Holbraad_Savage_proofs.pdf

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Within anthropology, much has been written about the possi-

bility of a posthumanist critical social science that is able to

emancipate things (objects, artefacts, materiality, etc.) from the

ensnaring epistemological and ontological bonds of humanism,

logicentrism and other modernist imaginaries.The aim of this

essay is to take this project further by exploring the possibili-

ties for an anthropological analytics that is able to allow things

by which I mean something akin to things themselves, though

only in the strict heuristic sense that I shall specify presently

to generate their ownterms of analytical engagement. Might

the feted posthumanist emancipation of the thing be shown toconsist in its peculiar capacity to unsettle whatever ontologi-

cal assumptions we, as analysts, might make about it (includ-

ing, perhaps, the ontological premises of a posthumanist turn

itself)? Might things decide for themselves what they are, and

in so doing emancipate themselves from uwho would presume

1 E.g. Marilyn Strathern, "Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of

images", in Culture and Hitory in the Pacific, ed. J. Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions

of the Finish Anthropological Society, 1990), 25-44; Alfred Gell,Art and Agency:

An Anthropological Theory(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Rea-

embling the Social(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel Miller, "Mate-riality: an introduction", in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke

University Press, 2005), 1-50.

Things as concepts:anthropology and pragmatology

M H


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T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M A T O L O G Y

S A V A G E O B J E C T S

to tell them? Might they, if you like, become their own thing-the-

orists, acting as the originators (rather than the objects) of our

analytical conceptualisations?

Such questions, I take it, would consummate the promise

of a properly savage thought: objects acting not merely as con-

duits for the thinking of the people anthropologist study (those

they used to call savages), but rather as a conduit for anthropo-

logical thinking itself. Objects, then, become the basis not only

for savages science of the concrete, as Lvi-Strauss himself

would have it,but also for thoughts that are savage enough to

unsettle the conceptual economy of analysis itself, including

anthropological analysis (which I shall take here as my point

of departure). Let me illustrate what such a savage concretion

of anthropology might look like with reference to ach one of

the most basic notions involved in the prestigious Afro-Cuban

tradition of divination of If, which I have been studying ethno-

graphically in Cuba since 1998.

The power of powder

Much like the notorious notion of manain Oceania, achis a

term that babalawo, which is what men who are initiated into

the cult of If are called, use in a wide variety of contexts. Most

salienty, they use it to refer both in the abstract to their power

(poder) or capacity (facultad)to divine, for which they are most

renown (to divine you must have ach, as they say); and, much

2 Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,And(Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social

Anthropology, 2002).

3 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

more concretely, to certain powders that they consider to be a

prime ritual ingredient for making divinities appear and speak

during divination. Among the many ways in which specially pre-

pared powders are deemed necessary to If ritual, perhaps the

most striking is its role as a register (regitro) for the divinatory

configurations through which Orula, the god of divination, is

said to be able to speak during the ritual. Spread on the surface

of the consecrated diving-tray that babalawouse for the most

ceremonious divinations they conduct for their clients (particu-

larly during the initiation of neophytes), this powder becomes the

medium through which Orulas words appear. This they do in the

form of a series of signs (igno, also referred to in the original

Yoruba asoddu)that are marked(marcar) by the babalawoon

the surface of the powder, following a complex divinatory pro-

cedure in which consecrated palm-nuts are used to generate dis-

tinct divinatory configurations, each corresponding to its own

sign. Sometimes considered as guises of Orula himself (or hispaths or representatives), these figures, comprising eight sin-

gle or double lines drawn by the babalawo with his middle and

ring finger in the powder, are considered as potent divinities in

their own right that come out(alen)in the divination: crouch-

ing around the divining board as they mark the sign, thebabala-

woand their consultants are in the presence of a divine being,

a symbol that stands for itself if ever there was one.

Crucially,babalawo emphasise that the powder itself is an

indispensable ingredient for effecting these elicitations of the

divine. Properly prepared according to secret recipes that only

4 SenuRoy Wagner, Symbol that Stand for Themelve(Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1986).


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babalawoknow,ach de Orula, as the powder is referred to in

this context, has the power to render divinities present. Ach-

powder does this not only by providing the surface on which they

can appear on the divining-tray, but also because it constitutes a

necessary ingredient in the consecration of each of the various

objects used in the divination, including the divining tray, the

palm-nuts and various other items babalawomust have con-

secrated for divinatory use during their own initiation. As they

explain, none of these items work unless they are properly con-

secrated, and this must involve charging them with achee, i.e.

with ach-powders, according to secret procedures.

Concepts versus things

Elsewhere I have explained ways in which the notion of achso

blatantly exemplifies some of the central preoccupations that

inform Lvi-Strausss theorization of savage thought, such asthe antinomies he associated with floating signifiers that can

signify anything e.g. both power and powder because, in them-

selves, they mean nothing.Here we may draw attention only to

the fact that, viewed from within the prism of the kinds anthro-

pological preoccupations Lvi-Strausss argument on floating

5 Claude Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mau,trans. F. Barker

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). See Martin Holbraad, "The power of

powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban If (or

manaagain)", in Thinking Through Thing: Theoriing Artefact Ethnographi-

cally, ed. A. Henare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 189-225. See also

Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recurive Anthropology of Cuban Divina-

tion(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

signifiers itself exemplifies, the case of achraises classical

anthropological conundrums about the rationality credentials

of what he playfully called savage thought. Much as with clas-

sic anthropological controversies about so-called apparently

irrational beliefs (Nuer twins being birds, Bororo men being

red macaws, and so on), we seem here to be confronted with a

series of notions that are counter-intuitive to say the least. Cer-

tainly, it would appear that the terminological coincidence of

achas both power and powder corresponds to an ontological

one, since, as babalawoaffirm, a diviners power to elicit divini-

ties into presence is irreducibly a function of his capacity to use

the consecrated powders at his disposal as an initiate. Powder, in

this sense, is power. And this would seem to raise the classical

anthropological question: why might Cuban diviners and their

clients believe such a notion? How do we explain this appar-

ently irrational belief anthropologically?

It should be noted, however, that this classical way of pos-ing the question draws its power from what one might call its

own inherent perverity. In order even to ask why certain peo-

ple might believe that a certain form of powder has the power

to elicit certain divinities into presence, one has first to take for

granted that this could not (or should not) be the case in the first

place. In particular, assuming that the pertinent anthropological

question is why people might believe in this way that powder is

power turns on the corollary assumption that such a belief can

be parsed as the particular way in which the people in question

represent the objects in their midst, namely, in this case, repre-

senting (signifying, imagining, socially constructing etc.) powderas power. And this in turn relies on that foundational ontological

axiom of straight-thinking modernism, namely the distinction


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between things as they are in the world and the various and vari-

able concepts that people may attach to them. Indeed, as long as

the analysis of achremains within the terms of an axiomatic

distinction between things and concepts, it cannot butask the

question in terms of representations, beliefs, social construc-

tions and so on. Since we know that powder is just that dusty

thing there on the diviners tray, the question cannot but be why

Cubans might think that it is also a form of power.

The move to posthumanist analyses of things in anthropol-

ogy has been motivated partly by a desire to avoid precisely this

way of raising questions, and in particular to overcome the bla-

tant perversity of seeking to parse alternatives to our own meta-

physic of concepts versus things in terms of just that metaphysic

(for Cuban diviners powder ipower; we, on the other hand, ask

why they might believe it to be so, since, from first metaphysi-

cal principles, it cant). Hence the penchant in recent writings on

material culture (and note the telling ontological oxymoron) forso-called relational ontological premises which seek, in one way

or other, to erase or otherwise compromise the concept versus

thing divide.Still, rather than placating the conceptual impe-

rialism of modernist metaphysics by binding things to an alter-

6 E.g.Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Pren-

tice Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reaembling the Social(Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005); Tim Ingold, Perception of the Environment: Eay on Livelihood,

Dwelling and Skill(London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Tim Ingold, "Materi-

als against materiality",Archaeological Dialogue14, no.1 (2007): 1-16; Bjrnar

Olsen,In Defene of Thing: Archaeology and the Ontology of Object (Langham:

AltaMira Press, 2010); Jane Bennett,Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Thing

(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010).

native (e.g. relational, symmetrical, vital, vibrant) ontologi-

cal order, my interest here is in the possibility of freeing things

from any a priori ontological determination whatsoever, so as

to allow themto dictate, as it were, their own terms of analytical

engagement. As I propose to show, this most crucially involves

eliding the concept/thing divide, not as a matter of substantive

ontological revision, but rather as point only of analytical meth-

odology. Given space constraints, I present such a prospect as a

series of three methodological moves.

Step I: thing-as-heuristic

If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered,

somehow, also as non-things (e.g. a putatively material powder

that is also a putatively immaterial power, as in our example),

then, anthropologically speaking, the notion of a thing can at

most have a heuristic, rather than an analytical, role. The initial

7 For more detailed discussion see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Was-For more detailed discussion see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Was-Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Was-

tell, "Introduction", in Thinking Through Thing: Theoriing artefact ethno-

graphically, ed. Wenare et al(London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-31; Martin

Holbraad, "Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography

of things", Cambridge Archaeological Journalv19 n3 (2009 10 01): 431-441; Mar-

tin Holbraad, Can the Thing Speak?, OAP Pre, Working Paper Serie #7(2011),

available at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-

content/uploads/2011/01/Holbraad-Can-the-Thing-Speak2.pdf

8 For classic arguments to this effect with reference to the things anthropolog ists

call gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic

Societie,trans. W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Cf. Amiria Henare et al.,,

Introduction, 16-23.


