Of Mistakes, Errors, Superstition and Nonsense: Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer

<strong>JNU Philosophy Colloquium &amp; Centre for Linguistics, JNU</strong> a lecture by <strong>Veena Das</strong> Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA on <strong>Of Mistakes, Errors, Superstition and Nonsense: Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer</strong> My basic idea in this paper is to depart from the many discussions that take Wittgenstein's Remark on Frazer as giving us a theory of religion or ritual, emphasizing its expressive or symbolic dimension as against Frazer's evolutionary or historical one (e.g. Bouveresse) and to think, instead, of the Golden Bough, as providing Wittgenstein a provocation to reflect on issues relating to the internal (as distinct from an external) relation between language and the world (or worlds). The concepts that I signal in the title of this paper – mistake, error, and superstition - lead us to think of the various ways in which we are misled by our language either because it captures us within a given picture of the real or because it goes idling. Chair: <strong>Ayesha Kidwai</strong>, Centre for Linguistics, JNU, New Delhi Date: <strong>7th August 2015</strong>