A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul & Albert L. Refiti

The Status of Oral Traditions in the History of Philosophy: Methodological Considerations

7.-9. September 2023, Universität Hildesheim

Anna-Christina Engels-Schwarzpaul & Albert L. Refiti

Salutations to the mountain:

Towards a Samoan lived philosophy of oratory, ritual practices and buildings

As a metaphor for tofā sa‘ili, former Samoan Head of State, Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese Efi cites the ninth of ten ritual greetings to the heavens. Tofā sa‘ili is the human search for “wisdom, knowledge, prudence, insight [and] judgement” through reaching out in “reflection, meditation, prayer, dialogue, experiment, practice, performance and observance” – with awareness of the limits of human knowledge and the relationships between cosmic, human, animal and plant life (Tui Atua, 2018a).
Historically, intergenerational knowledge transfer occurred in Sāmoa through dance, for example; however, the full significance of specific forms, styles and movements was not usually known to all performers, only to each family’s custodian. Samoan society accommodated such concentration of knowledge without endangering the overall body. Today, changed socio-political structures – within Sāmoa, but particularly in various diasporas with entirely different conditions of life – demand different modes of sharing knowledge, lest it might be lost with the death of its custodians.
Knowledge is traditionally vested in tulafale (orators; one of two classes of Samoan leaders, who play complementary and interdependent roles in collective decision-making). Tula means head, fale means house; important is the “coming together of the mind and the senses” in the head (analogous to what Tui Atua notes about tulafono, literally: head(s) of a fono, the formal village/district meeting, Tui Atua, 2018a). The mind discerns evidence and makes judgements, while the senses synthesize. These two kinds of knowledge, one analytic and one synthetic, have been treated very differently within Western philosophical traditions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Smith, 2012; Smith, 2016). In Samoan oral culture, “knowledge on any subject, philosophical or otherwise, was more often than not embodied in proverbs or muagagana” (Tui Atua, 2018a). Muagagana combine in spaces of appearance (like fale tele/meeting houses, and malae/central ceremonial grounds), during fono and other community events, with oratory, music and dance to harness emotional, intellectual and spiritual energies (Refiti & Engels-Schwarzpaul, in print).
To explore these relationships within Samoan and more widely Pacific traditions, we think along with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who has a long engagement with art as “a form of philosophical thinking” (Drabinski, 2019). He has also written about the reception “in the Colony” (Diagne, 2008) of Henri Bergson’s concepts, two of which are fruitful here: intuition and duration. Diagne argues that Bergson’s break with Western philosophical tradition helped African philosophers articulate and extend traditional local thinking across and beyond Africa. Notably, Senegalese poet, philosopher and statesman, Léopold Sédar Senghor created the terms “reason-eye” and “reason-embrace” to distinguish between “two ways of knowing”. The first carves out a difference between perceiving subject and perceived object; the second draws subject and object close, rather than defining them in opposition (Diagne, 2019: 25). For Senghor, who inscribed his own philosophy into “Bergsonism’s dynamic, evolutionary cosmology”, spiritual energy is especially to be found in art (Diagne, 2019: 9).
Through Diagne and Senghor’s transformative lenses, we will canvas the connections between different forms of world building in Samoan communities. We will trace philosophical thinking in muagagana; in lauga (performative oratory) and spatial practices in the fono; and in the material manifestation of Samoan ontologies in fale tele and malae. To understand transformative processes through which contemporary Samoan thinkers seek to translate Samoan values into the globalised world of the twenty-first century, we will predominantly lean on the writings of Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese Efi. As with Senghor’s work, this is “not a case of reviving the past so as to live on in [a Samoan] museum. It is a case of animating this world, here and now, with the values that come from our past.” (Senghor quoted in Diagne, 2019: xviii; see also Tui Atua, 2018b)

