VAN DE PORT, Mattijs. 2015. “Reading Bruno Latour in Bahia”.

In:
Jackson, Michael, and Albert Piette, eds. What Is Existential
Anthropology?. London: Berghahn Books.

Reading Bruno Latour in Bahia.

Or: how to approach the “great, blooming, buzzing confusion” of life and being.
without going mad.1

It happened almost twenty years ago, on the shadowy side of the Rua Aurea,
not too far from the Terreiro do Paço, in the Portuguese capital Lisbon. A
panick attack. I do not remember anything in particular that triggered it, but I
vividly recall the accelerated heartbeats, the dizziness, the profuse sweating
and the fear that engulfed me. An intense, all-consuming fear, but no way of
pointing out for what. I leaned against a dark-grey wall to recover from the
dizziness, and then stumbled into a shop — the first door within reach, which
gave access to a stationery store. I bought a box of color pencils.
The days after the attack I came in the grip of the thought to go mad.
“What happened to me? Am I going mad?”, I kept asking myself, to then tell
myself “no, of course not, don’t be an idiot”. Yet another inner voice would
undermine such attempts to calm myself down by saying, “well, that’s exactly
what other people who did go mad were telling themselves. But people do go
mad, you know. Madness is of this world!”
It took a day or two for this second voice to quiet down. In a way,
however, this all too lucid insight that “madness is of this world” has stayed
with me. So when my dear friend David, who sort of never stopped being a
hippy from the Height-Ashbury in San Francisco, insisted that one day we
should take an LSD-trip —“That is exactly the kind of mind-expanding
experience you keep writing about!”, he keeps saying — I appreciated the
gesture but told him “no thank you”. Or when Pai Luis, the Candomblé priest
who consulted the cowry-shell oracle to divine my guardian spirit, told me that
my Oxóssi “would never descend from his throne” to take possession of me, I

1I would like to thank Jojada Verrips, Birgit Meyer and Annemarie Mol for their comments
on an earlier draft of this text.
was quite relieved, no matter how pitiful the priest looked at me for having to
miss out on such a marvelous experience.
Now you may think that I am opening up to you by putting my
recollections of this frightening, and somewhat embarrassing episode of a
psychic breakdown on paper. But believe me, I am not opening up. Not really.
For the act of writing is to invent forms for experiences that in and of
themselves are ill-containable, boundless, fluid, formless, always in excess of
the words we use to pin them down. The act of writing is to create frames:
word-frames, sentence-frames, paragraph-frames, chapter-frames, book-frames.
It is to punctuate the flow of being with full stops. The act of writing, I would
say, is an act of closure.

***

Last summer I was in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, doing research for a film2 on
the many ritual practices I encountered in that setting to “close” the body. I
interviewed friends and acquaintances about the use of protective amulets and
talismans; the taking of ritual herbal baths; but also about such mundane acts
as the donning of sunglasses or headphones, or the buttoning up of one’s shirt
all the way up to the collar. Such ongoing activities to close the body — fechar
o corpo, as Bahians say — reveal an understanding of bodies as being both
permeable and vulnerable. As I will elaborate below, my interlocutors were
highly ambivalent as to how to evaluate this given. On the one hand, they
considered an open body to be a prerequisite to establish a more intense and
fulfilling engagement with the world. On the other hand, they recognized that
there is a limit to how much openness a human being can handle. And thus
they seek to harness their bodies against malevolent spirits and energies;
protect it from the gaze of others; seal it off from the influences of bad luck and
misfortune, not to mention bacteria or lethal viruses.
My intrigue with this never-ending concern of finding the right balance
between opening and closing the body — between “letting the world in” or
“shutting the world out” — is grounded in an observation that, over the years,
has become the Leitmotif of my anthropology: the stories we live by, and on
which we so depend to make communicable sense of ourselves and the world,
fail to capture the experience of our selves and the world in its entirety.3 As

2The filmproject is being realized together with video-artist Kostana Banovic.

3I first explored this theme in my work on the war-ridden Serbia of the early 1990s. See
Mattijs van de Port, Gypsies Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilization and its
Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998).
Slavoj Žižek famously argued, getting to know the world discursively is a
process “which mortifies, drains off, empties, carves the fullness of the Real of
the living body”, 4 and we are forever haunted by “the remainder, leftover,
scraps of this process of symbolization”. 5 I call this inerasable, menacing
remnant of our reality definitions the-rest-of-what-is. Fechar o corpo is an
attempt to keep the-rest-of-what-is at bay. So is the act of writing, as I
suggested. Or the buying of a box of color pencils after a panick attack, for that
matter. For when this reality-surplus threatens to mess up received
understandings as to what is of this world and what not, we have no other
option but to fortify the boundaries of the normal, to thus keep our world and
our selves from disintegrating.
Whereas Lacanian thinkers such as Žižek tend to stress the traumatic
aspects of the-rest-of-what-is — its maddening threat to the daydreams we call
normality — mystically inclined truth-seekers make another assessment of it.
They court this realm beyond the horizons of the known, hoping that an
ecstatic encounter with what William James once called the “great, blooming,
buzzing confusion” 6 will bring mind-expanding revelations about life and
being.7 And that is indeed what I see many of my Bahian friends doing: in the
possession ceremonies of the afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, in the ecstasies
of the Bahian carnival, or in the raptures of their love making, they open
themselves up to that which is Other, intuiting that it is by moving beyond the
horizons of their imagination that they will enrich their experience of being.8
In the film project I was working on that summer, I sought to evoke my
Bahian friends’ desire and fear for a reality that is larger then the one they
know. However, as things go in contemporary academic lives, I could not use
my summer break to fully focus on the research for the film. There was other
work to be done, as I had committed myself to the organization of a special
issue on the reception of the work of Bruno Latour in anthropology. 9 So in
between my filming activities I had to proofread incoming contributions, (re-

