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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 3.2

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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 3.2
Figures:

  • Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (ontological turn)
  • Bruno Latour (purification and hybridization)
  • Levi-Strauss (and his inspiration to de Castro)

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro:

  • Cannibal Metaphysics: applied Deleuzian metaphysics
  • Brazilian anthropologist, very well known
  • inspired by Deleuze
  • part of the ‘ontological turn’ (term used all over the humanities)
  • part of the same Zeitgeist: Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, and Philippe Descola

ONTOLOGICAL TURN MOVEMENT:

  • different world views (say, that of China, that of America, that of an uncontacted tribe) represent not different ways of looking at the same world, but they rather represent entirely different ontological realms (i.e. different worlds)
  • old idea is that Being is much the same, but peoples see it differently
  • we go beyond representations, and delve instead into natures and ontologies
  • we live in a world of multiple ontological worlds, across different cultures

Western Ontology:

  • in the West we define culture via the Nature/Culture division
  • where Nature is self-same and constant, and Culture is a difference that distributes differences and identities (i.e. a matrix of difference, relation, thing-ness application)
  • the old idea is that Nature is self-same for every culture, and only the matrix of differentiation projected upon Nature as a stable self-same foundation varies
  • this Nature/Culture distinction is not applicable to other cultures
  • non-Western cultures manifest different ontological regimes and epistemological frameworks
  • it is, furthermore, wrong to project OUR distribution of differences (Nature/Culture specifically) upon other peoples
  • issues with traditional Western approaches: no appreciation for foreign ontologies, reduction of the Other to being simply ‘wrong’, etc.
  • if we don’t understand the Other as, in many ways, fundamentally different, then we wont understand it at all
  • SOLUTION: overthrowing Nature-Culture divide

BRUNO LATOUR - We Have Never Been Modern

  • belief in a N/C divide that we undermine perpetually

  • this paradigm is practically invalid

  • N/C divide: emerges from Descartes, where culture eminates from the psychic/mind, and nature from the physical/body

  • on one side are things with rationality and soul, on the other pure extended matter

  • Two modern practices: purification, hybridization

  • PURIFICATION: the act of creating two distinct ontological zones

  • Descartes’ Meditations does this (body-mind dualism)

  • if Descartes is critiqued for not connect mind and body, this critique is wrong, since his whole point was the creation of these 2 ontological zones (pineal gland was an afterthought)

  • purification of Being (from One-ness to two distinct domains), is how we understand our entire reality

  • this is why we think of Natural vs Human/Spirit sciences (again, 2 ontological zones)

  • yet modernity functions via a bizarre practicality → everywhere we see hybrids of the two ontological zones (an iPhone is a technological entity, yet also one imbued with cultural meaning, so its a hybrid entity, etc.)

  • this is why we are not truly modern, because we don’t fully function within our own paradigm

  • another example is the hole in the ozone layer: obviously natural, but also cultural in how we understand and perceive it, etc…

  • so a natural thing (one zone) intermingles with the political (second one) to create a hybrid social entity…

  • HYBRIDIZAGTION: the creation of natural-cultural entities

  • thus, what we call Nature is a cultural construct, a hybrid

De Castro’s Anti-Narcissus:

  • a book he never wrote, an homage to D&G
  • the idea was to propose a new methodology for anthropology, on the basis of his critiques
  • this was, however, too tricky to achieve
  • CRITIQUES: anthropology does not think of the Other, but only of itself
  • anthropologists actually project an imagine of the other upon the real Other
  • anthropology thinks only through projections of images it has created, the Other in its proper Other-ness is never encountered
  • the issue was that this new methodology would have nevertheless been foreign to the Other, outside the Other, thus de Castro would have fallen into the old pit fall
  • taking a Levi-Straussian approach he instead went out to see the Other proper in actual anthropological field work → thus Cannibal Metaphysics
  • a truly critical science would succeed only by implementing the Other into itself
  • in starting Cannibal Metaphysics with his examination of the failed Anti-Narcissus (entirely fictional and ideal) he wants to show how all science MUST begin with some fiction as its grounding, rather than with some reality
  • de Castro wants a new discursive organizing of the sciences and Western ontology
  • as Anti-Oedipus tried to overthrown partiarical and hierarchical thinking, Anti-Narcissus would try to overthrow the West’s narcissism
  • despite anthropology’s narcissism de Castro turns his criticism against, first and foremost, historians and sociologist, who try do not understand the Other

D&G’s ontology, further:

  • de Castro believes that culture has an ontological foundation
  • this a kind of ‘intensive layer’
  • this is anti-constructivist (for them there wouldn’t be such a foundation to analyze scientifically)
  • D&G affirm the possibility of reaching a fundamental, underlying structure of structure (the plan(e))

Cultural Anthropology:

  • de Castro’s solution to thinking about the other
  • all about giving a voice to the Other, integrating the Other within itself
  • Levi-Strauss was already doing this — for him being an anthropologist is like being dreamt by the people you are analyzing
  • methodology and epistemology should be completely compatible with the Other, not foreign to it
  • Levi-Strauss is more complicated than this, since he maintains the N/C divide, etc.
  • cultural anthropology seeks to make subject/object relations symmetric, to enact a kind of scientific becoming between the thing being studied and the studier
  • the object melts into the subject and the subject into the object (like D&G’s wasp and orchard)
  • this means introducing within western anthropology elements which threathen it
  • the Western paradigm is overthrown from within, this is a practical, active decolonization coming from inside colonial hegemony

