“Never Wholly Respectable:” Divination, Death, and Humanism in Contemporary Anthropology

Abstract

SummaryIn 1993, Bruce Grindal wrote that “Humanistic anthropology must never become wholly respectable.” Implying that humanism is anthropology's important gadfly or jester, designed to “challenge and occasionally outrage the priestly purveyors” of science, his influence perpetuates the continued salience and current engagement of interpretative and humanistic anthropology. In this article, I compare Grindal's work with Sisala notions of death in northern Ghana with my own work among Yorùbá peoples in Bénin, West Africa. Exploring anthropology's reflective turn, I use our combined ethnography to explore the ways in which humanistic approaches to anthropology are well positioned to engage with those subtle, complex, and sometimes “messy” layers of meaning that almost define the “human experience.” Struggling with similar themes, in 1983, Grindal wrote, in his prescient style, that he had with “intuitive certainty … witnessed the raising of the dead.” He described the experience as a “real” occurrence that “wounded and sickened” his “soul.” Here, I argue that this reaction is precisely the goal of humanistic anthropology. To be effective, humanistic anthropology, like life itself, while potentially uplifting and unifying, must also be painful and sickening. It is in this way that humanism facilitates an understanding—a type of divinatory “knowing—among disparate people who live in worlds that are at once vastly different and startlingly similar.