Things as concepts:
anthropology and pragmatology
Martin Holbraad
Within anthropology, much has been written about the possibility of a posthumanist critical social science that is able to
emancipate ‘things’ (objects, artefacts, materiality, etc.) from the
ensnaring epistemological and ontological bonds of ‘humanism’,
‘logicentrism’ and other modernist imaginaries.1 The aim of this
essay is to take this project further by exploring the possibilities for an anthropological analytics that is able to allow things
– by which I mean something akin to ‘things themselves’, though
only in the strict heuristic sense that I shall specify presently
– to generate their own terms of analytical engagement. Might
the feted posthumanist emancipation of the thing be shown to
consist in its peculiar capacity to unsettle whatever ontological assumptions we, as analysts, might make about it (including, perhaps, the ontological premises of a ‘posthumanist turn’
itself)? Might things decide for themselves what they are, and
in so doing emancipate themselves from us who would presume
1
E.g. Marilyn Strathern, "Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of
images", in Culture and History in the Pacific, ed. J. Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions
of the Finish Anthropological Society, 1990), 25-44; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency:
An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel Miller, "Materiality: an introduction", in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2005), 1-50.
17
T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
S AVA G E O B J E C T S
to tell them? Might they, if you like, become their own thing-theorists, acting as the originators (rather than the objects) of our
analytical conceptualisations?2
Such questions, I take it, would consummate the promise
of a properly ‘savage thought’: objects acting not merely as conduits for the thinking of the people anthropologist study (those
they used to call ‘savages’), but rather as a conduit for anthropological thinking itself. Objects, then, become the basis not only
for savages’ ‘science of the concrete’, as Lévi-Strauss himself
would have it,3 but also for thoughts that are savage enough to
unsettle the conceptual economy of analysis itself, including
anthropological analysis (which I shall take here as my point
of departure). Let me illustrate what such a ‘savage’ concretion
of anthropology might look like with reference to aché – one of
the most basic notions involved in the prestigious Afro-Cuban
tradition of divination of Ifá, which I have been studying ethnographically in Cuba since 1998.
more concretely, to certain powders that they consider to be a
prime ritual ingredient for making divinities appear and ‘speak’
during divination. Among the many ways in which specially prepared powders are deemed necessary to Ifá ritual, perhaps the
most striking is its role as a ‘register’ (registro) for the divinatory
configurations through which Orula, the god of divination, is
said to be able to ‘speak’ during the ritual. Spread on the surface
of the consecrated diving-tray that babalawos use for the most
ceremonious divinations they conduct for their clients (particularly during the initiation of neophytes), this powder becomes the
medium through which Orula’s words appear. This they do in the
form of a series of ‘signs’ (signos, also referred to in the original
Yoruba as oddu) that are marked (marcar) by the babalawo on
the surface of the powder, following a complex divinatory procedure in which consecrated palm-nuts are used to generate distinct divinatory configurations, each corresponding to its own
sign. Sometimes considered as guises of Orula himself (or his
‘paths’ or ‘representatives’), these figures, comprising eight single or double lines drawn by the babalawo with his middle and
ring finger in the powder, are considered as potent divinities in
their own right that ‘come out’ (salen) in the divination: crouching around the divining board as they ‘mark the sign’, the babalawos and their consultants are in the presence of a divine being,
a symbol that stands for itself if ever there was one.4
Crucially, babalawos emphasise that the powder itself is an
indispensable ingredient for effecting these elicitations of the
divine. Properly prepared according to secret recipes that only
The power of powder
Much like the notorious notion of mana in Oceania, aché is a
term that babalawos, which is what men who are initiated into
the cult of Ifá are called, use in a wide variety of contexts. Most
salienty, they use it to refer both in the abstract to their ‘power’
(poder) or ‘capacity’ (facultad) to divine, for which they are most
renown (‘to divine you must have aché’, as they say); and, much
2
Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, And (Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social
Anthropology, 2002).
3
4
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
18
Sensu Roy Wagner, Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986).
