http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Roy A. Rappaport. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.536 pp.

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity

Writing at the Margin is primarily a collection of revisions of recently published articles, some coauthored, by a distinguished medical anthropologist-psychiatrist. This review will describe only those sections that are relevant to medicine. While medicine is universal in human societies, healing customs and traditions vary widely both among and within societies. According to Kleinman, biomedicine does not accept this multiplicity of healing systems but maintains a "single-minded approach to illness and care," with an almost total emphasis on the physical aspects of disease. To biomedicine "the psychological, social, and moral are only so many superficial layers of epiphenomenal cover that disguise the bedrock of truth, the ultimately natural substance in pathology and therapy." While the biomedical approach has advantages, it fails to incorporate "the patient's experience of suffering," to utilize the "charismatic powers of the healer-patient relationship" or to take advantage of "the therapeutic powers within patients, denying efficacy to

Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine

Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. WEBB KEANE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; 297 pp. (paper). Anakalang is a dry, out of the way place in West Sumba, Eastern Indonesia. Here, where subsistence agriculture is the norm, neither trade nor wages play much part in people's lives. Local affairs take place in a realm largely untouched by the reach of the Indonesian state. Although most people have converted to Christianity within the last thirty years, and warfare and the headhunting that went with it have been in abeyance since the colonial era, violence and bravado still command men's image of themselves, and ancestor spirits remain important. This is where Webb Keane carried out fieldwork in the 1980s and '90s, trying to understand exchanges, formal speech, and feasting. In his remarkable and ambitious ethnography, he makes these esoteric subjects speak to general theories of representation. The result is a critique both of those approaches that treat culture as a text or as disembodied discourse and of those that lean toward economic or material reductionism. Further, Keane shows that agency is not only something individuals exercise, but also a property of groups. The main actors in formal transactions are the corporate patrilineal descent groups called kabisu and their segments known as "houses." High status kabisu, some of which constitute a nobility, assert claims as village founders, and possess ancestral heirlooms and villages with stone tombs and dancing platforms where they sponsor great feasts. Asymmetrical alliance characterizes the pattern of marriage among kabisu, with, ideally, at least one marriage each generation renewing the affinal bond. Nonetheless, long-standing affines construe each other as antagonists and constantly scrutinize the objects and words they exchange in ceremonial contexts as either a recognition of honor or grounds for offence. The ethnography sticks mostly to formal settings such as marriage negotiations, where the predominant speakers are generally not themselves party to the exchanges or decisions that occur, but merely the delegated voices of the principals. Adepts of ritual speaking lace their talk with the couplets that are a hallmark of this region and that Anakalangese regard as a legacy from an ancestral golden era. The stylized expressions bracket an event as efficacious or definitive, for this was the manner in which ancestors spoke. Much speaking in ritual events also consists of highly redundant messages relayed by go-betweens, reports and repetitions of what others have said. This agency-blurring practice, and the replicability of utterances among different speakers, Keane argues, displace utterances from persons and bespeak the transcendent authority of ancestors. Keane explores at length the implicit logic of speaking in pairs. A couplet says the same thing in two different ways, and also points to an unstated, third possibility: a gloss in colloquial speech. Couplets as a poetic device thus evince a general process of displacement where signs point to something not actually there, a semantic center that is only presupposed. Displacement is also evident in behaviors relating to slavery. …

Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society

This essay argues that the convergence of religious ethics and business management knowledge illustrate the formation of what are termed spiritual economies. Spiritual economies conceptualize how economic reform and neoliberal restructuring are conceived of and acted on as matters of religious piety and spiritual virtue. The spiritual economy described consists of producing spirituality as an object of intervention, reconfiguring work as a form of religious worship, and inculcating an ethic of individual accountability and entrepreneurial responsibility among workers. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, the majority of which took place at Krakatau Steel in Banten, Indonesia, this essay describes a moderate Islamic spiritual reform movement active in state-owned companies, government bureaucracies, and private enterprises in contemporary Indonesia. Proponents of spiritual reform consider the separation of religious ethics from economic practice as the root of Indonesia's economic crisis because this disjunction resulted in rampant corruption, inefficiency, and a lack of discipline at the workplace. The essay analyzes these efforts to inculcate Islamic ethics in combination with western management knowledge that is expected to enhance economic productivity, reduce endemic corruption, and prepare employees of state-owned enterprises for privatization.

Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia

While it is generally agreed that in the postmodern world all tradition is invented, in many post-colonial contexts the emerging identities are spelled out in the idiom of ‘traditional heritage’. This article considers the social field of ‘shamanism’ as it has been shaped in the post-Soviet years in Tuva, an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation in Southern Siberia, and analyses Tuvan shamanism as a product of local historical and social forces, and global processes. Based on both the ethnography of the organisational structure of contemporary Tuvan shamanism, and portraits of different categories of practitioners, the article analyses continuity and change in various aspects of what is locally seen as ‘traditional knowledge’, and discusses different skills, orientations, and divisions of labour among the practitioners. Shamanism in post-Soviet Siberia is seen as a postmodern religious movement enmeshed in global structures and processes, and it is only in this context that a local tradition c...

Healers, Leaders and Entrepreneurs: Shamanic Revival in Southern Siberia

This article considers an instance of magical services in Moscow, where the practitioner adapted western neo-shamanic methods to cater to the problems of the newly rich. The techniques that are ostensibly used for improving business are analyzed as attempts to alter the problematic morality of money making. The semiotic mechanisms of kitsch and magic are compared, and it is suggested that similar mechanisms are involved in the processes of identity construction of the new elites. These semiotic processes are seen as symptomatic of deep changes at the very foundations of cultural cosmologies, resulting from the new openness to the globalized world.

Spirits and Souls of Business New Russians, Magic and the Esthetics of Kitsch

L'A. examine la question de la legitimite des systemes de guerison non biomedicaux en Russie. Il considere ces systemes en tant que domaines culturels specifiques, integres par la maniere personnelle et idiosyncratique dont chaque praticien exerce un pouvoir charismatique qui, dans la pratique, genere l'efficacite therapeutique. Il montre comment, dans un contexte de pluralisme medical, les guerisseurs construisent une representation de soi a travers la narration de leur vie, la constitution materielle du lieu de leur pratique, et leur apparence corporelle a travers le vetement. Il decrit notamment un exemple de guerisseur pour qui ce projet de presentation de soi atteint les dimensions de l'art et de l'ethos. Afin de contextualiser ce cas specifique, il decrit brievement le domaine du soin medical en milieu urbain en Russie contemporaine, et il examine les strategies generales de legitimation par l'articulation de ses differentes composantes. L'A. soutient que dans les pratiques medicales alternatives, pour lesquels l'autorite charismatique est essentielle, le pouvoir de l'alterite constitue, en Russie, une autre source importance de legitimite.

The culture of charisma : Wielding legitimacy in contemporary Russian healing

An important premise for the anthropological study of healing systems is that they are cultural domains, constituted by local systems of knowledge, meaning, and social relations. People undertake their quest for health with more conviction if the medical systems they resort to are meaningful for them (MacCormack 1986), if the conceptualizations of health, disease, and cure correlate with their more general cosmology, and fit within broader patterns of personal and collective identity construction. It is this meaningfulness of the systems of healing \vithin the broader domains of meaning-making, their place with reference to the dominant structures of knowledge and power, that may be understood as their legitimacy. This legitimacy may be particularly contestable in multiple medical systems, where several traditions of knowledge and institutional frameworks coexist and compete for state funding and paying clients, as well as for media coverage. In such a situation, discursive and performative strategies of legitimation can become a part of persuasiveness, both of an individual healer and of an ideology behind a certain therapy, thus having direct bearing on the therapeutic efficacy of treatment. In this paper, I will try to unravel strategies of legitimation used in the pluralistic medical field of the contemporary Russia. In this analysis, the Russian healing systems will be treated as reflecting broader cultural dynamics, expressing hitorical continuity as well as social change.

Wizards, Gurus, and Energy-Information Fields: Wielding Legitimacy in Contemporary Russian Healing

In contemporary Russia, the Orthodox Church has started to assume its traditional but long‐lost role as a guardian of morality and a source of coherent ontological foundations. At the same time, magic and alternative healing have become pervasive and conspicuously public phenomena, thriving on the new institutions of the market and the free media. The article examines the nature of ideological offensive deployed by the Russian Church against magic and healing. It suggests that the controversy between Church and magic reflects conflicting ontologies of self and incompatible constructions of agency inherent in these respective cultural fields. It argues that magic and healing are built on the Western models of agency as empowerment of an autonomous individualistic self, and explores contrasting models of agency offered by the Orthodox Christianity. In the light of this argument, seemingly premodern practices of healing and magic appear as phenomena deeply embedded in globalised modernity.

Galina Lindquist

Papers

Healers, Leaders and Entrepreneurs: Shamanic Revival in Southern Siberia

Spirits and Souls of Business New Russians, Magic and the Esthetics of Kitsch

The culture of charisma : Wielding legitimacy in contemporary Russian healing

Wizards, Gurus, and Energy-Information Fields: Wielding Legitimacy in Contemporary Russian Healing

Not my will but thine be done: Church versus magic in contemporary Russia