Common Knowledge

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY
Symposium on an Unanticipated Conceptual Practice

Peter Skafish, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,

Patrice Maniglier, Louis Morelle

Introduction: A New Pocket of Intellectual Space

It could be said that anthropologists have had the wrong idea about philosophy.
The tendency of at least some anthropologists has been to think that abstract
thought is an end in itself and that, in the fabrication of concepts, almost anything counts as one. Of course, we realize that formulating a proper concept
is a task of profound difficulty, requiring an ability to address authentic intellectual problems with precise and learned arguments. Still, the anthropologist
labors in a discipline that began as an examination of outlandish conceptsthat
some objects are persons, for example, or that some twins are, while remaining
human, also birds. Anthropologists, for a long time, tried to find the reasons for
and the hidden rationality underlying thoughts of this kind, maintaining that, in
the societies where they arose, they served structural functions or else amounted
to primitive sciences, employing the same logical forms as modern people do,
although to very different ends.
Eventually, anthropology ran up against the possibility that the bizarre
ways of thinking that its practitioners studied might contain something like
metaphysical ideas, requiring a combination of speculative imagination and analytical precision to be understood. But before then some anthropologists came to
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DOI 10.1215/0961754X-3622236
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regret the fascination of their trade with otherness or alterity of this kind and
arguedthis was in the 1980sthat what their predecessors had thought about
the exotic ideas of others said far more about their own politics and psychic lives
than about the peoples that they had studied. Afterward, much of the field either
drifted away from contemplating alien concepts altogether or else turned toward
treating them as pragmatic features of the lives of people struggling under postcolonial and capitalist regimes of power. At that same time, however, a small group of
anthropologistsnotably, Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and
Philippe Descolacame to feel that justice was not being done to what Claude
Lvi-Strauss had called la pense sauvage. They argued that to understand alien
concepts demands an alteration of ones own.1 The work involved is trickily recursive and speculative: one must first try to articulate in modern terms what the
alien concepts mean, then account for how those terms inevitably fail to translate
some essential and perhaps incommensurable part of their meaning, and, finally,
compensate for that betrayal by recasting the meaning of the modern terms being
used in light of that other, untranslatable meaning. The result is a new group of
concepts, a translation of the original source concepts that redefines the target terms into which they are translated.2
A defining instance of this approach is Stratherns book The Gender of the
Gift (1988), an account of Melanesian personhood, gender, and power that proceeds by demonstrating, almost obsessively, the failure of social scientific and
feminist categories for that purpose and then inventing an array of concepts,
including dividuality and relations that separate, in order to revise the relevant modern categories.3 Equally paradigmatic of this approach is Viveiros de
Castros argument, in his article Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism (1998), that the understanding, on the part of many Amerindian peoples,
that nonhuman beings are humans too should not be taken for a particular cultural representation of nature.4 Such an interpretation, he showed, would fail to
recognize that Amerindian cosmology inverts the functions of the modern categories humanity and culture. In that cosmology, humanity and culture are
universal to all beings, while bodies (or natures) are the particulars that distin-

1. For a comparison with perhaps parallel developments

in psychoanalysis of about the same time, see contributions to the seriatim symposium on countertransference
published in early issues of Common Knowledge (Winter
1995, Spring 1996, Fall 1996, Spring 1997, and Winter
1997).
2. I am condensing into a few lines two detailed accounts
of this process: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Perspectival
Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation, Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of
Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004): 322; and Patrice

Maniglier, The Others Truths: Logic of Comparative

Knowledge (2009), draft essay online at www.scribd.com
/doc/260897345/Maniglier-Patrice-The- Other-s-Truth
#scribd (accessed April 5, 2016).
3. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with
Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988).
4. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Deixis and
Amerindian Perspectivism, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 46988.

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5. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell,

Introduction: Thinking through Things, in Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically,
ed. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (Oxford: Routledge,
2007).

