EASA Biennial Conference 2006

European Association of Social Anthropologists

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Ethos

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Meetings:

Wednesday 20th September, 1pm, Reception Room

AGM of the Royal Anthropological Institute, including Henry Myers lecture by Piers Vitebsky, Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

Loving and forgetting: a farewell to ancestors?
The anthropology of forgetting usefully distinguishes intentional from unintentional aspects, but sometimes echoes a cognitive model of memory and downplays ideology and emotion. I shall emphasise these in my exploration of the aggressively intentional 'forgetting' of the dead among the Sora, an aboriginal jungle 'tribe' in India whose younger generations have converted from shamanism to Baptism (a shift which I failed to anticipate in my book Dialogues with the dead).  ...read more here

The shamanist Sora discourse about remembering and forgetting the dead is not cognitive but relational, emphasising attachment and engagement, and calling for great articulacy and emotional agency. The living converse repeatedly with the dead, who speak through the mouth of a shaman in trance. In dialogue, both sides express the tenderness and the resentments which make up their mutual love. The living gradually transform the ontological state of the dead by persuading them to forgo their sense of pain, and thus to cease causing illness. Over several years, the emotional tone of the engagement with each dead person becomes less distressing and the person become less dangerous. Borrowing from Bakhtin, I call this dialogic process of disengagement (or forgetting) 'unfinalising'.

Christianity disengages the living from the dead immediately after death, replacing dialogue with monologic genres of sermon and prayer which bypass the dead altogether. A new ontology is matched by a new muteness on both sides. Local approaches to God and Jesus offer little scope for verbal agency or emotional excitation, but literacy and new language skills encourage Christians to transfer these outwards to the previously forbidding cosmopolitan realms of trade and politics.

But for those who have made this shift in their lifetime, the unsayable is not always unfeelable. I focus on moments of emotional confusion in which someone is denied the outlet of dialogue: a layman weeps as he misses his father, a shamaness weeps as she struggles to recover her abandoned technique of trance and its accompanying feeling of bliss. These moments are triggered by my own sudden reappearance as an age-mate of dead parents and a living, speaking reminder of a 'forgotten' past.

In examining internal and external kinds of negation which can make conversion feel like a liberation for laypersons and a repression for shamans, I suggest that these moments of confusion arise from new scenarios of loss without format, which in turn generate unprecedented forms of inarticulacy. These are transitional scenarios and forms, which will no longer occur under the limited certainties of the next generation. As slow, therapeutic time collapses, forgetting is becoming militant, impatient, and finalising. Cosmologically and emotionally, loving is simplified: those who fail to forget, persist in loving in a complicated, obsolete way.

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