On spirit writing

Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction

Bibliographic Data

ID2252149
AuthorsW Keane (0000-0003-4981-7030, University of Michigan, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume19
Issue1
Pages1-17
Publication date2013-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9655.12000
OpenAlexW1901599806
LanguageEN
Citations received86
References cited29

This is a speculative essay in comparative possibilities. It looks at some widely separated religious contexts in which a power-laden relationship across ontological difference - for instance, between living humans and a world of gods or spirits - is mediated by operations on the materiality of the written sign. These operations typically result in either materializing something immaterial or dematerializing something material. But they may also involve other activities that take advantage of specific physical properties of the written word such as being persistent, transportable, perishable, alienable, and so forth. Once divine words are rendered into script, they possess a distinctively material quality and form. They appear on some physical medium, and so are both durable and potentially destructible. Anything that can happen to another artefact can happen to them. The practices I dub 'spirit writing' subject the written word to radical transformation, taking advantage of its very materiality in order to dematerialize it, even if only in order to be rematerialized in yet some other form (such as a person's body). Many such practices seek to generate or control religious powers by means of transduction across semiotic modalities, material activities that help render experience-transcending forces realistic or at least readily imaginable

Action (physics · Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Materiality · Materiality (auditing · Political science · Semiotics · Sign (mathematics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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