Connecting-Africa | Find publications

Advanced search

Find:


Title Albinos do not die: Belief, philosophy and anthropology
Full text http://hdl.handle.net/10451/47877
Date 2013
Author(s) Pina-Cabral, Joao
Abstract 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. - info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Subject(s) Albinos; Mozambique; Race; Racialization; Whiteness; Ethnicity; Belief; Donald Davidson; Social Anthropology; radical interpretation; skepticism; retention of belief
Language eng
Publisher Anthem Press
Type of publication article
Rights openAccess
Identifier Cabral, J. P. (2013). Albinos do not die: Belief, philosophy and anthropology. In Ananta Kumar Giri and John Clammer (Eds.), Philosophy and Anthropology, 306-321. London: Anthem Press, 2013; 9780857285126
Repository Lissabon - University of Lissabon
Added to C-A: 2021-05-17;11:20:43