The world is a forest of symbols
Italian Freemasonry and the practice of discretion
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2279366 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lilith Mahmud (0009-0008-3898-0637, University of California, Irvine, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 425-438 |
| Publication date | 2012-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Ethnologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01373.x |
| OpenAlex | W1716686440 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 25 |
| References cited | 37 |
Members of Italian Masonic lodges, esoteric organizations widely perceived as secret societies, prefer to explain their elaborate practices of concealment and disclosure in terms of discretion. Through the aesthetics and epistemology of discretion, Freemasons view the world as a "forest of symbols" hidden in plain sight and awaiting interpretation. Taking "discretion" as both an ethnographic and analytic category, I ask how an anthropological study of discretion may reveal not only forms of cultural practice deemed secret but also the interpretive art of decoding that underlies the process of knowledge formation at the heart of Masonic communities of practice. [discretion, secrecy, Freemasonry, Italy, secret societies, aesthetics, epistemology
Discretion · Political science · Sociology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Discretionary Governance
Russian queer migrants in Sweden
Collaborations with natural light and darkness
Intimate and yet Alienated
Taking the matter into your own hands
Behind Closed Doors
Architectures of discretion
Beyond the Secret ( gsang ba )
Secrecy's subjects
The Social Life of Rumors
Secret Language as a “Weapon of Defense”
Written with seed
Beyond enclosure
We Are Too Anxious
The shared boundary
From Clans to Co-Ops
Allah has spoken to us
In The Name of Transparency
University as Secret Society
The correct secret
Secrecy
Conspiracy Theories as Productive Practices
The Architecture of Collective Intimacy
Embodying the State in the Margins
Where do we go when we follow the money? The political-economic construction of Antimafia investigators in Western Sicily
The Iconography of landscape
Nature, culture, and gender
How Societies Remember
The Nuclear Borderlands
The Language of Secrecy
Asian Exclusion Acts
The Forest of Symbols
The modernity of witchcraft
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
Right-Wing Women
Gender in Real Time
Outline of a Theory of Practice
Modern Greek Lessons
Transparency in a New Global Order
Transparency
Bodies that Matter
Cultural Intimacy
Politics of Piety
The Underneath of ThingsViolence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone
Masquerades of Modernity
Transparency and Conspiracy
Imagined communities
The Mende of Sierra Leone
Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
The Magic of Secrecy
In The Name of Transparency
Comrades and Christians
Situated Learning
Situated Knowledges
Secret knowledge as property and power in Kpelle society
A Secret Shared
Ethnography, fiction, and the meanings of the past in Brittany
"Italy's "Southern Question
The political economy of movement and gesture in Cairo
The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies
| Unique citing works | 25 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,79 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2026 (15) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 23 |