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analytical task, in other words, cannot be to add to the theoreti-

cal purchase of the term thing by proposing new ways to think

of it e.g. as a site of human beings objectification,an index

of agency,an on-going event of assemblage,or what have you.

Rather it must be effectively to de-theorise it, by emptying it out

of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a pure ethno-

graphic form ready to be filled out contingently according only

to its own ethnographic exigencies. To return to our example: if

calling the powder babalawouse a thing implies that it could

not, properly speaking, also be a form of metaphysical power,

then let us notcall it a thing in any sense other than merely as

an ontologically and analytically vacuous heuristic identifier

merely a tag for identifying it as an object of study, with no

metaphysical prejudice, and particularly with no prejudice as to

what it might be, including questions of what it being a thing

might even mean.

Step II: concept = thing

If the first step towards letting things set their own terms of ana-

lytical engagement involves emptying them out of any a priori

9 Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Ma Conumption(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1987); Daniel Miller, Materiality: an introduction, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller

(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50.

10 Alfred Gell,Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory(Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1998).

11 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice

Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reaembling the Social(Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005).

metaphysical contents, the second is geared towards allowing

them to be filled by (potentially) alternative ones in each ethno-

graphic instance. We may brand this methodological injunction

by way of a further heuristic formula, namely concepts = things.

According to this methodological edict, instead of treating all

the things that people say of and do to or with things as modes

of representing them (i.e. as manners of attaching various con-

cepts to the things in question by way of social construction, as

per the standard anthropological way of thinking), we may treat

them as modes of defining what thee thing are. This renders

wide open precisely questions about what kinds of things things

might be: whatmateriality might be, objectification, agency all

that is now up for grabs, as a matter of ethnographic contingency

and the analytical work it forces upon us.

So, to return again to the Cuban example, the idea here is

to treat all the things babalawoand their clients supposedly

believe about their ach-powders as elements of a conceptualdefinition of what such a thing might actually be: Cuban diviners

do not believe that powder is a form of power, but rather define

it as such. To the extent that our own default assumption is that

powder is notto be defined as power (its just a dusty thing, we

assume), the challenge then must be to reconceptualiethose

very notions and their many empirical and analytical corollaries

(powder, power, deity etc. but also thing, concept, divinity etc.) in

a way that would render the ethnographically-given definition

of powder as power reasonable, rather than an absurd belief.

I have sought at length elsewhere to specify the full gamut

of ways in which different kinds of data may enter into the efforts

of analytical conceptualization that problems of the powder-is-


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power necessitate for anthropologists.Crucially, a sound eth-

nographic understanding is necessary in order even to formu-

late such problems in the first place, let alone solve them. For

example, since what powder might be in If divination depends

on the notion of power that is at stake in this ritual activity, part

of an attempt to articulate the question involves developing the

cosmological conundrum that lies at its core: if power, in this

ethnographic context, refers to babalawo ability to render

divinities present as signs during divination, then are we not

in some pertinent sense dealing here with a version of the age-

old theo-ontological conundrum, so familiar in the anthropology

of religion,of how entities that are imagined as transcendent

might under certain conditions in this case by ritual means

that involve the use of powder as an indispensable component

be rendered immanent? Conceptualising powder as power, then,

requires us to understand how Afro-Cuban divination effectively

olvesomething akin to the so-called problem of transcendencein Judeo-Christian theology although immediately one wants

to add that this may well be a misnomer, at least insofar as the

very notions of transcendence and immanence may themselves

have to be reconceptualised in this context.

12 Martin Holbraad, "Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion",

Debate & Discussion at the GDAT 2008, Critique of Anthropology30, 2 (2010):

179-185, 185-200 paim;Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recurive Anthro-

pology of Cuban Divination(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

13 E.g.Matthew Engelke,A Problem of Preence: Beyond Scripture in an African

Church(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Webb Keane, Chritian

Modern: Freedom and Fetih in the Miion Encounter (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007).

What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreduc-

ible contribution that, heuristically understood, things them-

selves can make to this work of conceptualization. Indeed, with

reference to the case of powder in If, one might say that while

ethnographic information derived from babalawoserves to set

up the anthropological conundrum that achin its dual aspect,

so to speak, poses, it is what I shall call the pragmatographic

information culled from its peculiar qualities as a thing (viz. as

powder) that delivers the most crucial elements for its solution.

