Concerning the boundaries of serious anthropology, or: Can witches fly?

Abstract

In a commentary on German anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s, the literary critic Peter Braun has remarked that Duerr’s essay “Can witches fly?” (together with Hubert Fichte’s “Heretical remarks for a new human sciences”) represented nothing less than a charter “for the revolutionary renewal of anthropology against the orthodox forces of the discipline” (Braun 2002: 223). As the literary critic Ian Robinson once observed (1975: 124), “‘In reality’ is the assertion that one set of rules should judge the rest, especially if they are the rules of physics.” Duerr’s compact and sometimes cryptic argument is essentially an exploration of how such judgments about reality are made with respect to claims of sorcerous flight, from the Renaissance scholar Della Porta to the ethnographer Carlos Castaneda. How is an anthropologist to get to grips with such experiences? It cannot be, suggests Duerr, by positing that alien forms of life are radically incomparable, nor yet by assuming that they can be neatly folded into our own frameworks. Instead, we ought to keep ourselves open to the onto-epistemic surprises occasioned by boundary crossings and borderline cases. For if—as Duerr suggests elsewhere (1985a: 131)—“shocks are the precondition for insight” then this is only so long as we allow ourselves the possibility of being affected.