indistinguishable from magic
Saturday, 5 August 2006 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtThe New South Africa can brandish all it likes its its development, its recovery, its progressive constitution, it used to be a newt but it Got Better, but underneath it's the same old dark continent, really. The township world inhabited by our cleaning lady is, to her eyes at least, a seething morass of jealousy, hatred, back-biting and threat, in which her enemies don't just envy her the twin fortune of job and house, they attack it with muti, evil spirits and the massed might of the African popular church. She propitiates both ill-wishers and supernatural harm with strange gestures: odd, unprompted gifts to us, the ceremonial communication of a particular and weirdly decontextualised problem, as though her employers are themselves a talisman against the magical ills which beset her. I don't know what power she imagines we have: one cannot rationalise her fears, any pragmatic interpretation is rejected out of hand. It's a curiously pervasive and impermeable belief system. Muti is not only desperately real, it offers an underlying structure and rationalisation to the many ills the flesh is heir to.
I am quite willing to sit for twenty minutes listening to a litany of supernatural woe in a generally empathetic and supportive manner, but it makes me realise how much I am, at heart, a pragmatic and sturdy rationalist. I can believe very readily in psychology, in the reality of something to the mind despite its lack of external validity, but it goes no further than that. I seem to have swung through several pendulum cycles over my life, going from oblivious atheism as a child, to born-again Christianity in adolescence, then paganism and Wicca, and back to atheism. It suggests that (a) early imprinting will tell, after all, and (b) there is a certain sort of intellectual utility in a Humanities degree. The Christianity didn't survive first-year comparative religion, at any rate.
It also makes me realise precisely where my love of fantasy is situated: in the unreal. Contrary to the apparent belief of most of my department, I have no difficulty at all in distinguishing between fact and fantasy: in my world view the fantastic is, absolutely, and necessarily by definition, fiction. I suspect that somewhere deep down I rather wish it wasn't, but there's no actual ambiguity on this point. I suppose that if you're going to spend significant chunks of your life examining the way in which culture expresses the magical, the last thing you'll end up believing in is the magical. Or vice versa.
I am quite willing to sit for twenty minutes listening to a litany of supernatural woe in a generally empathetic and supportive manner, but it makes me realise how much I am, at heart, a pragmatic and sturdy rationalist. I can believe very readily in psychology, in the reality of something to the mind despite its lack of external validity, but it goes no further than that. I seem to have swung through several pendulum cycles over my life, going from oblivious atheism as a child, to born-again Christianity in adolescence, then paganism and Wicca, and back to atheism. It suggests that (a) early imprinting will tell, after all, and (b) there is a certain sort of intellectual utility in a Humanities degree. The Christianity didn't survive first-year comparative religion, at any rate.
It also makes me realise precisely where my love of fantasy is situated: in the unreal. Contrary to the apparent belief of most of my department, I have no difficulty at all in distinguishing between fact and fantasy: in my world view the fantastic is, absolutely, and necessarily by definition, fiction. I suspect that somewhere deep down I rather wish it wasn't, but there's no actual ambiguity on this point. I suppose that if you're going to spend significant chunks of your life examining the way in which culture expresses the magical, the last thing you'll end up believing in is the magical. Or vice versa.
