Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism: Submutances and the Body 1032426632, 9781032426631

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Routledge Studies in Anthropology

RETHINKING RELATIONSUBSTANCE DUALISM SUBMUTANCES AND THE BODY Aurélie Névot

Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism

This book analyses anthropological debates on “relationism” (referring to methodological and theoretical issues) and sets out to reconsider these discussions with regards to the notion of “substance” (generally associated with the body). Reflecting on the philosophical origins and implications of these two concepts, the author aims to bring them to the heart of contemporary anthropological discourse and addresses the erasure (or blurring) of “substance” in favour of “relation.” The argument put forward is that the conceptual pairing of “substance-relation” should be substituted for the “nature-culture” dualism that has been dominant in structural anthropology. The chapters engage with the work of scholars such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Wang Mingming as part of a decentring and questioning of the tradition in which anthropology is rooted. The book also considers the role that the anthropology of China plays in the re-evaluation of the relationship between relation and substance. The concept of “submutance” is introduced with Chinese ethnographic material to explore the possibility of moving beyond the relation-substance dualism of Western heritage. This is valuable reading for scholars interested in the theory and history of anthropology. Aurélie Névot is an anthropologist and research professor at the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS).

Routledge Studies in Anthropology

Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica Toward an Anthropological Understanding of the Isthmo–Colombian Area Edited by Ernst Halbmayer Africa and Urban Anthropology Theoretical and Methodological Contributions from Contemporary Fieldwork Edited by Deborah Pellow and Suzanne Scheld Human Trafficking, Structural Violence, and Resilience Ethnographic Life Narratives from the Philippines Amie L. Lennox Knots Ethnography of the Moral in Culture and Social Thought Edited by David Lipset and Eric K. Silverman Secular Narrations and Transdisciplinary Knowledge Abdelmajid Hannoum One World Anthropology and Beyond A Multidisciplinary Engagement with the Work of Tim Ingold Edited by Martin Porr and Niels Weidtmann Cosmopolitan Moment, Cosmopolitan Method Edited by Huon Wardle and Nigel Rapport Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism Submutances and the Body Aurélie Névot For a full list of titles in this series, please visit the Routledge website: https:// www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Anthropology/book-series/SE0724

Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism Submutances and the Body

Aurélie Névot

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Aurélie Névot The right of Aurélie Névot to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-42663-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-42664-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36369-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction: Lévi-Strauss’ Enfants Terribles

vii ix 1

PART I

Historiographical Overview 1 2

37

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives: From Aristotle to Cognitivism via Lévi-Strauss

39

Anthropo-Philosophical and Ethno-Phenomenological Relations: From Torment to Ecstasy?

62

Conclusion to Part I

88

PART II

Structuralist Legacies 3 4

Body and Intentionality: Philippe Descola’s “Relative Universalism”

91

93

The Body-Sign: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Anti-Substantialist Relationism

133

Conclusion to Part II

167

vi

Contents

PART III

Chinese Relationisms and Submutances 5 6

171

The Lost Body: Wang Mingming’s “Cosmology of Relationship” and Hierarchical Relationism

173

Shamanic Bodies and Submutances: The Course of Writing, Blood, Breath, and Water

209

Conclusion to Part III

240

Conclusion: “What the Body Can Do”

242

Index

248

Acknowledgements

This study was born from questions in both academic and field research, specifically the ethnographical fieldwork I had conducted in China since 1998. As a specialist on a Yunnan minority population, more specifically on a local scriptural shamanism developed by the religious specialists called bimo (“Masters of Psalmody”), I began to reflect upon certain theoretical propositions that developed over the course of my ethnographic analysis. My own data proved resistant to the application of theoretical models derived from exogenous systems. The long process of reflection that these difficulties provoked, combined with an interest in both the Chinese ethnographic field and the theoretical frameworks of my own discipline, led to the present work on the conceptual couple “substance-relation” and its epistemological foundations, a problem that connects philosophy and anthropology. This book was first published in French in 2021 under the title Le corps effacé. Relations, substances et submutances in Les Mémoires des Annales de Phénoménologie. I warmly thank the editor, Alexander Schnell, for having allowed Routledge editions to publish the revised and expanded English version of this text and also for our numerous exchanges that brought essential insights to the present work (the first part of this book in particular reflects our daily debates about philosophy and anthropology). This text was originally supposed to be the first chapter of a book entitled Le ressac de l’altérité. Marc Richir et Pierre Clastres à l’épreuve de l’ethnologie (Névot 2023). It eventually turned into an independent study. This essay is accordingly the first part of a dialogue that I want to promote between anthropologists and philosophers who have made me see the need to reshuffle the conceptual cards that we all use in our intellectual exchanges although we are not all seated around the same table. But going beyond our disciplinary borders does not mean ignoring or prejudging exchanges between the partners at play. In fact, it seems timely and appropriate to provoke such a meeting by laying out these conceptual cards to the view of all in order to better explain the positioning of current anthropology in relation to philosophy. I would therefore like to thank those who gave the necessary jolts and made me aware that a debate should fully engage our two disciplines and thereby both to encourage philosophers to decentre their analytical possibilities by considering

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ethnographic otherness, and to motivate anthropologists to question their own symbolic institution on a more fundamental level and to discuss more generally the “metacosmologies” that they strive to observe, translate, and think. The anthropological side of my research was especially enriched, on the one hand, by those anthropological works whose theoretical foundations I will discuss in the following and, on the other hand, by the research of sinologists (historians and philosophers) and ethnologists on the Chinese worlds. I thank them all for their ethnographic and conceptual contributions, which were essential to the realisation of this work. This book has benefited greatly from the advice and suggestions of Sacha Carlson, Béatrice David, István Fazakas, Stéphane Gros, and Alexander Schnell. I thank them wholeheartedly for engaging in discussions. Alain Arrault and Patrice Maniglier also generously contributed to the improvement of this book. I thank them all too for their invaluable assistance. At last, many thanks to Aengus Daly for his proofreading and correction of my awkward turns of phrase in English and to Katherine Ong for her editorial work and support. Lastly, I would like to thank the Research Centre on Modern and Contemporary China (CECMC-EHESS), the Centre for Studies on China, Korea and Japan (CCJ-EHESS), and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Cultural Studies (LinCS-Strasbourg University) for their support of this publication.

Foreword

The honour of the critic is not to praise, the honour of the critic is not to blame: the honour of the critic is to understand. But he does not understand enough if he only understands his own ideas. To understand, one must be free. And first, to be free of oneself. André Suarès, Xénies (1923, 206)1

The nature-culture dualism has a prominent place in the structural anthropology founded by Lévi-Strauss. This dualism is still widely discussed today, notably by Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro who, each in their own way, have indicated its Eurocentrism and sought to deconstruct it. These anthropologists play major roles in contemporary debates and they give a particular twist to structuralistinfluenced theoretical anthropology, which aims at reconsidering the concepts of “nature” and “culture” inherited from philosophy.2 However, two other notions underlying these approaches turn out to be just as problematic and just as central to the discipline, yet these have been somewhat sidelined in these debates. I mean the concepts of “substance” (generally associated with the body) and “relation” (referring to methodological and theoretical relationism). The present book proposes to deconstruct this conceptual pairing and also to address the philosophical heritage that has played a crucial role in the constitution of anthropology.3 Over and beyond this deconstruction, I will also show that one of the major challenges facing anthropology is precisely the re-evaluation of the relation established between substance and relation. The two terms remain, in fact, the master concepts from which this “science of Man” (science de l’Homme) developed, a science that still remains bound to its Greek and Judeo-Christian androcentric metaphysical underpinnings4 in spite of the reflexive decentring that it presupposes by the very nature of its object: the other and in spite of the decolonisation of thought that it promotes in order to reflect on the correlation established between the view from the other and its view on the other. Yet, by using the concepts of “substance” and “relation” with a certain freedom, by associating them not only with philosophical categories (the Aristotelian

x Foreword and Kantian, a point to which I will return) but also with reflections on the body and its symbolic representations, anthropology grants them new meanings. This form of semantic freedom forces us to rethink them. It is this deviation, provoked by the process of “ethnographic bifurcation” and inscribed in what could be described as an anthropological metabasis eis allo genos (“moving on to another genre”), that this book proposes interrogating head-on. What do these conceptual leaps reveal? It is undoubtedly the notion of “substance” even more than that of “relation,” that proves to be the most blurred in contemporary anthropological discourse. It refers either to the first Aristotelian category and is thought as having a certain fixity, or to the essences or humours of the body, or even to both at once. Sometimes it is associated with the register of immutability, sometimes with that of movement and externalisation, substance then becoming the content of the relation, i.e., what underlies it. The different semantic fields in which this same notion appears are hardly ever discussed in anthropological writings. Following Anne Cheng’s reference to the “constellations of notions” in ancient Chinese texts, we could thus argue that the terms used in these texts do not function precisely as concepts in that they do not constitute discrete entities that could be examined as objects one after the other and independently of each other. On the contrary, these “constellations” form networks of infinitely complex and diversified relations which, through constant interaction, are continually evolving, thus allowing for a multiplication of points of view and at the same time inviting one to “follow the movement” of thought and theoretical debates. (Cheng 1999, 33, quoted by Herrou 2017, 362)

The terms “substance” and “relation,” removed from their original philosophical anchorage, become subject to the new semantic constellations introduced by anthropology. Hence the need to analyse them, for it is in this notional gap that otherness is located and we can reveal the “enigmatic life” of those concepts5 that pass from one symbolic institution to another, i.e., from that of the observed to that of the ethnologist who, by translating vernacular notions through the prism of European terms, causes both the former and the latter to deviate from their original meaning. This double movement provokes a form of chiasmus that emanates from the meeting of the two symbolic systems at stake. In other words, anthropology’s use of the concepts of substance and relation generates a movement of thought that needs to be questioned. In order to do so, anthropology and philosophy must necessarily enter into discussion with each other. Accordingly, both are fully at issue in what follows. This book will discuss three orientations that deal more with theory than ethnographical data. It does not aim at presenting extensive ethnographic research from beginning to end, but at considering matters case by case in

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order to discuss both anthropological and ethnographical analyses. The key points are thus conceptual, regardless of whether the concepts addressed come from within the discipline (thus they may be etic) or from the ethnographical fieldworks (thus may they be emic). • First, an epistemological and critical approach to the use of the conceptual pair “relation-substance” in the anthropological tradition that considers its philosophical foundations. It will be necessary, in the first instance, to deal with the concepts of substance and relation as they have been treated in the philosophical field in order to understand, in a second step, how anthropologists have drawn upon this conceptual heritage and given prominence to relation at the expense of substance. • Second, an analysis of the uses of these concepts in two of the main contemporary structuralist theories, including the main representatives of the “relationist turn,” namely Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Their approaches mirror each other, and they both developed their own perspectives on the relational body. Descola introduces a bodyintentionality (physicality-interiority) dualism that he puts at the basis of the four ontologies he identifies. Viveiros de Castro refers to the body as a sign (without substance) and to habitus. • Third, the introduction of Chinese perspectives on the subject. “The new Chinese anthropology,” which claims to be affiliated with structuralist and Maussian heritages, draw upon the notion of relation but do so outside the philosophical framework and inside Chinese conceptuality. Its own epistemic view aims at a decentring. I will analyse this “decolonial” perspective in which, contrary to the relation seen as habitus, substance and body play no theoretical role at all. This will also mean giving my own perspective, which was gained through the analysis of the ethnographical Chinese data I gathered among scriptural shamans in southwestern China, and its comparison with data on other shamans of the same area. In doing so, I will focus on the complementary rather than the oppositional in relation and substance by re-introducing the body into the debate, which current Chinese relationist reflection completely omits. My broader aim is to rethink the anthropological European relation-substance dualism from chiasmatic shamanic Chinese perspectives on the body. In other words, my purpose is to highlight the theoretical scope of the anthropology of China with a view to a conceptual renewal of anthropology.

Ethnographing Concepts Is undertaking such a decentring not paradoxical in itself, given the field of intelligibility of this discipline is based on a domain staked out by the Enlightenment and on the cognitivist paradigm—relatively prevalent in anthropology, as we shall see, and allegedly more “scientific” than other

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reflexive orientations in that it focuses on human capacities and mental structures—which similarly refer to a particular mode of thought and advocates for the superiority of naturalism, i.e., for the Western natural sciences? How can we take the other seriously in an (ethnographic as well as theoretical) anthropology that seeks to analyse the logics of thought associated with the phenomena observed, which are inscribed in a form of unconsciousness that inevitably confronts any ethnologist? How can we apprehend its constitutive diplopia? These questions are at the origin of this book and developed together with a reading of three key authors: first, Marilyn Strathern, to whom I will refer mainly in the introduction, who introduced a questioning of gender (both in ethnography and in ethnographic practice), while distancing herself from universalist theoretical attempts to promote the idea of “bifurcation” induced by the conceptual upheavals caused by field data; then, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who is more central to my discussion and who invites us to put “Plato’s thought and Amerindian thought” on the same level; finally, Marc Richir, who is in the background of my reflections without being the direct object of the discussion6 and who, as already emphasised, introduced the notion of “symbolic institution” and the idea of symbolically instituted meaning that allows a conceiving of philosophy as a multifaceted form of expression of different symbolic systems that unfold differently throughout the history of the European worlds.7 These three orientations, original in their subversive stances and in their (more or less) explicit call for an intellectual decentring, invite us to develop a critical approach to anthropological theory, insofar as the latter is ipso facto inscribed in the European symbolic institution, be it anchored in Kantian philosophy, or in post-Kantian relationist and anti-substantialist philosophies, or more recently in materialist philosophies with cognitivist orientations.8 The theory, in its essence, reflects the model of the institution in which it takes shape. It is precisely a question of ethnographing the contingency of our thought and knowledge with regard to the epistemic framework of the discipline concerned. In other words, and to use Rajeev Bhargava’s felicitous formula (2013, 413), which Philippe Descola also employs ([2014] 2017, 218), I am aiming at an “ethnography of concepts” in anthropology. Substance-Relation: Anthropological and Ethnological Approaches It is obviously not possible to provide an exhaustive introduction to the various theoretical trends in current anthropology here, a fact that shows the vitality of this discipline. Hence, I will only refer to some of them in a more or less developed and critical manner so as not to lose the guiding thread of this book. The anthropology of structuralist heritage is central in the present context, as it is the one most marked by the notions of relation and substance.9

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In examining this, I will essentially question Descola’s psycho-cognitivist hermeneutics, which is heir to Lévi-Strauss’ cognitivist orientations,10 and his ontological anthropology that at the same time (and one might say paradoxically) refers to Husserlian phenomenology. The altercognitivism of Viveiros de Castro, influenced by Deleuzian philosophy, will constitute a joint field of study with this French theoretical approach, which aims at searching for human cognitive architectures.11 Consideration of the “ethnology of relationism” promoted by Wang Mingming,12 an anthropologist who claims to be part of a theoretical debate close to Maussian and structuralist perspectives, will allow us to pursue our reflection from a Chinese point of view. Different forms of relationism govern these three theoretical orientations in which substance is either backgrounded (Descolian type of relationism) or entirely banished from consideration (Viveiros Castrian and Wangian types of relationism who both focus on habitus). This “effacement” refers to a setting aside of substance, which is then either placed in the shadow of relation or is completely annihilated in favour of relation. These ways of considering the notions of “substance” and “relation” reflect the idea that anthropologists are bearers of conceptualities they have integrated without their knowledge and that they always express themselves from the symbolic institution which trained them in their discipline. For the precedence of relationism over substance in post-structuralist theories is culturally founded and inscribed in the history of anthropology (despite the phenomena of indigenisation and decentring that it advocates); yet it is important to question its universal validity—proclaimed or assumed more or less explicitly, depending on the authors—in order to better welcome the thought of the other. We are obviously not masters of the system of thought that we draw upon, but we can critically set it aside. This is the approach that this book takes. In parallel with the post-structuralist relationism that will be central here is the “material turn,” which has gained momentum since the end of the 20th century. It invites us to look at the physicality and circulation of objects in order to go beyond, in a certain way, the opposition between subject and object and to see them both in a correlative way.13 Although the terms “substance” and “relation” are central, the relation philosophers and anthropologists established between these two concepts are not the subject of a historiographical discussion. We can find a relationism that promotes “the social life of objects” in Bruno Latour’s theory of the actornetwork or in Alfred Gell’s idea of agency of cultural objects. Of these thinkers of processes and flows associated with this material turn, the theoretical positioning of Tim Ingold stands out, because he is not interested in the objects in themselves but rather in the idea of promoting a “living philosophy” (2011). He claims to be engaging in phenomenology, but unknowingly, as he explains (2016, 217–218). In particular, he maintains that the forms of things are not imposed from the outside on a substrate of inert matter but are continually generated and

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dissolved in the flows of materials through the interface between “substances” and the environment that surrounds them. Consequently, things are active not because they are inscribed in an agency, but because of the way they are caught up in the currents of the living world. The properties of materials are not fixed attributes of matter, but processes and relations (Ingold 2007). Ingold thus introduces what I propose calling a “sub-mutantial phenomenology” by evicting the stare (stance) of “substance” in favour of the mutare (mutance), while breaking up the conceptual relation-substance couple but without questioning or rejecting these concepts, which remain surrounded by a certain semantic vagueness that should be questioned. I propose not only to considering certain theoretical approaches in which the substance-relation dichotomy plays a preponderant role, but also the systems of thought specific to certain societies. I will thereby question the validity of this conceptual pairing in the light of these societies, as translated by ethnologists, and not by using the reflections of anthropologists who are more involved in a theoretical and philosophical approach. Certain ethnographies constantly emphasise the importance of bodily “substances” which are seen as the conditions for the possibility of inter-human relations as well as for relations between humans and non-humans. They reveal that the Aristotelian concept of substance, which refers to a certain fixity, is not a fitting designation for what are also called “humours” or “essences,” since the latter are not inscribed in a process involving any stare but rather a mutare. Moreover, there are systems of thought without any ontological basis in which the question of being is not prominent at all, and for which the conceptual oppositions of “subject-object” and “relation-substance” do not exist. Hence the idea of a dynamic substance related to perceptions of the body prevails, but without this being perceived antinomically. Such a notion could draw, to a certain extent at least, upon Merleau-Pontian and Ingoldian theories. However, I will mainly approach it in the light of “thinkers” coming from other symbolic institutions. The Body The body and its symbolic representations are at the foundation of this “substantial relationism.” They are therefore at the heart of the present reflections. Two orientations emerge in the anthropological field. On the one hand, the body is treated without Eurocentric projections. The ethnographers accordingly bring to the fore, by drawing upon in-depth field analyses, multiple symbolic variations around the body, which is conceived in terms of metamorphic schemes and therefore as of great plasticity. On the other hand, the body is introduced using its Eurocentric meanings. The perceptions that emanate from it are predetermined by anthropologists themselves in current theoretical anthropology, particularly among structuralist relationists. Descola and Viveiros de Castro thus base their theoretical perspectives on a

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primary definition of the body, anchored in the European world and heir to the semiological and/or naturalist perspectives that they use to weave their theories. In a second stage, they insert exogenous representations of the body with all the particularities of the imaginaries in play that these imply. Contrary to this, the body has no place in Wang Mingming’s “supranational” relationist perspectives that are rooted in a theory in which the habitus prevails in connection to relations. However, another approach is possible. The one advocated here considers the body on a level that combines philosophy and ethnography. Specifically, the idea is to apprehend the body as it is conceived within different theoretical variants, notably those that issue from structuralism, as conceptualities that cannot refer to any truth about the world but to a precise epistemic framework. It is a matter of considering these different stances as theoretical constructions that are to be positioned on the same reflexive level as ethnographies, and thus of revaluing the “local sense,” the lived experience of the world, as well as abstract language. The idea is to radically divest the body of any “anthropological” conceptuality that would give voice to a school of thought—and to a philosophical and individual theory—and that does not primarily concern the system of thought that the ethnologist seeks to translate. What is at stake in this is giving ethnographic theory its rightful place and conceiving theoretical anthropology as a field of otherness in the same way as any ethnographic field. Submutance The anthropology of China (and not the anthropology seen from China) has a major role to play in the revaluation of the substantiated body implied in a transcendence, and thus in the reconsideration of the relation between the concepts of relation and substance. This does not of course mean considering China as a monolithic isolate inscribed in a fantasised permanence, but rather in its multiplicity with respect to its history, its populations, and its writings, and as a field of reflection in dialogue with “Western” conceptualities. Myths, ancient scholars, as well as present-day social actors from a wide range of backgrounds express ideas linked to fundamental metamorphoses through their discourses, writings, and practices rather than referring to the question of a stable being. All of them intellectualise and/or put into effect (notably through ritual) phenomena that are both placed at the foundation (sub) and inscribed in a movement, a mutation (mutare), far removed from any stasis and implying, on the contrary, transformations. This deconstructive attempt is based on this Chinese bifurcation where the representations of the body and the cosmos are central and correlative, where flows, energies, essences, humours are linked. I use the concept of “submutance,” first introduced by the sinologist Léon Vandermeersch (2013, 108–111), to go beyond the conceptual substance-relation pair which, as the introduction to this book will show, is a source of

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dissatisfaction for a large number of anthropologists in thinking beyond kinship relations and also thinking ritual and social relations. I am admittedly considering here a concept originally coined by a sinologist that refers to a sinological problematic in opposition to a (Western) philosophical conceptuality. This resolutely “decentred” concept of “submutance” is nevertheless based on its Latin etymology. In this sense, it does not in any way abandon its original anchoring. But how could things be otherwise when translating an exogenous idea? I would certainly have preferred to use vernacular terms to translate what is at work here, for instance, the Chinese term yi
, which is linked to the idea of “mutation” and which Vandermeersch associates with submutance, or to the notion of se, implied in different energy flows and referring to both blood and writing—which latter is a term that also comes from China but does not belong to the Sinitic vocabulary as it is part of the Tibeto-Burmese shamans’ secret speech. In a perpetual dialogue between different symbolic institutions and between philosophy and anthropology, this book is an invitation to think with the other, in a chiasmatic fashion, and to question the “effacement”14 of the “body with organs” in theoretical anthropology. I introduce this expression in reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s “body-without-organs” (“corps-sans-organes,” CsO) whose influence is undeniable in Viveiros de Castro’s anthropology. Although this anthropologist does not use this famous concept of CsO per se, his treatment of the Amerindian body seems to come close to such an idea, as we shall see. He takes over his antisubstantialist approach that is anchored in the philosophical heritage and in which the body is one stratum among others inscribed in an arrangement. On the other hand, China, when approached from an ethnographic perspective, forces us to apprehend, if I may say, the “body with organs” (“corps-avec-organes,” CaO), which is thought of as a microcosm and intimately linked to the incessantly moving exhalations and emanations of the universe.15 Philosophical Relationism and Correlationism These reflections do not therefore concern anthropology exclusively. The anthropological “relationist” debate brings into play philosophical readings and projects and makes reference to Hume, Goethe, Bergson, Cassirer, Warburg, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Levinas. Work remains to be done in order to make current anthropological propositions communicate with other current philosophical questions, notably phenomenological ones.16 The status of the relation questioned here is not that of an Aristotelian substantialism but a submutance. This questioning specifically echoes a recent problematic, at least to a certain extent—caution being required in order not to risk confusing different “ideational routes.”17 On the one hand, it opposes the phenomenologists who inscribe themselves in a “correlationist” perspective (a

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variant of relationism which implies a relation between subject and object) and the new realists on the other hand, whose leader is Quentin Meillassoux, for whom real being can be thought outside such a relation. In the light of this debate, the present book provides anthropological material that may allow phenomenologists to evaluate and reconsider their position in this discussion. In the background of this work is the aim of enabling an encounter between these two disciplines, which do not relate to “thinking” in the same way. Philosophy has never ceased to concern the dialogue of the soul with itself, in Plato’s sense. This discipline has developed from the texts of wellknown authors, in relation to the reflections that they have exhibited in the foreground or in the background, within an (almost) exclusively male intellectual environment. Complex and diversified, this universe was built by founding fathers, the remnants of whose work are only fragments or found in second-hand reports. Yet they have continually enriched the philosophical debates that have unfolded over the centuries. As for ethnology, if it has looked far away before looking around, its perspective is in any case turned towards others and “their thoughts” (be they close or “exotic”). The “classical” ethnologist calls upon us to be attentive to what these others, who belong to diverse communities, think, rather than to what he or she may think about their thoughts. He or she analyses the different answers that humans give to universal questions, is interested in the logic of thoughts in populations with distinct symbolic anchors, and tries to put an order into the discourses, practices, and environments described by those they study and who, by their very nature as humans, move in the unconscious. In essence, ethnology refers to the multiple and the empirical as forms of abstractions that should be brought to light, and would be an analytical project, referring to something that needs to be uncovered; philosophy, for its part, takes this abstraction both as an object and as a methodological tool. It is therefore only very recently that we, in Europe, have moved from the singular to the plural, from a “thinking” that was essentially elaborated by men belonging to a restricted geographical area, to the thoughts of humans of both sexes interacting, coming from a much wider horizon and turned no longer towards the individual but towards the dividual—a concept that will be discussed later. Our Western perception has effected a brutal translation from the masculine over to the feminine,18 from a universe limited in that it concerns thinking from oneself and between other selfs (philosophers) to a pluriverse open to heterogeneity, involving observers and the observed (with all the ambiguity that such a relation implies), from a metaphysics to different form of “metacosmologies.” The notion of “metacosmology” is also borrowed from Vandermeersch, who introduces it with reference to the Chinese context where “the dimension of transcendence proper to divination is not ontological but only transphenomenal” (2013, 108). The adjective “transphenomenal” refers to the idea of processes, exchanges of flows,

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energies and materials that link and animate everything that constitutes the cosmos and that proves to be at the heart of Chinese perceptions (I will return to this point). To what extent can there be a meeting of metaphysics and metacosmologies, and through this, of philosophy and ethnology? A Double Movement as a Condition for the Possibility of Anthropological Discourse This book encourages the development of an anthropology of multiplicities based on the circumstances of the ethnographic experience. It is from this latter that the ethnologist makes language, discourses, practices, songs, rituals, etc. speak for themselves. Anthropological analysis and comparatism should not be set aside in the name of merely displaying ethnographic data—and thus reverting to the “obsession with the concrete” that has characterised some critical approaches to structuralism. The idea is to be attentive to “present phenomenality” as it emerges in this or that type of symbolic institution and to see it as a way of getting rid of the “relationist everything,” the “metaphysical everything” or, similarly, the “materialist everything,” in order to consider metacosmology as an equal. I thus appeal to a reasoned and theoretical relativism, at least to a certain extent, in order to conceive anthropology as a power for unveiling thinking, including our own, through the dialogue that it develops internally with its specific tradition. Consequently, the present project consists of questioning a problematic at the very heart of structuralism afresh, for, to use Denis Kambouchner’s assessment of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, we should speak here not of relativism but of multilateralism associating all the forms of reflection in a judicial practice that will remain, according to the distinction due to Kant, “reflecting” rather than “determining”: to the comparative reflection on the differences between societies or cultures19 will be added a reflection on the heritage and on the reflexes of the observer; and to this reflection, a constitutive relation of the judgement to a model—the “theoretical model of human society”—which cannot be of the order of the given, but to which it is a question of giving shape to. (Kambouchner 2014, 317)

The role of the ethnologist is to immerse himself, to “travel” (in the sense of the German word erfahren, to “experience”) in a symbolic institution other than his own. In so doing, it is a matter of being attentive to the human experience while striving to raise it to consciousness—again, the concrete “alone” would not suffice. The intellectual impulse at work is thus twofold: The ethnologist is inscribed in a chiasmus between this raw experience, this concrete reality, and a bringing to awareness (of a philosophical heritage). He thus moves in a kind of epiphany of meaning that intimately involves this double movement between his own symbolic institution and the symbolic institution of those he observes. He thus acts as a phenomenologist in

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disarray, anchored in two different registers of thought, having to pay as much attention to the reflexive system of the other as to his own. By bringing the raw experience to awareness, in other words, by analysing his ethnographic data, the ethnologist provokes a circulation of meaning from the other to himself: A movement towards himself, therefore, towards his self as representative of the analytic symbolic institution which has formed him. Bringing the other into this sphere of thought in order to bring out what he thinks among us—which does not necessarily concern these others, because such a project does not automatically accord with their symbolic institutions—undoubtedly presupposes a distortion. Nevertheless, this should not mean recasting of the logic of the other’s thinking in a theoretical system that articulates itself more than it gives voice to and accounts for that peculiar system of thought(s). For Kroeber, the concept of cultural relativism holds that any cultural phenomenon must be understood and evaluated in terms of the culture of which it forms part. We, the students of culture, live in our culture, are attached to its values, and have a natural human inclination to become ethnocentric concerning it, with the result that, if unchecked, we would perceive, describe, and evaluate other cultures by the forms, standards, and values of our own, thus preventing fruitful comparison and classification. (Kroeber [1952] 1965, 103)

To take account of the thought(s) of others by thinking the other is to think through oneself and others. This chiasmus is the very quintessence of our practice: Such is the approach of the ethnographer when he goes into the field, for— however scrupulous and objective he may wish to be—it is never he, nor the other, whom he meets at the end of his investigation. At most, he can claim, through the application of himself to the other, to be able to extract what Mauss called facts of general functioning, which he showed to be more universal and to have more reality. (Lévi-Strauss 1960, 628)

In short, it is a re-evaluation of this dialogue and balance in the very action of this double intellectual movement that anthropology advocates here. Inscribed in a mimesis, which is neither resemblance nor dissimilarity, the anthropologist is a chiasmatic interpreter, embodying a double discourse, that of his or her symbolic institution and that of the symbolic institution of the other, which he or she must harmonise with and relate to without making the one predominant over the other. At the same time, it implies the de facto assumption of betrayal and interpretation.

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Diplopies and Abstractions In Ingold’s words (2013, 308), anthropology is conceived of as both “idiographic” research, which consists of collecting and describing data, and “nomothetic” research, which aims at generalisations based on the former. Yet it is also necessary to ascribe the field its proper role in generating paradigmatic shifts. It is remarkable that anthropology, like phenomenology, is diplopic, that is, it looks in two opposite directions: towards the objectivity of facts, on the one hand, and towards the subjectivity of experiences, on the other. But is our field of vision disturbed by these different orientations? How can we reconcile the etic and the emic, how can we associate the point of view of the observed with our own, as an observer? Do we colonise the thought of the other with this pretense at wanting to perceive a meaning in everything, in relation to what we are told or to the practices that surround it? It is without question that it is always a matter of our interpretation. Patrice Loraux evokes the “asymmetry requirement” of philosophy, which consists in going to the side where something does not fit into our conceptual boxes, in consenting to be in a position of discomfort.20 This philosopher refers to Toussaint Desanti’s idea of the phenomenologist as having to “make the subject thin,” an action that refers to the image of the tightrope walker, to Henri Michaux’s becoming thread, as Loraux again emphasises. He contends that this operation is akin to that of an acrobat and implies an extreme sensitivity. It is accompanied by a crisis, a wandering, a deviation: One leaves the Heim, one loses one’s footing. One must then “reckon with what will cause one to deviate, and this wandering leads either to emptiness or to confrontation: Struggle and victory,” adds Loraux, “hyperbolic revival, withdrawal, self-denial, taking off from oneself: Be oneself!” The Desantian idea of making the subject “thin” is a beautiful metaphor that is applicable to anthropology. The analytical process does indeed imply a certain discomfort, a strong destabilisation, associated with the fact of tirelessly removing the different layers that cover the meaning that is stuck in the strata of human thoughts and practices. It is a question of “working on one’s field material” as Giacometti did when he sculpted filiform figures that he let appear by themselves, so to speak, without trying to make them appear. Because, as Jean-Christophe Goddard points out, it is at the same time a disappearance: Appearance goes hand in hand with subtraction. But this solidarity is better understood as the close dependence which, in the de-objectifying passibility, links the reduced, isolated phenomenon, a head, an eye, a leg, a glass, a woman on the opposite side of the street, to the appearing subtracted of the background. (Goddard 2008, 120)

Anthropological analysis of ethnographic data engenders this form of withdrawal, of abstraction from the material, while its maieutic allows meaning to emerge from the field materials. This meaning is in no way the

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“copy” of either what we see or what we hear. It is an extraction. Phenomenologists and ethnologists are precisely nothing other than meaning-diggers, aesthetes of unveiling, curious about a priori incoherence. For if the ethnologist often goes so far, goes into a world far from his own, it is to experience “the pleasure of not understanding,” to use the title of a chapter written by Jean Pouillon (1993). It is because meaning is not immediately given to him that he sketches it out, by seeking it. By going in search of the other, he goes in search of meaning, and in search of himself as an analyst. Aurélie Névot Notes 1 I usually write he/she when possible while sometimes using the masculine gender as the neutral gender to avoid excessively burdening the text. I have translated citations from non-English language texts directly into English. 2 I take up Marc Richir’s idea that to speak of philosophy is to refer to the Greek world and to a specific “symbolic institution,” hence to the philosophical West (see Richir 1988). Edmund Husserl had previously stressed this in the following terms: “[Europe] has a birthplace. I am not thinking, in terms of geography, of a territory, although it has one, but of a spiritual birthplace, in a nation or in the hearts of a few isolated humans and groups of humans belonging to that nation. This nation is the ancient Greece of the 7th and 6th centuries BC. It was in Greece that a new kind of attitude towards the surrounding world emerged, resulting in the emergence of an absolutely new type of spiritual creations (geistiger Gebilde) which soon assumed the proportions of a clearly defined cultural form. The Greeks gave it the name of philosophy; correctly translated according to its original meaning, this term is another name for the universal science, the science of the whole world, of the unique totality that embraces all that is. Very soon the interest initially directed to the whole and, by the same token, the question of the becoming that encompasses all things and of the being that subsists in the becoming, begin to split up according to the general forms and regions of the being; and thus philosophy, the unique science, branches out into a diversity of particular sciences. The irruption of philosophy in this sense, including all the sciences, is therefore, in my opinion, paradoxical as it may seem, the original phenomenon (Urphänomen) that characterises Europe from the spiritual point of view” ( Husserl 1950, 236–237). It is still difficult to find an adequate expression to transcribe the exogenous modes of thought that Philippe Descola calls “spontaneous philosophies” and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro “metaphysics.” As the term metaphysics also implies a Western perception of the world, I prefer the term “metacosmology” proposed by Léon Vandermeersch in relation to the Chinese context, see below. 3 It could be specified that this is a “Euro-American” anthropology, for other orientations also exist, notably the “Chinese anthropology” that I will address in Chapter 5 by examining its development in the light of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda fantasy of a “world empire” (see Cheng [ed.] 2021). It would seem redundant, however, given the etymology of the word “anthropology,” to specify its “Western” foundations, especially since this discipline was scientifically constituted in Europe and America in the 19th century. I am taking up here the threefold distinction established by Lévi-Strauss between ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology. Ethnography “corresponds to the first stages of research: observation and description, fieldwork. A monograph, dealing

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5 6 7 8

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with a group small enough that the author has been able to gather most of his information through personal experience, is the very type of ethnographic study. […] Compared to ethnography, ethnology represents a first step towards synthesis. Without excluding direct observation, it tends towards conclusions that are sufficiently broad to make it difficult to base them exclusively on first-hand knowledge. This synthesis can be carried out in three directions: geographical, if one wishes to integrate knowledge relating to neighbouring groups; historical, if one aims at reconstructing the past of one or more populations; and finally, systematic, if one isolates, in order to give it special attention, a particular type of technique, custom or institution. […] In all cases, ethnology understands ethnography as its preliminary approach and constitutes its extension. […] [E]very where we encounter the terms social or cultural anthropology, they are linked to a second and final stage of the synthesis, taking as a basis the conclusions of ethnography and ethnology. […] We can therefore say […] that there is the same relation between anthropology and ethnology as the one we have defined above between the latter and ethnography. Ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology are not three different disciplines, or three different conceptions of the same studies. They are, in fact, three stages or three moments of the same research, and the preference for one or other of these terms only expresses a predominant attention turned towards one type of research, which can never be exclusive of the other two” (Lévi-Strauss [1958] 1974, 411-413). As we know, “phallogocentrism [a concept coined by Derrida and taken up by many feminists] has organised since the beginning and still governs Western philosophical discourse” ( Malabou 2020, 18). This quote is taken from Le plaisir effacé. Clitoris et pensée [The pleasure erased. Clitoris and thought]. The French notion of “effacement” in relation to the body has inspired my subsequent use of the notions of “erasure” or “blurring”/“shadowing” of the body to question theoretical anthropology. I introduce this idea by referring to “the enigmatic life of signs,” a course in general linguistics taught by Ferdinand de Saussure. Structural anthropology was founded on this, see Chapter 2. His political philosophy is more widely discussed in Le ressac de l’altérité [The Backwash of Alterity] (Névot 2023). The notions put forward by Richir are programmatic and remain to be questioned. Chinese anthropology, as it is presented today, is inscribed in a strong relationist perspective and refers to the Chinese symbolic institution despite numerous EuroAmerican influences. It values its Chinese conceptual foundations in order to reverse the positions of observer-knowing/observed-determined. However, the body is forgotten in these perspectives even though it is central to “Chinese thought(s)” defined below by underscoring its/their multifaceted and complex character. French anthropology differs from that of the Anglo-Saxons: While the latter theorise from singular ethnographies with a view to reaching at reflexive generalities, the former construct theoretical models that are more marked by philosophy “in order to account for a totality made up of all the observable variants of the same type of phenomenon and in order to elucidate the principles of their transformations” (Descola [2014] 2017, 241). Of course, the perspectives cannot be so clear-cut, but there is a French specificity. Even if Lévi-Strauss and Descola are usually not considered as “cognitivists,” they refer to mental structures and their anthropologies are cognitively oriented. Descola mentions his penchant for hermeneutics and cognitivism in “Sur Lévi-Strauss, le structuralisme et l’anthropologie de la nature” (2008). See also Tremlett (2011,

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14 15 16

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352) who underlines that “[d]espite this concatenation of influences—as well as the centrality of the mid-twentieth century political-economic milieu to his writings and ideas—one thing that can be said with certainty is that Lévi-Strauss’ writings on religion—or rather, on totemism and myth—were cognitively oriented. That is, Lévi-Strauss was interested in totemism and myth as examples of a pattern of thinking he called la pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss 1962).” Let us recall, moreover, that the cognitivist Dan Sperber was the first to obtain the Lévi-Strauss Prize in 2009, which is another symbol. We shall return to cognitivism in Chapter 1 and discuss Descola’s use of cognitive psychology in Chapter 2. See Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby (1992). In this book, the Chinese way of referring to a person is respected, the patronymic (here Wang) preceding the first name (here Mingming). “Relationist turn,” “material turn,” “ontological turn,” and “ethnographic turn” are all terms used to describe anthropology, as the same author is likely to integrate different turns at the same time. These expressions risk categorising what should undoubtedly remain unclassifiable, given that the theoretical positions are individual, and they also risk masking specificities and give the unfair impression that anthropology is caught up in an incessant theoretical whirlwind, dispersing itself at every turn and implying a certain break with its past, whereas it is simply enriched by different stance that are part of a certain continuity and reflexive logic with regard to the history of the discipline. Once again, using the double sense of the term previously mentioned: it refers to an annihilation as well as to a placing in the background. These two formulations are from Marcel Granet ([1934] 1968, 329), the famous sinologist whose work strongly influenced the structural anthropology of LéviStrauss, see Chapter 2. The relation between anthropology and phenomenology is increasingly attracting interest from anthropologists and phenomenologists—Etienne Bimbenet speaks of an “anthropological turn in phenomenology”—see Laplante and Sacrini (2016). The present project does not aim at promoting the integration of the phenomenological method into the anthropological approach, but at discussing the relation maintained between phenomenology and anthropology, and to bring other thoughts into dialogue with certain philosophical fields. The analysis of the concepts of relation and substance remain central here. The formulation is borrowed this time from Strathern and I will discuss it further later. The major interest of women in this discipline, since its foundations and notably in the United States, should be noted. This is recalled in his own way by Descola when he says that, for an anthropologist, “the object of the investigation is less the description of the phenomenon than the logic of contrasts” ([ 2014] 2017, 228). A lecture dedicated to Levinas, delivered at the ENS on March 18, 2013.

