Review of Anna M. Hennessey, Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular
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Review of Anna M. Hennessey, Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular Lanham: Lexington Books, imprint of Rowman and Littlefield, 2018, ISBN: 978-1-4985-4873-1, hb, xxi+195pp. Abigail Klassen 1 Published online: 15 August 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Anna M. Hennessey’s book functions as an excellent account of the social ontology of birth, as well as of birth practices, rituals, and objects—that is, their social meanings and how these meanings come into being and sometimes change. The first line of the Introduction alone should strike the reader as ample reason to read Hennessey’s work. ‘Birth and death are the only two monumental events in life shared by all human beings…’ (p. xiii). What is more, though not mentioned by Hennessey, these monumental events are not experienced by the self. One does not, assuming the non-existence of an afterlife, experience one’s own death, though one might experience one’s own process of dying. Nor does one experience or remember one’s own birth. Only other people do or might experience the event. This peculiar feature of death and birth suggests even more that a social ontology or even competing social ontologies concerning these extraordinary events is imperative. At least with respect to academic literature, Hennessey provides a persuasive argument, articulated mainly in her first chapter, that there exists a prioritization of focus on death over birth. I would add that this is particularly so within the philosophical academe. Though Hennessey’s analysis is centered around the social ontology of birth and birth practices, providing a novel account of how, in particular, birth and birth practices, as well as birthing objects (e.g., the Sheela-na-gig) undergo socialontological and social-epistemological change, her account can be extrapolated to other social phenomena and objects, and to their corollary social meanings. Unlike John R. Searle (see The Social Construction of Reality (1995) upon which Hennessey draws heavily), Hennessey is not best described as a sort of underlaborer whose account is intended to provide the conditions for the very possibility of a social world. Instead, Hennessey describes her book’s use of the concept of social ontology as referring to the ‘being’ of processes and objects in * Abigail Klassen [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada
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A. Klassen
their ‘social sense (their social meaning…) as opposed to their metaphysical state of existence’ (p. xiii). Hennessey does not explicitly intend for her account of social ontology, to problematize the distinction between social ontology, understood as accounting for social meanings, and metaphysics (where metaphysics is understood as the question: In virtue of what does something exist?) or for her account to be understood in the Searlian sense, i.e. as asking the question: What are the basic conditions of the possibility of a social world? However, examples in her book that focus on the epistemic meaning of obje
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