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Anthropological Philosophy

Skaf ish

guish them from one another. Recognizing this difference enjoins the anthropologist to approach the modern categories as pertinent to a strictly local way of
distributing Being and beings, from within which other such distributions look
very different than they do when the anthropologist presumes to operate within
a cosmology, that of modern science, that is, quite simply, true.
Viveiros de Castros and Stratherns work, along with that of Bruno Latour,
Roy Wagner, and others, was eventually conceived, by Amiria Henare, Martin
Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, as comprising an ontological turn in anthropology.5 The new ontological method, they argued, was capable of extracting conceptual revisions, like those that I have been describing, from encounters with
any kind of cosmology or practice. As broad as their theorization of this sort of
research isHolbraad, in particular, has done extensive work to show that it
concerns general issues of truth and representationthe way that they develop
it speaks primarily to anthropology as a scientific project that is unambiguously
located in the disciplines theoretical corpus, literature, and professional community. Their virtual equation of the ontological turn with anthropology has left
largely untreated an unanticipated mode of thinking that is currently emerging
from it: a hybrid of anthropology and philosophy that takes metaphysics as both
its object and its method and that hence may be of relevance to other intellectual
and political practices. The texts gathered in the present symposium address the
character, stakes, and intellectual background of this conceptual practice as it is
emerging from both anthropology and philosophy. This symposium has been
organized with the intent of opening a pocket of intellectual space in which that
practice can be developed further.
My own text here regards Jane Roberts, an American spirit medium (or
channel) who played a foundational role in New Age religion, and the circumstances that led her to develop, however improbably, a speculative metaphysics.
It was largely through an encounter with her many published booksdictated
through her to her husband by a cohort of channeled personalities, the chief
of whom called himself Seth, but then there was also one named William
Jamesthat I was led to the view that certain people(s) call on the anthropologist to fashion means of metaphysical speculation equal to their own capacities
for it. What happened was that I began examining Robertss texts closely while
doing ethnographic fieldwork with channels in the San Francisco area. Initially
perplexed by their esoteric concerns and terminology, I came to realize that their
ideas about the psyche and consciousness were profound enough to demand treat-

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ing them as a serious body of thought. I say so because, after years of channeling
in a way that involved her consciousness being, in her words, absent, to the
side, and on hold, Roberts began to experience her trances as states in which
she remained partially displaced while finding another part of her consciousness present to and coinciding with the current of thought and speech that was
Seth. As years went by, she dubbed this state other-consciousness, in order
to capture how it involved, as she saw it, the merger of ordinary, apperceptive
consciousness with a current of thought that, however familiar it became to her,
retained its status for her as alien.
Robertss notion of consciousness is very much at odds with the claim,
important both to psychoanalysis and to a large part of French theory, that states
of madness, possession, and unconscious thought mark the limit of the subject
(in the sense of people always capable, in principle, of owning their thoughts
and actions). Yet contrasting Robertss views on this point with those of Gilles
Deleuze, a leading proponent of this view of subjectivity, shows that she may
have perceived something important that eluded him and other philosophers
of difference: that experiences of alterity can involve feeling oneself to be both
oneself and another without absorbing and canceling the sense of otherness. My
text further shows that this idea, if it holds, can recast, in an unexpected way,
basic issues of metaphysics and psychology that Deleuze raises. At the same time,
the capacity of Robertss thought to produce a novel interpretation of a credentialed philosopher demonstrates that the forms of social and historical analysis
most often employed by anthropologists are actually not well suited for engaging
alien concepts.
The conversation published here between Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and
myself addresses in some depth the question of why speculative thought should
be an object of anthropology and be assigned a method appropriate for the purpose, along with the question of what the consequences are for the practice of
philosophy. Conducted some two years ago as an introduction to his work for
an American audience (the ontological turn, amid much controversy, had just
crossed the radar of US anthropology), our conversation quickly turned from the
matter, already widely discussed in professional journals, of why ontology should
be a core problem of anthropology to the question of what metaphysics has to do
with it. The background of our discussion of this point is that Viveiros de Castro,
during the first decade of this century, had decisively crossed the disciplinary
line separating anthropology and philosophy, most significantly in 2009 with the
publication of his book Mtaphysiques cannibales, which in France attracted more
interest from philosophers than from anthropologists.6 He has referred to this

6. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For

a Post-s tructural Anthropology, trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Books, 2014).

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7. Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Transformation in

Anthropology, Transformation of Anthropology, in
The Forest and the School/Where to Sit at the Dinner Table?,
ed. Pedro Neves Marques (Khn: Archive Books, 2015),
559.

