MARA BENADUSI
«Ti conosco, lo so chi sei,
Māra»
Occulto e (in)dicibilità come metafore
del feldwork
Rivista di antropologia contemporanea 2/2020, pp. 3-25
ISSN 2724-3168 © Società editrice il Mulino
«I Know Who You Are, Māra». The Occult and (Un)Speakable as Metaphors
for Fieldwork
The article charts the terrain of dissimulations, lies and partial unveilings I moved through
while conducting research in Sri Lanka in the prolonged wake of the Asian tsunami. I
begin by delving into the dynamics of personification associated with figures of the Bud-
dhist pantheon and popular religiosity suspended between benevolence and malevolence,
such as the iridescent demon-god Māra. Similarly to the relationship between Buddha
and the mutant beings sharing the same ambivalent domain as Māra, the anthropologist
was likewise called on to both malleably incorporate deceptive illusion and to unmask it.
The article goes on to outline the effects of the researcher’s efforts to navigate the gate-
ways of purification and control identified by local idioms of sacredness and kingship as
a remedy to the pitfalls of samsāra (and thus ethnography). The anthropologist, with her
moral ambivalence, thus lent herself to a kind of co-dramatization with the power to take
up both the «poisons» of and the «antidotes» for the divine-demonic potential unleashed
by research. This experience raises interesting points of reflection about the meaning of
analogy in anthropological knowledge and the relationship between the occult and (un)
speakable as metaphors for fieldwork.
Keywords: Gods, Demons, Buddhism, Ethnography, Sri Lanka, Tsunami.
Mara Benadusi, Dip. di Scienze Politiche e Sociali, Università degli Studi di Catania, via V.
Emanuele II, 8 – 95131 Catania, mara.benadusi@unict.it