Bibliography Barkow J. H., Cosmides L. and J. Tooby (eds.). (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Bhargava R. (2013) Overcoming the Epistemic Injustice of Colonialism. Global Policy 4 (4): 413–417. Cheng A. (1999) Émotions et sagesse dans la Chine ancienne. L’élaboration de la notion de qing dans les textes philosophiques de Royaumes combattants jusqu’aux Han [Emotions and wisdom in ancient China. The development of the notion of

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qing in philosophical texts from the Warring Kingdoms to the Han]. Études chinoises 18 (1–2): 31–58. Cheng A. (ed.) (2021) Penser en Chine [To think in China]. Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais. Descola P. (2008) Sur Lévi-Strauss, le structuralisme et l’anthropologie de la nature. Interview avec M. Hénaff [About Lévi-Strauss, structuralism and the anthropology of nature. Interview with M. Hénaff]. Philosophie 98: 8–36. Descola P. [2014] (2017) La Composition des Mondes [The composition of worlds]. Paris: Flammarion. Goddard J.-C. (2008) Henri Maldiney et Gilles Deleuze. La station rythmique de l’œuvre d’art [Henri Maldiney and Gilles Deleuze. The rhythmic station of the work of art]. Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 33: 109–124. Granet M. [1934] (1968) La pensée chinoise [Chinese Thought]. Paris: Albin Michel. Herrou A. (2017) La part essentielle de l’être n’est “ni dans le corps, ni hors du corps”: portrait d’un maître taoïste médecin et ascète [The essence of being is “neither in the body nor out of the body”: portrait of a master doctor and Taoist ascetic]. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Le battement de la vie. Le corps naturel et ses représentations en Chine [The beat of life. The natural body and its representations in China]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 359–399. Husserl E. (1950) La crise de l’humanité européenne et la philosophie [The crisis of European humanity and philosophy]. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 55 (3): 225–258. Ingold T. (2007) Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1–16. Ingold T. (2011) Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge. Ingold T. (2013) Marcher Avec les Dragons [Walking with Dragons]. Brussels: Sensitive Areas. Ingold T. (2016) A Living Philosophical Anthropology. Interview with Professor Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen). In Laplante J. and Sacrini M. (eds.), Phenomenologies in Anthropology. Anthropologie et Sociétés, 40 (3): 217–233. 10.7202/1038641ar. Kambouchner D. (2014) Le règne de la réflexion. Lévi-Strauss et le problème du relativisme [The reign of reflection. Lévi-Strauss and the problem of relativism]. Les cahiers de L’Herne. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion, 307–328. Kroeber A. [1952] (1965) The Nature of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laplante J. and Sacrini M. (eds.) (2016) Phenomenologies in Anthropology. Anthropologie et Sociétés 40 (3): www.erudit.org/fr/revues/as/2016-v40-n3as02898/. Lévi-Strauss C. [1958] (1974) Ethnographie, ethnologie, anthropologie [Ethnography, ethnology, anthropology]. In Lévi-Strauss C. (ed.), Anthropologie structurale [Structural Anthropology]. Paris: Plon, 411–413. Lévi-Strauss C. (1960) L’Anthropologie sociale devant l’histoire [Social Anthropology in front of History]. Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 15 (4): 625–637. Malabou C. (2020) Le plaisir effacé. Clitoris et pensée [The erased pleasure. Clitoris and thought]. Paris: Éditions Payot et Rivages.

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Névot A. (2023) Le ressac de l’altérité. Marc Richir et Pierre Clastres à l’épreuve de l’ethnologie [The backwash of alterity. Marc Richir and Pierre Clastres to the proof of Ethnology]. Dixmont: Les Mémoires des Annales de Phénoménologie. Pouillon J. (1993) Le Cru et le Su [The Believed and the Known]. Paris: Le Seuil. Richir M. (1988) Phénoménologie et Institution Symbolique [Phenomenology and Symbolic Institution]. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Suarès A. (1923) Xénies. Paris: Émile-Paul Frères. Tremlett P.-F. (2011) Structure Amongst the Modules: Lévi-Strauss and Cognitive Theorizing About Religion. In Hughes A. W. (ed.), Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Journal of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. Boston and Leiden: Brill, 351–366. Vandermeersch L. (2013) Les Deux Raisons de la Pensée Chinoise. Divination et Idéographie [The Two Reasons of Chinese Thought. Divination and Ideography]. Paris: NRF, Gallimard.

Introduction Lévi-Strauss’ Enfants Terribles

A man cannot receive an inheritance of ideas without transforming it by the very fact that he becomes aware of it, without injecting his own, and always different, way of being. An indefatigable volubility moves ideas as they are born, just as a “need for expressiveness” that is never satisfied, the linguists say, transforms languages at the very moment when one would think that they have reached their goal, having succeeded in ensuring, between the speaking subjects, a communication that is apparently unequivocal. How can we dare to count acquired ideas, since, even when they have been accepted almost universally, it is always by becoming as other as they are? Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes [Signs] (1960, 284)

The Amerindianist Viveiros de Castro states that “relation” is the “master notion of anthropology” and he advocates the development of a “minor structuralism” supported by a relational ontology, which would be centred less on Kant and more on Deleuze. With regard to the Deleuzian ligne de fuite (leakage path), Viveiros de Castro also summons us to resist a certain form of “pre-structuralism,” which would be characterised by “a strange movement of reaction to the relation that favours the re-proliferation of identities and substances, essences and transcendences, agencies and consciousnesses” (2009, 143–144). Specifically, he adds that even the “materiality” of bodies and signs is being recruited, more or less everywhere, for the rather thankless task of reincarnating the mystery of incarnation and celebrating the miracle of agency. And this, when one does not go straight to “substance,” as the French anthropology of kinship has already done, which has spent the last twenty years eagerly undermining the exchangist foundations, or in other words relational, of structuralism, in order to put in place innate ideas about bodily fluids. Substance upon substance. (ibid., 144)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-1

2 Introduction 1 Relation versus Substance? If Viveiros de Castro’s position has the merit of being clearly pro-Deleuzian and contrary—anti-material/anti-substantialist/anti-essentialist—, the explanation of such a rejection and the exclusion of essences, matters, substances (associated here with bodily humours as “signs”) from any relationist perspective requires clarification. Why would the latter “undermine” the relational foundations—the verb used here is heavy with meaning because it supposes a prior determination?1 Unless we place ourselves in a logic of Eurocentric (or even Franco-centric) thought that refers to structuralist and Deleuzian antisubstantialism, to what extent would substance be irreconcilable with relation? For the “other,” taken in all its multiplicity— including the Brazilian—, would essences, substances, humours, bodily fluids imply an Aristotelian stasis contrary to the Deuleuzian becoming that is so dear to Viveiros de Castro? Why start from such a presupposition? In what way would the conceptual couple substance-relation, anchored in the theoretical field of an academic world established on both sides of the Atlantic, concern the whole world? Finally, why do we read such a protest against substance and in favour of relation from the pen of this leading thinker of current anthropology, who nevertheless claims to be extremely concerned with questioning the limits of Euro-American conceptual constructions through the experience of otherness—“taking the thought of the other seriously,” to quote his own words (ibid., 39), with reference to the idea of “taking primitive societies seriously” invoked by Pierre Clastres (1974)? Such questions require a re-contextualisation of the debate. Indeed, if the “relationist turn” in the social sciences has now become well established throughout the world (against a background of more or less salient postcolonial self-criticism) with the development of previously mentioned theories such as Latour’s actor-network, Gell’s “art and its agents,” Ingold’s processes and flows, Descola’s “relative universalism,” Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism/multi-naturalism, Wang Mingming’s ethnology of relationism, Strathern’s more precise analysis of relations, not all approach relationism in the same way. Some of them look at it through the prism of its materiality, as was pointed out earlier with respect to the “material turn” in anthropology, while others place substance in the background or even eliminate it from their thinking because habitus prevails on body materiality. In fact, the ins and outs of such a “pro-relationist” approach are often overlooked, which has the consequence of obliterating those who are put in relation and what constitutes both the latter and the relation itself. Are the relata empty and reducible to a purely abstract dimension of the relation? Should they simply be considered as attributes of the relation and ascribed only a minor role? What is there in their gap, and how is it envisaged? How can we apprehend this “in-between”? The present reflection is based on these questions and on a sense of dissatisfaction, equal to that experienced in their time by Descola and Viveiros de

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Castro (and many others) in the face of the Lévi-Straussian nature-culture dualism, but that is here experienced with regard to another binomial that the latter make great use of without ever subjecting it to epistemological questioning: “substance-relation,” concepts whose respective discussions proceed in mirror images of each other. It is appropriate to address this conflicting couple in order to pursue a theoretical decentring of anthropology by granting other modes of thought their rightful place. For even if, in terms of the EuroAmerican epistemic register, such a deconstructivist project may seem at best paradoxical (relation is opposed to substance and these two concepts are not equivalent), at worst, useless (this conceptuality is intangible), it nevertheless echoes certain other perspectives. Now what place is to be given to others, how are others to be fully given a place—a question Merleau-Ponty already raised in Signs?2 To borrow a question from Viveiros de Castro: “What does anthropology owe conceptually to the peoples it studies?” (2009, 3). This preoccupation with “the chant of otherness” (Serrano 2006) is not new, but it raises fresh questions about the legitimacy of Western discourse on the other, as Edouard Saïd pointed out in L’Orientalisme [Orientalism] (1978). It echoes Bhargava’s more recent call for epistemic reflexivity and autonomy, issues that need to be addressed in a reasoned manner: Modern western traditions are just one among many, with certain strengths and several weaknesses—as much in need of cure as all others. It has clearly fallen from its high pedestal, as Gandhi once put it. With this, we see the beginning of the end of what might be called the colonization of the mind and intellectual cultures; of what may be called epistemic injustice. Nowadays, a space has emerged of real intellectual and civilizational equality between a much-weakened hegemon and a previously hegemonized world. This transformative moment gives us an opportunity to launch a new ethnography of concepts and representations in different parts of the world, so that we can understand the subtle but crucial differences in the way peoples outside a few countries of the North Atlantic have imagined their worlds. Successfully challenging the hegemony of the intellectual traditions of that small cluster of societies that we call the west is not going to be easy. We must avoid both a hysterical rejection of western categories and an uncritical, wholly unacceptable indigenism. The focus must remain on the concepts and representations in play today in different parts of the world, regardless of their origins. Yet a deep intellectual (epistemic) inequality must be addressed. While a million reams of paper have been written on a small but dominant number of traditions in the west, little systematic research has been carried out to excavate the treasures of other traditions. (Bhargava 2013, 413) In the background of the present work is the aim of deconstructing the Western conceptual couple substance-relation in the light of the “Chinese

4 Introduction tradition(s)”3—and not of “Chinese anthropology,” as will be explained in Chapter 5—, and at questioning the obvious dislike that binds these two concepts due to persistent misunderstandings inherited from the European episteme. I thus can only endorse what Descola writes about the natureculture dualism: Making the modern dualism of nature and culture the standard for all world systems thus forces us into a kind of benevolent cannibalism, a repeated incorporation of the objectification of the pre-moderns by themselves into the objectification of ourselves by ourselves. (2014, 234–235) It is “to make their contribution to the intelligibility of the human condition disappear” (ibid.). A pictorial metaphor may clarify my orientation. Georges Braque spoke of his paintings as follows:4 It is very difficult to dissociate things from a painting. There are people who say: “What does your painting represent? … What? … There is an apple, that’s understood, there is … I do not know … Ah! a plate, next to it …” These people seem to be totally unaware that what is between the apple and the plate is also painted. And my goodness, it seems to me just as difficult to paint the in-between as the things. This “in-between” seems to me to be an element as crucial as what they call “the object.” It is precisely the relation of these objects to each other and of the object to the “in-between” that constitutes the subject. (Charbonnier [1959] 2002, 27) The task I propose tackling is that of paying attention to the material laid down on the painter’s canvas between the plate and the apple as well as to these two “things,” to try to approach relationism by being attentive to what the subject, the object are (in case such perspectives exist, for the question of being is no more universal than the conceptual couples nature-culture and substance-relation) as well to as the relation that links the beings—human and non-human. In a word, it is a matter of (re)infusing substance into the relation (“what” is painted between the apple and the plate), of approaching the relation in its “below,” where it cannot be (necessarily) thought without substance. Such a chiasmatic insufflation does not consider abolishing the two terms at stake because they make sense in our system of thought—a “beyond relation and substance” is therefore irrelevant. Rather, the aim is to parry the opposition, which has already been done in the field of the anthropology of kinship, as we shall see below. However, it has not yet been really problematised in terms of theoretical anthropology as a whole. This is why I propose approaching the debate in this way. While in this work ethnological anthropology is addressed in response to the call for the

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decolonisation of thinking (of its thought), might we not be paradoxically dealing with a form of colonisation of the other’s thought by asserting the supremacy of relationism and the ineptitude of anything that has to do with substance? In this undertaking, does not the Western philosophical legacy speak against indigenous epistemic frameworks, push them into the margins, the shadows, given that certain attributes that are central to these frameworks, concern “substances”? Is it therefore an inadequate concept? If “relation versus substance?” is the question at the heart of this attempt to lay this matter out in full view, it could have been declined in the following forms: “the relation of the relation to the substance,” to play on words, “the matter/nature of the relation,” to get to the heart of the matter in a more polemical way. But then, I would risk being accused of being materialist (and therefore of being a Marxist or even cognitivist “realist”) and of seeming thereby uninspired by the elusive and implicit—the unconscious—that often prevails in what informants communicate to anthropologists in the field, through different media and that I, for my part, never disregard (see Chapter 1). This ambiguity will be discussed and what must be clarified is the precedence given to relation by certain tenors and sopranos of the contemporary anthropological debate, of a (post)structuralist obedience—more or less acknowledged—that occurs at the expense of substance, which is thereby erased. In these reflections on the relation of the anthropos to its environment, substance is either radically rejected, as we just saw in Viveiros de Castro’s work, or approached without revising the relational approach, i.e., without questioning head-on the role or the relation of substance to relation from an epistemological and methodological perspective—as will be emphasised in the discussion of Strathern in the next section and will be again, in a different way, through a broader reference to Wang in Chapter 5. Substance is still considered in the light of ethnographies while nonetheless being backgrounded in the analytical approach—as I will also emphasise when discussing the questions of analogism in Descola. Now, if everyone understands the meaning of relation a priori, namely, the idea that something or someone relates to something or someone else and thereby opens up towards an exteriority and implies a link, this locution is nonetheless somewhat vague and tends to be used indiscriminately by anthropologists—but what about their informants?—, and it is considered as an acquired concept without any reflection on its meaning in the context of the history of the discipline. 2 Relation versus Dasein? Throughout her work, Strathern stresses that relation is both the object of study in anthropology and its condition of possibility. In this sense, anthropology would be doubly relational: the relation is the methodological basis through which the anthropologist is brought to his or her field of study; it is concurrently what is observed and analysed. Relation is thus linked to

6 Introduction interpersonal and conceptual issues at the same time—and, in another sense, the production of anthropological knowledge is based concomitantly on the conceptual and the interpersonal (Strathern 2005a). Strathern is very clear about the scope of this concept as well as its limitations, and calls it an “attractor,” namely a term that engages other terms, a concept in a field of concepts, an idea that draws in values and disseminates feelings, a substantive from which adjectives (relational) and abstractions (relationality) can be made exactly as though everyone knew what was meant. (Strathern 2020, 2) Let us recall that the notion of “relation” comes from the Latin relatio (see relatus, past participle of referre, “to relate”). Strathern points out (1995; 2020, 4) that this expression does not originally refer to what would be situated in an in-between, but rather to what would refer from one to the other, i.e., to whom something is therefore reported.5 It was only relatively recently that the idea of relation as “relation between” entered the semantic field. Anthropology remains to some extent bogged down in relations because it is the heir to the (European) “scientific revolution.”6 Strathern recalls that before the 16th and 17th centuries, the word “relation” was used to designate logical relations. With the development of science, the same term was then used to describe relations in the field of kinship in particular and subsequently more extensive phenomena. She thus indicates that the concept has moved between different semantic registers. Those remarks have the merit of bringing the logics of current anthropological thinking back to a particular system of thought, geographically located in Europe and of a specific time, that still influences anthropologists today. Strathern is also among the first to question the relevance of the idea of relation for societies outside the orbit of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. She claims things are always in relation, no matter where we are (2005a, 91). In a sense, for her, I venture to say, the human being is homo relationis—it would seem in fact to be the only universalism that she recognises: The concept of relation can be applied to any order of connection; this is its first property. It is holographic in the sense of being an element of the field it occupies, every part containing information about the whole and the information about the whole being enfolded in each part. It is a holographic effect to imagine one can make connections anywhere. (1995, 17–18) The preponderance of the notion of relation in the discipline is affirmed without, however, questioning its accompaniment, namely the side-lining of substance in the social sciences. There is no relation to substance in Strathern’s first essay, which focuses on relation in particular, aside from one

Introduction

7

metaphorical reference in the following sentence: “Routing relations through persons became the substance of anthropological empiricism” (1995, 12). She also specified that “the relation always summons entities other than itself” (ibid., 18). In her last book, which is entirely devoted to relations, substance is not addressed at all. Strathern briefly recalls that relation refers to one of Aristotle’s categories, to an “accident,” without mentioning its relation to substance, which latter nevertheless has precedence over the other categories. In other words, she barely questions the relation of relation to substance (see 2020, 4) nor does she discuss the causes nor the consequences of the epistemic invisibility of substance in this favouring of relation. Although she does not put these concepts precisely “in relation” to each other, we cannot, in my opinion, refer to relation in an epistemological approach without referring to substance and vice versa, because these notions have, since Greek antiquity, been thought of interdependently in Europe, through correlativity, complementary, and opposition. If Strathern proceeds in this way, it is probably because her famous book, The Gender of the Gift (1988), a seminal work in gender research, deals essentially with bodily “substances” in motion and as involving relations. She analyses how, in Melanesia, food, sperm, milk, and blood are not only commutable, inscribed in processes of transformation that intertwine and metamorphose them, but also in relation to the masculine and feminine. These substances (as she calls them) are not in fact perceived as fixed in the body; they can be detached from it and thus circulated and exchanged, which implies bodily transformations of personhood. Gender is not immutable but depends on actions, relations, and thus on the substances exchanged. We are dealing here with substances in movement that act on bodies and “gender” them. Strathern shows that male initiations in particular refer to the modification of the bodies of boys who, once they have become “single-sex,” can reproduce with other “single-sex” boys, insofar as they themselves are not masculinised but their organs and their sexual substances (ibid., 212–213). In this sense, the Melanesian person is masculinised and feminised according to the circumstances of the moment, and is characterised by his/her androgyny, which implies cross-sex and same-sex relations. Following Strathern, Pascale Bonnemère’s research (2018) reveals that Melanesian man constructs himself by giving birth and participates in pregnancy through the exchange of fluids with his child, emphasising that “substantial” kinship relations are not only the prerogative of humans in this culture but also of non-humans such as animals and plants. Hence the importance of the concept of “dividual personhood,” that is, singular and composite at the same time (Strathern 1988, 13), a notion that Strathern takes from McKim Marriott (1976). In the contemporary Indian context, the latter, along with Ronald Inden, draws attention to the substantive nature of human interaction: Various codes of action or conduct (dharma) are thought to be naturally embodied in actors and otherwise substantialized in the flow of things that

8 Introduction pass between actors. Thus the assumption of the easy, proper separability of action from actor, of code from substance […], that pervades both Western philosophy and Western common sense […] is generally absent: code and substance (Sanskrit purusa and prakriti, dharma and sarira, and so on) cannot have separate existences in this world of constituted things as conceived by most South Asians. (Marriott and Inden 1973; Marriott 1976, 110–111) Like Marriott’s and Inden’s Indian ethnographies, Melanesian ethnographies point to non-static bodily substances insofar as the latter involve metamorphoses of the person and the relating of persons. These processes are at the foundation of local sociality. Consequently, unlike Viveiros de Castro, Strathern cannot oppose substance to relation—which does not explain why she (unconsciously?) turns her back on substance when she addresses the concept of relation in anthropology. Faced with this predominance of the relation, which is at the foundation of anthropology and ethnography, James F. Weiner supports a Heideggerian approach that encourages a questioning of being: Once we have agreed that anthropology’s starting and ending points are the elucidation of social relationships, what then is our task? What kinds of problems are given to us to solve against this grounding proposition? […] [A]nthropology must address itself not only to identifying and analysing the various forms and processes of human sociality but also to specifying the kinds of beings for whom the question of society and its analysis are issues of life […]. In other words, we want to specify the conditions under which the world is perceived to be relationally based (by ourselves as well as our hosts) prior to our analysis of it. (2001, 71) Weiner thus asks us to question relations insofar as they shape our subject of study and as we seek to make them visible—this is indeed an intellectual act, to which I will return when discussing Vincent Descombes’ “external relation.” But what precisely is undertaken in doing this? Weiner points to a certain form of naivety, namely that we do not know what we are doing epistemologically in making relations appear, which has the consequence of excluding what is non-relational in human life (ibid., 73). Thus, for Weiner, rather than asking, “What is the form of social relations?” the question should be, “What are the practices and conditions that cause social relations to be revealed as an issue of life?” (ibid., 74). More precisely, the emphasis is on the mode of being, which makes these relations necessary and inevitable (ibid., 75). Weiner refers to Heideggerian hermeneutics, questioning the way in which the human being reveals itself to the world, for what is revealed in this philosophical thought, Weiner emphasises, is a mode of interrogation of being. It is therefore not only the relation but the definition of the type of human being that makes the relation into one of its existential conditions (ibid., 80).

Introduction

9

This approach places the anthropologist’s cursor on the individual and on the concreteness of what he or she is, and it thereby criticises a major oversight on the part of some anthropologists: the fact that language and other practices of representation (such as art, for example) reveal the world and human subjectivity as much as they conceal them. Hence the importance of the non-relational must be granted in anthropological reflection: I am proposing a search for a form of sociality that is not mediated, that is not directly articulated, that is only visible when one’s attention is directed elsewhere. If we fail to make this form appear in some way, the ones that are recognized would have no form themselves, no limit, no temporality. (ibid., 75) But is being in the Heideggerian sense and in the phenomenological sense that Heidegger sought to develop, the same as being as is observed in anthropology? Strathern suggests that we should be cautious in our use of concepts because of the risks in using the same terms to describe different “ideational routes” (Strathern 2011, 97). However, in view of the very complex notion of “being,” caution is needed. It is worth asking whether phenomenologists and anthropologists are really talking about the same thing. Another reader of Heidegger, Albert Piette (2014a),7 adopts an even more radical position than Weiner by resisting “all relation.” He promotes an “anti-relationism” that opposes “the relation as a research theme (of roles, relationships, links) and the relation as a theoretical reading, reducing the individual to trajectories, interdependencies or situational salience” (ibid., 20). What is important is to “think of the individual in the process of existing, in its nuances, during, before, and after the moment of said interaction,” practicing what he calls a “realistic ontism” (ibid., 44). The anthropologist should then focus on the individual present in a given situation. His task would then be to follow the individual: The critique of relationism thus implies disassociating oneself from the ethnographic focus on relations and interactions as abstract sets constructed by the researcher—these are social relations, various exchanges, activities between human beings, etc.—on the one hand, and from the theorisation of the individual as a relational entity engaged in an action, an activity, on the other. On the contrary, it is a matter of privileging a thought of the individual in successive situations, as a singular entity each time irreducible to the latter. (ibid., 44) Piette wants to “pose the phenomenographic challenge of anthropology” (ibid., 57). Only the individuals observed should be able to speak of the existence of relations based on their experience, and not the anthropologist, who is only an outsider and cannot therefore impose the idea of a relation that does not necessarily exist for the observed. Hence this approach involves

10

Introduction

an extreme kind of valorisation of the “indigenous” point of view (ibid., 63). And to achieve this, the observer would have to engage in “a kind of shadowing” (ibid., 71). If this theoretical proposal challenges the diktat of relationism in anthropology insofar as the latter is not fully thought out, neither methodologically nor epistemologically, the question of its methodological realism arises. Moreover, in what way does the method advocated here ensure better anthropological knowledge? To question what relations have value for the individual seems essential, but should we only see what the “native” makes explicit as important? How, then, are we to apprehend what is implicit and unspoken, what ethno-anthropologists give voice to—at least in the framework of the ethno-anthropology I am concerned with? To follow up on Weiner’s idea, it would be a matter of asking the question of “non-relation” as experienced by the anthropologist, that is to say, that which is a priori non-existent, but which nevertheless is and which appears precisely owing to the relation that the ethnographer weaves with his field. In this respect, the ideas of revelation and concealment Weiner puts forward should be addressed, and both with respect to the side of informant as well as that of the anthropologist. Like Strathern, but for different reasons, in these two Heideggerian perspectives that challenge the hegemony of relationism in anthropology, the substantialist question is nonetheless removed from the discussion. Weiner and Piette anchor the discussion in phenomenological “fundamental ontology.” The silence on substance is so deafening in theoretical anthropology (and not in the “anthropological philosophies” as previously seen in Ingold in particular) that we cannot avoid questioning its meaning. Does it imply that the conceptual pairing of substance and relation inherited from Kant—substance is a category of relation—is so firmly anchored in our unconscious that it subjects anthropologists to this philosophical legacy, thus blinding them to this “subtle and profound domination,” to use Bhargava’s words (2013, 57) about the conceptual colonisation of India? Does this notional binomial operate “without our minds knowing” (ibid.)? Bhargava’s reflection on the conceptual and epistemic effects of colonisation on the “natives” seems to hold for anthropologists themselves. The latter insidiously bear a conceptuality that they have integrated without their knowledge, which they do not question because it seems to be common sense, as if it came direct from the source. But the very fact of being an anthropologist means going back to this source with a self-critical perspective. 3 (A)substantial Relations? Let us turn to the term “substance,” which is not much more precise than the notion of “relation.” It is classically associated with the idea of something that underlies being, substantia meaning “that which stands beneath.” This Latin word, introduced by medieval philosophers to translate the Greek

Introduction

11

concept of ousia, has more than one meaning and refers to precise epistemic foundations. In Plato, ousia can be translated as “reality,” “existence,” “essence,” “what a thing is,” as opposed to the flux of changing things and to the becoming. It refers to being from different perspectives (as nature, as existing, as a whole, as a constitutive part, or as a stable reality, etc.) (Mansion 1946, 350).8 It can also imply the materiality of a thing considered in the fixity of the thing-in-itself and it is then be in line with the theory of ousia inherited from Aristotle. For him, ousia is no longer the being but a species of beings, a kind of being that refers to “what the real really is” (ibid., 351). Substance can also have different connotations that arose in postAristotelian philosophy, which, depending on the epistemic framework in which the word is applied, do not necessarily refer to the same idea; “that which underlies” can also be associated with the idea of an action and a relational dynamic, as in Leibniz, for example. Kant is generally (consciously or unconsciously) the reference point with respect to relation and substance, and he made the latter into one of the categories of the former (and not, as in Aristotle, the other way round). A brief look at these concepts shows that a certain confusion reigns in anthropology with respect to the meaning given to them.9 The misunderstandings are numerous: Although the same term is used, it refers, on the one hand, to different theoretical foundations, and on the other hand, to different components outside the strictly philosophical field. Substance can thus refer to essences, humours, the materiality of anything, in short, to what composes it and can be of the visible as well as the invisible order; it may be blood, milk, sperm, breath, force, energy, sap, etc., according to the location of one’s ethnographic and historical anchorage. The idea of substance may therefore be associated with animal and human bodies, as well as with plants, with the cosmos, or it may even come from what would be associated with inert objects in our own frame of reference, but which can be considered substantially and relationally at the same time in other systems of thought—which are often characterised as “animistic,” an adjective that remains to be questioned because it is anchored in a particular reflexive perspective. Janet Carsten devotes a chapter of After Kinship (2003, 109–135) to the uses and abuses of substance. She identifies no less than 23 different meanings of the word in English, which she groups into four categories: vital part or essence; distinct and separate thing; that which underlies phenomena; bodily matter (ibid., 111). This anthropologist is essentially interested in the role that the concept of substance has played in certain Anglo-Saxon studies of kinship. She refers first to American Kinship: A cultural Account (1980) in which David Schneider focuses on the fixed and permanent “biogenetic substance,” and then to E. Valentine Daniel’s monograph Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (1984), which argues that blood, milk, and sexual fluids are not separate entities, but rather that they are permutable for the Tamils. Finally, Carsten indicates the work of Strathern mentioned above.

12

Introduction

But she does not refer in any way to the French debates, which were quite bitter. They were provoked by Françoise Héritier’s structuralism, which was characterised by a “substantial” orientation (which Viveiros de Castro criticises in the quotation placed at the opening of this introduction). Indeed, in order to grasp the complex kinship system of the Samo (a population of Burkina Faso), Héritier had to take into consideration the fact that for them the human being is composed of substances that guide their choices of alliance. In a word, she integrates into structuralism the relational body and substances, notably blood, addressing local representations to question the rules of kinship and the theoretical field in a new way. In L’exercice de la parenté [The exercise of kinship] (1981), Héritier introduces the idea of the “differential valence of the sexes,” highlighting the social prevalence of men: “The differential valence of the sexes, or, if one prefers, the different place of the two sexes on a table of values, and more generally the dominance of the masculine principle over the feminine one” (ibid., 50). In Héritier’s view, this principle is “the driving force behind the internal differentiation of all the kinship systems, depending on whether it is taken into consideration and how it is done” (2000, 24). In particular, she points out that although the rules of kinship are based on male discourses that prescribe them, reality says something else. Based on data from the Samo, she examines rule-breaking, highlighting alliance structures in semi-complex forms of alliance, revealing that the choice of spouse is made as close as possible to the prohibitions, a reflection that Les deux sœurs et leur mère. Anthropologie de l’inceste (1994) [The Two Sisters and Their Mother. Anthropology of Incest] pursues by highlighting the representations of the Samo body. In this work, Héritier is inspired by Durkheim, who showed using ethnographic examples that certain representations linked to the body orient kinship—he claims “totemic” populations forbid alliances between people who are related to the same totem in order to prevent any contact with the totemic blood (Durkheim [1896–1897] 1969). Based on this reading, Héritier notes that she was struck by a Samo expression which says one does not marry “from the same strain.” For the Samo each person is composed of substances from eight agnatic blood strains (four from the father, four from the mother) which are attributed an unequal importance. The two strains that Héritier calls “dominant” are, on the one hand, the one that comes from the father’s blood, i.e., from the father’s lineage, transmitted by sperm, and, on the other hand, the one that comes from the mother, i.e., from the mother’s lineage, transmitted by the bone marrow. The strains qualified as “recessive” are those of the father’s mother and the mother’s mother, then those of the paternal grandfather’s mother, the maternal grandfather’s mother, the paternal grandmother’s mother, and the maternal grandmother’s mother. The choice of spouse is oriented by these different strains and their compatibility, because the dominant and recessive strains cannot be present in duplicate in the same individual: “The ideal is when the bloods are already somewhat familiar with each other, at a good distance” (Héritier 2000, 31).

