Department of social anthropology seminar with Giovanni da Col

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Giovanni da Col from the Department of Social Anthropology at University of Cambridge. He will present the following paper:

"The Way of the Begu: Bullshitting and the Opacity of Interiority in Tibetan Borderlands"


Abstract:

The bullshitter...does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Homo non intelligendo fit omnia. Giambattista Vico (1654), “Corollari d’intorno a tropi, mostri e trasformazioni poetiche”. In La Scienza Nuova. II, I.

In Ancient Greece, the idiotes were the ones who refrained from seriously engaging with the public structures of the polis and directed their concerns only towards the oikos, the household and their ‘private’ domain, an inscrutable yet qualified ‘interior’ life. The cognate verb is idioteuein, “to occupy a private station”. This ‘idiotic’ stance resonates with Tibetan conceptions of personhood that highlight an opacity of interiority as a native form of epistemology and perceptual regime. Opacity is not a riddle to be deciphered, but an essential element of Tibetan socio-cosmologies, their Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy, a physical constant of the Tibetan moral universe. There is no better exemplary of such opacity than the mysterious figure of the begu, a super mana-term (with no corresponding spelling or script) employed in SW China’s Tibetan borderlands to designate a man capable of employing jokes, humour, hyperbole and inauthentic narratives to challenge institutional domains and categorical determination for eliciting social vitality and gathering consensus. Whilst malicious gossip (Tib. mi kha) is the witchcraft of everyday life and aims to drain and limit a person’s fortune, efficacy and vitality, the activity of the begu (begu rgyab) generates vitality over truth. The begu is neither an ‘ironic’, ‘cynical’ character or a classic ‘trickster’ but resists all determinations, with sometimes the only function to equivocate conceptual assumptions and displaying the opaque and ‘idiotic’ topology of Tibetan personhood which implies a constitutive incoherence between private and public ‘beliefs’, inside and outside, and a pivotal and valued motility of subjecthood. Where Mauss and Radcliffe-Brown explored the forms of relatedness emerging from humor and jokes, this paper shall inquire into the “bullshitting relationships” emerging from three very different figures of begu active in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in NW Yunnan (China): 1) the former Prefecture Governor and inventor of China’s official Shangri-la, author of an hyperbolic manifesto titled Xian ge li la lun or ‘The theory of Shangri-la’; 2) a Tibetan hunter, hit by the revengeful curse (gnod pa) of the mountain god Khawa Karpo and converted into an environmental activist and seeker of the location of the ‘original’ Shangri-la; 3) a fake aspiring ‘Living Buddha’ roaming over the region carrying a portfolio of his accomplishments and miracles while attempting to gain fame through the association with the cult of the sacred mountain.

Bionote
Giovanni da Col is Research Associate at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge and currently on a writing Research Fellowship at the Centro Incontri Umani in Ascona (Switzerland). He has conducted fieldwork on luck, events, spiritual kinship, and witchcraft among Tibetans communities in Northwest Yunnan. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory and two book series (Masterclass and Classics in Ethnographic Theory); and author of several peer-review articles while being the editor of collections such as the inaugural themed issue of HAU, titled Archaeologies of Kin(g)ship (with Stephane Gros); the 2012 Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute titled The Return to Hospitality: Strangers, Guests and other Ambiguous encounters (with Matei Candea); the co-editor (with Caroline Humphrey) of two special issue of Social Analysis in 2012 titled Cosmologies of fortune: luck, vitality and uncontrolled relatedness and The Times of Fortune: Contingency, Moral Agency and the Anticipation of the Future. He is currently editing another collection titled Cosmopolitics of the invisible: spirit worlds and States of nature on China’s frontiers. Giovanni is also active as a travel writer in Italy: his first book, The Invisible Side of Paradise: Pilgrimages on Tibetan Borderlands has been released in 2009 by Egon Press and a second one, Tibetan Shadows (Ombre Tibetane), is forthcoming with Mondadori Electa Press.

All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee