Cosmological deixis and amerindian perspectivism
01 Sep 1998-Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland)-Vol. 4, Iss: 3, pp 469-488
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the signification du perspectivisme amerindien, i.e., the idees which concernent la facon dont les humains, les animaux et les esprits se percoivent eux-memes and se percivent les uns les autres dans les cosmologies amerinien.
Abstract: Cet article discute la signification du perspectivisme amerindien, c'est-a-dire les idees qui concernent la facon dont les humains, les animaux et les esprits se percoivent eux-memes et se percoivent les uns les autres dans les cosmologies amerindiennes. Ces idees suggerent la possibilite de redefinir les categories classiques de nature, culture et supernature sur la base des concepts de perspective ou de point de vue. L'article soutient plus particulierement que l'antinomie entre deux caracterisations de la pensee indigene - d'une part l'ethnocentrisme selon lequel les attributs de l'humanite seraient refuses aux humains appartenant a d'autres groupes, et d'autre part l'animisme, qui appliquerait ces qualites humaines par extension a des etres appartenant a d'autres especes - peut etre resolue si l'on considere la difference entre les aspects spirituels et corporels des etres.
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TL;DR: Anthropologists have been committed, at least since Franz Boas, to investigating relationships between nature and culture, and this enduring interest was inflected with some new twists as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Anthropologists have been committed, at least since Franz Boas, to investigating relationships between nature and culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, this enduring interest was inflected with some new twists. An emergent cohort of “multispecies ethnographers” began to place a fresh emphasis on the subjectivity and agency of organisms whose lives are entangled with humans. Multispecies ethnography emerged at the intersection of three interdisciplinary strands of inquiry: environmental studies, science and technology studies (STS), and animal studies. Departing from classically ethnobiological subjects, useful plants and charismatic animals, multispecies ethnographers also brought understudied organisms—such as insects, fungi, and microbes—into anthropological conversations. Anthropologists gathered together at the Multispecies Salon, an art exhibit, where the boundaries of an emerging interdiscipline were probed amidst a collection of living organisms, artifacts from the biological sciences, and surprising biopolitical interventions.
1,226 citations
TL;DR: The Pirah language as mentioned in this paper is a language restricted to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors, which explains the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting and of any terms for quantification.
Abstract: The Pirah language challenges simplistic application of Hocketts nearly universally accepted design features of human language by showing that some of these features (interchangeability, displacement, and productivity) may be culturally constrained. In particular, Pirah culture constrains communication to nonabstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors. This constraint explains a number of very surprising features of Pirah grammar and culture: the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting and of any terms for quantification, the absence of color terms, the absence of embedding, the simplest pronoun inventory known, the absence of relative tenses, the simplest kinship system yet documented, the absence of creation myths and fiction, the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past, the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures documented, and the fact that the Pirah are monolingual after more ...
879 citations
Cites background from "Cosmological deixis and amerindian ..."
...He should bear in mind the decade of work that anthropology, particularly in the Amazon (e.g., Descola 1994, Viveiros de Castro 1998), has dedicated to criticizing the notion of culture and the dichotomy that it establishes with the notion of nature. michael tomasello Department of Developmental…...
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Book•
19 May 2011
TL;DR: Ong as mentioned in this paper argued that the interiorizing force of the oral word relates in a special way to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence, and that hearing binds people together in community; vision isolates the individual vis-a-vis the world.
Abstract: and context-independent; and focused on persons rather than things. Hearing binds people together in community; vision isolates the individual vis-a-vis the world. Finally, ‘the interiorizing force of the oral word relates in a special way to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence’. With the ascendancy of vision, however, religion gives way to secular science (Ong 1982: 73–4). 1 2 3 4 5
869 citations
Cites background from "Cosmological deixis and amerindian ..."
...Against this world of nature, it is the status and the forms of human culture that appear problematic (Descola 1996a: 88, see also Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478)....
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...5 This is a wonderful example of what Viveiros de Castro (1998) calls ‘perspectivism’, namely the conception ‘according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human or non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view’ (1998: 469)....
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...Both face and mask are the phenomenal forms of ‘the Other as Subject’, that is, as the ‘second person’ whom one would address as ‘you’ and who would respond in kind (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 483)....
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...The parallels are extraordinary, and warrant further investigation (see, especially, Descola 1992, 1996, and Viveiros de Castro 1998)....
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...In Amerindian cosmology, clothing does not cover up the body, it is a body (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 482)....
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Book•
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: In this paper, Descola proposed the four ontologies of animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature.
Abstract: Successor to Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture - as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth - is often seen as essentially different than nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies" - animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism - to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.
614 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Latour uses a case study of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and repeats an anecdote he tells about Amerindians and conquistadors talking at cross-purposes to illustrate his claim that even well-intentioned and sophisticated peacemakers can get us into worse trouble than we were in when negotiations began.
Abstract: At the outset of his reply to Ulrich Beck in this symposium, Bruno Latour cites a case study of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and repeats an anecdote he tells about Amerindians and conquistadors talking at cross-purposes. Latour deploys the story to illustrate his claim that even the most well-intentioned and sophisticated peacemakers can get us into worse trouble than we were in when negotiations began. The problem, he says, is that the likelihood is low that either side in a communication, let alone a formal negotiation, knows what the other side thinks is under discussion. Negotiating contradictory opinions may seem difficult enough, but in cases of deep enmity, opinions are not what is at stake. The disagreements are ontological: enemies disagree, as Latour cites Viveiros de Castro saying, about what world we inhabit. And when peace is achieved, it does not consist in agreement to a set of opinions or principles; the parties begin, rather, to live in a different world. The article that follows is not the one to which Latour refers but a later and related paper, appearing here in English for the first time. It has already been published, in a somewhat different version, in Italian and for an anthropological audience. It was not written for this symposium, in other words, and does not directly respond to either Latour or Beck; but Viveiros de Castro has revised the article for inclusion here, and its relevance should be immediately apparent. —Editor
541 citations
References
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Book•
01 Jan 1979
275 citations
Additional excerpts
...3See for example, Saladin d'Anglure 1990; Fienup-Riordan 1994 (Eskimo); Nelson 1983; McDonnell 1984 (Koyukon, Kaska); Tanner 1979; Scott 1989; Brightman 1993 (Cree); Hallowell 1960 (Ojibwa); Goldman 1975 (Kwakiutl); Guedon 1984 (Tsimshian); Boelscher 1989 (Haida)....
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01 Sep 1976
201 citations
TL;DR: The rise of "the body" to the status of a primary category of social and cultural theory has been one of the most salient aspects of the development of postmodern forms of cultural theory over the past two decades as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The meteoric rise of "the body" to the status of a primary category of social and cultural theory, replacing more collective categories of social and cultural understanding like "society" and "culture" themselves, has been one of the most salient aspects of the development of postmodern forms of cultural theory over the past two decades. The reasons for this turn to the body have remained shrouded in confusion despite the voluminous discussion it has occasioned. Even some of the main exemplars and partisans of the new body focus have been at a loss to account for it. Martin, for example, suggests that the body has come so prominently into focus because a new body, suitable to the postmodern era of "flexible accumulation," is now replacing the old, familiar body of the previous capitalist era of Fordist mass production (Martin 1992). This formulation, however, merely exemplifies the problem it sets out to solve. Why do we suddenly find it appropriate to speak of a new regime of social production in terms of a unique body it supposedly brings into being? Why did not social thinkers, cultural theorists, or just ordinary folks of the previous Fordist era conceive of their own era in such terms? Like social thinkers of most, if not all, previous historical epochs and modes of production, they would doubtless have found the characterization of their era in terms of the appearance of a new body (as distinct from a new style of representing the body) bizarre and mystifying. Martin' s formulation therefore seems to me to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The dimensions of the problem are suggested by juxtaposing Martin's proposition with two very different passages that express ideas and attitudes central in the turn to the body in cultural theory. The first, appropriately enough, is from an interview with Foucault, in which he suggests that his reconception of cultural and social theory in terms of a focus on the body as the site of disci
183 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this paper, a proposer a propos de l'oeuvre Le pli, Leibniz et le baroque (1988) / Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) is presented.
Abstract: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Documents a propos de l'oeuvre Le pli, Leibniz et le baroque (1988) / Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Pages dans data.bnf.fr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Cette page dans l'atelier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Sources et references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Voir dans le catalogue general de la BnF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Sources de la notice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Autre forme du titre
163 citations
"Cosmological deixis and amerindian ..." refers background in this paper
...It does not express a dependency on a predefined subject; on the contrary, whatever accedes to the point of view will be subject ...' (Deleuze 1988: 27)....
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...12 'The point of view is located in the body, says Leibniz' (Deleuze 1988: 16)....
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