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Postmodern ontology, anthropology, and religion

a
Pablo G. Wright
a
University of Buenos Aires , Argentina
Published online: 30 May 2008.

To cite this article: Pablo G. Wright (2000) Postmodern ontology, anthropology, and religion, Culture and Religion: An
Interdisciplinary Journal, 1:1, 85-94, DOI: 10.1080/01438300008567141

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 Article

Postmodern Ontology,
Anthropology, and Religion
Pablo G. Wright
University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

This article analyses some changes produced in the contemporary

'postmodern' self and its consequences for the anthropological study of
religion. In this regard, these changes influence deeply the way we
westerners represent our ontological structure, and approach other religious
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systems and ontologies, due to the current processes of globalisation and

transnationalisation, the notion of Self often fluctuates between an old
stable, autonomous, maximiser (condensed) self and a dispersed,
multivocal one. It is argued here that traditional anthropological analyses
of religion lack this critical and reflexive awareness. For that reason,
cultural phenomena such as shamanism, sorcery, and many forms of
religious and cosmological syncretisms, are frequently approached from a
distant, naturalistic viewpoint In this paper a more existential view of
religion is proposed; it approaches the observer to the observed, opening
up his/her assumptions about the 'order of things'. A collection of
notions, such as critical hermeneutics, critical intersubjectivity, dialectics,
and ontological language is discussed, to build a fresh inquiry into the
realms of numinous life.
KEYWORDS: shamanism, postmodernity, self, religion, anthropology,
ontology

Late ontology
The late twentieth century shows a series of socio-cultural and economic
transformations that shift our cognitive and epistemological categories away
from the ontology inherited from the Enlightenment. Here I suggest that we are
witnessing the emergence of a new (cultural) type of subject, that is displacing
the old Cartesian ego. This paper analyses the consequences of this change vis-a-
vis the anthropological study of religion, and the constitution of its key research
tool: the subject-ethnographer.
If we define postmodernism in Jameson's sense (1984), as a cultural
phenomenon within the current stage of capitalism, postmodern ontology can be
viewed as a Western 'regional ontology' that is gradually transforming the entire

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world through mass media, information technology, and the processes of

globalisation and transnationalisation.1 It exhibits a tendency to think of the
individual as an open, ambiguous, dynamic entity, which means that there is
less confidence in the autonomous, modern individual. Postmodern ontology is
characterised by an open subject, re-installed in the world, that contrasts with the
modern self, an entity essentially separated from it. In this regard, the modern
individual turned to be 'the ultimate hermeneutic authority' (Gutman 1988:101)
incorporated within him/herself the power of authority, decision, adventure, and
judgment. However, these 'faculties' implied, as Marshall Berman warned
(1982), a perpetual danger of crisis, of internal rupture. For the open subject that
process of concentration of faculties is reversing; they are being dispersed into
the inter-subjective sphere. It questions individual authority, and redefines the
links that connect subjects.
Contemporary macro context of capitalist 'flexible accumulation' (Harvey
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1990), where this fluid subject appears can be related to the cultural realm
through a sort of Weberian 'elective affinity*. This flexible system of
commodity production shapes 'flexible bodies' (Martin 1994) and categories,
immersed in corporate lives. The images and experiences of the self are usually
defined nowadays in terms of networks, linkages, and interactions functioning as
renewed metaphors to portray our being-in-the-world.
It is suggested that postmodern ontology emphasises a relational way of
thinking. This mode, deeply rooted in the paradigmatic changes introduced by
physics and neurosciences in the Western Weltanschauung, appears in social
sciences as a stress in concepts such as communication, interaction, dialogue,
intersubjectivity, fusion of horizons, emergence, transpersonal, reciprocity,
negotiation, polyphony. They are bridge-type concepts, that allow a fresh, more
dynamic apprehension of the phenomena and processes arisen in social
interaction. In this regard, as Sampson notes (1989:2), ontological primacy is
granted to relations rather than individual entities. In anthropology, Gregory
Bateson's work was one of the earliest examples of this mode, of reasoning.
Recently, the late Victor Turner acknowledged this conceptual motion 'from a
stress on concepts such as structure, equilibrium, function, system to process,
indeterminacy, reflexivityfrom a "being" to a "becoming" vocabulary'
(1985:152; emphasis added).
This emphasis in 'becoming' introduces temporality, context, and
contingency as chief factors of current ontology. I argue that for anthropology,
there is a shift from the autonomous individual of Malinowskian ethnography,
to an open, reflexive subject whose nature implies a redefinition of the field
situation, and the anthropological knowledge. Fieldwork presupposes currently a
'contract of knowledge' that needs to be interactive, reflexive, and politically
informed. An interactionist epistemology could create a space for a truly
dialectical exercise of interpretation between the individuals involved in field
interaction. Because the field is immersed in the world, anthropology implies a
particular praxis in the world. That praxis is based upon an experiencing

