This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

These comments on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's article, “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology,” emphasize, first, his engagement with ideas of Gilles Deleuze that open to the political dimension of Amerindian perspectivism and to a “multinatural” understanding of human-to-environment relations; these form the foundation of postdevelopment action in this part of the world and orient actors' “postures of attention” to power relations. Second, this commentary raises questions concerning arrows—archetypal of the protentive element of Amerindian “speculative ontology” and, as such, symbolic (...) vehicles of a hopeful environmental consciousness and activism. The interesting point of arrows in this context is that their protention can and must take into account both forward- and also backward-looking time, in order to fulfill their promise of finding their mark. The matter of their intended effectiveness being sharply focused on the figures of their human sources, parabolic course, and targets, both reversals of direction and the ground they would traverse can be lost sight of. Ironically, focusing on figures invites attention to their backgrounds: expanses of earth or air and gaps between origin and contact can remind us, for example, of all that can interfere with or defeat intended goals, particularly in a lifeworld of multisited human and nonhuman agency. Overall, this response to Viveiros de Castro takes an aesthetico-political approach to his article. It comments on the important work of recognizing how uncemented values of Amerindians can be recombined with Western concepts to shape an ongoing “found object” relationship of Western and Amerindian intellectual traditions that is capable of addressing complexities of shifting power in modern times. (shrink)