19
T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
S AVA G E O B J E C T S
babalawos know, aché de Orula, as the powder is referred to in
this context, has the power to render divinities present. Achépowder does this not only by providing the surface on which they
can appear on the divining-tray, but also because it constitutes a
necessary ingredient in the consecration of each of the various
objects used in the divination, including the divining tray, the
palm-nuts and various other items babalawos must have consecrated for divinatory use during their own initiation. As they
explain, none of these items ‘work’ unless they are properly consecrated, and this must involve ‘charging them with acheses’, i.e.
with aché-powders, according to secret procedures.
signifiers itself exemplifies, the case of aché raises classical
anthropological conundrums about the rationality credentials
of what he playfully called ‘savage thought’. Much as with classic anthropological controversies about so-called ‘apparently
irrational beliefs’ (Nuer twins being birds, Bororo men being
red macaws, and so on), we seem here to be confronted with a
series of notions that are counter-intuitive to say the least. Certainly, it would appear that the terminological coincidence of
aché as both power and powder corresponds to an ontological
one, since, as babalawos affirm, a diviner’s power to elicit divinities into presence is irreducibly a function of his capacity to use
the consecrated powders at his disposal as an initiate. Powder, in
this sense, is power. And this would seem to raise the classical
anthropological question: why might Cuban diviners and their
clients ‘believe’ such a notion? How do we explain this ‘apparently irrational belief’ anthropologically?
It should be noted, however, that this ‘classical’ way of posing the question draws its power from what one might call its
own inherent perversity. In order even to ask why certain people might believe that a certain form of powder has the power
to elicit certain divinities into presence, one has first to take for
granted that this could not (or should not) be the case in the first
place. In particular, assuming that the pertinent anthropological
question is why people might ‘believe’ in this way that powder is
power turns on the corollary assumption that such a belief can
be parsed as the particular way in which the people in question
‘represent’ the objects in their midst, namely, in this case, representing (signifying, imagining, socially constructing etc.) powder
as power. And this in turn relies on that foundational ontological
axiom of straight-thinking modernism, namely the distinction
Concepts versus things
Elsewhere I have explained ways in which the notion of aché so
blatantly exemplifies some of the central preoccupations that
inform Lévi-Strauss’s theorization of savage thought, such as
the ‘antinomies’ he associated with ‘floating signifiers’ that can
signify anything – e.g. both power and powder – because, in themselves, they mean nothing.5 Here we may draw attention only to
the fact that, viewed from within the prism of the kinds anthropological preoccupations Lévi-Strauss’s argument on floating
5
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. F. Barker
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). See Martin Holbraad, " The power of
powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or
mana again)", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed. A. Henare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 189-225. See also
Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
20
21
T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
S AVA G E O B J E C T S
between things as they are in the world and the various and variable concepts that people may attach to them. Indeed, as long as
the analysis of aché remains within the terms of an axiomatic
distinction between things and concepts, it cannot but ask the
question in terms of representations, beliefs, social constructions and so on. Since we ‘know’ that powder is just that dusty
thing there on the diviner’s tray, the question cannot but be why
Cubans might ‘think’ that it is also a form of power.
The move to posthumanist analyses of things in anthropology has been motivated partly by a desire to avoid precisely this
way of raising questions, and in particular to overcome the blatant perversity of seeking to parse alternatives to our own metaphysic of concepts versus things in terms of just that metaphysic
(for Cuban diviners powder is power; we, on the other hand, ask
why they might ‘believe’ it to be so, since, from first metaphysical principles, it can’t). Hence the penchant in recent writings on
material culture (and note the telling ontological oxymoron) for
so-called ‘relational’ ontological premises which seek, in one way
or other, to erase or otherwise compromise the concept versus
thing divide.6 Still, rather than placating the conceptual imperialism of modernist metaphysics by binding things to an alter-
native (e.g. ‘relational’, ‘symmetrical’, ‘vital’, ‘vibrant’) ontological order, my interest here is in the possibility of freeing things
from any a priori ontological determination whatsoever, so as
to allow them to dictate, as it were, their own terms of analytical
engagement. As I propose to show, this most crucially involves
eliding the concept/thing divide, not as a matter of substantive
ontological revision, but rather as point only of analytical methodology. Given space constraints, I present such a prospect as a
series of three methodological moves.7
Step I: thing-as-heuristic
If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered,
somehow, also as non-things (e.g. a putatively ‘material’ powder
that is also a putatively ‘immaterial’ power, as in our example),8
then, anthropologically speaking, the notion of a ‘thing’ can at
most have a heuristic, rather than an analytical, role. The initial
7�����������������������������������������������������������������������������
For more detailed discussion see���������������������������������������������
Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, "Introduction", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically, ed. Wenare et al (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-31; Martin
Holbraad, "Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography
6
E.g. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Pren-
of things", Cambridge Archaeological Journal v19 n3 (2009 10 01): 431-441; Mar-
tice Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
tin Holbraad, ‘Can the Thing Speak?’, OAP Press, Working Paper Series #7 (2011),
Press, 2005); Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
available at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-
Dwelling and Skill (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Tim Ingold, " Materi-
content/uploads/2011/01/Holbraad-Can-the-Thing-Speak2.pdf
als against materiality", Archaeological Dialogues 14, no.1 (2007): 1-16; Bjørnar
8
For classic arguments to this effect with reference to the things anthropologists
Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Langham:
call gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
AltaMira Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Cf. Amiria Henare et al.,,
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010).
