Magic, Self and (World) Society: Groundwork for an Existential and Cosmopolitan Anthropology

Abstract

ABSTRACTHuman beings can be found everywhere (Piette) and the true subject of anthropology is anyone (Rapport). What do we need to do to our epistemology and practice to reframe anthropology in existential and cosmopolitan terms? This paper explores processes of cosmology- and society-making through an existential and cosmopolitan epistemology and axiology. We can reenlist classic anthropological discussions on magic to understand how subjects generate a Society into which they insert themselves as creative agents. Magical practice shows how Society is uniquely biographical and personal, and that subjectivity is an irreducible and ‘in-additive’ source of social and cosmological structure. Cosmopolitan anthropology describes, then, encounters of ‘non-interchangeable’ (Kneubuhler) biographical selves meeting in and constructing world-space; different selves on diverse cosmopolitanizing trajectories engage in divergent biographical worldmaking practices. In this light, cosmopolitan anthropology takes the form of analytic biography, tracing and retracing these unfoldings of self-orienting structure. Two radically distinct examples of subject-oriented cosmology-making are enlisted: Rastafari I-Yaric and Arrernte tjurunga knowledge. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 I met Mauritz on a streetside in Kingston, Jamaica, in June 2019.2 For the purposes of these notes I have capitalized Society to underline that I am not using this term in its sociological sense as a social, hence objective, fact, but in an existential-‘Simmelian’ one as a subjective reification.3 The idea that the social field ‘affords’ potentials to its different subjects adapts Gibson (Citation1986) without taking on the entire Gibsonian epistemology.4 British Prime Minister, Theresa May used it in a speech to her political party in 2016: ‘But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means’. Unwittingly, May adverts to the centrality of imagination and wish fulfilment in the construction of Society and citizenship.5 In many groups reincarnation seemed to follow clear lines of inheritance from the parents with the spirit child choosing a father or mother who was of a like totem. In some groups the spirit children reincarnated as males on some occasions, females on others, taking up their place in the symmetrical tribal inter-generational marriage sections proportionately.6 ‘Piaget on Piaget: The Epistemology of Jean Piaget’: 1977, Yale University.