Michael Lambek

• Professor at University of Toronto

This is a reflection on the relationship between ethnography (as practice and as product) and ethical life. I suggest that there are values internal to the practice of ethnography as fieldwork, as writing, and as reading, irrespective of the historically situated objects and values of ethnography external to it. I summarize my understanding of ethi...

This article explores the unexpected arrival of new spirits in possession of young spirit mediums at an annual ceremony in Majunga, Madagascar. In it, the author explores the significance of the event for local politics, but also uses it to exemplify a form of historicity distinct from that of Euro-American historicism, with respect to both the str...

A response to Descola, Philippe. 2016. “Transformation transformed.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 33–44; and a contribution to the HAU (Volume 6.3) Lectures section on “Teleologies of structuralism,” edited by Alejandro I. Paz.

This paper explores the unexpected arrival of new spirits in possession of young spirit mediums at an annual ceremony in Majunga, Madagascar. I explore the significance of the event for local politics but also use it to exemplify a form of historicity different from that of Euroamerican historicism, with respect to both the structure of historical...

Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we...

Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we...

It is not obvious or straightforward to write about happiness or even to know who or what the subject of our description should be: an individual or a society; a moment, an event, or a life; a semantic category or an embodied experience? Is happiness reached through struggle or found in complacency? It could be considered as an emotion or a virtue,...

At one place in this complex but engaging and invigorating book Stephan Palmié remarks that until the publication of Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1985) the questions associated with scholarship on the Caribbean were seen to be on the periphery of anthropological theory. In Palmié’s hands, and very much in the spirit of Mintz, the Caribbean i...

What Jonathan Mair and Nicholas Evans (this collection) describe is the scene of hermeneutics. To put it another way, encounters between traditions can be ethical only when they are approached hermeneutically. The hermeneutic approach lies beyond a choice between rationalism and relativism (a border of its own), not to mention doctrinaire assurance...

I discuss a set of papers that examine the concept of personhood in Christianity and offer a number of clarifications and suggestions. I suggest examining the ostensible opposition between individual and dividual through the lens of structuralism but also propose that rather than distinct social types it may be a matter of incommensurable forms of...

Michael Lempert’s misleading critique of what I have called ordinary ethics provides a welcome invitation to clarify my perspective. I briefly address what I mean by immanence and point to my argument that the ethical is intrinsic to action and practice rather than discernable only as a discrete object or distinct product of linguistic interaction....

Comment on Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

What happens when we shift from the interpretation of cultures to the interpretation of lives and from interpreting action to understanding action as itself a form of interpretation? I describe interpretations by three Malagasy-speaking spirit mediums of the life of a single powerful ancestral figure who cohabits with each of them and how their res...

These stimulating essays provoke a number of brief reflections on what we can know about sacrifice, in both its ritual and non-ritual and its violent and nonviolent aspects, reflections concerning its seriousness, reverberations, interpellation, temporality, naming, instrumentality, and heterogeneity.

Questions of methodology hang on epistemology. I consider the conceptualization of the subject of the study of religion, arguing that the disciplines that carry out the study and also the objects or subjects of their study can be understood as traditions. I briefly review the conceptualization of religion within the anthropological tradition, notin...

Just as the concept of semiotic ideology can be applied to distinctive religious formations so it can be applied to the theories or models developed by anthropology. Here I distinguish three such ideologies that understand religious words as vehicles, respectively, of thought, creation, and action. This clarifies the role of language for religion a...

Whereas early liberal thinkers developed the concept of the ethically accountable continuous forensic modern European person in contrast to what they saw as the discontinuous and hence unaccountable mimetic person, I argue that forensic and mimetic are better understood both as ideologies of personhood and as dimensions of all persons rather than a...

In this paper I pursue arguments concerning the relation between economic and ethical value. I consider the relationship of activities to objects and (following Aristotle and Arendt) distinguish between the activities of action (doing) and production (making). Marx founded his theory of value on labor and the way it is congealed and occluded in com...

The literature in the anthropology of religion has queried not only how to define religion but also whether religion can be defined at all and whether, as an object, it is a product of the modern state.1 Insofar as there is some truth to the latter (Asad, 1993; 2003), religion is, in part, constituted by means of law, but simultaneously as somethin...