4 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 169.
5 ibid.
6 William James, Principles of psychology, vol 1. New York: Cosimo, Cosimo Classics, 2007

[1890]), 488. I thank my colleague Laurent Legrain for bringing this wonderful phrasing to
my attention.
7 For a full discussion of this theme, see Mattijs van de Port, Ecstatic Encounters. Bahian

Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011).
8 The term “mysticism” has long been used to denote candomblé’s religious practices,

starting with Raimundo Nina Rodrigues late nineteenth centry descriptions of the cult.
Today, misticismo is one of the terms cult members use when discussing their religion.
9 David Berliner, Laurent Legrain and Mattijs van de Port (eds.), Bruno Latour and the

Anthropology of the Moderns. Social Anthropology, 21, 4: 435-447.

)read some of Latour’s work and ponder his radical revisions of what a science
of the social might entail. The situation made for the occurrence of an exciting
dialectic between mystical and scientific modes of inquiry, knowledge practices
that are usually rigidly kept apart. With the comments and observations of my
Bahian friends still echoing in my head, I couldn’t help but notice just how
much Latour’s work is permeated with metaphors of opening and closing. In
his thinking and writing, he seeks to open the body of thought underlying
conventional research procedures, so as to keep the “great, blooming, buzzing
confusion” of life and being in full view. And indeed, if mystical modes of
knowing are characterized by what one author has called “an unrelenting
resistance to procedures that ground the Real in stable or discrete conceptual
or experimental objects”,10 then Bruno Latour certainly qualifies for the label.
Unsurprisingly, I soon found the lines between my two projects blurred.
Bruno Latour’s instructions how to go about grasping the real of life and being
began to speak to my interlocutors’ ways of expanding their knowledge, and
vice versa. And yet, for all of the intriguing and unexpected similarities,
reading Latour in Bahia also taught me that there is a huge contrast between
Latour’s rigorous ways of opening up to the-rest-of-what-is, and those of my
interlocutors. This contrast, I will argue below, does not so much concern the
propositions as to what it takes to know the really real. It concerns — if I can
put it that way — the “doing” of this knowing. In the case of my Bahian friends,
opening up to the rest-of-what-is occurs in a wide variety of practices that seek
to manipulate the boundaries of the body, to thus produce extra-ordinary forms
of consciousness. In the case of Latour, an awareness of the-rest-of-what-is
follows from a different, but no less embodied and experiential practice: the act
of reading an academic text. The task I will set myself to accomplish in this
essay is to discuss the contrast between these different modes of knowing, and
ponder its implications for anthropological research.

***

Bahians tell each other — and their anthropologists — that an open body
brings some of the best one can experience in life. And some of the worst. In
the thoroughly religious society that is Bahia, it is an open, welcoming body
that allows for intimate encounters with divine beings. In Candomblé initiation
rituals, for instance, the body of the initiate is quite literally opened by cutting

Marsanne Brammer, Thinking Practice: Michel de Certeau and the Theorization of

10

Mysticism. Diacritics, vol. 22, no. 2, 1992, pp 26-37.

the skin with razorblades: incisions are made in the body and on top of the
shaven head of the initiate, to thus give the spirit full access to the body of its
devotee. Spirit possession ceremonies spectacularize this openness in theatrical
ways: dressed in transparent, lace fabrics, as if to highlight the permeability of
the boundary between themselves and the world, the initiates flaunt their
capacity to receive orixás, caboclos and exus 11 into their bodies. The actual
moment of the arrival of the spirits also underscores the porosity of the
initiates’ bodies: in what often comes across as a dramatic struggle between
spirit and self, the initiates clench their fists, and their faces get contorted as
they close their lips tight, and squeeze their eyes shut. Some make a gesture of
covering their ears, at which point the priest who is leading the ceremony
usually comes running towards them to shake the silver rattle close to their
heads. The piercing, metallic sound suffices to break what was left of the
mediums’ resistance to the arrival of the spirit. Once the spirits are
incorporated, yet another striking performance of the permeability of the body
may be witnessed: bystanders typically hold out their spread hands when
approached by one of the dancing mediums, a gesture that turns their body
into an “antenna”, ready to receive axé, the life-giving energy the spirits emit.
When I asked a friend who is in the initiation process whether he didn’t
think it to be scary to open his body so as to become possessed by something
other, he smiled away the suggestion. “No way!” he sighed, “I think that it is
the most wonderful thing in the world … really, to have the orixá inside your
body … that is fantastic!”
The celebration of an open, porous body is certainly not exclusive to
Candomblé and other afro-Brazilian religions. Salvador’s many baroque
churches, for instance, are full with statues of bleedings saints, offering their
open wounds up for contemplation, or insistently holding their stigmata out to
you. And whereas Charismatic Catholics and Pentecostals are keen to avoid a
vocabulary of “possession” (which they associate with the demoniacal), they in
fact seek a very similar, bodily intimacy with the Holy Spirit. Stretching their
arms towards the heavens, and singing such hymns as “venha ser o fogo dentro de
mim” (come be the fire inside of me), “vem fluir dentro de mim, santidade, santidade”
(come streaming inside of me, holiness, holiness), “o meu corpo es a morada tua”
(my body is your dwelling), they too turn their bodies into receptacles for
divine presence.12

11 Orixás, caboclos and exus are different types of spirits with which the people from
Candomblé maintain relationships.
12 See for instance Maria José A. De Abreu, Goose Bumps All Over: Breath, Media and

Tremor. Social Tekst 26 (3), 2008, 59-78.