Introduction

13

In order to grasp the logics of kinship at stake here, Héritier therefore had to refer to ethnographic representations of the body and its components, thus reconsidering, in a way, Durkheim’s social primacy, which was set aside by Lévi-Strauss in favour of the intellect (I will return to this point in Chapter 1). From her ethnographic analyses on the compatibilities attributed to bodily substances that guide the rules of alliance and the prohibition of incest, Héritier suggested generalising her thesis by arguing that representations associated with bodily substances and the prohibitions and rights that surround them can explain the different forms of incest prohibition as well as certain principles of filiation and alliance. If, for Descola, Héritier has displaced “structural analysis from a logic of relations to a combinatorics of the body’s humours” ([2014] 2017, 74), I would counter by saying that she has substantialised structuralist relationism. Because she approached kinship from a “biologising perspective,” to use Laurent Barry’s expression—a perspective that Barry (2008) does not share because, for him, the biological is one metaphor among others developed by societies to think about their relation to the other and to themselves10—, Héritier, who was very original in her approach, was accused of being an essentialist. What cannot be doubted is that she introduced a major questioning of substances, as well as a feminist perspective, into the anthropology of kinship, thereby forcing a rethink of our epistemic framework. Her work is therefore crucial for thinking beyond the opposition “relation versus substance.” However, despite Barry’s recent work, such a decompartmentalisation of anthropological—structuralist—relationism through substances has hardly led to a global awareness of the importance of rethinking the substance-relation conceptual couple and its implications for anthropological thought as such. On the contrary, this relationist substantiation has led to an increased rigidity. Before discussing this, let us first return to Carsten. Over and beyond these debates, which highlight a knot in the French academic community formed by structuralism around the relation between relation and substance—which the present book questions—, Carsten perceives very precisely that if the opposition in anthropological analyses is strongly marked by the individuality of Westerners and the dividuality of non-Westerners,11 substance is perceived as permanent and unchanging in the first case, whereas it is depicted as intrinsically fluid and transformable in the second. This observation reveals how “substance” is more or less fixed, or more or less unstable, depending on the location of the anthropologist, and that this concept, while it suffers from the major flaw of being a catch-all is, as Carsten again points out, nevertheless useful. According to her, it fills a gap by allowing “mutability and relationality in terms of flows between persons or between persons and things” (2003, 134). In other words, its use is important in indicating the substantial relations revealed by many ethnographies. But the conceptual pairing of substance-relation, rather than the co-extensivity of relation and substance, thereby remains underlying and

14

Introduction

continues to bear a number of potential misunderstandings within it (how would it be possible to associate substance, which according to Greek antiquity is fixed, with relational processes?). We remain prisoners of the gap that Carsten refers to, which we then try to fill with notions that are difficult to manipulate, even in some cases antinomic, when we refer to societies that do not necessarily think in dualisms or with opposed notions, but in a much more extensive and “chiasmatic” way. I will later discuss this important adjective, which I have borrowed from Merleau-Ponty. Viveiros de Castro’s radical position, which opens this book and which refers a priori to two meanings of the notion of substance (as opposed to relation [and therefore in relation to reality], as it refers to matter, notably the body [and therefore in relation to experience]), will serve as a lever that I will use to clarify how “relation versus substance” remains anchored in the Euro-American analytical system, in our rationality. When these notions are perceived in this way, i.e., through the correlative exclusivity of the terms at stake and not through mutual correlativity as in Carsten’s (and other anthropologists’) case, it proves impossible to consider relation through substance. Such a position generates a certain ostracism of exogenous specificities to what we may call “substance.” This, however, does not mean weakening the debate and “de-relationalising” anthropology, but inflecting it and thus enriching it with new perspectives. If there are, in fact, invariants and universal logics in macro-anthropological perspectives, there are also differences and a greater multiplicity of points of view in micro-ethnographic perspectives that must be fully taken into consideration, even if (or because) they contradict—or, more modestly, relativise—certain anthropological theories that hang over concrete ethnographic analyses. Viveiros de Castro never stops promoting such a perspective by going even further in the decentring process. A powerful Deleuzian influence shows itself in his advocacy of the epistemic decolonisation of anthropology and his pursuit of a “becoming-Indian” of the concept (2019, 67)12 and of politics (ibid., 63). These ideas are based on analyses that do not consider the “Brazilian natives” as the starting point for a new ethnocentrism, but for a bifurcation (as Viveiros de Castro puts it: “inhabiting the margins, living at the edge of the enclosure” versus “remaining in the fortified centres, comfortably identified with the coloniser” (ibid.)). Such a theoretical perspective relies on representations derived from a specific cosmopolitical framework that Viveiros de Castro describes as relationist and a-substantialist, ideas that he otherwise considers to be universally applicable. Yet is this not contrary to the decentring he advocates? It should not be forgotten that structuralism is based on Amerindian ethnographies. Americanists confirm that Lévi-Strauss’ thought owes much to Amerindian thought, although Lévi-Strauss rejected this claim. Yet, “no one is master of his thought,” as Viveiros de Castro points out, underlining Lévi-Strauss’ non-reflexivity on his own practice.13 The same is logically true of post-structuralism. Therefore, when Viveiros de Castro claims an

Introduction

15

anthropological positioning that is decentred from the Amerindian worlds, is this not in itself paradoxical? Would not standing up to anthropological approaches to substances—a stance at the heart of many discourses—run counter to an openness to thinking differently? And this seems all the more to be the case as Viveiros de Castro himself writes that [t]he different ethno-geographic areas of the world—their various civilizational styles—possess something like conceptual “valences” that make them more or less affine to determined theoretical approaches, without becoming mere hypostases of these theories. In the end, the opposite is true, as any anthropological theory is often nothing more than an abstract and (re)stylized redescription of determined “indigenous theories”, i.e., of historically and culturally situated cosmopracticies. (2019, 21 note 10) Such positions, which seek to draw new lignes de fuite (leakage paths), are quite ambiguous and do not highlight certain ethnographic “variables” in relation to substances. The aim here is to decentralise the anthropological models that were proposed on the basis of the substance-relation conceptual couple, which is here elucidated in a completely different light with regard to certain observable phenomena. In addition, it will be a question of denouncing a form of fixism which confuses model and reality, possibility and obligation, and reduces to nothing the notion of a class of facts; successive shifts by omission or elimination of variables so as to conclude in fine that the premises are valid. (Copet-Rougier and Héritier 1993) This remark, made by the two Africanists Elisabeth Copet-Rougier and Françoise Héritier in response to Viveiros de Castro’s criticisms, is emblematic of the situation. It is a quarrel between, on the one hand, work relying on empirical evidence and the analysis of convergences and divergences in the data, which seems to invalidate the claim that semi-complex alliance systems are reduced to a patrilateral choice, and on the other hand, a criticism of this study, which points out that a few examples are not sufficient for generalisation and contradiction, and that the field data somehow fits into a patrilateral scheme, thus relativising the innovative contribution of the ethnography developed and returning to theories of kinship that refer to concepts inherited from Lévi-Strauss. This dispute did not, however, give rise to a wider debate. But the quarrel continues indirectly: Viveiros de Castro’s remarks, cited in the opening of this introduction and directed against the emphasis on substances in the field of French kinship studies, are obviously aimed at Héritier. In Politique des multiplicités, she is again strongly criticised by Viveiros de Castro, who reduces her to an “Africanist close to the ‘ethnomarxists’,” adding that

16

Introduction

“Héritier’s declared theoretical fidelity to Lévi-Strauss has never managed to compensate for her irreducible lack of understanding of structuralism” (2019, 22 note 10). Certainly, her substantialist perspective, which starts from representations of the body and its fluids, has been translated by some as contrary to structuralism because it may seem to refer to a certain fixity of the sexes centred on the difference between men and women, an essentialism deemed irreconcilable with the transformations of the relations of the Lévi-Straussian symbolic regime (see Chapters 1 and 2). But developing an original perspective from structuralist theories does not imply a lack of understanding of the latter. Renewing a field of study does not imply misunderstanding it. There is no doubt, however, that the Héritier’s aforementioned substantialism is at the heart of the dissension. Emmanuel Désveaux’s criticism of Barry revives the quarrel by describing the latter as a “devoted disciple” of Héritier, adding that he has the impression that Barry now intends to take up the torch of a heuristic of kinship derived from substance, while seeking to remedy the intrinsic weaknesses of Héritier’s work, which was received for years in polite silence by the anthropological community.14 (2009, 6) We can see how lively and tense the debates between concepts and field realities remain, and how substance is a fundamentally problematic concept, apparently more so in France than in Anglo-Saxon countries, as Carsten and Strathern’s readings suggest, and more so among Americanists than among other ethnologists.15 This confirms what was noted in the preamble, namely that the French anthropological tradition is caught up in a particular theoretical logic that gives primacy to the construction of models in which relationism predominates, whereas Anglo-Saxon countries more commonly practice ethnographic theory and therefore are less reluctant when it comes to the idea of substantive relations or relational substances that originate from the societies studied. This is why, in order to elucidate this situation, I will focus on relationist perspectives developed since the end of the 20th century in France, Brazil, and China, inscribed in or claiming to have a close or more distant connection to the French structuralist heritage. 4 The Real and Lived Experience as Issues of Deconstruction Anthropology is not only, as Strathern points out (1995; 2020), “entangled” in relations in the sense that the discipline studies these through the relations established between the ethnographer and his informants, but also, in mirror image of this, on the institutional level, in the divergences of point of view and heritage. On the one hand, we observe anthropological models that provide structures of thought set in highly generalising universal schema, and on the other hand, we find ethnographies, with all their variants, which nonetheless reveal logics of thinking from which anthropological theories

Introduction

17

can, albeit in a different way, be envisaged—thus making ethnography a theoretical issue but one that does not serve to validate existing theories. There is a tension between these two extremes. The theoretical modelling approach uses selective comparison to schematise and take into consideration the ethnographic data confirming its theses and it seeks above all to outline great universal systems. But starting from the ethnographic field, from its particularities, and letting oneself to be carried away by the elements collected in order to try to compare them is an approach that gives a lot of space to specificities, to variabilities and that also discards as far as possible one’s epistemic apparatus with a view to grasping the discourses and practices in a neutral way. It is then a question of accepting the logic of the other’s thinking while remaining the fruit of one’s own culture, an internal distortion immanent to the figure of the ethnologist. This analytical perspective does not mean confusing the relativisation of a theory with a naive relativism and it also implies resisting the great anthropological paradigms that, although essential in feeding the field of reflexivity, nevertheless reflect only selected and remodelled ethnographic realities. They are intellectual constructions among others, but undoubtedly the most artificial. There are certainly internal divisions within anthropology. Much ink has been spilled in this long-standing debate. Lévi-Strauss’ 1974–1975 seminar (Lévi-Strauss [1977] 2019) on the topic of identity had as its background theme the identity crisis that French anthropology was then undergoing. 1968 had left its mark and the structuralism of the 1970s was judged using the yardsticks of Marxism, Maoism, and the various revolutionary and anarchist currents that were grafting themselves onto the discipline. Facing the very strong criticism of his anthropological practice that was developed within the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (LAS) that he himself had founded in 1960, Lévi-Strauss wrote: A fashion […] reproaches anthropologists for melting cultures, which are radically different, into the mould of our categories and classifications, for sacrificing their distinctive originality and ineffable character by subjecting them to mental forms specific to an era and a civilization. ([1977] 2019, 10) It was during this period that Robert Jaulin instituted “The Ethnology of the Modern World,” privileging ethnographic experience over anthropological reality with a view to “deconstructing” the anthropology inherited from the French school in general and from Durkheim and then from Mauss in particular, in which latter approaches there is something that exists outside of the individual and these supra-individual facts are real and have their own existence.16 But what is this “real”? Let us recall what Lévi-Strauss wrote in Tristes Tropiques [Sad Tropics]: Phenomenology offended me insofar as it postulates a continuity between lived experience and the real. I agreed that the latter envelops

18

Introduction and explains the former. I had learned from my three teachers/mistresses [“maîtresses”: Marxism, psychoanalysis, geology] that the passage between the two orders is discontinuous; that in order to reach the real, one must first repudiate lived experience, even if it means reintegrating it later into an objective synthesis stripped of all sentimentality.17 (1955, 50)

The fundamental question, which is far from resolved, concerns the real and lived experience, the thing in itself and the manner of relating to it. It concerns relationism, in this case the constitutive relation of the subject to the object. Now, a re-evaluation of this relation must also be undertaken, as some anthropologists, including Descola and Viveiros de Castro, are trying to do today. As Descola points out, Lévi-Strauss’s distrust of ritual and of thought incorporated into action has left the new generation of Americanist researchers at a loss.18 The continuity/discontinuity between what LéviStrauss called the real and lived experience must be reinterrogated with a particular focus on the theme of the body. But why should this problematic only concern the nature-culture dualism? These anthropologists are Les enfants terribles of Lévi-Strauss, to use the title of Jean Cocteau’s novel. This work is an allegory of childhood, it is about a brother and a sister who develop their own reality in order to break with that of adults, especially that of their parents.19 These anthropologists are indeed Lévi-Strauss’ terrible children for they reinterpret relationism using the nature-culture dualism and some of them reintroduce philosophical questions into their theoretical practices.20 We are all enfants terribles, each in our own way, vis-à-vis our masters—and this not the very process of transmission?—by our favouring the emergence of a multifaceted anthropology that is strong precisely owing to the contributions of works in the last century and thus capable of questioning and deconstructing its practices. And this is undoubtedly because anthropology trains thinkers in the power of metamorphosis that the ethnographic approach implies and that they then integrate this into their analytic procedures. By putting the diverse foundations of anthropology and theoretical issues into perspective, we can question them with a view to reinventing them and to continuing our anthropological tradition, which presupposes ongoing transformation—for a principle of internal transformation is inherent to our discipline. To be an ethnologist is also (and this follows from one’s own ethnographic practice) to take an analytical view of what anthropologists themselves produce. Our concepts, our interpretations, our methods must be constantly subjected to critical deconstruction. Hence the major interconnection between ethnography and anthropology, hence the importance of highlighting singularities in order to enrich the debate and to raise questions in a different way. As Merleau-Ponty so rightly wrote in 1958 when he advocated the creation of a chair of anthropology for Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France:

Introduction

19

There is a second way to the universal: no longer the superordinate universal of a strictly objective method, but as a lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience, incessantly testing oneself by the other and the other by oneself. ([1958] 2008, 52) Rather than a dialectic that would refer to the result of an encounter between our (Euro-American) conceptuality and that of the other, MerleauPonty is referring here to a chiasmus, a theme dear to him and that seems to be promising not only in terms of decentring the way we look at the other—thus of giving a different account of the modes of being or thinking of non-European worlds—but also, and consequently, for analysis to go beyond the conceptual structures of European systems of thought. This “chiasmatisation” of thinking (of our thinking in relation to that of others) is in some respects reminiscent of Strathern’s idea of merographic thinking, according to which things considered as parts always relate to a whole (parts and wholes), which emphasis on merography is also apparent in her 1994 inaugural lecture at Cambridge (published in 1995).21 She claims our episteme is constantly fed by merographic connections, which generate new knowledge: [A]nything may be a part of something else, minimally part of a description in the act of describing it. In this view, nothing is in fact ever simply part of a whole because another view, another perspective or domain, may redescribe it as “part of something else.” When that something else is perceived as a context or underlying assumption, the very grounds on which things appear become another perspective upon them. (Strathern 1992, 73)

5 Ethnographic Deviation, Chinese Bifurcations, and Submutances Strathern brings a breath of fresh air to the discipline, firstly through her ethnography which revises certain androcentric anthropological assertions and substantiates relations, and secondly by integrating researchers and their ways of operating into her thinking while also on another level urging the abandonment of the idea of reconciling universal schemes and ethnographic specificities. In her view, it is not theories that should constitute the project of anthropology; rather, the idea of “bifurcation” is preponderant in her reflections and should prevail over what differentiates as such. Strathern herself has decentred two key concepts of anthropology to describe the aforementioned “Melanesian sociality” (Strathern 1988; 2005b) through her preference for the term “sociality” over that of “society” and for the dividual person over the “individual.” Her position should be understood in the light of her own experience as an ethnographer in Papua New Guinea. In analysing the local

20

Introduction

kinship system in the 1970s and 1980s, she was confronted with theoretical models derived from exogenous systems that proved difficult to apply to her field (Strathern 1994). The ethnographic encounter should make us aware that we are inscribed in a precise epistemological framework with a plethora of concepts and theories at our fingertips which do not necessarily respond to what we observe. Strathern liberates the voice of ethnographers by asserting that it is possible, even desirable, to seek new concepts on the basis of bifurcations—even if these do not come from a milieu that is subject to a regime of assiduous self-reflexivity, as is the case in the Euro-American worlds. The danger is that of associating concepts that do not belong to the same “ideational routes”. In light of his rich field experience among the Tupi of Amazonia, Viveiros de Castro expresses much the same view when he writes that ethnology is “knowledge not as appropriation but as dispossession” (2019, 41). He even uses the idea of bifurcation but without referring it to Strathern (ibid., 47) (perhaps because he borrows it from Whitehead?) in making philosophical and political application of his theoretical orientations. What remains to be questioned here and what runs counter to common sense—and therefore what we could call “ethnographic unreason”—is the master notion of anthropology: the relation, which, like other notions, cannot escape the tumult of conceptual splintering. The project of this book is thus to engage in a form of re-description (in Strathern’s sense) of the concepts of relation and substance: Not to redescribe relations and substances, but relation and substance as a whole, i.e., to ethno-anthropologise both of these notions and to do so with the help of Chinese ethnography. The analysis of the latter does not fit into theoretical models and even contradicts some of them. It is from out of the field that we can reflect on our own concepts, that is, from out of ethnography, which therefore implies a return to our disciplinary field and to epistemology (the backwash discussed in another book, see Névot 2023). In other words, the position taken here is deliberately resistant to certain analytical options and is so with a view, on the one hand, to giving a place, a voice, to the point of view of the other, whose practices are connected to substantial relations, and on the other hand, to extending anthropological concepts, rather than restricting them (Strathern 1987, 27). This does not mean rejecting the concepts of “relation” and “substance” but addressing their connection by questioning this European dualism from Chinese perspectives. My reflexive option is centred on the local points of view, which is to be generalised (and not by using a general anthropological model that is to be then enriched and consolidated by selected ethnographic examples). This project is far from that of an integration of criticisms from the 1970s “against structuralism” in order to promote unbridled relativism. On the contrary, it is a matter of testing our concepts and promoting anthropological bifurcations in order to get rid of certain pre-established schemas and

Introduction

21

to put “new” concepts into circulation. Of course, these latter make sense in a field and within the relations forged with a particular ethnographer in a specific field. But it is precisely in this confrontation with the field that we experience the conceptual limits of Western anthropology, limits that must be recognised in order to enrich the debate in turn by starting from this discrepancy (no matter how slight). This means considering the figure of otherness that is China as endowed with an endoconsistency and critical and heuristic value for us.22 Such an approach does not aim to promote the phantasmatic idea of a supposed Chinese exceptionalism, but to compare what ethnologists observe in different places in China with the most recent anthropological theories. I will refer in particular to de-substantiated relationism, in which substance is recognised without being fully considered in the analysis (Descola). But I will also address anti- or non-substantialist relationism, in which, even more radically, substances are disregarded (Viveiros de Castro) or put aside (Wang). Precisely by starting from the notions of relation and substance at the same time, I aim to bypass formal structuralist perspectives (Descola) in order to provide anthropology with decentred conceptions (Viveiros de Castro, Wang) from different Chinese ethnographic fields in which substance (which takes various forms) is the condition for the possibility of relating (which is in line with Ingold’s “living philosophy”). If I follow to a certain extent Viveiros de Castro’s political project of decentralising the anthropological reflection that is anchored in the European episteme, the aim here is to promote “the Chinese becoming of the concept of relation” in order to propose a new ligne de fuite (leakage path) that allows a re-evaluation of the materiality of relation from other conceptions of the body. At the same time, following Strathern’s lead, the idea is to decentralise the theoretical anthropology that is focused on the Amerindian world. In short, it is a matter of indicating a bifurcation. And the importance given to China in the constitution of anthropological theory should not be forgotten: Lévi-Strauss’ reflection on systems of kinship, which was to give the “la” to the whole structural enterprise of anthropology, originates in a reading of Granet.23 On this point, then, I am aligned with Viveiros de Castro’s perspective but I also take a radical distance from it as my aim is to reinvest “the body with organs,” that is to say, the body seen in its materiality that also concerns fluids. And although we are witnessing the “integration of the body and affects, of the sensitive body” into reflection, as Héritier rightly points out and she herself has suggested that sexual difference lies at the basis of symbolic and structural constructions (Héritier 2014, 353–354),24 this approach is part of a structural presupposition: The binary oppositions of the mind are carried (not to say conditioned) by their prior bodily inscription—and this would mean that structure is already in the body. I will later return to the “carnal experience” of the structural analysis that claims to be inspired by Merleau-Ponty (at least in Lévi-Strauss and Descola, see Chapter 2). However, such a binary perspective

22

Introduction

on the body is not universal. I emphasised above that the person is “dividual” in India as in Melanesia, a concept that could also be applied to China. Granet has shown that within this (other) immense cultural area, one can observe a correlative system involving congruences in motion and a metacosmology (this last term being from Vandermeersch) far more than oppositions in the binary mode that involve certain mental mechanics. But neither Lévi-Strauss nor his heirs ever paid full attention to this and instead gave preference to a specific, largely structuralist inspired, interpretation of Granet. More precisely, the present approach envisages a dialogue between theoretical perspectives and ancient China as well as with the ethnographies recently carried out in China. It aims at highlighting the rigidity of some generalisations that do not thematise substantial dynamic phenomena, which latter were ostracised in analytical thinking in favour of the concept of relation. This concept is voided of any reflection on the underlying matter and of any sense of the interiority of that which it grasps. This type of approach essentially promotes “external relations” and, to a lesser extent, “internal relations,” which, however, fail to fully consider interiority or “the consistency of the terms put in relation.”25 The hypothesis is that those logics of thought in which “substance” predominates in grasping relations are used above all within societies which maintain close contact with practices of interpreting cosmic signs. And precisely there metacosmology(ies) are not be confused with metaphysics, for it is not so much substances in the Aristotelian sense that are predominant, but rather essences in transformation and thus in incessant correlativity: submutances. By using this term, which is derived from sub (“that which underlies”) and does not come from a stare (from a standing, fixed, immobile “stance”) but from mutare (in movement, metamorphosis and difference) and where sub in this sense is in movement, metamorphosis, and inscribed in otherness, we free ourselves from all the equivocations of the term substance, which, as already emphasised, retains too many echoes of Aristotle’s ontology. The question of being is not universal but comes from the Greek worlds. Speaking of “submutance” avoids entering into this ontological sphere and enables putting forward the central theme of this approach: that which, by virtue of what it is, implies and supposes a movement and a metamorphosis; the subject is to be glimpsed as dynamically constituted, carried towards the object which is itself inscribed in this movement, thus at the same time becoming a subject. In his critique of Descola, Bruce Kapferer points to, but does not elaborate on, other forms of thinking that foreground “essences” rather than “being.” As noted earlier with respect to Marriott and Inden, many societies in India might be conceived as decentring human being conceiving it as a hypostasization of a fluid confluence of essences that in different combination link and differentiate a variety of forms of existence (see Marriott 1976). Interestingly, this is a perspective that some scholars

Introduction

23

across the disciplines (including anthropologists and physicists, for instance) conceive of as an implication now made theoretically explicit in the theoretical cosmology of contemporary quantum physics.26 (see, e. g., Handelman 2013; Bohm 1980). (Kapferer 2014, 396) Kapferer does not hesitate to point out that anthropologists in the Indian world and physicists specialising in the theoretical cosmology of quantum physics agree that essences link and differentiate a variety of forms of existence. He refers specifically to David Bohm’s famous book Wholeness and the implicate order (1980), where this physicist develops a theory of quantum physics that treats the totality of existence, including matter and consciousness, which he perceives as forming an unbroken whole. The human does not stand at the centre of the world’s representations there, but is part of a substantial whole. In the same way, the expression “submutance” translates the idea of a “de-anthropocentric” substance and makes it possible to simultaneously combine the concepts of relation and substance. It supports the idea that substance can be perceived as closely correlated with relation, inscribed in a relation, animating a relation. In other words, this is in no way a static conception but it is rather characterised by an opening onto a field of metamorphosis through the very setting in relation that it generates and thus implies an opening to the world through its own action. Following Strathern’s comments on Descombes’ theoretical proposals (Strathern 2020, 5–7, referring to Descombes (1996) 2004), who is the thinker of “structural holism,” we could say that this perspective is part of an old discussion regarding the distinction between the external (Locke) and internal (Leibniz) dimensions of the relation. In the latter relation has no impact on the entities put in relation. Contrary to this, in the former case it does influence on these entities because these latter become existent only through relation. In Les institutions du sens [The Institutions of Meaning] (1996), Descombes in fact distinguishes between two forms of relation. The external relation does not depend on the entities it links and it in turn cannot affect them. This type of relation is only possible through the intellectual activity of comparison, which links the entities (we find such a conception in Lévi-Strauss, Descola and Wang, for example, even if they do not employ the same concept of “relation,” as we will see). Conversely, an internal relation is constituted through the linked entities; which means the three are interrelated and interdependent. For Descombes, the internal relation cannot link individual entities but instead entities that are different parts of the same whole, that are relative existents, so to speak. (The perspectivism Viveiros de Castro puts forward could integrate this relationist scheme as could some Descolaian ontologies.) And the idea of submutance has the potential to extend this line of thought by refocusing the analysis on the substantially dynamic interiority of the entities in question. Do the latter only exist because there is a relation or is there relation only because the entities are inscribed in an interactive dynamic? The debate should probably not be

24

Introduction

treated in terms of such contraries, but in a far more genetic and “sui generically” unstable way, with a relation without a static starting point, composed and conceived on the basis of substances that are self-dynamising and that move indefinitely between subjects and objects (which can potentially be both at the same time). It is an approach that tends to go beyond the opposition of relation versus substance in that this conceptual scheme does not respond to the observed phenomena. Binary perceptions of the world are not universal. Ethnographic fields bring to the fore many chiasmatic systems of thought in which the human is not central.27 The aim here is to put Viveiros de Castro’s opening statement into perspective by drawing on what Vandermeersch says about China, where phenomena are represented from the outset as changing. The permanence of their substance is only relative to their transformations, whereas in Aristotle it is the changes that are relative to the permanence of substance. […] In Kantian language, in Chinese thought, correlativity, as one of the fundamental categories of the organization of experience by the understanding, plays the role that is that of causality in Western thought; what should be called “submutance” (yi
), the role that is that of substance in Western thought. (Vandermeersch 2013, 116–117) “Chinese thought”28 is characterised by correlativity (an idea that Vandermeersch takes from Needham and Granet) and not by analogism whose foundations are anchored in a form of primitive shamanism (ibid.), and which “grasps the nature of things not as sub-stantial, that is to say, as fundamentally stable, but as sub-mutational, that is to say, as fundamentally changing” (ibid., 111). To put it another way, in such a context, opposing substantialism to relationism is inconceivable as the sub implies a mutation, a becoming other by being itself. It is a matter of combinations, of successions of phases, of potentialities. What is now commonly called the “five agents” (wuxing ) and no longer the “five elements” (which implies stasis), namely wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, are not in fact substances but matters in motion (xing meaning “to walk,” “to go,” “to move”). They are “the fundamental forms of the dynamics of the movements and changes incessantly affecting all the beings of the universe” (ibid.).29 The body and the universe are in constant correspondence with these agents, with the breaths, with the various moving substances of the cosmos—with the exhalations and emanations of heaven and earth mentioned above. We can ask whether this idea of submutance, or submutantialism, might not fall between, on the one hand, the Greek philosophical models of change which see it as accidental with respect to substance and, on the other, the far more recent process philosophy (I will come back to this when I discuss Whitehead, Bergson and Deleuze), which, as fundamentally antisubstantialist, considers change as inherent and primordial to reality. Being,

Introduction

25

emptied of all substance, is then thought of as becoming and no longer as static—and Viveiros de Castro takes up this conceptuality and rejects static substance. It would not be possible within the framework of this work alone to provide an inventory of all the data that would fit into this submutantial scheme that associates the dynamics of being (hence in becoming) and driven by/with its substance, its consistency, its proper matter. In this first reflexive phase, which is to some extent programmatic, I will limit myself to (a few parts of) China, which acts as a kind of paradigm that can allow further exploration of the possibility of thinking about “relation” outside the EuroAmerican scheme inherited from the Enlightenment. And this possibility becomes manifest through pure contingency, i.e., through the relation I, as an ethnographer, established with a particular terrain that allows the decentring of this major anthropological concept, i.e., for re-substantiating it without de-relating it. An anthropological dissidence can be constituted from the Chinese worlds that foster an intellectual subversion of all the bifurcations that this pluricultural area places on our path: non-ontology, submutantial writing and the not logos as a paradigm, the conceptuality of change, the indivisibility of body and mind, the trans-passibility of all things caught up in the same universe that is made up of fluxes, essences, substances, all of which are in movement. Thus, it seems that sinology opens up important critical perspectives for the contemporary debate on anthropology in general and for the breaking down of certain epistemic barricades. The ethnology of China is therefore likely to permit certain reconfigurations and deconstructions in order to approach the Kantian relationist perspective differently, a perspective that anthropologists are heir to. This does not mean considering the Chinese area as an otherness, as some presuppose, but rather including it fully in a debate beyond its borders: [L]et us start with the unity of human experience and try to understand from there the Chinese reality we are studying and to give an account of it in the most direct way possible. We will then simultaneously highlight what the Chinese experience and our own have in common and where they differ. When one posits the difference a priori, one loses sight of the common ground. When we start from this common background, the differences appear by themselves. (Billeter 2007, 82) This starting point for reflection and discussion, which is not intended to establish a fixed framework (thus echoing the subject matter itself), will consist of three parts, each composed of two chapters. The discussion will begin by addressing theoretical anthropology with regard to philosophy. The first chapter, will initiate the reflection through an epistemological and philosophical detour that is essential both to providing a historical contextualising of the debate and to grasping the stakes of the

26

Introduction

relevant theoretical positions as well as the misunderstandings that these generate. I will thus inquire into the foundations of the substance-relation conceptual couple by returning to the Greek origins of substantialist and relationist thought so as to then look at different philosophical approaches (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) that led to the Kantian break. The latter marks a reversal in the apprehension of substance. It is from then on seen as a sub-category of relation, a position that is still prevalent in the social sciences today. The discussion of a-substantialism that goes together with a relationist emphasis that marked the turn of the 20th century especially will enable us to create a link between this and the foundations of Saussurean and subsequently Lévi-Straussian structuralisms. For this was characteristic of an era that attempted to apprehend a “savage mind” based on Goethe and D’Arcy Wentworth Thomson, which founded the cognitivist impulses of anthropology.30 Structuralism, which is relationist, will then be brought into dialogue with phenomenology. The second chapter will highlight the links between anthropology and philosophy as well as the philosophical choices underlying the highly conceptual direction French structural anthropology took that put it at a remove from both experience and action. This then encouraged the post-structuralists to renew their ties with these neglected phenomena. Lévi-Strauss, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty will form the backdrop of the discussions of that chapter, which will also introduce the problematic of the sensible and meaning. It will accord a place to Cassirer, whose influence can be felt despite his having been irremediably silenced in structural anthropology. In a second reflexive phase, I shall then provide an analysis of some elements of the well-established positioning in favour of relationism to the detriment of substantialism in structuralist-influenced theoretical anthropology. I will successively put into perspective two different orientations, not to mention their being opposed in their methods and the theoretical projects aimed at. These were previously introduced at the end of the second chapter. The third chapter will be specifically devoted to Descola. His phenomenological and transcendental approaches are based on a body-intentionality (interiority-exteriority) dualism that is conceived from a psycho-cognitivist hermeneutics perspective. The fourth chapter will focus on Viveros de Castro, a Deleuzian who claims to promote “indigenous metaphysics” and the concept of “becoming” based on the body-sign linked to habitus insofar as this determines ways of being and of seeing. I will address Descola’s hermeneutic ambition and the conceptual couple relation-substance that he, like Viveiros de Castro, does not discuss, as he takes it as a given that relationism predominates over substance in the theoretical and analytical field. I will discuss in particular his analogist perception of China by drawing upon ancient and contemporary data from the Chinese intellectual and literate milieu as well as from local practices. In this way, I will introduce the notion of submutance with particular reference to Daoist cults, a concept that elucidates “the absolute priority of the human body” (Schipper [1982] 1997,

Introduction

27

141). On another level, we will see that while Descola shatters the natureculture dualism and establishes other forms of relations between humans and their environment, this binomial remains central although re-elaborated in the anthropology promoted by Viveiros de Castro. Within the framework of his multi-naturalism based on Self-Other relations, I will propose a rereading of Tupi cannibalism in the light of the ingested flesh that the Brazilian anthropologist does not consider at all. Despite their very different styles, these two anthropologists initiate a decentring movement that is of great significance for theoretical anthropology. With this path having been opened, we can also slip into it via another route in order to create a distance from our usual use of concepts and to strip away yet more of our structural-Kantian heritage. The third part of this book will accordingly be devoted to Chinese perspectives. The fifth chapter will return to Bhargava’s proposal concerning the conceptual decentring that needs to be carried out on the basis of critical traditions outside the orbit of the Enlightenment. “Chinese anthropology,” that is, anthropological theory as it is read and heard in China today, will be at the heart of this reflection. This Chinese aspect of theoretical anthropology is far from neutral and a key concern here is ethnographing its concepts in the same way as those of Euro-American anthropology. After a preliminary contextualisation, which is also indispensable to grasping the ins and outs of what we observe, I will focus on Wang Mingming who promotes the concept of “civilisation” by linking it to “relationist ethnology.” The body, linked to habitus in Viveiros de Castro’s anthropology, is neglected in this “new Chinese anthropology” in favour of “relation” as rooted in Chinese habitus. This relationism is not philosophical but is instead based on Chinese sociology and refers in particular to the concept of guanxi. And because the notion of relationship/relatedness prevails over “relation,” a term used with a degree of confusion in Western anthropology, substance is totally erased from the discussion while the notion of habitus remains central. The focus is thus diverted from the body to the relation(ship), while Self and Other remain at stake (as they do for Viveiros de Castro as well). Wang takes a more global and historical-sociological approach based on his theory of the “three circles.” He thereby intends to get rid of EuroAmerican centrism by revalorising Chinese concepts in order to apply them to the whole world by means of a relationist and civilisational cosmology. In discussing his implementation of this reversal of conceptual authority, I will question the ideological foundations of such an intellectual enterprise, which has strong neo-Confucian overtones. Today, as in the past, Chinese ethnology seems to be built on cosmopolitical foundations, which now concern not only China but the entire world. In this sense, anthropology would be a disciplinary tool at the service of Chinese expansionism, whose colonising impulses extend beyond the Asian continent. Finally, the sixth chapter will accent not Chinese state ideology and official discourse but shamanisms. Unlike the Greek worlds, which were

28

Introduction

committed to a theology, the Chinese worlds continue to “shamanise,” a practice that has a very specific orientation towards the relation established between the visible and the invisible as expressed in the intellectual and religious fields.31 This point was already stressed in Chapter 3 with reference to Daoist perspectives in order to address the Descolian analogism. But this chapter will focus on shamanisms anchored in the southwest of China, on the high plateaus of Yunnan.32 I will present an analysis of data I collected from the shamans of the Nip’a called bimo,33 and then compare them with data coming from other Yunnanese shamans for whom bodies and submutances are also central: the pemo of the Nasu and the bimox of the Nuosu. More specifically, I aim to question relationism as it is envisioned in this diffuse and plural cultural area, constituted on the basis of multiple influences, and where we can observe different shamanic writings that are submutances connected with the submutances of the plant, animal, human, and divine worlds. Shamanic bodies and movements, as well as metacosmologies in relation to submutantialisms will thus be at the heart of this reflection. The presentation of ethnographic analyses will highlight, by drawing on discourses, texts, writings, and practices, the inscription of the thinking of submutance in the current Chinese worlds regarding certain regional and ethnic particularities. This anthropological perspective will free the body from the European epistemic burden and will enable the establishment of a point of retreat (a “bifurcation”) or even the drawing of a new ligne de fuite (leakage path) not only in regard to relationist anthropological theories but also to writing and shamanism theories, in order to give voice to other thoughts that are likely to question our concepts and to challenge our theoretical propositions. Notes 1 This expression is often used in Viveiros de Castro’s work, which aims to “undermine the Kantian, Cartesian and Platonic foundations of anthropology,” see Disputatio (2009). I will return to this point. 2 See the heading of this introduction. I take up here the question raised by Viveiros de Castro (2019, 42), which relates it to the reading of Pignarre and Stengers (2003, 89), who evoke the interrogative “until where” posed by Clastres. 3 “Tradition” is not to be seen in relation to a supposed statis but in relation to changes: “Just as one must have known in order to be able to forget, or as there is no transgression without prohibition, traditionality is a condition of change” ( Lenclud 1987, 123). “Chinese tradition” is an expression that is commonly used in the singular for ease of use, although this is not justified. While there is undoubtedly a cultural background common to various Chinese populations that have influenced each other for centuries, Chinese traditions are multiple (as are Greek or European ones). “China” is characterised by a great linguistic, scriptural, religious heterogeneity. 4 The notion of the gap refers to François Jullien (2012) who connects it with the notion of “in-between.” I also borrow from Etienne Klein (2018) the idea of referring to Braque, taking care, however, to quote more extensively the passage in question, which says much more than the famous quote “What is between the

