Produção Nacional
Revisado por pares
The relative native
2013; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 3; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.14318/hau3.3.032
ISSN2575-1433
Autores Tópico(s)Primate Behavior and Ecology
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe relative nativeEduardo VIVEIROS DE CASTROEduardo VIVEIROS DE CASTROMuseu Nacional, Universidade Federai do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author Museu Nacional, Universidade Federai do Rio de JaneiroPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTurning a cornerPreamble for "The relative native" by Eduardo Viveiros de CastroMartin HOLBRAADUniversity College LondonIn his own preamble to the original Portuguese version of "The relative native" (2002), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains that the article's aim is to elaborate "metatheoretically" upon his earlier arguments regarding the cosmology of Amazonian animism, published in Portuguese in 1996 and in English in 1998—the now classic JRAI article "Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism" expanded upon in his Cambridge lecture-series of the same year, titled "Cos-mological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere," which is now available as Volume 1 of HAUs Masterclass Series (2012). Viveiros de Castro's move to extract metatheoretical implications from his theory of perspectivism in Amazonia recalls Roy Wagner's claim that The invention of culture (1981) sets forth the "epistem-ology" (1981: xv) that corresponds to his earlier ethnographic presentation of the role of invention in Daribi social life in Habu (1973; see also Strathern 1980—the mediating term in a Wagner-Strathern-Viveiros metatheoretical triptych). Certainly, each of these "moves to meta" can be seen as exercises in anthropological "recursion" (Corsin Jimenez, in press; Holbraad 2013). For example, where Wagner Melanesianizes anthropology by taking Daribi manners of invention as an ethnographic template from which to reinvent the activity of anthropology itself, namely as a manner of invention also (and note the virtuously double circularity of the recursion), Viveiros de Castro's equivalent attempt to Amazonianize anthropology in the present article consists in adopting for anthropology the core tenet of Amazonian perspectivism, namely, the idea that differences between "perspectives" are to be seen in ontological rather than epistemological terms.In Amerindian cosmologies, Viveiros de Castro writes in the earlier ethnological article, different species do not see the same thing (or "world") in different ways, but rather "see in the same way … different things [or 'worlds']" (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478). Similarly in anthropology, runs the metatheoretical argument elaborated here, the difference between anthropological analyst and ethnographic subject lies not in the different perspectives each may take upon the world (their respective "world-views" or even "cultures") but rather in the ways in which either of them may come to define what may count as a world, along with its various constituents, in the first place. For Amazonians and anthropologists alike, then, difference pertains to the ontological question of what things are or indeed could be, rather than how they might be differentially "represented," "known" (or at least "believed"), or for that matter "constructed." So in this sense, anthropologists, again like Amazonians, may best be conceived as multinaturalists. If nature is meant to designate what there is and cultures are the different ways in which this can be seen, then Viveiros de Castro's anthropology is one that multiplies natures rather than cultures (hence also the deep affinity of this vision of anthropology with Bruno Latour's parallel argument about the ontological pluralization of nature in the practice of science—e.g., Latour 1993).So Viveiros de Castro brings Wagner's assault on the nature/culture matrix of anthropological thinking full circle. If Wagner recasts the idea of culture as the manner in which the world invents itself (culture does as nature is, one might say), Viveiros de Castro recasts the idea of nature as the manner in which people conceive it (nature is as culture does it), provided "conception" here is understood in sharp contrast to representation, as an irreducibly ontological operation—establishing this point, and drawing out its consequences for the practice of anthropology, is one of the prime tasks of the article. If there is any asymmetry at all in these complementary operations it lies in the fact that, by working at the reversible "nature = culture" equation from its "nature" end—the end of what things are and what they could be—Viveiros de Castro's argument brings the question of ontology to the very center of anthropologists' metatheoretical deliberation. Indeed, in view of the current furor about the so-called "ontological turn" in anthropology,1 one way to read the article that follows is as just that: the moment when anthropology turned the ontological corner.ReferencesAlberto Corsin Jimenez. In press. "The right to infrastructure: A prototype for open source urbanism." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMartin Holbraad 2013. "Scoping recursivity: A comment on Franklin and Napier." Cambridge Anthropology 31 (2): 123–27.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBruno Latour. 1993. We have never been modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. London: Prentice-Hall.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMichael W. Scott 2013. "The anthropology of ontology (religious science?)." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (4): 859–72.