BRUCE KAPFERER

Anthropology. The paradox of the secular

Secularism denes the orientation of most contemporary thought in the philosophies and social sciences. So much an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment, their secularism manifests the potency of human thought nally liberated and liberating, a demythologizing force that replaces God with Man, that sees human beings as the architects of their own destinies. This is the thoroughgoing argument of the discipline of anthropology regardless of conceptual or methodological orientation. Secularism also declares knowledge, all branches of valid knowledge to be grounded in rationality, a rationality guided by the rule of reason and usually that dened in European and North American Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment discourses. Here the commitment of anthropology is less certain and considerably divided. What constitutes reason and rationality is at the root of much anthropological endeavour and the history of debate over theory and method in the discipline resounds with its irresolution. In many ways the dominating gure of Kant looms over anthropological discourse (even in his current Nietzschean extension or rejection) but there is a deep suspicion as to whether ideal or transcendental reason is independent of its daily or ordinary articulations in routine practices. In other words, abstract reason is always directed and lled with cultural assumptions constructed in the dynamics of a contemporary history. All reason and rationality is of this order. Scientic or logical Reason is no exception and anthropologists argue the problematics of this fact when applied to the rigorous exploration and understanding of human practices which are formed in different historical and cultural circumstances. Such a problematic is compounded in a view, held by many anthropologists, that all human beings are in one way or another authorities as to what is the nature and meaning of being human. In other words, the authority does not rest with any particular and historically specically located body of human beings, no matter how politically, economically or technologically dominant. In fact, forms of practical knowledge or reason constructed in such contexts of dominance may distort and subdue other forms of practical knowledge that otherwise may yield understanding of both a specic and more general nature. Louis Dumonts annoying point, anathema to many, but a development from the great Marcel Mauss, is that the mythologised realities of an India of his investigation refuse comprehension through the individualistic terms of a European modernism. Simultaneously, serious attention to such Indian discourse (perhaps most tragically revealed in the very crisis of its colonial demythologisation or securalisation) provides insight into the nature of colonial structurings and the kinds of recongurations of the human subject underway in recent European and North American history. Anthropologys distinction and potential contribution is founded in the paradox

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that there are limits to the rationality and reasoning of the demythologised and secular realities integral to its very invention. Furthermore, many of its more important discoveries are grounded in a recognition that theories and methods that engage relatively unproblematically modes of description or analysis that embed naively or unreectively those assumptions drawn from within the anthropologists own existential realities can seriously subvert the generation of understanding. If anthropology is through and through a demythologising practice it simultaneously makes a distrust of such practice vital to its method of knowledge production. Anthropology is secularisms doubt. Of course, the history of anthropology demonstrates that this has not always been the case and there is by no means agreement on the matter now. Much anthropology was committed to demonstrating the power of its secular thought and that all forms of practice could be bent to a largely western reason, thus demythologised. This was the colonising force of a variety of functionalisms and structuralisms, and much critiqued by anthropologists, including the proponents of such perspectives. Postmodernist and postcolonial anthropology sustains such criticism but these too, even despite attacks on the rationalism and totalism of other anthropologists, are nervously continuing a very western-dominant demythologising course, often of a celebratory kind. Anthropology is bound to a secular rationalism whether its practitioners like it or not, which may account for why old theories never seem to die. Thus a postmodern assault on overly coherent, value-integrated, and subject-effacing modernist perspectives has seen the re-emergence, redressed and in postmodern guise, of a highly relativised individualist particularism, subjectivism, transactionalism, a domesticated more user-friendly Marx and a modied Durkheim. All this is quite consistent with an anti-progressivist stance, but I suggest that the continual circling and repetition of debates in anthropology is motivated by the paradox, namely the secularist distrust at the centre of anthropology. Anthropology probably locates such a paradox more centrally than many cognate disciplines. It has always stressed the diversity of human experience and has by and large insisted on a comparative method that attempts to sustain the authenticity of difference, of the different realities that it draws within its comparative net. While its practitioners may not be explicit about the matter, the great potential contribution of anthropology rests in my view on a particular ontology of reason and rationality that has its source in the Enlightenment. This is not a commitment to reason or rational secularism of that particular kind which consigns all thought bar its own to the dustbin of unreason or the irrational without so much as a second thought. In anthropology such a cavalier attachment to a secular rationalism has been too free, for example, to label practices as magic and witchcraft without closer inspection and has thus been drawn into hasty error, as Wittgenstein has shown. Rather what I refer to is a method more often implicit than explicit in anthropology that joins the Cartesian notion of radical doubt with the phenomenological recommendation of the willing suspension of disbelief. It is the methodological conjunction of these orientations in anthropological practice that decentres certainty and continually opens up possibility in interpretation and understanding. Contemporary calls for decentring in an anthropology inuenced by deconstruction and postmodernism are not necessarily abandoning the Enlightenment, but perhaps taking up in different vein some of its more fruitful indications. Radical doubt, epitomised in the thought of Descartes but everywhere engaged in

