Abadi Religion by Marta Figleowicz

In the short story Jorge Luis Borges “The Ethnographer,” a white postgraduate student named Fred implanted himself into an American indigenous tribe. Finally, he pierced “his secret doctrine.” His advisor then called him back to report it:

He walked to his professor’s office and told him that he knew his secret, but had decided not to express it.

“Are you bound by your oath?” The professor asked.

“Not the reason,” Murdock answered. “I learned something out there that I couldn’t express.”

“English may not be able to communicate it,” advised the professor.

“Not that, sir. Now I have a secret, I can say it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you, but the secret is beautiful, and our science, our science, seems to be just a preparation for me now.”

The Borges story plays with the view that Western and non-West culture is basically not translated. Stepping into a non-west trust system makes someone fall from the ends of secular knowledge that is said to be rational.

The exchange between the Professor and his rebellious student arrested Frisson Ambivalen who surrounded the transcultural work in the tries, when Borges was supposed to meet the man who inspired this story. The anthropologist this period hopes that such cross -cultural metamorphosis can free them and their readers from social diseases and Western malais. Maybe, Margaret Mead speculates, learning about relative sexual freedom of Samoa women can cure the sexual drive of American women. Marcel Mauss and his student Georges Bataaille speculated that learning about the exchange fashion for alternative gifts, Potlatch-could break the mantra of capitalism in the early twentieth century. However, this excitement comes with certain anxiety: as suggested by “ethnographer”, adopting a different cultural perspective might make a person unwilling with a touch with someone’s property.

One century later, the anthropologist once again mobilized a comparison of culture to strengthen their readers (especially the West) from the assumptions of calm cultural. These newer alienation modes play in different keys: instead of emphasizing the striking difference between what is called modern, secular and “traditional culture,” non-West practices, they highlight the surprising similarity between them. They hunt for ways in which even people who should be disappointed are resolved by charm forms.

Hunting Similitudes like that involves taking his own anthropologist down from his scientific position. Our culture that other people should usually be more skeptical than we assume, and we ourselves are more credible than we admit. To understand the faith of others, anthropologists must recognize their own desires to believe. In the Shamanism: Abadi ReligionWhat came out recently, Manvir Singh placed himself on the edge of the Borgesian cliff. While watching the initiation of shamanism on an island in Indonesia, he found himself on the verge of surrendering to the rhythm of the dancer:

The veranda feels like a light ball that is inferred by the Spirit arranged in thick darkness. And as it seems that everyone around me experienced possessed, I experienced the same pull. I inhaled deeply and felt my eyes up under the lid closed. I stood on a cliff, puddles under me. I just need to jump. I can let the sound and social environment and deeper awareness wet me. I could let my body jerk and his head trembled. I can give up on ecstasy.

Singh spoke both as a scholar and as a new comparable of comparative assessment of human religiosity which became the basis of the new field to move. “The comparison seems to dissolve the arrogance of culture more than that reinforces it,” he said. Universalism has long been a taboo idea in its field because of its relationship with excessive simplification of non-West thought. But different types of universalism are leaving the play field between those that should be modern and non-modern-cant, Singh argues, strongly providing Western trust in the concerns of the secular state mentioned.

Shamanism defines religion as a battle of Yin-Yang between the elements of “shamanism” and “institutional”. The chaotic power of prophecy, ownership, and inspiration of individuals raises rituals and formal religious doctrines, which in turn narrow the same power. Singh believes to expand the extreme of what is called “shamanism”. This includes not only the original practices of Siberia and Pan-America, whose similarity (and has the potential to share the origin of Asia) has long been recognized, but also a broad and more transcultural spectrum of phenomenon, capturing the Holy Spirit. All of these phenomena involve encouraging the condition of special awareness in “shamans,” their audience, or both, to communicate with Beyond: to talk to the gods and ancestors, to see the future, or find someone’s spirit animal.

Singh expansion about the conceptual space of what the meaning of “shamanism” is interesting. The Hebrew Prophet was a shaman, according to him; Likewise Jesus. Likewise, the early human ancestors who carved pictures of wild animals of hybrid humans into caves that were secreted in the French rural areas; Likewise, the Protection Fund Manager of Value from Wall Street and Shamanista New Age of Burning Man. Binding these numbers together -the same intoxicating, and that is food to think about. Singh himself saw him as a movement that humiliated the western even when he raised the culture of others: “The manager of Jesus’ money and wall street seemed to exemplify Western features,” he argued; “That is, until it is considered with the healer of Ketangari Trance and the countless Mesianik prophets.”

Singh, along with other people in his field, called his readers to raise the gap that should be fundamental between “enlightened,” self -reflexive thinking and magical thinking that are claimed to have been abandoned. This is an important paradigm shift Shamanism also show some weaknesses. The Singh book revolves around, but, I dare to say, with a reckless: general denominator that develops too fast at risk of losing his critical advantage.

The shaman he met was all credible and all suspected; Although he insisted, at a glance, that some shamans are more effective than others, he does not offer clear criteria about how fake shamans can be distinguished from real things. He does not give insight into what can – or should – for us – for us, only a warning that we are bound, at a certain point, to be cheated by him.

Who brought me back to the Borges story. When Fred told his advisers that science became unattractive to him, his advisor believed this as a statement of cultural separatism. However, this did not happen:

Professor spoke coldly: “I will tell your decision committee. Are you planning to live among Indians?”

“No,” Murdock answered. “I might not even return to the grasslands. What is taught by people of grasslands is good anywhere and for any situation.”

That’s the essence of their conversation.

Fred married, divorced, and now one of the librarians in Yale.

By placing Fred in Yale, an interested Western institution, Borges suggested that life and career might have been running along the same line even if he did not impose a dramatic cultural crossing. Does the time between the indigenous tribes change it, or does it only give it a slightly different lens in the same path of life? This is a gift and trap of the Singh book, on his widest conceptual horizon, a IVY league professor like him, or like me, looks the same as his shaman as Siberian shaman.

Marta Figleowicz is a comparative literary professor at Yale University and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.