Comparative Metaphysics

Ontology After Anthropology

Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, Peter Skafish

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783488599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Metafisica filosofica

How does the ontological turn in anthropology redefine what modern, Western ontology is in practice, and offer the beginnings of a new ontological pluralism? On a planet that is increasingly becoming a single, metaphysically homogeneous world, anthropology remains one of the few disciplines that recognizes that being has been thought with very different concepts and can still be rendered in terms quite different than those placed on it today. Yet despite its critical acuity, even the most philosophically oriented anthropology often remains segregated from philosophical discussions aimed at rethinking such terms. What would come of an anthropology more fully committed to being a source of (post-) philosophical concepts? What would happen to philosophy if it began to think with and through these concepts? How, finally, does comparison condition these two projects? This book addresses these questions from a variety of perspectives, all of which nonetheless hold in common the view that “philosophy” has been displaced and altered by the modes of thought of other collectives. An international group of authors, including Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Philippe Descola, and Bruno Latour, explore how the new anthropology/philosophy conjuncture opens new horizons of critique.

Part I

COMPARISON, SYMMETRY, PLURALISM

Chapter 1

Varieties of Ontological Pluralism

Philippe Descola

Some twenty years ago, in the introduction to a special issue of the journal L’Homme devoted to native Amazonian societies, Anne Christine Taylor and I ventured to write the following sentence: “Structuralism ‘works well’ in Amazonia because native peoples there appear to be spontaneously structuralist” (Descola and Taylor 1993, 16). It seemed to us, and it still does, that the propensity of Amerindians to use concrete properties observable in the environment to construct highly intricate conceptual relations did share with structuralist analysis certain of its characteristic features—in particular its capacity to render manifest complex symbolic assemblages out of the encapsulation of secondary qualities gleaned on the surface of phenomena. And we were convinced that this Amazonian propensity had been, via Lévi-Strauss’s Brazilian ethnographic experience, one of the sources of inspiration for his peculiar mode of anthropological thinking. In other words, beyond the two platonic spouses that Lévi-Strauss claimed—structural phonology and D’Arcy Thompson’s brand of morphogenesis—and beyond his three no less platonic avowed mistresses—Marx, Freud, and geology—we thought it was necessary to recall the role played by a companion he had met in his youth—“Amazonian thought” as it is expressed in myths and institutions—a companion which had never ceased to exert upon him a charm so profound that it could not be reduced, by contrast with the others, to propositional formulae. To this idea of a deep resonance between, on the one hand, the nature of the structural method and, on the other, the nature of the object with which it experimented, Lévi-Strauss contented himself with remarking “Here, you went a bit far.” In a way, this chapter on the relationship between Western and non-Western ways of thinking, will be a reflection on Lévi-Strauss’s comment.1

What does Lévi-Strauss’s reply suggest? It begs a question that could be formulated in the following way: When an anthropologist studies how some natives think and strives to give an account of it, how are we to discriminate between three distinct strands: first, the information, first-hand or reported, that she makes use of—mainly statements and actions often disconnected from one another; second, the affinity that she senses between the discursive and behavioral style that she observes and the modes of conceptualization that are familiar to her or that she has learned to appreciate, and finally, the greater or lesser degree of reflexivity with which the propositions she analyses are endowed? I will return in a moment to the vexing question of studying how natives think. At present, I wish to focus my remarks upon certain conceptual properties of the anthropological discourse itself and its relation to our own native mode of reflexive thinking, namely philosophy. This is a question that takes all the more importance in the French context, as a great number of French anthropologists and social scientists since the beginning of the 20th century, including me, have first majored in philosophy before embracing a career in anthropology, a situation which contrasts in that respect with that of the other great anthropological nations. Philosophical parlance comes spontaneously to us even when, as is most commonly the case, we have chosen to yield to an anthropological vocation out of a disenchantment with academic philosophy, that is, a system of thought mainly concerned with a reflexive exegesis of its own conceptual genesis, and thus generally indifferent to questions raised elsewhere in terms that, for most of its history, philosophy did not strive to understand.

