Be Careful with Imagination! Remarks on Anthropology and Demonology

Abstract

Demonology in anthropology and the reflexivity. Theodicy as a cosmological exegesis and a social strategy blaming someone/something for the injustice of the world; the starting point for accusations of magical practices (Michael Herzfeld). Theodicy as a cul-de-sac of rationalizing religious faith in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics; critique of the retribution scheme. Transformations of Polish ethno-anthropology in the last 30 years from the perspective of demonology. Between the Kazimierz Moszynski’s taxonomy of demons and the Kirsten Hastrup’s experience of the „invisible people”: the basic dichotomy for constructing of the „ideal type” of the anthropologists’ attitude to the supernatural phenomena; between the recording of facts and their construction, irrational folk fantasy and imagination as a potential agent of social change. Bricolage as a technique of imagination and of symbolic thinking. The universe of demonology elaborated by Polish ethnology in the 70s and 80s open to analysis in terms of social facts.