Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

34
Michael Singleton
situation as of now, when, humanly speaking, the present gives you
more than sufficient satisfaction, what urgent need is there to speculate
about First Beginnings or prognosticate Last Ends, what could make
you desperately want to barter your present sinecure against the offer of
a totally transcendent but somewhat hypothetical Other? Not being restless
(inquietum) but perpetually mobile, the nomad does not aspire to
share Eternal Immobility (nunc stans) with an Unmoving Mover (Primum
mobile).
Within the limits of this contribution, I can afford the reader only the
briefest of inklings as to the sui generis character of nomadism and its
impact on the theme of transcendent traces. Before concluding, however,
an important and interesting issue must be raised, albeit just as summarily.
To what extent would the WaKonongo I frequented subscribe to
my tardily identifying them as authentic nomads? Though people tend
to take their personal and collective identities for granted, speculatively
they are far from representing self evident phenomena. Before being recently
superseded by the more fundamental issue of recognition, that of
identity was much debated by philosophers, psychologists and social
scientists 30 . To the extent that a simple worker must be conscientized to
his proletarian role I do not claim that peasants such as the WaKonongo,
left unattended by anthropologists, would be completely conscious
of their nomadic intentionality. The West has a long history of conscripting
natives as cannon fodder for hostilities none of their making.
Not only did colonial troops die in their thousands during our world
wars but the identities of “primitive” peoples were pillaged and put
polemically to use in such exclusively Eurocentric debates as that which
opposed the promoters of primordial monotheism to its detractors 31 .
None the less, despite “nomadic” being an appellation academically
controlled by anthropologists, I remain convinced not only that this theoretical
“fact” does justice to the ethnographic data but that “my” 32
WaKonongo would not accuse me of instrumentalizing them for a cause
to which they would of themselves in no way subscribe.
30 M. SINGLETON, La carte de l’identité, in P.P. GOSSIAUX (ed.), Questions régionales
et citoyenneté européenne, Liège 2000, 101-122.
31 Epitomized by the never ending polemic between Schmidt and Pettazzoni
(R. PETTAZZONI, L’essere supremo nelle religioni primitive, Torino 1957).
32 Far from being a condescending, paternalistic appropriation, this personalization
of my relations with the WaKonongo reflects a fact often glossed over by
recourse to more anonymously habitual but also more academically ambiguous