A few words, to start with, on the peculiarity of philosophy in comparison with other forms of speculative thought attested to in civilizations other than our own. The specificity of philosophy has less to do with the objects it has elected to deal with—some are proper to it, others not—than it does a blending of traits that one does not find combined elsewhere, except perhaps in theology. Philosophy is reflexive; it creates new concepts and pretends to universality. Now, all systems of thought which endeavor to give meaning to human existence and enterprises invent original ideas; less numerous are those that take themselves again and again as objects of reflection and inquiry; there is none but philosophy which claims, in the wake of the sciences of nature, that its propositions, if only by preterition, are relevant in absolute terms. This last proposition is clearly exorbitant, as the concepts that philosophy uses—nature, being the, the subject, transcendence, history, etc.—are just as uncommon to other ontologies as the circumstances these other ontologies designate, or try to account for, are indigestible to philosophy: animals that see themselves as humans, dead humans who still act upon the living, mountains that need to be chastised, etc. The consequence appears straightforward: either philosophy must reform itself in a drastic manner by revising its presuppositions so as to accommodate other ways of thinking—a process which, judging by its antecedents, will only be embraced by a tiny minority of philosophers—or the task of symmetrization will have to be entrusted to anthropology, provided that it succeeds in borrowing selectively from the rich conceptual depot of Western metaphysics and gnoseology. It seems to me that this latter path is the one which the most stimulating minds in anthropology have decided to follow ever since the end of the 19th century.

However, sad as this may be, and for reasons to which I will return in a moment, this symmetrization is condemned to remain incomplete, for its final result is conditioned in its very form by the audience to which it is destined: “not the Melanesian of some island,” to borrow Mauss’s celebrated formula (Mauss 1969, 78), but professional anthropologists and, more generally, the amateurs of reflexive thought whose tastes have been formed by two and a half millennia of the European philosophical tradition and whom one has to address in a language that they are able to understand. This incomplete symmetrization may also take very different forms according to the types and modalities of transfer between the local ideology, or ideologies, and the ideology of the analyst. Three of them are prominent.

The most common form of symmetrization, and the oldest one in anthropology, consists in developing the conceptual implications of a local institution in such a way that its relevance will exceed the limits of both the original institution and the peculiarities of the region where it was initially described. In the discipline’s early phases, this movement of generalization was operated by stretching the meaning of local concepts to subsume a myriad of disparate phenomena, which typically had as their only common denominator their failure to square with the Western manner of apprehending the field of practice such concepts reputedly qualified. “Totem,” “mana,” “taboo,” “shaman,” and “hau” were born in such a way and with positive effects—whatever the critics of essentialism might think—in that this process of extension ultimately meant transforming what were previously perceived as ridiculous superstitions into philosophical problems or cognitive categories worthy of being taken seriously.

More recently, this generalizing operation is more commonly undertaken by intensively exploiting the conceptual consequences of an institution, a process, a regime of relation or an epistemic orientation stemming from ethnographic observation. Instead of disproportionately extending an initially fuzzy meaning, it is, on the contrary, a deepening and an operationalization of a very precisely defined concept that is sought after here. Well-known examples of this process are Dumont’s idea of hierarchical encompassment, Marilyn Strathern’s notion of the person as an objectification of relations or Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism: theoretical constructs, that is, initially intended to account for the dispositions of specific cultural areas, but later employed in a wider context. One may even add to this category Lévi-Strauss’s idea of reciprocity as a foundation of social life, an intuition initially stemming from his observation of the working of Bororo moieties, but that later acquired a seminal dimension in his sociological work, quite divorced from the actual functioning of dualist societies. In all of these cases, the originality of these local models turned paradigms, as well as the very principle of their constitution, results from the stark contrast they present, implicitly or explicitly, with Western ways of perceiving and conceptualizing the field of phenomena these models account for: Frazerian totemism contrasts with the dualist idea of nature and society, Dumontian hierarchical encompassment contrasts with possessive individualism, the Maussian hau contrasts with the logic of commoditization. Here, the generalization of a cultural relative in turn relativizes what was hitherto seen as a generalizing principle.

