THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough Translated by Stephan Palmié, with a Preface by Giovanni da Col 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. 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Table of Contents 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 77 Carlo Severi chapter 4 Wittgenstein’s Spirit, Frazer’s Ghost 87 Heonik Kwon chapter 5 Deep Pragmatism 97 Knut Christian Myhre chapter 6 Wittgenstein Exercise 117 Wendy James vi THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE chapter 7 Wittgenstein on Frazer 137 Michael Puett chapter 8 Of Mistakes, Errors, and Superstition 155 Veena Das chapter 9 Remarks on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough: Ritual in the Practice of Life 181 Michael Lambek chapter 10 Explanation as a Kind of Magic 199 Michael Taussig chapter 11 On an Anthropological Tone in Philosophy 207 Sandra Laugier, translated by Daniela Ginsburg appendix Remarks on Wittgenstein and Ritual 227 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. 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. 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. chapter 1 Translation is Not Explanation Remarks on the Intellectual History and Context of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer Stephan Palmié The origins of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Bemerkungen über Frazer’s The Golden Bough” are as complex and unclear as its checkered editorial and translational history (see Orzechowski and Pichler’s [1995], Rothhaupt’s [2016], and West- ergaard’s [2015] systematic assessments and critiques). The way Wittgenstein’s literary executor, Rush Rhees (in Wittgenstein 1967: 233) presents the matter, one year after Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929, he expressed to his student Maurice O’Connor Drury an interest in reading James Frazer. As Rhees reports, Drury appears to have procured the first volume of the 1906–15 third edition (The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings I) and proceeded to read to his mentor from it for the course of one academic term, before the two abandoned their conversations. Despite Drury’s mention of the third (12 volume) edition, there is some agreement that Wittgenstein based his occasional lecture remarks during 1930–31 concerning Frazer as well as his notes on The Golden Bough on the 1922 abridged edition, which, perhaps not insignificantly, had been purged of most of its reference to Christianity that had caused such public furor upon publication of the second edition in 1900. Again, according to Rhees’s version, Wittgenstein commenced writing on Frazer for a few weeks in June 1931, 2 THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE eventually dictating the results as part of what became known as “The Early Big Typescript,” but rearranging the materials repeatedly, and eventually dropping practically all of them in what eventually became the so-called “Big Typescript.” As Rhees tells us, there was a second set of notes on The Golden Bough, jotted down on “odd bits of paper,” not “earlier than 1936 [when Wittgenstein ac- quired a personal copy of the 1922 abridged edition] and probably after 1948.” Elizabeth Anscombe discovered these after Wittgenstein’s death. Rhees even- tually united the various sets of notes for the 1967 publication in the German journal Synthese, though he never gave a clear rationale for his editorial in- terventions, or for why significant segments of the resulting text were omit- ted from the eventual translation published in 1979. Based on Rhees’s original selection and arrangement for the 1967 Synthese publication, the following text is a complete English retranslation of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.1 The following translator’s notes need to be prefaced by the disclaimer that I am neither a philosopher nor an intellectual historian, but an anthropologist. Hence the title of this contribution, which aims to gesture toward a set of prob- lems peculiar to my discipline since at least the last decades of the twentieth century. Putting matters in Wittgensteinian terms, the question is this: Is it even possible to translate the language games constitutive of other forms of life into those we find ourselves immersed in? At what cost do we attempt to override their incommensurabilities? And what, for that matter, are the entail- ments of such attempts at translation? What are its politics, and what are its consequences for both the language of origin and target (Gal 2015)? Like me, Wittgenstein was a native German speaker working in an Anglophone envi- ronment. But even though English and German are closely related languages, he chose to think and write in the latter idiom. This fact may seem of trivial consequence at first glance. Surely, all of his work has long been available to An- glophone audiences, and has spawned a vast secondary literature in English. But taking Wittgenstein by his own word, to entertain such a view is to trivialize the 1. The numbering of Wittgenstein’s Notes in this new translation has been undertaken solely for ease of reference, and should decidedly not be seen as Wittgenstein’s own choice. Rhees’s Synthese publication features them in unnumbered succession, but does not make clear whether the order in which they are presented originated with Wittgenstein, or from Rhees himself. For an editorial procedure comparable to the one presented here, see G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright’s “Editor’s Preface” in Wittgenstein (1981). Translation IS Not EXplanation 3 difference between the forms of life constitutive of—and recursively constituted by—specific language games, the mutual interintelligibility of which cannot be a foregone conclusion.