References:
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What Is Philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Diagne, S. B. (2008). Bergson in the Colony: intuition and duration in the thought of Senghor and Iqbal. Qui parle, 17(1), 125-145.
Diagne, S. B. (2019). Postcolonial Bergson. Fordham University Press.
Drabinski, J. E. (2019). Foreword: Locating the postcolonial idea. In S. B. Diagne, Postcolonial Bergson (pp. viivviii). Fordham University Press.
Refiti, A. L., & Engels-Schwarzpaul, A. C. (in print). Tofiga: placing and creating belonging. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/ZfE - Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology/JSCA, tba.
Smith, D. W. (2012). Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh University Press.
Smith, J. E. H. (2016). How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures. Aeon.
Tui Atua, T. T. T. E. (2018a). Samoan jurisprudence and the Samoan Land and Titles Court: the perspective of a litigant. In T. M. Suaalii-Sauni, I. u. Tuagalu, T. N. Kirifi-Alai, & N. Fuamatu (Eds.), Su'esu'e Manogi: In Search of Fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta'isi and the Samoan Indigenous Reference. Huia Publishers.
Tui Atua, T. T. T. E. (2018b). Tupua/egase: The eternal riddle. In T. M. Suaalii-Sauni, I. u. Tuagalu, T. N. Kirifi-Alai, & N. Fuamatu (Eds.), Su'esu'e Manogi: in Search of Fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta'isi and the Samoan Indigenous Reference. Huia Publishers.

Anna-Christina Engels-Schwarzpaul was born and raised in Germany, enrolled in an undergrad degree in Interior Architecture at Hochschule Darmstadt. In 1985, she completed a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and, in 2000, a PhD in Education and Art History, also at the University of Auckland. Having completed undergraduate studies, she began to work as a designer in architecture, industrial and object design, exhibition and set design, as well as historic places protection. Employers include Kramm + Strigl, Architekten, Darmstadt; ERCO Lighting, Lüdenscheid; Messe Frankfurt GmbH, Frankfurt; ADC Duncan Wu architecture, Auckland; Deutscher Werkbund, Darmstadt; Department for the Protection of Historic Buildings, Frankfurt. Having returned to Aotearoa from Germany, she took on her first academic position at Unitec before joining AUT in 2004. Initially, she taught studio and theory in Spatial Design but soon moved into postgraduate supervisions, later to serve as Head of Postgraduate Studies and programme leader of the PhD/Mphil programmes at the School of Art and Design. In 2008, Albert Refiti and Anna-Christina Engels-Schwarzpaul established the Māori and Oceanic Space Research Cluster in Spatial Design and, in 2012, the Vā Moana – Pacific Spaces Research Cluster at the School of Art and Design (see: www.vamoana.org/) for which they subsequently won two significant grants from the Marsden Fund (Royal Society Te Apārangi, Aotearoa New Zealand). In 2013, Anna-Christina Engels-Schwarzpaul was appointed a leading researcher at AUT.

Albert L. Refiti is a research leader in the field of Pacific spatial and architectural environment with an extensive research and publication in the area, supported by his teaching and lecturing in the last 15 years. Albert has worked in architectural practice in Auckland and London. He has lectured in the history of art and architecture and related fields at the University of Auckland School of Architecture, Unitec School of Architecture and Manukau School of Visual Arts. Albert has served on a number of community and academic boards relating to Pacific culture, art, and education. Albert has written a several book chapters, journal and conference papers on indigenous spatial and environmental knowledge relating to the identity formation of people and communities in the Asia Pacific region. His current research is on Pacific concepts of space – how they are formulated and enacted, the aim of which is to find out how this understanding might play a role in rethinking the ways that Pacific people can create new modes of working and creating new notions of place and citizenship in the diaspora towards a Pacific cosmopolitic. This has led to the formation of Pacific Spaces (with Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul), a three-year research project which combines the disciplines of architecture, spatial design, anthropology and sociology by convening a series of Fono or meetings (in Auckland – 2013 & 2014, Hawaii – 2014, Europe 2015 and the US – 2016) to discuss and develop scholarship on how new types of spaces and environment are to be imagined for the future by Pacific, New Zealand, US and European scholars. The outcome of which is to publish 2 monographs on Pacific Spaces starting in 2016.

12 News