Introduction

5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14

29

apple and the plate is also painted,” as the point here is precisely to emphasise the ignored—erased—in-between. In Relations, Strathern brings together texts she has previously published on the theme of relation. She opens this book with these words: “Relations are ubiquitous in the account people give of their world, and no less so in the observations or theories by which any kind of knowledge is made. Indeed, attempts to address the relation as a concept get quickly lost in the diffuseness of this highly abstract term” (2020, 1). To speak of a “scientific revolution” is to express a Euro-American-centric viewpoint. Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams promote the de-centring of the history of science: “One way of seeing the necessity for such a de-centring is to look at a map of the world, preferably in the Peters projection, and consider that almost all the material with which the History of Science discipline has been concerned comes from a tiny geographical area, about the same size as Zaire or the Sudan, and considerably smaller than Brazil” ( 1993, 431). For a reminder of the different uses of the word relation in the social sciences, see Piette (2014a, 8–20). The author distinguishes between endo-relations and exorelations. See also Piette (2014b). For a more recent approach that refers to the complexity of the term “essence” or “substance”, see Courtine (2019, 400–414), Balibar, Cassin and De Libéra (2019, 1233–1253). I will discuss the notion of ousia in more detail in Chapter 1. I will develop this point in Chapter 1. “The concept of ‘substance’, which is itself linked to that of the biological rooting of the human being, if it is frequent and above all recurrent from one end of the globe to the other—the whole of comparative ethnography worldwide would have to be rejected in order not to recognize the importance of this theme—is, for me, only one of the many metaphorical supports that express the effectiveness and performativity of these sexual roles (dynamics that I designate under the expression of ‘kinship principles’) and thus their capacity to constitute ‘lumps’ of identities that I call ‘kinship groups’” ( Barry 2009, 291). I will not elaborate on the controversy concerning these perspectives on kinship, which are not part of my field of expertise. However, I will come back to them later, not to go into the issue in depth, but to emphasise that dealing with substances in the field of kinship remains problematic for some, especially for Americanists of structuralist heritage who radically reject this notion. On the distinction between dividual and individual, see above. I also take the terms West and Western from Carsten. Clastres’ work “consists, above all, of an intervention in the field of Amerindian social anthropology, an intervention that came to fertilise Western philosophy with the contribution of the thought of savages, opening up the possibility of an authentic Indian becoming of the concept” ( Viveiros de Castro 2019, 67). I repeat here the comments made by Viveiros de Castro and Descola during the Disputatio organised by Patrice Maniglier on 30 January 2009, see Disputatio (2009). I refer to Barry’s scathing reply, mentioned above (see Barry 2009), whose analyses cannot be reduced to such a substantialist orientation. It should be noted that Barry, who takes substance in a biological sense and considers it to be part of a metaphorical vision of kinship among others, is a bit too quick in dismissing substances from the debate on Chinese kinship. Moreover, referring substance to biological schemes needs also to be put into perspective: It can also refer to the cosmos in China and therefore need not be seen as anthropocentric and only focused on the human body. Finally, let us recall that Désveaux, a structuralist, is the author of La parole et la substance. Anthropologie comparée de l’Amérique et

30

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

Introduction de l’Europe [The word and the substance. Comparative Anthropology of America and Europe] ( 2017), a work in which he seeks to show that “America is under the total sway of language” (ibid., 164) while Europe is under the sway of substance (in the sense of matter implying dualities such as matter-spirit). For him, any substantial reflection is thus reducible to Europe and cannot concern America. Moreover, he does not discuss the relationist foundations of anthropology with regard to substantialism. The question that will arise later, when discussing Viveiros de Castro’s antisubstantialism, concerns substance among the Amerindians. Are the latter exceptional in that they disregard any idea of substances, i.e., humours, essences, exhalations, etc.? Or is this dismissal of Amerindian substance not rather the result of the structuralist heritage perpetuated by Amerindianists? For Mauss, the symbolic is real and the real is symbolic, see Tarot (1999). Chapter 2 deals in more detail with this misunderstanding of Husserl’s neutralisation of experience. See Disputatio (2009). I will return to this in Chapter 2. I owe the idea of referring to Cocteau to Jean-Clet Martin (2016), who was interested in Deleuze’s “enfants terribles.” Descola comments that “between the brilliant intuitions of Lévi-Strauss and the very down-to-earth monographs, there was nothing and we therefore had to build something,” see Disputatio (2009). I also refer to the citation at the opening of this chapter, taken from Signs, where Merleau-Ponty evokes the dynamics and creativity of the chiasmatic intellectual process in a manner quite similar to Strathern’s merography. I take these last words from Viveiros de Castro (2019, 46). Granet’s work has an important place in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté [The Elementary Structures of Kinship]. On the subject, see Goudineau (2014). Wang Mingming furthermore rightly points out that “Granet had an important impact on Mauss and Lévi-Strauss. In the early 1930s, he added a third dimension, that of hierarchy as seen from ancient China, to the theory of left and right hand debated in anthropological discourse. Mauss was deeply absorbed by it. Later, Lévi-Strauss was able to derive from Granet’s study of Chinese civilization an important element of his elementary structures of kinship. He acknowledged the influence of Granet, but Granet has been forgotten. It seems that people rarely consider the potential contribution of Chinese anthropology to world anthropology. What explains this is perhaps simple: China has been perceived as too special a case in anthropology by sinological anthropologists, who paradoxically have mostly studied China by means of non-China regional paradigms (but not the reverse)” (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands 2010, 911–912). Héritier specifically quotes Freud ([1932] 1976), according to whom the “Man of the origins was forced to understand the external world with the help of his own bodily sensations” (2014, 366). “These structural necessities do not depend, as Claude Lévi-Strauss postulated some thirty years ago, on a pre-ordered cerebral wiring, common from birth to every human being, which would impose a binary system of cerebral recording of data, a hypothesis that makes it possible to explain the universal existence of the dualistic categories that we use to think. But we now know that the baby’s brain is not like a fully functional computer. In fact, it is in the opposite direction that things have probably happened for the genus Homo in general and for every human being in particular. It is from the same hard base of common vital experience: the sensitive body and the way it receives impressions and is manipulated, that the wiring between neurons and synapses is gradually created, inducing in the individual both emotional and social responses. This is how the body and the emotions act in the symbolic construction of

Introduction

25

26

27

28

29 30 31

31

reality” ( Héritier 2006, 39). These remarks are reminiscent of the Cassirer’s perspective, which will be discussed in relation to structuralism in Chapter 2. I am taking up the words of Alain Caillé and Philippe Chanial: “It will not be a question here of praising relationism without remains. For there are remains. By privileging the relation, the ‘between’ in this way, are we not neglecting—to the point of denying them all existence—the consistency of the terms placed in relation? Are they, or should they be considered as mere effects of relations? After all, is not contemporary deconstructionism, with all its problematic implications, also a relationism? A radical relationism? The question then is to know how far to follow, in the name of relationism, this propensity of contemporary thought to dissolve all substantiality—of things, of collectives or of subjects—in pure relationality. How to make right, on the contrary, to singularity (to selfconsciousness, to interiority) and to the thickness of persons, institutions, and symbolic structures?” ( 2016, 8). See what Don Handelman writes in One god, two goddesses, three studies of cosmology (2013, 48) about the three essences common to all beings, whether human or gods, which are in permanent interaction and determine, according to their equilibrium, the condition or character of the being. Following on from Strathern’s and then Bonnemère’s reflections on the Melanesian genre, we can quote Handelman: “Discussions of the metaphysics of the Indian genre should recognize first and foremost the premises of lability, fluidity, and processuality that permeate Indian cosmological imaginings […]. Hindu cosmology is organized by transformations that are continuous and fluid, not by discrete and sharp separations that resemble, for example, binary oppositions” (2013, 101). Viveiros de Castro notes in this regard: “The burgeoning critical industry that broaches the Westernizing character of all dualism has argued for the abandonment of our dichotomous conceptual heritage. But so far, the alternatives amount to somewhat vague ‘post-binary’ desiderata” ( [1996] 1998, 431). However, if it is appropriate to take the thought of the other seriously, and not only that of the Amerindian “other,” it turns out that this binary mode of thought is not universal. If for Viveiros de Castro, a kind of dualistic agreement is conceivable between Amerindian thought and Western conceptuality (nature-culture, relation-substance), this proximity cannot ipso facto be generalised to all thoughts. In China, “changes prevail where the two opposites […] are never antithetical but complementary and can mutually generate each other in a world conceived as a great resonance chamber” ( Arrault 2001, 88–89). An expression about which Gernet quite rightly writes: “Within the same civilization, neither the environments nor the periods can be confused, and it is as absurd to speak of ‘Chinese thought’ in general as a whole as it would be to treat ‘Western thought’ in the same way. One can therefore say nothing in such a field that is only provisional and incomplete, limited by personal knowledge that is always very partial” ( 1994, 323). In the same way, it is out of the question here to think of this “Chinese thought” as the reverse of our own (European, also plural), which is only a “myth” to use Jean-François Billeter’s expression, dating back to 18th century France ( Billeter 2007, 11). Anne Cheng (2007) also invites us to put an end to this essentialist point of view on China, to this myth of otherness. Vandermeersch specifies that in its original sense, wuxing means “way of walking” and by extension “way of acting,” specifying that this translation should be read as “in the manner of water, fire, wood, metal, earth” (2013, 111). See Lévi-Strauss (1962) and on The Savage Mind, see Keck (2004). “The function of the shaman has been statized, which has made the shaman a sort of state cleric, prefiguring, from Chinese protohistory, what the scholar would be in imperial China” ( Vandermeersch 2013, 15). In Chinese, the word “scholar” is

32

Introduction

written with a character that etymologically refers to the “rainmaker,” in other words to a shamanic dance to make the rain fall (ibid., 15 note 1). 32 This chapter is the result of the fusion of recent reflections detailed in Névot ( 2019, 2021 and 2022). I here make a revised translation of the article I published in 2021 in Cahiers d’Extrême Asie, while refocusing on the submutantial theme. 33 Nip’a are the Ni people. In Chinese, they are officially called the Sani branch of the Yi nationality. I will not take into consideration the changes made by the Chinese state in order to transform this lineage shamanic tradition into a state shamanic tradition and that also made the bimo writings into a script taught in school that transcribes the five-tone language of the Nip’a. On this subject, see Névot (2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2019).

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Keck F. (2004) Lévi-Strauss et la pensée sauvage [Lévi-Strauss and the Savage Mind]. Paris: PUF. Klein E. (2018). L’entre-détour. In Bougnoux D. and L’Yvonnet F. (eds.), François Jullien. Cahier de L’Herne. Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 139–143. Lenclud G. (1987) La tradition n’est plus ce qu’elle était … Sur les notions de tradition et de société traditionnelle en ethnologie [Tradition is not what it used to be … On the notions of tradition and traditional society in ethnology]. Terrain. Anthropologie et sciences humaines 9: 110–123. Lévi-Strauss C. (1955) Tristes tropiques [Sad Tropics]. Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss C. (1962) La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]. Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss C. [1977] (2019) L’identité, séminaire dirigé par Claude Lévi-Strauss, professeur au Collège de France [Identity, seminar directed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, professor at the Collège de France]. Paris: Quadrille PUF (First edition Grasset et Fasquelle, 1977). Mansion S. (1946) La première doctrine de la substance: la substance selon Aristote [The first doctrine of substance: substance according to Aristotle]. Revue Philosophique de Louvain 44 (3): 349–369. DOI: 10.3406/phlou.1946.4064. Marriott M. (1976) Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism. In Kapferer B. (ed.), Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 109–142. Marriott M. and Inden R. (1973) Towards an ethnosociology of Hindu caste systems. 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Chicago: Paper n°2206. Martin J. C. (2016) Le siècle deleuzien [The Deleuzian century]. Paris: Editions Kimé. Merleau-Ponty M. (1960) Signes [Signs]. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty M. [1958] (2008) Rapport de Maurice Merleau-Ponty pour la création d’une chaire d’Anthropologie sociale [Report by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for the creation of a Chair of Social Anthropology]. La lettre du Collège de France, Hors-série 2. DOI: 10.4000/lettre-cdf.229. Névot A. (2008a) Comme le sel, je suis le cours de l’eau. Le chamanisme à écriture des Yi du Yunnan (Chine) [Like salt, I follow the course of water. Scriptural Shamanism of the Yi in Yunnan (China)]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Névot A. (2008b) Une écriture chamanique bonne pour gouverner. Du processus de nationalisation des caractères d’écriture ni en caractères d’écriture yi [A shamanic script good for governing. On the process of nationalising Ni script characters into Yi script characters]. In Baptandier B. and Charuty G. (eds.), Du corps au texte. Approches comparatives [From body to text. Comparative approachs]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 293–323. Névot A. (2009) Chamanes et intellectuels d’État: les transcriptions de la mémoire écrite des Nipa (Yunnan/China) [Shamans and State Intellectuals: Transcriptions of the Written Memory of the Nipa (Yunnan/China)]. In Krauskopff G. (ed.), Politique de l’origine et écrits sur le passé [Politics of origin and writing about the past]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 217–246. Névot A. (2011) Une écriture secrète sur la scène publique en Chine [Secret writing on the public stage in China]. Revue de l’histoire des religions 228 (2): 227–243. Névot A. (2012) Literate Shamanism in Southwestern China: Bimo Religion, the State and Christianity. SHAMAN: International Journal of Shamanistic Research 20 (1): 23–54.

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Part I

Historiographical Overview

1

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives From Aristotle to Cognitivism via Lévi-Strauss

I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and even if it is not in my power, that is, resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree. René Descartes (First Meditation 1641,
10, 12, [1986] 1996, 15)

Since its genesis, (European) philosophy has been marked by a closely established connection between substance and relation. This conceptual pairing does not presuppose that these two concepts exclude each other, but rather their constant connection. Thus, in ancient Greece, Aristotle considered relation to be an “accident” of the substance. For two thousand years, the predominance of the latter over the former remained undisputed in philosophical debates, although it was of course conceived in different ways depending on the contexts of the thinkers. Kant brought about a reversal in perspective: In his work relation is no longer seen as one of the accidents of substance but substance becomes a subcategory of relation. This paradigmatic shift, which originated with the philosophy of the Enlightenment, wove the fabric that forms anthropology right down to the present day. Indeed, the “ontological” question, as it is currently developed within this discipline, is essentially based on the Kantian reflections (although Kant refrained from founding an ontology) that made relation predominant in understanding the world. Two key moments will therefore be highlighted in the following: Aristotle and then Kant, with some background information concerning Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, which last was among those who initiated the relationist turn in philosophy. In the third section, I will pay particular attention to some DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-3

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neo-Kantian philosophical (and essentially anti-substantialist) theories that strongly influenced the anthropological perspectives developed by Lévi-Strauss from the 1940s onwards. Structuralist relationism will be the focus of a fourth and final part. It will discuss the question of the unconscious as it is treated in anthropology, and then, as Lévi-Strauss had opened the way to a naturalist (biomathematical) approach of the discipline, cognitivism. Providing a complete history of ontological questioning would obviously be an insurmountable challenge. It would also go far beyond the scope of this chapter, whose sole ambition is to concentrate on key moments where the link between relation and substance played a crucial role for certain Western thinkers. In doing so, I am fully aware that I will be considerably simplifying complex ideas, which must be read in the light of the “symbolic institutions” (Richir 1988) in which they originated, and which in any case evade precise determination by virtue of being singular thoughts. It is therefore with a certain degree of freedom that I draw a panoramic picture of some philosophical and anthropological orientations. I do not intend to take on the role of historian but instead to point out elements that will help us to better understand the current anthropological debate, which is my main focus. 1.1

Going Back to the Sources of Relationism: Being and Substance

As is well known, the notion of substance is first found in Aristotle and it stands at the centre of his ontology, which deals with “being as being.” The entire history of philosophy has been punctuated by considerations concerning being (to on in Greek) and its properties, concerning what constitutes the meaning and the foundation of all that is. The word “ontology” has in fact assumed different meanings over the centuries. The introduction to this book noted that Aristotle changed the Platonic understanding of ousia. In the Metaphysics (Book F, chap. 2.), he explains that “this unique nature to which all modes of being relate is none other than substance” (Mansion 1946, 354). There are four meanings of being: being as what characterises an object (i.e., what is accidentally appropriate to an object), being as what an object is in itself (the idea that it has this or that nature), being as meaning “true,” and finally being can also be said of what is potentially and actually (ibid.).1 In what follows, I will consider only the first two meanings, which are those most immediately relevant to the aims of the present study. For the Stagirite, the being of every being “has several meanings” (Aristotle Metaphysics, Book X,
1), i.e., it is conceived using different “categories”: substance, quantity, quality, relation to something (the relation/relative),2 place, time, position, having, doing, undergoing (Aristotle The categories/On interpretation [1938] 1962, 9–11). Substance is the most important of these categories:

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 41 […] in one sense the “being” meant is “what a thing is” or a “this,” and in another sense it means a quality or quantity or one of the other things that are predicated as these are. While “being” has all these senses, obviously that which “is” primarily is the “what,” which indicates the substance of the thing. For when we say of what quality a thing is, we say that it is good or bad, not that it is three cubits long or that it is a man; but when we say what it is, we do not say “white” or “hot” or “three cubits long,” but “a man” or “a god.” And all other things are said to be because they are, some of them, quantities of that which is in this primary sense, others qualities of it, others affections of it, and others some other determination of it. […] And so one might even raise the question whether the words “to walk,” “to be healthy,” “to sit” imply that each of these things is existent, and similarly in any other case of this sort; for none of them is either selfsubsistent or capable of being separated from substance, but rather, if anything, it is that which walks or sits or is healthy that is an existent thing. Now these are seen to be more real because there is something definite which underlies them (i.e., the substance or individual), which is implied in such a predicate; for we never use the word “good” or “sitting” without implying this. Clearly then it is in virtue of this category that each of the others also is. Therefore that which is primarily, i.e. not in a qualified sense but without qualification, must be substance. (Metaphysics, book 7,
1, 2008) Substance is therefore the first category of what an object is in itself: Substance, he [Aristotle] says, is that which cannot be said of another subject, but to which all predicates refer. It is the ultimate subject, capable of receiving attributes, but which cannot be affirmed by anything else […]. This is the common definition of substance. In contrast, everything that does not fulfil this definition, everything that is attributed to another subject, is an accident […]. The other categories: quality, quantity, relation, action, passion, etc., therefore deserve the name of accidents. (Mansion 1946, 355) To use Mansion’s terms, we must grasp Aristotle’s concept of substance as the “final subject of attribution” (ibid., 361–362): a being subsistent in itself, separate, and determined. Substance is thus the essence of a thing: “Aristotelian substance is a subsistent, determinate being, the substratum of non-substantial modes of being, the accidents” (ibid., 355). The predominant idea is that of an ontological substratum endowed with a number of attributes—the other “categories” mentioned above. Aristotle states regarding relation: Terms of this kind are said to be relative to something: all those which are said to be that which they are “…of something else,” or which refer in

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Historiographical Overview some other way to something else. […] And all relative terms are said in relation to terms that have a reciprocal relation to them. (Aristotle Categories 2007, 143–145)

Relation is in fact a property of substance, and not the reverse. In this perspective, being, prior to its being relation, is substance, and relation is “predicated” of the latter: “All these are called substance because they are not predicated of a subject but everything else is predicated of them” (Metaphysics, book V,
8, 2008). However, substance is itself “predicated of matter” (ibid., book VII,
3). Aristotle calls matter “that which in itself is neither a particular thing nor of a certain quantity nor assigned to any other of the categories by which being is determined. For there is something of which each of these is predicated, whose being is different from that of each of the predicates (for the predicates other than substance are predicated of substance, while substance is predicated of matter)” (ibid.). Substance remains central to philosophical reflections in the time between the Copernican revolution and Kant—who marks a break in this tradition. While Locke (1997) points out that we have only an obscure idea of what substance could be, specifying that we cannot conclude that it does not exist, Descartes places it at the centre of his metaphysics. As Karol Tarnowski puts it, “[s]ubstance constitutes for him the synonym of the real and of what is ‘really’; it thus plays […] the role of the most general and universal metaphysical and ontological category” (2017, 205). Descartes here echoes the primordial philosophical problem which was mentioned in the introduction, namely the relation between the real and lived experience, that is, between general ideas (in the Platonist sense of ideality) and its individual apprehension. Now Descartes places substance at the heart of this relation between the ideal and the real. In continuity with the Aristotelian tradition, but without speaking of a category, he defines it more precisely as follows: When we conceive of substance, we conceive only of a thing which exists in such a way that it needs only itself to exist. In which there may be some obscurity concerning the explanation of this word, needing only itself; for, strictly speaking, there is only God who is such, and there is no created thing that can exist for a single moment without being sustained and preserved by His power. Therefore it is right in the School to say that the name substance is not univocal with respect to God and creatures, that is to say, that there is no meaning of this word which we distinctly conceive, which is suitable for Him and them; but because some of the created things are of such a nature that they cannot exist without some others, we distinguish them from those which need only the ordinary assistance of God, by calling these substances, and those qualities or attributes of these substances. […] And the notion that we thus have of created substance refers in the same way to all of them, that is, to those that are immaterial as well as to those that are material or

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 43 corporeal; for it is only necessary, in order to understand that they are substances, that we perceive that they can exist without the aid of any created thing. ([1644] 1989, 122) For Descartes, God is a substance which, moreover, is entirely selfsufficient. Here we see the theological weight ascribed to substance, which remains autonomous in the pre-Christian sense given to it by Aristotle, while at the same time fitting into a metaphysical logic inherited from Christianity. More precisely, Descartes makes a distinction between non-extended thinking substance (the mind/spirit) and extended substance (matter/body), which are indistinctly created by God; the self-sufficiency of Cartesian substances is only subject to one condition, their dependence upon God, i.e., they are absolutely independent except for the fact the ultimately depend on God. If, for Aristotle, substance is one of the categories of being, and if Descartes establishes a substance dualism dependent on God, Spinoza gives God an even more prominent place in that he is the only substance: “the nature naturing” (natura naturans) (Feldman 1992, 11). He writes in the first part of the Ethics entitled “Of God”: “Proposition 14. There can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God” (Spinoza [1677] 1992, 39), “Proposition 20. God’s existence and his essence are one and the same” (ibid., 46). Being is thus substance itself: “nature natured” (natura naturata). In other words, the beings are modes of substance (God). Spinoza expresses himself on the question, again in the Ethics: 3. By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed. 4. By attribute I mean that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence. 5. By mode I mean the affections of a substance; that is, that which is in something else and is conceived through something else. VI. By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence. (ibid., 31) He adds further: Proposition 15. Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God. Proof: Apart from God no substance can be or be conceived (Prop. 14), that is. (Def. 3) something which is in itself and is conceived through itself. Now modes (Def. 5) cannot be or be conceived without substance; therefore they can be only in the divine nature and can be conceived only through the divine nature. But nothing exists except substance and modes (Ax. 1). Therefore nothing can be or be conceived without God. (ibid., 40)

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We find in Leibniz much the same preoccupation with reality and experience (and the question of truth in particular) as well as the idea of the selfsufficiency of substance. However, Leibniz already anticipates relationism as Kant will understand it for the monads or “simple substances” refer to a relation to the world: Monads, or simple substances, are the only true substances and […] material things are only phenomena, but well founded and well connected. (Leibniz 1900a, 34) In general, Leibniz considers that there is always a particular disposition to action, and to one action rather than the other. And, besides the disposition, there is a tendency to action, of which even there is always an infinity at once in every subject: and these tendencies are never without some effect. (Leibniz 1900b, 75) All being is thus animated by a sui generis and potential force, a “conatus.” Substance is therefore not inert or static in the Aristotelian sense (who thought that everything is moved by something else as relation is a property of substance). On the contrary, in Leibniz, substance is action and turned towards action (and therefore it moves by itself). It becomes dynamic and enters into movement, independently of any external action, because it is closed and without windows (Piat 1900, 8). But a monad cannot enter into a dynamic relation with another monad. Each monad is independent and has its own point of view and its own internal dynamic, while standing in a pre-established harmony, established by God, with the others. If, as Piat stressed, “Leibniz’s philosophy is thus a return ‘to the substantial forms, so decried’” (ibid., 12), it has very specific implications regarding relationism. The monads are not material but metaphysical points, inseparable elements that can only be grasped by thought. They do not communicate with each other nor influence each other but are effectively conatus, that is to say, impulses towards the world. Everything happens as established by God who has chosen the best of all possible worlds. The monad-substances are here in relation to the world in that they each constitute a particular point of view on it, God being the central monad. Kant deepens this idea while radically transforming it. He starts from the transcendental subject who establishes a relation to the real constituted through the categories. 1.2

A Paradigm Shift: Kant

Kant overturns the perspectives inherited from Greek antiquity. He reverses them, so to speak, by considering substance not as a being in itself but as one

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 45 of the a priori forms of the understanding that constitute objective reality, more specifically as a subcategory of relation. He establishes this in his “table of categories,” which lies at the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason. The author of the first Critique did indeed revolutionise ontology. Instead of seeing our knowledge as about “things in themselves” (as he calls them, Aristotle called these “substances”) independent of our way of relating to them (in other words, of our relation to them), he insists that we can only know things insofar as they are in relation to us: If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. As for objects insofar as they are thought merely through reason, and necessarily at that, but that (at least as reason thinks them) cannot be given in experience at all—the attempt to think them (for they must be capable of being thought) will provide a splendid touchstone of what we assume as the altered method of our way of thinking, namely that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them. (Kant [1781] 1998, 110–111) Those things accessible to our knowledge, which called “phenomena,” open up the idea of a relation between “us” and what is radically external to us. They therefore render all substantial ontology obsolete. Kant states about the latter: The Transcendental Analytic accordingly has this important result: That the understanding can never accomplish a priori anything more than to anticipate the form of a possible experience in general, and, since that which is not appearance cannot be an object of experience, it can never overstep the limits of sensibility, within which alone objects are given to us.

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Historiographical Overview Its principles are merely principles of the exposition of appearances, and the proud name of an ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognitions of things in general in a systematic doctrine (e.g., the principle of causality), must give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of the pure understanding. (ibid., 345)

From the Kantian perspective, the subject constitutes the object through one of the four “categories”: quantity, quality, relation, modality of objects. Kant uses this Aristotelian term not to indicate what is said of the being of things, understood as “substances,” but to designate the different points of view from which an “object,” as a “phenomenon,” can be constituted by the subject: In such a way there arise exactly as many pure concepts of the understanding, which apply to objects of intuition in general a priori, as there were logical functions of all possible judgments in the previous table: for the understanding is completely exhausted and its capacity entirely measured by these functions. Following Aristotle we will call these concepts categories, for our aim is basically identical with his although very distant from it in execution. (ibid., 212) It follows that Kantian categories designate the fundamental dimensions of our relation to things—they make knowledge of them possible. To say that the object is constituted by “categories” in the Kantian sense implies that the ontological perspective we can adopt is not a substantial but a relational one. Kant drew up his table of categories by associating the following categories with “relation”: subsistence and inherence (substantia et accidens), causality and dependence (cause and effect), community (reciprocal action between the agent and the patient). Substance is thus a category among others, it is no longer an ontological characteristic of the object but the first category of relation. Now each function of the understanding is already in itself intrinsically relational. In this sense, substance, as a category of the understanding in general and as a sub-category of the category of relation in particular, is doubly relational. In other words, the “relationist” perspective is operative on two different levels in Kant. The first level is properly “transcendental.” The “transcendental subject” is an epistemic tool used to explain the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, and is nothing but a condition of the possibility of knowledge (it is nothing objective or real). The transcendental level concerns the “relationist” analytic that replaces any ontology of the “thing-in-itself” (or of “substance” in the Aristotelian sense). The second plane no longer concerns the relation of the subject to the object but the concrete determinations of things (of “objects,” of “phenomena,” as just mentioned).

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 47 However, the development of new and autonomous sciences (such as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, etc.) over the last two centuries can be traced back to Kant. These disciplines were based on his thought and gradually sidelined the notion of substance. 1.3

The Neo-Kantians or the Hegemony of Relationism

Following the Lamarckian tradition and in contrast to biological theories rooted in Christian creationist perspectives, the naturalist Darwin emphasised that a natural species is not fixed and, moreover, that it is likely to transform itself into another species. This evolutionary theory of movement (relation) rather than the static (substance), which was already apparent in Goethe’s philosophy of nature, invaded the social sciences. The anthropology of the second half of the 19th century consisted of relating so-called primitive societies to the first stages of humanity and Western societies to the most advanced, and in this sense, superior humanity. Comparatism developed in order to classify and organise the peoples of the world using a scale ranging from the primitive to the civilised with various intermediate stages. This predominantly relational evolutionism allows comparisons of so-called primitive societies with the civilisations of European antiquity, and the understanding of the latter on the basis of observable practices in vivo. Two important figures in this period were Lewis Morgan, who wrote Ancient Society, or Researches in the Line of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization (1877), and Edward Tylor, who published the first anthropology textbook in 1881: Anthropology. An introduction to the study of man and civilization. The same year, Godefroy de Roisel published La substance. Essai de philosophie rationnelle [Substance. Essay on relational philosophy]. Let us look at this latter work, which has been totally forgotten by the history of philosophy and which differs considerably from the intellectual currents of the period (which probably explains its erasure). Drawing on logic and the sciences of physics, chemistry, and nature, Roisel (de) followed the spirit of his time in taking an organicist perspective but broke with it through his subject matter, the “universal substance” that purportedly constitutes the bodies that surround us and that is the “essential cause of all phenomena” and of the relations between things de Roisel [1881] 2013, V): “Everything that manifests itself is substance, and every substance manifests itself by some phenomenon” (ibid., 1). Substituting the atom, so to speak, for Spinoza’s God, de Roisel advocated linking the “logical induction” that yielded the discoveries of the physical and natural sciences with philosophy (ibid., 125). His work deals more particularly with the idea of substances in action. He thus sought to demonstrate that substance is eternal and active by drawing on research on the atom, spheroidal action, gaseous bodies, liquid and solid bodies, and the cell:

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Historiographical Overview We say that [substance] is powerful necessarily, since it acts, and one must be careful not to give motion a kind of independent existence and consider it in an absolute way. (ibid., 95)

This relational understanding of substance is maintained throughout the work: We shall still call fatality the correlation of facts which follow one another and which constitute in the order of phenomena a series of situations whose connection is not always possible to perceive, but which are nevertheless coordinated by laws which link them to the universal order. (ibid., 108) Blithely confusing “fatality” and “legality,” de Roisel held to the relative necessity of substance (ibid., 109), which is impersonal, and acts “without consciousness and without reflected knowledge” (ibid., 132). In fact, he affirmed “the substantial unity of the universe, […] the identity of nature of the elements that constitute the various beings” (ibid., 159): Is it not the possession of the same attributes of the same power which enables these eternal invisibles to take all forms, and to be at once the materials, the workmen, and the architects of the universe? Is it not to the constitution of substance and to the infinite multitude of its elements that we must relate, as their natural effects, the phenomena of unity of composition and relativity which are manifested in all bodies? Is it not to this substantial identity that we must especially attribute the possibility and the realization of the phenomenon of the substitution of elements in a being which does not cease to be one, in spite of the modifications it undergoes? (ibid.) This highly speculative approach, which is entirely fictional, is very disconcerting in view of the context in which it was articulated, namely one characterised by a growing anti-substantialism. Indeed, in parallel with the still young anthropology’s cultural comparativist approach, the philosophical impulses at the turn of the 20th were above all marked by a more or less explicit anti-substantialism, which definitively consigned de Roisel to the dustbin of history and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest opponent of the substantialist ontology of this period was Whitehead, a logician, mathematician, and philosopher of nature. Contrary to the substantialists, Whitehead’s key idea is that nature cannot be immutable and fixed, but on the contrary, that it is moved by a process (see Whitehead [1929] 1978) in which all things are linked and interdependent and inscribed in a becoming—Deleuze was later influenced by this notion and we can also better understand Viveiros de Castro’s antisubstantialism by reading Whitehead. For the latter, relation predominates

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 49 to such an extent that any entity is the sum of the relations it has with other entities and that generates reactions in it. Becoming predominates over static being. On the other side of the Channel, his contemporaries Durkheim and Mauss participated fully in the post-Kantian relationist tradition—a point I will return to in Chapter 5 when discussing the Chinese anthropologist Wang Mingming, a reader of Mauss who promotes a civilisational approach to relationism. And Bachelard openly advocated an anti-substantialism concerning being and matter and preferred the concept of relativity: Relativity […] has been constituted as a frank system of relation. Doing violence to habits (perhaps to laws) of thought, one has endeavoured to grasp relation independently of the related terms and to postulate connections rather than objects, to give meaning to the members of an equation only in virtue of that equation, thus taking objects as strange functions of the function which relates them. (Bachelard 1929, 98) Like Whitehead and his disciple Russell, for whom “ [s]ubstance in a word, is a metaphysical mistake, due to transference to the world-structure of the [grammatical] structure of sentences composed of a subject and a predicate” (1947, 225), Simondon (who Viveiros de Castro also read) opposes substantialist ontology in favour of a realism of relations: As we can only apprehend reality through its manifestations, i.e., when it changes, we only perceive the extreme complementary aspects; but it is the dimensions of the real rather than the real that we perceive; we grasp its chronology and its topology of individuation without being able to grasp the pre-individual real that underlies this transformation. (Simondon 2005, 150–151) As Didier Debaise formulates it (2002, 62), Simondon’s “being as relation” substitutes relation for substance, making the latter “a kind of slowing down of relations” and thus of the individuation processes. A new reversal is operative here: The proposition “being is relation” is a real reversal that produces the passage from relation as a simple modality of existence, an inferior reality and reduced to the question of substance, to a real transcendental principle. (ibid.) A reading of Simondon also sheds light on Viveiros de Castro’s introduction of the concept of “force” into his work: Simondon substitutes energy and structure for form and matter. For him, relations unfold within being itself. This greatly minimises the significance of substance.