 Beyond explicitly religious settings, it is an open body that is capable to
take in the beauties of the world. Body language is again revealing. When
facing the wide blue expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, looking up the towering
heights of Salvador’s Baroque churches, or listening to some moving ballad
performed on a stage, people typically spread their arms as if to open their
chests and let beauty “in”. My friend Adriana gave me another striking
example of the way she keeps her body open to the beauty of the world. When
I asked her whether or not she was in the habit of using headphones, she
answered:

I use them rarely. I like to be connected to the sounds of places, of

people. You know, I even like to close my ears [presses her fingers
against her ears] to then open them again, so as to be more aware of
these sounds. Sometimes I go out on the veranda to do that. That is
such a special moment! You hear the sound of insects, of birds, of
the leaves, of the wind. And also of the city, you know. The honking
of the cars. The people. I think that sounds reveal a lot about places,
about my city. So I use my headphones very little.

Last but not least, it is an open body that allows for intimacy with one’s lover.
“Your presence enters through the seven holes in my head”, is how singer
Caetano Veloso puts it in a famous love song, which in Portuguese sounds a lot
better, and when Caetano sings it even more. Interestingly, these seven “holes”
are as much entrances to the body’s interior as they are exit gates to all-of-the-
world — which drastically modifies the notion of intimacy. For if the intimacy
of lovers is conventionally thought of as the couple withdrawing into some
secluded space, shutting out the rest of the world, in Caetano’s love song it is
quite the opposite:
 Entra pelos sete buracos da minha cabeça, It enters through the seven holes in my head,
a tua presença
 
 your presence
Pelos olhos, boca, narinas e orelhas, Through eyes, mouth, nostrils and ears,
a tua presença 
 
 your presence
Paralisa meu momento em que tudo começa, Calls the moment in which everything begins to a
a tua presença 
 halt
Desintegra e atualiza a minha presença, your presence
a tua presença 
 Disintegrates and actualizes my presence
Envolve meu tronco, meus braços e minhas your presence
pernas, Wraps my torso, my arms and legs
a tua presença 
 your presence
É branca verde, vermelha azul e amarela, Is white green, red blue and yellow,
a tua presença 
 your presence
É negra, negra, negra
 Is black, black, black
Negra, negra, negra 
 Black, black, black
Negra, negra, negra, Black black, black
a tua presença 
 Your presence
Transborda pelas portas e pelas janelas, Flows out of doors and windows,
a tua presença 
 Your presence
Silencia os automóveis e as motocicletas, Silences the cars and motorcycles
a tua presença 
 Your presence
Se espalha no campo derrubando as cercas, Spreads out over the fields, tearing down the fences,
a tua presença 
 your presence
É tudo que se come, tudo que se reza, Is all that one eats, all that one prays,
a tua presença 
 Your presence
… …

For all of their appreciation of a body that is able to open itself up to (or
even merge with) the world, my interlocutors also made it clear to me that this
permeable, receptive body is a vulnerable body; and in need of constant
protection. It is accessible to demons, to the danger of witchcraft, or to the
harm that the evil eye and other bad energies may inflict.
In Candomblé circles, where openness to otherness is cultivated in the
form of possession, stories abound about people having gone mad, or
committing suicide, for having failed to protect themselves adequately.
Marcelo explained that to be able to open yourself and receive the orixás you
have to close your body in all kinds of ways. You cannot eat certain things, you
cannot drink or smoke at certain moments, you cannot make love:

Anyone in Candomblé has this obligation to purify the body, to close

the body. You only leave the body open when you are inside the
temple, and there are even rituals in the temple where you have to be
closed. There are works you have to do for the eguns, which are the
 spirits of the dead that require you to be closed. We have various
clothing items, which signify that the body is closed. They really close
it, you know, they tie it.

