I Nietzsche claims that the way in which we picture the world affirms or denies what we are ready to put in it, in short, that our representations rely on a pre-representational basis, inasmuch as we see what we see depending on how we are inclined to value it. In other words, he underscores the…
Category: Anthropology
Of Dreamscapes and Dancescapes
(A sequel to “Phantasmagoria“) There are two different theories of dreaming. One interprets dreams according to well-established a priori categories (such as complexes) and views dreams as symptoms of the dreamer’s personal expectations and frustrations, family and social roles, etc. Conversely, the other one approaches dreams in pragmatic and heuristic manner (as in a trial-and-error…
Dreams as the Fugues of the Unconscious? On Musical Polyphony and Schizoanalytic Pragmatics
For Mahoro Murasawa and Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart I Like everything else, music is (to use a Guattarian concept) an “optional matter”; that is to say, there are many ways to organize any sound material. Take, for instance, the chromatic scale, which represents a way of classifying and gathering together a finite number of sounds, namely, twelve…
Seeds of Singing – or, What Else Can a Soul Be and Do
Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) ends with one of the characters, “Paolo,” a bourgeois middle-aged man, running naked through the wilderness out of shame, a profound anti-bourgeois shame. For, while Paolo is able to break off with the bourgeois order that he himself incarnates as both a bourgeois father and businessman, he proves incapable of replacing it…
“We Fight Because We Die” (II): An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War
(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “We Fight Because We Die” (I): On Extra-Modern War as a Question of Social Logic.”) We die. It can hardly be minimised. Thus the common ancient-Greek terms for men: θνητοί, “mortals.” During the opening seconds of Robert Gardner’s beautiful ethnographic film, Dead Birds (1964), the camera follows…
“We Fight Because We Die” (I): On Extra-Modern War as a Question of Social Logic
In Chapter 11 of Archeology of Violence, subtitled “War in Primitive Societies” – the term “primitive” has different connotations in French than it has in English: it means something like “original” or “primordial” in the Rousseauian sense, which is overtly non-evolutionist – Pierre Clastres begins by tracing a sharp contrast between two phenomena, namely, the…
Cannibalism as a Total Social Fact
1 “The power to change form – power over the image – can be seen as the ultimate realisable power in a society dominated by consensual (visual) image,” writes Roy Wagner.(⊛) By “consensual (visual) image” Wagner means what is commonly (and poorly) known as “tradition.” Take, for example, any extra-modern ritual: on the day in…
Bodies, Ghosts, Ancestors
It is tempting to view Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in Phaedrus 245c–253e as an instantiation – whose conceptual complexity is easily overlooked when the image it conveys is turned into a myth in the modern sense of the term, i.e. into an object of belief – of what we have called a semiotic…
On Difference
In the first place, difference presents itself in two ways: as difference in nature (a dolphin is different from a violin because their respective natures differ) and difference in degree or gradual difference (it is now warmer than it was earlier this morning). Yet difference can be also thought in terms of archetypes and their…
Anthropology as Heterology
It was Herder (1744–1803) who coined the term Volkskunde (pl. Völkerskunde), which may be translated as the “knowledge” of the “popular traditions” and “cultural practices” of a given “nation” or “people.” But it was not until 1839 and 1843 that the first learned ethnological societies were established in Paris and London, respectively. The Ethnological Society…