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Wittgenstein on Frazer THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough Translated by Stephan Palmié Edited by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié With critical reflections by Veena Das, Wendy James, Heonik Kwon, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Knut Christian Myhre, Rodney Needham, Michael Puett, Carlo Severi, and Michael Taussig Hau Books Chicago © 2018 Hau Books and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stephan Palmié, Giovanni da Col, Veena Das, Wendy James, Heonik Kwon, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Knut Christian Myhre, Rodney Needham, Michael Puett, Carlo Severi, and Michael Taussig Cover: “A wicker man, filled with human sacrifices (071937)” © The British Library Board. C.83.k.2, opposite 105. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Editorial office: Michelle Beckett, Justin Dyer, Sheehan Moore, Faun Rice, and Ian Tuttle Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9905050-6-8 LCCN: 2018962822 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Table of Contents Preface xi chapter 1 Translation is Not Explanation: Remarks on the Intellectual History and Context of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer 1 Stephan Palmié chapter 2 Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough 29 Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Stephan Palmié chapter 3 On Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough 75 Carlo Severi chapter 4 Wittgenstein’s Spirit, Frazer’s Ghost 85 Heonik Kwon chapter 5 Deep Pragmatism 95 Knut Christian Myhre vi THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE chapter 6 Wittgenstein Exercise 115 Wendy James chapter 7 Wittgenstein on Frazer 135 Michael Puett chapter 8 Of Mistakes, Errors, and Superstition: Reading Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer 153 Veena Das chapter 9 Remarks on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough: Ritual in the Practice of Life 179 Michael Lambek chapter 10 Explanation as a Kind of Magic 197 Michael Taussig chapter 11 On an Anthropological Tone in Philosophy 205 Sandra Laugier, translated by Daniela Ginsburg appendix Remarks on Wittgenstein and Ritual 225 Rodney Needham Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein 1889–1951 Sir James George Frazer 1854–1941 viii THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE Contributors Stephan Palmié is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002) and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013) as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro- Atlantic anthropology and history. Giovanni da Col is Research Associate at SOAS, University of London and Founder and Editor of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory as well several volumes and collections on the anthropology of hospitality; luck and fortune; the anthropology of future; the history of anthropology; animism; and the spirit world in Tibet and Southwest China. Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University and author of Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Wendy James recently retired as Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford and is author of War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile, The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology and The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the Uduk of Sudan. Heonik Kwon is professorial Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Uni- versity of Cambridge, and an APJ associate. The author of The Other Cold War, he co-authored North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics and is completing a book on intimate histories of the Korean War. Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. The author of The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value, and The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar, he co-authored Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives. Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne and author of Etica e politica dell’ordinario, Recommencer la philosophie, and Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy. THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE ix Knut Christian Myhre is a researcher at the Department of Ethnography, Nu- mismatics, Classical Archaeology and University History, University of Oslo. He is the author of Returning Life: Language, Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro and editor of Cutting and Connecting: ‘Afrinesian’ Perspectives on Networks, Rela- tionality, and Exchange. Professor Rodney Needham (1923–2006) held the chair of social anthropology at Oxford University from 1976 to 1990 and was author of Mamboru, history and structure in a domain of Northwestern Sumba, Counterpoints, and Exemplars. Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthro- pology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China. Carlo Severi is Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is author of L’Objet-Personne: Une anthropologie de la croyance visuelle, The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination, and co-author of Naven, ou le donner à voir. Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at The European Graduate School and author of What Color is the Sacred?, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, and My Cocaine Museum. Preface Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough are of profound inter- est for anthropology. Anthropologists have read and learned from them but have not often put them into the perspective of the anthropological under- standing that has been gained through the sustained ethnographic fieldwork that became the hallmark of the discipline since James Frazer and Wittgenstein wrote. Generating such a perspective is the ambitious project that was con- ceived by Giovanni da Col in 2013. Noting that the Remarks on Frazer were out of print and thinking it would be good to have a translation that was carried out by an anthropologist, he commissioned Stephan Palmié to do the job. Da Col secured the rights for a translation and invited a number of anthro- pologists to offer their thoughts on the Remarks. The original idea was to have contributors think about how—after 83 years of ethnography and reflections— anthropologists can engage with Wittgenstein’s forays into their domain (which predated by decades the now so-called ‘ontological turn’). The idea was also to draw a balance and consider once again what anthropology has to offer today to philosophy. Da Col decided to number the remarks in order to facilitate distribution to the contributors, and originally wrote contributors: There are 50 numbered remarks. We expect you to choose about 9 remarks each, just in case there are any overlaps. Each of you will end up commenting on about 6 or 7 remarks, 250–500 words comment on each. Feel free to approach each remark accord- ing to your style and preferences. We are just expecting an engagement from the xii THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE point of view of anthropology: What can anthropology speak to Wittgenstein’s reflections? . What did anthropology achieve in the last eight decades? How can we significantly engage with Wittgenstein’s ideas today?” He also circulated quite a number of published articles on the Remarks and on Wittgenstein, in- cluding pieces by Veena Das and Wendy James, as well as Michael Taussig’s as yet unpublished essay on the corn wolf and published reflections by Rodney Needham, Thomas de Zengotita, Terence Evens, Stanley Tambiah, Godfrey Lienhardt, and several philosophers. By the summer of 2014, we settled on a title for the volume: The Mythology in our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. A number of anthropologists signed on to the project: Veena Das, David Graeber, Wendy James, Heonik Kwon, Michael Lambek, Michael Puett, Carlo Severi, and Michael Taussig. There ensued a fruitful exchange of ideas over email as we circulated our ini- tial individual choices and began “trading” the Remarks among ourselves. On July 17, 2014, Lambek asked, somewhat facetiously, “Do we all pick numbers until the last person left ends up . as the corn wolf?” As da Col noted in re- sponse, “choosing remarks is quite an entertaining process!” Several of the contributors also wondered whether addressing the material “Remark by Remark” was the best way forward. The concern was both how each commentator could best make their arguments and also how to be faithful to Wittgenstein’s Remarks themselves. On July 17, 2014, Lambek wrote da Col: “Your recent instructions . still leave open the question: Is it your intention that each of Wittgenstein’s remarks will be followed by or paired with an indi- vidual commentary? Is this in fact the best way to proceed? If the commentaries each address several of Wittgenstein’s remarks, as Wendy [James] and David [Graeber] indicate they would like to do, and if the remarks themselves connect to each other in various ways, then this suggests a bit more flexibility is in order. In any case, one of the things Wittgenstein’s text leaves us with is precisely how to read it and I’m not sure we should pre-empt that with a single formula.” Das, however, liked “the innovative idea of providing remark by remark,” pointing out that it could be “very enlightening to think how one would relate to the specificity of that particular remark from the anthropological archive” (email from Das to contributors July 21, 2014). Most of the original contributors submitted their essays by the fall of September 2014. However, after this initial spurt of collegial energy, for vari- ous reasons, the project languished.
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