In love lives, one’s openness to the other easily brings pain and despair, urging
one to close one’s body, or “lift the shield” (levantar o escudo) as some Bahians
would say. “Don’t you try to mess with me”, it says in a love song by singer
Maria Bethânia, “for I do not walk alone.” And then, to the thundering sound of
the drums, she enumerates the whole army of spiritual and imaginary beings
she has gathered around her to harness her self against the pain a lover has
been capable to inflict on her. Among them Zumbi, the legendary runaway
slave hero; several orixás, especially those known to be warriors; Jesus, Mary
and Joseph; the hands of the benzadeiras that healed her body; and the
indigenous shamans called pajés. A powerful crowd indeed. Yet the way
Bethânia invokes these bodyguards in her song, with a voice that alternates
between expressing utter frailty and a boastful overestimation of self, testifies
to the impossibility of her attempt to “close her heart and throw away the key”.
Urges to protect oneself by closing the body find expression in a rich
repertoire of practices. People wear talismans, scapulars or contra-egum
bracelets against the threatening spirits of the dead. Small infants, thought to
be particularly vulnerable, wear a broche with a figa, the image of a clenched
fist, which symbolizes the strength of one’s fé (faith). Many ask protection from
the armor-plated saints one finds on Bahian altars, or else visit a rezadeira, a
woman who has the gift to close a body. Younger, urban generations wear t-
shirts with the prayer to Saint George printed on it, saying: “I’ll walk dressed
and armed with the weapons of St. George / So that my enemies, while having
feet, don’t reach me / while having hands, don’t touch me / while having eyes,
don’t see me / and not even a single thought they have can make me suffer”.
João told me about his escapular, a small necklace that has two images of
a saint — one to be worn on your chest, the other one on your back. His body,
sandwiched between saints, was thus made invulnerable for evil forces

When I just obtained my escapular, I was using it for months. I drive a

motorcycle, and it would happen that on the road, all of a sudden I
would feel here [touches his chest] to see if indeed I was wearing it.
Ahh [sighs with relief], I’m protected! It even happened that I
returned home when I noticed I had forgotten to put it on. But
although I have these syncretistic beliefs, I must say that after some
 time I lost this strict observance of going out with my scapular on. I
think, o well, I’m already protected, and I’ll continue my journey.

His lenience was not, as I first thought, because of a lesser concern over
spiritual protection. Quite to the contrary, João told me that he now sees a
Candomblé priest who regularly performs a ritual to close his body.
Other practices to close one’s body are less explicitly situated in the
realm of popular religiosity. Adriana already mentioned how headphones close
the body and immunize the user from her surroundings. Alex, talking about
the way he uses his sunglasses, told me:

Well, I obviously use my sunglasses to protect myself from the insane

clarity of the light in this city. But, well … this week I wasn’t doing
well, you know. I really wasn’t well … and so I found myself thinking,
I’ll go out with my sunglasses on. I live in this building from quite
some time, I know the people who work here, and I always say bom dia.
And these sunglasses, because I really wasn’t doing well, prohibited
people to notice it. I think sunglasses have this capacity: you weapon
yourself to face the big city, and you protect yourself from the gaze of
others.

The thing that struck me most in the way people talked about the opening and
closing of their bodies is that these practices are never-ending balancing acts.
Far from armor-plating themselves against the dangers of an open body, they
seek to reach a livable degree of vulnerability. They are willing to take a risk:
seeking to avoid the worst, they also seek to keep themselves open to the best
that life can bring. “I know I should be using a condom, and usually I do”,
Vinícius told me. “But there is nothing better in lovemaking than the meeting
of the flesh (carne tocando na carne)”. Adriana was quite explicit about the
balance that must be sought between opening and closing the body.

For me, this closing of the body is somewhat paradoxical. Because you
close yourself to open yourself up. You protect yourself so as to be
able to throw yourself … with more security and less protection! For
example, look at a group of capoeira players. The capoeirista who plays
most daringly, who has the most beautiful performance, he certainly
did a ritual to close his body. He knows that he need not be too
concerned with the kicks of the other, and so he can put more into his
own kicks. I am fascinated by this seeming contradiction, because it is
 not a contradiction. When I do a ritual in a Candomblé temple to close
my body, then certainly I am not only closing my physical body. I am,
above all, closing my ethereal body, my spiritual body. Knowing that I
have a certain protection, the relation that my physical body has with
the world can be looser (seja mais solta). And so I do not have to be so
cautious, with the world, and with people. This is fantastic, don’t you
think? You close yourself to be able to open yourself up. You close
something so that not everything can access you, but this enables you
to throw yourself more easily into the world. So you are not
invulnerable, simply because you did a ritual to close your body. These
rituals don’t make you invulnerable. They make you more daring.

Adriana articulates what most of my Bahian friends were saying in one way or
the other: we can’t take in all of the world, but we certainly want to keep
ourselves open to the-rest-of-what-is, to connect ourselves with that which lies
beyond the horizon of our knowing. Marcelo and Adriana are both in
Candomblé, where they actively look for this kind of engagement with
otherness. Alex is not in Candomblé, in fact, in our interview he declared
himself to be an atheist. Yet then he added: “but I am a Bahian atheist, who is
capable to see miracles”. So he too wants to sensitize himself to all that is being
shut out in the process of trying to make sense of things. He too wants to
replenish his consciousness with all that he is not being conscious of. He too
wants to see wonders and miracles.

