The contemporary astrophysicist today deals with questions that bear on the area known to traditional philosophy as “metaphysics.” Consequently, it is tempting to cross the threshold. One can allow oneself to be tempted by the idea that science is in a position to provide solutions to ancient and venerable metaphysical quests. One can even imagine, according to the wish expressed two thousand years ago by Epicurus, that it can calm our “metaphysical anxieties.”.

Offers a revised understanding of human subjectivity that avoids the extremes of both traditional humanism and cultural relativism.“Acknowledging the importance of the ‘middle voice’ of rhetoric is a worthwhile endeavor. For this, Vivian’s goals are to be applauded.” — Rhetoric and Public Affairs.

These meditations, which begin with Stephan Schwartz and Mark Schroll's contested and contesting histories of the lineage and founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (below), contribute to the imagining of what Bethe Hagens calls "the relatively new interdisciplinary field of anthropology of consciousness.” Ethnographic vignettes from fieldwork of anthropologists, as well as fieldwork of students studying that fieldwork, highlight the paradox of anthropology's secularism and invite the reader, through the reading and writing of the text itself, to (...) participate in the practices of consciousness described. Using Schwartz's metaphor of "boulders in the stream,” these practices, and the modes of consciousness they invoke, serve as boulders that readers must swim around, or hop from, secularist anthropology through cyborg anthropology to an anthropology of consciousness itself. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

Speaking about the state of the Hollywood film industry at the 2008 Academy Awards, the Oscars’ host – comedian Jon Stewart – made the following wry assessment: ‘Not all films did as well as Juno obviously. The films that were made about the Iraq War, let’s face it, did not do as well. But I’m telling you, if we stay the course and keep these movies in the theatres we can turn this around. I don’t care if it takes 100 (...) years. Withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience. We cannot let the audience win.’ The films he is referring to include Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007) and Stop-Loss (2008) – all of which focus on the personal cost to American soldiers on their return to civilian life, as well as exposing the failure of the US invasion of Iraq at home and abroad. Despite their topical subject matter, these movies were, for the most part, commercial failures. This article seeks to investigate audience indifference (Jean Baudrillard claims a certain indifference is a fundamental consequence of the Western globalising ideology) to mainstream cinematic depictions of the post September 11 invasion of Iraq, via a consideration of the trauma and abjection depicted in these films. Baudrillard’s hypotheses on terrorism – as a symbolic challenge put forth by terrorism (embodied by the attack on the Twin Towers) – and the West’s incapacity to respond to it, forms the basis for our investigation of the limits of these films to incite and engage viewers. His writings offer a lens through which to consider how ‘terrorism’ operates symbolically, and fundamentally, the dilemmas this raises for a Western psyche grappling with how the ‘terrorist threat’ might be answered, engaged with, responded to. (shrink)

For a half a century, Claude Lévi-Strauss multiplied statements about the demographic situation of humanity and its anthropological consequences. Those statements, often seen as shocking, were interpreted as a kind of aberration which defied rational understanding. Current opinion held was that the analysis of such idiosyncratic ideas overstepped the competence of anthropologists and historians. In fact, as shown in my text based on newly discovered archival materials, quite the opposite is true. Firstly, Lévi-Strauss became interested in demography very early in (...) his career. Secondly, his conception of demographic trends and their effects was based on scholarly knowledge. Thirdly, far from being an idiosyncratic extravagance, his demography corresponded to widely shared concerns, central to the cultural policies of UNESCO, in which Lévi-Strauss was involved as Secretary general of the International Social Science Council (from 1952 to 1961). These facts are necessary if one is to grasp the cosmological outlook underlying the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The principles of Lévi-Straussian cosmology, in which demography plays an important role, are not reducible to the axioms of his structural theory. Without taking this cosmological infrastructure into account we are unable to correctly understand the moral message that Lévi-Strauss endeavoured to deliver, which concerned the extreme dangers humanity could face in the near future. (shrink)

This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And through his (...) fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the métier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson’s work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson’s early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson’s fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article’s final section argues that Patterson’s work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole. (shrink)

Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representationalism and the acceptance of the extended mind thesis. In this paper, I will attempt to evaluate the advantages and potential drawbacks of ontological anthropology—arguing that to become a true alternative (...) to current social scientific thinking about methodology, it has to meet certain philosophical objections. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

(1993). Managing the future: Science, the Humanities, and the myth of omniscience. World Futures: Vol. 38, Theoretical Achievements and Practical Applications of General Evolutionary Theory, pp. 157-164.

