Local Knowledge

COMMON SENSE AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM When we say someone shows common sense we mean to suggest more than that he is just using his eyes and ears, but is, as we say, keeping them open, using them judiciously, intelligently, perceptively, reflectively, or trying to, and that he is capable of coping with everyday problems in an everyday way with some effectiveness. And when we say he lacks common sense we mean not that he is retarded, that he fails to grasp the fact that rain wets or fire burns, but that he bungles the everyday problems life throws up for him : he leaves his house on a cloudy day without an umbrella; his life is a series of scorchings he should have has the wit not merely to avoid but not to have stirred the flames for in the first place. …it is as part of this tissue of common-sense assumptions, not of some primary metaphysics, that the conception of witchcraft takes on its meaning and has its force. For all the talk about its flying about in the night like a firefly, witchcraft does not celebrate an unseen order, it certifies a seen one… … thus, if a man contracts leprosy it is attributed to witchcraft only if there is no incest in the family, for “everyone knows” that incest causes leprosy. Adultery, too, causes misfortune. A man may be killed in war or hunting as a result of his wife’s infidelities. Before going to war or out to hunt, a man, as is only sensible, will often demand that his wife divulge the names of her lovers. If she says truthfully, that she has none and he dies anyway, then it must have been witchcraft – unless, of course, he has done something else obviously foolish. Similarly, ignorance, stupidity, or incompetence, culturally defined, are quite sufficient causes of failure in Zande eyes. If, in examining his cracked pot, the potter does in fact find a stone, he stops muttering about witchcraft and starts muttering about his own negligence – instead, that is, of merely assuming that witchcraft was responsible for the stone’s being there. And when an inexperienced potter’s pot cracks it is put down, as seems only reasonable, to his inexperience, not to some ontological kink in reality. ART AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM Linear precision, [Robert Faris] Thomson says, the sheer clarity of line, is a major concern of Yoruba carvers, as it is of those who assess the carvers’ work, and the vocabulary of linear qualities, which the Yoruba use colloquially and across a range of concerns far broader than sculpture, is nuanced and extensive. It is not just their statues, pots, and so on that Yoruba incise with lines: they do the same with their faces. Line, of varying depth, direction, and length, sliced into their cheeks and left to scar over, serves as a means of lineage identification, personal allure, and status expression; and the terminology of the sculptor and of the cicatrix specialist – “cuts” distinguished from “slashes,” and “digs” or “claws” from “splittings open” – parallel one another in exact precision. But there is more to it than this. The Yoruba associate line with civilization: “This country has become civilized,” literally means, in Yoruba, “this earth has lines upon its face”… … This realization, that to study an art form is to explore a sensibility, that such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and that the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep, leads away not only from the view that aesthetic power is a grandiloquence for the pleasures of craft. It leads away also from the so-called functionalist view that has most often been opposed to it: that is, that words of art are elaborate mechanisms for defining social relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening social values.