‘Introduction’, 16-23.
22
23
T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
S AVA G E O B J E C T S
analytical task, in other words, cannot be to ‘add’ to the theoretical purchase of the term ‘thing’ by proposing new ways to think
of it – e.g. as a site of human beings’ objectification,9 an index
of agency,10 an on-going event of assemblage,11 or what have you.
Rather it must be effectively to de-theorise it, by emptying it out
of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a pure ethnographic ‘form’ ready to be filled out contingently according only
to its own ethnographic exigencies. To return to our example: if
calling the powder babalawos use a ‘thing’ implies that it could
not, properly speaking, also be a form of metaphysical power,
then let us not call it a thing in any sense other than merely as
an ontologically and analytically vacuous heuristic identifier
– merely a tag for identifying it as an object of study, with no
metaphysical prejudice, and particularly with no prejudice as to
what it might be, including questions of what it being a ‘thing’
might even mean.
metaphysical contents, the second is geared towards allowing
them to be filled by (potentially) alternative ones in each ethnographic instance. We may brand this methodological injunction
by way of a further heuristic formula, namely ‘concepts = things’.
According to this methodological edict, instead of treating all
the things that people say of and do to or with things as modes
of ‘representing’ them (i.e. as manners of attaching various concepts to the things in question by way of ‘social construction’, as
per the standard anthropological way of thinking), we may treat
them as modes of defining what these things are. This renders
wide open precisely questions about what kinds of things ‘things’
might be: what materiality might be, objectification, agency – all
that is now up for grabs, as a matter of ethnographic contingency
and the analytical work it forces upon us.
So, to return again to the Cuban example, the idea here is
to treat all the things babalawos and their clients supposedly
‘believe’ about their aché-powders as elements of a conceptual
definition of what such a ‘thing’ might actually be: Cuban diviners
do not ‘believe’ that powder is a form of power, but rather define
it as such. To the extent that our own default assumption is that
powder is not to be defined as power (it’s just a dusty thing, we
assume), the challenge then must be to reconceptualise those
very notions and their many empirical and analytical corollaries
(powder, power, deity etc. but also thing, concept, divinity etc.) in
a way that would render the ethnographically-given definition
of powder as power reasonable, rather than an absurd ‘belief’.
I have sought at length elsewhere to specify the full gamut
of ways in which different kinds of data may enter into the efforts
of analytical conceptualization that problems of the powder-is-
Step II: concept = thing
If the first step towards letting things set their own terms of analytical engagement involves emptying them out of any a priori
9
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987); Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: an introduction’, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50.
10
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998).
11
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice
Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
24
25
T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
S AVA G E O B J E C T S
power necessitate for anthropologists.12 Crucially, a sound ethnographic understanding is necessary in order even to formulate such problems in the first place, let alone solve them. For
example, since what powder might be in Ifá divination depends
on the notion of power that is at stake in this ritual activity, part
of an attempt to articulate the question involves developing the
cosmological conundrum that lies at its core: if power, in this
ethnographic context, refers to babalawos’ ability to render
divinities present as ‘signs’ during divination, then are we not
in some pertinent sense dealing here with a version of the ageold theo-ontological conundrum, so familiar in the anthropology
of religion,13 of how entities that are imagined as transcendent
might under certain conditions – in this case by ritual means
that involve the use of powder as an indispensable component –
be rendered immanent? Conceptualising powder as power, then,
requires us to understand how Afro-Cuban divination effectively
solves something akin to the so-called ‘problem of transcendence’
in Judeo-Christian theology – although immediately one wants
to add that this may well be a misnomer, at least insofar as the
very notions of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ may themselves
have to be reconceptualised in this context.
What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreducible contribution that, heuristically understood, ‘things themselves’ can make to this work of conceptualization. Indeed, with
reference to the case of powder in Ifá, one might say that while
ethnographic information derived from babalawos serves to set
up the anthropological conundrum that aché in its dual aspect,
so to speak, poses, it is what I shall call the ‘pragmatographic’
information culled from its peculiar qualities as a ‘thing’ (viz. as
powder) that delivers the most crucial elements for its solution.
