Talking to spirits and other anthropotechnical things

John Tresch: I’ve got a lot from your ethnographic work—I’m always recommending Of Two Minds!—but was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a review you wrote, probably when you were doing your PhD, of a collection about Renaissance history of science and occultism. You connected Frances Yates’ studies of early modern hermeticism to the “rationality debate” in philosophy and social sciences. Yates is a legend at the Warburg Institute where I work. It was a kick to see you thinking with her about historical and contemporary connections between magic, religion, and science. 

The editors invited us to talk about another figure who crosses these territories, Bruno Latour, and about the anthropology of religion and science studies, under the heading, “sensing the social.” Your book, How God Becomes Real, presents insightful approaches to the sensory experiences people have in different cultures, in coming to know and work with beings which are other than human, not necessarily observable by anyone but them. The book develops really useful concepts and methodologies, among them the “faith frame,” religion as “paracosm,” and “spiritual kindling.” It also does a great job of bringing in a lot of the anthropological canon as well as theorists of religion, of perception, cognitive science, philosophy. 

Can your approach to religion and experience be understood as a way of “sensing the social”?

Tanya Luhrmann: My deep question has always been about how things, and particularly invisible things, come to feel real to people. I am arguing against two common explanations. One of them is the suspicion that vivid experiences really have their source in madness. I just don’t think that’s true. I think there’s something much more basic in the human experience of mind that encourages people to have the sense that there are other social beings around them. The other common explanation I’m arguing against is the insistence that the answer lies in irrational belief—that the important challenge for an anthropologist is to understand why people believe something that isn’t true.

My first project was inspired by Evans-Pritchard’s book, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. When I was a graduate student, the rationality debate was in full swing. Anthropologists and philosophers were trying to make sense of how apparently reasonable people could believe in apparently unreasonable beliefs. For many of them, Evans-Pritchard’s book was the central jumping off point. He had spent time in his fieldwork with people who seemed to think that some people are able to be witches, who can use their thoughts to affect other people and other bodies directly. And he said: This is a perfectly reasonable way to think. Most of the answers that were given in the rationality debate were that people held these beliefs because they hadn’t been exposed to science. There were more or less sophisticated versions of that approach. But the idea of science as the counterpoint and corrective to beliefs in witchcraft and spirits was central.

Mary Douglas also made a pretty powerful argument: When people are praying, say, for rain, it’s not about the rain. It’s not about the belief. The prayer is about changing something in their experience. For my graduate work, which I published in my first book, I set out to replicate Evans-Pritchard’s famous work among the Azande, but now among a modern, science-educated community of witches and magical practitioners in London. I was expecting them to talk about why they held these apparently unreasonable beliefs. What I saw instead was that actually they experienced something. It wasn’t a set of inferences they had drawn from a logical understanding of the universe. They felt magical power coursing through their veins. They felt the presence of gods and spirits. Sometimes they heard them speak. Certainly they experienced themselves as interacting with them. People were very clear that if someone wanted to understand what they meant by their talk of magic and witchcraft they’d have to practice magic themselves. Some people were going to be better at it than others, but everybody would learn something if they practiced.

Tresch: I hear you pointing to two different alternatives to the idea that religion or even cosmology is all about thought and concepts. One is focusing on experience, which William James and many others made central. The other is focusing on practice: To have the experience requires practice—work, training, and repetition. The things that people do are much more important for you than the things that they believe or say. 

Luhrmann: My fieldwork was not about belief. It was about experience. People really cared about these moments when they seemed to hear, feel, or see something that didn’t make sense in their everyday world. I saw this with Evangelical Christians when I began hanging out with them as well. I started really following that rabbit: What’s the practice? What are they actually experiencing? 

What people were doing in both the magical world and the Christian world looks a lot like what shamans do. It looks a lot like what some Kabbalists do and what people do in Sufi Islam. It also looks like what Niloofar Haeri describes in Tehrani living rooms: People are using their inner imagery to represent an invisible being, then they are experiencing themselves in conversation with that invisible being, and the invisible being starts to feel like it’s there. That is not something you believe. It’s something that you sense. You feel that there’s a presence sitting in that chair in the corner. You feel that these conversations are somehow not entirely inside of you. People start to feel as if these are more than mental experiences, more than interior. They have a kind of authority.