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMarilyn Strathern. 1980. "No nature, no culture: The Hagen case." In Nature, culture and gender, edited by Carol MacCormack, Marilyn Strathern, 174222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarEduardo Viveiros de Castro. 1998. "Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 4 (3): 46988.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarEduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2002. "O nativo relativo." Mana 8 (1): 113–48.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarEduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2012. "Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere: Four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, February-March 1998." HAU: Masterclass Series 1: 45–168.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarRoy Wagner. 1972. Habu: The innovation of meaning in Daribi religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarRoy Wagner. 1981. The invention of culture. Revised and expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Notes 1. See Scott (2013) for a recent review of the literature on the anthropology of ontology.Martin Holbraad teaches Social Anthropology at University College London where he codirects the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research Group (CROC). He conducts ethnographic fieldwork on religion and socialism in Cuba and is the author of Truth in motion: The recursive anthropology of Cuban divination (Chicago, 2012).The relative nativeEduardo VIVEIROS DE CASTROMuseu Nacional, Universidade Federai do Rio de JaneiroThe human being, such as we imagine him, does not exist.—Nelson RodriguesGround rules1The "anthropologist" is a person whose discourse concerns the discourse of a "native." The native need not be overly savage, traditionalist nor, indeed, native to the place where the anthropologist finds him. The anthropologist, on his part, need not be excessively civilized, modernist, or even foreign to the people his discourse concerns.2 The discourses in question (and particularly that of the native) are not necessarily texts, but rather may include all types of meaning practice.3 What is essential, however, is that the discourse of the anthropologist (or the "observer") establishes a certain relation with that of the native (or the "observed"). This relation is one of meaning or, when the anthropologist's discourse aspires to be Scientific, a relation of knowledge. By this token, anthropological knowledge is also a social relation, since it is the effect of the relationships that reciprocally constitute the knowing subject, on the one hand, and the subject he comes to know, on the other. As with all relations, this form of knowledge brings about a transformation in the relational constitution of anthropologist and native alike.4The (meta)relation between anthropologist and native is not one of identity: the anthropologist always says and, therefore, does something different than what the native says or does, even when he intends to do nothing more than repeat the native's discourse in a "textual" form, or when he tries to establish a dialogue—a dubious notion—with the native. This difference is nothing other than the knowledge effect created by the anthropologist's discourse, which is produced by the relation between the meaning of this discourse and the meaning of that of the native.5Clearly, this kind of discursive alterity is grounded in an assumption of similarity. The anthropologist and the native are of the same species and share in its condition: they are both human, and each of them is positioned in their respective culture, which could (even) be the same. But this is where the game starts to get interesting or, better, strange. For even when the anthropologist and the native share the same culture, the relationship of meaning between their respective discourses serves to differentiate them: the anthropologist's and the native's relationship with their respective cultures are not exactly the same. What makes the native a native is the presumption, on the part of the anthropologist, that the native's relationship with his culture is natural, which is to say, intrinsic, spontaneous, and, if possible, nonreflexive or, even better, unconscious. Thus, the native gives expression to her culture in his discourse. The anthropologist does so too, but if he hopes to be something other than a native, he must also be able to express his culture culturally, which is to say, reflexively, conditionally, and consciously. The anthropologist's culture is contained (in both senses of the word) in the relationship of meaning that his discourse establishes with that of the native. The native's discourse, by contrast, is merely penned in by his own culture. The anthropologist's deployment of his own culture is a necessary condition of his humanity, one might say, while for the native being deployed by his is a sufficient one.Obviously, these differences are not in the so-called nature of things. They are a feature of the language game that we are describing here, and serve to define the very characters we have been designating as "the anthropologist" and "the native." So let us turn to some other ground rules.The anthropological idea of culture places the anthropologist and the native on an equal footing, inasmuch as it implies that the anthropologist's knowledge of other cultures is itself culturally mediated. in the first instance, this sense of equality is simply empirical or de facto, since it refers to the common (or generic) cultural condition of the anthropologist and the native. However, their differently constituted relationships with their respective cultures, and