Religion and Morality are not Isomorphic or Commensurable The Durkheimian Stream: Obligation, Commitment, and Ritual Performance The Weberian Stream: Practice and Religious Values A Brief Ethnographic Invitation Conclusion Acknowledgments References

This paper attempts to conceptualize the local neither in exclusive relation to the global nor as a specifically spatial phenomenon but in terms of ethical life, as a conjunction of activities and their consequences. In this sense the local is singular rather than merely a specific site on a homogeneous grid and as much temporal as spatial. The arg...

Religion, Globalization, and Culture is a collection that appears to be written by and for sociologists of religion. I say 'appears' because there is little guidance in the cursory introduction and no list of contributors. The editors are concerned to redress the fact that studies of globalization have failed to address religion. Another theme is t...

When kinship is viewed through the lens of succession rather than reproduction, conflict between siblings becomes salient and the gift of kinship can be experienced as theft. Developing an approach to kinship as ethically constituted through acts, I draw on the biblical story of Jacob and Esau to frame an account of succession in Mayotte that trans...

What does it mean to know one's own mind, to make up one's mind, or to be of two minds? The paper explores some of the assumptions Westerners make about mind and confronts them with elements from the ethnography of spirit possession among Malagasy speakers. It challenges the assumption that a unified state of mind, exemplified by pure reason as opp...

Le choix d'une photographie de Jacques Faublée et les raisons de ce choix

What is the place of the ethical in human life? How do we render it visible? How might sustained attention to the ethical transform anthropological theory and enrich our understanding of thought, speech, and social action? This volume offers a significant attempt to address these questions. It is a common experience of most ethnographers that the p...

The relationships among texts, readers, and moral community are explored in order to understand the dissonance and interplay of personal and textual authority in local Islamic practice (Sunni, Shaf'i branch) among Malagasy-speaking villagers of Mayotte (Comoro Islands, East Africa). A political economy of knowledge approach is linked to an analysis...

When the identities of the spirits that possess particular individuals in communities of Malagasy speakers in Mayotte are taken into account, it becomes evident that spirits are frequently passed on from generation to generation and thus associated, though not exclusively, with particular families. The paper presents a number of case studies of spi...

This article describes an unusual system of ceremonial exchange found among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte (Comoro Archipelago) and demonstrates the manner in which the person as citizen, the experience of aging, and ultimately society itself were constituted through it. The forces leading to the demise of the system and the manner in w...

This article is about my relationship with Dr. Emmanuel Tehindrazanarivelo, Malagasy-Canadian friend, colleague, teacher, informant, and possibly the most cosmopolitan person I know. At one time he was to have been coauthor; as I will describe, things shifted so that his article is written in response to mine. I recount how my current fieldwork in...

This article offers suggestions for situating value in the liberal economic sense with respect to values understood in a broader, ethical sense. It is a conceptual exercise in bringing together ideas about value, which pertain largely to objects, with ethical ideas of virtue, which concern acts and character. I argue that economic value and ethical...

research project;economic practice;inhabitants;authorized practice;kinship

Women at the Crossroads:. Prostitute Community's Response to AIDS in Urban Senegal. Michelle Lewis Renaud. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1997. 172 pp.

Once people accept the historical emergence and spread of science as a unique discursive formation, it becomes nonsense to talk about the relationship between religion and science, or religion as a kind of science in societies that have not yet encountered or internalized this development. Religion and science cannot be judged or compared along a s...

Adam Ashforth has written a compelling book about life in an urban society in which witchcraft is rampant. Not quite the masterpiece that Madumo is, it complements that previous work by supplying a good deal of the social context and consequences and the academic references that were missing there. More scholarly than Madumo, this book too is writt...

This article addresses the general problem of beginning in human thought and action. It argues for complementing the emphasis on transition in the analysis of ritual with attention to beginning and for supplementing the relative passivity of liminality with the resoluteness of initiating action, while also attending to both the transitive and intra...

This depiction of social change in the Western Indian Ocean emphasizes consciousness, agency, and temporal experience as Malagasy speakers are poised between grasping the future and completing—but also regretting—the past. /// Cette description de changement social dans une île de l'océan Indien fait ressortir la conscientisation, la prise en charg...