12
Martin Holbraad, "Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion",
Debate & Discussion at the GDAT 2008, Critique of Anthropology 30, 2 (2010):
179-185, 185-200 passim; Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
13
E.g. Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African
Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Webb Keane, Christian
Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
26
Step III: thing = concept
Consider what powder actually odes in the diviner’s hands. As we
saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, it provides the
backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, ‘come
out’. So powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, where that
power is understood as the capacity to make divinities ‘come out’
and ‘speak’. Now, note that, considered prosaically as a ‘thing’,
powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collection of unstructured particles – its pure multiplicity, one might say.
In marking the oddu on the board, the diviner’s fingers are able
to draw the configuration just to the extent that the ‘intensive’
capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean
bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the
oddu as it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive
mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is ‘registered’.
In this way powder renders the premise of the oddu’s revelation
explicit, as a matter of these signs’ inherent motility: by way of
figure/ground reversal, oddu figures are revealed as a temporary
displacement of their ground, the powder.
27
T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
S AVA G E O B J E C T S
But this suggests also a logical reversal that goes to the
heart of the problem that apparently ‘transcendent’ oddu might
be imagined to pose. If we take seriously babalawos’ contention
that the oddu just are the marks they make on aché-powder (the
basic ‘magic’ of divination), then the constitution of deities as
displacements of powder tells us something pretty important
about the ontological premises of Ifá cosmology: that these divinities are to be thought of not, say, as ‘entities’ that may or may
not exist in states of transcendence or immanence, but rather as
motions. And if the oddu just are motions, then the ontological
discontinuity between transcendence and immanence (and with
it the onto-theological problem they may be imagined to pose) is
resolved. In a logical universe where motion is primitive, what
looks like transcendence becomes distance and what looks like
immanence becomes proximity. Indeed: qua motions, the divinities have inherent within themselves the capacity immanently
to relate to humans, through the potential of directed movement
that aché-powder guarantees, as a solution to the genuine problem of the distance deities must traverse in order to be rendered
present in divination.
Now, what I wish to draw attention to here is the work powder does for this analysis, by virtue specifically of what heuristically (once again!) one would identify as its prosaic, ‘material’
characteristics. If ethnography carries the weight of the analytical problem, in this argument, it is the material quality of powder
that provides the most crucial elements for its solution. If deities
are conceptualised as motions to dissolve the problem of ‘transcendence’, after all, that is only because their material manifestations are just that, motions. And those motions, in turn, only
emerge as analytically significant because of the material con-
stitution of the powder upon which they are physically marked:
its pervious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured particles, amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of
water, in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviner’s fingers, and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres
in powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that
they can engender conceptual effects, setting the parameters for
the anthropological analysis that they ‘afford’ the argument. As
an irreducible element of the analysis of aché, it is powder that
brings the pivotal concepts of perviouness, multiplicity, motion,
direction, potential and so on into the fray of it own analysis,
providing its own answer to its own problem – its savage power,
if you like, analytically (conceptually, ontologically) to unsettle.
So what is at stake in this mode of analysis is the capacity that things have to engender conceptual transformations of
themselves, by virtue of the conceptual differences their material characteristics can make. Indeed, this irreducibly pragmatological element, as we may call it,14 of anthropological analysis is nothing other than the corollary inversion of our earlier
‘concepts = things’ formula, namely things = concepts. If the formula ‘concept = thing’ designated the possibility of treating what
people say and do around things as ways of defining what those
things are, its symmetrical rendition ‘thing = concept’ raises the
prospect of treating things as a way of defining what we as analysts are able to say and do around them. At issue, to coin a term,
28
29
14
Cf. Christopher Witmore, in press, ‘The realities of the past: archaeology, objectorientations, pragmatology’, in Modern Materials: Proceedings from the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference, ed. B.R. Fortenberry and
L. McAtackney (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009).
T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
are a thing’s conceptual affordances: how things’ material characteristics can give rise to particular forms for their conceptualization. One might even imagine this kind of transformation
movement as a form of abstraction, provided that notion is disentangled from habitually corollary distinctions between concrete things and abstract concepts.15 Indeed, this is just what the
‘thing = concept’ clause of our analytical method would suggest.
Where the analytical ontology of things versus concepts would
posit abstraction as the ability of a given concept to comprehend
a particular thing, external to itself, in its extension, the heuristic continuity of ‘thing = concept’ casts this as a movement internal to ‘the thing itself: the thing differentiates itself, no longer
as an instantiation ‘of’ a concept, but a self-transformation as
a concept. Savage thought thinking itself.
15
See also Martin Holbraad and Morten A. Pedersen, " Planet M: the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern", Anthropological Theory 9, 4 (2009): 371-94.
30