Tresch: In talking about the hard, intentional work, or “kindling,” that allows those experiences to happen, you describe different strategies in many traditions—some as simple as prayer or meditation or being in a group. You talk to people who picture things in their minds—gods, spirits, divinities, and cite Henry Corbin’s concept of the “imaginal”: a repeated encounter with something active and autonomous that is not “mere” imagination. You also observe variations in the strength or intensity of this encounter. The first experience can extremely strong and afterward less so, but enough to keep them coming back. 

I was struck that you talk about what’s going on with these invisible, nonhuman beings as a relationship: They’re part of an extended social field. If we think about relationships, there’s also a question of what holds two or more people or entities together. That can be words and feelings, expectations and duties, and maybe institutions and social structure. I’m wondering now about images as concrete objects, as media. I’ve been working on cosmological images and how they express and contribute to people’s sense of what the universe contains and how it works. We can think of imagery—objects of contemplation, Tibetan deities, Sufi gardens, stations of the cross— as internal and imaginal but also as ways of sensing the social. Forms, aesthetics, and visual styles, which people first encounter in the external world, are kindled and activated internally. 

So more generally, what are your thoughts about the materiality of kindling? You describe attentional practices and states of mind and anthropotechnics, which might have a physical, gestural, embodied dimension, but they’re primarily personal, individual, and internal. What about the external apparatus which orients and gives form to these possible relationships? In what ways might specific iconographies, visual styles, architectures, images, statues, and other “equipment” of religious practice be relevant or even essential to kindling?

Luhrmann: I think something really basic about human experience is that humans distinguish between “mentalish” things and things of the body world. That’s the experience of consciousness. No matter the cultural context, humans have an experience of being aware. And I think at its deepest level, the challenge of faith is being able, in effect, to bring something that is represented by your social community and make it feel more interiorly and viscerally present.

This goes along with the sense that some aspects of your own interior experience come to feel as if they’re not entirely interior. There’s a way in which this mind, body, world boundary is sort of absolute because really there’s something pretty basic about that, but when you look at culture and human practice—where and how people draw that boundary—there’s much more flexibility than we imagine. So I think that social worlds where there is a lot of material support—where there are statues and stories and churches and shuls and places where people go where they see all of that—can help to reinforce a sense that this experience that I have is really there.

But this sense is digested by individuals in different ways. The classicist Sarah Iles Johnston says that an important aspect of the Greek world was that people saw many statues of Apollo and they heard many stories of Apollo. In the midst of this richly social representation of all these different things that Apollo does, individuals each made their own experience of Apollo. And there’s a kind of paradox: the more detail there is in the material world, the more personal and more powerful your personal interpretation is.

Tresch: That’s great. Johnston seems to be addressing that famous question of Paul Veyne (Did the Greeks believe their myths?) but rephrasing it: How did the Greeks believe their myths? Or better yet, but what did they do with the beings in their myths, how did they interact with them? Some of this might be observed but it has aspects which are interior—going on inside their minds with all kinds of effects. And one of these effects, as you say, is this sense of autonomous existence. The decisive moment is when the being that you’re contemplating does something you didn’t plan and that you’re not in control of. There’s a spontaneity to it. You describe those moments beautifully in How God Becomes Real.

I’m dwelling on this point because it’s connected to an important notion developed by Latour: the “factish”—a little pun on “fetish.” The approach of a traditional sociology, or post-enlightenment philosophy of religion, which is one of your targets as well, is the critique of religion as fetishism. Maybe it’s not madness that makes people believe in gods, but enthusiasm or self-deception: They made these objects, these idols, but then they forget that they made them, and they start to worship them thinking that they’re alive. The term fetish derives from Portuguese and means something that is made or fabricated. So Latour’s “factish” involves acknowledging that these objects, idols, or images are made—that humans are involved in producing the original object or icon. But when these objects and icons are properly administered—approached with the right state of mind and the right gestures—they come to have a kind of power, force, agency: the small surprise of action. The fetish becomes factual.  

