thomas, 232n7 nambe erí, 107, 110, 132 Napier, D. David, 111, 135 Nasacó, 106–8, 218n2, 219n13 Native Americans, 1–2 naturalism, 179 naturalist ontology, 9, 36. See also Descola, Philippe Nelson, Alondra, 68, 80, 90, 212n25 Newton, Isaac, 10, 144, 190, 198n6, 217n48 nfumbí, 46, 47, 65 ngangas, vii, 11–12, 16, 36, 43–48, 56–61, 181, 192, 203n14, 203n16, 203n19 Nuer, 31, 198n1, 209n5, 231n30 Oakeshott, Michael, 141 objectively necessary appearances, 37, 50, 95

obonécues, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 138, 218n9, 219n13 obones, 106–8, 218n4, 219n13 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 1, 183, 212n23, 232n8 Ong, Walter J., 117, 219n16 ontological hybridities, 162. See also Descola, Philippe ontological turn, 14, 16–17, 162, 168, 179, 186, 192, 231n28, 232n7 operators, 33, 93, 98 orichas, 166–67, 171–72, 174–76, 203n16, 229n13 Ortiz, Fernando, 102–3, 109–10, 184, 192, 218n7, 218n8, 228n9 other minds problem, 31, 168, 187–88, 190 other worlds, 19, 31, 36. See also Feyerabend, Paul; Kuhn, Thomas Palmié, Stephan, vii, x, 1, 8–9, 12, 15, 39, 45, 47, 57, 85, 103–4, 115, 140, 145, 163, 167, 169, 172, 179, 182–84, 187, 191, 203n13, 203n16, 203n19, 208n46, 212n23, 213n32, 217n49, 218n7, 219n13, 228n9, 231n25, 231n30 Palo Monte, paleros, vii, 44–48, 56–57, 60, 203n16, 203n19, 204n25, 207n40, 227n36 Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios, 15, 185, 207n40 pastness, 142 past-relationships, 146, 153–54, 156 Pedersen, Morten Axel, 16–17, 162, 186, 192, 198n8. See also ontological turn Peel, J. D. Y., 230n23 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 85, 99, 134, 136, 172, 184, 216n45 Pels, Peter, 169, 229n12 personalized genetic histories (PGHs), 67, 76–78, 81, 86, 89–91, 94, 214n34, personhood, vii, 12–15, 37, 40–43, 50– 53, 55–59, 62, 124, 147–49, 153– 54, 158, 162, 181, 201n6, 203n12,

270 ∙ index

personhood (continued) 204n24, 206n31, 206n32, 208n46, 225n18, 226n25 perspectives by incongruity, x, 8, 11 Peters, John Durham, 108, 119, 122–23, 125, 133, 135, 176, 220n25 Pettenkofer, Rudolph, 3–4, 8, 197n2 phenomenology, 14, 32, 141, 171, 174, 227 phonautograph, 119–21 phonograph and phonography, 13–14, 36, 121–28, 130–37, 220n27, 222n37, 222n41 photography, 130, 225n16, 229n19. See also spirits Pickering, Andrew, 7, 12, 16, 30, 33, 35, 187. See also mangle of practice piedras de ara, 228n1, 230n22 Pietz, William, 39, 52, 125 Pina Cabral, João de, 15, 23, 25, 34, 185, 187, 229n12. See also ethnographic gesture; metaperson plantation, 9, 45, 48, 57 Pocock, J. G. A., 40, 140–41, 224n9 poison oracle, 11–12, 20–22, 29–30, 32– 33, 35, 88, 93, 185, 199n3, 200n10 Polanyi, Karl, 12, 40, 201n3 Polanyi, Michael, 8, 15, 27–30, 181, 190– 91, 232n11 Popper, Karl, 7, 31 Porter, Jennifer E., 221n32, 224n15 possession, possession rituals, vii, 14, 16, 20, 36, 40–41, 45, 51, 53, 55, 59, 113, 126, 139–40, 146, 151, 157, 167, 174, 178, 181, 183, 191, 230n21 possessive individualism, 41, 52, 202n9. See also MacPherson, C. B. posthumanism, 14, 16, 161 poststructuralist philosophy, 11, 33, 184 pragmatism, 20, 28, 58, 152, 204n24, 209n8 prelogical mentality, 4, 23–24, 26, 92, 199n5, 35, 36. See also Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien prenda, 45 presentism, 146

