“Seeing.  Still Working on believing” from Anthropologists

  

In the movie “Avengers” there is a scene of giant alien invasion flying over New York.  In it, the character of Captain America radios to Iron Man / Tony Stark:

Captain America: “Stark, are you seeing this?”

Tony: “Seeing. Still working on believing.”

Tony Stark was a man of science and logic. He believed that his intelligence and technology could solve and defeat all the problems in life.  But sometimes, even what he was seeing with his own eyes, his belief in science wasn’t able to comprehend.

 

In an episode of “Star Trek Voyager” called “Sacred Ground”, a member of the spaceship crew named Kes is visiting an alien planet and is knocked unconscious by a strange energy from a temple.  She ends up dying as a consequence. The captain of the star ship visits the planet and its temple in order to appeals to people there for help. She tries to respect and understand their spiritual beliefs and practices.

JANEWAY: Well, I'm here now and I'm asking for your help. I want to understand the purpose of waiting in this room.

OLD WOMAN: But isn't it enough to sit and be sociable? We're good company.

JANEWAY: That's what I'm supposed to do. Talk to the Ancestral Spirits.

OLD WOMAN: First we were a test, and now we're the Ancestral Spirits.

JANEWAY: Are you?

OLD MAN 1: That would be nice and quantifiable for you, wouldn't it. If the spirits were something you could see and touch and scan with your little devices.

OLD MAN 2: If you can explain everything, what's left to believe in?

JANEWAY: I know it's an important part of your religion to trust the spirits without question, but I wasn't brought up that way. It's hard for me to accept.

OLD MAN 1: So much for your tolerant open-minded Starfleet ideals.

JANEWAY: There's a difference between respecting the spiritual beliefs of other cultures and embracing them myself.

OLD MAN 1: Fine. Don't embrace a thing. It's all the same to us. Go on back to your ship and play with your molecular microscanner.

OLD WOMAN: You've tried all that already, but it didn't work, did it. Kes didn't get better.

JANEWAY: No, she didn't.

OLD WOMAN: Why not?

JANEWAY: The Doctor couldn't explain it.

OLD WOMAN: So it's inexplicable. A miraculous non-recovery.

JANEWAY: We haven't found the reason yet.

OLD WOMAN: But of course you will. You'll find all the answers eventually, with enough time and study, and the right sort of tools. That's what you believe isn't it as a scientist?

OLD MAN 1: Be honest.

JANEWAY: Yes, that's what I've always believed.

OLD MAN 2: Even when her science fails right before her eyes she still has full confidence in it. Now there's a leap of faith.

OLD WOMAN: Unconditional trust. Now that's promising.

JANEWAY: All right. If you're saying that science won't help Kes, what will?

 

Sometimes in life, there are methods and paths to healing that are not testable nor quantifiable, but still real, nonetheless.

Anthropologists are scientists that have gone into places where values of life and healing are very different then their own.  And sometimes things they see and experience are not things their culture and science are able to explain.

From “Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field” - Jean-Guy-a-Goulet 

I made mistakes in the field, especially toward the end. Hearing a fight, I looked out my window to see a middle-aged woman on the doorstep of her cabin, two doors away, arguing with two men. This is the neighbor I described earlier who was heavily involved with power. While it is my usual practice to avoid all surreptitious photography in the field on ethical grounds, I picked up the camera and shot the scene. There was a strange noise as I pressed the shutter release. For some reason, the camera stopped working. I borrowed a replacement camera and mailed my own to a repair shop in Chicago. 

In due course, the shop wrote back asking what I had done to the camera. Its entire shutter mechanism lay in a puddle at the bottom of the instrument, every single piece undone. When my film came back from processing, I got another shock. The picture of the fight had come out, but over the powerful woman's head there was a black vortex. 

This I report as a skeptical scientist, for whatever it is worth. None of it was ever explained.

 

Following several rounds of this, someone in a back corner of the tent suddenly called out, "You are cheating. You closed your eyes, so you can see." Embarrassed, unable to deny the charge, I had to terminate the game. Thirty-one years later, I still wonder about this one.

 

From “Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande” – E. E. Evans-Pritchard

The poison oracle is essentially a method for obtaining answers to obscure or difficult questions by administering poison to fowls. The verdict of the oracle is expressed by whether or not the fowl survives the ordeal. The poison used by the Azande was a red powder extracted from a particular forest creeper. This was mixed with water to a paste, from which the liquid was then squeezed out into the beaks of small domestic fowls, which were compelled to swallow it. The dose was generally followed by violent convulsions.  Sometimes these proved fatal, but just as often the fowls recovered. Some, indeed, seemed unaffected by the poison. Evans-Pritchard took a sample of the powder back to England for chemical  

The soul of witchcraft may leave its corporeal home at any time during the day or night, but Azande generally think of a witch sending his soul on errands by night when his victim is asleep. It sails through the air emitting a bright light. During the daytime this light can only be seen by witches, and by witch-doctors when they are primed with medicines, but any- one may have the rare misfortune to observe it at night. Azande say that the light of witchcraft is like the gleam of fire-fly beetles, only it is ever so much larger and brighter than they. They also say that a man may see witchcraft as it goes to rest on branches for 'Witchcraft is like fire, it lights a light'. If a man sees the light of witchcraft he picks up a piece of charcoal and throws it under his bed so that he may not suffer misfortune from the sight.

I have only once seen witchcraft on its path. I had been sitting late in my hut writing notes. About midnight, before retiring, I took a spear and went for my usual nocturnal stroll. I was walking in the garden at the back of my hut, amongst banana trees, when I noticed a bright light passing at the back of my servants' huts towards the homestead of a man called Tupoi. As this seemed-worth investigation I followed its passage until a grass screen obscured the view. I ran quickly through my hut to the other side in order to see where the light was going to, but did not regain sight of it. I knew that only one man, a member of my household, had a lamp that might have given off so bright a light, but next morning he told me that he had neither been out late at night nor had he used his lamp. There did not lack ready informants to tell me that what I had seen was witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, on the same morning, an old relative of Tupoi and an inmate of his homestead died. This event fully explained the light I had seen. I never discovered its real origin, which was possibly a handful of grass lit by someone on his way to defecate, but the coincidence of the direction along which the light moved and the subsequent death accorded well with Zande ideas.