2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 537–548

BOOK SYMPOSIUM

The blending power of things

Pierre Lemonnier, CNRS, Aix Marseille University

Response to Hau Book Symposium on Lemonnier, Pierre. 2012.

Mundane objects: Materiality and non-verbal communication. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

An amazing thing about the anthropology of material culture is that it is constantly

assembling promising theories and utopias summarized in similarly exciting for-
mulas, references to great ancestors, fierce disputes and misunderstandings, and,
hopefully, painstaking fieldwork. Such is the diversity of approaches to objects and
techniques that an agreement on the very topic, questions, and methods to broach
has yet to be reached. It is no surprise, then, that, as an ensemble, the reviews of my
book so kindly offered by my colleagues illustrate that point. Besides summarizing
its basic propositions and flaws, they so cleverly bridge it to their own (varied!)
interests that I almost feel justified in having added one more catch-all expression
to the debate: perissological resonator. Needless to say, I will content myself here
with clarifying this term and the role of the objects to which it refers, together with
discussing some objections and developments introduced by the reviewers.

Perisso-what?
Without pertinent field observations, formulas are merely another way to put the
cart before the horse. In itself, uttering the magical words “agency,” “affordance,”
“mapping,” or “materiality” does not explain anything. On the other hand, some
dense formulations fit with one’s ethnography and questions. Such is the case with
Mauss’ remark that “technical actions, physical actions, magicoreligious actions
are confused for the actor” (Mauss [1934] 2006: 82), which fits my description of
Ankave people preparing eel traps, an activity in which separating “technique” from

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Pierre Lemonnier.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.038
 Pierre Lemonnier 538

“aesthetic,” “ritual,” or “myth” would be an anthropological nonsense. Likewise,

Hutchins’ notion of “material anchors for conceptual blends” (2005), Tuzin’s paper
on the ability of some objects to refer to “ineffable significances” (2002: 4), and
Keane’s “bundle of attributes” (2003) led me to explore why an Ankave mortuary
drum-beating ceremony is a way to acknowledge, without words, that maternal kin
are disguised killers and cannibals with whom one had better interact peacefully.
I have hypothesized that this “nonpropositional statement”, or rather “nonver-
bal statement”—a term I will persist in using in the sense of Forge (1970: 288)
because I mean just what the Random House unabridged dictionary says (“the com-
munication of an idea, position, mood or the like through something other than
words”)—results from the particular way and context in which the Ankave make
and physically use the drum. I have speculated that this particular object makes
people share a same set of ideas, social relations, and practices by bringing into play
multisensorial references (“acts of evocation,” writes Ballard) to various domains
of their life. This object—not only its making, components, materials, construc-
tion (as Küchler rightly stresses), but also its myth of origin, physical usage, and so
on—is detailed in the book. I ignore the precise cognitive processes in question, but
only ask an Ankave why s/he is taking part in a songen night drum-beating ritual
and you will hear about most or all of the contexts, social relations, objects, physi-
cal manipulation, ambulation, and so on, that converge at that time and make the
drums key elements of people’s “connectivity of thought” (Küchler). At that stage,
an Ankave drum (or Baruya fence, model classic car, etc.) is a sort of resonator. But
why add “perissological,” that “horrible” word (Latour), and why not keep “what
communication theorists used to call redundancy” (Ingold)?
Perissology is a useful pleonasm for things that in various domains or registers
reinforce a message. “Various” is crucial. Whereas redundancy can be limited to the
use of more or less identical doubles (e.g. all Anga groups have received similar yet
different bone-made artifacts used to pierce the nasal septum of the boys, and sev-
eral of a group’s local clans each gave their own sacred object), in a perissology (or
asymmetrical redundancy), the same goal is achieved through different systems:
slowing a truck with distinct brakes (hydraulic, electric, mechanical), or conveying
ancestral power to a ritual scene via blood-soaked clay, bones, or plants that plau-
sibly grew where the blood of the ancestor was spilled. Together with this variety
of media goes a multisensorial engagement with things (e.g. Tambiah’s [1985: 147]
detailed account of redundancy in a Sinhalese exorcism rite).
For example, the domains of ordinary life that converge during an Ankave
drum-beating mortuary ceremony (songen) are all related in a perissological way
to the ambivalent nature of the maternal kin or to the bad manners of the ombo’
invisible cannibals—who will ultimately devour the flesh of their nephew, niece, or
cross-cousin to recover and recycle the life substance they previously gave. Yet the
process through which making and using the artifacts in question “enhance[s] cog-
nition” (Latour) is not first of all about perissology. It is based, among other things,
on perissologies, which is different. The “potential significance” that is “projected”
(Küchler) is not about the meaning associated with each given perissology. It is
about what the convergence of references based on perissologies allows, namely the
emergence of a nonverbal message that is not identical to any of those expressed in
a perissological way.