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Structuralism entered the social sciences on the basis of these various relationisms. 1.4

Structuralist Relationism

Structuralism considers things as being ontologically characterised as relations and not apprehended as substances—they must be perceived as “functions,” “gaps,” in Cassirer’s sense. Cassirer had radicalised Kantian relationism by refuting its metaphysical presuppositions regarding substance so as to privilege relation and structure.3 He also developed, with Warburg, the project of a theory of “man in movement.” Van Vliet (2013) refers to Cassirer’s correspondence (2009), abbreviated as ECN 18, in particular to a letter from Warburg to Cassirer (15 April 1924, ECN 18, 67): “[…] the ellipsis is the starting point or again the dividing line that marks a change of climate [Wetter], if we both want to inaugurate ‘a general science of culture as a theory of man in movement’.” Their project, van Vliet comments, “is rooted in the humanism of the Renaissance, which allowed for a new relation of the individual to the cosmos and a new understanding of human freedom” (2013). I will discuss Cassirer in the next chapter, but will here focus first on linguistic and then on anthropological structuralism. Patrice Maniglier points out that [t]o understand Saussure’s position, it is necessary to introduce the conceptual distinction of substance and form. The dual entities of language do not constitute substances. By substance, Saussure always means three things at once: in the metaphysical sense, that which exists in and for itself is not confused with its attributes or properties; in the “physical” sense, an order of causality; and finally, in the epistemological sense, that which can be the object of a presentation in experience, whether passive or provoked. In none of these senses does the domain of signs offer any substance. When Saussure says that the sign is a “double entity,” he does not mean that there is something like a double substance, but rather that the sign is not substantial.4 (2006, 276) The sign as such implies a dynamic system, and Saussurean semiology deals with this “life of signs.” It is an object of the mind, subject to variation, and beyond the control of any individual mind (ibid., 466). Saussure makes a distinction between language, a social product that depends on the collective, and speech, which is the actualisation of language on an individual scale. The latter cannot be integrated into linguistics, which deals with the former, taken as a social phenomenon and as a system of signs (Saussure 1974, 30). This Saussurean distinction between language and speech, which could be seen as paralleling the distinction between the real and lived experience, the intellect and the empirical, the anonymous and the personal, is taken up by

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 51 Lévi-Strauss and interpreted through the prism of Jakobson.5 But as Maniglier underlines, [O]nly Lévi-Strauss will rediscover the Saussurean inspiration: if we cannot prejudge the identities between the motifs of a myth on the basis of their similarities, it is because the same mythological sign can very well be metamorphosed into a theme that is apparently very dissimilar, but in reality perfectly identical, provided that we understand the system of transformations that makes it possible to pass from one to the other […]. (2006, 467) Lévi-Strauss applied linguistics to anthropology and thus brought about a kind of paradigm shift. Contrary to Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim, he claimed culture should not be compared to an organism, but to a language made up of signs that must therefore be deciphered and grasped with regard to their variation, according to “groups of transformation.”6 In this sense, it must be treated as what it is, independently of individual achievements, and therefore with regard to a kind of anonymity. Personal consciousness cannot be seen as the ultimate anchor of human thought. Lévi-Strauss expresses his opposition to existentialism in Tristes tropiques [Sad Tropics]: “As for the movement of thought that was to flourish in existentialism, it seemed to me to be the opposite of legitimate reflection because of its complacency towards the illusions of subjectivity” (1955, 61). He develops his criticism in more detail in La Pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind] (1962), especially in the chapter entitled “History and Dialectics.” The controversy surrounding Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) is all the more potent because Sartre excludes the history of societies then designated primitive from the “Truth of Man.” Lévi-Strauss instead considers them from a historical perspective by describing them as “cold” (marked by repetition) as opposed to Western societies with a “hot” history (marked by a bubbling). He never refuted this distinction: In my opinion, it has lost none of its relevance, provided that we are careful not to see in it two moments in the evolution of human societies. These notions, which are relative, have nothing real but refer to the subjective ways in which societies conceive their relation to history: either they bow to it or adhere to it; or they prefer to ignore it and seek to neutralize its effects. Some societies may have this latter attitude by vocation. It resurfaces in others, which have had to suffer from history. (Lévi-Strauss 1993, 9) Sartre responded to Lévi-Strauss when he refers to structuralism in “JeanPaul Sartre répond [Jean-Paul Sartre responds]” (1966). He suggests reintroducing praxis “as a totalizing process” in order to understand how structure is made as “the inert” cannot give itself away:

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Historiographical Overview [I] do not dispute the existence of structures, nor the need to analyse their mechanism. But structure is for me only a moment of the pratico-inertia. It is the result of a praxis that goes beyond its agents. All human creation has its domain of passivity: this does not mean that it is partly subjugated. You will recall Auguste Comte’s words: “Progress is the development of order.” It applies perfectly to the idea that structuralists have of diachrony: man is in some way developed by the very development of the structure. I do not believe that history can be reduced to this internal process. (ibid., 90)

We thus find a form of cultural abstraction and a distancing from lived experience in Lévi-Straussian structuralism and thus a reversal of Durkheim’s sociology and the primacy it accorded to the social over the intellectual (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 143). Observable phenomena are manifestations of the human mind (which is anonymous) governed by logical and natural laws. Lévi-Strauss referred to the first biomathematician D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson to explain the use of the notion of transformation in his structural anthropology (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1988). In continuity with Darwin, this biologist had showed in On Growth and Form (1917) that geometrical transformations explained the passage of a form from one species to another. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Claude Lefort wrote a blistering critique of structural anthropology in 1949 that emphasised the phenomenological shortcomings of its extreme repudiation of lived experience: “Lévi-Strauss’ analysis turns away from a phenomenological analysis. The most profound reality, according to him, is mathematical reality” (Lefort quoted by Pidival 1964, 1096). Almost paradoxically and as opposed to the existentialism of the same period, the human is dissolved in structuralism. Hence the preponderance given to theoretical productions rather than to social actors animated by the unconsciousness of the real in their lives, hence the predominance, in LéviStrauss’ work, of abstract models of relations. In such a framework, myth predominates over rite.7 In Tristes tropiques [Sad Tropics], Lévi-Strauss states: the same problem arises [for Marxism, geology and psychoanalysis], which is that of the relation between the sensible and the rational, and the goal sought is the same: a kind of super-rationalism, aiming to integrate the former with the latter without sacrificing any of its properties. (1955, 61) Lévi-Strauss did not fail to stress Marx’s influence on his thinking. He was struck by Marx’s construction of a model in order to “study its properties and the different ways in which it reacts in the laboratory, in order then to apply these observations to the interpretation of what happens empirically” (ibid., 60–61). Kinship relations and myths are not so much approached with regard to the sociology of their enactment in their environment as

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 53 understood as abstractions to be ordered and analysed as emanations of thought whose coherence the anthropologist must elucidate. As Descola points out, Lévi-Strauss has set his sights on “superstructures,” pursuing a study that Marx, he says, had barely begun. At this stage of the anthropological division of labour, nature becomes a gigantic reservoir of observable properties from which the mind can draw objects to be converted into signs. In short, this encyclopaedic nature is above all “good to think about,” a springboard from which the taxonomic imagination takes off, a pretext for the bizarre combinations that make up the fabric of myths, a vast and abundant presupposition for the objectification of the world in codified statements. (2014, 266) Structure is an invariant; it appears from the analysis of various human productions which Lévi-Strauss perceives as diverse aspects of the same object: “Multiplicity of aspects and identity of the object, that is basically what characterizes the ‘structural method’” (Hamberger 2014, 332). Hence the predominance of comparatism in structuralism, which starts from the presupposition that these productions are made up of the same elements whose arrangement can nonetheless vary. The task that remains for the structuralist is seeking the system that implies such transformations. This is why Hamberger writes that it is indeed a re-conception of the object of anthropology as such. We want to define the concept of “objectivity” in anthropology in the same way as it is defined in anthropology: as a correlate of the “convertibility” of a certain group of transformations. (ibid., 333) Accordingly, structural anthropology aims at elaborating models that the social actors are not themselves aware of but that nonetheless determine them: “the fundamental phenomena of life and of the mind […] are situated on the level of unconscious thought” (Lévi-Strauss 1980, XXXI). In Structural Anthropology II, Lévi-Strauss thus explains that one of the essential purposes of ethnography is to teach us something about the conscious and unconscious processes, translated into concrete experiences, individual or collective, by which men who did not possess an institution came to acquire it, either by invention, or by transformation of previous institutions, or by having received it from outside. ([1958] 1974, 15) Lévi-Strauss owes this idea of the unconscious not to Saussure but to Boas: Boas was also one of the first—I have sometimes written that it was Saussure, but in fact Saussure did not say anything about this, it follows

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indirectly from his work—to insist on this essential fact for the “sciences of Man”: the laws of language function at the unconscious level, outside the control of the speaking subjects, and they can therefore be studied as objective phenomena, representative as such of other social facts. Boas stated this crucial principle in 1911 in his justly famous preface to the Handbook of American Indian languages. (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1988, 59) In this sense, the anthropologist’s work consists in bringing out the unconscious of thought which is grafted onto all human productions, in revealing the signified in the implicit, in bringing out (through observation and analysis of discourse) the hidden meaning—“what is not conscious is more important than what is conscious,” as Lévi-Strauss said in 1963 in response to Lautman ([1963] 2004, 197). The idea is to consider the meaning, even if the ethnologist’s interlocutors in the field do not explicitly express this meaning. This “unconscious consciousness” put forward by Lévi-Strauss is obviously of a Freudian inheritance. As Pouillon emphasises, it is a typical Freudian attitude: the one that consists in always suspecting the manifest, in seeing only an appearance behind which a different and unconscious meaning is hidden.8 (1993, 46) 1.5

The Materiality of Causes and Effects

For Lévi-Strauss, identifying the unconscious structures that govern humans—and we shall later see how Descola fits into this logic by substituting cognitive psychology for the Lévi-Straussian unconscious9—means operating after the fashion of the natural sciences, that is to say, retaining significant facts in order to analyse them and to construct a model from them that makes it possible to interpret all phenomena of the same order and to formulate a universal law. We have already mentioned the importance of the biomathematician D’Arcy Wentworth Thomson in this reflective framework. In “Les mathématiques de l’homme [The mathematics of Man],” LéviStrauss expresses his scientism more openly. He emphasises that the laws of structural linguistics “present a degree of rigor entirely comparable to the laws of correlation found in the exact and natural sciences” (1956, 526). The Saussurean distinction, discussed above, between language and speech, coincides, he adds, with the “orientations of physical thought” (ibid., 527). Language is then given a mechanistic interpretation and speech is the calculation of probabilities. The father of structural anthropology concludes: For the first time in the history of the humanities, it became possible, as in the natural sciences, to set up laboratory experiments and to verify hypotheses empirically. (ibid.)

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 55 Diversity is thus reduced to general principles, and the confusion of the social is subjected to classificatory principles that bring to the fore systems of logical oppositions, deviations, relations, in short, structures that are in no way inscribed in a form of immutability (the sign is not substance) but which can be extended to other structures (hence the idea of “transformation groups”). In Structural Anthropology II, Lévi-Strauss states this very clearly: The fundamental principle is that the notion of structure does not refer to empirical reality, but to the models constructed according to it. This is how the difference between two concepts that are so similar that they have often been confused with each other becomes apparent, namely, social structure and social relations. Social relations are the raw material used for the construction of the models that make the social structure itself manifest. In no case, therefore, can the social structure be reduced to the set of social relations that can be observed in a given society. […] In the first place, a structure has the character of a system. It consists of elements such that any modification of one of them leads to a modification of all the others. Secondly, any model belongs to a group of transformations, each of which corresponds to a model of the same family, so that the set of these transformations constitutes a group of models. Third, the above properties allow us to predict how the model will react if one of its elements is modified. Finally, the model must be constructed in such a way that its operation can account for all observed facts. ([1958] 1974, 305–306) From the structuralist perspective, relationism thus exclusively concerns concrete determinations of “things”—thus the “second categorical plane of relation”—and not the relation characterised above with respect to Kant as the “first plane of relation” that the transcendental perspective opened up by deploying an “analytic” that substitutes itself for an “ontology” of “things in themselves” or “substances” (in the Aristotelian sense). In a famous debate with Ricoeur, Lévi-Strauss discussed this issue, specifying that structural anthropology is a transcendental philosophy in the Kantian sense. However, it does not have a centre, that is, a transcendental subject: It is, in short, a transposition of Kantian research to the ethnological domain, with the difference that instead of using introspection or reflecting on the state of science in the particular society in which the philosopher finds himself, we are transported to the limits: by searching for what there may be in common between the humanity that appears more distant to us, and the way in which our own mind works; trying, therefore, to draw out fundamental and binding properties for every mind, whatever it may be. (Lévi-Strauss [1963] 2004, 171–172)

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Lévi-Strauss finally stated: “I also feel in complete agreement with M. Ricœur when he defines—no doubt in order to criticize it—my position as a ‘Kantianism without a transcendental subject.’ This deficiency inspires reservations in him, whereas nothing hinders me from accepting his formula” (ibid., 174). It is on this Kantian relationist basis and through the nature-culture dualism that Lévi-Strauss wanted to move anthropology into proximity with the natural sciences. From very early on he approached it mathematically and cognitively, with reference to logical and mental structures. And today more than ever, it is with a renewed sense of certainty that the pre-eminence of a cognitivist analysis is pronounced capable of overcoming anthropology’s undeniable conceptual vagueness. If some are able to draw a deconstructive and creative force from this conceptuality, which is difficult to manipulate and construct, and then seek to measure the validity of the foundations of a thought of thoughts, still others point to the relativism inherent in the discipline, which, they claim, is a source of weakness. These latter try to found an anthropological science, a science more natural than human and that strives to free us of our sinful subjectivities. Hence Dan Sperber, a leading proponent of cognitivism in anthropology who claimed that “all causes and effects are material” (1996, 110–111; 1989), was the first winner of the Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize in 2009. Frédéric Keck (2013) reminds us that Sperber invites us to substitute the cognitivism of Turing and Chomsky for Lévi-Strauss’ Saussurean-inspired semiology.10 From these perspectives, culture would thus be material, and cultural phenomena would find causal explanations that give precedence to cognition, since representations are visible through the neuronal (through neurons). On this view, it is not a matter of studying cultures in themselves, which are essentially different, but of studying what makes their material productions causally possible. We rely on the natural sciences in this undertaking: The form, meaning, and value of things or objects in the living world of culture are thus evacuated in favour of a representative material that the anthropologist is able to describe because of its shared and public presence.11 (Affergan 2007, 93)

1.6

Conclusion. Naturalism Lies in Wait

On this account, the neural sciences should thus be capable of explaining what humans produce (symbolic, meaning, language, etc.) in the near future. On their assumptions, which revert to a naturalist vision of the world that is as heavy with presuppositions as the theoretical constructions noncognitivists put forward, we should engage in a form of “epidemiology of

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 57 representations in anthropology” to use the concept Sperber coins. From such a perspective, the unconscious in its Freudian foundations is eradicated in favour of a cognitive unconscious and to be interested in this is inane; to claim to bring out “particular” logics of thought would be to lapse into poetry, fiction, or even philosophy! Yet this last is the foundation of structural anthropology. How can we understand this shift from Kantian philosophy to a naturalism of the “hard sciences” that is supposed to make anthropology capable of becoming a nomothetic science through the development of an analytical approach comparable to that of mathematics? In order to follow this movement of thought, it is important to go back to the philosophical ins and outs of the Lévi-Straussian enterprise, as well as those of post-structural anthropology. Doing this means going into certain specifics of the French relationist debate or, more precisely, the debate of French origin, since it also concerns Brazil and China, albeit in different ways. Notes 1 See also Balibar, Cassin and De Libéra (2019, 1234–1235), and Courtine (2019, 406). 2 As Paul Studtmann notes, “A contemporary philosopher might naturally think that this category contains what we would nowadays call ‘relations.’ But this would be a mistake. The name for the category is ta pros ti (
 π!"#
$), which literally means ‘things toward something.’ In other words, Aristotle seems to be classifying not relations but rather things in the world in so far as they are toward something else. It would seem, however, that for Aristotle things are toward something else insofar as a relational predicate applies to them. Aristotle says: Things are called ‘relative’ if as such they are said to be of something else or to be somehow referred to something else. So, for instance, the greater, as such, is said to be of something else, for it is said to be greater than something (6a36)” ( 2021). 3 See especially the first part of Substance and Function & Einstein’s Theory of Relativity ([1910/1923] 2015). 4 Although Viveiros de Castro opposes any idea of the materiality of bodies and signs, the idea of considering writing without (bodily) substance is totally abstruse in China, as we will see. The main question throughout the present book concerns the “point of view of meaning,” i.e., the emic or etic foundations of the logics of thought. 5 See Durand and Albert (2011), Izard (2014), van Vliet (2012). I will return to this in the next chapter. 6 On the subject, see Breton ([1950] 2014). 7 We find the inverse of this in Cassirer. In this regard, see van Vliet ( 2014). 8 To a certain extent, we find a similar preoccupation in Richir in the search for the “phenomenological,” below what is symbolically instituted. 9 In this sense, Descola is a structuralist, whereas Viveiros de Castro is more in line with the anti-substantialist pre-structuralism of the turn of the 20th century. I will come back to this point. 10 Keck refers here to Sperber (1972, 1973, 1974). 11 “Like classical naturalism, contemporary naturalism bases its epistemological claims on a definite metaphysical bias, but it seems to give more importance to the ontological question than to the epistemological question. From an epistemological point of view, what it introduces is a stronger policing of the

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Bibliography Affergan F. (2007) L’anthropologie cognitive existe-t-elle? [Does cognitive anthropology exist?]. L’Homme 184: 85–105. Aristotle [1938] (1962) Categories. On interpretation. Prior analytics, trans. Cooke H. P. and Tredennick H. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aristotle (2007) Catégories. Sur l’interprétation, Organon 1b25, trans. Crubellier M., Dalimier C. and Pellegrin, P. Paris: Flammarion, GF. Aristotle (2008) Metaphysics, trans. Ross W. D. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing. Bachelard G. (1929) La valeur inductive de la relativité [The inductive value of relativity]. Paris: Vrin. Balibar E., Cassin B. and De Libéra A. (2019) Sujet [Subject]. In Cassin B. (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Le dictionnaire des intraduisibles [European Vocabulary of Philosophies. The dictionary of untranslatables]. Paris: Seuil. Le Robert, 1233–1253. Breton A. [1950] (2014) Note sur les masques à transformation de la côte Pacifique Nord-Ouest [Note on the transformation masks of the Pacific Northwest coast Note on the transformation masks of the Pacific Northwest coast]. Les cahiers de L’Herne. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion, 167–172. Cassirer E. [1910/1923] (2015) Substance and Function & Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Cassirer E. (2009) Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte [Posthumous Manuscripts and Texts], vol. 18, Ausgewählter wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Courtine J.-F. (2019) Essence. In Cassin B. (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Le dictionnaire des intraduisibles [European Vocabulary of Philosophies. The dictionary of untranslatables]. Paris: Seuil. Le Robert, 400–414. Debaise D. (2002) Les conditions d’une pensée de la relation selon Simondon [The conditions of a thought of the relation according to Simondon]. In Chabot P. (ed.), Simondon. Paris: Vrin, 53–68. Descartes R. [1641] (1996) Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Cottingham J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes R. [1644] (1989) Les principes de la philosophie. Œuvres philosophiques [The principles of philosophy. Philosophical works]. Alquié F. (ed). Paris: Bordas, Classiques Garnier. Descola P. (2014) Les deux natures de Lévi-Strauss [The two natures of Lévi-Strauss]. Les cahiers de L’Herne. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion. Durand J. and Albert J.-P. (2011) Roman Jakobson et Claude Lévi-Strauss: linguistique et anthropologie structurales [Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss:

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 59 structural linguistics and anthropology]. Caravelle 96, 151–163. DOI: 10.4000/ caravelle.4586. Feldman S. (1992) Introduction. In Spinoza B. (ed), The Ethics. Treatise on the Emandation of the Intellect. Selected Letters, trans. Shirley S. USA: Hackett Publishing Company. Hamberger K. (2014) La pensée objectivée [The objective thought]. Les cahiers de L’Herne. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion, 339–346. Izard M. (2014) “Les chats” de Charles Baudelaire. Roman Jakobson et Claude LéviStrauss [Charles Baudelaire’s “The cats.” Roman Jakobson and Claude LéviStrauss]. Les cahiers de L’Herne. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion, 125–153. Kant I. [1781] (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Guyer P. and Wood A. W. USA: Cambridge University Press. Keck F. (2013) L’esprit humain, de la parenté aux mythes, de la théorie à la pratique [The human mind, from kinship to myths, from theory to practice]. Archives de Philosophie 66 (1): 9–32. DOI: 10.3917/aphi.661.0009. Leibniz G. W. (1900a) Letter I to Remond, in Piat C., La Substance d’après Leibniz [Substance according to Leiniz]. Revue néo-scolastique 25: 33–57. DOI: 10.3406/ phlou.1900.1688. Leibniz G. W. (1900b) Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain. Œuvres philosophiques de Leibniz [New essays on human understanding. Philosophical works by Leibniz]. Paris: Félix Alcan. Lévi-Strauss C. (1955) Tristes tropiques [Sad Tropics]. Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss C. (1956) Les mathématiques de l’homme [The Mathematics of Man]. Revue Esprit 243 (10): 525–538. Lévi-Strauss C. [1958] (1974) Anthropologie structurale [Structural Anthropology]. Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss C. (1962) La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]. Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss C. [1963] (2004) Autour de la “Pensée sauvage”. Réponses à quelques questions [about the Savage Mind. Answers to a few questions]. Esprit 301 (1): 169–192. Lévi-Strauss C. (1980) Anthropologie structurale [Structural Anthropology]. Paris: Livre de Poche, Agora. Lévi-Strauss C. (1993) Un autre regard [another view]. L’Homme 33: 126–128, La remontée de l’Amazone, 7–11. DOI: 10.3406/hom.1993.369624. Lévi-Strauss C. and Eribon D. (1988) De près et de loin [From near and far]. Paris: Odile Jacob. Locke J. (1997) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Woolhouse R. (ed.). London: Penguin Books. Maniglier P. (2006) La Vie énigmatique des signes. Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme [The enigmatic life of signs. Saussure and the birth of structuralism]. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer. Mansion S. (1946) La première doctrine de la substance: la substance selon Aristote [The first doctrine of substance: substance according to Aristotle]. Revue Philosophique de Louvain 44 (3): 349–369. DOI: 10.3406/phlou.1946.4064. Morgan L. (1877) Ancient Society, or Researches in the Line of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization. London: Macmillan and Co. Piat C. (1900) Leibniz. La monadologie [Leibniz. The monadology]. Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre.

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Pidival R. (1964) Signification et position de l’œuvre de Lévi-Strauss [Significance and position of Lévi-Strauss’ work]. Annales: Economies Sociétés Civilisations. Paris: Armand Colin, 1087–1099 Pouillon J. (1993) Le cru et le su [The believed and the known]. Paris: Le Seuil. Quéré L. (2001) Naturaliser le sens. Une erreur de catégorie? [Naturalising meaning: a category error?]. Revue du MAUSS 17 (1): 275–292. Richir M. (1988) Phénoménologie et institution symbolique [Phenomenology and symbolic institution]. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Roisel (de) G. [1881] (2013) La substance. Essai de philosophie rationnelle [Substance. An Essay in Rational Philosophy]. Paris: Hachette, Livre BNF. Russell B. (1947) A History of Western Philosophy, 2nd Impression. London: Allen and Unwin Ltd. Sartre J.-P. (1960) Critique de la raison dialectique [Critique of dialectical reason]. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre J.-P. (1966) Jean-Paul Sartre répond. L’Arc, Sartre aujourd’hui 30: 87–96. Saussure (de) F. (1974) Cours de linguistique générale [Course in General Linguistics]. Paris: Payot. Simondon G. (2005) L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information [Individuation in the light of the notions of form and information]. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Sperber D. (1972) Le savoir des anthropologues [The knowledge of anthropologists]. Paris: Hermann. Sperber D. (1973) Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme [What is Structuralis]. Le structuralisme en anthropologie [Structuralism in Anthropology]. Paris: Seuil. Sperber D. (1974) Le symbolisme en général [Symbolism in general]. Paris: Hermann. Sperber D. (1996) La contagion des idées. Une théorie naturaliste de la culture [The Contagion of Ideas: A Naturalist Theory of Culture]. Paris: Odile Jacob. Sperber D. and Wilson D. (1989) La pertinence. Communication et cognition [Relevance. Communication et cognition]. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Spinoza B. [1677] (1992) The Ethics. Treatise on the Emandation of the Intellect. Selected Letters, trans. Shirley S. USA: Hackett Publishing Company. Studtmann P. (2021) Aristotle’s Categories. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Zalta E. N. (ed.). URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/ entries/aristotle-categories/>. Tarnowski K. (2017) L’existence et la problématique ontologico-formelle de la substance chez Descartes [Existence and the ontological-formal problematic of substance in Descartes]. Etudes philosophiques 172: 205–230. DOI: 10.3917/ leph.172.0205. Thompson D. W. (1917) On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tylor E. (1881) Anthropology. An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization. London: Macmillan and Co. Van Vliet M. (2012) De la Philosophie des formes symboliques d’Ernst Cassirer à l’Anthropologie structurale de Claude Lévi-Strauss: portée et limites d’une comparaison [From Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to Claude LéviStrauss’ Structural Anthropology: scope and limits of a comparison]. Philosophie, Symbole et Société 115: 45–58.

From Substantial Premises to Relationist Perspectives 61 Van Vliet M. (2013) Eléments pour une anthropologie de l’homme en mouvement [Elements for an Anthropology of Man in Motion]. Appareil 12. DOI: 10.4000/ appareil.1983. Van Vliet M. (2014) Rituel et mythe chez Warburg, Cassirer et Lévi-Strauss [Ritual and Myth in Warburg, Cassirer, and Lévi-Strauss]. Appareil. DOI: 10.4000/ appareil.2074. Whitehead A. N. [1929] (1978) Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press (Mcmillan Publishing Co).

2

Anthropo-Philosophical and Ethno-Phenomenological Relations From Torment to Ecstasy?

[M]y reading of phenomenology is extremely uneven. And often, when I find myself with a specialist in phenomenology talking about this or that, about Husserl or other authors, talking about this or that chapter, sometimes, when I get into very scholarly discussions of concepts such as “consciousness” and “intentionality,” I am lost. I do not have any solid grounding in this regard. People tell me that I should read certain authors, such as Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger or Husserl, but I have never touched on these works. I was interested in what these people had to say rather than whether their speeches were specifically about phenomenology. And I think that is the way one should do things generally in anthropology. It is probably more beneficial to be open to ideas from all directions. Tim Ingold, “A Living Philosophical Anthropology” (2016, 217)

“What is it about current anthropology that makes it want to refer to philosophy?” Many ethnologists have posed this nagging and sceptical question. For them, venturing outside the boundaries of their discipline implies disinterest or even ethnographic weakness. This diverting of the gaze beyond the empirical field of its object implies a kind of disciplinary betrayal. For many colleagues in other disciplines too, anthropology has undoubtedly nothing to do with philosophy: Since anthropology was built in reaction to philosophy (I will come back to this), why should we refer to the latter now, especially in times where empirical knowledge is supposed to provide us with all that is needed to understand the world? Here, we can see a “natural science of the mind” lurking in ambush, with its rationalist and cognitivist arguments that show (at best) a lack of interest and (at worst) a lack of understanding of the issues at stake. I do not aim here at reconciling radically antithetical positions, nor at convincing the most reluctant of the merits of a possible ecumenical approach—such a project would be futile—but rather at explaining certain connections concurrently with certain oppositions and misunderstandings, all more or less explicit, at the basis of the relation between anthropology and philosophy, disciplines with joint and eminently porous borders. The historical depth of the latter is unquestionably greater than that of the former, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-4

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despite the fact both are born from a common questioning of the meaning of things, a distance of more than two millennia stands between them. Although both engage in intellectual exercises that aim to bring out logics of thought or reflections on the world and on what surrounds us, they do not do so in the same way. They do not look in the same direction or at the same object. Their points of view are fundamentally different, but this does not mean that they do not or cannot intersect. Their relation to reality and to experience constitutes a shared problematic. It is precisely in order to better question relationism that I place the connections between the two disciplines at the heart of the present investigation—the word “relations” in the chapter title thus refers to this double relational dimension. It is phenomenology that seems to be indirectly (and involuntarily) at the origin of the relationist anthropology that is supposedly of an aphilosophical and scientific intent. This anthropology was instituted in France during the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, a deep resentment towards philosophy, nourished by a misunderstanding of the relation between reality and lived experience in Husserl, supported the new orientation that Lévi-Strauss gave to the discipline in the 1950s (already with a rich Durkheimian and Maussian past). Not only will Lévi-Strauss once again play a central role in the following discussion, but two more recent relationist perspectives, inscribed in structuralism’s field of influence, will also call for attention: Descola’s relational ontologies based on notions adopted from the cognitive psychology associated with Goethean, Humean and Husserlian perspectives on the body, intentionality, and the idea of transformation; and Viveiros de Castro’s multi-naturalism that is based on Deleuzian perspectives and linked to semiological foundations, with the body associated with a sign. I will first introduce these two theories in a comparative manner to highlight their intrinsic differences. With this background in view, I will then further examine these approaches independently of each other in Part II. 2.1

From Philosophical Torment to Husserlian Misunderstanding: The Lévi-Straussian Abhorrence of Lived Experience

French ethnology has never been indifferent to philosophy, and vice versa, but these disciplines have always kept a more or less respectful distance from each other. Philosophy, however, felt no need—wrongly, no doubt—to refer to (ethnological) anthropology in order to evolve. However, from its very beginnings, the latter was quick to take a position with regard to philosophy in order to criticise it and distance itself from it, and today in order to theorise about itself. More or less proximal to or distant from each other, explicitly invested or radically ignoring each other, and sometimes involuntarily entangled in each other, these human sciences share a comparable destiny that arises from their intrinsic common cultural background: pushing through to the meaning of what is

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seen as given as well as of what is inapparent. However, there have been, and there still remain, misunderstandings. The first misunderstanding concerns the father of structural anthropology. We can recall that Lévi-Strauss was awarded the agrégation in philosophy in 1931. The passages he devoted to his philosophical past in Tristes tropiques [Sad Tropics] (1955, 52–61) are deeply sarcastic; they reflect a great bitterness that is expressed more and more strongly as the pages go by, leading up to the coup de grâce inflicted on phenomenology through biased arguments resulting from a truncated reading of Husserl. This essay makes explicit the irreparable distancing of philosophy from the anthropology that Lévi-Strauss established and could also lead the uninformed reader down this path. And if for almost two decades some ethnologists have again looked towards philosophy, the misunderstandings originally inscribed by LéviStrauss between the two disciplines as early as the 1930s today generate new misunderstandings that I will address later. But first I want to the origin of the quid pro quo. What the father of structural anthropology wrote in 1955 about philosophy, and more particularly about phenomenology, reveals a gap between what he aimed at and what he experienced. This gap lay at the very origin of his “entry” into anthropology. “One becomes an ethnologist by opposing philosophy” is essentially the answer he gives to the problem posed in the title of chapter 6 of Tristes tropiques, namely, “How one becomes an ethnologist.” I will focus on this text, which should be read critically in order not to simply note down this great 20th century thinker’s impressions but instead to look analytically at his rejection of philosophy and the consequences of this ostracism. Lévi-Strauss writes the following of his philosophical apprenticeship: These exercises soon become verbal, based on an art of puns that takes the place of reflection; assonances between terms, homophonies and ambiguities gradually provide the material for these speculative theatrical stunts, the ingenuity of which good philosophical works are known for. Five years at the Sorbonne were reduced to learning this gymnastic, the dangers of which are nevertheless obvious. (1955, 53) Lévi-Strauss concludes unambiguously that “philosophical teaching exercised the intelligence at the same time as it dried up the mind” (ibid.), continuing: “Philosophy was not ancilla scientarium, the servant and auxiliary of scientific exploration, but a kind of aesthetic contemplation of consciousness by itself” (ibid., 53–54). He speaks even more explicitly of his “disgust” with philosophy, ethnography being his “lifeline” (ibid., 54). The philosophy courses he then taught in Laon were especially “tormenting” for him (ibid.). In contrast to this, Lévi-Strauss points out that these years of study were also those in which psychoanalytical theories were disseminated in France.

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What struck him therein was the idea that the most irrational phenomena are also the most significant (ibid., 58). He equates his infatuation with geology with that of psychoanalysis, for in both cases, the researcher is immediately confronted with seemingly impenetrable phenomena; in both cases, in order to inventory and assess the elements of a complex situation, he or she must apply qualities of finesse: sensitivity, flair and taste. (ibid., 60) Geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism too (which he calls his three teachers/mistresses) made him understand that “true reality is never the most manifest; and that the nature of truth is already apparent in the care it takes to evade itself” (ibid., 61), thus raising the question of “the relation between the sensible and the rational” (ibid.). It is precisely with respect to this that LéviStrauss once again turned to his philosophical training, and to phenomenology in particular. What struck him at the time, he writes, was the continuity postulated by Husserl between lived experience and the real.1 Now, he continues, one must repudiate lived experience in order to reach the real. Such is the teaching drawn from Marx, from geology and from psychoanalysis. He firmly denounces “the illusions of subjectivity” (ibid.), specifying: This promotion of personal preoccupations to the dignity of philosophical problems runs too great a risk of leading to a metaphysics for a midinette [sic!], excusable as a didactic process, but very dangerous if it be allowed to interfere with this mission accorded to philosophy until science is strong enough to replace it, which is to understand the being in relation to itself and not in relation to me. (ibid.) However, Lévi-Strauss’ challenge to phenomenology is based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of “lived experience” in the Husserlian sense, which he understands psychologistically. He likely has empirical, ethnographic, psychological experience in mind, whereas Husserl understands it in the sense of neutralised experience, grasped in its eidetic dimension. Let us look at this more closely. In Husserl, “lived experience” is called Erlebnis, a concept that brings together the idea of (er)leben, “to live,” and erfahren, “to experience.” Husserl speaks of its neutralisation in the phenomenological approach, i.e., the elimination of empirical experience. In the Logical Investigations II (1922), the founding father of phenomenology affirms the importance of this neutralisation, which involves psychology and logic. Derrida perceived and praised the evolution of Husserl’s approach to the subject: We can say that, until the end of Volume I of Logical Investigations, the problem remains posed in terms of psychologism and logicism; to go

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In other words, the Husserl to whom Lévi-Strauss refers in Tristes tropiques is that of the first writings, before the Logical Investigations, where he still defended a kind of psychologism. But in his explicitly phenomenological work, the “phenomenological reduction” (epoche) neutralises lived experience: The birth of phenomenology thus goes hand in hand with this elevation of lived experience to an eidetic level. The claim that phenomenology reduces reality to experience is based on the early Husserl, a psychologist, and not on his work as it unfolded afterwards up until his death in 1938. Lévi-Strauss thus establishes his view through a fragmentary reading,2 which prevents him from understanding lived experience in the phenomenological sense. This latter concerns ethnologists to the extent that they rise the phenomena observed to the level of meaning, and in analysing ethnographic phenomena they set aside (as far as possible) their own lived experience in order to try to grasp what they see and hear. There is no doubt that the ethnologist’s exercise here and the phenomenologist’s thinking are worth comparing and that there are plausible similarities between what Lévi-Strauss advocated methodologically and phenomenological practice. An encounter between these approaches seems to have been missed because if Lévi-Strauss suggests, as we shall see, supplanting (“transcending”) the opposition subject-object through structure, phenomenology ascribes the same role to intentionality or to (neutralised) lived experience, and both have the same aim: giving an account of reality. Although structural anthropology refers to the Kantian transcendental without a subject (cf. Chapter 1), and, as I will discuss later, although LéviStrauss was probably inspired by Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism, he continually called for an “abjuration of philosophy,” firmly opposing Husserl and the then-contemporary existentialism: Contrary to any philosophical exploitation that one might wish to make of my work, I limit myself to stating that, to my taste, it could, in the best

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of hypotheses, only contribute to an abjuration of what is meant today by philosophy. (Lévi-Strauss 1971a, 570) Lévi-Strauss did not, however, remain totally impervious to the influence of one of the great exponents of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty. They became friends after the war, but had met for the first time when they were both preparing their agrégation in Paris. Their common passion for the meaning of phenomena allowed a degree of crossover between their views. It should be remembered that Merleau-Ponty supported the creation of the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France in 19593 and that Lévi-Strauss dedicated La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind] (1962) to Merleau-Ponty. This homage is not only due to the sudden death of the philosopher, but also to the very content of the work. According to Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “wild being or the pre-objective” is “at once the same thing and something else” as what he called “savage mind.” The anthropologist seeks the logic of the meaning that savage mind draws upon. However, for Merleau-Ponty, this meaning is prior to all logic (Lévi-Strauss 1971b, 45). Merleau-Ponty’s “wild being” in fact concerns “the world before knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, III), that is, before “the lived world” (ibid., 208) and the “perceived world” (ibid., 223). The issue at stake in the debate, common to anthropology and philosophy (especially phenomenology), is the questioning of the subject-object relation. Yet, as we shall now see, an insurmountable distance was established between the Lévi-Straussian structure and the Merleau-Pontian body as configurations of meaning. As a result, and despite what Descola says, I agree with Bimbenet’s conclusion (2011) that a true exchange never took place: Lévi-Strauss and Merleau-Ponty both, but in a relatively autonomous way, contributed something new to the knowledge of the human, notably concerning the relation between nature and culture, the phenomenon of childhood and the concept of the symbolic. Even if these three lines of inquiry have a point of convergence in that they rest, according to Bimbenet’s hypothesis, on a common definition of the archaic, these two thinkers did not, however, put them in dialogue. 2.2

Merleau-Ponty: Transcending the Subject-Object Relation through the Body

For Merleau-Ponty, it is a matter of placing oneself beneath the subjectobject relation and moving towards a monism that would refer to the body through the idea of a bodily or motor intentionality (a position developed in The Phenomenology of Perception in particular) and then, later, to the body through the notion of flesh (developed in The Eye and the Mind and The Visible and the Invisible). This idea is already in the making in Husserl, notably in Thing and Space. Lectures of 1907, a work that explicitly prefigures the idea of the intentional body, namely through the “carnal” dimension of intentionality as based on the concept of Leiblichkeit to which

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Descola refers while also perceiving a dualism in it. As we will see, if LéviStrauss read Husserl psychologistically, Descola reads him dualistically. Merleau-Ponty saw in Bergson a first step towards the elaboration of a thought in which things are not inscribed in the in-itself but “below or beyond the point where we look” ([1964a] 2006, 73). At the beginning of the 20th century, Bergson did indeed introduce the idea of a flow connecting existing things and he encouraged us to consider everything in its movement and its process character rather than as a thing in permanence: “The living being is above all a place of passage, and the essence of life lies in the movement that transmits it” ([1907] 1959, 92–93). If the surface of our very small organized body […] is the place of our actual movements, our very large inorganic body is the place of our possible and theoretically possible actions. (Bergson [1932] 1976, 274) But with Bergson, there is no subject, the body is traversed rather than being the beginning of an interlacing in Merleau-Ponty’s sense. The latter inquired more precisely into the role of the body in the configurations of meaning by insisting on its relation to the world and its deployment in the world: I say of a thing that it is moved, but my body moves, my movement unfolds. It is not in ignorance of itself, it is not blind to itself, it radiates a self. (Merleau-Ponty [1964a] 2006, 18) Whereas in Husserlian phenomenology, the living body (Leib) is centred on the subject, Merleau-Ponty reverses this idea by considering the living body as the instance through which the subject is linked to the world. He thus carries out a form of subjective decentralisation, an opening of the subjective sphere towards the worldly sphere, a sphere that is part of a transcendental dimension of the world (a point Lévi-Strauss was particularly sensitive to, as we will see): Visible and mobile, my body is among things, it is one of them, it is caught in the fabric of the world and its cohesion is that of a thing. But since it sees and moves, it holds things in a circle around itself, they are an appendage or extension of itself, they are embedded in its flesh, they are part of its full definition and the world is made of the very fabric of the body. (ibid., 19) He adds, two pages later: Since things and my body are made of the same material, his vision must be made in some way in them, or else their manifest visibility is doubled in him by a secret visibility: “nature is inside,” says Cézanne. (ibid., 21–22)