therefore also with each other's, are such that this de facto sense of equality does not imply an equality de jure—that is, an equality with regard to their respective claims to knowledge. The anthropologist tends to have an epistemological advantage over the native. Their respective discourses are situated on different planes. While the anthropologist's capacity to produce meaning does depend on the meanings produced by the native, the prerogative to determine what those native meanings mean remains with the anthropologist—explaining and interpreting, translating and introducing, textual-izing and contextualizing, justifying and signifying native meanings are all jobs of the anthropologist. The anthropological discourse's relational matrix is hylomor-phic: the anthropologist's meaning is form; the native's is matter. The native's discourse is not the master of its own meaning. De facto, as Geertz might say, we are all natives; but de jure, some are always more native than others.This article proposes the following questions: What if we refuse to give this kind of strategic advantage to the anthropologist's discourse over that of the native? What would happen if the native's discourse were to operate within the discourse of the anthropologist in a way that produced reciprocal knowledge effects upon it? What might occur if the form intrinsic to the matter of native discourse were to be allowed to modify the matter implicit in the form of anthropological knowledge? it is said that to translate is to betray. But what happens when the translator decides to betray his own tongue? What happens if, unsatisfied with a mere passive or de facto equality between discursive subjects, we claim an active or de jure equality between their respective discourses? What if, rather than being neutralized by this equivalence, the disparity between the meanings produced on either side, by anthropologists and natives, is introduced into both discourses, thus releasing its full potential? What if instead of complacently admitting that we are all native, we take the opposite wager as far as it can go, namely, that we are all "anthropologists" (Wagner 1981: 36)—and, to boot, not some a little more than others, but just each in their own way, which is to say, very differently? in short, what changes when anthropology is taken to be a meaning practice that is epistemically continuous with the practices that it discusses, and equivalent to them? What changes, in other words, when we apply the notion of "symmetrical anthropology" (Latour 1991) to anthropology itself, not to condemn it as colonialist, exorcise its exoticism, or landmine its intellectual field, but rather to turn it into something else? Something different not only to the native's discourse (for that is a difference that is constitutive of anthropology), but different also to the discourse that anthropologists habitually enunciate about themselves, often in hushed tones, when commenting on native discourses.6If we do all of this, I would say that we would be doing what has always been called "anthropology," properly speaking, rather than (for example) "sociology" or "psychology." My hesitation here is due to the fact that much of what goes, or has gone, by the name of anthropology turns on the contrary assumption that the anthropologist has a privileged grasp of the reasons for the native's reasons-reasons to which the native's reasonings are oblivious. The anthropologist, according to this view, is able to provide a full account of how universal or how particular any given native might be, as well as of the illusions that the latter may have about himself-at times providing an example of his native culture while imagining that he manifests human nature in general (the native as unselfconscious ideologue), while at other times manifesting his human nature while thinking that he is displaying his own particular culture (the native as unwitting general cognizer).7 Here, the knowledge relation is conceived as unilateral, such that the alterity between the anthropologist's and native's respective discourses dissipates as the former encompasses the latter. The anthropologist knows the native de jure, even as he may not know him de facto. Or we could go the other way around: even though the native may know the anthropologist de facto (often better than the anthropologist knows him in turn), he does not know him de jure, precisely because the native is not an anthropologist, which is what the anthropologist, well, is. Needs must, the anthropologist's science/knowledge is of a different order to the native's: the condition of possibility for the former includes the denial of the latter's claim to legitimacy—an act of "epistemocide," to use Bob Scholte's acute expression (1984: 964). The subject's knowledge requires the object's ignorance.But we need not be overly dramatic about all this. As the discipline's history attests, this discursive game and its biased rules provided lots of instructive information about the natives. The experiment proposed in the present article, however, consists precisely in refusing to play it. This is not because this game results in objectively false results, say in representing the native's nature erroneously; the concept of objective truth (along with the notions of representation and nature) is part of the rules of that game, not of the one proposed here. In any case, once the aims of that classic game are set, its results are frequently convincing, or at least, "plausible" as adepts of the game like to say.8 To refuse to play the game amounts simply to giving oneself a different set of goals, appropriate to different rules, as outlined above.What I am suggesting, in short, is that there are two