Priestley, Joseph, 2, 197n1 primitive mentality or thought, 22, 24, 26, 199n4, 199n7. See also LévyBruhl, Lucien purification, 10, 38, 144, 152. See also Latour, Bruno Quine, V. O., 36 Rabinow, Paul, 67, 74, 208n43, 215n37 race, 50, 63–64, 67, 69, 81, 82–85, 87, 89–96, 128, 209n2, 213n29, 214n36, 215n39, 215n40, 216n42, 217n52 racecraft, 63–64, 82–83, 85, 89, 91, 100 racial identities, 66 racial passing, 209n6 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, ix, 19, 201n7 radical alterity, 14, 16, 23, 36, 136, 162, 168, 179, 192. See also ontological turn radical incommensurability, 16, 36 Radin, Margaret, 37, 41, 49, 52 Ralph, Michael, 205n27 rationalism, 10, 29, 31, 92, 200n11 rationality debate, 7, 11, 16, 29, 31, 36, 152, 161, 168, 186, 209n8. See also epistemological relativism; Hollis, Martin; Lukes, Steven rationality of divination, 67, 86 Reardon, Jenny, 64, 84, 90, 210n10, 212n24, 216n46 Regla de Ocha, 36, 94, 139, 166, 170–71, 174, 181–83, 203n16, 217n51, 223n2, 228n8, 231n31 Reglas de Congo, 12, 45, 56, 223n2 relativism, 26, 31–32, 92, 154, 197n3, 224n10 Renteln, Alison Dundes, 49, 204n25 Richardson, Ruth, 49, 60, 208n44 ritual masks, 135–36. See also LévyBruhl, Lucien Rivers, W. H. R., ix, 211n16 Rogers, Joel A., 63, 209n9, 213n29 Rorty, Richard, 28, 158 Rotimi, Charles, 77–78

index ∙ 271

sacrifice, 46, 94, 102, 104, 107, 111, 112, 121, 122, 167, 172 Sahlins, Marshall, 23, 40, 42, 96, 134, 175, 199n2, 201n4, 202n11, 226n25, 227n33 Saint Augustine, 125, 161, 213n29, 220n27 Santería, 163–64, 170, 203n16 santeros, 48, 164, 166, 169, 172, 175, 178, 182, 188, 191, 229n16, 230n22 Sarró, Ramón, 190 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 61, 207n37, 208n48 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 117, 125, 131, 219n16 Schneider, David, 70, 85 Schuetz, Alfred, 1, 32, 75, 168, 187 Schwartz, Robert S., 215n37, 215n39 scientific beliefs, 8, 27. See also Polanyi, Michael scientific reductionism, 27 Sconce, Jeffrey, 119, 220n22 semiotic ideology, 11, 141, 173, 177, 222n41, 224n5. See also Keane, Webb Sen, Amartya, 42 sensorium, 13, 108, 116, 121, 128, 134, 175, 229n12 Sharp, Leslie, 38, 52, 57, 207n34 Shriver, Mark, 67, 78 Sikan, 104, 106–7, 112, 115, 218n2 skinbound individuality, 40, 42, 50, 53, 147, 187 Skinner, Quentin, 152, 156 slavery and slaves, 12–13, 45, 47–48, 57, 65, 71, 76, 78, 80–81, 90, 113, 145– 46, 148, 154, 157, 159, 165, 198n8, 201n7, 202n8, 203n17, 205n27, 208n46, 211n14, 219n13, 225n24, 228n8, 232n5 Smith, Adam, viii, 151, 205n27 social categories, 65, 73, 93 social constructivism, 64, 85, 96 social identities, 13, 63, 67–68 socialized ambivalence, 178–79, 228n6, 231n31 sociology of knowledge, 5, 141, 216n47