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The philosopher writes again in The Visible and the Invisible: The body unites us directly to things by its own ontogeny, by welding together the two blanks of which it is made, its two lips: the sensible mass that it is, and the mass of the sensible where it is born by segregation, and to which, as a seer, it remains open. (1964b, 177) Merleau-Pontian philosophy therefore implies a kind of “living reappropriation of metaphysics” (Colonna 2014) as well as of the Kantian relationist perspective. “All consciousness is perceptual consciousness” (Course Two) and the body is the perceptual opening to the world. He specifies that my body does not perceive, but it is built around the perception that emerges through it: through its entire internal arrangement, through its sensory-motor circuits, through the feedback pathways that control and revive movements, it prepares itself, so to speak, for a perception of itself, even if it is never it that it perceives or it that perceives it. (1964b, 24) Merleau-Ponty thus induces a corporeality of consciousness and an intentionality of the body: Things are never one behind the other. The encroachment and latency of things do not enter into their definition, they only express my incomprehensible solidarity with one of them, my body, and, in all that they have of positive, they are thoughts that I form and not attributes of things. ([1964a] 2006, 46) His ontology is therefore in no way dualistic after the fashion of the Cartesian mind-body split, which he strongly criticises. It is rather thought through an interlacing and chiasmus. In The Eye and the Mind, he evokes the chiasmus established between the painter and the world: It is by lending his body to the world that the painter changes the world into painting. In order to understand these transubstantiations, we must rediscover the operative and actual body, the one that is not a piece of space, a bundle of functions, that is an interlacing of vision and movement. (ibid., 16) He makes this point more precisely in The Visible and the Invisible: My body as a visible thing is contained in the great spectacle. But my seeing body underlies this visible body, and all the visible with it. There is a reciprocal insertion and interweaving of the one into the other. (1964b, 180)

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If Merleau-Ponty brings the term “flesh” into play, he does not foreground the “materiality” of the intersubjective relation, but, as a phenomenologist, he reveals its ontological and transcendental dimension, even if he refuses to use this term because he wanted to distance himself from idealism (Schnell 2010). Indeed, he explains: Once again, the flesh we are talking about is not matter. It is the winding of the visible onto the seeing body, of the tangible onto the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself in the process of seeing and touching things, so that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws from itself this relation, and even this double relation, by dehiscence or fission of its mass. […] Flesh (that of the world or mine) is not contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself and suits itself. (1964b, 189–190) He also writes: Our century has erased the dividing line between “body” and “spirit” and sees human life as both spiritual and corporeal, always based on the body, always interested, even in its most carnal modes, in the relations between people. For many thinkers at the end of the 19th century, the body was a piece of matter, a bundle of mechanisms. The 20th century restored and deepened the notion of flesh, that is, of the animated body. (1960, 287) This passage is crucial: Merleau-Ponty here introduces the idea of a body in movement, in relation to the world, from a carnal experience—without matter—and consequently fully inscribed in a metaphysics. Let us now return to structural anthropology’s reading of this. 2.3

Lévi-Strauss and Descola: Transcending the Subject-Object Relation through Structure

Lévi-Strauss claims Merleau-Ponty’s work invites us to use the notion of structure in the sense of a path offered to overcome the factitious opposition of subject and object, the structure being situated at their articulation, more real. A way, therefore, of a carnal experience which structural analysis brings closer, provided that it never claims to reconstitute the duality which it had first helped to transcend. (1971b, 47) The Merleau-Pontian phenomenological perspective attracts Lévi-Strauss’ attention because it represents a step forward from Husserl in that it transcends the subject-object relation. Lévi-Strauss places structural anthropology

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precisely below (or beyond) the subject-object opposition, the structure being at the junction between the two. He argues here, half-heartedly but with a certain aplomb, that structure is more real than the Merleau-Pontian conception of the body, which remains metaphysical and therefore abstract. According to Lévi-Strauss, structure thus allows for a (more exact?) neutralisation of lived experience. A year after the publication of this tribute to Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss gave a lecture in the United States entitled “Structuralism and Ecology” (republished in Le regard éloigné [The view from afar]). One passage in particular concerns the body and structure and again refers to structural analysis as carnal experience: Structuralists are sometimes criticized for playing with abstractions taken from reality. I have tried to show that, far from being an amusement for dilettantes and aesthetes, structural analysis is only set in motion in the mind because its model is already in the body. Visual perception is initially based on binary opposites, and neurologists would probably agree to extend this statement to other areas of brain activity. By ways wrongly considered hyperintellectual, structuralism rediscovers and brings to consciousness deeper truths that the body already obscurely announces; it reconciles the physical and the moral, nature and man, the world and the mind, and tends towards the only form of materialism compatible with the current orientations of scientific knowledge. (Lévi-Strauss 1983, 160) Descola rightly points out that Lévi-Strauss never varied in the idea that nature conditions the intellectual operations through which culture receives empirical content, nor did he hesitate to anticipate the moment when it could be interpreted in purely organic terms, as the natural result and social mode of apprehending modifications in the structure and functioning of the brain. (2014, 264) For Descola, the influence of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is particularly evident in Lévi-Strauss’ 1972 lecture. He writes: Bodily nature is defined as an organic environment, homologous to the physical environment, and all the more linked to it since man is only able to grasp the latter through the mediation of the former. Between the information transmitted by the sense organs, their cerebral coding, and the physical world itself, a certain affinity must therefore exist. On what does this affinity rest? On the fact, says Lévi-Strauss, that the immediate data of sensitive perception are not a raw material, a sort of carbon copy of the apprehended objects, but consist of distinctive properties abstracted from reality by coding and decoding mechanisms inscribed in the nervous

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Descola further specifies that for Lévi-Strauss, the sense organs themselves have a structuring activity and that he asserts that the structural properties of nature are not distinguished in their essence from the codes by means of which the nervous system deciphers them, nor from the categories which the understanding uses to account for the properties of reality. (ibid., 268) Because there is a “homology of structure between the sign and the thing it denotes” (ibid.), Lévi-Strauss embraces “a physicalist theory of knowledge” (ibid.). In short, thinking functions following organic principles: The mind is the same everywhere despite its different environments, which is why Lévi-Strauss says that anthropology is a psychology. Let there be no mistake: This does not mean approaching the mind through psychologism, as we saw earlier, but of grasping it through a dual approach that makes the unveiling of mental structures possible through the observation of the social as animated by unconscious structures that must be analysed in the light of naturalist and biological theories. And this double face of anthropology supposedly opens up an escape from the paradox that drives it (with its bipolarity of “ethnographic variabilities-cognitive unvariabilities”). Indeed, the great human variability that emanates from ethnographic fields refers to the logics of thought over and beyond these variations, logics of thought that are inscribed, as was already seen, in structures. These structures allow us to go beyond ethnographic experience in order to stand at the junction of the subject and the object (at its “articulation”). Descola takes the idea of structural analysis as a carnal experience from Lévi-Strauss. The following passage gives a clear account of the reception of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in his own anthropology: We know the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s work in Lévi-Strauss’ thought (La Pensée sauvage is dedicated to him). The phenomenological tradition has contributed to questioning a theory of knowledge and action that goes back to Cartesianism, that was thematized by Kant, and that can be called “cognitive realism.” It is the idea of a mind isolated in its cranium, receiving information about the external world through the body and then processing this information in such a way as to give instructions back to the body, in order to act on this world. Thus a dualism of body and mind in which the body has an ancillary role and

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which neglects the fact that it is both in me and in the world, that it is an instrument of knowledge in the same way as the brain. This dualism has become the common sense of our anthropology of the body as modern Westerners, so that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of cognitive realism did not immediately take hold. Yet, as Lévi-Strauss had seen, it is important to be able to combine a structuralist approach (the construction of contrastive models that account for regularities) with some of the contributions of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. This is an approach that I fully agree with, but which is far from being unanimously accepted among anthropologists. Attempting to eliminate the duality of the subject and the world in the description of collective life, restoring the importance of the body as an instrument of knowledge, to follow Merleau-Ponty, should not lead to neglecting the search for framing structures that account for the coherence and regularity of the behaviour of members of a community. However useful the physiology of interactions may be, it is nothing without a morphology of practices, a praxeological analysis of the forms of experience. Paraphrasing a famous formula of Kant’s, one could say that structures without content are empty, experiences without forms, deprived of meaning. In short, putting the body at the centre of the experience of the world is good, but on the condition that we take an interest in the cognitive schemes that structure the uses of the world according to particular modalities. (Descola answering Boëtsch 2007) This means the body as a metaphysical relation to the world, and the carnal experience as a condition of possibility of structural analysis, would not be sufficient. Cognitive concerns must be associated with this Merleau-Pontian phenomenology because the body is still thought of in philosophical abstraction. Descola therefore proposes taking up the critical approach to cognitive realism Merleau-Ponty had initiated and pursuing it, but by introducing cognitive questions and a biological perception on the body. As in LéviStrauss, “the Merleau-Ponty body” is thus taken as a vector of knowledge integrated into structural configurations of meaning referring to a certain naturalism. Héritier points out that “Structuralism and Ecology” is ultimately about the “already existing structural character of nature” (2014, 351). To summarise, the Merleau-Pontian chiasms body-world, bodyintentionality, flesh-world are characterised by a corporeal relationism without matter (without substance, one might say, because, according to this logic, a body “animated” and in movement is without matter). Lévi-Strauss and then Descola perceive a means, in the Merleau-Pontian body, of better emphasising structural analysis and defining it as a carnal experience. This yields an a-substantial relationism that allows us to transcend the oppositions subject-object, practices-structures, ethnography-anthropology. In doing so, these structuralists seem nonetheless blind to the intersubjective potential of phenomenology, which ultimately does not interest them, as they anchor their

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theoretical orientations in a cognitive body. The body is in no way perceived as a chiasmatic point, the interweaving of sense and sensibility, as in MerleauPonty. We thus witness a diversion from the metaphysical relational body that is derived from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to the cognitive relational body. We will see that Descola in particular, while reviving the first phenomenology through the prism of Husserl, who himself was ousted from anthropology by the father of structuralism, refers the perception of the body to semiotic representations and cognitive psychology while introducing the idea of body and intentionality (see Chapter 3). Although Descola perceives a Merleau-Pontian influence in structural anthropology, it seems, on the contrary, that in the structuralist configurations of meaning regarding the body we can observe a departure from the Merleau-Pontian schema, namely: body and intentionality, individual body, body-sign (as we will also see in Viveiros de Castro). In this sense, the structuralists’ view is relatively far from the Husserlian Leiblichkeit and the Merleau-Pontian body (body-intentionality of the same line, i.e., without deviation). This anthropology’s perspective on the body thus remains very Saussurean and Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is ultimately minor. Moreover, it should be noted that by being referred to structure, the metaphysical body in Merleau-Ponty’s sense remains enmeshed, for LéviStrauss and Descola, in the abstractness and configurations of philosophical meaning, without becoming interrogated in any way with respect to the metacosmologies that also develop abstract modes of thought in relation to the intentional body. Consequently, Lévi-Strauss and Descola remain in an eminently philosophical sphere; they think through structure, they do so from above, and they are anchored in a Eurocentrism. However, if we take our distance from structuralist theories, and if we leave behind the idea of associating philosophical perspectives with the anthropological method in order to glimpse the former in the light of other ways of thinking, it would be possible to compare Merleau-Pontian thought with the “spontaneous philosophies” (to use Descola’s expression) or the other metaphysics (to use Viveiros de Castro’s expression) and to refer it to the phenomena of the body studied by ethnography. Neither Lévi-Strauss nor Descola bring what the phenomenologist wrote about the body-flesh into closer proximity with other discourses on the body. These other discourses are not those we read about in structuralist analysis but are analysed in terms of their own perceptual schemas. To put it another way, we find in structuralism a radical break between the sensible world and thought, and the body is a concept in this scheme. It is removed from the sensible world into theoretical perspectives on the pretext that anything else would be essentialist, psychologising, and far too subjective. In Lévi-Strauss and Descola, the body represents at one and the same time the break between and the rallying point of sensibility and thought. They accept the phenomenological lived body because it is without matter, the real body is cognised, and the sensitive body is rejected. How then can we reconcile the gendered, substantial body with this almost spectral structural

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image conferred upon the body, this structure that transcends the cumbersome body? Descola reintegrates it into his thinking, but he pays little attention to it, as we shall see for him the body is a tool forged by cognition. There is a chasm between the real body and the lived body. But do we not need to overcome this gap? Lévi-Strauss places the Merleau-Pontian body in structure: He establishes a reflexive relation between the phenomenologist’s proposal and his own vision of anthropology. Descola revives this position to make the body a monistic structural enterprise while inscribing it in a dualism. Lévi-Strauss sees the body as an epiphany of structure, Descola as a monist structuralism beyond nature and culture, Viveiros de Castro as a multi-naturalism. In all cases, the body is borrowed, conjectured, and transformed by these anthropologists. It is not taken in the senses that we find in ethnographies. Yet the biological body is never alone or self-sufficient. It is always displaced beyond its envelope (Beauvoir speaks of “transcendence”), shaped by discourses, norms, and representations. A body is always a device of transfer, circulation, telepathy, between an anatomical reality and a symbolic projection. If the body were only an anatomical datum, it would not survive its injuries. It must always remain in the world, and this work of accommodation presupposes an exit from oneself, the setting up of a platform between the biological and the symbolic, the body and flesh in the world. The symbolic is not the tomb of matter, it is its relocation. (Malabou 2020, 114–115) We must move towards an “anarchic body,” that is to say, towards a theoretical manumission of the body approached without a principle of command, a body taken thus anthropologically speaking, without an a priori, without derivation, without a dependence on one or another theoretical school. Just as Malabou stated that “everything has changed, nothing has changed,” when referring to Dolto’s speech on transgenderism at the congress on women and psychoanalysis, so it could be said that despite Strathern, Marriott, Inden, Héritier, Carsten, Bonnemère, and so many others, everything has changed and nothing has changed in structural anthropology; the body remains imprisoned in theoretical systematisation, in a relationism devoid of organs. 2.4

Cassirer, the Forgotten, or the Body as “Symbolic Medium”

Lévi-Strauss and Cassirer were both associated with the New York Linguistic Circle and contributed to the first issues of the journal Word alongside Jakobson—with whom Cassirer also crossed the Atlantic in 1941 (van Vliet 2013). In 1945, Lévi-Strauss published an article in that journal entitled “Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology.” It is the starting point for structuralist anthropology.

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Although it has never been explicitly mentioned, Muriel van Vliet (2016, 46) suggests that Cassirer was aware of Jakobson’s essay on the theory of transformation groups (see Cassirer [1938] 1944). She points out that LéviStrauss organised the great families of structures, such as language, mathematics, art, and myth according to the same functions of meaning that Cassirer had noted. Each of these forms a group of transformations that can maintain relations of transformation within itself or with other families. According to this hypothesis, Cassirerian philosophy also seems to have played a major role in Lévi-Strauss’ work, but one that has been overlooked.4 Even though Lévi-Strauss refers to it in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté [The elementary structures of kinship] through two of Cassirer’s publications: “Le langage et la construction du monde des objets [Language and the construction of the world of objects]” (1933) and An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944), it is only to affirm the universality of “the conception of speech as verb, as power and as action” (Lévi-Strauss [1949] 2017, 566). Descola (2012) argues that Lévi-Strauss took recourse to two different traditions when he introduced the idea of transformation: that of the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (particularly in the analysis of myths) and that of Goethe (in The Elementary Structures of Kinship). The former, unlike the latter, is an explicit point of reference: In short, whether it concerns organisms, images, social types, or semantic units in certain classes of utterances, the transformation of one form into another can be envisaged rather as a “Goethean regime” or rather as a “Thompsonian regime.” In the first case, the transformation is the development in different forms of a kind of initial plan which is itself constructed by comparing empirical objects belonging to the same set. In the second case, the transformation is a deformation by continuous variation in a space of coordinates applied to already given forms. (Descola 2014, 2017, 233) Cassirer also commented extensively on Goethe, who will be discussed in the context of an examination of the impetus he provided for Descola’s work (Chapter 3). In any case, why does Lévi-Strauss—and Descola (in his own anthropology and in his analysis of Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology)—not refer to Cassirer more explicitly given that this neo-Kantian philosophy of knowledge fundamentally implies anthropology, which it had never discarded, in inquiring into the creation of meaning in relation to the concrete and the sensible? Cassirer refused to separate sensibility and understanding, far more so than the phenomenology of perception developed by MerleauPonty (who was himself influenced by Cassirer).5 The phenomenologist was, as we have seen, a reference point for Lévi-Straussian and more recently for Descolian anthropology—although his actual influence seems to have been marginal.

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This question seems all the more justified in that Cassirer develops a philosophical anthropology by grafting his thinking onto ethnology. He remains close, in this sense, to the “active subject,” grants a primacy to ritual action as a lived experience over the mythical narrative (van Vliet 2014), and is interested in “embodied signification” (van Vliet 2016, 49). MerleauPonty develops this Cassirerian approach while distancing himself from the interweaving of the symbolic (perceptual) and signs (consciousness), preferring to go back to the wild human being, that is, prior to the lived and the perceived, as previously noted. Cassirer defends a philosophy of consequent relation, and his metaphysics does not fall back into a philosophy of being or substance. There is no meaning without a sensible support where this meaning literally takes shape and, reciprocally, there is no sensible without it always already having a meaning, because the individual who approaches the world possesses a symbolic function that is active from the most rudimentary sensible perception, even in the interaction that takes place between the body schema and the surrounding environment. For meaning to be produced, a body must certainly move in an environment that it contributes to colouring, while being formed by its very course within it, and man has, like any living being, a certain body schema that develops as he experiences his environment. But this body schema is not the only place where the symbolic function takes shape. It is also embodied in all the concrete productions that the human being elaborates, whether rituals, discourses, scientific and technical systems, or works of art. (van Vliet 2016, 42) Cassirer places the body at the heart of his thinking. John Michael Krois has pointed out that for Cassirer the body is the primary symbolic medium through which cultural meaning is produced (2011, 52). His conception of symbolism is not based on a linguistic model of semiotics, but on a biological model linked to affectivity (ibid., 81). Whereas structuralism makes reference to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and sets up a sensibility-understanding dualism, in Cassirer, who refers to Kant’s later Critique of the Power of Judgement, the interweaving of the sensible and the thinking predominates, an articulation that Cassirer calls “symbolic forms” (van Vliet 2016, 38). For him, the idea of “embodied meaning” (ibid., 39) is prevalent and action also prevails over the verb. For Warburg and Cassirer, myth presupposes that there are acts and passions, i.e., pre-linguistic phenomena that are only then presented in myths. Forms of life and rituals are the necessary preconditions of myth. The activity of thinking begins with the formation of rites which are based on actions and gestures. Lévi-Strauss’ observation that rites have three aspects: movements, manipulations of objects, and a repetitive and strictly

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Cassirer’s semiological approach accords a place to affects in actions and grants to language a meaning more extended and less intellectualist than in Lévi-Strauss. Structural anthropology has always maintained a distance from precisely this “excess” of lived experience and thus of action. The “living,” matter, substances, are irremediably set aside: structure overshadows the social. Cassirer, who was perhaps regarded as too immersed in lived experience, was not the only thinker whom Lévi-Strauss ostracised from anthropology, while nonetheless remaining greatly indebted to him. Even though, as we have seen, Granet’s work underlies the structural approach to kinship, he too was largely ignored or forgotten, probably because he remained faithful to Durkheim’s position (see Goudineau 2014, Mathieu 1985). This sinologist made the connection, on the basis of classical texts, between Chinese social organisation and reciprocity and exchange. He showed the significance of these phenomena, tracking them chronologically in relation to institutional and moral developments (Goudineau 2014, 182). However, for Lévi-Strauss, “exchange founds society symbolically, not chronologically” (ibid.). The Structures élémentaires de la parenté was devoted to the synchronic study of the systems studied and it approached the empirical data with great rigor, unlike Granet, who took liberties with it. In any case, Goudineau (2014, 203) reminds us that Granet was a major figure, probably more so than Jakobson or Mauss, for Lévi-Strauss’ work, but to the latter his loyalty to Durkheim seemed objectionable. For Lévi-Strauss, action and affect are without structure, without form, whereas for Cassirer (and Warburg), the opposite holds: “ritual action and affective life construct a relational field polarised by the body schema, in which the symbolic function is already at work: in the ritual, action itself already has a form” (van Vliet 2014, 7). Michael Houseman and Carlo Severi’s work has shown, in the continuity with Warburg and Cassirer, the “symbolism weakly linked to [the] language” of the naven (Houseman and Severi [1994] 2009, 194), a Melanesian rite that they suggested studying on the basis of Bateson’s 1935 ethnography (ibid., 162). This accordingly reintroduced the concrete and therefore the sensible (the body, the imagination) into the analysis. As van Vliet points out, Warburg and Cassirer would thus be situated between the intellectualizing and structuralist approach based on Lévi-Strauss’ exclusively discursive model of language, and the approach of Severi and Houseman centred on the field of ritual action, which totally abandons a model of language, because they adopt a clearly semiological position while refusing to narrow down language to a purely discursive approach regulated by the

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Begriff (scientific concept), the representative dimension of language (Darstellung) or the pure meaning of the sciences (reine Bedeutung), and preferred instead to make a place for the expression of the affects in ritual or artistic actions (Ausdruck) within language understood in a widened sense. (2014, 8 note 69) The British anthropologist Ingold is perhaps the figure most inspired by the phenomenology of perception. He engages in a form of “real” application of Bergsonian philosophy and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to anthropology and is fully attentive to embodied meaning. In a very fine article, van Vliet, who will cited again as her approach to the subject has now become a standard reference point, shows that Ingold “draws the general lines of an anthropology rooted in the sensitive lived experience of the journey. It is the body that orients itself in a certain perceived space, and it is its gestures that carry meaning that constitute the starting point of any description” (van Vliet 2016, 37). She emphasises especially that Ingold extends Cassirer’s and Warburg’s theory of culture to a theory of “man in movement,” and that biology also inspires him to go beyond the natureculture dualism. In the continuity with Bergson, Ingold defends in particular the idea that as inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers, and that wayfaring is a movement of self-renewal or becoming rather than the transport of already constituted beings from one location to another. Making their ways through the tangle of the world, wayfarers grow into its fabric and contribute through their movements to its ever-evolving weave. (Ingold 2007, 116) For him, life is a “transgenerational flow in which people and their knowledge undergo perpetual formation” (ibid., 117–118). We can see here relations in movement and in the making, with substances included in this relationism. Like his Anglo-Saxon colleagues who were mentioned in the introduction to this book (Strathern, Carsten, Marriott, Inden) and who are much less rooted in the structuralist tradition, Ingold sees the relations substantially, an idea that he develops without, however, subjecting it to an epistemological questioning, nor by situating his reflections in the historical disciplinary field with respect to its Kantian foundations. He speaks, let us recall, of the interface between substances and their environment (Ingold 2007). In fact, we could say that Ingold is an anthropologist of submutance; yet he does not anchor his reflection in the terms of another way of thinking, but in what he himself perceives of the world. He is thus an anthropologist who develops a philosophy. In so doing, he is undoubtedly the most significant representative of current anthropological philosophy, a thinker liberated from any disciplinary tradition, far more so than Descola and Viveiros

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de Castro, who remain strongly impregnated with structuralism and the conceptual relation-substance pair that Ingold deconstructs. Let us now consider these latter figures. 2.5

The Metaphysical Turn in Anthropological Relationism

Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology repudiates lived experience as well as action, while Descola and Viveros de Castro’s post-structuralism invites to fully consider action. The body plays a central role in their respective theories, a body that in both cases is understood as a relational position. Descola is interested not only in what I called, in the previous chapter, the “second plane of the relation,” but also in the “first plane of the relation,” which is fundamentally philosophical and speculative and which he revisits using a Husserlian prism. He thus makes a profound break with Lévi-Strauss, while remaining structuralist, as shown by his numerous references to Goethe and to cognitive psychology (which replaces the Lévi-Straussian unconscious while nonetheless retaining its scientistic approach). Viveiros de Castro is not motivated by cognitivism but for him relation also predominates, as was already emphasised. He suggests a Deleuzian rereading of Lévi-Strauss and advocates substituting “indigenous metaphysics” for Western thought. This considers the thought of others as equal to that of (Western) philosophers and aims at fostering a dialogue between these different spheres. Commenting on this “metaphysics of predation” put forward by Brazilian ethnologists—which is the topic of Chapter 4—Lévi-Strauss says the following: From this current of ideas, an overall impression emerges. Whether we rejoice or worry about it, philosophy is once again at the forefront of the anthropological scene. No longer our philosophy, which my generation had asked exotic peoples to help it get rid of, but, by a striking twist of fate, theirs. (2000, 270) We are witnessing two different movements: on the one hand, the reintroduction of philosophy and of the transcendental subject into theoretical anthropology, and on the other, the consideration of modes of thought exogenous to the West (other metaphysics, in Viveiros de Castro’s sense) in the same fashion as Western philosophy and that seeks to confront these ways of thinking with each other—which amounts to an attempt to set metaphysics in dialogue with metacosmologies and not with different metaphysics. While “anthropology was thought to be the successor to classical metaphysics with Kant, when the finitude of the human being became the only point of view from which to pose the question of being” (Keck 2011, 909), new metaphysical positions have recently emerged. Thus, in addition to a “relationist” and an “ontological” turn that questioned the Eurocentric theory of knowledge in asserting there are no longer cultures but

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ontologies, a part of current anthropology seems characterised by a “metaphysical” turn.7 At the same time, we are witnessing the growing influence of cognitivism, which implies an epistemological turn that replaces the structuralist paradigm with the cognitivist paradigm (Wolff 2010), which Descola, unlike Viveiros de Castro, has taken up through cognitive psychology. While their analytical perspectives thus both reintroduce ontological and metaphysical questions into anthropology by taking relation as the nodal point of their approaches, they move in very different directions—one could even see these perspectives as two extreme visions of anthropology—and they do not consider the nature-culture dualism or Amerindian perspectivism in the same way. These anthropologists orient themselves differently in their thinking, to use Viveiros de Castro’s words (Disputatio, 2009), while starting from the same point: a sense of dissatisfaction (mentioned above) upon reading La pensée sauvage, a work in which Lévi-Strauss makes totemism the paradigm for the savage mind. These two anthropologists found this reductive, as ritual, war, and cannibalism can hardly be integrated into this totemic sphere. Descola and Viveiros de Castro therefore set out to “break the straitjacket” of this Lévi-Straussian theory through Amazonian ethnography. Descola, who draws on the Achuar, does so by paying attention to local animism and analyses how this population is linked to animals and to its environment and Viveiros de Castro, who considers the Tupinamba, by studying cannibalism and war.8 The latter recalls that, according to LéviStraussian concepts, “totemism is a topicality of discontinuity” (metaphorical discontinuity), whereas “sacrificial transformations, on the contrary, trigger intensive relations that modify the nature of the terms themselves, because they ‘pass’ something between them” (metonymic continuity) (Viveiros de Castro 2009, 116–119). The Lévi-Straussian definition of totemism apprehends it as a system of forms, while the definition of sacrifice uses formulations that suggest the presence of a system of forces. Everything happens, Brazilian anthropologist writes, as if the structural method was designed to account for form rather than force, for the combinatorial rather than the differential, for the corpuscular more easily than the undulatory, for language rather than speech, for categorization rather than action. Thus, as we know, sacrifice was held to be imaginary and false, and totemism was held to be objective and true [by Lévi-Strauss]. (2009, 118) Descola’s formal ontology presents totemism, in the sense in which he understands it, “as a symmetrical scheme characterized by a double continuity, interiorities and physicalities” (2005, 280). He finds its logical complement through the analogy he draws with sacrificial practices that link the sacrificing to the sacrificer, the victim to the divinity: “the characteristic of the sacrifice being to link two terms between which there is no link at the

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outset” (ibid., 318). It is a matter of establishing a contiguous relation (bridges) between entities that were initially dissociated: Just as links in the chain of being cannot be skipped without compromising its structural integrity, so the link between two distant and heterogeneous entities, the sacrificing and the deity, can only be constructed through a mechanism of gradual and transitive identifications between intermediate elements. (ibid., 319) Pushing their reflections towards not only ethnological but anthropological problematisations, Descola and Viveiros de Castro took similar but ultimately different paths. Descola breaks down the classic opposition between nature and culture to develop a monistic anthropology based on a system of four ontologies that is at once Goethean, Humean, phenomenological, and cognitivist. It uses ethnographic data or areal generalities to support his thesis, which is itself based on logical presuppositions. For Viveiros de Castro, Descola’s four ontologies precisely express the four different ways of domesticating the savage mind, since all thought has gone through a process of domestication that is particular to it.9 He claims that if Lévi-Strauss contrasts the savage mind (specific to all humans) and which would therefore be universal (the most widely shared in the world) with domesticated mind, which would be particular (Western science), there has never been a savage mind as all thought is domesticated, but in different ways. Unlike Descola, Viveiros de Castro does not reject the nature-culture dualism, but rather reverses it (the uniqueness of culture and the multiplicity of natures). He bases his argument on Amazonian ethnographic analyses, which he raises to a more general reflective level, without however inserting it into a universal interpretative scheme. As Descola himself points out, instead of taking an expansive view of the anthropological problems addressed, [Viveiros de Castro] has taken a more intensive perspective in trying to work out the tension between a Native American thought (but perhaps [this is] a kind of abstraction […]), in order to try to bring out something […] of the order of a philosophical system. Disputatio (2009) It is from this point of view, Descola emphasises, that their “intentions have become different” (ibid.). Perspectivism is thus treated by Descola as a special case of animism, whereas Viveiros de Castro literally conceives of it as a “bomb” for deconstructing anthropology—for breaking it down, deflagrating it, as it were. Viveiros Castro openly envisages perspectivism as “a war machine” (his words) and not as merely as a “type” as in Descola. Hence, the title of the article by Bruno Latour (2009): “Perspectivism: ‘type’ or ‘bomb’?” Viveiros de Castro claims to forefront bifurcation and fully engages in the ethnographic charge by pushing it very far interpretatively and conceptually.

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Descola, however, reduces all ethnographic expression without remainder to his combinatorial system and explains that the ontologies he distinguishes can be intermingled—like Lévi-Strauss, he considers the structures he identifies to be dynamic and inscribed in transformations in Goethe’s sense— whereby all the ethnographic data is capable of being inserted into his anthropological scheme. There is therefore nothing here to suggest any openness to the idea of bifurcation, even though his system emphasises that the “naturalist” vision of the world cannot be the only one. The Descolian decentring is to be found in this last claim. We could argue from this that Viveiros de Castro’s approach is a priori less “colonising” than Descola’s, since the latter in thinking the other does not pay any attention to their epistemic framework and since he obviously establishes his three other ontologies from out of a naturalistic approach (like all ethnologists trained in anthropological reflection). He thus inserts the other into his own episteme, as he himself says (2005, 418). However, Viveiros de Castro also translates, and thus betrays, the thought of the other, placing perspectivism at a level of reflexivity that it does not have in Amazonia. By applying exogenous concepts to what he observes—he gives the perspectivist shamanic discourse a generality that it does not itself maintain (Déléage 2020)—he does the work of a “naturalist” ethnologist, but in an even more radical way than Descola. At first glance, he is less centripetal and more open to difference—multiplicity being both the watchword of his anthropologicalphilosophical enterprise and that which he explicitly lays claim to. But his way of proceeding is no less interpretative. He is to be read as a philosopher who takes up an idea in order to take it to a horizon far removed from ethnology as such—taking a philosophical posture, he creates a concept, to use Deleuze’s words. His “project is to amplify [from his field] in order to make a conceptuality emerge,” to use Descola’s words (Disputatio, 2009). The latter says that he is himself no longer a philosopher because his primary concern is not the epistemological question. What matters to him, he states, “is understanding, intellection of the diversity of systems, […] using all the things that work to get there, and in this sense,” he is “a tinkerer like all anthropologists.” (ibid.). If he tinkers, it is in fact by making use of philosophy in his anthropology without delving into the phenomenological and metaphysical questions that he places at the origin of his reflective enterprise. Viveiros de Castro makes no less a claim to universalism than Descola, but in a quite different way: He thinks that perspectivism alone must be capable of recasting an anthropology that is in the grip of naturalism through its proceeding in the light of an unsaid, even unthought European philosophical heritage. He paradoxically asserts this on the basis of a relationism and an anti-substantialism that are not interrogated at all and whose conceptual basis is also the fruit of our philosophical heritage. The idea is to apply Amazonian multi-naturalism on a planetary scale, to take Amerindians seriously by considering perspectivism/multi-naturalism as a thought that one can converse with in much the same way that one converses with Plato.

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The two anthropologists are definitely not interested in the other’s thinking in the same way. 2.6

Conclusion. The Philosophical Spectrum?

Just as Ricoeur wondered in 1963 whether the success of Lévi-Strauss’ method was not facilitated by the geographical and cultural area on which it was based, we are led to wonder whether the structuralist enterprise, from its linguistic foundations to its recent metaphysical excursions, is not strongly influenced by the “Amerindian system” itself and the “extraordinary exuberance of syntactic arrangements” found there, to use Ricoeur’s phrase about totemism. This philosopher called for a reflection on semantics and no longer on just syntax, so that we can consider what is said and not simply the way it is said (Lévi-Strauss [1963] 2004, 169). For Maniglier (2019), Descola is a “cathedral builder,” explaining that his conceptual structure is built of many Brazilian stones, while Viveiros de Castro would be a “pirate” who set out to board anthropology. And if Deleage (2020) sees in the latter a “patented corsair,” I see a conceptual firebreather in Viveiros de Castro, one who exhales affects and does this not so much by creating concepts (to take up again the last two formulas from Deleuze) as by carrying out a cultural takeover and displacement of Deleuze’s concepts towards Amerindian ethnographies (and not inversely). In Descola, I see someone who designs cultural shelves, an archivist of the world’s cultures, one who may have laid the last stone in the edifice of classificatory anthropology. We can thus see a movement from the recognition the phenomenologists of the 1960s accorded to the genial and omnipotent Lévi-Strauss, who himself gave them little credit (Merleau-Ponty was probably the only one of merit in his eyes, and, as I have emphasised, even this to a limited extent), to present-day anthropology’s taking recourse to metaphysical philosophy, which reaches high spheres of abstraction. Anthropology has thus gone from torment to a form of philosophical ecstasy. But to what extent is philosophy fully integrated into the anthropological debates of structuralist heritage? Notes 1 The quotation is given in extenso in the introduction to this book. 2 It would be interesting to know precisely which teachings and writings the young Lévi-Strauss had access to. 3 See Merleau-Ponty ([1958] 2008). 4 See the comparison between Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and LéviStrauss’ Structural Anthropology made by van Vliet (2012). 5 “Did Lévi-Strauss get to know Cassirer’s work through Merleau-Ponty, who quotes him extensively, or was it through Lévi-Strauss that Merleau-Ponty got the notion of reading Cassirer, whom, curiously enough, he never quotes? It remains difficult to know” ( van Vliet 2016, 46). 6 I am referring to van Vliet’s translation (2014) of Krois, cited in French.

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7 It is remarkable that contemporary phenomenological research is also marked by a “metaphysical turn.” 8 See Disputatio (2009). 9 See Disputatio (2009). It remains to be seen who domesticates whom and what, since Descola’s classification does not necessarily echo the “thoughts” themselves. I will come back to this in relation to “Chinese thought(s),” a notion that must be discussed.

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Merleau-Ponty M. [1958] (2008) Rapport de Maurice Merleau-Ponty pour la création d’une chaire d’Anthropologie sociale [Report by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for the creation of a Chair of Social Anthropology]. La lettre du Collège de France, Hors-série 2. DOI: 10.4000/lettre-cdf.229. Merleau-Ponty M. (1960) Signes [Signs]. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty M. (1964a) 2006 L’œil et l’esprit [The eye and the mind]. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty M. (1964b) Le visible et l’invisible [The visible and the invisible]. Paris: Gallimard. Schnell A. (2010) Remarques sur le transcendantal chez Maurice MerleauPonty [Remarks on the transcendental in Maurice Merleau-Ponty]. Annales de Phénoménologie 9:51–62. Van Vliet M. (2012) De la Philosophie des formes symboliques d’Ernst Cassirer à l’Anthropologie structurale de Claude Lévi-Strauss: portée et limites d’une comparaison [From Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to Claude LéviStrauss’ Structural Anthropology: scope and limits of a comparison]. Philosophie, Symbole et Société 115: 45–58. Van Vliet M. (2013) Eléments pour une anthropologie de l’homme en mouvement [Elements for an Anthropology of Man in Motion]. Appareil 12. DOI: 10.4000/ appareil.1983. Van Vliet M. (2014) Rituel et mythe chez Warburg, Cassirer et Lévi-Strauss [Ritual and Myth in Warburg, Cassirer, and Lévi-Strauss]. Appareil. DOI: 10.4000/ appareil.2074. Van Vliet M. (2016) Phénoménologie de la perception et anthropologie de l’homme en movement: l’incorporation du sens de Cassirer à Ingold [Phenomenology of perception and anthropology of Man in motion: the incorporation of meaning from Cassirer to Ingold]. Anthropologie et sociétés 40 (3): 37–57. DOI: 10.7202/ 1038633ar. Viveiros de Castro E. (2009) Métaphysiques Cannibales [Cannibal Metaphysics]. Paris: PUF, Gallimard. Wolff F. (2010) Notre humanité. D’Aristote aux neurosciences [Our Humanity. From Aristotle to neurosciences]. Paris: A. Fayard.

