Once Upon a Time

As I begin this blog, I have just finished reading Tomoko Masuzawa’s In Search of Dreamtime, The Quest for the Origin of Religion. So, what better place to begin than on origins.

Masuzawa wonders at the way in which the modern study of religion has rejected the nineteenth century obsession with origins as an explanation of religion, often violently denying the possibility of ever grasping the ‘origin’. Alongside this rejection of intellectual, or scientific, or literal origins, however, Masuzawa notes that the thing that has no origin, religion, or more correctly, myth, is itself defined by its focus on origins (at least in Eliade’s reading of myths). So while the academic purifies themselves from the taint of origins, the people the academic is studying, the religious, or the myth makers, are seen to be obsessed by origins.

In the book Masuzawa presents a series of close readings of the work of Durkheim, Muller and in particular Freud, showing that, for each author, their particular obsession with origins is not, in fact, all that it seems. In each case the origin that is identified is not in fact the real origin of religion, it is a gap, a fiction, a dream, a transference of the sign. The book is highly theoretical and written in a very clever and sophisticated analytic language. Essentially, however, the origin of religion, in the writing of each author is itself presented as a kind of myth, the home of ‘origins’, that exists not in historical time, but in the time of once upon a time.

As I was reflecting on this work, and the ideas that were circulating throughout Masuzawa’s book, my mind kept coming back to the idea of time and of origins as a form of explanation. Post modernism, we are told, saw the death of the grand narrative, the idea of a teleological understanding of history, or progress. As such it must also have seen the death of origins, playing, as Lyotard puts it, in the ruins of history, but ruins that never were a building, and never were built, that had no origin. Without progress there is no end, and likewise, no place to start, no origin worth mentioning.

One area where this is very apparent in today’s world is in the whole field of identity politics. The emphasis on ‘identity’ sits almost at odds with the concept of ‘origins’. Identity is about the hear and now, about my feelings, my imminent response to my sense of being. It is entirely about the present, even to the point of rejecting, and wanting to overturn, history. This is glaringly obvious in terms of Trans identity, which points to a reality that is felt by the individual at a fundamental, essentialist, level, to the point that origins, sex at birth, has to be denied and even destroyed, often with a violence or vehemence that it terrifying to the observer. The same principle, however, can be seen in all identity politics, the felt reality of the now always trumps any critical view of the past, and origins become irrelevant in the play of self-construction.

The point, however, is not that there are no ‘origins’ in identity politics. It is the rejection of origins in terms of historical narrative time that is at question here, origins in terms of the structures imposed on the individual by their past, by history, by society. Identity is found in a different, much deeper, and much more personal form of ‘origin’, what it is to be fundamentally the self, the person I am today. Narrative is still essential, but the starting point is not biology, or sociology, or even history, it is not who I was, it is much more meaningful, it is who I am, in the here and now, and in my very being, a more fundamental kind of origin, the origin of my sense of self.

Of course, there is far more to identity politics than the simple denial of origins, and this is a topic that I will inevitably come back to time and time again within this blog.

In the book that I am just completing, on the academic appropriation of the Dogon from Mali in western thought, I end the final chapter by noting that my approach has been rigorously historical. I track the ‘history’ of the anthropological discourse on the Dogon, the history of the art historical discourse on the Dogon, the history of the popular appropriation of the Dogon and the history of the tourist discourse on the Dogon. In doing this, however, I have noted, throughout the text, the importance of myth, and narrative, to the Dogon themselves, or perhaps more accurately to those who write about the Dogon. I ask therefore whether even to write a history of the appropriation of the Dogon in western thought is itself an appropriation, the use of western analytic methods (history) to represent a people who do not think in those analytic frames about themselves and their world. I ask what a mythic presentation of the Dogon, as presented by the Dogon, might actually look like.

In asking this, however, I find myself back inside Masuzawa’s somewhat circular argument. Myth, in Masuzawa’s perspective, and that of Eliade before her, is all about origins. Western academic writing rejects the mythic narrative of origins, even perhaps denying the validity of such analysis in disciplines such as post-colonial studies. And yet history, which must be about origins if it is about anything, is the western analytic frame that I am seeking to reject in place of mythic reflection. Is this any more than rejecting one statement of origins, one form of myth, for another statement of origins, another form of myth? Or is it, perhaps, recognising that all forms of academic analysis, all forms of explanation, are ultimately little more than once upon a time?

And so I begin: Once upon a time…