Abstract
Abstract (Introduction)Regardless of the complex analysis of ethnographical cases, the main theme of this thesis is quite simple. It challenged anthropologists’ “anti-fideilistic” tendencies--maintaining that natives cannot possibly believe things absurd in our view, that the scarcity or “thinness” of natives’ exegesis can be complemented or even replaced by the deeper message recognized by academic interpreters with the holistic view, and, as the combination of them both, that because natives cannot possibly believe the absurd thing they said, they must be figuratively expressing something social. On the contrary, the author’s position is: if and only if natives are asserting honestly and we can interpret their language, then whatever their utterance means (and however absurd it is) as interpreted by our translation manual, the utterance at issue as we understand still expresses natives’ belief—this is what I call the premise of anthropological fideism; and if other cultural community indeed literally asserts and believes things that we construe as being absurd, this engenders the problem that how natives would still hold them. Accordingly, this thesis also demonstrated anthropological fideism by explaining how natives could have paradoxical statements as for the relation between the spirit and its manifestation, and how natives could believe magic clearly absurd in our view, in chapter 3 and 4 respectively. In such work of explanation, we catch the underlying epistemic and psychological ground for having these absurd beliefs, and therefore we can more sympathetically perceive the motivation in our heart to hold such “absurd” beliefs as well. Obviously, an anthropological fideist doesn’t take natives as being correct or telling the truth as for the belief at issue; he simply defends natives’ “right to have their own beliefs”, by, interestingly, being a cognitive universalist.As a result of being anti-anti-fideilistic, two kinds of symbolic studies were criticized in chapter 1 and 2. Firstly, symbolic studies in the broadest sense take culture as “a web of significance”, or a structured system of symbols, communicating meanings to us and natives themselves. In analyzing how Hawaiians took their king as being dead in ritual and how Geertz took Balinese cockfight as an expressive activity, I demonstrated another mode of experience, immersion (taking something false to be the case with suspension of the opposite, truth) and thus overthrew the universality of Geertz’s linguistic conception. Secondly, symbolic studies in the more restrictive sense not only seek to understand meanings of the subject at issue, but also search only those meanings beyond the literal and native-exegetical; and such deeper figurative meanings, from the anthropologists’ perspective, are social. But I proposed a minimal intentionalist account of meaning that showed the practical indeterminacy or even unavailability of such symbolic interpretation as that of V. Turner; for we cannot help but be serious about the postulate of unknown historical “authors”, or designers of culture. And if anthropologists like Needham want to argue the semantic-about relation between non-social representation and social reality by tacitly appealing to the resemblance or “iconicity” between them, such strategy was also refuted in chapter 2. On the other hand, the search for figurative message about social reality can be integrated with the anti-fideilistic premise that natives cannot possibly believe what they said (say, as for Tully river blacks in Australia, “a woman would beget a child because she caught certain frog, or . . .”) as understood by our translation manual. We must carefully examine the reasons offered by anthropologists that allegedly would defend that premise. If we can neutralize those skeptical reasons, then such symbolic interpretation, as the third type symbolic study this thesis criticized, is a unsound argument. However, even if it were sound, such argument, “because natives cannot possibly believe such and such, what is said must be figuratively expressing some aspect of social reality”, would still be an invalid argument because the consequence of the premise (natives’ disbelieving) is not a single “must-be”, but multiple “maybe”--if natives cannot possibly believe what they said as understood by our translation manual, then maybe natives are figuratively expressing, or fictionalizing, or making verbal mistakes or inappropriate expressions, or maybe our translation manual is mistaken and we cannot interpret natives’ language (say, maybe the “because” in “ a woman would beget a child because . . .” is a wrong translation for what natives spelled). And this is simply the result of applying modus tollens to the premise of anthropological fideism: if natives don’t believe the utterance as we understand, then natives are not honestly asserting or/ and we can’t interpret natives’ language. That is to say, by being fideilistic, we knows how to locate properly such popular, intuitively appealing form of symbolic interpretation in a completed, valid reasoning structure, rather than abusing our intra-community conversational instinct in a cross-community encounter (see chapter 5).