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On Body and Soul Guilherme Werlang Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, [email protected]
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America ISSN: 2572-3626 (online) Volume 4 Issue 1 Special Issue in honor of Joanna Overing: In the Article 6 World and About the World: Amerindian Modes of Knowledge May 2006 On Body and Soul Guilherme Werlang Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti Part of the Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Werlang, Guilherme (2006). "On Body and Soul," Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol4/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Tipití (2006) 4(1&2):103–127 © 2006 SALSA 103 ISSN 1545-4703 Printed in USA On Body and Soul GUILHERME WERLANG Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil) [email protected] Since thought is inseparable from action and motivation, we are not so much dealing with different “logics” or rationalities as with total modes of being, of inventing self and society. —Roy Wagner (1981 [1975]:117) ... the Piaroa do not tend to oppose, in the way we do, thinking and acting. We cannot use our gloss of “mind” and “body” to capture their way of understanding this distinction. They, in fact, have no term for “body.” —Joanna Overing (1996:14) INTRODUCTION This paper discusses the plausibility of notions of “body” and “soul” within the dual universe of the Marubo from Southwestern Amazonia.1 At two levels the discussion implies “an acquaintance with the epistemologies and ontologies of other cultures” (Overing 1985:7). -
Art History and Cultural Difference: Alfred Gell's Anthropology Of
Published in: Art History Vol. 28 No. 4 (Autumn 2005) pp. 524-51. Art History and Cultural Difference: Alfred Gell’s Anthropology of Art Matthew Rampley One of the most pressing issues currently confronting the theory and history of art is the question of cultural difference. Specifically, what are the implications of the difference between western and non-Western cultures for the task of visual and artistic analysis? In what ways is it possible to undertake cross-cultural analysis while remaining within the frame of art history – a set of discourses originally formulated to account for the development of Western art? The responses to this question have been varied, ranging from an emphasis on the complete incommensurability of different cultures to ambitious attempts at constructing world art histories. In this article I examine the work of one particular author – the anthropologist Alfred Gell (1945-1997) – and his contribution to discussion on this issue. As I argue, Gell offers some potentially significant ways of rethinking this question, and specifically, his work offers the outline of a possible form of cross-cultural analysis that avoids some of the pitfalls that have beset previous such attempts. I analyse Gell in detail shortly, but before doing so, offer a brief overview of the current state of critical debate on the issue. Questions of Cultural Difference 1 Published in: Art History Vol. 28 No. 4 (Autumn 2005) pp. 524-51. At the root of the topic of cultural difference are a number of inter-related questions. In particular: -
Steingo, Gavin. 2016. Kwaito's Promise
Steingo, Gavin. 2016. Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aes- thetics of Freedom in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reviewed by Emily Hansell Clark Gavin Steingo’s Kwaito’s Promise is an ethnographic monograph that “thinks with” kwaito, a black urban South African electronic popular music with roots in a short-lived period of euphoria surrounding the end of apartheid in the mid-1990s. As the hopefulness of that historical moment was quick- ly dispelled by the realities of a post-apartheid existence, kwaito persisted as feel-good dance music with lyrics that evoke context-free fun, such as “Let’s celebrate/It’s time to celebrate!” from the Trompies’ “Celebrate” (4). Critics of the genre have pointed to a dissonance between the aesthetic and lyrical tone of the music and the circumstances of its listeners’ and performers’ precarious lives in segregated and impoverished South African townships to characterize kwaito as “immature, apolitical, disconnected from social issues, and lacking any meaning or purpose” (vii). Steingo de- constructs these descriptors, unpacking longstanding assumptions about what it means for music to be political, to interact with social conditions, and to “have” meaning. Ultimately, he argues that kwaito’s musicians and audiences may well choose to ignore their social conditions through their engagements with the genre, but in doing so they “deliberately . invent another way of perceiving the world,” making kwaito “less a form of es- capism than an aesthetic practice of multiplying sensory reality and thus generating new possibilities in the midst of neoliberalism’s foreclosure of the future” (vii–viii). -
The Logic of Invention