Conclusion to Part I

I had to open up a relatively wide panorama in order to show the evolution of the connections between the concepts of “substance” and “relation,” which were never thought in isolation from each other. In contrast to the priority given to substance since Aristotle, relationism predominates after the Kantian reversal, and relationist theories from the 19th century onwards developed fundamentally through an opposition to the notion of substance. From then on, we can see the connection established between these concepts became increasingly rigidified. Current anthropological debates reflect this philosophical heritage, which gave pre-eminence to relation over substance, which was irremediably sidelined. However, it is not this conceptual pair that stands at the theoretical forefront of anthropology, but instead the nature-culture dualism that is notably revived by Descola and Viveiros de Castro. Although they both work within the heritage of structuralism, they carry out this conceptual deconstructivism by relying on philosophy, and thus in opposition to Lévi-Straussian precepts. If the latter did indeed advocate distancing the two disciplines, his theoretical enterprise nonetheless bears witness to an eminently philosophical thought. This historiographical approach thus enables grasping the theoretical background to (and the resulting inadequacies of) anthropology in the French field, which is entangled with a philosophy, a cognitivism that is increasingly asserted on an institutional level, and in an ethnography that remains present, abundant, and scholarly, but with less pronounced theoretical aspirations and that remains less heeded. Moreover, these considerations raise questions about the training given to current students of ethnology who, unlike their predecessors, are generally no longer aware of philosophical issues. However, a “good ethnologist” must not be exiled from their own intellectual culture and therefore from the philosophical foundations of their episteme, because otherwise they will not be able to develop a critical view of the ideas they use and the theories in circulation. In order to have a command of what is being done in one’s own epistemological field is crucial to grasp, in a different way, thoughts from elsewhere. A foot in ethnology and a foot in philosophy would allow for a balanced approach and, no doubt, the avoidance of many misunderstandings DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-5

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on both sides and the deconstruction of theories that make free reference to philosophy without questioning their own reflexive basis. Consequently, there is no question about whether an ethnologist is a phenomenologist who ignores their self, to take up the topic of an article published by Nathalie Depraz nearly 30 years ago, which was subtitled “The contribution of phenomenology to the social sciences.”1 It is implicitly assumed therein that the heights of phenomenology should allow ethnologists to approach a problematic that they have not yet questioned: the taking into account of the observer in the observation. However, such a relation was considered at least since Lévi-Strauss and to an even greater extent since the end of the 1970s, thanks to the involvement of young ethnologists in new ethnographic fields that could also approach the field through the female gaze. We can no longer consider the phenomenologist as a scout for the naive ethnologist, carried away by the exaltation of his exotic travels. A dialogue must now be promoted between these disciplines in order to overcome the misunderstandings that have marked their connected histories. Note 1 Depraz N. (1993) L’ethnologue, un phénoménologue qui s’ignore? L’apport de la phénoménologie aux sciences sociales [The ethnologist, a phenomenologist who ignores himself? The contribution of phenomenology to social sciences]. In Bensa A (ed.), Municipalismes [Municipalisms], Genèses, 10, 108–123.

Part II

Structuralist Legacies

3

Body and Intentionality Philippe Descola’s “Relative Universalism”

[…] There is a structuralist hero: neither God nor man, neither personal nor universal, he is without identity, made of non-personal individuations and preindividual singularities. He ensures the breakdown of a structure affected by excesses or defects, he opposes his own ideal event to ideal events […]. Whether it is up to a new structure not to start over again with adventures similar to those of the old one, not to revive deadly contradictions, depends on the resisting and creative force of this hero, on his agility to follow and safeguard displacements, on his power to vary relations and redistribute singularities, always issuing yet another throw of the dice. This point of mutation precisely defines a praxis, or rather the very place where praxis must settle. For structuralism is not only inseparable from the works it creates, but also from a practice in relation to the products it interprets. Gilles Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” [By what do we recognise structuralism?] ([1967] 1973, 268–269)

“The anthropology of culture must be coupled with an anthropology of nature,” Descola declares in Par-delà nature et culture [Beyond Nature and Culture] (2005, 15), planning to set in motion a monistic anthropology that would disregard the opposition between nature and culture and thus rid itself of its institutional heritage, “its constitutive dualism” (ibid., 12). The notion of “nature,” he points out, has “gradually been constructed as a particular kind of ontological device that serves as the basis for the cosmology of the moderns” (ibid., 123). What must be added is that the creation of the concept of “culture” was accompanied by the emergence of anthropology at the end of the 19th century, a discipline in which the natureculture dualism has since become central. However, this conceptual foundation is, according to Descola, “an obstacle to a proper understanding of ontologies and cosmologies whose premises differ from ours” (ibid., 155). Thus, the opposition between nature and culture formulated by Lévi-Strauss is not perceived as a universal component but as a Eurocentric one, as resulting from its own ontology, which is described as naturalist. This is Descola’s coup de force: the contextualisation and breakdown of this dualism. His methodological and argumentative foundation is nonetheless DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-7

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based on a dualistic and Eurocentric conception of the body—which he considers to be universal—and he conceives it on the basis of two principles: an exteriority (physicality) and an interiority (intentionality). He makes particular reference to Husserl and to interpretative orientations that are guided by cognitive psychology—which replaces the Lévi-Straussian unconscious. Lévi-Strauss placed great emphasis on the weight of the unconscious. According to him, the unconscious activity of the mind explains the structure and functioning of symbolic systems, the variation of their contents being a contingent effect of the natural and historical environments in which they unfold. Hence his famous proposition that anthropology is first of all a psychology […]. I find it more reasonable […] to give credit to what cognitive psychology has begun to establish regarding the implementation of non-propositional knowledge. (Descola (2014) 2017, 227) In fact, Descola, who is well versed in a form of cognitivist hermeneutics, retains from Lévi-Strauss his “monist gnoseology,” that is, “the continuity of natural order between the states of subjectivity and the properties of the cosmos” as well as his rejection of cognitive realism (ibid.). In Les cahiers de L’Herne, he reminds us that in Lévi-Strauss, it is precisely the bodily nature of the human being that “is privileged as the keystone of a theory of the faculties that refuses to discriminate between the states of subjectivity and the properties of the cosmos” (2014a, 267). The bodily experience, whose connection with structural analysis was introduced in Chapter 2, is in fact central to the reflection that Descola himself proposes but in a manner that differs from LéviStrauss. My aim is to explain how he apprehends the concept of the body in order to understand how he weaves his quadri-ontological system in Beyond Nature and Culture. I will then focus on “Chinese analogism” as Descola calls it. I will address this categorisation with reference to the so-called “classical” Chinese perspectives in relation to the idea of a mutation (yi
) that is not associated with any ontology but with a metacosmology that links the macrocosm and the microcosms and fully includes the body and its “essences.” More precisely, I will discuss the plural perceptions of the (submutantial) body in China, specifically “the Daoist body,” which I will introduce by drawing on historical and anthropological approaches. 3.1

Physicality and Semiological Interiority? Phenomenology Paired with Cognitive Psychology

The body-intentionality dualism that Descola says he takes from Husserl—a phenomenological reference that will be discussed in detail later—and that he considers to be universal, is related to physicality (exteriority) and interiority. He explains this as follows:

Body and Intentionality 95 The vague term “interiority” refers to a range of properties recognized by all humans and covering some of what we usually call mind, soul, or consciousness—intentionality, subjectivity, reflexivity, affect, the ability to signify or to dream. We can also include the immaterial principles supposed to cause animation, such as breath or vital energy, as well as even more abstract notions such as the idea that I share with others the same essence, the same principle of action or the same origin […]. It is, in short, the universal belief that there are characteristics that are internal to the being or that originate in the being […]. In contrast, physicality is concerned with external form, substance, physiological, perceptual, and sensorimotor processes, and even temperament or manner of acting in the world insofar as they manifest the influence exerted on conduct or habitus by particular bodily moods, diets, anatomical features or mode of reproduction. Physicality is thus not the mere materiality of organic or abiotic bodies, but the set of visible and tangible expressions that the dispositions proper to any entity take on when they are deemed to result from the morphological and physiological characteristics intrinsic to that entity. (2005, 169) Descola raises the criticism that it is impossible to universally perceive the generality of the experienced unity of self-consciousness by arguing that there are many cases where populations do not consider that the body can constitute an absolute limit of the person, the latter being fragmented into multiple constituent units. (ibid., 169–170) But he immediately rejects this criticism by appealing (briefly) to Mauss, Pierce, and Benveniste, references that support the idea that self-perception is universal. Although Descola, unlike Viveiros de Castro, does not refer the body directly to the sign, such references nevertheless insert, ipso facto, his conception of the body into a semiological/semiotic perspective. He affirms unambiguously “the universality of individuation” (ibid., 170) in the process. And if he refers immediately after this postulate to the concept of “dividuality” put forward by Strathern,1 it is to clarify by means of opposition that others have retained “a more egocentric conception of the subject” (ibid., 171). This is a clear attempt to persuade the reader of the validity of his argument, which is more convincing if this reader is not familiar with the works mentioned, but much less so if they are sensitive to certain anthropological bifurcations (especially in Oceania and Asia). In other words, these two pages of Beyond Nature and Culture cannot demonstrate the relevance of the bodyintentionality and physicality-interiority dualism that are at the foundation of Descolian theory. They do, however, clearly illuminate the fact that Descola starts from a profoundly Eurocentric point of view on the body, and thus from a presupposition that refers to semiology and cognitive psychology.

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In The Composition of Worlds Descola takes a retrospective look at his methodological enterprise in relation to cognitivism. He stresses that [t]he idea that humans, in order to identify objects in their environment, detect in these objects physical properties and inner states of the same nature as those they experience in their own bodily and psychic life, has a double origin. ([2014] 2017, 22) Descola then refers to ethnography and works in developmental psychology. In the same book, he emphasises once again that physicality and interiority are two dimensions inherent to the human being and, in this sense, are universal. The relation between them “constitutes a hypothetical invariant” (ibid., 233) from which he thinks the unfolding of this invariant, that is, its transformation. Descola approaches the notion of transformation by first calling attention to its Goethean inspiration and then saying that it is based on the combinatorial nature of the two terms at stake: interiority and physicality. Four combinations are therefore possible in total. It is in this way that he claims to establish “the elementary matrix” on “a fact of universal order.” While Descola considers this primary dualism to be universal, he nevertheless points out that there is some arbitrariness in the choice of the original relation, but that once it has been established “it must account for all possible forms, and this is its only a posteriori justification” (ibid., 234). 3.2

Four Ontologies, Six Modes of Relations

From the postulate of “physicality (exteriority)-intentionality (interiority)” and the combinatorics that this dualism implies in the form of “four entries,” Descola constructs “a kind of experimental device” (ibid., 235), an “anthropological model intended to solve anthropological problems, that is to say, to explain correlations or incompatibilities observed for a long time between classes of facts that anthropologists study” (ibid., 223).” For instance, why is shamanism preponderant in hunting societies but not in those where sacrifice is practiced? This is the example he proposes—but how is this questioning itself justified? Viveiros de Castro associates sacrifice and shamanism, as we will see in the next chapter. There is also much evidence suggesting that some forms of shamanism and sacrifice have gone hand in hand in China for millennia. To start from such a postulate is to take a problematic stance on a misleading question right from the outset. It would be necessary to explain these presuppositions, which are themselves based on certain ethnographic examples, generally Amerindian and Siberian, and which do not take into account the most recent data on shamanism, in particular in China. But now to return to the exposition of Descolian ontologies in Beyond Nature and Culture. Based first on research he conducted among the Achuar, an Amazonian population, Descola emphasises that “nature is not here a transcendent

Body and Intentionality 97 instance or an object to be socialized, but the subject of a social relationship” (2005, 23). He explains that this type of representation of the world is frequent in Amazonia where all these cosmologies have the common characteristic of not making clear ontological distinctions between humans, on the one hand, and the good number of animal and plant species, on the other. (ibid., 27) Descola concludes that “the common referent of the entities that inhabit the world is not man as a species but humanity as a condition” (ibid., 30). In order to anchor this pan-monistic thesis, he then refers to the far north, to Siberia, and then to studies on the Chewong or the Kaluli of Melanesia, who are dualists, but in a way different to “our” dualism, according to Descola, who speaks of a “perceptive relativism” comparable to Amazonian perceptions. Going further, he shows that this type of representation is not the prerogative of societies “without writing”—an expression that should be discussed since the opposition between writing society and oral society has been reevaluated—because in the Vedic India as depicted by Charles Malamoud (and elements of it remain in contemporary India), nature is not opposed to society. There are, he claims, modes of identification (an expression borrowed from Mauss ([2014] 2017, 236)), that is, the assignment or detection in the objects of the world of certain types of qualities that are defined in relation to qualities that one confers upon oneself as a subject. According to this order of thought, and contrary to what Lenclud asserts (2014), people do not see the same thing differently, but they see different things in that they attribute different qualities to them because of their cultural or personal backgrounds. We thus see the extreme importance ascribed to subjective human projections onto the world. Systematising his thought, Descola distinguishes four types of ontologies mobilised by humans, these identifications being “the means of specifying the properties of the existing” (2005, 459). This system aims to “highlight a reasoned inventory of relations and their mode of compatibility and incompatibility” (Disputatio, 2009). First of all, animism is “the imputation by humans to non-humans of an interiority identical to their own” (2005, 183), “a combination of similarities of interiorities and differences of physicalities” (ibid., 203)—Descola reduces Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism to a particular case of animism by taking it as an example of the inversion of points of view that he believes can be found just about everywhere. He then reexamines, following Lévi-Strauss, the concept of totemism: [T]he identity of a totemic group is based on the sharing among all its human and non-human members of a specific set of physical and moral attributes constituting a kind of ontological prototype of which the totemic species is the emblematic expression, not the concrete archetype from which the qualities would be derived. (ibid., 223)

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This definition is very different from that of Lévi-Strauss, although it does not reject the latter’s initial intuition, as Descola points out: “human thought is permanently exercised in the registers of the discontinuous and the discrete and constructing symbolic systems that are marked by the dialectic of these two poles is based on the observation of the world” (ibid., 213). The third type of ontology is “naturalism”: [T]his scheme inverts the formula of animism, on the one hand by articulating a discontinuity of interiorities and a continuity of physicalities, and on the other hand by reversing the sense of their hierarchical inclusion, with the universal laws of matter and life serving naturalism as a paradigm for conceptualizing the place and role assigned to the diversity of cultural expressions of humanity. (ibid., 241) Finally, analogism is “a system of gradual differences tending towards continuity” (ibid., 322), a hermeneutic dream of completeness [sic!] that stems from an observation of dissatisfaction [sic!]: taking note of the general segmentation of the components of the world on a scale of small deviations, it nourishes the hope of weaving these weakly heterogeneous elements into a weave of affinities and meaningful attractions having all the appearances of continuity.2 (ibid., 281) Descola also distinguishes six modes of relations that serve to modulate each identification, to “specify the general form of the links that they [the existing] maintain” (ibid.): exchange, predation, gift, production, protection, and transmission. Identification and relation are the “two fundamental modalities of structuring individual and collective experience” (ibid., 163). The term “ontology”—here, a structural (and transcendental, as we shall see) ontology—is thus used to designate different cosmologies, ways in which human cultures classify the beings of the world. In the “battle of the duffels,” to use Descola’s expression which Viveiros de Castro takes up—i.e., the Disputatio organised under the aegis of Maniglier on 30 January 2009 which Latour commented on in April of the same year—Descola explains that he aims to talk about models, constructions that do not necessarily have empirical existence but which I try, by means of the devices I use, to bring out properties so as to understand what logic drives them and which can then be used to understand a particular society or culture. So my approach […] is not inductive in the sense of that of many of our colleagues in the United States, [consisting of] extending from ethnographic knowledge of either a culture or a regional grouping properties in order to construct typologies […]; my approach […] is […] both investigative but at the same time

Body and Intentionality 99 deductive: […] how, from the elements of the nuclei in sum, the conceptual lumps that we have identified, to draw consequences in the interpretation of systems of thought, of a way of being in the world (Disputatio, 2009). During the same debate, Descola also stressed that methodological relativism is not pushed to its limit in anthropology and “the naturalist world continued to constitute the standard by which other worlds were judged” (ibid.). It was thus necessary “to proceed to a greater universalization in order to de-historicize or de-culturalize the concepts” (ibid.). He further states that what interests him: it is the output of this kind of experimental machine […] cobbled together to try to understand [and in this lies for him the fundamental mission of anthropology] how differences organize themselves in a systematic way, that is to say, to put order in the face of chaos, […] which implies a position of superiority, without any doubt. (ibid.) Descola recalls that his “system with four entries” starts with Viveiros de Castro’s coup de force, or “stroke of genius” as he puts it, on perspectivism, which “led him to build this machine” that he conceives of as an experimental device, a kind of thought experiment stabilized and developed systematically, much as physicists and chemists use machines to capture certain kinds of phenomena and distribute them in relation to each other and to think about the relations that exist between these phenomena. (ibid.) It is therefore, as Descola emphasises once again, an experimental and rather heuristic device to […] account for the compatibilities and incompatibilities between classes of objects, classes of phenomena, as can be seen in the ethnographic literature. (ibid.) These words masterfully echo those of Lévi-Strauss that were cited earlier, where the latter expressed his satisfaction at seeing anthropology adopt a posture comparable to the disciplines that set up laboratory experiments. 3.3

Humean, Goethean, and Husserlian Perspectives

Chapter 9 of Beyond Nature and Culture, which is devoted to the “vertigo of analogism,” begins as follows: Naturalism and animism are encompassing hierarchical schemes with an inverted polarity: in one, the universal of physicality attaches the

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contingencies of interiority to its regime, in the other, the generalization of interiority is imposed as a means of attenuating the effect of the differences of physicality. Totemism, on the other hand, presents itself as a symmetrical scheme characterized by a double continuity of interiorities and physicalities, whose logical complement can only be another symmetrical scheme, but where the equivalence of a double series of differences is affirmed. This is what I have called “analogism.” By this I mean a mode of identification that splits the whole of the existing into a multiplicity of essences, forms and substances separated by small gaps, sometimes ordered in a graduated scale, so that it becomes possible to recompose the system of initial contrasts into a dense network of analogies linking the intrinsic properties of the distinguished entities. This way of distributing differences and readable correspondences on the face of the world is very common. It is expressed, for example, in the correlations between microcosm and macrocosm established by Chinese geomancy and divination, in the idea, common in Africa, that social disorders are capable of bringing about climatic catastrophes, or in the medical theory of signatures which bases the etiology and therapy of the sick on the similarities that substances or natural objects present with symptoms or parts of the human body. (2005, 280) This passage is very enlightening with respect to how Descola’s four ontological orientations are constituted correlatively with regard to the logical and causal complementarity put forward by the author. It summarises very clearly his quadripartite ontological schema, as well as revealing that a form of methodological determinism underlies his system—how else can we read the passage: “the logical complement can only be another symmetrical schema”? This is echoed in his 2009 intervention in the Disputatio with Viveiros de Castro: He there speaks of a “logical formula.” Similarly, he writes as an introduction to naturalistic ontology that [i]nsofar as animism and totemism differ from each other without being opposed term by term, the two other ontological formulas completing the identification scheme must therefore possess structural characteristics that make them compatible with the first two, so that the coherence of the whole is ensured by simple rules of transformation. (2005, 241) In The Composition of Worlds, he expresses himself in much the same way: In order to arrive at the combinatorics of Beyond Nature and Culture, a fourth formula had to appear, which could logically follow from the first three. ([2014] 2017, 214)

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Such logical constructions are based on a foundational dualism from which follow a priori relations between causes and consequences that are fraught with theoretical presuppositions. They undoubtedly refer back to Hume, to whom Descola makes no reference in Beyond Nature and Culture, but whom he mentions elsewhere. At the end of the 2009 Disputatio, Descola states that his work is of the Humean type: “It is an empiricism of the relation as Deleuze defined Hume’s operation: I infer and I believe.” This constitutes the basis of the mode of identification for Descola, who then stabilises these modes into the ontologies that are therefore “rather the product than the operation.” Recall that Hume defines cause as follows: We can therefore define a cause as an object followed by another and such that all objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, such that, if the first object had not existed, the second would never have existed. ([1748] 2021, 144) Descola perhaps owes above all his way of considering ontological stabilisation to a neo-Humean conception of causality especially because, as Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde points out, it is not Hume but his heirs who take it “for granted that the relations between causes and their effects have positively the properties of regularity, contiguity and temporal order and that these properties suffice to account for the essence of our concept of causality” (2002, 15). Descola refers more explicitly to a contemporary of Hume’s: Goethe, who inspired Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Descola explains this background briefly in The Composition of Worlds ([2014] 2017 233–235). As we know, Goethe developed a typology which he intended to use to show how the individual should be classified within the overall order of nature. This classification of things is established through a series of similarities. Such an approach is thus based on a comparative description, with the assignment of individual things to a series of forms. The assignment of individual forms to a series then shows what varies in the forms of nature and how this variation takes place. Morphology thus becomes the reference grid that groups the details of nature (Breidbach 2001). Although Descola refers to Hume to explain his logical (and structural) perspective and to Goethe in relation to transformation groups, we can also perceive a possibly even more fundamental Husserlian influence concerning logical laws on his approach: [L]ogic reveals itself as a normative science and rejects the comparative method of historical science, which seeks to understand the sciences as concrete products of the culture of different periods […]. It is, in fact, the essence of normative science to found general propositions in which are given […] determined characteristics whose possession guarantees the

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adequacy of this norm or conversely constitutes an indispensable condition for this adequacy. (Husserl 2009, 28) Husserl was indeed interested in the relation between logical laws and the way they are constituted in lived experiences: [T]he question is whether it is only the practical point of view that founds the right of logic to be a scientific discipline of its own, whereas, from the theoretical point of view, all that logic gathers of knowledge would consist, on the one hand, of purely theoretical propositions that must seek their place of origin in other theoretical sciences known elsewhere, but mainly in psychology, and, on the other hand, of rules based on these theoretical propositions. (ibid., 34) Husserl claims (as lived experience is neutralised) that these logical laws cannot be reduced to psychological laws, but they act on our psyche in a “normative” way, thus establishing a link between the two. This idea should not be confused, of course, with the structuralist perspective and the relation it establishes between language (collective, normative), whose logical structures are to be deciphered, and speech (individual, personal consciousness), which is determined by the former. Whether or not these Husserlian logical perspectives influenced Descola, the latter criticises Lévi-Strauss’ nature-culture dualism by envisaging the founding of a monism beyond nature and culture, while deepening the idea of the Kantian transcendental subject by reintroducing it as interpreted through the prism of Husserl. 3.4

Descola and Husserl: Towards an Anthropological Phenomenology?

“The ontological question returns. And how can we reopen it?” Latour asks. He describes Beyond Nature and Culture as producing “fireworks” that represented the last moment of structuralism. He criticises this work for leaving the ontological question untouched, because, in his view, structuralism has no political project and is not equipped to interrogate ontology—whereas Latour associates his work with a political philosophy capable of interrogating ontology (Fossier and Gardella 2006). To what extent does Descola’s ontological perspective refer to the question of being as being? Here is how he answers: Let me clarify that ontology is not considered here as the science of being as expressed in Greek—to use Heidegger’s qualification of philosophy; an ontology is simply a concrete expression of how a particular world is

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composed, what kind of materials it is made up of, according to the general arrangement specified by a mode of identification (animism, totemism, etc.). In contrast to the latter, a cosmology (such as those of China or ancient Greece) is simply the form of distribution in space of the components of an ontology and the type of relations that link them. (2014b, 437) It is all the more obvious that Descola does not connect his ontological perspective with ancient Greece as he dispenses with any reflection on a possible substance—without denying the latter in the analogist perspective, and therefore in relation to the empirical—in order to glimpse it relationally. It is for him a matter of “qualities” that the subject lends to the object: For me, an ontology is simply the instituted result of a mode of identification, the particular form, identifiable in discourses and images, that one of the four regimes of continuity and discontinuity takes in such and such a time and in such and such a region of the world. ([2014] 2017, 237) We are thus very explicitly brought back to the Latin etymological sense of relation: It is not just a question of an “in-between” but of the projection of qualities from the subject onto an object. This relational “trajectory” is important to consider in all its complexity, because what is at stake is not only oneself but the other, the other on whom one projects qualities. It is an openly relative relationism that is very close to the Kantian perspective and without correlativity. The sinologist Stephan Feuchtwang writes about the role played by this Descolian notion of ontology: I understand it as a superior substitute for the two notions of “culture” and “ideology.” Superior to “culture” because it goes beyond values […]. Superior to “ideology” for the same reason and because it includes not only institutions […], but also a way, or a mode of experiencing the world that tests knowledge of the world in practice.3 (2014, 383) As we have seen, ontology in Descola’s sense refers to a hermeneutical position.4 For him, the differences that can be observed among humans do not emanate from their various cultural registers. And he poses the question differently: The differences that we observe are on the contrary the stabilized results of more fundamental intuitions […]. The word ontology seemed to me to be appropriate to designate this analytical level which could be qualified as antecedent in the language of phenomenology. ([2014] 2017, 239–240)

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In this sense, the social is rather the effect than a cause, as he notes again in The Composition of Worlds; consequently, he wants to set up a “science of beings and relations” ([2014] 2017, 245). Descola uses philosophical discourse—phenomenological in this case because although he previously took recourse to Heidegger to define ontology, he claims, but without making any specific references to his work, that Husserl is the starting point for his thinking—to answer questions that anthropologists generally do not know how to answer or do not want to answer. Although Descola claims to have been inspired by Husserl, the latter’s name only appears on page 168 of Beyond Nature and Culture, without even a reference for his citation. It is in HAU that he is more explicit on the question, a point I will return to. Bruce Kapferer maintains that Heidegger’s influence is arguably stronger than Descola is willing to admit: It is Heidegger who argues that the ontological, Being, reveals its form through its actualizations in the future, in its completions rather than in its beginnings. Of course, Husserl and Heidegger have an influence on Merleau-Ponty who makes his own innovations by going beyond Husserl’s equation of consciousness with intentionality, emphasizing that consciousness is both embodied and emergent through the multiplicities of perception. This is certainly relevant to Descola’s fourfold ontological schema […]. (2014b, 391) While it is fair to point out that it was Heidegger who emphasised the ontological dimension in the philosophical debate, it is Husserl who posed the question of the transcendental subject in relation to intentionality. By referring to them, Descola ventures into the “philosophical landscape” that Lévi-Strauss refused to put on his itinerary—without having abandoned it. Like Lévi-Strauss, he found it “useful to give a sort of philosophical, epistemological and cognitive underpinning” ([2014b] 2017, 219) to his conceptions. And if he has reinterrogated the ontological question, he specifies, it is by a requirement of conceptual hygiene [sic!]: we must look for the roots of the diversity of humans at a deeper level, that of the differences in the basic inferences that they make according to situations about the kinds of beings that populate the world and the ways in which these beings relate to each other. (ibid., 240) At the same time, Descola uses ethnography to answer philosophical questions about human nature. More specifically, he uses a double strategy in his reflection. On the one hand, he highlights a flaw in Husserl that only anthropology would be able to mend; on the other hand, he uses Husserl to fix a flaw that he has identified in anthropology.

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Husserl’s flaw concerns his approach to the transcendental subject, which gives rise to a formal ontology of the “something in general” that takes no account of anthropological diversity. This also explains why Descola suggests building a bridge between egology and anthropology, a point I will return to. The flaw in anthropology lies, in his view, in its inability to reduce anthropological diversity to a universal foundation. This means taking up a definite opposition to relativism that does not, however, exclude a form of relativism in terms of the ontologies themselves, as was previously said—but at a level derived from reflexivity and not ethnography. Let us now take a closer look at how Descola links anthropology and transcendental phenomenology. 3.5

The Transcendental Subject in Anthropology

Unlike Kant, the transcendental subject is not, for Husserl, a mere condition of possibility but a structure, centred, that can be analysed and described by means of a specific experience called “transcendental experience” (Husserl 1990). It requires the phenomenological method—the notion of transcendental experience would have been a contradiction for Kant, in that the transcendental could not, in his eyes, admit of being experienced. One of the most enlightening passages in Beyond Nature and Culture on this subject can be found where Descola discusses his relationist project in terms of “relative universalism,” a term which will be discussed later: There is no need here for a transcendental subject or an immanent, disembodied mind to act as a catalyst for meaning. All that this program requires is a subject that does not prejudge the experience of another’s consciousness from the experience of his or her consciousness and that nevertheless admits that the world offers the same kind of “holds” to all, whatever the uses, cognitive or practical, to which they lend themselves; a subject more attentive to the real instituted by the intentional activity of the very diverse subjectivities whose products it studies than to the deceptive evidence of its own instituting intentionality, which is thus reduced to the dimensions of an imperfect filter, always determined by historical determinations that no epoche can reduce; a filter that is certainly indispensable but that has no other privilege than to be the only one accessible, and that it must manage to objectify from the outside as a simple variation among others of the regime of being, provisionally invested with a function of totalizing knowledge because of the conjuncture in which it is placed. (2005, 419) In an article published in HAU, Descola explains (2014b, 438) his philosophical stance and the vision of anthropology that it generates. He specifies that his combinatorial approach, which unfolds in the form of four

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fundamental ontologies, only makes sense if it is based on the “transcendental subject,” which he evacuates, as we have just seen, from the sphere of meaning and knowledge. But how exactly should we understand the status of this instance (constitutive of combinatorics) that he calls the “transcendental subject,” which is, in Kant, an indispensable tool for reflecting on knowledge, but is in this way unexperienced, whereas, in Husserl, the phenomenologist would be capable, by reduction, of experiencing this transcendental instance? Is it, in Descola’s case, a real structure, possessing a determined ontological status in itself, or a hermeneutic structure (in Heidegger and Ricoeur’s sense) that would illuminate the epistemic tools through which we apprehend the world? The anthropologist clearly states that he understands the transcendental subject after the fashion of Husserl and not Kant, the essential difference between the two consisting, as should be emphasised again, in the fact that for the latter it is only a simple “condition of possibility” of knowledge, whereas for the former it possesses an “eidetic” structure and a certain “sense of being” that can be described thanks to a specific “intuition” that characterises the “transcendental experience.” It would thus seem that the transcendental subject translates an an-anthropological vision of this original instance, which is supposed to account for ontological combinatorics. But how to account for it? While Descola bases his combinatorics on the idea of the transcendental subject taken from Husserl, he reinterprets it in terms of an “identifying” instance characterised especially by the double dimension of intentionality and corporeality (interiority and exteriority, interiority and physicality): Operating well upstream of the categorization of beings and things revealed by taxonomies, identification is the capacity to apprehend and distribute some of the continuities and discontinuities that are offered to our grasp by the observation and practice of our environment. This elementary mechanism of ontological discrimination does not refer to empirical judgments about the nature of the objects that present themselves to our perception at each moment. Rather, it should be seen as what Husserl called an antecedent experience in that it modulates the general awareness I can have of the existence of an other, this awareness being formed from the only resources belonging to me when I abstract from the world and all that it means to me, namely my body and my intentionality. (2005, 168) Descola builds his system on this dualistic combination, which is in fact not so marked in Husserl (because intentionality predominates there, even if it is a bodily intentionality5). A dualism thus underlies his monistic project. Would this recourse to the Husserlian transcendental subject give rise to the reproach of “solipsism”? The anthropologist circumvents the problem by referring once again to Husserl, for whom the transcendental subject is originally constituted in an intersubjective way, it is already traversed by the

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other, who is a concrete being, precisely a living body (Leib). Without living corporeality, there is no otherness. So for Husserl the transcendental subject has a leiblich dimension (pertaining to a “living corporeality”).6 But to what extent is this anthropological? If the transcendental subject is constituted intersubjectively, what relation does it have to the human? For Descola, anthropology is secondary—though essential—in that it derives from ontology, which is itself founded in egology. He thus reveals in HAU that he does not start from ontologies, from “ontological wholes” in order to arrive at an understanding of what they constitute, but from “transcendental parts” in order to arrive at structural totalities through a point of passage, an “unexpected bridge,” he writes, that allows passing from egology (of the transcendental subject) to ontology. Anthropology thus rests, by virtue of a transitive relation, in the transcendental subject. But are we to cross this gap? Let us focus on this “bridge.” As Descola says he is inspired by the Husserlian transcendental subject, which he reinterprets in terms of the duality of intentionality/corporality and which he transcribes in the form of interiority/physicality—“every human perceives himself as a mixed unit of interiority and physicality” (2005, 169).7 He sets up in this way the combinatorial system referred to above, which gives rise to a fourfold distribution between these two parameters, namely: animism, in which all existing things with their different physicalities are characterised by the same interiority, totemism, in which all that exists has the same interiority and the same physicality, naturalism, in which all that exists has the same physicality but different interiorities, and finally, the analogical system, which is characterised by discontinuous interiorities and physicalities. The conceptual content of this bridge is ultimately neither anthropological nor phenomenological but a mathematical substruction (2² ontologies) that is heavy with metaphysical presuppositions. Descola does not explain how one moves from the transcendental to the anthropological. According to him, the transcendental subject generates an ontological matrix, thereby establishing this bridge between an inscription in the transcendental “I” and ontology. However, the claim that there is an intersubjective dimension to the transcendental subject stands in need of clarification, since the anthropologist, who nevertheless promotes a “conceptual hygiene,” takes it for granted that the transcendental subject is constituted intersubjectively, whereas among phenomenologists, the debate on this is far from settled.8 This claim accordingly suggests that the intersubjective constitution of the subject is a proven fact and that recourse to intersubjectivity removes us from the solipsistic framework, gives the subject an anthropological dimension, and refers to human diversity. However, it is not certain that in Husserl the otherness to which this intersubjectivity refers integrates any anthropological diversity. Hence these analyses do not allow a precise and clear reconstruction of how this passage from egology to ontology is concretely achieved. In short, the anthropo-philosophical debate is far from over and is still ongoing.