Co-creating knowledge takes a new approach to human phenotypic morality as a biologically based, human lineage specific trait. Authors from very different backgrounds first review research on the nature and origins of morality using the social brain network, and studies of individuals who cannot “know good” or think morally because of brain dysfunction. They find these models helpful but insufficient, and turn to paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to understand human moral capacity and its origins long ago, in the genus (...) Homo. An unusual narrative capturing “morality in action” takes the reader back 900,000 years, and then the authors analyze the essential features of moral thinking and behavior as expressed by early and later species on our lineage. In what has primarily been the province of philosophers to date, the authors’ morality model is presented for further scientific testing. (shrink)

The large, ancient ape population of the Miocene reached across Eurasia and down into Africa. From this genetically diverse group, the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans evolved from populations of successively reduced size. Using the findings of genomics, population genetics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and archaeology, the authors construct a theoretical framework of evolutionary innovations without which religious capacity could not have emerged as it did. They begin with primate sociality and strength from a basic ape model, and then explore how (...) the human line came to be the most adaptive and flexible of all, while coming from populations with reduced genetic variability. Their analysis then delves into the importance of neurological plasticity and a lengthening developmental trajectory, and points to their following article and the last building block: the expansion of the parietal areas, which allowed visuospatial reckoning, and imagined spaces and beings essential to human theologies. Approximate times for the major cognitive building blocks of religious capacity are given. (shrink)

Surgical training has traditionally involved a lengthy apprenticeship to a series of master surgeons, who teach medical students and residents the techniques of surgery while allowing them to work on patients in the operating room. This article examines surgical training as a structured environment that prepares students for the embodied lessons taught by a surgeon. It argues that even the most seemingly mechanical of surgical techniques contains social lessons when taught by a surgeon within the rich environment of the operating (...) room. (shrink)

Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of ‘law and society’, or ‘law in context’. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on ‘law itself’, on what Annelise Riles calls the ‘technicalities’ of law. How might the legal scholar be inspired by this approach? In this article, I explore (...) one possible way of approaching law after anthropology, which is to find within law’s own archive a set of resources for an analogous representation of law itself. Drawing on the historical scholarship of Yan Thomas, I suggest that the Roman conception of law as object offers an engaging counterpart to the anthropological take on law as a specific set of tools or, technicalities, or as a particular art of making relations. (shrink)

The following thoughts grew through a year of seminars with Dr. Michael Herzfeld (Indiana University). Readers of his forthcoming book entitled Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge 1987) may note some ideas strikingly similar to those expressed in these pages. I am indebted to him for much of the stimulus and inspiration, as well as for concrete suggestions for revision, and to him I offer this sincere dedication.

This commentary introduces a section of the journal titled ‘Notes on Structuralism’. It centres around two interviews. The first, from 1987, is with the structural anthropologist Mary Douglas (who speaks on various aspects of her work, including on Purity and Danger). The second is an interview with Roland Barthes, who, speaking in 1965, was at the height of his structuralist phase. The interview focuses upon the structural analysis of narrative and prefigures the well-known volume of Communications on the subject. The (...) interviews are supplemented with introductions and: a commentary on Barthes’ interview by Jonathan Culler, who contextualizes the development of Barthes’ thinking around narrative (as it leads to the publication of S/Z), The article concludes with reflections on structuralism with regards to contemporary practices of big data, AI and large language models. (shrink)