Abstract The story of a young man from the Western Indian Ocean island of Mayotte who was prevented from a career in the French army by an illness sent by a spirit who possesses his mother inspires reflection on the nature of agency. I suggest that spirit possession and the illnesses it produces are intrinsically ironic. The prevalence of irony imp...

Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of. Religious Movement. Thomas J. Csordas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.320 pp.

POSSESSION HEALING IN ZANZIBAR Everyday Spirits and Medical Interventions: Ethnographic and Historical Notes on Therapeutic Conventions in Zanzibar Town. By TAPIO NISULA. Saarijärvi: Finnish Anthropological Society, 1999. Pp. 319. No price given, paperback (ISBN 952-9573-21-9). - - Volume 42 Issue 3 - MICHAEL LAMBEK

In these remarks Durkheim presages both Mauss's influential discussion of total facts (Mauss 1966) and Bloch's significant analysis of the way human supplicants produce the blessing they subsequently receive from Merina royalty in central Madagascar (Bloch 1989). Not unconnected are the ideas of two of the most influential thinkers on economy. That...

Madagascar is an island, and its scholarship has always run the risk of remaining insular. The logo of the Canadian Association of African Studies is an outline of the African continent; Madagascar is literally ‘‘off the map.’’ At North American conventions of Africanist scholars, panels on Madagascar generally are attended by few but the small (th...

Particular scenarios of anger in two African societies are compared in order to discern some of the complex ways in which emotion is related to cultural context and social practice. The disappointment of Kgalagadi elders (dikgaba) in Botswana and the irascibility and violence of royal Sakalava spirits in Madagascar entail moral inspection with resp...

standing and the unease with master narratives and the dualisms they The Comaroffs' RRII is a complex work, possibly jarring to historians because of its rhetorical structure, but strongly neomodern. We identify a tension throughout the work between the desire for comprehensive underinevitably set up. This ambivalence, together with their brilliant...

Proposant une mise en perspective des fondements epistemologiques de l'anthropologie religieuse, l'A. examine les questions suivantes : 1. l'apport de certains aspects de la pensee d'Aristote pour une approche de la religion ; 2. la signification de la moralite pour l'anthropologie religieuse et la theorie sociale ; 3. la dimension pratique des app...

Dans le cadre d'une reflexion sur les subjectivites postcoloniales, l'A. s'est propose de revoir les notions de subjectivite, de post-colonialisme, et de morale a travers le portrait d'une femme medium spirituelle a Mayotte. Apres avoir rappele et analyse le contexte historique et politique de Mayotte, l'A. montre que Nuriaty Tumbu, la modeste medi...

The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Bruce Kapferer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.400 pp.

Using a broadly Aristotelian framework I propose poetic form as a means for distinguishing historicities. I analyze Sakalava performances of possession by royal ancestors as the creative production of a kind of history, distinguish it from a dominant occidental model of history, and elaborate the chronotope on which it is based and the heteroglossi...

Large-scale comparisons are out of fashion in anthropology, but this book suggests a bold comparative approach to broad cultural differences between Africa and Melanesia. Its theme is personhood, which is understood in terms of what anthropologists call 'embodiment'. These concepts are applied to questions ranging from the meanings of spirit posses...

People of the Sea: Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar Rita Astuti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 188 pp.

Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession. MICHAEL LAMBEK. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. xxx + 468 pp., photographs, notes, glossary, references, index.

This paper summarizes some of the arguments from Lambek (1993) concerning the conjunction of Islam with other practices on the local scene, among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte, Comoro Archipelago. Islam, astrology and spirit possession are treated as forms of knowledge, examining how each is reproduced and circulated and how they are l...

It is an enormous privilege to be able to engage in public conversation with such thoughtful interlocutors whose own work I admire. I am greatly indebted to Willem Derde for establishing this forum as well as to each of my respondents for their careful reading and generous remarks. In some respects they represent Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte b...

Les Antankarana occupent la partie la plus septentrionale de l'ile de Madagascar. En reflechissant sur la formation de leur identite, les A. affirment qu'elle est moins constitue selon des categories conceptuelles qu'au moyen d'un engagement dans un certain recit historique associe a sa remise en acte periodique grâce a un cycle de ceremonies. En a...