Truth in Motion
The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
Embarking on an ethnographic journey to the inner barriosof Havana among practitioners of Ifa, a prestigious Afro-Cuban tradition of divination, "Truth in Motion" reevaluates Western ideas about truth in light of the practices and ideas of a wildly different, and highly respected, model. Acutely focusing on Ifa, Martin Holbraad takes the reader inside consultations, initiations, and lively public debates to show how Ifa practitioners see truth as something to be not so much represented, as transformed. Bringing his findings to bear on the discipline of anthropology itself, he recasts the very idea of truth as a matter not only of epistemological divergence but also of ontological difference – the question of truth, he argues, is not simply about how things may appear differently to people, but also about the different ways of imagining what those things are. By delving so deeply into Ifa practices, "Truth in Motion" offers cogent new ways of thinking about otherness and how anthropology can navigate it.
Reviews
"'Truth in Motion' is very much an intellectual journey, a rigorous engagement with Cuban divination and theories of meaning. It is extremely original, innovative – indeed daring and radical – in its invitation to replace our entire bedrock of representational semantics (and its associated distinctions between words and objects, signifiers and signifieds, judgments and facts, substances and attributes, etcetera) with a more generative ontology of 'inventive definitions'" – Andrew Apter, University of California, Los Angeles
"'Truth in Motion' is an exceedingly well-thought, sophisticated piece of ethnological and conceptual analysis, with philosophical underpinnings both solid and clever. It is an ambitious and provocative work, which will certainly spark off quite a few welcome debates. His argument is complex, at times vertiginously so – any engagement with recursivity has this cognitive effect, and this book takes recursivity as far as it can go – but it throws a wonderfully clear light over one of the more shadowy zones of the Anthropological Exchange, to wit, the precise nature of the relation between the conceptual presuppositions of 'observer' and 'observed' in the ethnographic 'encounter'" – Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
"Martin Holbraad's 'Truth in Motion' is the Godel's Proof of anthropology, the paradox of the inconsistency that proves its own consistency by going back and taking a parallax on it. As Godel allegedly told Einstein: 'You have mistaken space ('dimension') for time; the true past is really past (gone) and irrecoverable by human means – it is not what you remember, which is still present'. Basically he was telling Einstein that every aspect of temporality – duration as well as the 'presence' of time – is beyond human ratiocination. Translated in Holbraadese, it means that most of our perceptual encounters and all of our 'spiritual' ones are experiences with radical, unmediated, and undefined alterity ('otherness') – the uncanny shock and awe of chaos. The only recourse we have – the thing we call 'perception' or 'thinking' – is to generate false alibis or interpretive rationalizations for something that is beyond all possible analogies. Skeptical? Still don't believe it? Now is the time to put your unbelief to the test: read this beautiful book" – Roy Wagner, University of Virginia
