The Magical Power of Words

Wearing powerful words and objects: healing prosthetics

“…Tambiah has observed, 'The Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names' and this may account, too, for the frequency of sequences of divine names in amulets. 53 The Gospel proceeds to tell of Christ's activities as a miracleworker: this is the Gospel in which Christ 'raiseth Lazarus', heals a blind man and multiplies barley loaves and fish. Absolute belief in the power of the Word to perform miracles is presented by the Gospel of John as a prerequisite for would-be healers as well as sufferers:…”

Das Encruzilhadas: As Categorias Tempo-Espaço em Rituais e Cosmologias

“…É recorrente, em contextos rituais, a presença de conhecimentos secretos, ou o uso de linguagens codificadas não para o grande público, e sim para os especialistas rituais (Tambiah 1968), i.e., conteúdos não acessíveis a todos os membros do grupo. No caso Temne (Shaw 2002:78-79), isso se dá na presença e no monopólio dos muçulmanos ao manejar certas práticas rituais de proteção vistas como mais eficazes.…”

The clash of ontologies and the problems of translation and mutual intelligibility

“…In my view, a large group of problems was not solved but radically lessened when the anthropologists moved away from the supposition that the beliefs and behavior that puzzled them reflected assumptions about causality, to an alternative set of questions to do with felicity and appropriateness. And one such anthropologist, Stanley Tambiah, was certainly inspired to do so by his reading of the philosopher J. L. Austin's distinction between different speech acts (Tambiah 1968(Tambiah , 1973. The efficacy/ felicity distinction can, in other words, be brought to bear to relocate the question of intelligibility to give it a far more manageable, if still to be sure not unproblematic, twist.…”