Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

14
Michael Singleton
more than the deaf, we prefer clear and distinct ideas to irrational emotions
7 ; the world view (Weltanschauung) of which we speak culminates
in the beatific vision; like God, Big Brother is watching us; we seek realistically
visual art forms rather than symbolically evocative figures; statues
of our Lady of Lourdes or Fatima are supposed to represent the
Blessed Virgin as she really appeared for purposes of contemplative
adoration, fetishes on the other hand, are not iconic images but aidememoire,
functioning like the prompting cards of actors, tangible reminders
of the actions agreed upon by the owner of the fetish and his
interlocutor. An African sculptor carves Motherhood and not any recognizable
mother. The predominance of the eye over the ear even affects
my own discipline: “visual anthropology” 8 , like anthropology itself, is a
typical product of our Weltanschauung and as such participates in that
Westernization of the world decried by Latouche 9 .
– Objects: The anthropologist could concede the term… provided
one recognizes not only the ethnocentric character of material versus
immaterial divide but above all that any concrete object “materializes”
the particular project of a singularly situated, socio-historic subject answerable
in turn to the Global Project or Culture to which he belongs
and in which he believes 10 . Objects as not lying there (iaceo) to be stum-
7 The voyeuristic bias of the western mind though sublimated as intellectual curiosity
obliged the indigenous other to behave exhibitionistically and led to a century
of sterile debate about primitive ideas of God or the total neglect of the emotional,
though it be crucial in such phenomena as emigration (L. MERLA - L. BAL-
ADASSAR [edd.], Les dynamiques de soin transnationales. Entre émotions et considérations
économiques, numéro spécial de Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques
41/1 [2010]).
8 Now “in”, to the extent of its having regular rubric in professional journals
such as the Journal des Anthropologues. I woke up this morning to hear the speaker
on the Belgian radio say “merci d’ouvrir les yeux avec nous”!
9 S. LATOUCHE, L’occidentalisation du monde, Paris 1989.
10 A culture can be seen to function as a Global Project carried forward by its
constitutive, particular projects, be they micro, meso or macro (M. SINGLETON,
Critique de l’ethnocentrisme Du missionnaire anthropophage à l’anthropologue postdéveloppementiste,
Paris 2004). Take, for instance, the school system which articulate
the Choice of Society, which a country like Belgium can represent: at a macro
level, the Ministry for Education oversees two meso, parallel structures, one religious,
the other lay – the first being further divided at the micro level into establishments
run by the Jesuits, the Salesians or the Benedictines.