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539 The blending power of things

For instance, none of the perissologies “condensed” during a songen refers to

the “ineffable truth about the world” (Tuzin 2002: 17) that the convergence of the
domains evokes, namely the tension between the continuous coaxing of one’s chil-
dren’s maternal kin and the inexorable disappearance of the former into the latter’s
belly. Thus, the dispersal of the families in forest camps is a protection against those
malevolent ombo’ which myths and “true stories” depict as including too many
maternal kin, but it does not refer explicitly to these kin. It is only when the drums
are played the way they are played that the atrocious tension of the relations with
maternal kin is suggested.
“The way they are played,” that is when the origin of the drums and the unseen
life of the ombo’ are called forth in various multisensorial ways: the crowd’s move-
ment reproduces the whirlpool from which the drum emerged in mythical times;
and the shape and position of the drums played by the drummers are reminiscent
of the instrument that stood in the middle of the vortex, and between two words,
when it was given by the ombo’; and the hands of the drummers’ masks call the
spirit of the recent dead to send them to the ombo’; and participants may go and
wash in a nearby stream because they think that an ombo’ carrying a corpse just
grazed them.
The Ankave’s drums are surrounded by perissologies, but what the drums reso-
nate is the one “statement” about the overwhelming contradiction between hope-
less kind relations with and gifts to the maternals and the latter’s cannibal feast.
This contradiction is never directly addressed in the various ideas and practices
evoked and made to converge during a ceremony. Rather than qualify this type
of objects as “cognitive blending devices based on perissologies and allowing the
emergence of a nonverbal message,” I choose the term “perissological resonators.”
Why Ingold’s cello is not a perissological resonator in my sense is probably now
obvious. As a musical instrument, it resonates if it is part of a standard technical
system made up of all those elements that Tim mentions: “a meeting of bowhair,
rosin, metallic strings,” and so on, not to mention his own fingers and skills, and
that “bundle of affects” anthropologists are at pains to observe. But it is not (yet?) an
object that “binds people to one another” via a “connectivity of thought” (Küchler)
as Baruya fences, Ankave drums, Anga sacred pouches, or classic cars do in the
specific manner I have described in Mundane objects (Lemonnier 2012).

Mundane and less mundane objects, ritual, and “symbols”

By shelving my book with the anthropology of Leach, Tambiah, or Turner (to whom
I of course referred) “as if nothing had happened between then and now,” Ingold
both honors me and makes me realize how much has happened since, both in the
anthropology of material culture and in that of ritual. So much so that extending
the minute description of operational sequences to the study of ritual objects has
now become a promising program.
If the propositions of Mauss about the sociocultural dimension of material ac-
tions are now taken seriously and lead to anthropological results that could not be
obtained otherwise, it is because previous attempts to study objects and techniques
failed to do so. The technologie culturelle of the 1970s and 1990s faced the difficulty

