The ends of the dead (original) (raw)

REJOINDER

The ends of the dead

Michael Lambek, University of Toronto Scarborough

Rejoinder to Despret, Vinciane. 2019. “Inquiries raised by the dead.” HAu: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (2): 236-248.

It is a genuine pleasure to read Vinciane Despret. She writes with wit and perception and she demonstrates a sure footing with respect to questions of ontology. Indeed, she exhibits admirably precisely the kind of “ontological tact” she ascribes to others.

From the many threads one could pull from this lecture I take two, the first concerning the dead and their status, the second concerning the mediums and their work. I will not take up the question of truth and the real with respect to spirit mediumship except to repeat what people in Madagascar have often said to me, always shifting from Malagasy to French to do so: “Incroyable . . . mais vrai!” (“Incredible . . . but true!”). As Paul Sorrentino (2018) says, one can render the dead present simply by addressing them. That happens in writing and in mediumship, but only in the latter instance do they respond in a way that is manifest to others. Or rather, there are acts and signs, everything “proceeding as if” they were responding. This can be taken as a process akin to what literary theorists call vraisemblablisation (Culler 1975). Yet address need not presuppose response, as it generally does not in the genre of biography.
“Les morts sont des gens comme les autres,” says a Belgian medium, named Philippe. Translating this phrase into English is not straightforward. Catherine Howard suggests, “The dead are people like everyone else.” Or perhaps, “the dead are people, too.” But the question remains whether there is an identification of people (gens) with humans. And then, what is meant by “human”? I recall here Cora Diamond (1988), for whom “human”
does not indicate a category or species in contrast to other categories or species (as some evolutionary anthropologists might want to distinguish Neanderthals). 1{ }^{1} Despret quotes a newspaper article entitled “Dogs are people, too” (Berns 2013). Here they are manifestly not humans for Despret, but perhaps that is less evident for those anthropologists working in the oxymoronically labeled field of posthuman anthropology.

The Sakalava of Madagascar ascribe freedom and agency to cattle (as researchers do to dogs in the PET scanner) in one particular context: if they bellow when thrown in preparation for sacrifice, they are deemed unwilling to serve and are released. But this is shameful for the human owner who offered the beast, indexical of the weakness of their commitment (Lambek 2002). For me, the question is how the ascription of qualities of personhood to members of other species illuminates the human.

For an anthropologist, the point, as Despret rightly says, is not the truth or falsity of these statements but the meaning, intention, and effect of the utterances.

1. “Life with the concept human being is very different from life with the concept member of the species Homo sapiens. To be able to use the concept ‘human being’ is to be able to think about human life and what happens in it; it is not to be able to pick human beings out from other things or recommend that certain things be done to them or by them” (Diamond 1988: 266).

What happens when I call dogs or Neanderthals “people, too”? For Lévi-Strauss of The savage mind ([1962] 1966), it would be a matter of whether such statements operate metaphorically or metonymically and in relation to other statements: dogs are people, but wolves are not; or perhaps, dogs are my people, while cats are yours; or maybe, poodles are my family, while retrievers are yours. But in the current phase of anthropology, metaphor has gone out of date and tropes have become insufficient as interpretive devices. Instead, as Viveiros de Castro (2013) incisively shows, what is at issue are distinct and incommensurable concepts. The concept “peccary” for an Amerindian group may encompass what for me are two quite different concepts of humans and wild pigs. Of course, the translation issue is when to recognize conceptual difference and when to recognize metaphor, and this becomes more complicated if we go along with Nietzsche in the idea that all language is tropical in origin but sometimes becomes frozen into literalness. 2{ }^{2} In this formulation, the literal is parasitic on the tropical rather than the reverse, inducing what one could call, pun intended, tristes tropiques.

