Etymology And Magic Yaskas Nirukta Flatos Cratylus And Riddle Of Semanticetymologies

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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Johannes Bronkhorst
fer. The importance of identification in the first of these two is emphasized: "The symbol in some sense is, or participates in, the reality it represents." (Skorupski, 1976: 144). It is not difficult to see that this modified classification, and in particular the symbolic identification which Skorupski recognizes in a part of so-called magical acts, are as useful as Frazer's Law of Similarity, if not more so, to make sense of etymologies. David Freedberg, speaking about images in particular. maintains that many theories, from Frazer's laws of similarity and contagion to more contemporary notions of sympathy, identification. symbolic linkage, association of ideas, evocative resonance of symbols. or what have you, assume the disjunction between the symbol and the symbolized between representation and reality. But this is precisely what is not given at the level of our emotional and cognitive response to images. Hence he says (Freedberg, 1989: 436): "we will only come to understand response if we acknowledge more fully the ways in which the disjunction... lapses when we stand in the presence of images." Once again it is possible without difficulty to transfer this to the understanding of semantic etymologies.
A more serious criticism would be to doubt the belief of the actors in the efficacy of magical acts. Gilbert Lewis puts it as follows (1994: 568): "Take, for example, sorcery as an example of magical belief. If we assume a man's true and literal belief in his sorcery, then either violence or the sorcery will seem to be ways to harm his enemy. The sorcery might substitute for the violence. But if we slacken the certainty of his belief. impute less of the literal to his statement, then his sorcery action may become that much more of an act which stands for something violent he would like to do but which he does not wholly dare, and perhaps not really desire, to carry out. It is a substitute, but a partial one. And it becomes in part symbolic to the man himself." This position, which seems to be representative of the majority of present
As presented in Sharf, 1999; 85, Sharf's own concern is primarily with Buddhist relics, which are "for all intents and purposes, formless" and do not represent or signify anything. For a presentation of the differences between Freedberg's and Skorupski's positions, see Freedberg, 1989: 274 T
Etymology and Magic
day thinkers in this domain, implies for homeopathic magic that its actors do not really think that similar things are related to each other. A parallelism with semantic etymologies is hard to maintain in this
case.
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Lewis expresses himself carefully in the above passage ("it becomes in part symbolic to the man himself") and further softens down his position in the next paragraph. He does not totally reject the idea that perhaps some practitioners of magic sometimes believe that there is after all some kind of connection between the substitute and the object it represents. For an analysis of the situation, we must consider S.J. Tambiah's Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality (1990). After discussing Tylor and Frazer, Tambiah turns to Malinowski's views on magic, and observes (p. 73):
Malinowski had two specific insights into the internal structure and constitution of Trobriand rites. The first was that they exploited simultaneously both words and acts, both speech and the manipulation of objects and substances, thereby posing the problem of the logic of use of multiple media in ritual for his successors to ponder over. Secondly his so-called 'ethnographic theory of the magical word' proposed some illuminating insights which foreshadowed and anticipated in England Austin's "linguistic philosophical notions of performative force carried by speech acts, that is, how speech acts created both illocutionary and perlocutionary effects by virtue of being conventional acts; and in this Country [= U.S.A., JB, Kenneth Burke's discussion of the 'rhetoric of motives".
Yet Tambiah is not completely happy with Malinowski's position. Observing that "it would seem that we cannot yet completely exorcize the ghosts of Tylor and Frazer", he concedes that magic has a dual structure (p. 82-83):
On the one hand, it seems to imitate the logic of technical/technological action that seeks to transform nature or the world of natural things and manifestations. On the other hand, its structure is also transparently rhetorical and performative (in that it consists of acts to create effects on human actors according to accepted social conventions). Tylor and Frazer fastened exclusively on the first equation
Lewis, 1994: 568: "People must differ individually in how they view the truth of what they assert in common with others in their community... Emotion and feeling as well as reason enter into the link between assertion and conviction..."