THE LOGIC OF INVENTION THE LOGIC OF INVENTION by Roy Wagner Hau Books Chicago The Logic of Invention by Roy Wagner is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Figures and illustrations: Roy Wagner Editorial office: Michelle Beckett, Justin Dyer, Sheehan Moore, Faun Rice, and Ian Tuttle Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9991570-5-3 LCCN: 2018963544 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. To DONNA MARIE HAYES, soulmate Table of Contents List of figures and illustrations ix A note from the editor xi Preface and abstract of the argument xiii Acknowledgments xix chapter 1 The reciprocity of perspectives 1 chapter 2 Facts picture us to themselves: Wittgenstein’s propositions 19 chapter 3 Nonlinear causality 59 chapter 4 The ontology of representation 89 Epilogue: Totality viewed in the imagination 113 References 121 List of figures and illustrations Binary involution in the Mayan Long Count 13 Synthesis: Retroactive conception 69 Antisynthesis: Proactive Mythmaking (“Creation”) 73 Telefolip—A “Western” perspective 80 Dimensional co-dependency 91 Third point perspective 92 Triasmus 101 Denmark: Royal incest 108 Bee-mark: Royal outcest 110 Totality viewed in the imagination 119 A note from the editor The Logic of Invention is a posthumous publication. The editing of the manu- script attempted to preserve the text as close as possible to the author’s last available draft and creative impulse. -
What Is an Individual? the View from Christianity
2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 271–294 SPECIAL SECTION INTRODUCTION What is an individual? The view from Christianity Jon Bialecki, University of Edinburgh Girish Daswani, University of Toronto The introduction to this special section of Hau focuses on the tensions between individualism and dividualism as modes of personhood; while this essay approaches this foundational anthropological question through recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity, its larger concern is to reopen the question of in/dividualism in order to see whether we can imagine different relations between these two forms of being. As part of this discussion, this introductory essay rehearses the history of individualism and dividualism as concepts, reviews the current controversy over partible Christian personhood in Melanesia, and attends to recent debates about the relation between religion, the nation, and the state in Papua New Guinea that have followed from defacement of the Papuan Parliament Building. Synthesizing this material, we argue for a shift in framing of the question of in/dividualism. Rather than viewing dividualism and individualism as merely heuristics, or as vying but extant modes of organizing the subject, we suggest that in/dividualisms are best thought of as actualizations of a unitary underlying generative problematic. This is a problematic not merely for the anthropologist but for the anthropologist’s interlocutors as well; and as this problematic is worked through in various locales, we should expect not merely a wide variety of dividual and individual crystallizations of the person but also we should anticipate particular ethnographic milieus expressing complex emergent relations between the various extant dividualisms and individualisms. -
Preface Roy Wagner‘S ―Chess of Kinship‖: an Opening Gambit
2011 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): 159–164 Preface Roy Wagner‘s ―Chess of kinship‖: An opening gambit Tony Crook, University of St. Andrews Justin Shaffner, University of Mary Washington Usually, the peer-review mechanism of a scholarly journal is designed to ensure that an article can stand for itself. In the unusual circumstances that the editors take the step of augmenting an author‘s piece of writing with a short foreword, this is often intended as either an introduction, an explanation or a justification of the piece – that is, to exert some controlling effect on the meaning of the article. This brief text intends nothing of the kind, and for best results should not be read that way. We offer up a few ideas, whose usefulness is restricted, only to provide an opening to that which follows, and which is sure to clear these away. The publication of ―The chess of kinship and the kinship of chess,‖ a chapter from a new manuscript entitled, The place of invention, falls on the heels of a visit this summer (2011) to Brazil, where in addition to participating in a series of seminars and lectures, Roy Wagner also engaged in a symmetric anthropological exchange with indigenous shamans and leaders—such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Mauricio Yekuana in Rio de Janeiro, and Iginio Tenorio Tuyuka in Manaus and in nearby communities. The shamans there on the Rio Negro initiated Wagner into their own form of knowledge-practices, including the psychoactive kahpí, which has its own capacities to spin initiates‘ heads, in ways not unlike the effects of Wagner‘s writing. -
EXPERIMENTING with ETHNOGRAPHY a Companion to Analysis Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik, Editors EXPERIMENTING