Clearly, when taken as utterances of discourse rather than as general propositions about the world, the force and meaning of the statements are particular and thereby not uniform. In uttering the phrase “gens comme les autres” (“people like everybody else”), Philippe seems to mean, first, that the dead are individuals; second, that they are familiar; and third, that the dead are beings who have, as Kant ([1785] 1998) put it, a dignity. As is clear in the position of Paabo (2014) regarding Neanderthals, they must be respected as ethical beings. 3{ }^{3} That has implications both for how we relate to them and with how we expect them to relate to us. In a society that values egalitarianism, relations are expected to be reciprocal, but in a society premised on social hierarchy, it could mean deference.

An additional theme of Despret’s lecture is how mediums help the living manage their relations with the dead. Here the register of the therapeutic (healthy/
2. Nietzsche writes, “with respect to their meanings, all words are tropes in themselves, and from the beginning” ([1872-73] 1989: 23). I am indebted to Simon Lambek (2019) for the reference.
3. In my current work, the issue is to what degree I respect the privacy of the dead; whether, for example, I can quote from their personal letters.
unhealthy) displaces the register of the epistemological (true/false) or the ontological (real/imaginary). Despret suggests that the enigmatic quality of the messages received from the dead produces a certain kind of attentiveness and affect on the part of the living that has positive consequences. But a number of ambiguities in the argument remain. First, therapeutic as opposed to what? Second, are mediumistic practices exclusively therapeutic, or can they also be neutral or harmful, or fill some entirely different functions? And third, in what would health or well-being consist?

Here I find Despret pulling between, on the one hand, the openness, indeterminacy, and inconclusiveness of the tropical, whereby the living continue to be surprised and enriched by relations with the deceased, and on the other, resolution and conclusion, terminating relations with the dead, saying good-bye, as in classical funerary art depicting dexiosis (shaking hands in farewell), possibly producing the kind of stasis characteristic of the literal (“the dead are dead”). Here it is not hard to think of Freud’s distinction between endless melancholia and finite mourning, or of Hertz’s ([1907] 2006) demonstration of the tripartite nature of the mortuary process that has a clear-cut ending in which the dead are finally put to rest and the living to ease. I think also of psychoanalyst Hans Loewald’s (1980) fine description of laying internal angry ghosts to rest as peaceful ancestors, which is more or less what Heonik Kwon (2008) documents externally and ethnographically in Vietnam. Despret’s observation is that the mediums place the desire for separation in the mouths of the deceased, thereby enabling the living to let go without guilt (i.e., to release themselves of guilt) or anger, perhaps without another backwards glance. At the same time, Despret is suspect of all the arguments I have just made, seeing in them attempts on the part of the state to regulate the subjectivity of its citizens, as if a strict separation between the living and dead were necessary for social order.

In thinking about commencement, it has proved useful to distinguish origins, in an ontological register, from beginnings, in the register of human acts (Said 1975). Perhaps we need a comparable distinction between kinds of endings, one in which the conclusion of specific acts is distinguished from finality in an ontological sense. The Malagasy word vita signifies “finished” in the sense of “completed,” which is different from an ending that is final. The ending of a life is different in kind from the ending of a book or a task or an argument. The judgment that concludes a trial is

different from the comprehensive final judgment that Muslims undergo at death. Sacrificial killing-whether of an ox or a cucumber (are these “persons, too”?)— is irreversible and hence final rather than merely completed (Lambek 2015). The finality of death is a lesson that mourners have to learn (internalize) and that may require its own act (or series of acts). Closure is necessary precisely so that life in all its indeterminacy can continue. The existential finality of death needs to be addressed through the completion of human acts. One could propose that the “therapeutic” here lies in ensuring that the psychological register is harmonized with the ontological one. Or one could argue that psychological therapy remains in conflict with philosophical therapy. 4{ }^{4}

Note that for Loewald (1980) and the Vietnamese, the dead are not simply “people, too” but are also distinguished (ghosts, ancestors) as different kinds of people. In part, this is a distinction between people who are settled, that is, with whom relations are finished, and those who are unsettled, relations with them unfinished, perhaps because we do not even know their names. Distinctions among kinds of dead are common in the ethnographic record. In contemporary North America, the concept of zombies (borrowed and transformed from the Haitian), 5{ }^{5} is currently salient. The horror or fascination of zombies or vampires is the failure of termination. Here one could speak of the “living dead,” who are, in a sense, antipersons and without ethical dignity, in contrast to what one might call the “dead living” of the Belgian spirit mediums and of societies with ancestors.

