Introducing Castoriadis for Religion and Anthropology. A First Attempt

I’ve often been frustrated by the lack of prior attention to Castoriadis’ thought in anthropology: good work has been begun by Alain Touraine (sociology) and Nancy Munn and David Graeber (anthropology), but nothing really systematic and explicit has been done.[1]  That’s not a criticism, just a complaint that the work’s not already done.

Here are some thoughts I’m working through today, from Castoriadis’ foundational The Imaginary Institution of Society, all from Chapter Three: “The Institution and the Imaginary. A First Approach” (Castoriadis 1975, 114ff.)

If you’re not familiar with Cornelius Castoriadis, I highly recommend becoming familiar. He was a founder of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, a Greek Communist who fled Greece chased by both the Stalinists (for his then-Trotskyism) and the Fascists, and who was one of the very first marxists to mount a critique of the USSR, a critique he made by criticizing its bureaucratization and its alienation from the revolutionary social groups that attempted to institute it. Often called either the “Philosopher of the Imagination,” or the “Philosopher of Autonomy,” his influence has been deep in some fields (radical political thought, psychoanalysis) but negligible in its reception in other fields and disciplines, including my own. He is sometimes credited with inspiring the 1968 worldwide rebellion, though it is certainly both more accurate and more modest to say rather that his writings influenced some of those revolutionaries in way that significantly altered their approach. Here’s a Wikipedia article, and here’s a link to the Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Webpage.

A first word of introduction: Castoriadis’ use of the word ‘institution’ refers to any shared object created by society, ranging from concepts, gestures, and symbols, to organizations and governments, those things which we more commonly use the word to refer to in everyday American English. These institutions are created by groups of people – that is, they are instituted, and, in a way that replicates much of Weber’s analysis of routinization and the creation of bureaucracies, become alienated from these groups, an alienation that signals the institution’s autonomy from society: the institution has gained its own life, its own force in the social world. One might almost call this the creation of a form of social agency, or as David Graeber wrote of the concept of the fetish in an essay that references Castoriadis, “Gods in the process of construction” (Graeber 2005)

More after the jump….

Quote: A Few Nice Thoughts From Roy Rappaport

Working on some of my thoughts on Ritual and Imagination right now, and it’s always good to go back to Mr. Rappaport. Here are some good quotes from, and about, his thought:

“The nature of humanity…is that of a species that lives and can only live, in terms of meanings it itself must fabricate in a world devoid of intrinsic meanings but subject to physical law.” (Ritual and Religion, 451)

Roy defines ritual as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.” (Ritual and Religion, 24)

“The meaning of ritual’s informationlessness is certainty.” (Ritual and Religion, 285)

According to Rappaport, social truths are hierarchically organized so that “the ultimately sacred forms an unchanging ground upon which all else in adaptive social structures can change continuously without loss of orderliness.” (Ritual and Religion, 427)

“Rituals create conventional states of affairs and conventional understandings. Magic is the extension of the process ‘beyond the domain of the conventional in which it is effective into the domain of the physical where it is not.; A war can be ended by a properly conducted ritual of peace, but a drought cannot. However, the domains are hard to distinguish: ‘people occasionally die of witchcraft.’” (Ecology, meaning, religion, 191).

“[A]s Rappaport himself so ably argues, precisely because the cooperative act of symbolic communication enables – indeed demands (cf. Wagner 1981) – individuals’ continual invention of new meanings, ritual’s speechless form and performance persist within already established systems of symbolic communication as a way of defending ourselves from the arbitrary power of our own symbolic formulations to imagine alternatives, sanctify the inappropriate, and intentionally lie.” Watanabe and Smuts, (“Explaining Religion without….” 105)

Why am I interested?  I find in ritual a far less ‘noisy’ set of cultural ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ (I’m not being at all precise in my language here) than the discourses about such rituals – either emic or etic – could ever provide.  I am convinced that these basic sets of meaning, or certainty, are extremely generative and powerful, and construct themselves around particular sets of social closure, a topic I’ve begun to address – also unfortunately elliptically, which seems to be my curse – here.

