Albinos do not die: Belief, philosophy and anthropology

• Autor(a) principal: Pina-Cabral, Joao
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/47877
• topic: Albinos; Mozambique; Race; Racialization; Whiteness; Ethnicity; Belief; Donald Davidson; Social Anthropology; radical interpretation; skepticism; retention of belief

In Mozambique one is often told things about albinos that can hardly be interpreted at face value. These are not, properly speaking, fictionalised narratives of a connected series of events, but rather they are evidence of propositional attitudes pertaining to refer to statements of fact, that is, they are ‘beliefs. If these beliefs do not meet up with the test of disbelief, what then is the significance of both conveying and holding them. We take recourse to Donald Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation (1984, 2001) provides us with a novel way of looking at the role of ‘belief ’. In ethnographic accounts, thus overstepping many of the scepticist doubts that have haunted anthropological theory over the past decades. In this chapter, I focus in particular on the problem of the retention of belief: that is, the way in which all beliefs are dependent on other beliefs that constitute an environment surrounding them.