Technology & Occultism. Also, what's up?

[A. Ashkuff]

Why hello, fellow denizens of Open Anthro Cooperative!

 

I wanted your opinion on the relationship between technology and occultism. I wrote a short article examining three case studies where cultures perceived technology as decidedly occult. You can access it here, http://ashkuff.com/akaBlog/?p=1650. I would love to hear your comments! Seriously, I cannot improve without good commentary from readers. Plus, it’s always nice to get insights from my fellow anthropologists, my peers and such.

 

On a personal note, I just graduated and find myself ensnared in the job hunt. I was lucky enough to get a job offer right after graduation, but had to turn it down because a loved one was getting surgery on the start date. Bleh.

 

So, how is school and/or work treating all of you? I’d seriously like to hear. It might take a while, but I always respond to all of my messages.

 

--- Ashkuff | http://ashkuff.com | How to venture out of “armchair” scholarship, and into action? One anthropologist tackles occultism, violence, and more! He gets spooked and roughed up a lot.

[John McCreery]

I've mentioned this before, privately—but let's go public. Keith's comment is spot on. I recall reading Ulrich Beck's Risk Society and thinking how much Beck's world of invisible risks mediated by experts, who claim access and technique that lay people lack, resembles the world of Daoist magic I studied for my dissertation. It is, of course, a world filled with sharks and fakers and, nonetheless, lots of people who believe that someone, somewhere is the real thing — the problem being how to find these needles in the rotting hay stack.

[Keith Hart]

I have long been interested in a broad interpretation of the word 'occult'. We all live busy everyday lives that we know all to well -- how to clean our teetch, make a cup of coffee, catch the bus to work etc. But we also understand that we are potential victims of forces that we don't know, that are hidden from us, and we would like to get to know them or at least influence them.

Durkheim and Freud each founded disciplines whose purpose was to make the occult knowable: for the first what we don't know is how we belong to each other in society, so we worship society and call it God. The second said we don't know the hidden forces that u7nconsciously shape our personal behaviour and founded psychoanalysis as a way of overcoming that.

My teacher, Meyer Fortes, wrote a great article on divination which he saw as a bridge between the problems of everyday life -- a sick child, a failed harvest etc -- their occult causes. The diviner identifies the ancestor who is causing the problem and what kind of sacrifice to make in order to get himn on your side.

When I was doing fieldwork in Northern Ghana during the 60s among the same people that he studied, Fortes wrote letters to me. In one he wrote PS Diviners are the pop stars of the Tallensi, don't you think? I couldn't figure out what he meant and I never got round to asking him. A long time later it came to me. He was writing in the 60s, the age of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Maybe pop music -- linked to dancing, sex and various altered states of consciousness -- was the bridge then between westen youth and the occult forces that shaped their lives.

For me, technology often appears to be driven by malign and mysterious forces that I don't control. I often speak of the bad fairies being in charge of my life. But the solution is to persevere and get better advice. None of this subverts the three examples you mentioned in your post. But my point is that the issue is something we are all deeply familiar with, forcing us to device our own ways of communicating with the occult.