***

My notes — as preliminary as they are — on these practices of opening and

closing the body resonated well with the work of (and on) Bruno Latour that I
had to read for the preparation of the special issue. As stated, I was struck just
how much Latour’s philosophy is permeated with the attempt to open up
received ways of knowing in the social sciences. His radical revisions of what a
science of the social could be are one sustained effort to crack open the black-
boxes of sociological and philosophical inquiries. He urges researchers to give
up on the securities of being in the know, and promotes a radical uncertainty as
the more profitable starting point for inquiry. Likewise, the concepts he
introduces are first and foremost “crowbars”: tools that were devised to keep
openness at a maximum, so as to enable the researcher to witness how realities
come into being. Take the way he describes the central notion of the actor-
network.
 The two parts are essential, hence the hyphen. The first part (the
actor) reveals the narrow space in which all of the grandiose
ingredients of the world begin to be hatched; the second part (the
network) may explain through which vehicles, which traces, which
trails, which types of information, the world is being brought inside
those places and then, after having been transformed there, are being
pumped back out of its narrow walls.13

Clearly, this whole idea displays a deep affinity for the permeability of
boundaries. Whatever we recognize as an entity — an actor — is bounded, yet
via the network each actor may be filled with all-of-the-world. Reading these
lines in Bahia, I was immediately reminded of those spectacular trompe l’oeuil
ceilings which one finds in the baroque churches of Salvador, where clouds,
angels and a distant light seek to bring the infinite outside into the
architectural structure, or indeed, transport the congregation out of the
building. Just so, I was reminded of Marsanne Brammer’s understanding of
mystical practices as “the dismantling of objectifying procedures, dismissing
any claim that conceptual objects represent or contain either this experience or
reality itself”.14 I wouldn’t go as far as to characterize Latour’s work as a brand
of intellectual mysticism (I doubt the man would be happy with such labeling),
but (re-)reading Latour in Bahia highlighted his preoccupation with opening up
to the-rest-of-what-is. For here is a thinker who seeks to give up on any a
priori assumptions as to what constitutes reality, to then be able to follow the
dense continuum of experience, and the endless mediations through which
reality takes shape.
Given mainstream academic modes of knowledge production, so much
given to the power of definition, predictability, iterability and being-in-control,
it need not be surprising that some of the critiques on Latour’s work have
focused on exactly the infinitude of the actor-network, its endless expansion.
Thus, I found myself reading about the problem of “infinite regress” (i.e. the
problem of knowing where things end in terms of causality) and the problem of
“indefinite extension” (the problem where things end in terms of geographical
and spatial limits).15 In a famous passage in Reassembling the Social16 Latour has

13 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005), 179-180.
14 Brammer, 1992, 27.
15 Jeremy Lecomte, Beyond Indefinite Extension: About Bruno Latour and Urban Space.

Social Anthropology 21, 4, 2013, pp 462-478.

joked his way around these critiques in a characteristically trickster-like
manner, by staging a dialogue between an ANT professor and a student. The
student is desperate to find out where to stop his Latourian analysis, but his
professor keeps telling him that there he cannot see the problem: the limits of
his analysis are set by such givens as the number of words he is allowed to
write; the size of his hard disk and the amount of data that can be stored on it;
or else the amount of time that rests given the deadline he has been given. The
passage has been commented upon as being exemplary of how Latour jokingly
evades the tricky problem of infinite regress and indefinite extension. 17 In
Bahia, however, I kept thinking that Latour probably does not want us to stop
the network. Indeed, maybe he simply wants to criticize academic pretentions
to be able to conquer all of reality; maybe he wants to keep his model open for
infinity, so as to keep the awareness alive that any totalizing representation of
reality is lacking. Maybe, he is arguing against academic “hubris”.18
And yet, for all of the resonances between Latour’s and my Bahian
friends’ understandings of “what it takes to know”, there are striking
differences to be noted as well. These do not so much concern the propositions
to replenish one’s understandings by opening up to “the great, blooming,
buzzing confusion”, but they concern the way in which this mode of knowing is
to be practiced.

***

As stated, my friends in Salvador are engaged in an ongoing balancing act

between opening and closing their body; between allowing themselves to be
vulnerable … up to a certain point. Theirs is a risky game. Driven by the desire
to experience the best that life can bring, they risk ending up with the worst:
fear, misfortune, pain, sickness, madness, even death. It is exactly this
vulnerability, this riskiness, which I find to be absent in the work of Latour.
Latour wants to keep things open to the maximum. Time and again he
exhorts researchers to open up, and to open up more. He shows little patience
for balancing acts. Typically, closure is the weakness, the flaw of the Moderns,
or the petty concern of his critics. Sneering at the conventional thought that
research may profit from the limits set by a framework, he writes: “It is true
that frames are nice for showing: gilded, white, carved, baroque, aluminum, etc.
But have you ever met a painter who began his masterpiece by first choosing a
16 (2005: 141-156)
17 Lecomte, 2013, 473.
18 Jojada Verrips, Holisme en Hybris. Etnofoor 1, 1, 1988, pp 35-56.
frame?”19 He can take up this radical attitude, I realized in the Bahian setting,
because with Latour the act of opening up contains little risk. The reader who
follows him to that spectacular vantage point from where one can see how
being unfolds may loose some certainties along the way, but not his sanity.
This then is the odd thing with my reading of Latour. It is not that I do
not subscribe to his take on the way realities come into being and unfold — I
pretty much do. But I have difficulties identifying with a perspective that is so
oblivious to the dimensions of danger, vulnerability, risk and fear that my
interlocutors kept referring to. Certainly, the real of “reality” may well consist
of those never-ending movements along the infinite networks Latour urges us
to describe; a world where everything is in constant transformation, an
irreducible fluidity, an unstoppable streaming. Yet it takes only a few steps out
of the universe of Latour’s writings to realize that no one lives reality that way.
Not my Bahian friends; not me; and I venture to say, none of you either. For
Latour’s unrelenting relativization of all closures, of all fixities, turns being —
or at least, human being — into a nightmare.
Take for example my Bahian friend Lucas, who told me he is only able to
sleep when he has wrapped himself all up, from head to toe, in a white sheet:

