Goulet.pdf

Deborah Bird Rose
Colin Turnbull wrote just such an article, published in 1990 , in which
he contends that anthropological methods and boundaries, linked with
a constrictive ideal of objectivity, have limited us and incapacitated
us in our fundamental endeavor of understanding. He notes the criti-
cism, leveled by “third world scholars and laymen alike,” that we fail
“to be fully human and [thus fail] to use our full human potential.”
This failure leads us to treat others “as though they were indeed not
full human beings themselves but things that could be satisfactorily
examined and explained through the artifice of reason alone” (Turn-
bull 1990 , 51 ). He goes on to describe our superficiality as a major
weakness of anthropology.
Anthropology and its silences: thinking about theories of absence
in the context of my own silences demonstrates to me the limits of a
strictly discursive approach. To put it abrasively, normative anthro-
pology’s silences are not so much signs of repression as they are signs
of amputation. These silences do not produce an excess of meaning
and desire; rather, they diminish meaning while producing compla-
cency. They dumb down toward instrumental modes of explanation,
and they excise vast amounts of experience, including the encounter
with mystery and the experience of joy.
But my own silences can also be understood as part of a much
broader set of processes that are amplifying silence in both ecological
and social spheres. In contrast to a recursive epistemology that adds
depth and richness to life through entanglements, another set of pro-
cesses is reducing, debilitating, and silencing life. I can approach this
reductionist process through the concept of double death (Rose 2004 ),
drawing on Bateson’s insights concerning entropy and the disorganiza-
tion that starts to ramify with the loss of meta-patterns (Harries-Jones
1995 , 169 , 210 ). Long before Jessie’s death, I had written about death,
life, and what becomes of human beings after death, according to Vic
River people. I will return briefly to some of this earlier discussion in
order to look at the twisting together of life and time, so that death is
bent back to affirm and contribute to the life of the country.
As I discuss in Dingo Makes Us Human (Rose 2000 ), Vic River peo-
ple talked about the components of the human person in ways that
suggested at least two animating spirits (I expressed caution about