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the revolutionary ideas of such gures of the dawning age of secularism as Leibnitz, Newton and Kant is the engine of reason and rationalism, the force for the construction of new and world-shattering knowledge. With Descartes, radical doubt involves a questioning of ones own subjective or, as Kant expanded the point, sensory knowledge. This is particularly so in as much as the meaning of subjective knowledge is conditioned and communicated by authority that is external to the subject, and unquestioningly taken for granted. I stress that the notion of radical doubt was not anti-subjective but deeply concerned with both the grounds of subjectivity that which the subject too readily assumed or took for granted and with potentially reconguring this subjectivity, altering its horizonal orientation, its ontological ground. Descartes and Newton were not anti-subjective they wanted a conjunction of the objective with the subjective, the subjective to ultimately authenticate what was objectively known. The anthropological method of eldwork and the recommendation of participant observation are deeply Cartesian in their imagination. It must be stressed that the radical doubt to which Descartes gave voice was already the spirit of a larger secularism (beyond that of the search for scientic knowledge). This was manifest in political and religious upheaval, the overthrow of the divine right of kings continuing through to the current attacks against totalitarian state systems of whatever political hue, the press for other political and economic freedoms and the emergence of innovative forms of religious belief and practice. Radical doubt gains its force as a destroyer of those certainties about the nature of reality and experience that are in some way or another formed independently of these realities or deny aspects of their dimensionality. It is antagonistic to closure even to those, scientic and otherwise, it may paradoxically bring into existence. If radical doubt is integral to secularism secularism as the dialectics of suspicion it is theoretically the enemy of that secularism that recasts itself in the image of those certainties it may have deposed, secularism as blind faith, belief, secularism as the new form of the religious. Anthropology grounded in radical doubt bears as its specic generative crisis the recursivity of radical doubt. This is the concern to attack, on the one hand, what appear to be the certainties of anthropologists and, on the other hand, the certainties of those whose ways of existence anthropologists encounter. Without such recursivity a mockery is made of radical doubt. It is to declare for ones opinion, hypothesis and view without submitting it to the scrutiny of suspicion. It apes science or the attainment of rigorous knowledge by succumbing, in fact, to a kind of religious attitude that protects ones own subjectivism in the process of objectively deconstructing that of another. This is especially problematic for a discipline such as anthropology which should be concerned with the dimensions of human existence in all its diverse and continually differentiating forms, and about which there can never be any absolute or nal closure. Radical doubt not applied recursively becomes the instrument of self assertion against other possibilities, a blind religious kind of secularism, that simply afrms what is already known but in fact is shielded from critical inspection. This has been the fate of much anthropology both in its beginnings in the nineteenth century and in later applications of an unexamined self-condent rationalism and a desire to celebrate pragmatic individualism. Much of the recent hoo-ha over the concept of culture in anthropology and the renewed debate that surrounds the culture concept seems oblivious to its key role in a discipline whose contribution derives from a commitment, even an extreme commitment, if this is possible, to radical doubt. The concept of culture is more than a mere

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relativising instrument. It opens the possibility of other ways of being human that not only indicate a limit, for example, to modes of western secular understanding, but also opens ways to challenge dominant subjectivities and revise scientic visions or other ruling opinions concerning the nature of being human. The orientation to culture, an openness to other ways of life, is a method for facilitating the necessary recursivity of radical doubt. Kin to radical doubt is the notion of the willing suspension of disbelief. Perhaps given greatest place in Husserls phenomenology (in the concept of bracketing, which rather than being the enemy of Cartesianism is an extension from it), it is methodologically vital in an anthropology that seeks to enter within those realities it aims to expose to greater comprehension and understanding. This is particularly so in an anthropology that is committed to a view that all human beings in their practices, for instance, contribute even unselfconsciously to the understanding of what it is to be human. This perhaps offends most of all that secular rationalism, that virtually religious secularism, that refuses to relinquish its hold on reality and which most often results in the reduction of all difference to the boring and dull repetition, often in lower register, of what it already reckons the truth to be. It is not the boredom which is difcult boredom and rigour are probably inseparable bedfellows rather the way the commitment to secularism in the form of belief (rational secularism as such) militates against openness. The suspension of disbelief does not mean the exchange of rationalism for mysticism, which is how some anthropologists appear to practice the suspension of disbelief, or else react to the idea. Such exchange in my opinion is nothing more than the other side of rationalism itself, as in the Victorian fascination with magic or current New Age dabblings. Rather the method of the radical suspension of disbelief is one way to overcome the prejudices, the unexamined assumptions which are as much the product of demythologised realities as they may be of mythologised ones. It enables the exploration of the nature of the phenomenon to be grasped within its own terms something which an overcommitted and unreected secularism can block or prevent. Anthropology is a practice of secularism that must often be anti-secular in an effort to break through what is often a blinding prejudice that can be the self-same limitation of secularism, a secularism that defeats itself and a passion for understanding, in its very secularist zeal. Anthropologys commitments are ideally open so as to challenge even rationality and reason as a necessary method for engaging with the possibilities of being human. Its dialectics of suspicion, combining radical doubt with the suspension of disbelief, is essential to anthropology as a rigorous knowledge practice. Such a dialectics, too, is necessary to the liberating possibility of a discipline which ideally strives to break the constraints to knowledge and understanding that is, paradoxically, internal to the pursuit of rational knowledge as much as it may appear to be its external enemy.
Bruce Kapferer Department of Social Anthropology University of Bergen Fosswinckelsgate 6 5007 Bergen Norway

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