Oh well, this thing of covering myself in a sheet at night … you know,

I was always very afraid of the dark. Maybe it was this thing of being
half-asleep, when your mind is no longer fully in control. So when I
was a kid, I always saw things, heard things, and that fear has stayed
with me up until today. I don’t sleep well in dark places, alone. And in
a way, to wrap myself up in sheets, all the way up to my head, protects
me from the dark. It turns everything under the sheet into my world
…

It does make sense, doesn’t it, Lucas’ observation that things and sounds loose
their well-delineated form in the dark, and can thus be taken to be something
other, anything other? That the night disintegrates well established boundaries
between what is possible and what is impossible? That the dark is bottomless?
No wonder a sensitive person like Lucas needs to protect himself from this
dark, shrink the boundless universe so as to feel safe.
The spectacle that we see from the vantage point where Latour takes us
in his writings recalls the traumatic Lacanian Real, or what religious scholars
call the mysterium fascinans et tremendum, dimensions of being which we may

19 Latour, 2005, 143.

want to explore, but which we cannot fully enter if we don’t want to go mad.
This, I would say, raises an intriguing set of questions. For what is it about our
mode of knowing that allows us to embrace Latour’s vision as a persuasive
portrayal of being, and then continue to go on living as if nothing is the matter,
as if nothing has changed? How is it possible that we follow Latour all the way
up to the point were we can face his nightmarish portrayal of being, while
comfortably sitting in our chairs, and even enjoying the fine jokes he is
cracking along the way? Why do the vistas he opens up for us do not instill an
utter sense of discomfort, despair, fear? Why do I shy away from taking an
LSD trip, or from the invasion of otherness that is spirit possession, but not
from reading Bruno Latour? The answer that readily presents itself is that this
has to do with our academic practices of knowing, with the academic modes of
address, the particular way in which we are engaged as readers.

***

Roland Barthes,20 Wolfgang Iser21 and many others have taught us that “it is
the convergence of text and reader that brings the literary work into
existence”.22 There is no reason to assume that academic texts are not subject
to the same principle. Therefore, if we want to understand how it is that we can
embrace Latour’s portrayal of reality as persuasive, and yet go on living our
lives as if nothing has changed, then we need to attend to the act of reading. A
brief exposition of my own reading-experiences of Latour’s work, last summer
in Salvador, may be illuminating here.
I confess, Latour is no easy read for me. In Bahia, which must be one of
the noisiest places on earth, I often had to use earplugs to arrive at the kind of
concentration that his texts require. There must be no one around — nothing
must distract me. To enter Latour, one might say, I had to leave Bahia behind.
Once I find myself inside the universe of his text, I find myself in Academia.
From the footnotes to the references; from the witty little jokes to the lay out
of the printed text; from my underlining of sentences to the turning of the
pages; the practice of reading Latour brings me back to familiar terrain.
Nothing is ever really strange or radically other in this world — nowhere close
to the baffling, open-ended strangeness of a possession ceremony in a
Candomblé temple, for instance. Or to the strangeness of being invaded by fear

20 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
21 Wolfgang Iser, The Reading Process: a Phenomenological Approach. New Literary History,
3, 2, 1972, pp 279-299.
22 Iser, 1972, 279.
without being able to say what it is that is so frightening. Nothing is strange,
because in the world in which I sojourn when reading Bruno Latour the
comforting signs of a secure and familiar world are always in sight. Year, page
number, footnote, heading, subheading. Stretches of text may be opaque or
impenetrable, but they are never nightmarish. Insights may be brilliant, they
are never devastating.
This capacity of the text to keep me in my academic comfort zone is
reinforced by the mind-work I have to perform reading Latour. As an
anthropologist, with no thorough philosophical training, I have no choice but
to mobilize all of my intellectual capacities so as to stay attuned to the
development of the argument, to follow the author along, sentence by sentence,
paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. Reading Latour “I’m all head”, as
the expression goes. Against all phenomenological insights that there is no
such possibility of being “all head”, I can only observe that all of my
consciousness is up there under my skull, trying to process the abstractions,
working hard to make something out of the complicated twists of the
arguments. Wherever Latour is taking me on the level of ideas, at this level, the
level of reading, I’m deeply in academia: tied to its conventions of world
making; my body, emotions and affects numbed; “all head”.
And then there is the particular pleasure-economy of the universe of the
text. The rewards that keep me going are the moments where I sense that I’ve
grasped the argument. “Aha, so this is what he wants to argue!” These
moments allow for a pleasant sense of mastery, of being in control. Even where
Latour is arguing against the possibility of such mastery, the act of reading
rewards me with exactly that sense of “seizing it”, of “holding it firm” that the
verb “to grasp” connotes. Sure, I get lost every now and then, but I’ve learned
that if only I read on there’ll be that moment of regaining control again.
So how am I being engaged as a reader? I’d say the Latourian text takes
me out of the world and locks me up in the familiar environment of academia.
It keeps me in my head. It constantly replaces my sense of not knowing with a
sense of being in the know. Even when the very argument leads to an
understanding that reality exceeds all knowing, the act of reading produces the
satisfaction of having grasped just that. These then might well be the
balancing acts the readers of Latour perform to make it possible to access the
reality he holds out to us without going mad. What we access intellectually,
gets affectively neutralized in the act of reading. We don’t go there all the way.
We don’t give ourselves over to the reality the philosopher has created, with
all of our mindful bodies or embodied minds. We have our own white sheets
under which to hide. And it is only thus, I would suggest, that we are able to
follow Latour into the maddening reality he describes.