Depuis le célèbre article de Merleau-Ponty, « De Mauss à Claude Lévi-Strauss », la manière dont on évalue le rapport entre ces deux auteurs détermine ou exprime autant d’interprétations historiques du structuralisme et de choix théoriques ou philosophiques quant aux sciences sociales. Cette filiation se voulait une critique: être fidèle à la découverte de Mauss, celle du caractère central de la réciprocité dans la vie sociale, imposait de dépasser la sociologie vers une sémiologie générale. Cet article s’efforce de montrer qu’il (...) ne s’agit pas là, contrairement à l’interprétation subtile qu’en fit Merleau-Ponty, de faire de la réalité sociale un système de points de vue substituables ou de mouvements corrélés de sub-jectivation, mais de montrer que ce sont les « valeurs » qui, du fait de leur nature, de leur ontologie, doivent nécessairement circuler entre plusieurs points de vue exclusifs et complémentaires. Il revisite la célèbre critique de Lévi-Strauss à Mauss sur l’explication de l’obligation de donner par une « force des choses », et replace l’apport de l’anthropologie structurale dans la philosophie de l’esprit contemporaine, là où elle se confronte aux questions ouvertes par la physique sur l’ontologie des objets quantiques. (shrink)

Few notions are more central than noise to the transformation of modern life. Noise has become synonymous with the complexity of our world and its global digitised information networks, for as the...

The aim of this paper is to provide a philosophic answer to a question, which is not at all rhetoric, as it may seem. The author, in fact, wonders whether identity has to be framed, as usual, as an absolute value, i.e., as an “all-or nothing” question. The conclusion of this inquiry is clearly a negative one: Identity, on the contrary, has to be seen as a value which is highly complex, fuzzy, and allowing for degrees, nuances, and trade-offs. In (...) modern societies there must be an interplay between identity and difference which is capable of ensuring institutional fairness and ongoing multicultural dialogue. (shrink)

This article aims to draw a portrait of the influence of cybernetics on soft science. To this end, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy will be successively analyzed in a perspective based on importing concepts stemming from the cybernetic paradigm. By focusing more specifically on the American postwar context, we intend to remind the audience that many soft science specialists were involved in the elaboration of this ‘new science’. We will then retrace the influence of the cybernetic paradigm on structuralism. Starting (...) with the historic meeting between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, we will illustrate that structural phonology is directly inspired by discoveries stemming from the informational model. In the same perspective, the conceptual borrowings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan from cybernetics will be identified and analyzed. Then, we will address the matter of the relationship between postmodern theories and the cybernetic paradigm. The philosophical movement towards deconstruction, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, will be analyzed based on how they relate to this paradigm. We will also insist on the fact that the philosophy of Jean- François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne is fully in line with the epistemological revolution launched by cybernetics. (shrink)

This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the `primitive' for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West's self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to appreciate what is potentially being lost, the (...) space that may be closing up as a result of the death of the `primitive', the first part of the article strives to demonstrate the latter's significance for the self-critique of modern ways of thinking and acting by historiographically reconstructing its changing roles within and representations by the human sciences. In the second section, it is contended that the eclipse of primitiveness has created a potentially problematic situation for the human sciences, since the cross-cultural mode of critique cultivated through this myth risks being neglected in a post-`primitive' age. All in all, then, the article claims that continued engagement with cultural alterity is essential for the human sciences after primitiveness, and that such an engagement can be sustained by an understanding of the different ways in which the `primitive' has been defined and has functioned over the course of the modern era. (shrink)

