PREVIOUS PART HERE In Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion, Roy Wagner writes: The words defined in a dictionary are all based on the principle of signification, and in most cases their signification is what is called lexical, that is, each word refers to one or more specific elements (which may be objects,…
Category: Otherness
Metaphor and Meaning (I)
The Yanomami myth of the “falling sky” – which resembles that of the Celts reported by Ptolemy to Alexander during his campaign in Thrace against the Illyrians – offers a perfect site to briefly explore the relationship between metaphor and meaning. Davi Kopenawa narrates the myth thus: At the beginning, the sky was still new…
Beyond the Semiotic Prism
There is, on the one hand, the earth’s flesh, i.e. the multiplicity of movements, images, sounds, and sensations that compose it, by which all earthly beings enter in communication with one another emitting and receiving signs; that is to say, a dynamic multiplicity which is, furthermore, permanently accompanied by thought – a thought that is…
Capitalism as Acculturation – or, the Revolutionary Force of the Past
December 9, 1973. In an article published in the Corriere della Sera Pasolini laments the acculturation brought about by capitalism. In particular, he deplores the loss of the “peripheral cultures which, until a few years ago had their own life assured – essentially a free life, even if within the poorest, or even miserable, peripheral…
10 – 3 ≠ 7; 10 – 3 = 13
Should we have learned indigenous mathematics or, more exactly, should we remember them – for we were all once indigenous peoples – the world would be different and probably better than it is today. For the ontology behind modern mathematics and, more broadly, modern science, is anything but neutral. Put differently, reality is not just…
More on Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms
We have written elsewhere on schizophrenia, following Jean Oury, as a “rhythmic distortion.” We would now like to add that such distortion is neither what one presences when one witnesses a schizophrenic delirium nor what one enters when one enters one. For, as Freud stresses, it is at re-building their collapsed worlds that psychotics aim…
When Binary Thought is Not What you Think
A Primal Evolutionary Phenomenon and a Recurrent Social-Cultural Constituent “It is a singular property of the human species,” writes Leroi-Gourhan, “that by confining itself to engendering action, it periodically eludes the organic specialization that would definitively tie it down. If the hand of the earliest anthropoid had become a tool by adaptation, the result would…
Becoming Extra-Moderns
I As Tim Ingold writes, “apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it.”(*) This does not only mean that all knowledge is, by definition, situated; it also means that…
A Post-Anthropocentric Take on the Human Difference
C. Boesch writes that “wild chimpanzees seem to use drumming on buttressed trees to convey information and changes of travel direction.”(*) From this we may infer that at least some animals have symbolic language, i.e. an abstract and agreed-upon type of language. Conversely, iconicity (in terms of the mimicry of visual, sound, and olfactive forms,…
Derrida’s Mistake – or, Why One Should Never Philosophise on the Origins of Things According to What Happens at One’s Home
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…