Part of why Latour’s interested in this—in the ways religious beings speak back through our preparations, through our equipment, through our networks of activity, and begin to give a sense that they really exist outside of all that—is that this relation between human preparations and non-human agency can be compared directly to what goes on in the sciences. The delicate production of the autonomy of religious beings is comparable to the careful production of the autonomy of scientific objects. In both there’s a huge depth of planning, thinking, describing,  imaging, rules, methods, risks. Before an observation can become something solid and resistant and true, the ground has to be laid with instruments, terms, standards, optical conditions, and a whole pre-existing set of formats that includes conventions and institutions. But when an entity has been addressed with the right kind of rigor—a kind of ritual purity—it can speak with its own voice. It becomes robust; it embodies a local transcendence in a way that can be compared directly to the immanent transcendence of the fetish, the statue, the icon, the “imaginal” being who answers back. Theory and belief are involved, of course, just like there are concepts and narratives and attributions in religious experience, but what’s decisive are the human-made, material set-ups, the “dispositifs,” and the very careful repetitions and observances that go with them. All this is needed for nature to speak for itself.

Luhrmann: Latour is so interesting as somebody who in some ways stands for a critique of the objectivity of science, yet he articulated at the end of his life that critique was not his intention at all. He didn’t mean to say, for instance, that climate science was wrong. He didn’t mean to feed into the skepticism that was being ginned up in America and Europe. And even more so during that period, he also began to be aware of his own Catholicism. So the early Latour was a happy skeptic. He asked: What is this fact? How is it made? There’s so much human stuff! And then, at the end of his career, he was committed to the real reality of God and to there being a material world that scientists are trying to understand. 

I think there’s a Kantian dimension to his work in that you never really see the thing itself. You never really see the objective world. You never really see God. There’s all this human-made stuff of the categories and interpretations and discussions. And they can be wrong.

Tresch: But that doesn’t mean that there’s not something that they’re grasping. The well-made fact is real: It shapes what humans do and experience. It becomes an entity with which one has an ongoing and even dependable relationship—like the invisible others of religious experience though maybe with a different mode of relation or a different mode of being. They’re both woven into the fabric of the world.

Luhrmann: Yet they can be wrong. That’s the other thing that Latour pays attention to: Science can get it wrong. I myself have kind of a Whig model of science, a sense that science progresses. I think it comes to a better approximation of how the world works in a kind of—what did Geertz call it?—a fumbling forward. Just as Latour thinks it’s certain that the fact emerges human-made from the world, but there are some facts which are a mistake, he also has a pretty deep commitment to the sense that some supernatural understandings are wrong. That’s his challenge. And that’s also quite intriguing.

Tresch: He’s open to the idea that quite a lot of possible natural and supernatural beings can exist. In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, or “AIME,” he’s got a great line about how the problem with the term “supernatural” is that it assumes that there’s such a thing as the “natural,” some domain of reality which would be outside of human action and interactions. “Nature” denies all of the mixing and involvement and complicated weaving with the non-human that we’re always doing—with a particular intensity in what we call science and what we call religion. So just as there’s no nature, there’s no supernatural. There are just beings that one relates to, though in different ways and with different modes. (It’s interesting that Latour’s source for the notion of “modes of existence,” Etienne Souriau, is also an influence for Corbin’s theory of the “imaginal.”) 

And yes, you can get it wrong in both cases. But the point is the same. There’s all this apparatus, these networks, and ways of going forward and starting again—renewing and maintaining the relationship one has with these beings. The more elaborate they are, the more people are involved in testing them. The more corroboration there is with other entities, other humans, other samplings, the more robust and reliable these beings are. You keep kindling, stoking, and adding more fuel to keep them alive.

For Latour, the great error of science and religion is fundamentalism: when humans take a particular incarnation, statement, or realization of what the world is as true once and for all. But nothing exists in a permanent and enduring way; being always differs from itself. So getting to know and renewing those relationships is key to holding them in a way that can be said to be true, since they’re never true once and for all. Fundamentalism, whether it’s scientific fundamentalism or religious fundamentalism, makes the mistake of saying the world as given and self-evident according to a certain state of things is how it always is—that the original word and the original experience are the last on the subject.