Dans cet essai, nous cherchons à ressaisir le sens politique du structuralisme à la lumière d’un rapprochement inattendu, présenté à la fin de Tristes Tropiques, entre le bouddhisme et le marxisme. On s’est beaucoup interrogé sur ce que le marxisme a apporté en propre à l’anthropologie structurale de Lévi-Strauss, et cela dès la parution du livre de Lucien Sebag, Marxisme et structuralisme, en 1964. Dans le même temps, le marxisme officiel, dans ses différentes tendances, avait attaqué une approche des structures (...) de l’esprit comme une dérive idéaliste. Nous avons voulu déplacer complètement la question en prenant à la lettre la comparaison audacieuse que risque Lévi-Strauss, en quelques pages, où le marxisme comparaît comme ce qui, en Occident, fait écho à un processus de transformation du monde social dont l’Orient, en son propre sein, a inscrit par avance la possibilité. Ainsi, c’est une différence interne à l’Orient qui sert, en bonne méthode structurale, à penser une différence significative, mais inaperçue, dans notre propre culture. Et la pensée marxiste, inscrite sous le signe d’une volonté de transformation du monde plutôt que d’interprétation, est replacée dans un cadre qui la modalise, en même temps qu’elle en révèle la portée réellement critique. (shrink)

The first time I encountered the Rock, I tried to imagine Nietzsche’s experience and what it must have felt like to come to the rock for the first time. He tells us, of course, of the thought that...

The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification, engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers endorse such practices as self-constructive, distancing their practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii) critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference. However, in suspecting that such analysis should be attentive to the concurrent individual and social co-constitution of behaviours, a sociological and post-structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a “sovereign, denaturalizing” endeavour is (...) demanded. An engagement with the originary violence of Derridian deconstruction will duly re-conceive body modification practice as not something which introduces violence to corporeality. Rather, violence will present as a primordial differentiating process which bodies always already condition, and by which they are conditioned/produced/modified. The second issue at stake in this article will thus develop as a contestation to the characterization of “body modification” as an exclusive category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre-existing, but rather manifest as the originary violence/differentiation of bodies-as-modifications-which-modify. This re-defines modification from something that agentive subjects introduce to bodies, to something that subjects-as-bodies cannot help but be. Consequently, individual agency is not divorced from behaviour, but emerges as a corporeal, social production. (shrink)

Retracing the primary common aspects between anthropological and psychoanalytic thought, in this article, we will further discuss the main common points between the notions of the unconscious according to Carl Gustav Jung and Claude Lévi-Strauss, taking into account the thought of Erich Neumann. On the basis of very simple elementary logic considerations centered around the basic notion of the separation of opposites, our observations might be useful for speculations on the possible origins of rational thought and hence on the origins (...) of consciousness. (shrink)

This article describes a study that examined the experiences of 27 individuals who frequented an Open Access homeless shelter in Toronto, Canada. The overarching aim of this study was to map the social organisation of health care in Toronto, with particular regards to the ways in which literacy, or the lack of literacy, mediates the experiences of homeless individuals attempting to gain access to health care. While terms such as “literate” or “illiterate” might be seen to reflect an individual’s level (...) of acquired education or competence, critical social theorists argue that such terms instead more accurately reflect an individual’s relative class or position within the social hierarchy. Individuals who possess literacy are able to read into texts for their implicit understandings, directives, and power structures. Furthermore, they are able to translate and decode texts as potential pretexts for coordination or control. This study draws on a Freirean critical standpoint, which acknowledges that knowledge and power are inextricably interconnected. This study asked: How does literacy, or the lack of literacy, facilitate or impede access to health care for homeless individuals? What are the social consequences of illiteracy? (shrink)

The article begins by examining two arguments used by Derrida in work published in 1967. The first claims against Lévi-Strauss that an empirical pattern of events cannot be injected into or superimposed onto an historical pattern claiming universality, for then there can be no disconfirmation of what is said. (This argument is used against Marxian history by some who write in the wake of Existentialism, Paul Roubiczek for instance.) The second claims against Foucault that he does not distinguish between reason (...) as part of thinking and language and reason as an empirical historical structure capable of modification along time. The article then discusses the use of very similar if not identical arguments in Derrida’s much more recent work on laws, Force of law. The intelligibility, the interpretability, of laws and their history comes after the laws, not before, and is thus not fully universalisable. (shrink)

