Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

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Michael Singleton
On the left, starting out on a intercultural safari with a given definition
of the Sacred and its Imprints, one is obliged to recognize that the
further one travels the less it fits the empirical evidence. None the less,
despite the final culture visited resembling more a line than a triangle,
having decided from the outset that all cultures must have some form to
the Sacred (if only to distinguish men from animals), one relates the
ethnographic material to the Sacred as Such (represented by the underlying
the substantially black and perfect triangle). On the right, the intercultural
traveller realizes that, en route, the definition with which he
started out is undergoing the death of a thousand qualifications due to
increasingly contradictory data. At some point in cultural space, so as
to respect his findings, he decides to accept that his former definition
(represented by the dotted triangle) can only be plausibly applied to a
limited number of cultures (the triangular series) and must be replaced
by a new generalization (the dotted square) of similar onto-epistemological
shape and size, capable of creditably covering the field material
furnished by a fresh series of (square) cultures. However, for reasons of
sheer commodity and conventional communication, our nominalistic
voyager might prefer not to renounce the terms “sacred” and “imprints”
but will reduce them to purely generic or heuristic status, producing
field material to prove that, in actual fact, there exist several incompatible
species of what globally goes by as the sacred and its imprints.
3. Visible traces of the invisible in Africa
It is with these philosophical preambles in mind that we finally arrive
ad rem nostram – the visible traces of the invisible in Africa. Though it
goes against my empirical grain to have thus put the conceptual cart before
the ethnographic horse, I felt it was important to clarify the nature
and scope of an anthropological contribution to an interdisciplinary
colloquium such as ours. The anthropologist is often invited to leave his
native reserve so as to explain to his more civilized and scholarly colleagues
what his chosen but primitive people thought of fundamental
and recurrent human issues such as how the Transcendent Other made
Himself known in former times and out of the way places. With a bit of
luck, our meandering, labyrinthic introduction will have persuaded our
readers that what Africa has to say on the matter is as uniquely irreducible
as African languages are to their Indo-european equivalents.
Africa is not speaking, albeit in its own fashion, about basically the