incompatible ways of conceiving anthropology, and that one needs to choose between them. On one side, anthropological knowledge is presented as the result of applying concepts that are extrinsic to their object: we know what social relations, cognition, kinship, religion, politics, etc. are in advance and the task is to see how these play out in this or that ethnographic context—how they play out, of course, without the knowledge of the people involved. On the other side (and this is the game proposed here), we have an idea of anthropological knowledge that is founded on the basic premise that the procedures involved in anthropological investigation9 are of the same conceptual order as the procedures being investigated. It should be emphasized that this particular equivalence of procedure at once presupposes and produces the radical nonequivalence of everything else. For, if the first conception of anthropology imagines each culture or society as embodying a specific solution to a generic problem—or as filling a universal form (the anthropological concept) with specific contents—the second, in contrast, raises the prospect of the problems themselves being radically diverse. Above all, such an approach takes off from the principle that the anthropologist may not know in advance what these problems might be. In such a case, anthropology poses relationships between different problems, rather than placing a single ("natural") problem in relation to its different ("cultural") solutions. The "art of anthropology" (Gell 1999), I suggest, is the art of determining the problems posed by each culture, not of finding solutions for the problems posed by our own. It is just for this reason that positing a continuity between the procedures of the anthropologist and the native is such an epistemological imperative.10It bears repeating that this pertains to the procedures, not to those that carry them out. After all, none of this is about condemning the classic game for producing faulty results that fail to recognize the native's own condition as Subject-observing him with a distant gaze, devoid of empathy, which constructs him as an exotic object, diminishes him as primitive rather than the observer's coeval, denying him the human right of interlocution-we are familiar with the litany. The problem is rather the opposite. It is precisely because the anthropologist very easily takes the native to be an other subject that he cannot see him as an other subject, as an Other figure that, more than subject or object, is the expression of a possible world. It is by failing to accept the native's condition of "nonsubject" (i.e., his being other than a subject) that the anthropologist introduces his sneaky advantage de jure, under the guise of a proclamation of de facto equality. Before the game even starts, he knows too much about the native: he predefines and circumscribes the possible worlds expressed by this other, radically separating the other's alterity from his capacity to induce difference. The authentic animist is the anthropologist, and participant observation is the true (meaning, false) primitive participation. It is therefore neither a matter of advocating a kind of intersubjective idealism, nor of standing up for some form of "communicative reason" or "dialogic consensus." My touchstone here is the concept evoked above, namely the Other as an a priori structure. This concept is proposed in Gilles Deleuze's well-known commentary of Michel Tour-nier's Vendredi.11 Reading Tournier's book as a fictional description of a metaphysical experiment—what is a world without Others?—Deleuze proceeds to gauge the effects of the Other's presence through the effects of its absence. The Other thus appears as a condition of the field of perception: the existential possibility of those parts of the world that lie beyond actual perception is guaranteed by the virtual presence of an Other that perceives them; what is invisible to me subsists as real by being visible to an other.12 Without an Other the category of possibility disappears; the world collapses, reduced to the pure surface of the immediate, and the subject dissolves, turning into a thing-in-itself (while things-in-themselves, in turn, unravel into phantom doubles). An Other is thus no one (neither subject nor object) but rather a structure or relation—the absolute relation that provides concrete actants with their relative positions as subjects or objects, as well as their alternation between the two positions: the Other refers (to) me to the other I and the other I to me. The Other is not an element within the field of perception; it is the principle that constitutes such a field, along with its content. The Other is thus not a specific point of view to be defined in relation to the subject (the "point of view of the other" in relation to my point of view or vice-versa), but rather it is the possibility that there may be a point of view at all—that is, it constitutes the concept of a point of view. It is the point of view that allows the I and the Other to adopt a point of view.13On this point, Deleuze is critically extending Sartre's famous analysis of the "gaze," by providing a prior structure for the reciprocity of perspectives associated with the Sartrian regard. What is this structure? It is the structure of the possible: the Other is the expression of a possible world. A possible world that exists, really but not actually—or not beyond its expression in the form of an Other. This express possibility is implicated in, and constitutive of, the perspective from which it is expressed (which nevertheless remains heterogeneous), and is effectuated in language, or the sign, which
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