Some "muse"ings on past and recent encounters with lutins, naiads and non-anthropomorphic forces: Reconsidering vocabulary and questions concerning "religion" and "belief" in face of ethno-archaeological experiences in Madagascar.

Summary

This contribution involves a re-examination of assertions we have made in the past concerning "religion", "belief" and "ideology: jettisoning some, reasserting others, and offering "refinements" where appropriate. Often limited cultural exposure to a circumscript terrain of contemporary religions in service of the state contributes significantly to the initial framing of our questions (and attendant expectation of answers). One of our lives, embedded in context in rural and urban Madagascar, and our shared professional experiences in the field as ethno-archaeologists, have offered us some "alternative" insights because of a number of "grounded" and material encounters: with "imps", "mermaids", and "things; with others who have had such encounters; and with individuals capable of cajoling a range of quasi-anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic forces. On this edge between "religion" and "magic", we focus attention on the audacious stance of specialists in a "lifeworld" (à la Jackson) where humans are sometimes ephemeral features among amoral autochthonous and immanent forces. We continue to argue that the inscrutability of some concrete material (syncretic) tropes of word, object, and deed in such lifeworlds might prove more challenging than the assumed insubstantiality of (orthodox) beliefs that may be deliberate artifacts of the calculated abstractions of ideologues (and later, social theoreticians).

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Untangling the Intangible: Reconstructing Ideologies, Beliefs, and Religion in the Past

Keywords

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