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VOLUME 23, NUMBER 1 JUNE 1998 Obituary Prose Poem Killing Death (That Bastard's Been Here Again) Regarding the recent passing of Toni Flores and Marea Teski, the ever-gentle Miles Richardson said to me that it was enough to "make you want to stand and shake a fist." I agree. Death enrages and defeats. Sometimes it inspires retaliation. The present piece engages death in a poetic mode properly called romantic irony. Its absurdity is therefore licensed. The ethnographic setting is an Irish pub. It is very easy to find someone in a classic Irish pub who will talk about anything, if not someone who is an expert on everything. Smooth and influential talk--blarney--is common in such settings. Sometimes deceitful, it is seldom just bullshit. Blarney draws its mark in fact from a sacred stone. And the best blarney always contains a bittersweet truth. In this case, a recent passing creates great sadness and raises the ancient and perennial prospect of giving personified death a dose of its own project--of defeating death by killing it. The magic weapon is language. Talking is balm for the survivor's grief, and it protects others from more of the same, even as it chokes the life out of death itself. The text is marked for performance context. Articles Learning Womanhood in China Childbirth, a seemingly singular event in China, is nonetheless momentous. Bearing a child transforms a girl into a woman and a mother. Motherhood, in most traditional cultures, symbolizes both the major achievement and the full attainment of femininity. This is particularly true of contemporary China. The Powers of the Guru: Sakti, "Mind," and Miracles in Narratives of
Bengali Religious Experience This article discusses oral accounts given by Bengali disciples of gurus in which the disciples relate their personal experiences of the extranormal powers of their preceptors, as manifested, for example, in psychic healing or in rebirth in the disciple's family. I propose that these experiences, crucial to the guru-disciple relationship, may be understood in terms of the indigenous concepts of divine power (Sakti), "experiential knowing" or "miracle" (anubhuti), and a unique concept of the "mind" (man), and that these experiences are meaningful because they are powerfully transformative of the disciple's "self" as culturally defined. Arrow and Mirror: Interactive Consciousness, Ethnography, and the Tibetan State
Oracle's Trance Oracles and shamans are ambivalent figures, for both members of their own societies and outside observers confronted with their extraordinary status and behavior. Ethnographic narratives dating from the earliest periods of European contact onward suggest that interaction with Tibetan oracles has often evoked departures from "ordinary" consciousness which are no less remarkable in foreign observers than in the oracle himself and his Tibetan assistants and audience. Thus, processes of interaction, ethnographic observation, and professional communication require consideration in this study. Trance induction in the Tibetan State Oracle is a complex, multimedia process that resists unitary explanation by widely-used anthropological theories of trance, or even within the Oracle's own tradition, where the existence of multiple interpretations is considered normal. Moreover, with the Oracle's experiences traditionally conceived as being inaccessible at one level to observers, and at another level even to the Oracle himself, the results of any given induction remain problematic for cultural insiders as well as foreign ethnographers. For Tibetan participants, the "consciousness" of the Oracle's trance is constructed as an interactive process rather than an individual state; and ethnographers, too, become involved in this interactive process of constructing shifts of consciousness, in both their participant-observation in the field and their participation in processes of communication to professional audiences. The range and effects of these interactions are explored through a theoretical stance that treats culture as configurations of flowing and changing energies, and juxtaposes metaphors of the Oracle's mirror and a video recording, which latter was made at the Oracle's request and is used here to provide images for visualizing the interactions discussed in the text. Street Cuts: Splices from Project Notebooks and Other Indelible Impressions 1997 Fiction Contest Winner The Tortoise 1997 Poetry Contest Winner The Dancing Stones of Callanish Book Reviews Call to Home (Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the South, Carol
Stack) Discourse and Dreams (Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality among the
Xavante of Central Brazil, Laura R. Graham) Why Writing Matters (Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the
21st Century, Norman Denzin) An Amazonian Anthropology of the Senses (Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman
Anthropologist in Venezuela, Pei-Lin Yu) The Local and the Global (The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and
Gender in Rural Zambia, Kate Crehan) Representations of Anthropology and History in Oceania (In Oceania: Visions,
Artifacts, Histories, Nicholas Thomas) Return to Society for Humanistic Anthropology Page
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