Amerindian Perspectivism:
[that is, native american]

  • related to MULTINATURALISM
  • in their culture and ontology we see D&G’s ontology realized
  • the native Americans went on drowning Spaniards, because their white skin indicated a soul which was unembodied. I.E. a pure transparent soul, whereas the natives clearly had souls due to their darker skin (soul being non-transparent) → THEY WERE LOOKING FOR BODIES
  • the Spaniards, on the other hand, were trying to see if they had souls → THEY WERE LOOKING FOR SOULS
  • Europeans: they presume the same physical nature, but a different soul; Amerindians: presume the same soul, but a different body
  • Europeans see the Natives as animals, the Natives see Europeans as Gods
  • humanity is never truly universal
  • de Castro interprets their animism (even plants and natural phenomena have souls) as natives comprehending the entire world as having a great multiplicity of perspectives
  • for them even animals and non-persons understand themselves in a person-like fashion
  • they see intentionality everywhere, that is project their own cultural intentionality everywhere
  • the jaguar the fruit, the tree, the wind → all have the potentiality to be perosons, HOWEVER
  • they can only be such if they’re part of the prey-hunter dynamic, only then are they persons
  • Amerindians: ALL BEINGS SEE THEMSELVES AS HUMANS, BUT NOT THOSE THEY HUNT / OTHER SPECIES
  • From each being’s own perspective, one is a human, and the
    other, an animal
  • only the SHAMAN possess the capacity to escape his own POV and see the jaguar culture where blood is bear, a steak is flesh, a bed is the branches of the leaves
  • thus all entities understand the world through the same culture (an analogous, universally human culture), but NATURE is different
  • that is, the world they see is different, but is seen from the same sort of perspective, a human one
  • what is a multiplicity is the things themselves, and not the cultures. There’s one universal culture represented through a variety of cultural objects for each species (beer → for jaguars blood, for humans Stella Artois)
  • the principle of difference is not the mind, but the body

Q&A:

  • we must adopt this perspective so we actually understand the Other, there’s nothing we can do but assume their view of the world, their ontology
  • we then place our and their culture equally, much like the Amerindians’ perspectivism

Becoming, Multiplicity, Difference:

  • fundamental difference: both human and non-human at the same time
  • each persona infinitely differs from itself, there’s no self-same-ness
  • self-difference is the fundamental characteristic of spirit
  • our humanity is species-specific (I see the jaguar as a beast, but its nevertheless human to itself)
  • the cultural network is much of the same (or similar, ig), but as a matrix it is projected differently, so what is a bed for us is nothing for the jaguar, and what is a bed for the jaguar is a tree for us
  • In Amerendian perspectivism everything is in a process of becoming
  • QUALITATIVE MULTIPLICITY (Deleze’s D&R and Bergsonism)
  • The Shaman can only be understood by qualitative multiplicities (i.e. Deleuzian qualities, Bergson’s psychic states)
  • an emotion is always different in itself, it is internally heterogenous, since we always feel it with different intensitives, through different emotive relations
  • anger is a multiplicity of different qualities conjoined together under the heading of ‘anger’
  • the shaman and the sorcerer are analogous - they exist across the borders of multiplicities and rhizomes, they cause effects to transfer and flow
  • jaguar and man have the same affects → thus both are called human, but these affects interact with things differently (the beer-beer and blood-beer)
  • HUMAN IS A HETEROGENOUS MASS OF AFFECTS WHICH CAN EXIST IN ANY BODY (remember the child’s piss-machine from Becoming-Animal)

Multinature and metamorphosis:

  • multinature can be understood as affects manifesting themselves differently, connected to different assemblages, or outright expressed through different assemblages
  • all entities in the post-modern world are qualitative multiplicities, that is, hecceities (no longer essences or ‘types’)

Relational Humanism:

  • difference between person and human
  • “The common condition of humans and animals is not animality but humanity.”
  • every species has its own anthropomorphism
  • every species is human insofar as they reject other species’ fundemental human-character
  • only the Shaman, a metaphor for the anthropologist, can see this relationalism
  • intentionality, prey-predator relation, is what defines one’s humaness
  • every center of intentionality is a human one
  • humanity is everywhere different to itself (qualitative multiplicity)
  • by being exclusionary humanity always implies that which it is not, but which is human to itself

Humanity designates a RELATION, not a SUBSTANCE

  • collective of persons with prey-hunter relations
  • imples the excluded animal as a relation, always implying other POVs
  • this is completely different from the humanist tradition’s conception, now there’s no essential character, but a purely relational one

INTERMINABLE HUMANISM:

  • a humanism that is cross-roads between different species
  • a humanism of virtualities and possibilities, where all is capable of realizing a human relation
  • humanity and animality are on a horizontal level, where places are switched back and forth, distorted, swept away, etc.
  • the very nature of humanity shifts when we consider the jaguar and the shaman
  • by reaffirming the Other’s humanity, we can a relation with the Other possible
  • unlike the anti-humanists who throw the notion out completely de Castro instead creates a positive conceptualization

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