space of experience, 142. See also Koselleck, Reinhart speaking machines, 118, 121, 220n20 Special Period in Time of Peace, 140, 231n2 Spencer, Herbert, 128, 199n5 spirits, vii, 12–16, 36, 45–48, 56–57, 101–2, 106, 115, 119, 123, 126–27, 129–32, 139–41, 146, 153, 156– 58, 159, 170–71, 175, 178, 181–84, 203n18, 220n22, 222n35, 222n41, 223n3, 224n15, 225n20, 227n37, 227n1, 229n19. See also photography spiritualism, 119, 129, 130–32, 221n31, 221n32, 229n12 Star, Susan Leigh, 66, 209n8, 213n31 stem-cell research, 204n24, 206n32 Sterne, Jonathan, 108, 116–18, 121, 133–34, 219n16, 221n29 Stewart, Charles, 140 Stolcke, Verena, 9, 209n2 Stolow, Jeremy, 119 Strathern, Marilyn, 31, 40, 52, 70, 76, 80, 150, 181, 187, 206n30, 213n31, 216n42 strong programme, 8, 141, 154, 169, 216n47, 227n35 structural amnesia, 10, 66, 68, 81, 83, 88 structure of the conjuncture, 134, 175. See also Sahlins, Marshall subjectivity, 39–40, 80, 96, 126, 148, 153, 161, 201 Suchman, Lucy, 175 surrogate motherhood, 52, 66 Swazey, Judith P., 51, 62, 207n39 syncretism, 172–73, 178, 230n23 tata nganga, 45, 47 technologies of the self, 90 telegraphy, 119, 122, 220n21, 220n22, 221n33 telephone and telephony, 13, 119, 120–23, 127, 130–32, 134, 136, 193, 220n21, 220n22, 222n36, 222n37, 231n24

272 ∙ index

Temple of the Ancient Grace, 102, 104, 116, 119, 137, 219n13 temporal hybrids, 141, 144 temporality, linear, 105, 142–43, 144, 149, 221, 224n13 Thoden van Velzen, H. U. E., 52–53 Thomas Woodson Association, 69–70 thought collectives, 7, 26. See also Fleck, Ludwik trabajos, 45–46, 56 transduction, 13, 14, 109, 113, 118, 121– 22, 131–33, 136, 173, 174, 178 transplant surgery, vii, 13, 15, 36–37, 51, 53, 55–58, 62, 181, 207n34, 207n38, 207n39, 207n40, 208n41 trata, 46, 57 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 140, 142, 148, 153, 158, 162, 177, 223n4 Tylor, Edward, viii, 4–5, 22–23, 27, 199n6, 229n12 tympanic transduction, 14, 121, 136 US Census, 66, 70, 83, 89, 93, 95, 216n46, 217n1 US National Organ Transplantation Act, 62 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 35, 58, 179 voice of écue, 13, 16, 105, 108– 9, 111, 115, 132, 134, 136–38, 218n9, 219n13 von Foerster, Heinz, 15, 189 Wade, Nicholas, 89, 211n12 Wagner, Roy, 177

Wailoo, Keith, 212n25, 215n37, 215n38 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 221n33, 229n12 Washington, George, 65, 145, 211n15 Wastell, Sari, 162, 168 Watson, James D., 72, 87–88, 216n43, 232n14 Watson, Thomas, 127, 130, 220n22, 232n14 Weber, Max, 10, 117, 153 Weiss, Kenneth, 9, 85, 89, 90–93, 96, 216n47, 217n50 Weltanschauung, 141, 143 Western scientific expert practices, 11, 16 Wetli, Charles, 43–44, 46–49, 59–60, 204n22 Wilson, Bryan, 29, 168, 209n8 Winch, Peter, 25, 29–31, 34, 188, 200n11, 232n11 Wirtz, Kristina, 175, 223n2, 225n16, 227n36, 228n1, 230n21 witchcraft, 11, 13, 19–22, 30, 34–35, 64, 67–68, 82, 83, 84–86, 89, 92, 94, 125, 163, 176, 192, 199n4, 223n3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, x, 8, 15–16, 25, 29–30, 33, 41, 67, 86, 152, 177, 181– 82, 185–87, 189, 190–91, 232n11, 232n12 Yoruba, 78–79, 81, 94, 163–64, 178, 213n32, 214n33, 223n2, 228n1, 228n5, 229n15, 230n23 Youngner, Stuart J., 54, 56, 58, 207n39 Žižek, Slavoj, 42, 61, 216n41