Luhrmann: Yes. And that makes the practice of renewal curative: There’s always hope for remaking and changing our relationships so that they serve us better. But it can also go in the other direction: Our relationships can become worse. That’s also a possibility that he leaves open—and a possibility that some people see in the current state of the world. But the remaking makes possible a kind of renewal and cure for the despair of getting it wrong. 

But what I think Latour leaves out is what I would call human cognition, right? He’s focused on the space between the mind and the world. But there are also ways in which the mind itself is deeply social: It comes into awareness of itself peopled with beings. That is also part of the story.

Tresch: In the 1980s he says thinking can be understood without referring to an concept of mind or interiority but entirely by watching actions, inscriptions, alliances: What are they doing at the blackboard? What words are they speaking?

But in AIME—a book that’s been overlooked, since he jumped from that to Facing Gaia and Critical Zones—Latour describes several different modes of existence, different ways our society has for working with entities. One is basically science but in a minimal, non-metaphysical form. He calls this Reference. There’s another he calls Religion, which is concerned with the acts and words of renewing divine presence. 

Another, weirder mode in AIME is what he calls Metamorphosis. This isn’t the cognitive study of religion, but it is an interesting turn toward interiority. Metamorphosis deals with the impersonal forces, complexes, and characters that inhabit and transform our minds. He calls these psychogenic: They produce a sense of a mind, a self. He’s drawing on the ethnopsychiatry of Tobie Nathan and Isabelle Stengers—a clinical practice for patients who are overtaken or possessed by beings that don’t have a space in Western scientific ontology. The way Nathan says to deal with these djinns, these witches, these divine voices is to take them seriously as if they exist. Latour calls these “the beings of Metamorphosis”: angels, demons, and deities, as well as the voices and presences and malign or benevolent wishes of others that populate everyone’s minds. His approach here is similar to the ways cognitive analysis and phenomenology deal with religious experience, but with an opening to non-scientific ontologies.

Luhrmann: I also think there’s something more blunt, which is that to be human is to be aware that you have some kind of interiority. I don’t care which culture or tradition it is; sometimes it’s more or less elaborated, but all people have that sense of what cognitive scientist Anil Seth calls what it is to be you. This is just the enduring challenge of human life, the puzzle of figuring out how to make sense of your awareness: what it feels like to be alive. 

Tresch: More than the hard problem of consciousness—the hard problem of youness.

Luhrmann: We’re like bewildered children in the dark trying to figure out what it means that we are aware. Who am I? Am I safe? Am I good? Am I alone in here? And different social worlds give you a shape to make sense of that. Religion is one of those shapes. Ethics is one of those shapes. But those are things that you learn over the course of a lifetime. There’s something so basic and existential about that question: What am I and who am I? Cultural forms encourage the human to answer that question in different ways.

Can you talk a little bit about that in your work on Poe? You wrote this amazing biography of Edgar Allan Poe whose life people understand as just madness and confusion. But you tell a different story, starting with this poor confused kid who loses his mother and gets quasi adopted, and he ends up making things that stand outside of himself and that have a big impact on other people. How do you see him as sensing the social?

Tresch: I hadn’t thought about that! Maybe it comes back to what you say about how gods and spirits become real. Poe grows up in a hard-headed, factual setting, a brutal commercial household; he’s taken in at the age of two by a trader, a slave-owner in Richmond. He gets disowned, goes North and joins the army and eventually gets trained as an engineer at West Point. But he wants to be a poet, and all along he’s got this conviction of his own obscure depths and of the power of imagination. He’s drawing on the romantics, Coleridge and Naturphilosophie, just like Emerson and William James would: authors who say that the world is shaped by our mind and thought, and that the external world is also the product of an original thought, of the Soul of the World. Art and science connect the interior and exterior worlds. Both are constantly efflorescing, producing new possibilities. If these get echoed, stabilized, and reinforced, they become solid. For Poe, this means if his creations get read, if they’re transmitted through enough printed pages and reach enough readers, they take on a reality.

Luhrmann: You show him struggling to find an idiom that worked. Can you tell that story? 

Tresch: Well, when he sets out in the 1830s, there’s no recognized tradition of American literature, and there’s no international copyright, so you can buy pirated books by Dickens or Scott much more cheaply than a new book by some unknown American writer. He’s trying to live just by writing alone. He’s literally starving. So his writing is like a relentless barrage of experiments, or probes into social reality, trying see what will hook people. How can he make a mark? How can he make the figments of his thought a living presence in readers’ minds?  

