MODSTANDSDYGTIGHED OVER FOR STATSSTYRET IKONOKLASME BLANDT LOMA I GUINEA

Denne artikel er det danske resumé af afhandlingen Resisting State Iconoclasm among the Loma of Guinea. Den 6. februar 2006 blev afhandlingen antaget til forsvar for den antropologiske doktorgrad af det Samfundsvidenskabelige Fakultet, Københavns Universitet, og den er udgivet i Carolina Academic Press’ Ritual Studies Monograph Series. Resisting State Iconoclasm among the Loma of Guinea er et antropologisk studie af de årsagssammenhænge, der ligger til grund for en vestafrikansk lokalbefolknings vedvarende udøvelse af deres såkaldt traditionelle religion. Emnet vedrører en religiøs praksis, der fra at have været genstand for statsstyret voldelig undertrykkelse siden hen har udviklet sig til et instrument for vold begået mod nabofolk. Studiet af den tilsyneladende kontinuitet af religiøse forestillinger og rituelle handlinger baserer sig på to og et halvt års etnografisk feltarbejde udført i flere omgange blandt mande-talende lomafolk i det sydøstlige Guinea i perioden 1990-1999. Undersøgelsen inddrager desuden historisk og komparativt, regionalt materiale af både ældre og nyere dato fra det øvre Guineas skov- og kystområde, som foruden Guinea bl.a. omfatter landene Liberia og Sierra Leone. &nbsp

ANTROPOLOGIENS HEMMELIGHED: Refleksioner over etnografens rolle i studiet af hemmelige ritualer

Christian Kordt Højbjerg: The Secret of Anthropology. Reflections on the Ethnographer’s Role in the Study of Secret Rituals. The article gives an account of an apparently hopeless effort to study men’s secret association and its masked figure among the Loma in Guinea. The secret mask is purposely withheld during the ethnographer’s stay, and he is not allowed to assist in the meetings of the men’s society taking place in the sacred grove. However, the student possesses prior knowledge about the mask, and information from the meetings is transmitted constantly. Therefore, nothing is in faet held secret to the ethnographer, and the leaders of the men’s association seem to be aware of it. Still, secrecy is being practiced by the people chosen as the object of study. An essential aspect of secrecy is hereby revealed. Despite its emptiness, it is efficient in its patteming of social relations. The methodological point is that in anthropology, subjectivity can be a means to objectivity. Not by focusing too exelusively on the observing scientist, but rather in the sense that the staging of the ethnographic encounter by the anthropologist produces a miscalculation permitting an understanding of the scientific object. A sort of role inversion is taking place. The anthropologist realizes that he has become the victim of an illusion about the nature of secrecy, and that he has been subjected to the practice of secrecy. This lived experience leads to a concluding observation about the common but reversed strategies of staging inherent in secrecy and anthropology. While secrecy deliberately and inevitably reveals a part of itself in order to conceal, anthropology is on the contrary inevitably concealing reality when constructing its object. But just as secrecy implies concealment, anthropology is compelled to unmask reality, at least as a regulative principle, if it is not to lose its status as a scientific discipline