Truth in motion: The recursive anthropology of Cuban divination, Martin Holbraad, U Chicago Press, 2012
Cultural production, new book, Religion Add commentsJoining a growing collection of anthropological work on Cuban religious practice, Martin Holbraad’s Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination, U Chicago Press 2012, has just been released. More than simply presenting ethnographic data, Holbraad sets out to use his ethnographic insights to rethink disciplinary presumptions of anthropology as well.
Embarking on an ethnographic journey to the inner barrios of Havana among practitioners of Ifá, a prestigious Afro-Cuban tradition of divination, Truth in Motion reevaluates Western ideas about truth in light of the practices and ideas of a wildly different, and highly respected, model. Acutely focusing on Ifá, Martin Holbraad takes the reader inside consultations, initiations, and lively public debates to show how Ifá practitioners see truth as something to be not so much represented, as transformed. Bringing his findings to bear on the discipline of anthropology itself, he recasts the very idea of truth as a matter not only of epistemological divergence but also of ontological difference—the question of truth, he argues, is not simply about how things may appear differently to people, but also about the different ways of imagining what those things are. By delving so deeply into Ifá practices, Truth in Motion offers cogent new ways of thinking about otherness and how anthropology can navigate it.
Review comments:
The Book’s Agenda
Rudiments of Argument and Strategy
Recursive Structure
Truth as an Ethnographic Object
Ifá in West Africa and the Prestige of Truth
Afro-American Religion and the Politics of Its Representation
Evolutionism, “Diffusionism,” Constructivism: The Fall of Truth
Toward a Recursive Analysis of Truth
Divination in Anthropology
Evans-Pritchard on Oracles
Boyer on Divination, Causal Indices, and Truth
Divination and Indubitability
Desiderata for an Analysis of Divinatory Truth
True Encounters
Divinatory Regulation: Javier’s Initiatory Career
Divination and the Path of Initiation
The Matrix of Initiation and the Propulsion of Paths
Living Ifá
Speaking Ifá and the Economy of Learning
Secrets
The Problem with the Problem of Transcendence
Myth and Transcendence
Ritual and Immanence
The Cosmological Problem of Divination
The Liturgy of Ifá Divination
Ontological Non Sequiturs
Motile Practice—A Choreography of Nuts
Motile Discourse—Talking of Paths
Motile Cosmology—Aché in Divination
An Interlude on the Analysis of Motility—or, the Power of Powder
Motile Ontology—Potential Relations and the Direction of Motion
The Problem of Symbolism and the Motility of Meaning
Interrogating Orula
“Speaking the Signo,” “Interpreting the Paths”
Motile Meanings in Divination
Coincidence, Paths, and the Event of Truth (or Bewilderment)
Motile Truth, Representation and Their Mutual Eclipse
Skepticism and Misunderstanding
No Lies, No Mistakes
Divination and Definition
Divination and Obligation
Initiation as Ontological Transformation
Equivocations
Divination and Anthropology
Ontography as Antidivination
Appendix B: “Papers of Ifá”: An ExampleNotes
Works Cited
Index
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