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of conjugating Leroi-Gourhan’s program with Marxism and structuralism. For fear

of being “vulgar” or “technicist,” the French Marxist anthropologists (all “techno-
logues” were Marxists at the time) despised any study of the social dimension of
things, save what touched on the productivity of tools or the organization of labor.
Conjointly, the search for “correspondences” between patterns in chaînes opéra-
toires and other “structures” proved to be a daydream (Lemonnier 2011). Except
for research on know-how (Chamoux 1981; Mahias 2011), and more recently on
“action” (Ferret 2014), most work in technologie culturelle turned often on the sym-
bolic aspect of things, with all the limitations pointed out by Latour. Needless to
say, thirty years ago, confronted with a Baruya fence or an Ankave drum, my own
ultimate comment would have been a useless “they are polysemous.”
I have neither the legitimacy nor the space to expose how material culture stud-
ies aimed at understanding consumption then developed without paying much
attention to the making and physical use of things, to understand why Ingold’s
(1997) exciting program on technology made no reference to decades of research
and publications in Techniques & Culture (despite their obsession with things in-
the-making and materials), or to expose the advance and difficulty in creating a
phenomenology-friendly ethnographic approach to things (but see Warnier 2007
for a convincing example). Let me simply recall that, in more recent times, “tech-
nologues” started to collaborate with other strains of the discipline, and other disci-
plines, in particular with Actor-Network people, historians and anthropologists of
art, historians tout court, primatologists, postmodern archaeologists, anthropolo-
gists of ritual, and so on. Whether or not this is linked to that, a far-reaching change
of outlook has taken place in the study of techniques that is by no means limited to
my own “radical change of scene” (Latour). Instead of thinking in terms of compat-
ibility of some aspects of the organization of production with aspects of a social
organization, instead of studying the social effects of a change in techniques, and
instead of deciphering in the “style” of an object a reflection of some aspect of a so-
cial system, scholars now investigate the blending power of things (e.g. MacKenzie
1991; Santos-Granero 2009; González-Ruibal, Hernando, and Politis 2011; Pitrou
2012), including by the study of “significant tools” and that of ritualized actions
among animals (e.g. Joulian 2005; Schaeffer 2009).
In the domain of ritual, Ingold rightly reminds us of the importance of the now-
classical theories of the 1960s to 1980s for the study of what objects might do that
words alone cannot (Weiner 1983). But here, too, the novelties are considerable.
By insisting on “condensation,” on the “multireferential” quality of symbols (e.g.
Turner 1967: 29; Tambiah 1968: 202), or their association with “powerful conscious
and unconscious emotions and wishes” (Turner 1967: 32), theoreticians of ritual
action pinpointed one of its key aspects (Houseman and Severi 1998: 159, 284).
But whereas the “unification of disparate meanings in a single symbolic formation”
(Turner 1967: 30) was then “demonstrated” by listing all sorts of references to a
given thing (a tree, a shrine, pieces of clay, “cluster of red objects” [Turner 1967:
41]), anthropologists are now able to show what, in the construction or materials
of an object, in its history, or physical usage, makes people interacting with this
object pull together various domains of their social life, and what makes us reason-
ably hypothesize why it makes sense to put these facets together in a particular
context. In Küchler’s words, “the feat of engineering [that] is made palpable and

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541 The blending power of things