This paper discusses basic critical realism within the context of economic anthropology and develops an approach to studying material relations between people. A diachronic form of analysis, following the work of Bhaskar and Archer, is described as a practical means of analysing property rights. This new approach emphasises epistemic relativism and ontological realism in order to compare disparate forms of human interaction across cultures. The aim of doing this is to develop a philosophical framework that allows for the comparison of (...) economic practices without resorting to judgemental relativism. The implications are significant for institutional economics and anthropology alike, particularly for researchers examining multiple overlapping practices such as market and gift exchange. (shrink)

Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author’s long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, ethnography is obviously insufficient and proposals privileging the last half-century, or just the last quarter of a century, seem inadequate. (...) Influential theories, which define ‘modernity’ in terms of developments emanating from the countries of the North Atlantic in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Gellner, Polanyi, Wolf), remain partial and Eurocentric. To comprehend the social preconditions of the Anthropocene in a holistic fashion (the crucial contribution of comparative anthropology), it is necessary to follow Jack Goody and trace how the urban revolutions of the Bronze Age united Eurasia through the diffusion of new forms of economy, polity and cosmology. (shrink)

This essay will examine the polemic and poetic means through which three Indigenous Australian writers discuss the repercussions and risks associated with nuclear power, waste and weaponry as an existential and material threat to the mythopoeic creation stories, totemic systems and landforms which sustain Indigenous Australian belief. This essay will follow the establishment of a media ecology through which discourses of technological harm in Oodgeroo Noonuccal's “No More Boomerang” lay the foundation for Australian Indigenous anti-nuclear activist poetics and highlights the (...) relationship between language, belief and technology. Oodgeroo's [Kath Walker] “No More Boomerang” will be read as a precursor to the experimental expression of Lionel Fogarty's “Foot Walking and Talking – Atomic Confusion” as well as the procedural methodologies behind Natalie Harkin's “Zero Tolerance.” It will be argued that Indigenous-led representations of nuclear weaponry as an ontologic-existential threat can only be properly critiqued when framed through the constructs of race, nationhood and the history of colonization in Australia. (shrink)

This paper is an invitation to reflect on the advisability of analysing philosophy from a naturalistic perspective. That is, from a perspective that considers philosophy as if it was one more cultural object, which can be studied using the tools that we have available to us today and that are provided by disciplines such as evolutionary psychology or anthropology oriented by a distinctly cognitivist approach. A central concept in the analysis is that of “intuitive ontology” – closely linked to intuitive (...) (or folk-) philosophy or the spontaneous, naïve (natural) way of thinking that is associated with common sense – which is a result of the evolutionary process and a source of metaphysical prejudices such as dualism. A metaphilosophical reflection, such as that proposed here, identifies the “natural” character of a transcendent metaphysics that is still too close to intuitive philosophy, and the interest of constituting a naturalistic philosophy that is fully conscious of its “unnatural” or “counterintuitive” character. (shrink)

This article develops the idea that Lévi-Strauss’ thought was shaped all at once in the encounter with structural linguistics. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss’s readers know that his writings show blunt passages from a level of discourse that refers to the project of scientific modernity (accretion of knowledge and pursuit of generality) to one announcing the dissolution of culture into physicochemical phenomena (here defined as ultramodern level), and from these two to a language usually defined as “literary”. The latter corresponds to a language (...) which articulates the themes of loss, memory, yearning for the primitive, the concerns about the demographic and environmental transformations of the planet, and an “exaggerated” contact of cultures: themes which all persist in Lévi-Strauss’ thought since its shaping as a “structuralist” one, which have been highly controversial and that could be defined as “antimodern”. Accordingly, this article tries to produce a reading of Lévi-Strauss’ work as articulated on three levels, which persist in Lévi-Strauss’s thought since its early structuralist formation: three “musical staffs” on which his modernity, ultra-modernity and anti-modernity seem all to flow at the same time. (shrink)