Well, why didn't you say so? In the Catholic Church there's been serious debate about whether consecration actually occurrs if the priest says: "This is my body" instead of "For this is my body" and whether the priest could consecrate his dinner bread at the dinner table by simply saying the words and intending them, or whether he could consecrate by merely thinking the words with intent. The world is a wonderland of silliness.
Mike Geary Memphis----- Original Message ----- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "Anthro-L" <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, October 01, 2007 6:23 AM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?
On 10/1/07, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on lit-ideas:John wants to know whether pre-literate peoples believed in word-magic.No, that isn't the question. I know that preliterate and/or illiterate people use words in what have been described as magical ways. What I am inquiring about is the belief that only absolutely right words said in the absolutely right way are effective because they have a peculiar relationship to the absolute Truth. I once wrote a paper on the uses of language in a Taoist exorcism. As part of the research I discovered examples of preliterate folks who perform word magic, but the magical words are used in ordinary ways. As if, for example, we swore at our computers, "Boot, God damn you" and expected no better result than if we said, "Boot or be damned" or "Boot, please, won't you" or "Boot, and I'll buy you a nice new hard drive." I know of marginal examples, e.g., Malinowski's description of Trobriand garden magic, where the owners of the magic insisted that the spells had to be said just so. But I still don't find a clear statement that the words must be what they are because that reflects the true nature of things. Malinowski claims that, "No native in the Trobrians would be able to judge magical texts as well as myself. For no human memory is a match for a written comparative collection. Towards the end of my field-work, I found little difficulty in deciding whether a spell recited to me was genuine or corrupt; and, in the latter case, whether it was deliberate deception, self-deception, or deception on the part of my informant's predecessor, or just lack of memory." But Malinowski, of course, was a thoroughly modern man, whose thinking was influenced by German philology as well as notions concerning language current in his time--thus prone to believe that there is a right version, against which all others could be judged as muddled or mistaken, the old Tower of Babel thing again. The possibility that Trobriand magic might be muddled all the way down was something he simply didn't consider. Thus, my question. John -- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN Tel. +81-45-314-9324 http://www.wordworks.jp/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
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