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 Wright: Postmodern Ontology, Anthropology, and Religion

subjectthe ethnographerwhose own existence, transformed through a certain

type of displacement, becomes receptacle, chain, and producer of knowledge.
Here, I define the anthropological undertaking (in our times of flexible
accumulation, make-believe media, but also magic realism, geopolitical
consciousness, and non-traditional spaces of resistance), as an ontological
displacement.
It means that the subject-ethnographer displaces his/her being-in-the-world to
a different place, or to a known place but with a different (epistemological)
agenda. It implies not an exotic travel to re-encounter a lost self, but a journey
through the self to recover the world.2 As Fabian (1983) has shown,
anthropology was defined traditionally in terms of spatial displacement to meet
the Other. Instead, I perceive it as a radical kind of existential movement,
directed to meet another subject/s, involving the whole person. Moreover, the
ethnographer's being could be regarded as a Heideggerian 'field' instead of a
closed individual; a 'region of Being' without clear limits; a sort of
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electromagnetic field without a centre or an animic substance (cf. Barret 1958).

Any 'anthropological' study presupposes a certain kind of ontological
displacement In the case of religion, it seems to affect more intensely the
subject-ethnographer's ontology. I believe that this is so because in most cases,
belief systems, rituals, mythologies, and symbols challenge the researcher's own
conceptual frameworka product of the history of Western confrontations with
'other' societies. Concepts such as magic and superstition are clear examples of
the historical opaqueness of Western worldview. In developing a dialectical
epistemology, 'we have to let things, and especially people and their behavior
"appear" to us provoking new rules of perception' (Schlte 1981:176). Thus, it
will be possible to imagine a different (enriched) way of being in the world.

Field-world
An example from my fieldwork among the Argentine Toba3 may illustrate these
reflections. During a 1983 field research in the Toba community La Primavera
(Formosa province), I experienced a series of situations that questioned my
'autonomous', 'closed', Western worldview. They were related mainly to
ontology, language, and the nature of truth. In this regard, I had no previous
experience other than the reading of Jorge Luis Borges's El Etngrafo (The
Ethnographer') (1971), that addresses some of the existential dilemmas every
ethnographer may face.4
In La Primavera, I met a fifty-five year old shaman named Alejandro Katache.
For the first time, I could talk about shamanism with a specialist who seemed
friendly in talking to a doqshil'ek (White, Non-Indian). As I introduced myself to
him, showing interest in his knowledge as a pi'ioGonaq (shaman), he rapidly
commented that my visit was the first ever to his home made by a doqshil'ek.
He appreciated that, and overtly told me that he had many auxiliary spirits;3 also,
that his main companion, nioGonaq ('the whistler', a nocturnal non-human

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being), was a little scared by my missionary-look (beard plus blue eyes). The
reason was that nioGonaq didn't like any person related to Jesus, whom he
perceived as a powerful competitor to his own power.6 While I denied that
identitynot without the idiosyncratic uneasiness that such misidentification
provokes on usI reiterated my interest in learning from them. Then Alejandro
notified me that the 'whistler' wanted to grant me some of his haloik (shamanic
power). Alejandro laughed a lot at my reply: no thanks, I am grateful, but I'm
not prepared to have such power, it scares me! (while replying that, I felt an
overwhelming sense of embarrassment, weakness, and stupidity). One morning,
with a rare expression in his face, Alejandro asked me if I had slept well. A little
intrigued, I assented. When I asked Alejandro why he made such an inquiry, he
mentioned that the night before 'someone' had stolen two oxen from the corral.
He confessed that he had suspected of me, but when seeing my secure response,
he went on talking about the consequences of our dialogues. Thereon Alejandro
manifested that surely he was punished by the pajaakpi (a generic term for non-
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human beings), because we had talked too much about shamanic issues. That is
forbidden because words have power, one can't talk just for the sake of
knowledge; words carry meaning and power, more so if they are directly related
to shamans. The more one say words about the non-human realm, the closer this
realm and its inhabitants approaches one. Alejandro's interpretation shocked me.
I could never have expected that Neither Saussure's nor Chomsky's lucubrations
advised us that language might have any non-arbitrary relationship with the
(non-human) world (of power). Perhaps Jakobson was in the right track, as well
as Hymes and Paul Friedrich's contextual approaches to language.7 Toba ideas of
language were overlooked by my rigid quest for data, which, ironically, was
conducted using verbal interviews!
The way Alejandro and myself faced these field events illustrates how
anthropology explores certain types of phenomena that presumably confront the
Western epistemological bedrock. Malinowskian ethnographers were trained to
face these phenomena distantly, detached from their own experiences and their
interviewees'. To 'observe' and 'participate* in actual religious practices was an
ambivalent play performed by ethnographersclosed, self-contained units
segregated from the world. Their texts showed such distance through precise
writing devices (see Marcus & Cushman 1982).
The open subject's ontology implies an aperture to the world, stressing the
realm of intersubjectivity as constitutive of the social. There are no autonomous
individuals; conceptually, they are no longer viable; if they were, the social
would be impossible. Humans are intersubjective animals whose residence is the
social realm, which is endlessly produced by communication.
Returning to the Toba example, if I had a different epistemological approach,
displacing my Malinowskian being within my collaborators' intersubjective
community, my perceptions and understanding of that situations might have
changed radically. I assumed that language was disconnected from the world, or
connected in abstract terms. Of course, I was not able to receive power from a