Step III: thing = concept

Consider what powder actually odes in the diviners hands. As we

saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, it provides the

backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, come

out. So powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, where that

power is understood as the capacity to make divinities come outand speak. Now, note that, considered prosaically as a thing,

powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collec-

tion of unstructured particles its pure multiplicity, one might say.

In marking the odduon the board, the diviners fingers are able

to draw the configuration just to the extent that the intensive

capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean

bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the

odduas it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive

mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is registered.

In this way powder renders the premise of the oddus revelation

explicit, as a matter of these signs inherent

motility: by way of

figure/ground reversal, oddufigures are revealed as a temporary

displacement of their ground, the powder.


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But this suggests also a logicalreversal that goes to the

heart of the problem that apparently transcendent oddumight

be imagined to pose. If we take seriously babalawo contention

that the oddujust arethe marks they make on ach-powder (the

basic magic of divination), then the constitution of deities as

displacements of powder tells us something pretty important

about the ontological premises of If cosmology: that these divin-

ities are to be thought of not, say, as entities that may or may

not exist in states of transcendence or immanence, but rather as

motion. And if the oddujust are motions, then the ontological

discontinuity between transcendence and immanence (and with

it the onto-theological problem they may be imagined to pose) is

resolved. In a logical universe where motion is primitive, what

looks like transcendence becomes distance and what looks like

immanence becomes proximity. Indeed: quamotions, the divini-

ties have inherent within themselves the capacity immanently

to relate to humans, through the potential of directed movementthat ach-powder guarantees, as a solution to the genuine prob-

lem of the distance deities must traverse in order to be rendered

present in divination.

Now, what I wish to draw attention to here is the work pow-

der does for this analysis, by virtue specifically of what heuris-

tically(once again!) one would identify as its prosaic, material

characteristics. If ethnography carries the weight of the analyti-

cal problem, in this argument, it is the material quality of powder

that provides the most crucial elements for its solution. If deities

are conceptualised as motions to dissolve the problem of tran-

scendence, after all, that is only because their material manifes-

tations are just that, motion. And those motions, in turn, only

emerge as analytically significant because of the material con-

stitution of the powder upon which they are physically marked:

its pervious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured parti-

cles, amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of

water, in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviners fin-

gers, and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres

in powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that

they can engender conceptual effects, setting the parameters for

the anthropological analysis that they afford the argument. As

an irreducible element of the analysis of ach, it is powderthat

brings the pivotal concepts of perviouness, multiplicity, motion,

direction, potential and so on into the fray of it own analysis,

providing its own answer to its own problem its savage power,

if you like, analytically (conceptually, ontologically) to unsettle.

So what is at stake in this mode of analysis is the capac-

ity that things have to engender conceptual transformations of

themelve, by virtue of the conceptual differences their mate-

rial characteristics can make. Indeed, this irreducibly pragma-tologicalelement, as we may call it,of anthropological analy-

sis is nothing other than the corollary inversion of our earlier

concepts = things formula, namely thing = concept. If the for-

mula concept = thing designated the possibility of treating what

people say and do around things as ways of defining what those

things are, its symmetrical rendition thing = concept raises the

prospect of treating things as a way of defining what we as ana-

lysts are able to say and do around them. At issue, to coin a term,

14 Cf.Christopher Witmore, in press, The realities of the past: archaeology, object-

orientations, pragmatology, in Modern Material: Proceeding from the Contem-

porary and Hitorical Archaeology in Theory Conference,ed. B.R. Fortenberry and

L. McAtackney (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009).


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are a things conceptual affordances: how things material char-

acteristics can give rise to particular forms for their conceptu-

alization. One might even imagine this kind of transformation

movement as a form of abstraction, provided that notion is dis-

entangled from habitually corollary distinctions between con-

crete things and abstract concepts.Indeed, this is just what the

thing = concept clause of our analytical method would suggest.

Where the analytical ontology of things versus concepts would

posit abstraction as the ability of a given concept to comprehend

a particular thing, external to itself, in its extension, the heuris-

tic continuity of thing = concept casts this as a movement inter-

nal to the thing itself: the thing differentiates itself, no longer

as an instantiation of a concept, but a self-transformation as

a concept. Savage thought thinking itself.

15 See also Martin Holbraad and Morten A. Pedersen, " Planet M: the intense abstrac-

tion of Marilyn Strathern",Anthropological Theory9, 4 (2009): 371-94.

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Holbraad_Savage_proofs.pdf