[Linganth] Plugging Sessions: Executive Panel

[Jim Wilce]

Panel Title: Where Hybrid “Monsters” Dwell: A Discursive Bestiary of 
Magic, Science, and Religion (Sat. 8-11:45 a.m.)

Pervasive folk sociologies distinguish realms of “magic,” “science,” 
and “religion.” Anthropologists’ folk-sociologies, like those of other 
“folk” in the post-Enlightenment West, operate with a powerful 
unacknowledged debt to the foundational metadiscourses of Bacon and 
Locke on science, rationality, and society (Bauman and Briggs 2003). 
These folk sociologies orient us to expect to find “magic” in the 
discourse of shamans,;scientific rationality in laboratory, 
lecture-hall, and court-room arguments; and appeals to affectively 
loaded belief as central to domains of “religion” and late capitalist 
consumerism.  Instead we find what Mary Douglas (1966; 1970) might call 
“monsters” of discourse.         This panel explores ways in which 
veritable workshops of officially dichotomous “purification”—social 
sites dedicated to purifying science from social taint, religion from 
secular taint, etc. —flourish on discursive hybrids at every step. Our 
foundational disciplinary metadiscourses on magic, science, and 
religion begin with seventeenth century attempts to set apart a purely 
scientific sphere as a cognitive regime of language and discourse and 
to set (a rationalized notion of) “language” as grammar and logic apart 
from the impurities of rhetoric, of women’s stories, of vernacular 
“Others” with their epistemic anchorings in variously interested 
institutional forms.  They have continually spawned hybrids instead of 
a science free of the taint of society.  Yet our charge is not merely 
to reject the dichotomies or trichotomies, but to see them in the light 
of comparison.     This panel, then, considers ways in which current 
representational practices also participate in “magically” ironic 
processes of dichotomizing purification that at the same time, and 
contrariwise, are hybridizing in the way cultural values are presumed 
by discursive effectiveness. It will thus advance the linguistic 
ethnography of monsters lurking in places that on disciplinary 
conceptual maps might seem to be sites of attentive policing of 
discursive boundaries, so as to separate magic, science, and religion 
as a condition of modernity. More importantly, it exemplifies in a set 
of studies how we can look at the ubiquitous factories in which such 
“monsters” are performatively— magically—produced as 
construals/constructions of the world and discovers our own investment 
in recognizing—or not recognizing — them for what they are.      The 
first half of the session uncovers discursive hybridity when Tibetan 
politics becomes the site for the production of hybrid forms of 
medicine and spiritual desire (Adams); when contemporary Temiar and 
Malay shamans produce modernizing, hybrid discourses (Roseman and 
Laderman); when colonizers and other folk attempt to produce purified 
objects to populate the categories of “religion” and “culture” (Keane); 
and when encounters with extraterrestrials are interpreted as supports 
for the uncanny conditions of modern social life (Battaglia). The 
second half highlights scientific breakthroughs that were made to 
represent a nexus of mediation between the living and the dead (the 
phonograph, Bauman); scientific models of “face-to-face interaction” 
adopted as chartering myths to underpin Fordist and post-Fordist 
regimes (Briggs); and cross-examination that impugns expert medical 
testimony as compromised by subjective interest (Matoesian). Crapanzano 
considers how incompatible elements manage to stand together, e.g., in 
Creation Scientists’ discourse, to create a potentially effective 
montage.

Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
Northern Arizona University
PO Box 15200
Flagstaff AZ 86011-5200
Bldg. 98D, Room 101E
Office phone: 928-523-2729
Lab phone: 928-523-7118
email: jim.wilce at nau.edu
Home page: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22

For information on Jim's edited volume, Social and Cultural Lives of 
Immune Systems, click on 
http://www.routledge-ny.com/books.cfm?isbn=0415310040.

Eloquence in Trouble (Oxford University Press, New York) is now 
available in paperback (ISBN is 0-19-510688-1) at 
 http://oup-usa.org/isbn/0195106881.html .
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 4766 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20041005/51e673d8/attachment.bin>