***

I have suggested that mystical roads to knowledge and Latour’s

anthropological inquiries converge in the intuition that meaning does not
exhaust being. This awareness of the limits of human sense-making has
instigated mystics to search for the plenitude of the Divine in experiences that
lie beyond what can be said, thought and imagined. For Bruno Latour, and
researchers inspired by his work, it has triggered attempts to design what
some have called a “post-human” perspective on being: 23 a “flat” ontology,
which no longer privileges the human species (and hence human modes of
sense-making), but puts humans and nonhumans on equal par as actors in a
network. As different as these quests for knowledge may be, both seem to be
driven by a desire to open up consciousness for the-rest-of-what-is: to create an
awareness of the infinite reality surplus that is produced by the closure that
every single signifying act implies; to access and explore that which has to be
repressed and shut out, silenced and tabooed for human constructions of reality
to make sense; and to thus arrive at a more all-encompassing awareness of
being, a deeper insight, of more profound way of knowing.
I would like to believe that this convergence is a sign that the radical
separation between mystical and scientific ways of knowing, which Michel de
Certeau traced back to the late 16th century, may be open for negotiation. De
Certeau documented how Academia invented “mysticism” as a separate
category of truth- seeking, qualifying it first as “extraordinary”, then as
“abnormal”, and soon as “delusive” and “occult”. 24 As Brammer succinctly
phrased it: “Situated in the marginal, the unsayable, the unreal, or the
unconscious, the locus of the mystical became the elsewhere according to which
science defined itself by what it is not”.25 Unsurprisingly, then, there is still a
derogatory sound to the adjective “mystical” when used in academic settings.26

23 For example, Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think. Toward an Anthropology Beyond the
Human (Berkely: University of California Press, 2013).
24 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1992).

25 Brammer, 1992, 28.
26 The hesitant reception of the work of George Bataille in academia, frequently compared

with a mystical mode of understanding, is a case in point. Whereas Bataille’s work is often
addressed in academic writing, his insights are rarely allowed to do their disruptive work in
the analysis as such. “Bataille locates in limit-experiences such as sacrifice, eroticism, and
One can study mysticism as a phenomenon; one can ponder and explain its
stubborn attempts to move “into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive
intellect”;27 but one cannot take serious its truth claims, let alone embrace it as
a form of knowing that might actually add something to our knowledge
practices. 28
Now some may want to argue that the strength of the academy is that it
allows for intellectual exercises and abstract thinking: that it is our cool and
levelheaded analysis that has brought us such valuable insights and
understandings. And that we might leave it up to the artists, poets, mystics and
madmen to close in on the “great, blooming, buzzing confusion” and explore
alternative, more experiential modes of knowing. However, to sign up for this
division of labor — “the thinking is with us, the experiencing is with them”—
is to stick to a hopelessly inadequate portrayal of what the mystics and
academics actually do. Moreover, it is to miss out on the opportunity to arrive
at what Michael Jackson and Albert Piette call an “existential anthropology”, a
discipline that seeks to “illuminate life as lived, rather than exploit the facts of
experience as mere grist for some intellectual mill”. 29 Let me by way of
conclusion elaborate this latter point.
An anthropology that wants to speak of “life as lived” cannot afford to
ignore how the “great, blooming, buzzing confusion” plays itself out in human
lives. It needs to devise modes of report that are more welcoming to this
presence, showing how it may both enrich and mess up our lives. I think it is
fair to say that anthropology, more than any other discipline in the social
sciences and humanities, has acknowledged this necessity. And yet, being an

torture the instruments of an intolerable ecstasy he calls sacred. This immediate sacred
experience rejects outside of itself any and all disciplinary forms of archival codifications —
in short, any possibility of academization. For Bataille, the sacred is essentially and even
vehemently nonacademic. How is a scholarly community ostensibly devoted to the second or
third-order study of sacred things to approach such a figure?” Rocco Gangle, Review of
Jeremy Biles “Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form”, Journal of the
American Academy of Religion, 80, 4, 2012:1122-1125. For a discussion directly relevant to
anthropology, see Katherine P. Ewing, Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and
the Temptation to Believe. American Anthropologist, Volume 96, 3, 1994, 571—583.
27 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences: a Study in Human Nature (Seven

Treasure Publications, 2009), 206.

