Lord knows how many times myths, legends, stories and tales – or anything else we generally consider ‘untrue’ – have been subjected to ethnological study. But after all, isn’t truth-telling also embedded in the dense and complex tissue of ritual? It too has been accompanied by numerous beliefs, and accorded strange powers. So perhaps there is an entire ethnology of truth-telling to be pursued.
Michel Foucault. 2000. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling. The function of avowal in justice, edited by Fabienne Brion with Bernard E. Harcourt. Translated by Stephen Sawyer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 14
Reblogged this on The History of the Present reading group and commented:
A short passage from today’s reading