Let’s move now to the second form of symmetrization. It consists in transforming an account of a native way of thinking into a more or less systematized corpus similar to a philosophical doctrine, at least in its mode of presentation. This is also an old tendency in the West, and one that even predates the former type of symmetrization, since it has been a characteristic feature during several centuries of a certain type of missionary anthropology. The Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, compiled in Nahuatl by Bernardino de Sahagún in the 16th century, is probably the earliest example of this trend, while the Jesuits’ Lettres édifiantes et curieuses from China are its most celebrated expression, largely for the influence they had on Leibniz’s ideas. Aside from their indisputable ethnographic value, these documents demonstrate a real interest in pure knowledge and a no less real admiration for the subtlety of the concepts and intellectual operations they describe, albeit combined with a few less elevated considerations: most notably the wish to extol the formidable achievement of converting genuine scholars, whose intellectual constructions were every bit as complex as their evangelizers,’ and the desire to show that some of these constructions actually prefigured, in spirit if not in letter, certain truths of the divine message or some entities of Western metaphysics. A more modern expression of this long-standing trend is Father Placide Tempels’s famous Philosophie bantoue (1945) and the heated debate it triggered among African philosophers. However, the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji, for instance, sees in what he disdainfully dubs as “ethnophilosophies” nothing more than classical ethnological studies on African representations of the world and the person (Hountondji 1970).

Although the debate on alternative metaphysics has raged mainly in Africa where, due to the theological training of some of its participants, it may have appeared sometimes as a sort of revenge of a Thomist philosophy gone native upon the Hegelian philosophy of history and its unabashed claim of European superiority, this kind of proliferation of philosophy in nearby domains is also present in ethnological accounts properly speaking. Usually, it is under the guise of the easily recognizable philosophical hues thanks to which an ethnographer depicts the moral and epistemic dispositions of the society he or she studies. Examples are numerous in France due to the influence of philosophy, in particular of Husserlian phenomenology, on the formation of the first generation of ethnographers doing proper fieldwork in the 1920s and 1930s.Whether this influence was direct, as in the case of Maurice Leenhardt, or indirect, as in the case of Marcel Griaule, it had the effect of providing an epistemic paradigm which, because it ran counter to the dominant positivist cognitive realism of the time, appeared to correspond better to the modes of knowledge and of being present in the world that the ethnographers were encountering in faraway places. I suspect that this latter aspect is the reason for the continuous favor that phenomenology has enjoyed among anthropologists who nevertheless belonged to very different national traditions, such as Ernesto de Martino in Italy, Marcelo Bórmida in Argentina or Irving Hallowell in the United States. This painting of anthropology with philosophical colors has taken a more decided turn in the past few decades in the Anglophone world, in particular with the belated discovery there of Merleau-Ponty, and that too, more recently, of Deleuze in his work’s more digestible Guattarian form.

Although the invocation of philosophical concepts, and above all of the mighty authority of certain philosophers, has now become standard practice in anthropology—and surprisingly more in its Anglophone brands than in the Francophone ones—this practice often becomes an ambiguous homage, so superficial remains the reference to philosophy, a form of paying lip service which usually amounts to shrouding under a surreptitiously borrowed conceptual veil the robust empiricism that underlies seriously conducted ethnographic inquiries. And actually, the attempts to publicize alter-metaphysics and to evaluate, even promote, their subversive incidence on our own way of practicing philosophy, much in the wake of what was initially endeavored by African philosophers, these attempts are still uncommon, even if the echo aroused by recent philosophically inclined books, such as Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics (2014), may lead to a movement in that direction. However, whether these attempts at broadcasting alter-metaphysics are the work of native authors trained in Western philosophy, or of Western anthropologists drawing the lessons of a native way of thinking according to the canons of exposition of a philosophical work, they all have a very serious drawback. They remain an idiosyncratic exegesis which upsets, and bypasses, the pragmatic conditions o...