I
In Of Grammatology, Derrida rejects Lévi-Strauss’s account of his encounter with the Nambikwara as naif. Lévi-Strauss, says Derrida, is a victim of the typical Rousseauian nostalgia before an allegedly-egalitarian-and-transparent society in which any attempt on the part of one of its members to concentrate power and turn opaque its transparency is punished by the group. Thus, for example, the illiterate Nambikwara chief, to whom Lévi-Strauss had presented a notebook and a pencil, pretended to write on it so as to increase his authority, reports Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques; but the other Nambikwara did not like it and abandoned him. Unlike Clastres, who made of this episode the point of departure of an ethnographic and conceptual investigation by which he aimed at the renewal of political anthropology, Derrida accuses Lévi-Strauss of overlooking something – and of overlooking it fatally.
What is it that Lévi-Strauss does not see, according to Derrida? Very easy, suggests Derrida. He takes the Nambikwara to be an egalitarian society disturbed by the (fake) introduction of writing (on the part of its chief), against whose constitutive violence the (rest of the) group reacts; for, unlike speech, in which everyone partakes to one degree or another, a writing system presupposes a scribal class that controls the use of language, and this paves the way for the inscription of social inequality. But, Derrida goes on to say, Lévi-Strauss fails to notice that the Nambikwara prohibition to pronounce anyone’s (proper) name conceals a prior and terrible form of (structural) violence, or better, two: on the one hand, the fact that the utterance of anyone’s (proper) name is interdicted (i.e. the name’s consignment to secrecy and obliteration) means that censorship is already at stake among the Nambikwara, and with it an authoritarian imposition whose violence is only made evident by its violation; on the other hand, this conceals and even-deeper and more-fundamental type of violence, to wit: that in which naming consists, for to name implies to (violently) disrupt an undifferentiated reality and to parcel it by giving a name to this and that.(*)
Once more, we come across the dialectics of the normative (here, pretendedly, any name) and its subversion (or here, rather, its denunciation by means of its “deconstruction”) – against the backdrop ofthe Biblical God who names everything “from above” (Derrida’s Jewish ghost)?
In a way, Derrida’s preventive attitude vis-à-vis the meaningfulness and the use of language (which he likes to approach as an imbroglio of unlogofiable textual-like traces) is shared by much contemporary (“post-structuralist”) thought. Now, behind a shared symptom, there is usually a shared cause – plus, here, a shared fault, namely: a poor (to put it mildly, for elegance’s sake) knowledge of basic anthropology. Rousseau: “The great mistake of Europeans is to always philosophise on the origins of things according to what happens at their home.” Derrida included.
But which, exactly, is Derrida’s mistake?
Plainly: he projects an issue of power onto an issue of logic.
II
Why do the Nambikwara (and the same can be said about many other indigenous peoples) never pronounce their proper names, but agree instead to name themselves according to their relations (husband of…, mother of…, brother of… daughter of…) and nicknames?
At first sight, this looks like something strange among people who love to name and classify everything, even that which is useless, as for the hyper-logical “savage mind” (the expression is Lévi-Strauss’s) there is a place for everything and everything must be kept in its place to prevent the world from collapsing – naming, therefore, helps the world to be there and reinforces it. Classification is so meticulous that, usually, nothing is overlooked (not even minor and apparently-insignificant details that, in the case of plants, for example, would go unnoticed to the sight of a particularly observant botanist).
And yet they do not pronounce their proper names. But not out of censorship – that is Derrida’s mistake. They do not pronounce them because, otherwise, it would be too dangerous, as it would put the world the other way round.
What, exactly, do we mean by this? In The Relative Native, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro provides, if not a response response to this precise question, at least the elements needed to answer it.
Among the Piro, he says, “to be human and to be kin are the same thing,” in the sense that “to be a person is to be a relative, and vice-versa” – that is to say, only you and your kin are fully human, since you all have the same body and the body is (as a collection of physical dispositions and affects) the marker of identity of all that which is: a jaguar is such because of its claws and mottled skin, a parrot such because of its wings and coloured feathers, a missionary such because of his its ghost-like appearance, etc. Surely they also see themselves as persons, but that is a different matter: they all have souls, and by virtue of these they see themselves as true persons, but everybody knows that a jaguar does not see you as a person: you are just edible flesh to his eyes. As for the missionaries… well, who has never dreamed of cooking one, even if adult males of valour are naturally preferred as main dish?(**)
Nevertheless, “the production of relatives (consanguines) requires the intervention of non-relatives (potential affines),” so that “a difference is required in order to make bodies by means of other bodies”; that is to say, Difference is necessary for the making of Sameness.
As a result, any “living person” is not so much an individual as a “dividual, a singularity of body and soul internally constituted by the self/other, consanguine/affine polarity”; a composite singularity, then, in which the soul is theprinciple of affine alterity, and the body the principle of consanguineal identity. Which means that “the body must be produced out of the soul but also against it,” in the sense that to increase one’s family, i.e to enlarge one’s identity and thus expand one’s body, one must move outside of one’s own family and relate, by means of one’s soul, to an other who is not one’s kin, allaying to and thereby marrying her/him; yet the purpose of that outwardly movement is to produce kin, of which, as we have seen, the soul is the anti-principle, since it is the principle of alterity.
Therefore, we may deduce, the “process of kinship concerns the fabrication […] of bodies” – and of bodies alone. Conversely, “individual souls are never made, but always given: either absolutely during conception, or transmitted along with names and other pre-constituted principles, or captured ready-made from the outside”; and they are not good to classify anything, as everything is classified according to what it is, i.e. according to its own kin – or body. What one may become is an altogether different issue.
Now, the fact that everything is classified according to its own kin means that everything must be named according to its own kin or body, as well – whereas one’s proper name is an attribute of one’s soul. Therefore, one’s proper name must not be pronounced, even if one carries it within the soul.
One is called by one’s relational names: mother of…, sister of… son of… But one is never called by one’s proper name, which, denoting as it does the quid of one’s soul, one must keep secret to operate with it. It is a magical attribute of the soul, which, unlike your relational names, does not describe who you are but how you are capable of doing what you do to become more than what you are.
In short, your proper name is your shamanic principle. It is part of the fabric of the world, but not of its furniture. It is an active principle, but it has as such – it could be argued – the quality of a verb, for which reason it cannot be turned into a noun.
Derrida confused the two things: the constituted forms of the world and its constituent dynamics, the status of verbs and that of nouns. Thus he made not only an anthropological mistake, but also a linguistic one – without realising any of them.
(*) How did the theme of a supposedly-original violence against a primordial undifferentiated prius (which one should aim at fusing with) enter contemporary French philosophy, wherein it made its home? Very likely, through Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche (on whom we have written here and here). Its implications have been disastrous, but we cannot go into it here. We shall return to it in due course.
(**) We could not help the example, as we are currently writing on cannibalism, or, rather, on two different, in fact opposed, types of cannibalism: one in which the Other is fully erased even if it is metaphorically eaten (which is the logic behind European Christianity, colonialism, and capitalism alike); another one in which, despite the Other being physically eaten, its position is, paradoxically, exchanged but never suppressed (as it is more often than not the case with extra-modern ritual cannibalism). Meanwhile, a bit more on the notions of humanity and cannibalism can be found here. As for what bodies are in indigenous perspective, we have addressed the issue here and here.
Image: collage by polymorph