Knowledge, Culture and Society. Peter Burke
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thinking, against what has been and, surprisingly, continues to be held by some people today, is neither part of a pre-logical nor of a primitive mentality (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl), nor of inferior culture’s superstitions. It is also not a first step, prior to scientific knowledge, as the fathers of anthropology –Tylor and Frazer– or a historian like Robert Mandrou, among others, claimed. It is a complete and coherent system. In its internal coherence, it postulates determinisms as well, and it demands order, but its causality principle varies, as shown in an exemplary way by Edward E. Evans-Pritchard in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande [1937], where he established, against the ideas of his time, the epistemological relativity of other ways of knowledge, by showing that their causality may answer to rationalities different from ours, and that they can also be logical.51
Like science, magical thinking displays a principle of internal rationalization, being therefore systematic, and like every cognitive apparatus, it pretends to classify experience and nature. It is, as Lévi-Strauss named it, a wild way of thinking, a science of the concrete. Henri Hubert and Marcell Mauss described magical determinism in the following way: it has rules, laws that must and can be found again, and its principal feature resides in the importance given to symbolic thinking.52 A symbolic way of thinking - and here we return to what we said at the beginning (Cassirer) – that is also characteristic of cognitive apparatus like religion, art, and science, some of whose topmost examples are mathematics and geometry.
Magical acts have precise functions in social life: to produce long distance healing, disease, and fortune; to modify meteorological conditions in order to restore the order of nature when it has been compromised by an external agent; within shamanism, all practices concerning health; to establish contact with the dead, so that, with their supernatural powers, they can participate and foster the existence of the living; hexes or death by voodoo… All of them are magical acts, with precise roles within a community, that pretend to work on the world (of behaviours, feelings, or on the physical world itself) by symbolic means (at distance, voluntarily or involuntarily, with prayers, incantations, wishes, curses…), by physical means (filters, amulets…) or by a combination of both. Therefore, we are also talking about a technology, just as it happens with western science: it has technological applications.53
Having said that, we, the ones in the world of literate practices, are westerners, even if we belong to a region of ethnical and cultural diversity par excellence, even if we live in times of decolonization and even if our phenotype and part of our daily practices indicate that we are mixed with other ethno-cultural groups. Because, who in the world can nowadays say that he or she is not a mestizo of some kind? It may sound redundant, or it may not, since from a differential focus of History and Cultural Studies, more attention must be paid to a possible Intellectual History of Other-Intellectuals. However, this must be done starting from a more general reflection on society and the culture production circuit, that is, from cognitive and symbolic practices of ignorant people (in the broadest sense of the word, and without any semantic derogatory charge), from the ways in which they are produced, and the ways in which they circulate and become appropriated, from cultural analysis and a broadening of the notion of text to all forms of speech, just like it’s understood by hermeneutics, semantics, and the wrongly named “new cultural history”; all of which don’t forget the much needed anchoring in society, as many historiographical analyses of a culturalist type do.
Naturally, writing a cultural history or, if you wish, an intellectual history of the illiterate, of the other-intellectuals, of those who left behind their knowledge in the foundations of orality and traditions,54 is much more difficult, because “their texts” are out of our reach, never materialized in written sources that withstand the passing of time. And if they reached us, it was through the voices of others, who filtered and interpreted (and perhaps betrayed: traduttore, traditore) their thinking or practices. I think, for instance, about the long tradition of ancestral knowledge produced by diverse forms of the wisdom of shamans, figures at the centre of pre-Colombian America’s communities (and even of today’s) and whose knowledge reached us, for previous centuries, through sources written by “white” literates and, not on few occasions, through the hands of judges and mediated by criminal processes, in which they were the accused part. I think also about midwives, herb-doctors and herbalists that we come to know in the same way or by the documentation of professionalization processes, of the normalization of medico-pharmaceutical practices and of illiterate practitioner’s persecutions. In these relationships, each one feels his or her own alterity,55 because literates also find themselves in an alterity relationship when it comes to knowledge and practices that they don’t understand. Literates are also a minority, even if that minority holds symbolic and, most of the time, economic and political power.
Or when we think about practical ancestral knowledge or mestizo artisanal knowledge, at risk of extinction or already extinct in some of our countries and regions due to the emergence and consolidation of modern universities; lost cultural treasures that we know through civil judgements, political movements or all kinds of sociabilities. Or about cultural intermediaries that drove their communities to action: characters like Túpac Amaru in Peru in 1780-1782 or neo-granadian artisans of the Comunero movement and the uprising lead by the Katari brothers in Alto Peru, both in 1781. And, if we think of Europe, we find a case like that of Menocchio de Ginzburg,56 the miller. This is just to name a few known examples. We can’t forget that the set of objects, practices, representations and knowledge that we denominate as popular, refers more to a particular way of appropriating what the symbolic universe of a certain culture makes available for a determined human group, than to a separate and particular set that we could denominate as “popular” or “subaltern”; a very fortunate term that Antonio Gramsci brought to our attention.57
As I mentioned before, the space of representations is a battlefield of classifications and this is evident in conflicts between neighbouring cultures or in cultural conflicts between different groups within the same society or community. In the scientific field, we could say, following Bourdieu (although many others have addressed the issue; let’s just think about Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols), that a scientific discourse sanctions a state of division of the social world and the view that legitimates those divided things, through two groups: the critic of this classification and the accomplice, who shares it, in that battlefield of classifications in two fields: the one of objectified knowledge (a fight for the legitimate principle of division of the scientific field) and the one of intellectuals (a fight for the legitimate principle of division of the social field58).
I remember the debate brought up by Chartier, in The World as Representation, in which, supported by traditions like sociology –gravitating around Bourdieu and the Actes de la recherche, about De Certeau, Elias,59 Ricœur and the hermeneutics- and also by other legacies of cultural history originated in Germany, Italy and other confines, he distanced himself from both intellectual history or history of ideas, and the history of mentalities, deeply rooted in France – in Latin America too – for several decades, with the interest of approaching reading practices and the Bibliothèque Bleue, a collection of books, printed in Troyes from 1602, that circulated among illiterate sectors in France.
It is through collective representations that people incorporate a particular view of the world and the structures of the social world they inhabit, as it was already pointed out, in a negative way, by Karl Marx in the German Ideology and in a different fashion by the other two philosophers of suspicion (Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud) or by a neo-Kantian as Cassirer, lengthily exposed by Pierre Bourdieu, by Georg Gadamer in his works and, concretely, by Paul Ricœur in his reflections