recognizable in the very fabric of these objects … is decidely not apologetic” (e.g.
Coupaye 2013).
Moreover, what was previously proposed for “ritual symbols” is also now in-
vestigated for objects that “are not necessarily referential, but recall by manifesting
what cannot be experienced, and yet makes sense of the world as thought construct
and feat of engineering” (Küchler) and à propos of nonritual situations. I should
therefore add a few words on the reason why resonators are neither only “symbols”
nor “ritual.”
Küchler’s remark about Gell’s (1975: 236–43) discovery that an Umeda “casso-
wary-dancer” mask actually looks like a tree, not like a cassowary, is in line with
Turner on ritual symbols that “are at one and the same time referential and conden-
sation symbols” (1967: 30–31). However, although the Umeda mask-tree might be
“a generalized structural model of society itself ” [Gell 1975: 242]) and is therefore a
sort of symbol, it is not comparable to the objects in Mundane objects, the possible
symbolic dimension of which is secondary to the processes in play with resonators.
As an hourglass-shaped instrument, for instance, the Ankave drum is undoubt-
edly some kind of iconic representation of a double funnel indicating the passage
of the spirits of the recent dead through the vortex (another funnel) that is the mo-
mentary doorway between this world and that of the ombo’. But does it “symbolize”
or echo any of the relations that converge during the ceremony, the maternal origin
of life, or the ambiguous and horrible maternal identity of the ombo’, and so on?
No. Except for its being funnel-like, which is only partly related to what’s going on,
there is nothing to be “read” from it. Moreover, one could spend days specifying the
symbolic operations by which cordylines, clays, bones, or cowries are embarked in
the perissologies that are brought together by a resonator; but, whether these ma-
terials and things are qualisigns, indexes, or icons would not explain the decisive
blending power of the resonator of which they are a part. A Massim canoe (Damon
2008), an Abelam ceremonial yam (Coupaye 2013), or a Baruya fence also com-
municate crucially in ways that cannot be reduced to identifying which of Peirce’s
ten classes of sign is at work in a given context. That’s why to Ingold’s claim that
“[w]e have had more than enough of both agency and materiality,” I would venture
to reply that we may also have had enough of the systematic and single focus on the
indexicality and iconicity of particular things.
Let’s continue with the remarks of two reviewers about my so-called “mun-
dane” objects, which, I agree, are “hardly trivial” (Küchler) or “pseudo-ordinary”
(Ballard). Besides my will to concentrate on objects that would not end up in mu-
seum displays (although some might, as Graves-Brown remarks about classic cars)
and that were not necessarily “ritual,” “of art,” or “imbued with power,” my quali-
fying them as mundane was driven by my zeal to tackle the difference between
ordinary things and far less ordinary other things. A Baruya fence is a New Guinea
fence, an Ankave drum is a most common-looking thing, and the highly sacred
objects manipulated by the ritual experts of Anga male ritual are also basic magical
hunting pouches. Mundane objects results from my inquiry into these similarities
in objects that could be tagged as agricultural devices, art production, or ritual
tools; and blurring anthropological categories was therefore part of the exercise. I
did not intend to reopen any old files on the definition of ritual or religion or on
the continuum between technique and ritual, or to explain why, as “symbols,” the

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 Pierre Lemonnier 542

neighbor’s curtains may not be as important in people’s life as the introduction of

ancestral powers into the chest of Anga initiates. As for my rapid and unfortunate
association of supernatural beings with religion or ritual, it was merely a way to
bring in recent debates on ritual (McCauley and Lawson 2002; Whitehouse and
Laidlaw 2007) on which some attention to objects and material action might shed
new light. A Baruya fence or an Ankave trap harbors no form of “ancestral powers,”
and that is something that may be worth noting.
The similarity of mundane and nonmundane objects of a same type (fence,
magical bundle, etc.) on which I have elaborated deserves comment, for this is not
“superficial” (Ballard). For sure, at some point, a Baruya fence and an Ankave eel
trap differ from their ordinary New Guinea counterparts by some aspects of their
construction. But this is not true of an Anga highly sacred bundle, whose compo-
nents (bones, nuts, clays, cowries, etc.) are the same as those of a magical hunting
device. Incidentally, and still with reference to a remark by Ballard, there exist op-
erational sequences for both of them: those by which such objects are still made or
maintained if needed (which I have not seen, at least not entirely), assembled, and
used (which I have seen during the rituals). Even the way the two types of magical
pouches are opened and activated is the same.
Ballard is right to introduce here the historical context of origin of these arti-
facts. However, for some reason unclear to me, he reckons that “under the terms
of Anga historicity, mundane objects are essentially copies of original sacred
forms and technologies.” My claim or thesis is the reverse. In my view, what gives
a Christian relic or an Anga ancestral shrine its power to enable people to share
ideas, practices, and emotions as a given group at a given time does not differ from
what a takola garden fence does in this respect in Baruya country. The general
phenomenon is what takes place around seemingly mundane but not ritual objects.
As for Anga history, it says that Baruya hunting devices were changed into sacred
kwaimatñe, not the reverse.