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 Wright: Postmodern Ontology, Anthropology, and Religion

non-human entity: my Western scientific background denied both instances. I

was outside the Toba's Wittgensteinian language games, and that was my fault.
Furthermore, I did not even recognise that this language could have ontological
consequences at all.

Unification
Approaching religious phenomena such as shamanism' from a perspective of an
open subject, less in charge of his/her links with the world, yields to the
emergence of new rules of perception, through field interactions.9 It means a less
dualistic separation between the Being, on the one hand, and the World and
Language, on the other. This kind of 'existential reconciliation' (Schlte 1980),
supposes the inclusion of the researcher and the collaborators' social worlds,
within a wider field of life experiences.
Key terms of postmodern ontology are experience, performance, and praxis,
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which enable us to assess differently the Toba episode. The point is that an open
subject would be more sensitive to the complexities of language, the boundaries
between the numinous and the mundane, and the role of personal experience in
the anthropological endeavour. If we agree that, anthropologically, knowledge is
based upon an ontological displacement, the intersubjective bond established
between ethnographers and interviewees may be depicted as a 'fusion' between
'fields of beings', where language acquires a constitutive dimension. Language is
the verbal medium, the external mark of a multi-layered communicative event
Reality is composed of sounds, gestures, gazes, silences integrated within
existential Gestalten that ethnographers must appraise, experimenting on their
own ontologies.10 If we can understand such complexity, then, we might be able
to hear differently nioGonaq's offer, appreciate Alejandro's uneasiness, and judge
my ethnographic bad timing and powerlcssncss. Understanding is a dialectical
fact that, in our case, produces a sort of inter-shamanism, where researcher,
shaman, and auxiliary spirits are truly speakers, within a concrete time-space
location. Shamanism, among many other religious manifestations, as Turner
proposed (1982:86), 'lives in so far as it is performed ... it is meaningful
experience and experienced meaning.' Thus, the anthropological study of religion
must reframe its assumptions about ontology and cosmology to unlock its
analytical eyes (and body). This will give place to unified, inter-experienced
accounts of certain events, for instance, shamanic healing rituals, or lengthy
talks about cosmology, that are essentially public for our field fellows (cf.
Laughlin 1989; Laughlin, McManus & d'Aquili 1990). Here 'public' means that
they are intersubjective, not private activities. They need a basic communicative
consensusin my case given by the Toba communitythat we ethnographers
have to recognise and incorporate. Ultimately, if ethnograpers are regarded as
open subjects, we will be more susceptible to apprehend the contingent fluxes of
social reality. Within it, religion in the postmodern era, appears as a protean
manifestation, a vital niche of social praxis, that can be approached by

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displacing ourselves through a world from which we are no longer disengaged

components.

