Henry Imler October 15th, 2006

The chapter in the latter half of Conjuring Culture I found the most interesting was the chapter on Wisdom. The beginning question of the chapter, “What is the relationship between African, American and European elements in this [Black folk tradition] experience?” intrigued me. The idea of wisdom literature as not being very concerned with historical narration is relatively new to me. It is a very different way of looking at the world. I have always employed the narrow scope of viewing things either through the historical narrative or the abstract philosophical lens. Thus the ethos and cosmos would always remain separate. I found the following quote to sum up the idea of wisdom:

“Wisdom fulfills one of religions fundamental functions which is to bind together ethos and cosmos, the sphere of action and the sphere of the world. It does not do this by demonstrating that this conjunction is given in things, nor by demanding that it be produced by our action. Rather it joins ethos and cosmos at the very point of their discordance: in suffering and more precisely, in unjust suffering. Wisdom does not teach us how to avoid suffering, or how magically to deny it… [but] how to endure, how to suffer suffering.”

I found a similar truism in Dixon’s problem with the either/or distinctions that are used so commonly in the West. In binary opposition there is always a preferred element. When the least preferred element is attached to actual groups of humans, it leads to a dehumanization of the loosing group, which in turn usually leads to atrocities. It was very reminiscent of Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities by Albert Bandura. What I liked the most was that the categories themselves are not the problem, but the either/or distinction was the problem. Adopting a both/and approach will allow one to maintain distinctions which really appear to be there that does not result in atrocities and injustice.

I also found the idea in the latter part of the chapter, the idea of High John the Conqueror, to be a fascinatingly creative construct.

“He was a wisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and a song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low, but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing drum. The black folds had an irresistible impulse to laugh.”

I found a curious resemblance to the “whisper of a hope putting on flesh” with the way The Gospel of John describes the Word becoming flesh. High John served to sow the seeds of hope in the midst of their suffering and to conjure their freedom. Once again this concept was expressed most clearly in the following quotation:

“My mama told me, and I know that she would not mislead me, how High John Conqueror helped us out. He had done teached the black folks so they knowed a hundred years ahead of time that freedom was coming. Long before the white folks knowed anything about it at all… A heap sees, but a few knows. ‘Course the war was a lot of help, but how comes the war took place? They think they knows, but they don’t. John the Conqueror had done put it in the white folks to give us our freedom, that’s what. Old Massa fought against it, but us could have told him that is wasn‘t no use. Freedom just had to come. The time set aside for it was there. That war was just a sign and a symbol of the thing.”

That passage embodies all that Smith has set up in chapter five. It displays the Monkey-Lion dueling with the Monkey employing “wit over force” to accomplish his aims. The Monkey/John is not deceitful, but in his struggle over Old Massa/Lion he has to use his wit to turn the tables and bring about justice.

• Christianity , Religion
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