Don’t fiddle materiality away

So far, I have hardly mentioned the word “materiality,” that very materiality La-
tour proposes to redefine so that “technical does not mean material.” If “technical”
means “the “weaving of different entities,” I can only agree that his wording paral-
lels the “radical change of scene” (Latour) that represents the new interest for the
blending power of things. Actually, long ago I ventured to include algae and east
winds in my description of the “factors” at hand in what was going on in the salt
marshes of southern Brittany (Lemonnier 1984). I had not read Callon (1986), and
“everything is in everything and the other way round” was then a joke. Therefore I
left algae and winds at the margin of my analysis, but when Actor-Network Theory
came into the picture, I had no problem with the handling of heterogeneous enti-
ties per se. My discussions with Latour were about the status of “technical facts,”
those referred to by “stomping the ground” (Latour)—my own example being the
challenge to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew. My book being about the
numerous relations and entities modified or actualized because of what people
do à propos of particular objects, because of the very “tapestry of their structure”

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543 The blending power of things

(Küchler), I fully understand Bruno’s provocative sentence. But does that mean that
I must get rid of the “matter” in my Westerner’s sense?
As Latour reminds us, there is still a lot to to be done to fight “against colleagues
ignorant of technology” (as study of techniques), not to mention the growing dis-
crepancy between complex theoretical considerations on “things” and an ethno-
graphic information too often reduced to the smallest share. So many times I (and
many others) have heard something like “Baruya fences have something to do with
relations between brothers-in-law? Well, let’s jump to kinship and skip the [boring]
description of fences,” that mentioning actions on matter is a welcome reminder
of Mauss’ program concerning techniques. That is why I consider that we have to
set material action apart as a temporary field of inquiry—a view surely shared by
archaeologists too!
Without my consideration of the mechanical reinforcements of traps and fen­
ces, the materials in a magical pouch, or the spatial setting of a ritual site, I would
not have paid attention to the not-so-mundane objects that appeared so only in
comparison to other things through the lens of Western physics, mechanics in par-
ticular. Such is also the case with my current analysis of Anga male rituals con-
ceived as operational sequences—because this method is a means to forget as few
entities as possible in a description and because these complex actions are sup-
posed to do something to the novices, from both an emic then an etic point of
view, the combination of which indeed raises immense questions (Ingold). Faced
with the well-known dilemma that is the sequencing of a continuum of actions, it
is material settings, indeed in a Western sense, that tell me how to delimit the series
of operations that are combined, actually hundreds of operations involving dozens
of materials, objects, and gestures. For instance, wooden corridors are remarkable
(what happens in them are particular ritual operations delimited as such by the
Anga and myself) and appear to me as a series of sticks, ligatures, and leaves, in
which the boys are beaten. They are also narrow, so that the novices and their spon-
sors are mechanically obliged to progress slowly. Novices are often beaten, in or
outside corridors. But in that case, my starting point in the comparison of similar
sequences of beating is the corridor, materially defined as such.
Keeping “material” in mind is also what allows me to identify which entities
are crucially woven with a tight knot, to focus on the strong pulling on liana, on
the choice of a snake’s skin, as well as on sweat and puffing and panting. It also
enables me to discern which “affordance” (Knappett 2005), or rather “perceived
affordance” (Norman [1988] 2002: 9), is made to a mechanical and physicochemi-
cal phenomenon. The sort that strikes one as a long, controlled transformation of
substances from strong to soft (or vice versa), when, for example, I compare, on
the one hand, the disappearance of the flesh of a corpse in an amita’wa’ basket set
in a garden because the ombo’ feast on it with, on the other, the transformation of
almonds of Pangium edule into a sauce in a wooden device also called amita’wa’.

