ABSTRACT
Over two hundred years ago David Hume declared that there is no necessity in Nature: ‘Necessity is something that exists in the mind, not in objects.’ In other words, he insisted that knowledge of causality is of the intuitional kind, guts knowledge; causality is no more than a ‘construction upon past experience’; it is due to ‘force of habit’, a part of human nature whose study, he averred, is too much neglected. As anthropologists our work has been precisely to study this habit which constructs for each society its special universe of efficacious principles. This very habit peoples each world with humans, alive and dead, animal bodies and animal spirits, half-humans, half-animals, and divinities mixed with each. From the sheer variety of these constructed worlds, the anthropologist is led to agree, but only guardedly, with Hume. Other people’s causal theories are put into two sets: those which accord with our own and need no special explanation, and those which are magical and based on subjective associations as Frazer believed, or on affective rather than cognitive faculties, as Lévy-Bruhl (see Cazeneuve, 1972: 44, 68, 70) when he tried to distinguish the mystical from the scientific mind. But Hume claimed that all causal theories whatever and without exception arise from what he called the sensitive rather than the cognitive part of our nature. Whenever we reserve our own causal theories from sceptical philosophy, our gut response proves him utterly right. But it is almost impossible not to make this reservation. One of the objects of this paper is to propose a more formal mode of discussion in which we can hope to compare causal systems, including our own. Without that shift our only recourse as anthropologists is to translate from other cultures into our own. The better the translation, the more successfully has our provincial logic been imposed on the native thought. So the consequence of good translation is to prevent any confrontation between alien thought systems. We are left as we were at the outset, with our own familiar world divided by its established categories and activated by the principles we know. This world remains our stable point of reference for judging all other worlds as peculiar and other knowledge as faulty. Translation flourishes where experience overlaps. But where there is no overlap, the attempt to translate fails. The challenge of a new meaning by which to test our own ideas is turned into a challenge to find a new expression for our old meanings. The only confrontation takes place when the lack of overlap between our culture and others
suggests a few academic puzzles about the peculiarities of native thought. This is the failing I wish to remedy in this essay. Puzzles about native thought are puzzles about thought in general and so puzzles about our own thought. We anthropologists tend to discuss problems of meaning in a too segregated framework. We have to see that the categories and actual principles which we find in our own world present the same problems of rational justification that baffle us in the exotic worlds of foreigners. Just where there is no cultural overlap the effort to interpret should be driven to ascend from the particular puzzling statement to higher and higher levels of generalisation until finally the conflict of opinion is uncovered at its source. Two different sets of hypotheses about the nature of reality and how it is divided up are exposed, each carrying the ring of self-evident truth so clearly that its fundamental assumptions are implicit and considered to need no justification.
