I wonder how this essay has been received by anthropologists. James Fernandez seems to me take extraordinary risks in the argument, or at least they would be in some intellectual circles. Perhaps not in anthropology? (Paging Dr. Wesch.) In any event, this essay is remarkable in my view for the way it analyzes non-schooled reasoning without reducing its sophistication or objectifying its practitioners.

Fernandez closes with two wonderful paragraphs that I’d like to share with you:

In a compartmentalized society like our own we are very able to compartmentalize our intellectual exercises. We are well schooled to heuristics–to looking for rules and applying them in limited and apparently self-contained contexts. That’s intelligence for you! But more traditional societies with pretensions to cosmogony, and most traditional societies have that pretension, are more totalistic. Intelligence is a matter of relating to the context, in developing it, revitalizing it. Hence, it is an intelligence that employs images to a high degree in actual or suggested analogic relation. It plays upon similarities in experience, and in that play it suggests or requires answers that suggest overarching contiguities–cosmologies, totalities which encompass, absorb, and defeat particularities. All this is rarely done in a direct and explicit manner. “By indirections find directions out.”

As well schooled as we all are in the modern specialized compartmentalized societies, we tend to misread in a schoolmasterish way the masters of iconic thought. We look for a limited set of applicable rules, or we are simply puzzled, and we fail to see how these masters edify by puzzlement. Our inclination is to deprive puzzles of their mystery–that’s science for you–and thus we fail to see how the masters mysteriously suggest an overarching order–how they give concrete identity to inchoate subjects, how they reconcile these subjects. It is hard for us to tolerate ambiguities of this kind, let alone understand their function.

As I read these words I think of Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” and his advocacy of the “indirect approach” that itself must be complicated and dialectically reversed should the puzzlement ever become a mere parlor trick. I think also of the ways in which Michael Wesch has introduced a “grand narrative” into his anthropology classes as (I suppose) a kind of cosmogony or at least an overarching order. And I think of the way poetry plays with the most precise suggestiveness one can imagine. A far cry from schoolmasters, textbooks, and bon eleves, from which heaven save us.

James Fernandez, “Edification by Puzzlement,” in Explorations in African Systems of Thought, ed. Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. 44-59.