Resonators and change

There is no way I can pay full tribute to the diversity and complexity of the papers
into which the reviewers have expanded their comments. I would make mine most

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 Pierre Lemonnier 544

of the short sentences in which they refer to exciting research avenues and to years
of yet-to-come efforts by series of scholars. Küchler regrets that I have not “gone
the extra mile to unpack the assumptions and misconceptions that separate the
material from language and cognition.” Ballard rightly notes the need to contextu-
alize the “engagement with material objects within a comprehensive description of
Anga aesthetics across each of the senses.” Among other questions, Graves-Brown
expresses the very tricky one I have so many times asked myself without yet glimps-
ing an answer, and could be rephrased as: “Where have the resonators gone in our
own society?” Ingold’s nice suggestion to associate the propositions of the book
with his own questions is a brainteaser, too. As for Latour, I already said that I
clearly understand his distancing of “technical” and “material,” but it may at first
complicate my task considerably in my current struggle to invent a description of
Anga male rituals.
I willingly espouse Ballard’s and Küchler’s request for a better understanding
of the multisensorial interactions of the individual with mundane-looking resona-
tors or other objects. Feld’s (1982) “acoustemology,” recalled by Ballard, or Revolon
(2014) on “iridescence” among the Owa illustrate that direction, not to mention
Ingold’s (2013) or Malafouris’ (2013) proposals. Similarly, inquiring into our inter-
actions with computers might help us explore how “a logic of composition and an
aesthetics of texture, implying partibility, proportionality, and scaling” (Küchler)
are at work. Back to fieldwork, that’s a bit puzzling, but computation is probably
involved in Anga male ritual sequences, the principal aspect of which is the striking
abundance of elements (materials, all sorts of built structures, decorations, speech-
es, artificial sites, displays, etc.), for instance that of the material practices explicitly
aimed at warding off the risk of infection, septicaemia, and death that might follow
the piercing of the novices’ nasal septum. (Incidentally, the visiting anthropologist
will immediately link that richness to an obsession with the possibility that the rit-
ual fails. However, from my interactions with Anga ritual experts, and men in gen-
eral, I strongly doubt that any of them would acknowledge the possibility of failure.
Indeed, whether or not this reflects the visitor’s “sovereign perspective” [Ingold],
the anthropologist may have access to a fear that the actors do not articulate.)
Ballard’s question about “who gets to learn what, how, and from whom, about
the roles of verbal and nonverbal instruction, and about the ways in which the
operation of condensation gels for individuals over time and with experience” not
only reminds us of the need to account for the “opaque interactions at the heart
of condensation”; it also introduces history into the picture. But I am afraid that
“mapping communication or transmission through space” (and time) is wishful
thinking when it comes to Anga territory. As far as I know, we have no way to
reconstruct how the Baruya landscape was reshaped with takola fences. We can
only predict (that’s bold!) that these particular fences will disappear when coopera-
tion fades with the reduction of the obligations related to sister exchange and male
initiations (as it did among the neighboring Sambia). However, although I cannot
say “when” and “why” a fence, a drum, or a composite magical bundle becomes a
strategic object for the stability of a system of thoughts and practices, I have offered
some hypotheses about how resonators might be paradoxically involved both in
the stability and in the breakdown of such a system. On the one hand, the peris-
sologies at hand allow marginal changes to take place without jeopardizing the