28 Intriguingly, my study of Bahian candomblé has taught me that many of these mystics are

as resistant to academic knowledge practices, and perform their part in keeping up the divide.
They dismiss words and dialogues as suitable vehicles for the deep knowledge they are after,
arguing that discursivity brings you nowhere closer to “the mysteries”, as words keep you
locked up in what is already known. For an elaboration of candomblé attitudes vis à vis
academic researchers, see van de Port, 2011.
29 Introduction to this volume.
academic discipline, courting recognition and approval from other academics
(not to mention funding agencies), there are strong pressures to weed the
blooming and dim the buzzing. To sketch the issue in John Law’s felicitous
phrasing,

… parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories

and statistics, but other parts are not, or if they are, they are
distorted into clarity … if much of the world is vague, diffuse or
unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct,
changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t have much of a pattern at all,
then where does this leave social science? How might we catch some
of the realities we are currently missing?30

It seems to me that one of the responses to this dillema one finds in current
anthropology is the favoring of opening moves over acts of closure. Clearly, the
interest in the work of Bruno Latour does not come out of the blue: Latour is as
much an exponent of the anthropological search for re-openings, as an
instigator of it. Ever more frequent, and ever louder, are calls to replace the
metaphor of the boundary — dismissed as “one of the least subtle in the social
science repertoire”31 — with metaphors of the open-ended network. There are
suggestions to stop thinking of theory as a solid framework, capable to impose
its particular “sense” on the world and alternatively take it to be “an adaptable,
open repository” of sensitizing concepts and ideas, which help the researcher to
follow reality as it unfolds.32 The massive anthropological interest in bodies,
embodiment and phenomenology is at least partially inspired by the idea to
“collapse dualities” 33 such as body-mind, subject-object, structure-practice,
which again signals the wish do free reality from the discrete knowledge
objects into which it had been stored. At yet another level, the current
anthropological celebration of opening moves comes to the fore in instructions
for researchers to be “transparent” about their subjective presence in the
production of knowledge; in the promotion of interdisciplinarity; and in the
exploration of alternative, less logo-centric media for scientific report. David

30 John Law, After Method. Mess in Social Science Research (London: Routledge, 2004), 2.

31 Marilyn Strathern, Cutting the Network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, 3,
1996, p 520.
32 Annemarie Mol, Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions. Kölner

Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 50, 1, 2010, pp 253-269

33 Thomas Csordas, 1990, Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethos 18, 1, 1990,

pp 5-47.
MacDougall’s ruminations on the possibilities of a visual anthropology offer a
clear example of the latter. Stressing the capacity of moving images to
transport a spectator to the elsewhere depicted on the screen, he argues that
visual modes of communication allow for a mode of knowing that is less bound
by “meaning” and brings the spectator closer to “being”. Which, according to
him, helps to explain the academic resistance to visual media:

It is the fear of giving ourselves unconditionally to what we see. It

seems to me that this fear is allied to our fear of abandoning the
protection of conceptual thought, which screens us from a world that
might otherwise consume our consciousness.34

Having long advocated such opening moves, I delight in these new modes of
thinking, the vistas they disclose and the experimentations they allow for. I do,
however, regret that laudable pleas for opening up reified notions and concepts
are frequently building themselves up against all acts of closure. In current
debates there is an ill-concealed normativity that qualifies boundary making as
being somehow “bad”; meaning as somehow “artificial”, “unreal” or
“imprisoning”; symbolization as somehow “not getting there”; mediation as
somehow standing in the way for encounters with the im-mediate. William
Mazzarella coined this tendency “neo-vitalist”, and showed himself to be
critically of it, arguing that “by romanticizing the emergent and the immediate,
this neo-vitalist position tends too briskly to dismiss given social formations as
always already foreclosed”.35
In line with Mazzarella’s critique, I have sought to show that forms of
“closure” always accompany the moves of opening up — and I have suggested
that this is as much the case with the people we study as with ourselves. As
Clifford Geertz once wrote, the acts of closure by which human sense making
operates are “not additive to human existence but constitutive of it”.36 Mindful
of the lessons of Bruno Latour, we might want to substitute “constitutive” for
“co-constitutive”. But other than that, the reminder that ‘… the thing we seem
least able to tolerate is a threat to our powers of conception, a suggestion that our ability to

34 David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnogrpahy and the Senses (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006), 8.
35 William Mazarella, Affect: What is it Good For? In: Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enchantments of

Modernity: Empire, Nation Globalization (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009), 348.

36 Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory. Culture, Power and the Acting Subject. (Duke

University Press, 2006), 119.

create, grasp, and use symbols may fail’ is best not forgotten.37 We should therefore
resist the temptation to pit “the plenitude of being” against “the limitations of
meaning”. For an existential anthropology, which studies human modes of
being in the world, it might be more fruitful to take the irresolvable tension
between the quest for meaning and the ungraspability of being as a starting
point for research. We might then show how people’s actions are endless
balancing acts, seeking to calibrate the dangers and pleasures of “letting the
world in” or “shutting the world out”. As Michael Jackson put it in the
introduction to this volume, an existential anthropology might explore “the
tension and dialectic between immediate and mediated experience, reducing
reality neither to some purely sensible mode of being nor to the theoretical
language with which we render existence comprehensible”.38 It does not invest
in grand, absolutist statements, but in a description of the endless meddling
and tinkering39 and making-do that I have been discussing in this essay. It is
only because the capoeira player has closed his body that he is able to risk the
more daring performance. It is only because the reader of Latour finds herself
enclosed in the safety cage of Academia that she can enter his portrayal of
being in the act of reading. And when I stumbled into that stationery store on
the Rua Aurea in Lisbon, I bought a box of color pencils, hoping a performance
of normality might restore a framework that had just disintegrated. That is
indeed, how lives are lived.

37 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 99.
38 For a booklength pondering of such calibrating acts, see Michael Jackson, Between One and
One Another (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
39 I borrow this apt image of ‘tinkering’ from my colleague Annemarie Mol.