I was clearly feeling sarcastic that day....

[tree_and_leaf]

Looking back through some notes I made, about theoretical debates in ethnography - actually, the volume it came from was quite helpful, given that I was thinking about how to describe another culture, and the difficulty of explaining it in its terms rather than mine (which is one of the things the thesis is about. However for one article* a section of my notes reads:

OH 80S POSTMODERNISM! Writing is a totalizing will to power – 'to represent means to have a kind of magical power over appearances, to be able to bring into presence what is absent, and that is why writing, the most powerful means of representation, was called grammarye, a magical act' (I am not sure why he thinks magic is necessarily a bad thing; dangerous, maybe, but…) – writing 'increased out capacity to create totalistic illusions with which to have power over things or over others as if they were things' The answer is to be self-consciously fragmented, a la Benjamin and Adorno.
He then dissolves into a sort of mysticism - he rejects both the idea of thought as ascent and thought as descent, and speaks of his wish to evoke 'that stillness at the centre where there is neither higher nor lower, forward nor back, past nor future, when space and time cancel each other out in that familiar fantasy we all know as the everyday, commonplace world, that breach in time, that ever present, never present simultaneity of reality and fantasy that is the return to the commonsense world, floating like the Lord Brahma, motionless in the surfaceless void, all potentiality suspended within us in perfect realization, a return that is not a climax, terminus, stable image or homeostatic equilibrium, but a reduction of tension as the moment of transcendence simultaneously approaches, draws near, and departs without ever having arrived.' Which is… kind of nice, but perhaps he ought to try saying his prayers or reading Eckhart or Dante, rather than looking for God in Ethnography Today?
Though to be fair it is poor theology to think that God can't be in Ethnography Today. Expecting the Beatific Vision is pushing, it, though; for one thing I can't imagine how you could peer-review it.


In not-actually-related news, I really hate older scholarship on women mystics/ religious writers. While I can't blame anyone who thought Elsbeth von Oye (and her maggots) was mentally ill, it becomes clearly both patronising and misleading when dealing with someone like Catherine of Sienna, who may have thought about pain in ways we'd now rightly be cautious about, but was also an obviously brilliant and intelligent thinker. But the prize for total misogynist stupidity, and refusing to see what's in front of you, goes to two 'scholars' working on Julian of Norwich, who speculate that her visions 'were hallucinations showing precarious mental balance' (RH Thouless, 1928) or suggest that she suffered from "acute neurosis induced perhaps by an over-enthusiastic life of penance and solitude." (C Pepler, 1958). Pepler was a Dominican, apparently; I thought better of the OP.

I mean, Julian. She's the sanest and least neurotic theologian I can think of. Oh well: at least things have moved on in some respects. I was getting worked up about this as an example of How To Silence Women, but in this case, there's relatively little need to worry, it being so glaringly obvious that Julian Is More Awesome Than Them. All the same, though, how could they?

... I think I need to do something, eg eating, to bring my blood sugar level up! And also go and take books back to the library (town).

* Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. "Post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document" in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 122-140.

Comments

[twistedchick]

Julian is far more awesome than her critics, who may well have been suffering from an excess of Augustine. Did the OP have anything similar to say about Catherine of Siena, who was a third-order OP, I think?

[twistedchick]

Julian is far more awesome than her critics, who may well have been suffering from an excess of Augustine. Didn't Catherine of Siena starve herself for some time, in a serious manner? That might tend one to think about pain in different ways, not counting the kind of everyday suffering that was commonplace for her then and is not so now (or not as much.) I seem to recall reading something of her ideas on pain years back and thinking they could only have come from an entirely different culture.

[tree_and_leaf]

The Dominican was only writing about English religious history, so Catherine doesn't get mentioned - but yes, she's rather more problematic. Though the accounts of her life say that she wasn't deliberately starving herself, but couldn't eat properly for many years. Which, if true, is less morally problematic than extreme asceticism, but even more suggestive of something mentally or physically wrong... Though Catherine was a clever woman, just not as good as Julian (who is actually quite Augustinian herself, though not in the usual way).