Apology of voodoo (Conclusion to the political anthropology of Prince-Mars)

It should be clear that the understanding of African culture is distorted by Western philosophical prejudice; whose political repercussions would be corrected, but not the hermeneutical ones, which are the important ones here. This is because these corrections are not focused on its ontological efficiency, where its hermeneutical scope comes from; but as part of that other process of Western entropy, which then participates in the structural crisis determining it.

In fact, this greater ontological efficiency would not be proper or exclusively African, but of every culture; even that western, whose entropy is only a process accelerated by the crisis distorting it, as Modernity. The value here of African culture is then relative to this entropic process, as an adequation of western excesses; and by which that west culture could overcome its crisis, with a contraction to its functional principles, in its restructuring.

Hence the importance of organizing this understanding of that culture as a phenomenon, allowing that adequation; even in the renewal of their substructures, so that they can be functionally related to each other. In this regard, and as the basis of this organization, there would be its religious substructure, in its determination; since this what would provide the given understanding of reality, as an existential practice, from the punctuality of the individual; whose social projection —in the economy— would be that produced by the political, as an expression then of this existential praxis.

It would be also clear that, as a critic of extreme positivism, Prince-Mars is not extra-positivist but only moderate; that is why he starts from a relative error, in the criticism of the concept of fetishism, with which African religiosity is distorted. Prince-Mars's moderation would be an intuition —not conceptually developed— about this defect of positivism; adequating —rather than denying— it, conditioning it by the inmano-transcendence condition of reality —as a nature of the real—.

This would have been the point of Hegel's absolutism, only dependent on the hermeneutics of the idealist tradition; so it does not manage to overcome its intrinsic transcendentalism, to which it subordinates the immanence of the real. Mars goes to the origin of the term, defined as "artificial" and linked to the Portuguese word for "spell" (feitiço); and by which Africans would attribute supernatural powers to objects of nature, which would thus animate them, in animism.

The mistake is that the phenomenon is treated as an attribution of powers, rather than a representation of these; which is how totemism works, in the symbolization of the extrapositive phenomena in which the real is determined. In this sense, the term is not erroneous —although its application is— alluding to the establishment of a reality; which would be culture, as a reality as human and not as in itself, responding to the concrete needs of the human.

Mars's critique —of moderate positivism instead of extra-positivist— goes to the conceptual sufficiency of the religious; not to this function of redetermination of the real, in which it becomes of human value —distinct from as in itself— as culture. The principle to which Mars refers to, is the resolution of the religious in singular forms, determined by the environment; which is valid within that moderate positivism, but without denying the extra-positivity of this function of the religious.

This false contradiction would be what Mars alludes to, criticizing that concept of fetishism and religion by extension; when it states that "... it is not shells, nor stones, nor the idol of carved wood, nor even animals, that the African worships”. The understanding of the real that resolves the religious then has this other consistency of culture, which is singular; and again, this is what would have been denied with modern rational positivism, but keeping its efficiency outside this hermeneutical framework.

This distinction is important, because from here Mars will develop a kind of apology for that religiosity; that by reducing it to the political, it will also respond to its apparent (political) need, as a social phenomenon; rather than to its epistemological consistency, for which it can effectively correct the onto-hermeneutical excesses of Western philosophy. For this it is necessary to address this sufficiency directly, even in the archaeology of their traditional practices; which —as an update of those of their African origin— are ultimately the effective way in which this adequation occurs.