Truth beyond doubt

@article{Holbraad2012TruthBD,
  title={Truth beyond doubt},
  author={Martin Holbraad},
  journal={HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory},
  year={2012},
  volume={2},
  pages={81 - 109}
}
  • M. Holbraad
  • Published 1 April 2012
  • Sociology, Philosophy
  • HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
This article analyzes the concept of truth on which the practice of Ifá divination in Cuba turns. Motivated ethnographically by Ifá practitioners’ claims that the truths their oracles issue are indubitable, I argue that from the viewpoint of commonplace conceptions of truth such an assumption can only be interpreted as absurd. To avoid such an imputation, the article is devoted to reconceptualizing what might count as truth in such an ethnographic instance. In particular, it is argued that in… 
View on U Chicago Press
15 Citations
Background Citations
6

15 Citations

Truth-making institutions: From divination, ordeals and oaths to judicial torture and rules of evidence
Why Divination?
  • P. Boyer
  • Psychology
    Current Anthropology
  • 2020
Divination is found in most human societies, but there is little systematic research to explain (1) why it is persuasive or (2) why divination is required for important collective decisions in many…
Capitalist divination: popularist-speculators and technologies of imagination on the Hooghly River
Economic theory and technocratic policy have long understood economic action to be a communicative activity. From Laplace and Adam Smith to current liberalisation fiscal policy in India designed to…
Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination
Abstract This introduction explores how to build a critical analysis of post-crisis capitalism by moving beyond Marx, Foucault and Callon's approaches. This is crucially important because powerful…
Food-for-words: Sacrificial counterpoint and oracular articulacy in Cuba
By critically engaging with anthropological theories on sacrifice and religious “mediation,” this article offers a doubly indigenous ethnographic theory of sacrifice and much beyond. Using material…
Sindh in Karachi: A topography of separateness, connectivity, and juxtaposition
  • Nichola Khan
  • History
    Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
  • 2020
From imperial ‘unhappy valley’, to decapitated province, commercial capital, and 21st century megacity, this article reflects on relations of separateness and connectivity between Sindh and its…
Speculations on infrastructure: from colonial public works to a post-colonial global asset class on the Indian railways 1840–2017
Abstract This paper issues a challenge to examine the current emergence of infrastructure as a global asset class against a longer-term colonial history of speculation. Taking the case of the Indian…
Plants, people and health: Three disciplines at work in Namaqualand
TLDR
The research project engaged current debates on indigenous knowledge and its historical erasures, and offered an approach that has potential to produce new knowledges while respecting the integrity of the disciplines.
Pensar Etnográficamente un Concepto, Por Ejemplo “Control”: Un Breve Comentario para Abrir la Discusión
Este texto tiene por objeto relevar criticamente algunos lugares comunes que se tienen en Chile sobre la etnografia, proponiendo, en contraste, un esbozo de lo que seria una nocion de etnografia…
The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices : The Case of Divination.
TLDR
Evidence is presented showing that divination practices are often best viewed as an epistemic technology, and scenarios under which individuals may overestimate the efficacy of divination that contribute to its cultural omnipresence and historical persistence are modeled.
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 34 REFERENCES
Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
Embarking on an ethnographic journey to the inner barrios of Havana among practitioners of Ifa, a prestigious Afro-Cuban tradition of divination, "Truth in Motion" reevaluates Western ideas about…
Ontography and alterity: Defining anthropological truth
This article holds that deeply entrenched assumptions about the nature, provenance, and value of truth can be brought into view and examined critically when set against the backdrop of a radically…
Religious premisses and logical technique in divinatory ritual
  • M. Fortes
  • Education
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
  • 1966
Divination is a relatively clear-cut configuration of ritual action which embodies fundamental constituents of religious and magical systems and is easily accessible to repeated observation. It is a…
Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry
Turnerian progress, as desert, and as Big Rock Candy Mountain. This book should be thought-provoking to anyone interested in the relationship between landscape and environmental perception and folk…
Finding Meaning in the Text: The Process of Interpretation in Text‐Based Divination
work on Kalanga and Tswapong divination provides a case-study of the detailed praxis in such systems. Diviners have a multiple role when a divination technique selects a text. At each consultation…
Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition
In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmie offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that…
O nativo relativo
This article attempts to extract the theoretical implications arising from the fact that anthropology not only studies relations, but that the knowledge it produces in the process is itself a…
African Traditional Thought and Western Science
Opening Paragraph The first part of this paper seeks to develop an approach to traditional African thought already sketched in several previous contributions to this journal. My approach to this…
The power of powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifa (or mana, again)
Book description: Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related…
Naming and Necessity
I hope that some people see some connection between the two topics in the title. If not, anyway, such connections will be developed in the course of these talks. Furthermore, because of the use of…
...
...