Notes
Some ideas of this article were discussed in preliminary form in a paper
presented to the IV Latin American Congress of Religion and Ethnicity,
National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH-INAH), Mexico City,
June 1992, and in the article 'Experiencia, Intersubjetividad y Existencia.
Hacia una teora-prctica de la etnografa' (Wright 1994). Field research was
funded by the Argentine National Council for Scientific Research (CONICET)
and The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am
grateful also for the financial support provided by the Anthropology
Department and the Graduate School of Temple University. I deeply thank
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Alejandro Katache for his patience to resist my inquiries. I am indebted to

Rita Segato, Ezequiel Ruiz, Tom Patterson, Peter Rigby, Kyriakos
Kontopulos, Dan Rose, and Elmer Miller for their intellectual
encouragement. I also thanks George Marcus for his bibliographic assistance.
Finally, I am grateful to Jorge Wright and Ins Fernndez del Casal for their
linguistic collaboration.
1. They do not deny the existence of socio-economic, cultural discontinuities
world wide. On the contrary, in some way globalisation generates
regional/local tensions that create conditions for the emergence of ethnic,
nationalist, racist movements. Recent events in Chiapas, Eastern Europe,
Chechenia, Peru-Ecuador recent war, and the Mexican financial crisis indicate
that current interconnectedness does not guarantee automatically peace,
democracy, and human rights. Interesting discussions on these topics for
Latin America, mostly focused in the modern-postmodern debate, can be
found in a CLACSO published seminar entitled Imagenes Desconocidas. La
modernidad, en la encrucijada postmodema (1988), published in English in
Boundary 2, vol 20:3 (1993). Other interesting discussions about identity,
temporality, and cultural studies of current Latin America, can be found in
Hill (1988), Garca Canclini (1990), Rowe & Schelling (1993), volumes
edited by Len-Portilla et al. and Gutirrez Estevez et al. (1992), Rosas
Mantecn (1993), Sarlo (1993, 1994).
2. There seems to be an increasing interest in what can be called an ontology of
displacement. Many aspects of current 'global' culture are related to the
experience of displacement (see for example Rushdie 1985).
3. Self-denominated qom ('we', 'the people'), linguistically they are a
Guaykuruan group. Until late nineteenth century, they were hunting-
gathering nomadic bands that migrated seasonally throughout the Chaco
region (NE Argentina, central-south Paraguay, SE Bolivia). With the
occupation of their territories by White colonizers since the 1880-1890s, the

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 Wright: Postmodern Ontology, Anthropology, and Religion

Toba were violently forced to settle and work in sugar cane and lumber mills.
Currently, they practise agriculture, sell their work for wages, living mostly
in sedentary settlements in the Argentine Chaco rural and periurban towns.
Many Toba have migrated since the middle fifties to Resistencia, Rosario,
and Buenos Aires. Their total population can be estimated as 30,000
individuals.
4. I must add that by that time (1983), I had not yet read Carlos Castaneda's
controversial work, mainly The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), that refers to
many archetypal field situations experienced by students of shamanism.
5. For an account of Toba shamanism, see Miller (1979), and Wright (1992).
6. As Alejandro explained, nioGonaq thought that I was a biblical character
similar to those detected in Alejandro's biblical charts. Since the mid thirties,
Protestant missions introduced 'new' religious figures among the Toba (cf.
Miller 1979). In this regard, illustrated biblical charts circulated throughout
the region (c.f. Wright 1988), showing Western-type individuals, that the
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Toba identified generically as doqshi. I interpret nioGonaq's non-human

discourse as an ideological rejection, rooted deeply in five hundred years of
colonial domination. Usually the discourse of Toba 'believers in the Gospel'
denigrate ancient culture; their forefathers are seen as ignorant, pagan, and
sometimes influenced by the devil. For that reason, nioGonaq's allegation
surprised me a lot. There are many examples of the effects of colonial and
neo-colonial 'mode of producing reality' (Hill 1986:112) on native religions
(e.g. Taussig 1980, 1987; Fabian 1974). An extended account of this episode
was published in Wright (1996).
7. See for example Jakobson (1978), Dell Hymes (1974), and Paul Friedrich
(1986).
8. Shamanism must be regarded both as an ideology and a ritual praxis.
Anthropological studies of shamanism, as Langdon suggests (1989), only
recently understood it 'as an important dynamic force in today's world,' that
includes not only indigenous but urban populations as well. A good example
of urban 'neo-shamanisms' and popular culture in Colombia, is illustrated by
Ramrez de Jara & Pinzn Castao (1992).
9. Jean Favret-Saada's explorations in sorcery in rural France (1980) and Paul
Stoller's experiences as an apprentice of Songhay sorcerers in Niger (c.f.
Stoller & Olkes 1987), are excellent examples of the ambiguities we
experience when we start being part of our interviewees* intersubjective
network. Rita Segato's suggestive work (1988), questioning the positivist
bias of anthropological studies of religion, introduces fresh ideas to deal
anthropologically with religious experiences.
10. In this regard, I was very influenced by Michael Jackson's existential
anthropology, Paths toward a clearing (1989).

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