Luhrmann: And that changes him. As he enters into this space where people are willing to pay for his work, the work seems to change.

Tresch: Well, when he finds a formula that works he sticks with it. He invents the detective story and that strikes a chord. So do his horror stories. But he really gets recognized with one poem: “The Raven.” He then writes “The Philosophy of Composition,” a theory about what grabs people and keeps them moving across the page. I think there’s a connection here to the kindling practices you talk about. At what point does the choice of words, the rhyme and rhythm, catch fire, become a driving force that you can’t put down? He theorizes this in a methodical, scientific way: how long a poem should be, with what sounds, what imagery, a continuous variation, building to a peak of interest. 

He’s drawing on classical rhetoric but also an exciting new science in the 1840s: mesmerism. It’s linked to electromagnetism, phrenology, new medical theories—and becomes the spiritualism that provides so much material for The Varieties of Religious Experience. Mesmerists are extremely skillful performer-scientists. They capture the attention of the hypnotized patient at the same time as the audience. They lead everyone beyond where they started into a space where spirits talk back.

Luhrmann: And the spirits become real. They claim their place in the room. In the way he conjures them, and the way that mediums conjure them, they create an expanded society—a broader than human world.

Tresch: It’s like you were saying: that sense that you’re sitting in a chair and this other entity, who’s just spoken or just made itself felt, is really there. That uncanny experience is systematically produced in mesmeric performances, and it’s part of what Poe is doing. Fear is often stronger and easier to transmit than other emotions, but my favorite story of Poe’s, “The Domain of Arnheim,” isn’t a horror story. It’s a journey into an imagined landscape—a paracosm, you might say—that gets stranger and stranger. It’s about the imagination’s power to bring invisible spaces to life and to transform both the social and the natural through art.

Luhrmann: What I love about that is that it’s real but not real. This epistemic difference can feel more real than the everyday—but it doesn’t last. You keep going back; you want to feel the experience again. There’s something about that that’s really important in understanding the way these invisible beings operate in the world. They’re real but they’re not really real.

Tresch: They have a different mode of existence.  

Luhrmann: Durkheim talked about re-energizing—how you have to re-experience that moment of collective effervescence to make it remain for humans. This realm of the non-material can be so important, but it needs to be made and remade, in that Latourian sense.

Tresch: Latour spent a lot of time criticizing Durkheim, which mostly had to do with Bourdieu. But I think he’s describing something very similar to Durkheim when he talks about the mode of existence of religious speech, and, in general, how elusive things get maintained through specific apparatus, habits, and repetition.  

Luhrmann: Like he transferred Durkheim’s attention to practice and ritual from religion to science—with repetition and renewal at the heart of it. 

Tresch: Yes. In The Elementary Forms, Durkheim describes seasonal festivals: the objects that embody collective effervescence, the churingas and their rites, the actions that bring the group into a kind of ecstatic, heightened state (enough to last the 364 days until it comes around again). Of course, Durkheim makes the classic sociological move to say that the entity they think they’re encountering—God, the transcendent other, the ancestors—isn’t what’s really being brought into presence. What’s being brought into presence is a different invisible other: the totality of the society. That’s what gets activated in the festival and gets re-activated when you see the symbol or totemic animal or you remember the ritual phrase. The invisible other comes back; it’s recharged. All our sacred concepts work like that, Durkheim says—even in science.

But Latour, with his anti-foundationalism, refuses this explanation, this reduction. Durkheim sees society as the all-important, real, but invisible being that has to be renewed and recreated in these pivotal moments. But what the ritual claims to be doing—re-activating a higher, supernatural reality of gods, ancestors, the Dreaming—can’t be real; it can’t be part of the lexicon of social science. For Latour, too, sensing the more-than-human is also a way of sensing the social—but not only. As you say, those other presences are real in their specific way. They’re not supernatural or natural, because there’s no nature. They’re just different modes of accessing beings. 

Luhrmann: So Durkheim left his faith behind him, and Latour did not. 

Tresch: That’s a nice way to put it. 

Luhrmann: I think we can leave it here.

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