EXPERIMENTING WITH ETHNOGRAPHY A Companion to Analysis andrea ballestero and brit ross winthereik, editors EXPERIMENTING WITH ETHNOGRAPHY EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit EXPERIMENTING WITH ETHNOGRAPHY A Companion to Analy sis edited by andrea ballestero and brit ross winthereik DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2021 © 2021 Duke University Press This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Arno and Trade Gothic by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Ballestero, Andrea, [date] editor. | Winthereik, Brit Ross, [date] editor. Title: Experimenting with ethnography : a companion to analy sis / edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik. Other titles: Experimental futures. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Series: Experimental futures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020028571 (print) lccn 2020028572 (ebook) isbn 9781478010746 (hardcover) isbn 9781478011996 (paperback) isbn 9781478013211 (ebook) isbn 9781478091691 (ebook other) Subjects: lcsh: Ethnology— Research— Methodology. | Anthropology— Research. Classification: lcc gn345 .e974 2021 (print) | lcc gn345 (ebook) | ddc 305.80072/1— dc23 lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020028571 lc ebook rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 20200285721 Cover art: Beatriz Milhazes, Popeye, 2007/2008. Acrylic on canvas, 199 x 139 cm. © Beatriz Milhazes Studio. Photo: Manuel Águas & Pepe Schettino. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery. -
Os Nomes Dos Outros: Alteridade E Comunicação Em Roy Wagner
UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO DEPARTAMENTO DE ANTROPOLOGIA IRACEMA DULLEY Os nomes dos outros: alteridade e comunicação em Roy Wagner (versão corrigida) SÃO PAULO 2012 IRACEMA DULLEY OS NOMES DOS OUTROS: ALTERIDADE E COMUNICAÇÃO EM ROY WAGNER (versão corrigida) Tese apresentada à Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo para obtenção do título de doutora em antropologia social. Orientadora: Profa. Dra. Paula Montero De acordo: São Paulo 2012 para Barbara e Ariel Agradecimentos Agradeço a minha orientadora, Paula Montero, por muitas coisas: as leituras atentas e formadoras, a sabedoria, a disponibilidade, o rigor, a confiança, a inteligência. E por ter me acompanhado, instigado e apoiado durante minha formação como antropóloga. É difícil pôr em palavras o tamanho dessa dívida. À Fapesp e seu parecerista, respectivamente, pela bolsa de pesquisa e pela generosidade na leitura de meus relatórios. Aos professores, funcionários e colegas do Departamento de Antropologia da USP, especialmente a Márcio Silva e Rainer Schmidt, que foram meus professores, por todos os ensinamentos. Aos editores da Cadernos de Campo, pelo aprendizado conjunto e pela parceria, especialmente a André Schouten, Giovanni Cirino, Diana Mateus, Enrico Spaggiari, Inácio Andrade, Janaína Damasceno, Rodrigo Lobo e Samantha Gaspar. A Rosalind Morris agradeço por ter me recebido em Nova York e participado com perspicácia e leveza de um momento importante de descobertas. Bambi Schieffelin foi muito amável e me apresentou um pouco de Melanésia. Agradeço aos amigos e colegas dos tempos de sanduíche, especialmente Ellen Hunt, Firat Kurt, Elena Petkova, Isabela Oliveira e Aarti Sethi. Agradeço a Aarti também pelo apoio e companheirismo dos últimos tempos. -
Zeno and the Art of Anthropology
Symposium: Comparative Relativism ZENO AND THE ART OF ANTHROPOLOGY Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Translated by Antonia Walford It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light. — Thelonious Monk, from Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day The deliberately paradoxical nature of this symposium’s title encapsulates a dis- tinctive concern of some of today’s most vitally important intellectual endeavors. There is only one of these that I can or should consider as my own untransferable matter of concern — the endeavor seeking performatively to redefine anthropol- ogy as consisting essentially of (a) a theory of peoples’ ontological autodetermina- tion and (b) a practice of the permanent decolonization of thought. I am aware that the very word anthropology may be jeopardized by this redefinition, given that it belongs firmly among the conditions of our current civilizational deadlock (or should I say, impending downfall), which bears a more than fortuitous rela- tion to our unrelenting determination that the world continue to revolve around Common Knowledge 17:1 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2010-045 © 2011 by Duke University Press 128 the human in its various historico- conceptual guises. We could perhaps, in this case, rename the discipline “field geophilosophy” or (in reference to our armchair 129 moments) “speculative ontography.” In any case, the relevant onomastics would continue to be Greek — a detail that, there is little need to add, is neither acciden- tal nor inconsequential from an anthropological point of view. The question for me is how to give the expression comparative relativism a meaning specific to social anthropology. -
Introduction to Post-Social Anthropology Networks, Multiplicities, and Symmetrizations
