The Humanist Anthropology of Carmelo Lisón

Gaspar Mairal Buil

On March 17, the media, including the Heraldo de Aragón, reported the death in Madrid of Carmelo Lisón Tolosana, a leading Spanish anthropologist and native of the Puebla de Alfindén. The obituaries and reports that were published in successive days emphasized his biography also alluding to some aspects of his work. Some time after this date, it seemed to me that it was time to take stock, albeit briefly, of his work and of its importance for the Spanish Social Sciences and for Social Anthropology in general.

The Anthropology of Lison has a radical ethnographic foundation, conceiving it as an imaginative reconstruction of the encounter between a "self" and an "other" that can only be achieved after a demanding and conscientious fieldwork, because, as he himself writes: "In fieldwork we are aware of otherness; we do not fabricate the facts or invent the events we have experienced, we find them, we encounter them". This conception of ethnography, empirical and experiential at the same time, can be endorsed by a good number of anthropologists and was almost article of faith, when, as in my case, we were students of Social Anthropology and Lisón was the most outstanding of our professors. But in the end Lisón's originality was none other than that of having overcome this way of understanding ethnography in order, without renouncing it, to take it to other more sophisticated dimensions. In his case this dimension was history. If ethnography is elaborated in contact with the people in their daily life, Lison also made it a personal coexistence with the document, the book, the historical text or the work of art, treating them in their plural contexts and seeking dialogue with them. He did so in La Fascinación de la diferencia. La adaptación de los jesuitas al Japón de los Samurais en el siglo XVI 1549-1591. (Fascination of Difference. The Jesuits Adaptation to Sixteenth Japan of the Samurais 1549-1591), a book that was published in 2005. Here Lisón gives life to the letters sent to the superior in Rome by the first three superiors of the Jesuits in Japan in the second half of the 16th century: Francisco Javier, Cosme de Torres and Alessandro Valignano. The three of them convey in their letters the great amazement they are caused by the enormous difference they observe between Japanese culture and their own, giving an account of their efforts to adapt Christian preaching to this new "other", so striking to the eyes of three Europeans. Fascination is the feeling that runs through these pages and Lisón himself illustrates us by pointing out that this reaction is unusual in the encounter of some cultures with others, as it has been throughout history. In the end we can point out that Lisón's work is the most fundamental that has been produced in Spain when it comes to doing something that only the most cunning historians have suggested: "to anthropologize history". Lison does not produce history but describes and interprets culture, thus making anthropology, in the only place where it can be found, in history conceived as a reality. Thanks to his ethnography, he manages to place, with great force and enormous verisimilitude, the living subject in history. Lisón's narrative tries to reconstruct the past, a pure and simple reality, but a reality that does not separate the past from the present and the future.

La Santa Compaña. Fantasías reales, Realidades fantásticas ("La Santa Compaña. Real fantasies. Fantastic Realities) was published in 1998 and could well be his masterpiece. Based on the extensive and intense ethnography he developed in Galicia (Spain), he dedicates this book to one of the peculiar beliefs of the Galician rural world: the Santa Compaña. In this case the study of Lisón is a treatise of epistemology that is based on empirical data taken in situ in his many interviews with Galician villagers and especially with those who claimed to have seen the dead of the parish parading as spectres in the night. What is the reality? This is the question, of extraordinary magnitude, that centers the meaning of this book and in which the influence of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico is appreciated. To study the belief in the "Santa Compaña"  Lisón develops a "tolerant epistemology" in which truth and reality sustain a multipurpose relationship, because every reality, like the "Santa Compaña" can contain a plurality of truths, There are truths that go beyond reality and there are plural realities or kinds of reality. La Santa Compaña is a belief that challenges, as it is experienced by Galician peasants, the classical borders between reality and fantasy and it is in this extraordinary cultural creation that Lisón can observe "real fantasies" and "fantastic realities". We, the humans produce truths and these reside in our acts. To interpret in a "real" and "plausible" way means  to access some of these truths, the real in this case,  from an ethnographic experience. Ethnography must then be combined with experiential epistemology and in Lisón's terms "tolerant".

According to this "tolerant" epistemology we cannot reach reality to possess it, but we can create imagined realities, because to imagine is the most characteristic of human creativity, if we want to obtain a truth about something also human that seems valuable to us. The humanist mentality is essentially creative in recognizing the same creativity in his fellow men. Humanism is born from the desire to understand the whole of human creativity in a transversal way. This cultural universe that produces human creativity, so immensely rich and varied in cultural products, be a novel, a ritual, devotion to a relic and so many other things, makes possible and necessary a knowledge that can capture its heterogeneous dimensions and contradictions. Humanist Anthropology, as Lison understood it, pursues the quality of things and seeks to transcend empirical reality, which undoubtedly exists, but to which it seeks to extract dimensions that escape a canonical scientific analysis.

I conclude with a quote from Lison that perfectly summarizes his way of conceiving Social Anthropology: "The anthropologist is essentially an explorer of the unlimited human capacity to give meaning and value to virtually everything. We inhabit a dense forest of meanings and values, we inhabit the world of intentions, we live in the realm of purposes, we reside, in a few  words, in a cultural universe". Lison's anthropology is a magnificent example to observe how a social scientist assumed the basic principles of humanism and put them into practice in his extensive research on culture.