To take time to care for the dead is to take away time to care for the living. Parents who mourn a deceased child may thereby ignore the living child. But more generally, to dwell on the past is perhaps to evade the present and the future. The exercise of judgment concerning the balance of attention is a central feature of practical ethical life.

As Despret suggests, the ethics of closure is one that faces any teller of stories or writer of narratives and perhaps especially ethnographers. She describes it as the obligation to “honor the refusal of the story to come
4. Lear (2018) provides an illuminating discussion of the tension between psychological and philosophical interpretations of responses to death.
5. On Haitian zombies, see Motta (under review).
to a close.” I could not agree more, but I only add that this runs alongside the necessity, and even the obligation, for human beings to sometimes find or effect closure with respect to events in their lives and relationships. Anthropologists need to finish their books, even if they end them with the phrase, “In conclusion, inconclusion” (Lambek 1993: 406). One wants to say, along with Despret, “Ce n’est pas tout . . .” (“That’s not all . . .”). But the refusal to finish may be as problematic as finishing. And finishing need not be equated with abandoning.

References

Berns, Gregory. 2013. “Dogs are people, too.” New York Times, October 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06 /opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html.

Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist poetics: Structuralism, linguistics and the study of literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Diamond, Cora. 1988. “Losing your concepts.” Ethics 98 (2): 255-77.

Hertz, Robert. (1907) 2006. “A contribution to the study of the collective representation of death.” In Death and the right hand, 27-86. Translated by Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham. London: Routledge.

Kant, Immanuel. (1785) 1998. Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmerman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of war in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lambek, Michael. 1993. Knowledge and practice in Mayotte: Local discourses of Islam, sorcery, and spirit possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
—_. 2002. The weight of the past: Living with history in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
—_. 2015. “Sacrifice and the problem of beginning: Reflections from Sakalava mythopraxis.” In The ethical condition: Essays on action, person, and value, edited by Michael Lambek, 189-213. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lambek, Simon. 2019. “Receiving rhetoric: Language and democratic politics.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto.

Lear, Jonathan. 2018. “The difficulty of reality and a revolt against mourning.” European Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 1−121-12.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1962) 1966. The savage mind. Translated by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Ltd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Loewald, Hans. 1980. Papers on psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Motta, Marco. Under review. “Life with zombies: Forms of death at the core of the ordinary.” In In the grip of reality: Anthropology and our life with concepts, edited by Marco Motta and Andrew Brandel.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1872-73) 1989. “Ancient rhetoric.” In Friedrich Nietzsche on rhetoric and language, edited and translated by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair and David J. Parent. New York: Oxford University Press.

Paabo, Svante. 2014. “Neanderthals are people, too.” New York Times, April 14. https://www.nytimes.com/2014 /04/25/opinion/neanderthals-are-people-too.html.

Said, Edward. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and method. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sorrentino, Paul. 2018. A l’épreuve de la possession. Recherches sur la Haute Asie. Nanterre, France: Société d’Ethnologie.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2013. “The relative native.” Translated by Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad. HAu: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 473-502.

Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology and holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the author of four monographs on the western Indian Ocean: Human spirits (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Knowledge and practice in Mayotte (University of Toronto Press, 1993), The weight of the past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and Island in the stream: An ethnographic history of Mayotte (University of Toronto Press, 2018), and is the editor of several collections, including Irony and illness (with Paul Antze, Berghahn, 2003), Ordinary ethics (Fordham University Press, 2010), and Companion to the anthropology of religion (with Janice Boddy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Recent works include The ethical condition: Essays on action, person, and value (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and, with Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane, Four lectures on ethics (HAu Books, 2015). He delivered a Tanner Lecture on “Concepts and persons” in 2019.

Michael Lambek
Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto
19 Russell Street
Toronto, M5S 2S2
Canada
lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca