Etymology And Magic Yaskas Nirukta Flatos Cratylus And Riddle Of Semanticetymologies

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

Page 20

184
Johannes Bronkhorst
it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature." The Law of Similarity he described as the principle "that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause", the Law of Contact or Contagion as the principle "that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed" (p. 14). However, "the primitive magician... never reflects on the abstract principles involved in his actions. With him... logic is implicit, not explicit": "he tacitly assumes that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions" (p. 15).
Tylor and Frazer have frequently been criticized by more recent anthropologists." "Perhaps one of the most devastating criticisms levelled against Tylor (that is equally appropriate to Frazer) is his never posing the question why primitives would mistake ideal connections for real ones in one domain when they do not do so in their other activities. As Evans-Pritchard puts it- and in this he and Malinowski stand together: The error here was in not recognizing that the associations are social and not psychological stereotypes, and that they occur therefore only when evoked in specific ritual situations, which are also of limited duration..."56
Frazer's 'laws', too, have been severely criticized. Beattie, for example, observed (1964: 206): "Nobody in their senses could possibly believe that all things that share some common quality, and all things that have once been in contact, are continually affecting one another;
55 Cp. Douglas, 1978. Ackerman (1998: 129) observes: "By the late 1960s the reputation[...] of Frazer [was] about as low as [it] could be. Whenever an anthropol ogist interested in the history of the idea of "primitive' religion bothered to consider Frazer, he was regarded as wholly lacking in redeeming intellectual value, the very model of how not to do anthropology or think about religion".
56 Tambiah, 1990: 51, with a quotation from Evans-Pritchard, 1933: 29.
Etymology and Magic
185
in a world so conceived almost everything would all the time he affecting almost everything else, and all would be chaos. Tambiah (1968: 37) remarked, similarly: "... Frazer's principles... lead to absurd inferences about the logic of magic."
Here it is to be recalled that Frazer did not himself subscribe to this conception of the world. Quite on the contrary, he attributed it to those who practise and believe in magic. Frazer's critics are no doubt right in thinking that most magicians and their followers do not entertain such a conception, but saying that "nobody in their senses could possibly believe" in it certainly goes too far. We have seen that a respectable school of philosophy, Neoplatonism, adhered to ideas very similar to those formulated by Frazer, and was capable of inspiring thinkers many centuries later. Indeed, recent research suggests that Frazer may have formulated his theories under the direct or indirect influence of Renaissance thought." In fact, our preceding exposition has shown that also those who tried to give a rational explanation, and justification, of the use of etymologies arrived at views not dissimilar to the ones which Frazer ascribed to his "primitives". While many anthropologists have, no doubt rightly, criticized Frazer for underestimating the amount of common sense in the people he describes, no one seems to have raised the equally valid criticism that he overestimated their desire, or tendency, to create rational systems of thought.
It is of course possible to maintain that Frazer's classification, as classification, leaves to be desired. This is John Skorupski's position, who in his Symbol and Theory (1976) proposes instead the following modified classification: symbolic identification and contagious trans
57 See further Skorupski, 1976: 138 f.
58 Similar ideas existed in China, too: see Henderson, 1984: ch. 1 ("Correlative thought in early China").
Cp. Hanegraaff, 1998: 266: "Frazer's sympathetic magic can be divided into homeopathic (imitative, mimetic) and contagious magic: a distinction which may well have been taken straight from Tylor's Researches who, in turn, could have found it in the great compendium of Renaissance magic: Agrippa's De occulta philosophia" and ibid. n. 47: "Tylor repeatedly quotes Agrippa in Primitive Culture"