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545 The blending power of things

particular set of relations people have with a resonator that characterizes a given
time. For instance, the Ankave may someday no longer remove the floor of a dead
person’s house, but the shamans will nevertheless detect the presence of ombo’ all
around. On the other hand, if a Christian church were to replace strategic mortu-
ary drums by guitars (a pure hypothesis), then all that is gathered together during a
songen ceremony would vanish, and the Ankave might start going to Heaven… At
any rate, Ballard is right: a new mythology is needed to send Ankave people to God
rather than among the ombo’, or to make Baruya people agree that “God’s mobile
[phone] is in their belly” instead of relying on the ancestral powers of a kwaimatñe
(Lemonnier 2013: 164).
Now, is the documentation of resonators limited to strange-looking things in
situations of tremendous change, such as the shift to Christianity in New Guinea,
or “when things fall apart” (Ballard)? Of course not, but harder is the endeavor
when it comes to identify such objects in our modern industrial world. What about
mass-produced objects in which “our personal engagement with the practicalities
of [their] manufacture [is] more abstract and remote” (Graves-Brown), or “when
the connections they make palpable are not extended to subjects, but to other ob-
jects” (Küchler)? And is it the case that “the very disposability and mutability of our
material culture prevents it from accumulating what Lemonnier terms ‘perissologi-
cal resonance’” (Graves-Brown)? I can hardly comment on that, but an allusion by
Graves-Brown to the durability of Victorian industrial machines, which “were built
to last and presumably conveyed a social message not dissimilar to that of New
Guinea fences,” reminds me of a paper by Stourdzé (1980) on washing machines in
the France of the 1950s.
By that time the heaviness and solidity of those were in line with the durabil-
ity praised by the bourgeoisie. Also from what I remember—our 1953 “Lincoln”
washer lasted so long that I have a vivid memory of it—the physical interactions
with this novel thing were many: from lighting the gas that heated the laundry,
moving the taps as well as the levers that made the drum move, to the extraction of
the wet linen through a small and ill-disposed hatch. Washing machines may have
had more consequences for society at large than, say, that of the TSR2 or Aramis
(two stars of Actor-Network Theory), yet I doubt they were ever resonators in the
sense of an Ankave drum or a Baruya fence. Understanding the place of particu-
lar objects in the stability of a given world cannot be reduced to the durability of
things. In passing, in a forthcoming volume edited by Lipset and Handler (2014)
on “metaphors of moral imagination,” all sorts of interactions with a series of cars
and planes from very different places in the contemporary world exemplify pre-
cisely the process of blending of thoughts and emergence of new nonpropositional
messages. So the question of modern resonators is only half-opened. History has
obviously its say here, not only because it may lead us to modify our view on the
speed of change in the present world (Edgerton 2007 demonstrates the contrary),
but also because historians have amazing information on objects in rituals of the
past (e.g. Bartholeyns 2012 on the coronation of French kings).
I feel gratified that Mundane objects gave rise to so many questions and hope
that future research may take on the unfolding of the notion of resonator exposed
by the reviewers. Here Ingold’s general proposition is welcome, although hard as
yet to transform into an ethnographic means of inquiry. In the case of Anga rituals,

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 Pierre Lemonnier 546

paying attention to objects and affects, artifacts and materials, communication and
participation would indeed be a promising challenge and the subject of long, long
ethnographic fieldwork, as well as requiring a lot of theoretical elaboration. For
instance, together with the difficulty of getting “mere” ethnographic information—
would what an Ankave drummer says about his exhausting all-night experience be
enough for us to understand what he is “making” (Ingold 2013)?—we would still
have to resolve the not-insignificant dilemma of bridging individual phenomena
with collective ones, exposed by Devereux a long time ago (1956). A gifted musi-
cian, he, too, would probably have concurred with the limits to the anthropology of
techniques as once summed up for me by Lévi-Strauss (pers. comm.): “You will not
be able to account for a violinist’s pizzicato.”

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Pierre Lemonnier
Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie
Aix-Marseille Université
3, place Victor Hugo
13003 Marseille, France
pierre.lemonnier@univ-amu.fr

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