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Skaf ish

shift, with characteristic humor, as his entry into philosopause (a state marked
by the end of ones productive period . . . and the start of a phase of retrospection characterized by a certain sage-like pomposity),7 but it was much more a
serious attempt at developing intellectual means systematic enough to capture
the wholesale implications of Amerindian thought for our own. The effect may
have been to intensify his dialogue with thinkers like Isabelle Stengers and Bruno
Latour, but many anthropologists, including some that had found in Viveiros
de Castros previous work a source of inspiration, considered this new phase a
betrayal, by one of its most discerning theoreticians, of their disciplines methods
and empirical commitments.
In my conversation with him, Viveiros de Castro addresses this criticism
directly, arguing that anthropologys long-standing concern with differences of
culture and cosmology is underwritten by the notion that, while its subjects
may represent and classify beings in complex if alien ways, their thought cannot
be regarded as having anything like parity with that of Western philosophy. It
is in faithfulness to the basic impulse of anthropology that Viveiros de Castro
ascribes metaphysical sophistication of a high order to peoples without theory.8
Like some of his forebears in the discipline, he seeks to undermine a distinction
fundamental to Greek philosophy (the distinction between thinking citizen-
subjects of the polis and barbarians from the hinterlands) by respecting the latter as interlocutors. Where he goes beyond earlier practitioners, including even
Lvi-Strauss, is in his commitment to submit the concepts of philosophy to the
same recursive process as any other concept may be submitted. In that process,
the anthropologist puts the concept in question by exposing it to unrecognizable
images of itself produced by its indigenous counterparts.9
Viveiros de Castro offers one such image in his remarks (If Meillassoux
were an Indian . . .) about the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux. Even if
Viveiros de Castros encounter with Amerindian thought led him to reject the
effectively Kantian idea that cultures are collective representations by which
humans differently access the same underlying domain of nature, he is not in
agreement with Meillassoux that the basic problem with that idea is the correlationist assumption that Being and human thought are essentially linked and fitted
to each other. Rather, for Viveiros de Castro, anthropocentrism is the problem:
the notion of culture is centered on the human, and as such, it blocks the relations

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9. I tried to but could not avoid echoing here Patrice

Manigliers characterization of anthropology as a mirror
that returns to us an image of ourselves that we do not recognize. See Patrice Maniglier, La Parent des autres,
Critique, no. 701 (2005): 77374.

8. I am alluding here to Eric R. Wolfs book Europe and

the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

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of diverse nonhuman beings with humans, (and the nonhuman beings relations
among themselves) from bearing significantly on how the human might be conceptualized. Meillassouxs critique of Western correlationism barely addresses
this question, since it takes as its initial obstacle just a single relation, that between
human beings and Being. If Meillassoux were an Indian, as Viveiros de Castro
says in our discussion, he would have long ago dissolved correlationism in universal relationality, in which the relation between humans and other beings is but
one relation among an infinite number.10
In the course of our discussion, Viveiros de Castro mentions several times
the work of Patrice Maniglier, a French philosopher who is developing a mode of
metaphysical thought (comparative ontology) in response to the sense, which
he shares with Viveiros de Castro, Latour, and others, that philosophy should
be simultaneously local and systematically broad. Manigliers approach, which is
a hybrid of anthropological comparison and Cartesian skepticism, requires that
any modern conceptual truth eventually find its limits in other truths (usually
espoused by other human collectives) that are seemingly incommensurate with
it and then demonstrate that these other truths are variations of it, in the sense
of thoughts that could have been arrived at in its place. Thus, paths not taken by
modernity are reopened and are followed as though they had been their own.
Maniglier further suggests that the recursive and comparative analysis practiced
in anthropology supplies a means for relating and correlating those paths in ways
that yield new truths about the directions that were actually taken. Given that
this kind of inquiry is always dually focused on thoroughly empirical matters and
basic truths and principles, its results, Maniglier wants to argue, are at once scientific and metaphysicalfalsifiable and cumulative but also speculativeand thus
possibly a realization of the positive metaphysics called for by Henri Bergson
but so far unrealized.11
The kernel of Manigliers developing thought is found in an ontology, in
the precise sense of the term, that he argues was present in structuralism but
that essentially went unperceived during the years of its ascendancy. (He means
structuralism in the comprehensive, French sense, encompassing not only Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Lvi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes but also
so-called poststructuralists, such as Michel Foucault and Deleuze.)12 Manigliers
contribution here, Signs and Customs, is a digest presentation of that ontology,

10. For the argument that Meillassouxs criticism of subjectialism founders on its narrow vision of the subject, see
Dborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The
Ends of the World (London: Polity, 2016).
11. Henri Bergson, Le Paralllisme psycho-physique et
la mtaphysique positive, Bulletin de la Socit Franaise de
Philosophie, May 2, 1901,: 3334, 4357.

