This article explores belief and disbelief in Jeanne Favret-Saada’s writings on witchcraft and connects them to the ontological turn in anthropology. The term ‘ontology’ carries a long philosophical trajectory, and its appropriation in anthropology
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Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Minimal Ontology
Belief and Disbelief of Mystical Forces, Perilous Conditions, and the Opacity of Being
Theodoros Kyriakides
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 68–82 (15 total)
Examining Suspension of Disbelief, Perceived Realism, and Involvement in the Enjoyment of Documentary-Style Fictional Films
Qihao Ji and Arthur A. Raney
disbelief for the moment” (1817: 2). For the past two centuries that phrase—“willing suspension of disbelief”—has been repeatedly used by scholars and laity alike to describe how readers, listeners, viewers, and players seemingly disregard reality to enter
Confessional Anthropology
Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
Drawing on my experience of a Muslim version of exorcism in urban Macedonia, this article continues a methodological discussion of the implications of being an atheist anthropologist when researching religion, a situation known as 'methodological atheism'. Methodological atheism is often linked to the problem of suspending one's intellectual disregard of people's religions as delusions. This article will argue instead that there are barriers to participation in religious rituals that are not covered by questions of disbelief. The notion of 'dispositional atheism' is discussed against the backdrop of the anxieties, uncertainties, and inhibitions experienced by an atheist anthropologist caught up in a moment of religious intensity.
In Social Analysis
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 114–134 (21 total)
Godless People and Dead Bodies
Materiality and the Morality of Atheist Materialism
Jacob Copeman and Johannes Quack
Atheists are not the only people who donate their bodies, yet the practice is strikingly prevalent in a variety of atheist circles. We concentrate here on the Indian case, exploring body donation as a key instance of the material culture of atheism. Recent efforts to reinvigorate study of the material culture of religion are to be welcomed, but they should be extended to non-religion in order to address the irony that sees scholars representing materialism as an abstract doctrine and, hence, as immaterial. Body donation holds value for Indian atheists as a bridge between 'positive' and 'negative' modes of atheist thought and action. It also provides a ready-made solution for atheist activists keen to circumvent the cadaver-centered death rituals they find so redundant.
Introduction
Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism
Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
In the introduction to this special issue, we set the agenda for researching the aspirations and practices of godless people who seek to thin out religion in their daily lives. We reflect on why processes of disengagement from religion have not been adequately researched in anthropology. Locating this issue's articles in the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, we argue for the importance of a comparative investigation to analyze people's reluctance to pursue religion.
‘I Did Not Wash My Hand for Days’
The Stuplime Return of Revolutionary Speech in the Republic of Guinea
Mike McGovern
-conscious revolutionary stylings, until they weren't. How should we understand the majority of the Guinean populace's willing suspension of disbelief for some six months, and how do we understand their subsequent rejection of him as a verbose buffoon, a fate that never
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 78–95 (18 total)
The Generosity Paradox
Paul Walker
This article explores interactions with difference, highlighting what I call the “generosity paradox,” a term that refers to how we suspend disbelief and certainty in favor of a constructed potentiality not limited by preexistent knowledge or categories of authenticity and legitimacy. Touching on overlapping concepts from rhetoric, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, and queer theory, the discussion explicates fictional encounters with radical alterity in the film Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) to show that attempted respite from frustrating, confusing, and frightening interactions limits our voice, undermines difference, and favors a unifying persuasive intent, which more likely than not involves an attempt to change Others rather than allowing our mutual differences to generatively remain.
The Neuroscience of Metafilm
Norman N. Holland
Metafictions tell stories in which the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story as, classically, in Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote. In our times, both metafiction and metafilm have proliferated. Examples of metafilm include Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr., Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo, Alejandro Amenábar's Abre los Ojos, Ingmar Bergman's Persona, the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers and, in particular, Spike Jonze's Adaptation. In my experience and that of others, metafilmic movies have a peculiarly disconcerting effect, sometimes arousing fear, sometimes seeming comic. Why? Metafilms play tricks on the levels and kinds of our belief (or our suspension of disbelief). To explain the effect, we need to understand how our brains are functioning when we are, as we say, "absorbed" in a film. The answer lies in the fact that reality testing depends on activity in the motor regions of the frontal cortex. But in experiencing the arts, we are not moving or even planning to move. As a result, as Richard Gerrig's experiments show, we momentarily believe (or suspend disbelief in) the film we are perceiving. Metafilm, however, introduces another, more real reality, the physical medium of the film. Metafilm thus sends conflicting messages to the brain about moving. The result is what Freud called "a signal of anxiety." If the metafilmic effect is brief, we laugh. If it persists over time, it can arouse anxiety.
From the Editor
Stephen Prince
raises broader issue regarding stewardship and interaction with the natural world. Suspension of disbelief is fundamental to the experience of fiction in cinema and other narrative arts. Qihao Ji and Arthur A. Raney provide an empirical analysis of th e
Book Review
William Wheeler
sui generis area of law: it adds nuance to the ‘culture of disbelief’ identified by activists and scholars, by not only revealing the arbitrariness of decision-making but also suggesting why it is arbitrary. In light of such ethnographies, it is
In Journal of Legal Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 132–134 (3 total)