2012 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 421–433 | U n e d i t e d | Introduction to Post-Social Anthropology Networks, multiplicities, and symmetrizations Eduardo VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Marcio GOLDMAN, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Translated by Ashley Lebner 1st session. Openings Eduardo Viveiros de Castro This course was invented by both of us as a way to resolve a technical difficulty that arose after I declared my intention to lead, this semester [March–June 2006], the traditional course of the Post-Graduate Program in Social Anthropology ―AT1‖: Anthropological Theory 1, the introductory course that begins with the origins of anthropology, in the depths of the nineteenth century, and ends with Lévi- Straussian structuralism, or a bit before. We decided, faced with this difficulty, to offer a kind of ―Anthropological Theory 2+,‖ which would discuss what happens with anthropology after the course of Anthropological Theory 2, which follows AT1; that is, the one that goes from structuralism until ―today‖—although today is always, in the best case scenario, yesterday. Then we thought that maybe it would be more appropriate to classify this course as ―AT −1,‖ Anthropological Theory minus one, seeing that our proposal, here, is to approach anthropology not from beginning to end, according to the progressivist and teleological conception of intellectual history, but by means of another analytical trajectory, which is not historical, even though, or perhaps because, we are concerned with contemporaneity (hence the initial idea of an ―AT Publisher‘s note: We are grateful to the authors for allowing HAU to release the first English translation from Portuguese by Ashley Lebner of the introductory chapter (1ª Sessão – Aberturas) of an set of lectures (by Marcio Goldman and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro) titled Introdução a uma Antropologia Pós-Social: redes, multiplicidades e simetrizações given in March–June 2006 at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. -
The Logic of Invention
THE LOGIC OF INVENTION THE LOGIC OF INVENTION by Roy Wagner Hau Books Chicago The Logic of Invention by Roy Wagner is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Figures and illustrations: Roy Wagner Editorial office: Michelle Beckett, Justin Dyer, Sheehan Moore, Faun Rice, and Ian Tuttle Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) eISBN: 978-1-912808-52-6 LCCN: 2018963544 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. To DONNA MARIE HAYES, soulmate Table of Contents List of figures and illustrations ix A note from the editor xi Preface and abstract of the argument xiii Acknowledgments xix chapter 1 The reciprocity of perspectives 1 chapter 2 Facts picture us to themselves: Wittgenstein’s propositions 19 chapter 3 Nonlinear causality 59 chapter 4 The ontology of representation 89 Epilogue: Totality viewed in the imagination 113 References 121 List of figures and illustrations Binary involution in the Mayan Long Count 13 Synthesis: Retroactive conception 69 Antisynthesis: Proactive Mythmaking (“Creation”) 73 Telefolip—A “Western” perspective 80 Dimensional co-dependency 91 Third point perspective 92 Triasmus 101 Denmark: Royal incest 108 Bee-mark: Royal outcest 110 Totality viewed in the imagination 119 A note from the editor The Logic of Invention is a posthumous publication. The editing of the manu- script attempted to preserve the text as close as possible to the author’s last available draft and creative impulse. -
Paperback); ISBN: 9781912808526 (E-Book
Wagner, Roy 2019. The Logic of Invention. Chicago: HAU Books. 135 pp. ISBN: 9780999157053 (paperback); ISBN: 9781912808526 (E-book). oy Wagner (1938–2018) was, along with linear. In an obviation diagram, all connections Marilyn Strathern, one of the most between different points of a trope can be traced. Rprominent figures of the so-called New It is ‘metaphor spread out’ (p. 60). The diagrams Melanesian Ethnography. The Logic of Invention show how the conditions for the next step in is his last book, published posthumously and a trope are set up, to be obviated, ‘anticipated available as an open access download via and disposed of ’, in sequence. There are several HAU books. In addition to works based in examples of two- and three dimensional ethnography, Wagner has been building a more obviation diagrams in the book, which add universal theory of meaning throughout his to the previous texts in picturing details and career, and The Logic of Invention continues this comparisons of specific examples. trajectory. The book consists of a preface, four Chapter 3, titled ‘Nonlinear causality’, chapters, and an epilogue. Despite the many critiques unicausality, the persistent tendency links between them, the chapters are fairly to seek out a single cause for natural and other independent, rather different perspectives on phenomena. Wagner links this to ‘the illusion certain aspects of the theoretical apparatus than of linear causality’, the way phenomena are a cumulative argument. As usual, the scope is perceived as the result of chains of causality, far-reaching. Wagner’s focus is on meaning, but despite the way ‘determining influences the use of symbols is not treated as one more converge, diverge, and intersect with one tool of the human condition among others.