12. See Patrice Maniglier, Manifeste pour une comparatisme suprieure, Les Temps Modernes 682 (January
March 2015): 86145, and Maniglier, Anthropological
Meditations, or, Discourse on Comparative Method, in
Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology, ed.
Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish
(New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

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13. Patrice Maniglier, La vie nigmatique des signes: Saus

sure et la naissance du structuralisme (Paris: Lo Scheer,
2006).

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Skaf ish

which is developed in full form in his untranslated book on Saussure, La vie nigmatique des signes (2006).13 Although Manigliers explicit aim here is to examine
Lvi-Strausss answer to the classic sociological question of what compels social
behavior, his way of doing so is to adumbrate what that answer owes (wittingly or
not) to Saussures ontology of the sign and then to show how a comparative philosophy is strongly entailed by it. Lvi-Strausss debt, on this point, to Saussure
resides, according to Maniglier, not in the vague formalism that is attributed,
too casually and too often, to the anthropologist but rather, surprisingly, in the
very specific if exotic notion that all beings are variations of one another. In contrast with mile Durkheim, Lvi-Strauss thought that the objects of the human
sciences, for instance myths, are not initially observable and can be identified
positively only by correlating the way in which presumed instances of them differently realize the same semantic and aesthetic distinctions (all of which, taken
together, constitute their structure).
The story of one Northwest Coast Indian people, to take an example from
Lvi-Strausss work on myth, treats shells as economically valuable commodities,
while a variant from a neighboring group figures them as worthless. This difference, when viewed alongside other such differences between them, shows that the
two stories ascribe the same set of properties to the same set of terms but in an
inversely homologous fashion, thus comprising, together, a group of myths that
are transformations of each other. By establishing what myth is in this wholly
immanent way, Lvi-Strauss demonstrates, according to Maniglier, that no case
of any myth is individually an instance of the genre but, rather, can at best be
said to be a variation of other mythsa demonstration that carries significant
ontological consequences. If any instance of a possible object of structuralism,
such as a language or a form of kinship, is also a variation of other instances
of that object (another language or another form of kinship), then any inquiry
validly employing the structural method has the capacity to demonstrate ways
in which ones own beinginasmuch as it is constituted by language, kinship,
and so onis or has been otherwise (whether in other collectives or in ones own
historical past). Moreover, in the future, ones own being always will be different
again. As long as the process of thinking about the relations between ones variations is not kept outside the operation of establishing them, philosophy itself can
be transformed continually by discovering what else it could have been and, thus,
potentially remains.
An obvious question raised by Manigliers assertion that philosophical
inquiries of this sort are at once metaphysical and scientific is what they can be
said to elucidate about other sorts of philosophy. In The Trouble with Ontologi-

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cal Liberalism in this issue, another French philosopher, Louis Morelle, offers a
possible answer. In his text, which concerns Markus Gabriels recent diptych Why
the World Does Not Exist and Fields of Sense, Morelle takes a dim view of Gabriels
attempt to articulate a flat ontology, meaning one committed to accepting the
reality of as many objects as it possibly can. In Morelles view, flat ontologies
of this kind are able to offer neither knowledge nor even metaphysics. Gabriel
may be characterized, as his fellow travelers Tristan Garcia and Graham Harman have been, in a recent book on object-oriented ontology, as an ontological
liberalas a philosopher, that is, who proffers a descriptive realism to account
for every sort of existent (especially for those not amenable to proper scientific
explanation) without granting more reality to some and reducing other existents
to those.14 Gabriels primary means of doing soconceiving existents as belonging only to local fields of sense and arguing that there is no field of fields
in which a metadescription of sense is availableleads him to an impasse from
which extrication is unlikely to occur anytime soon.
The vague affirmation by ontological liberals of the equality of beings does
a poor job, Morelle writes, of recognizing the specific differences between them
and neglects to think through the ways in which each being defines and explains
all the rest. The value of Morelles diagnosis, for our present purpose, is in its
indication that the conceptual practice of anthropological philosophy, given its
more situated approach to pluralism, may be able to step in now and provide,
perhaps paradoxically, a metaphysics in just the sense that he calls for: a way of
thinking that examines the various fields of sense and the conflicts between
them and, in the process, constructs an explanation of how the universes are
their product.
Peter Skafish

14. For Garcia, Harman, and ontological liberalism,

see Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Ontology: The
Noumenons New Clothes (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic
Media, 2014).

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