Quote: Margaret Slocomb on the role of agriculture in the Cambodian economy

I was planning on writing up a short review and recommendation on Peg LeVine’s book Love and dread in Cambodia: weddings, births, and ritual harm under the Khmer Rouge today.  But then I finally got to a point in my writing where I picked up another book, Margaret Slocomb’s An economic history of Cambodia in the twentieth century, and at the end of it was this wonderful, refreshing quote:

As the following chapters will demonstrate, agriculture, which has always been the main occupation of the people and the mainstay of the state surplus, has consistently failed to fulfill its potential as the designated catalyst for the sort of economic development that Cambodia’s modernisers envisaged. It is equally true, however, that after each catastrophe that befell the nation, it was traditional agriculture that revived the national economy and salvaged the people’s livelihood. (p. 29)

Yes, yes, and again yes:  the role of agriculture as a foundation for economy, culture, politics, and ritual imagination, has never been genuinely appreciated in Cambodian studies (or indeed among Cambodian ideologues).

Amazing quote from George Jackson

A quotation from Philip Gourevitch gives this blog its (current) title.  The following quote, from Black Panther George Jackson, makes the same point in a different way; it’s beautiful.

The present, due to its staggering complexities, is almost as conjectural as the past.

George Jackson

“American Gods” On Belief

People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do, they believe. And then, they will not take responsibility for their beliefs. They conjure things, and then don’t trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness: with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe. And it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.

From an unknown page of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.

False Memory Animation

BoingBoing caught this a few days ago, and now its being picked up by the brain blogs. The boingers thought that the animation was cool (it is), but much more interesting to me (and the brain bloggers) is the way in which it quite concretely and effectively communicates the way in which false memories work. We all have them. Samuel R. Delany’s wonderful autobiography starts with his realization that a memory he’s told for years is in fact, wrong.

Maurice Bloch on Religion and Imagination

Maurice Bloch remains one of the world’s most important anthropologists. His refusal to countenance silliness, his willingness to consider positions opposed to his own (and to endorse them when they are right) is stunning and rare in the academy, and his work continues to evolve.

A recent article by Bloch in Philosophical Transactions (via Anthropologi) points out the importance of the imagination to Bloch’s conception of religion. For Bloch, religion is the product of the human imagination; it is inconceivable and impossible without it.

But Bloch argues that religion is only one manifestation of this unique ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.

Article in the New Scientist [link]

“Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society.”

“Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion,” he says.

Phantasmatic Authority Redux

In a post a few days ago, I noted that

Is this a case of botched terror or successful phantasmatic conjuring? The next few weeks might supply the answer, depending on the state’s response. Will they crackdown further on the Khmer Krom community? Will they blame the SRP or their non-existent ‘Army’ (another clear case of phantasmatic authority), or even Kem Sokha’s new Human Rights Party?

I regret that immediately following that posting, the very next day in fact, the stories began trickling out. It turns out that the bomb-planters were Khmer Krom people living in Cambodia as moto-dops and construction workers, and although the police are woefully incompetent at solving high-profile cases, they apprehended these culprits within hours. Perhaps this is because these culprits are ‘terrorists,’ and therefore legitimate targets in the eyes of the large foreign-aid providing donor nations. Oy, gevalt.

In other news, a SRP activist in Banteay Meanchey was assassinated.

Using your Eyeballs on Text

Well, it’s a more interesting title than ‘reading,’ which is all this post is about.

This last week I was bound up with a larger than usual share of non-dissertation duties, but I still managed to get through two wonderful, wonderful new books on Buddhism, and a very fun book on Zombies (and therefore about deathpower, and therefore work-related). All highly recommended.

CamNews: “Feral Woman” Captured from the Forest

This story appears to have captured the imagination of the world. As the story is reported, an 8-year old girl disappeared almost two decades ago near the Vietnamese border, when she was out watching cattle with her brother. The family never saw her again. Until the other day, when a ‘jungle woman,’ who is supposed to be ‘without language,’ ‘naked,’ and ‘walking just like a monkey,’ was captured stealing food from someone’s lunchbox. She was immediately identified as this girl through her possession of a similar/identical scar on her arm, and has been taken into custody by the family. There’s really no other word for it, since the young woman keeps trying to escape back to the forest, ripping her clothes off, etc. Some of the pictures published show villagers crowding around staring and pointing. It’s all a rather piteous spectacle. The sheer number of photos also indicate that she’s been under the lens for far too long in her brief period of return.