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Descola sets up the transcendental subject as an instance conditioning his system but does not clarify. As a sort of empty shell, the latter remains statically posed as a condition of possibility. The same holds of the aforementioned logical relations. Descola ultimately reduces reality to the concept through his quadri-ontological system. And if we were to follow the full implications of this proposed theoretical scheme, ethnographies would not contain any conceptual surprises, since they would be a priori insertable into this system, all the more ineluctably as ontologies are said to be modulable in the form of “an animism tinged with analogism,” for example. Such an approach seems to close ethnology upon itself, leaving it with nothing more to reveal. How can we understand, therefore, the multiplicity and the theoretical and conceptual inventiveness of ethnography? If everything is already pre-classified, why go in search of an ethnography that, in any case, would fit into one and/or the other ontology? Let us recall what Lévi-Strauss wrote in La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]: “The truth is that the principle of a classification can never be postulated: only ethnographic investigation, that is to say experience, can bring it out a posteriori” (1962, 77). How can we accept that field materials are preclassified in a system fixed a priori? Is this not precisely contrary to what the father of structural anthropology advocated, who was so concerned with referring to ethnographic data without glimpsing in it a preconceived system? 3.6

Descolian Relationism as a Structuralist Ersatz, or the Universality of the Relation

Descola thinks he is opening up “the path that would make it possible to reconcile the demands of scientific inquiry with respect for the diversity of the states of the world,” a path he calls “relative universalism,” an adjective that expresses the idea of relation (2005, 418). Referring to this relationist project, he more specifically states that [r]elative universalism does not start from nature and cultures, from substances and minds, from discriminations between primary and secondary qualities, but from the relations of continuity and discontinuity, of identity and difference, of resemblance and dissimilarity that humans establish everywhere between existing beings by means of the tools inherited from their phylogenesis: a body, an intentionality, an ability to perceive distinctive differences, the capacity to establish with any other person relations of attachment or antagonism, domination or dependence, exchange or appropriation, subjectivation or objectivation. (ibid., 418–419) Relation expressly predominates in this anthropology. As was mentioned, Latour saw Beyond Nature and Culture as the last moment of structuralism; Descola, in fact, states that he is part of this tradition while distancing himself from Lévi-Strauss, when he writes that:

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One can easily discern in this project a legacy of structural analysis, which holds that an element of the world becomes meaningful only by contrast with other elements, but a project stripped of the methodological clause of having to divide these elements and their relations into the black boxes of culture and nature. (ibid., 419) Descola assumes his structuralist heritage (and, through it, that of Kant and Piaget) when he speaks of the combinatoriality underlying his project.9 He goes even further, arguing that recent work in cognitive psychology validates this long-standing theoretical position. In fact, he relies on the latter especially ([2014] 2017, 222): It is the idea that much of what humans do is based on the activation of abstract structures that organize knowledge and practical action without mobilizing mental images or explicit knowledge that can be organized into propositions. (ibid., 221) Descola still refers to “mental models,” “connectionist models” and “schematic induction.” Structure upon structure. During the 2009 Disputatio, Maniglier asked Descola directly how one can claim to articulate the objectification of facts and the analysis of diversities in view of the displacement in relation to oneself that the field causes. This philosopher particularly emphasised the Descolaian paradox generated by “wanting to put things in order” on the one hand, and at the same time by a “decentring” on the other. Descola completely refused to engage in this debate, not answering the questions that, in his view, referred to epistemological rather than anthropological issues. Yet it seems difficult to duck this issue when one makes extensive use of both philosophical and cognitivist presuppositions in order to create an experimental device that is extremely remote from other epistemologies. Basically, and contrary to what I am sometimes reproached for, I am trying to develop analytical tools that are as free as possible from the historical particularities that social science concepts currently possess. ([2014] 2017, 244) How can we evaluate such an assertion when the whole device set up here is a construction that appeals to cognitive psychology, a naturalised conception of Kant’s philosophy and phenomenology, Goethe’s philosophy of nature, and even Deleuze’s interpretation of Hume? [W]hat I aspire to is a form of symmetrization that places anthropologists and those they deal with on a conceptual level of equality. […] This

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project does not aim to generalize the scope of a local principle (as has been done with mana, for example) nor to propose a philosophical counter-model inspired by indigenous thought… it aims to construct a combinatorial system that accounts for all the states of a set of phenomena by highlighting the systematic differences that oppose these elements. (ibid., 252) But to what extent does the other have a say in the theory proposed by Descola, who takes care to specify that “this analysis in no way implies an imperial point of view” (ibid., 253)? In what way is anthropological multiplicity fully considered in such a combinatorial mechanism through which this anthropologist seems to prolong and further support the naturalist heritage of 19th century anthropology? Despite the usual precautions he takes in his writings, he proves to be convinced of the validity of his system, taking any ethnographic element into the clutches of his structural-cognitive machine. He forces others to enter his “history-fiction” (ibid.). Thus, sacrificial shamanic societies are for him transformations and hybridisations, process that he describes using the biological term “exaptation” (ibid., 258–259). He refers once again to D’Arcy Wentworth Thomson and the model of organism transformations (ibid., 260) in order to think this, but not to ethnographies themselves, which contain many other interpretative paths (such as that of submutance in the Chinese context). 3.7

Chinese Analogism

I will now examine how and why, when discussing analogism in Chapter 9 of Beyond Nature and Culture, Descola first refers not to Chinese cultures but to “China,” which cannot be reduced to a thought, nor to a cultural modality as was already emphasised (see introduction). This type of system is characterised, he writes, by “the difficulty of distinguishing in practice [sic!], in the components of the existing, between what belongs to interiority and what belongs to physicality” (ibid., 287). Descola then refers to Granet (ibid., 287), more precisely at the beginning of Chapter 2 of La pensée chinoise [Chinese Thought] where the sinologist introduced the idea of a “global knowledge” that “is constituted by the sole use of analogy,” “valid for the macrocosm and for all the microcosms that fit into it” (Granet [1934] 1968, 297). Descola does not quote this passage in its entirety but focuses especially on what concerns microcosms in the macrocosm. It may be because for him, “this topicality is difficult to handle. Because it is universal if we take it at its highest degree of generality” (2005, 302). In The Composition of Worlds, Descola reveals that it was more precisely the crossreading of Foucault’s Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things], particularly the chapter on Renaissance thought, and Granet’s Chinese Thought that made him realise that there was a correspondence between the two descriptions proposed in relation to analogism and thus the possibility of a comparatism beyond Mexico and the Andes (ibid., 216).

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Even if Granet did evoke the concept of analogy, he nevertheless did not in any way foreground this notion in his analyses. Descola then refers to another passage in the same book, which speaks of what constitutes the “ten thousand things”—all existing things in the Chinese sense—namely, as Granet points out, exhalations and emanations from the sky, where the breath qi reigns, and from the earth, which produces nourishing essences jing (Granet [1934] 1968, 329). Stressing that in China there is no opposition between spirit and matter, Descola draws an inference about analogical ontology: Intentionality and corporeality rarely emerge as autonomous entities, distributed as they are in chains of coupling marrying the material and the immaterial at all levels of scale of the microcosm and the macrocosm. So my definition of analogism as a combination of difference of interiorities and difference of physicalities is not to be taken quite literally, as the contours of these two sets appear indecisive. (2005, 288) Descola himself notes that these Chinese cosmic “entities” somewhat confuse his theoretical orientation—without, however, prompting him to question them head on. He starts from a body-intentionality dualism and cannot envisage the body as intentionality, intentionality-flesh (in other words, submutance). But is this an admission of the limits of the system presented? Why include “China” in the analogy, if sinology (at least on Granet’s interpretation) itself demonstrates that the intentionalityphysicality dualism at the foundation of the four ontologies mentioned above cannot be applied to it? Descola, who openly admits “to embracing a completely dualistic point of view by maintaining that the double experience of a body and intentionality is universal” (2006, 244), refuses to confront this question, “[d]odging China, and the formidable erudition that its treatment requires” (2005, 288), before turning abruptly to Mexico. It is clear that the argument here is more intuitive than well founded, and that China, which has to be classified in the proposed ontological chart, escapes precisely such a classificatory treatment.10 Subsequently, after mentioning Dumont’s holism in which each existent is set in a hierarchical value system, Descola again discusses this cultural area, in particular the “inversions of dominance that accompany, in China, the changes of levels,” referring here to the “pre-eminence” of the left or the right in certain parts of the body (ibid., 316). He concludes that: Thanks to a set of rules based on analogy, inversion and duplication, a universe crumbled by multiple discontinuities becomes intelligible in all its connections and, at the cost of unfailing deference to ritual obligations and etiquette, habitable by everyone without confusion of place or status. (ibid.)

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However, Granet’s famous essay La droite et la gauche en Chine [The Right and the Left in China] (1933) does not support such an inverted perception of the system nor of the purported pre-eminences or discontinuities. On the contrary, Granet points to a system that is not fixed, namely one constituted by valences rather than by more or less connected discontinuities. The sinologist specifies that the diametrical opposition or polarity of which Hertz spoke is not found in China. The Chinese attribute unequal values to Left and Right, depending on the case, but always comparable. It is never an absolute pre-eminence, but rather an alternation. This is due to a number of characteristics of Chinese civilization and thought. There is nothing abstract in Chinese categories: One would look in vain for diametric oppositions, such as that of Being and non-Being. Space and Time are conceived as a set of domains, each with its own conveniences: instead of absolute oppositions, there are only correlations, and, consequently, neither formal indications nor counter-indications, neither absolute obligations nor strict taboos are admitted. Everything is a matter of convenience, because everything is a matter of congruence. ([1933] 1990, 22) In Chapter 10, on “terms, relations, categories,” Descola refers once again to “China,” more specifically to the “five elements.” He speaks of their “connection” with other “semantic fields,” and finally associates analogism with a classification by attributes. However, if we can perceive an extremely Saussurian/Jakobsonnian approach in this use of a linguistic lexicon and the primacy it accords to the syntactic analysis of the world, which is seen as a kind of language to be deciphered and thus fully inscribes Descola in a structuralist perspective, we shall also see that to think of China using categories and singularities, thus in the Greek and European way and through the prism of Eurocentric logical and linguistic structures, runs contrary to Chinese perceptions. By using the expression “five elements” rather than “five agents,” which has become well established and is in any case closer to the Chinese meaning, Descola also totally excludes the movement and transformations from his reflections, that is to say he rejects relation taken in a dynamic (the intentional body, so to speak) internal to relations in Chinese perspectives. He places the idea of dynamics and transformations on to the scale of the logical structures that he elucidates, referring once again to Lévi-Straussian “groups of transformation,” but not on to the scale of “substantial relationism,” i.e., on to the scale of the idea of submutance observable in China. And when, a few pages later, he returns to these five elements that he associates with the materials, among others, of an “analogical physics,” he adds that it is always on the same basic substances and the same principles of attraction and repulsion that the litany of sympathies and discordances is

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played out, as it is in medical knowledge, food prescriptions and ritual prescriptions. (ibid., 411) After the “dissatisfaction” that he associated with analogy 130 pages earlier, and then the “difficulties in distinguishing” between interiority and exteriority noted among analogists referred to a few pages later, one may wonder why it seems to him again necessary to use a vocabulary referring to affective states of mind here. Moreover, to associate the five “elements” with dualistic principles and substances without questioning the latter is once again to disregard dynamic perspectives that are far more complex than his schema suggests. Yet it is ultimately to the idea of process that Descola refers when he again discusses China in the last part of his book which is devoted to the “ecology of relations,” more precisely to “forms of attachment.” He refers to François Jullien’s commentary on Wang Fuzhi, emphasising not only “a logic of mutual relation without beginning or end,” (ibid., 442) but above all “the process [that] acts in a totally impersonal and unintentional way” (ibid.). Descola further stresses the importance of the “permanent flow of transformations” (ibid.). But why not address precisely this unintentionality introduced by a contemporary sinologist that is contrary to the intentionality that Descola places at the foundation of his ontologies and why not address the major question of these Chinese substances in movement instead of applying a conceptual scheme that, as the author himself underlines, fails to reflect local logics? The question of unintentionality that Jullien introduced remains to be discussed, especially with regard to whether a mythical or a practical view of it should be taken. As we will see later, intentionality is fundamental to Chinese practitioners who are considered capable of acting on universal flows. Descola raises a striking issue with the example of China—and in this his intuition is right—but he does not address it, because this would require revising not only the nature-culture dualism as he proposes, but (above all) the substance-relation conceptual couple which he wants to use to deconstruct the former. The point here would be not to place at the centre of the analysis the logical relations that Descola believes can be put forward with regard to China (and thus his structuralist epistemological perspective), but to start from the submutances as they are perceived there in all their transitivity through the components of the cosmos (and thus from the local epistemological perspectives). In short, a decentring seems indispensable in order to grasp what actors of the past, as well as the contemporary Chinese, express through ancient texts, their discourses, and their practices. It should also be noted that no Chinese ethnologists appear in the bibliography of Beyond Nature and Culture and that Descola did not include any Chinese ethnographic data in his discussions. He refers only to what is commonly known as “classical China” as discussed in Jullien’s work, through reference to specific authors. This means he has an extremely limited perception of China.

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In another note, which concerning New Guinea but is comparable to his approach to China, Descola admits he had “great difficulty isolating truly pure forms of one or other of the cosmologies [he has] defined” ([2014] 2017, 262). He mentions animist practices, totemic or analogist referents, and concludes: I sometimes feel that New Guinea is a vast group of transformation, in which a wide range of elements have combined in very diverse forms, in a fairly tight region. (ibid., 262–263) In other words, like China, New Guinea should therefore submit to Descola’s logical construction scheme. There is no need to stress here once again the subjectivity of such presuppositions: Instead of apprehending this territory for what it is, Descola conceives it as a conceptual laboratory in order to understand “how combinations of this type can be articulated and accompanied by different modes of identification” (ibid., 264). When ethnographic elements do not fit into his interpretative grid, as is also the case with shamanism and sacrifice, Descola inevitably refers them to processes of transformation in order to demonstrate the validity of his combinatorial approach and to prove the importance of the naturalistic processes placed at the heart of his “history-fiction,” an expression Descola himself coined. 3.8

Beyond Ontology: Body, Metacosmology, and Principles of Mutation

Descolian ontologies bring into play differential representations of worlds, whereas, as we will see in the next chapter, in Viveiros de Castro’s case, ontology does not refer to the scaffolding of a combinatorial system but to a plurality of worlds. Although the concept of ontology as used by these anthropologists has a degree of reflexivity that goes beyond the question of being as being, the notion remains nonetheless trapped in a specific philosophical and conceptual basis. It proves inapplicable to China, which “has strangely kept itself at a distance from such an adventure of the mind, not having taken the path of ontology in order to respond to the identifying concern of ‘what is it’, ti esti” (Jullien 2003, 27). As Du Xiaozhen points out (2011, 18), it is therefore extremely difficult to translate the concept of being into Chinese and of course this difficulty goes beyond the simple problem of translation in that it reflects a difference between modes of thought: Chinese thought based on the union of man and nature is contrary to Western thought. Its ideal is to reach the plenitude where there is no longer any distinction between subject and object, where everything can be experienced by the senses, and man and nature are united in the same body, henceforth directed by the same laws. (ibid., 20)

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This again resonates with Baptandier’s words when she writes that “China conceives of reality not in terms of being, but of process” (2017, 16). Feuchtwang similarly questions whether it is appropriate to call these families of universes “ontologies,” when Chinese ritual and other practices, including philosophical disputations and speculations, do not inquire into the existence of “being” or the thinking about thinking by which humans approximate the Unmoved Mover who thinks the world in Greek speculation. Philosophy endogenous to China has no preoccupation with being, no ontology. Cosmology in the changing civilization out of which this Chinese philosophy arises is based on the problem of preventing disorder under Heaven, ritually communicating with cosmogonic origins and with heavenly deities, whose most privileged places are in the border regions of All under Heaven. It is not a philosophy of joining singularities or communicating in a hierarchy of singularities and their classes of being. (2014, 387) In the opening of his chapter on the Chinese body and mind, Gernet sums up this last idea (further discussed through Wang Mingming in Chapter 5) very well: Chinese thought is reluctant to exclude and oppose contradictory elements. […] It is more likely to practice a logic of inclusion: for it, complementary opposites form the fabric of the world, and wisdom consists in understanding the complementarity of all things. It is all a question of dosage, of more or less. (1994, 270) Quoting Cheng Hao (1032–1085) for whom “it is in the order of the world that nothing exists in isolation and without its opposite. This is so, not by the effect of a voluntary arrangement, but entirely spontaneously” (ibid.), Gernet adds that in this system of thought, where there is no creator or ordering God, there is nothing eternal in that everything changes indefinitely. The idea of universal change is therefore preponderant. The sinologist also specifies, echoing Vandermeersch in relation to the previously introduced idea of submutance, that “China did not know the notion of matter as a raw and inert thing, just as it reciprocally ignored the notion of spirit as a radically different substance” (ibid., 271). In a way of thinking that privileges the generative model […] over the causal model, the line of relevance, instead of separating the transcendent from the immanent, passes between the virtual and the manifest. Perceived as two aspects of one and the same reality in permanent coming and going, they are

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not generative of “disjunctive concepts” such as being/being, mind/body, God/world, subject/object, reality/appearance, Good/Evil, etc. (1997, 39) Granet does not put it differently, while recalling the indifference between cosmology and politics, when he writes the following: Instead of applying themselves to measuring effects and causes, the Chinese ingenuously list correspondences. The order of the universe is not distinguished from the order of civilization. How could one think of establishing necessary, immutable sequences? To make an inventory of traditional conventions requires a more subtle art of a completely different interest. To know, then, is to be able. Sovereigns, when they are wise, secrete civilization. They maintain it, they propagate it by extending to the whole hierarchy of beings a coherent system of attitudes. They do not think of the constraint of laws, since the prestige of traditional rules is sufficient. Men only need models and things are like them. They do not dare to see in the physical world the reign of necessity, any more than they claim freedom for the moral domain. The macrocosm and the microcosms are equally content to maintain venerable habits. The universe is only a system of behaviours, and the behaviours of the spirit are not distinguished from those of matter. Matter and spirit are not distinguished. The notion of a soul, the idea of an entirely spiritual essence that would be opposed to the body as well as to all material bodies, is completely foreign to Chinese thought. ([1934] 1968, 319) In this connection, Fan Zhen (450–515), a scholar who resists the Buddhist thought that introduced the idea of reincarnation and soul-body dualism into China, wrote a treatise entitled “About the Annihilation of the Soul Shen Mie Lun .” It reads:11 The spirit (shen ) is body (xing ) and the body spirit. Therefore, as long as the body remains, the spirit remains; when the body perishes, the spirit disappears. The body (xing ) is the substance (zhi ) of the mind and the mind is a function (yong ) of the body. The word body therefore refers to the substance (zhi ) and the word mind to the function (yong). Body and mind cannot therefore be regarded as distinct. Mind is to substance [of the body] what the edge is to the blade of a knife; the body is to function, what the blade is to the edge. The word sharp does not mean the blade and the word blade does not mean the edge. However, without an edge, there is no blade; without a blade, there is no edge. I have never heard of an edge remaining when the blade is gone. How can the spirit remain when the body is gone? (1994, 275–276)

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The notion of functionality, yong, is fundamental here, for the correspondences established in China between the body, the emotions, and the cosmos are not established on the level of substantiality (in the Aristotelian sense) but of functionality. This makes Vandermeersch write that the Chinese medicine based on this functionality is “cosmo-psycho-somatic” and Needham that it is a philosophy of the organism (Vandermeersch 2013, 134). Shen  is translated as “spirit” or “soul” in English. The shen that resides in the heart is the “purest of celestial energies” in contrast to the earthly breaths jing located in the kidneys (this term physiologically designates bone marrow, semen, or menstrual blood) (Schipper [1982] 1997, 53). Catherine Despeux specifies that “the same Chinese term shen can designate either the soul, the central principle of the individual, the ‘divinity of the self,’ or the divinities of the body, or even the external divinities that can enter it” (2017, 67). And although zhi  is mistakenly translated into French here as “substance,” it refers to the idea of matter, to a constituent. Xing  refers to “body.” Before going any further, some clarification concerning the status of the body in China is essential because the English term actually covers different Chinese meanings, a “constellation of notions” in the Cheng’s sense (see forward), which underlines how complex and central the body is in this part of the world. In the first place, the xing body Fan Zhen refers to is the body perceived from the outside as a form (xing ) offered to sight, an image, a pictogram referring to the ideal body xing  transmitted by Heaven and Earth, its cosmic parents—I will come back to this parental relation. Xing is, in this sense, the proper body animated by the breath and the spirit traversed by fluids (water, blood, semen), as well as the seat of natural feelings and emotions (Lauwaert 1999, 38). The body-form xing is distinguished from the body called shen; it is then a “body/self” (Lewis 2006, 4), a body-person. An ancient text states that when the shen is governed, the house is well kept; if the house is administered according to custom, so is the state, and vice versa (ibid., 2). Such a deterministic and interactive perception, which makes the body a state in miniature, is a direct consequence of the Chinese model of the origins of the world and of humanity, according to which a series of sequential divisions allows us to emerge from chaos (a genesis I will return later). Everything is a fragment of the original chaos; it is up to the emperor to preserve the primordial unity, the source of harmony. Since universal dissolution is perceived as a constant threat, a series of rites must be performed to maintain order: It is through the idea of shangxia  (superior-inferior), which refers to the hierarchy of the sexes, of the elder and the younger, of the ruler and his subjects, of the civilised and the barbaric, that this order endures. The shen is not only a state in miniature but also a microcosm. Made up of bones and flesh, it is composed of corresponding heavenly and earthly essences. And if the body is a cosmos, it is also a fragment of the cosmos, linked to it through these shared “substances,” or rather submutances, because it is a

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flow of energies and essences that goes from the inside to the outside and the other way around (the skin, the celestial vault, is at the interface between the two12). Shen is thus made of different, fluctuating, and unstable materials. Such conceptions refer to the idea of a “composite body,” as described by the sinologist Mark Edward Lewis (2006, 36). They are driven by heterogeneous substances that generate transformations due to their changing character. The body would be akin to a dynamic mass in perpetual metamorphosis and in close relation with its environment, because, if it is not separated from the spirit, it is hardly more independent of the universe that surrounds it; porous, it impregnates and embodies it just as much (ibid.).13 In addition to the body-form and the body-person, a third figure of the body is identified, namely the ti  which is transmitted in the chain of generations, and whose writing character includes the character “bone” representing the agnatic substance par excellence which is transmitted from father to son, as opposed to flesh associated with women’s transmission. This ti is conceived as an assembly of limbs: It is the body shaped by the institution of kinship that refers to ancestral worship and mourning (Despeux 1996). It also has semantic and graphic analogies with the rituality li  (Lewis 2006, 14). This body in Chinese perception, at once body-form, body-person, and body-genealogy,14 whose representations “proceed from an organicist and ritualized vision of the world, comprising an order, a visible internal structure, and processes” (Despeux 1994, 8), is transformed by chastisements. Like rites [but are they not properly rites?], those act on the body (Lauwaert 1999, 38). In ancient Chinese, “form” and “punishment” were both called xing. It is above all the body-form xing that needs to be reformed by xing punishments. To punish a culprit is therefore to literally “reform” him, writes Lauwaert (ibid.). And the more the offence touched the natural foundations of society, the more radical must the reform of the xing body be and the more radical is the “offence”—this ling being derived from the term lingchi, a corporal punishment of great violence abolished in 1905. Since punishments denounce a disruption of the world, a failure to respect the cosmological order between earth and heaven, they also mean reforming the state and reconfiguring the microcosm constituted by the condemned person’s body in order to better reorder the global universe, whose order the emperor ensures (Névot 2015). The universal harmony and cosmological processes at play are based on the notion of substantial energy flows and exchanges. Feuchtwang points this out, by way of criticism of Descola, when he stresses the glaring difference between a cosmology of elements, conceived as basic substances and the composition of things, including diseases, that emerge from out of them in various balances (Greece and then Europe), and a cosmology composed by basic processes of change (China). These processes of change, deceptively named the Five Elements, though they should be translated as Five Phases—Water, Fire, Metal, Wood (or

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Plants), and Earth—interact in two cycles, one destructive, the other constructive. In other words, the problem of destruction, fragmentation, and disorder is not displaced to the outer regions of All under Heaven, it is inherent in the composition of a total universe. There is no premise of singularities. […] To posit the problem of the existence of singularity and its creatures, other singularities (even without exporting to China the hierarchy of approximation to the ultimate) as common to all analogical schemes and therefore to China as a founding premise is quite obviously wrong. (2014, 386) Gernet is also enlightening in this respect: “There have never been thinkers in China who have distinguished [as the Greeks did], in such a categorical manner, between the sensible and the intelligible, between being and becoming,” a Greek antinomy that was accompanied by “an equally clear-cut opposition between the world of men and that of the gods, between Earth and Heaven” (1994, 327). Hence, the triad tiandiren, i.e., “HeavenEarth-human,” is preponderant and the whole universe is subject to change (ibid.). The 10,000 things that make up the universe are therefore inscribed in cycles and are porous to each other. They are, so to speak, bathed in a common environment of unchanging movements. The Chinese conception […] is rather that of a process of generation by interaction, taking place at the meeting of “inside” and “outside,” of “landscape” and “emotion” (jing-qing). Without a subject-self being able to be invoked as a primary and radical instance. […] In view of this, China offers another possibility: It has conceived of the overcoming of the sensible, it has thought of a “beyond” of the concrete, thus a form of trans-cendence; but this concrete is a concretion, this sensible an actualization: it is what particularizes, by individuating, the great process—regulated—of transformation (shen-hua). Now whoever says “individuation” in this way implies an undifferentiated fund of things: this invisible dimension is the dimension of spirit that never ceases to operate through the sensible, opening it to a beyond. Through… and not separate from […]. (Jullien 2000, 201, 232) True fulfilment is not in the narrow confines of a measurable body, nor is it in a vain fusion with another that would still be finitude, but in the endless and ever-new coming and going between the units of life, the true mystery that is always other. Here, if we accept the idea of breath, we must also be able to admit the view that even our most intimate sensations are not limited to the interior of a poor shell; they are vibrations, waves propagated in a space that comes from oneself, but infinitely overflowing it, in resonance with the great rhythm of the Dao. This is the very definition of ecstasy. […] In short, it is not the One that commands the

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Two, but the Three that transcends the Two, I am not forgetting this comment by Lacan. (Cheng F. 2000, 139–143) The Dao is the properly Chinese principle, in other words, endogenous to China, that embodies these different ideas. For Vandermeersch, it is “the transphenomenal projection of the reason of things” (2013, 169); “beyond sensible forms” (ibid., 109), it constitutes the set of cosmic laws which command the harmonious arrangement of the various movements and changes continually taking place among the ten thousand beings. These laws are not visible on the phenomenal level of things, and are revealed only by divination. (ibid.) These laws related to the five agents (wuxing) and thus to the “way of walking” (xing) and, by extension, to the way of acting of the five matteragents (wu) which are water, fire, wood, metal, and earth, are not laws of causality. The Chinese term for these laws of harmony in the universe is lun (ibid., 112), which refers to the relations of kinship, a kinship that is inscribed, as we shall see later, in the transmission of bodily “substances”: bone, flesh and blood. If Vandermeersch thus sees in Chinese correlative thought “a structuralist thought that explains things through kinship” (ibid., 113) and which functions on a morpho-logic instead of the etio-logic on which Western thought of causality functions” (ibid.),15 it cannot be conceived solely in terms of this formalism, because matters are at stake in these relational schemes: those of nature and of the body, the two being intimately linked. Submutance is thought through these matters, for the correlations in question are animated in and by them. 3.9

The Daoist Body 16

The Tao [Dao] is both the transcendent and immanent principle of the universe, unnameable, ineffable, and yet present in everything. It is much more than a “principle.” The primary meaning of the sign Tao [Dao] is path: the underlying fact of the mutation and transformation of beings, the spontaneous process that governs the natural cycle of the universe. In this process, in this way, the fragmented world, the creation of which we are an integral part, finds its unity. (Schipper [1982] 1997, 15) If it is mistaken to apply the idea of singularities to China, Feuchtwang does not remind us that in China, and in Daoist thought in particular, which is more or less prevalent but in any case diffused throughout the country, writing is given a primordial role in the advent of everything that constitutes the

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world and in this sub-mututantial schema. However, “structural rigidity” (Feuchtwang 2014, 387) refers to a formal conception of writing, which recalls Derridean criticism of this: “any signifier, and first of all the written signifier, would be derived. It would always be technical and representative. It would have no constitutive meaning” (Derrida 1967, 23). According to Derrida, logocentrism would be essential to the determination of the being of being as presence: “The era of the logos thus lowers writing thought as mediation of mediation and falls into the exteriority of meaning” (ibid., 34). In this respect, China proposes a reversal of thought, or rather a cosmological reversal. The Daoist myth of the emergence of writing reminds us that embracing heaven and earth, medium object and agent of passage from one world to another, writing, the “decipherer of the world,” emanates from the primordial breaths, pre-figures of the varied essence of things. The transcendent nature of signs, these qi  (breaths) of the hidden world, manifests itself in the form of Real Writings, zhen wen ,17 archetypal emblems of the true and perfect form of all things, whose first visible signs were the mountains and rivers. Born in the same spurt as the original Beginning, writing is closely related to a primordial language of the world and thereby asserts its cosmogonic power of revelation of the hidden structures of the universe: The characters are above all the raw material, the living force of the cosmos, and the geological writing of the sacred diagrams, these Real Writings, thanks to which it is possible to infer the founding peaks and the curve of the rivers, precedes the creation of the world. The image thus precedes the site… and the mountain can therefore be considered as a writing. “The most sacred is not written by human hand but by Nature.”18 […] The prototype of these actual Writings, the sacred map of the “Five Talismans of the Precious Jewel,” Lingbao , was revealed to Yu the Great, founding ancestor and mythical hero, as a golden rule to assist him in putting the world in order. (Chenivesse 1996, 65–66) Hence, the importance of writing in the related practices and more broadly in Chinese cults. As Baptandier points out, “this mythological story, included in a ritual, highlights the relation of writing to the very substance of cosmological reality, and also, of course, to the human body, in the entire Chinese symbolic system” (1994, 60). She refers here more precisely to the Suqi of the golden register (Ms taoïste ASMT 1/1 029 EPHE, V Section, the text of a Daoist ritual accompanying the sacrifice of the writings): “It is said that when the primordial chaos burst, the breaths contained in it spread out. Then they dispersed and coagulated into a kind of first breath, and this is how they gave rise to the Real Writings, zhenwen. These Real Writings, a kind of grimoires, cosmological arabesques, gave rise to the ten thousand created things” (ibid.) Vandermeersch points out that

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[w]e are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Western theology, which makes God a “person,” man “his image,” and nature a “creation” of God handed over to man for “transformation.” The anthropomorphism of Christian theology is turned into the cosmomorphism of Chinese anthropology, making the moral (cultural) impulse proper to human nature one of the forms of the cosmic forces which command all the movements of the ten thousand beings. (2013, 170) In his book on the Daoist body, Schipper refers to this primordial chaos, hundun, which contains the universe in a diffuse state, namely the qi breaths. Under the influence of the Dao, this matrix reaches maturity, releasing these breaths: the lightest form the sky, the heaviest constitute the earth, then “from this polarity, the energies knot and unite at the centre which locates the third modality,” these three modalities giving birth to the 10,000 beings still called 10,000 things (Schipper [1982] 1997, 51).19 This diversification of energies does not mean that the composed whole is immutable but on the contrary that it is in constant change (ibid., 59). In this creation, the human being has no particular position, except as the most complex conglomerate. He incorporates all the differentiated energies of the universe. […] The force that makes the gods is [therefore] inherent in every being. Transcendence is not the work of a spirit separate from matter, a divine force allogeneous and given to the world, but a spiritualization of matter-energy (qi) itself. Cosmology has taught us that there is nothing that is not “matter” and that this matter is not distinguished from its substance, its energy or “breath.”20 (ibid., 52, 59) Therefore, it is the dynamics of body’s internal organs that is the object of Chinese physician’s attention: Correlativity does not apply to anatomy but to physiology (Vandermeersch 2013, 131, see also 133). The organic and visceral functions are then considered as yin or yang and each viscera is put in correspondence with one of the five agents. It is important to ensure internal balance (whose harmony refers to that of the cosmos). As Despeux points out, it is not by chance that Daoist practitioners have allowed acupuncture to continue, aiming to activate the components of the person in order to establish “a dialogue between oneself, the other and the surrounding world” (2017, 49). In her analysis of various acupuncture sessions conducted by a Daoist nun in 1993, she shows to what extent the relation between the therapist and her patient implies a body-to-body relation, “an active knowledge that passes through this mirror-presence [that of the acupuncturist], through the intention or mental image of the therapist (the yi), through the name of the point and the gesture of the practitioner” (ibid., 55, see also 60, 68). Through the acupuncture point and the needle, the breath is conveyed between the inside and the outside, the other, and the self (ibid., 72).

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Daoist thought shares this view of the living forces of the cosmos and the writing made of the primordial breaths is constitutive of it, “it is these relations of a second type that have been theorized by a metacosmology playing on correlativity instead of causality” (Vandermeersch 2013, 109). According to these conceptions, the human body can thus be modified. Recalling the capacity “to charge itself with energy and transmute itself […], it can not only be better off, but can radiate energy, that is, become transcendent” (Schipper [1982] 1997, 60). In other words, every human potentially holds the power of the gods. The Daoist Masters, daoshi (), who believe they have the ability to become immortals through extremely complex bodily exercises, are in fact part of a transmission process that passes on essences, breaths and energies and their ritual practices include the exchange of these.21 Submutances predominate in their actions. Schipper thus emphasises that to become an officiant, one must first inherit the bones, in other words the skeleton of the immortal, and thus be inscribed in a lineage of officiants ([1982] 1997] 83). This transmission of the Daoist body confers the right to hold the sacred writings that carry the cosmic essences and these are considered, as already emphasised, as being spontaneous creations of the universe: These ideograms are the cosmic essences that are present in their primordial power. One must be initiated to be able to use them and thus acquire the function of “transforming as a delegate of Heaven” (ibid., 85). The disciple’s body contains the primordial vital energy, and his ordination enables him to recognise and externalise it “and to make his body radiate and create his own universe, a space of order and peace, a sanctuary in which all beings who pass through it will be transformed” (ibid., 99). It is his role to “bind and unbind, to bring and integrate all beings into the space of the Dao [Dao]” (ibid., 102). Once invested with the Charter, [t]he Master incorporates the One breath, from which he creates, in his body, the categorical energies, the Agents that he entrusts to the faithful according to their Fundamental Destiny. The merit acquired by the latter returns to the social body which finds its source in the body of the Master, since it is through him that the passage of beings is accomplished. (ibid., 93) This is what it means to “transform as a delegate from heaven.” It implies that “man’s morality is a cosmic force” (Vandermeersch 2013, 169). The Daoist Master can, for example, expel energy from his body to compensate for the lack of energy breath of his patient, which entails mastering certain bodily techniques (Schipper [1982] 1997, 117). The sacrifice of scriptures plays an important role in these practices, which have banished bloody sacrifices; sacred books may thus be burned at the end of a ritual. “[T]he meaning of this gesture is defined in terms of transformation (hua) […], oblation is a transmutation that allows the essence of the sacrificed object to

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be distilled” (ibid., 124). To sacrifice, Schipper further clarifies, is to make real: The virtue released will remain active for some time; the transformation of the scriptures by fire causes them to return to their primordial state of living forces, primary energies, breaths. Indeed, the key ideas of Daoism are bian-hua , change, mutation, transformation, flow (ibid., 158). Schipper also points out, based on mythology, that Laozi is a man who is his own mother, his own womb: “the body of the Tao [Dao] is first woman, then child. The father is entirely absent in the genesis” (ibid., 167). In this sense, the action of the Dao, the creative power, is feminine, which refers to a primacy of the feminine in Daoism, but we should be more precise on this point: the body of the Tao [Dao] goes through successive and alternative transformations. First, there are repeated mutations between concentration and dispersion. Then, at each stage, there is the constitution of a form, a physical body, and between these distinct bodies: Old Lord, Mother, Old Child, a continuity which is a trans-substantiality. (ibid., 165) Following Schipper, we could say that this “trans-substantial” process, which is expressed in myths, learned discourses, and ritual practices, floods the whole of Chinese representations. For example, regarding a passage from the Yueji that appears in the Historical Memoirs of Sima Qian and in the Book of Rites, Sabine Trébinjac points out (2008, 36 note 56) that distinct writing characters are used in these two books when referring to qi: In one case, the character qi is calligraphed in such a way that Trébinjac translates it as “inspiration;” in the other case, the homophonic character qi appears, which she translates as “instrument.” Her translation of this entire passage from the Yueji is as follows: “These three means [poems, songs, and dances] are developed in the human heart. Only then do the instruments come into play.” Yet qi, “inspiration,” also graphically refers to “breaths,” to vital and cosmic energy. Indeed, music is the product of an internal elaboration in the sense that sounds are generated by inner sensations just as sounds generate feelings, it is “the intellect that transforms into sounds the sensations provoked by impressions received from the outside” (ibid., 15). “The breaths” qi thus seem to be fully at “play,” in the true sense of the word, within musical affairs. The learning of music would thus not only serve to convey the understanding that music is a political symbol and tool: This initiation passes through the body in relation to the cosmic and social order. Similarly, drumming during military activities had “effects.” This qi, an instrument, influenced the morale and qi energy of the opposing troops (ibid., 185). Similarly, if the Mohedoule play performed by the emperor’s horsemen on the battlefield probably generated “irritation” or “amusement,” as Trebinjac reports, it may also have influenced the qi, the vital energies of the warriors on the opposite side.

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Beyond the learned liturgical tradition of Daoism and the literate, musical, and military traditions, submutantialism can be observed first of all in shamanism. Indeed, it is clear that Chinese shamanism, which has survived to the present day, is the substratum of Daoism, and that it is evolving today in a way that complements the latter (Schipper [1982] 1997, 15, 20, 23, 29): “at all times, Daoism defines itself in relation to it” (ibid., 18). A form of Daoist shamanism can be observed in the southeast of China, in the province of Fujian, among the “Red-Head Masters” (hongtou daoshi ) to whom Schipper refers and to whom Baptandier has turned more particularly, seeing this Daoist shamanism as “the very flesh of the liturgical tradition” (Baptandier 1988, 8, see also 2008) described above. In the literate tradition that claims to be based on Laozi and appropriates writing and black ink, the masters address themselves directly to the Dao and the gods have no place. On the contrary, the shamanic tradition addresses itself to the gods and uses the predominantly red colour, that of blood, a feminine colour. It is more oriented towards orality and claims to be based on a goddess: Baptandier shows that it is this female body that links the rituals (1988, 10). The analysis of myths reveals the omnipresence of transmutations in these shamanic representations, the legendary characters constantly living metamorphoses by nourishing their embryo of immortality, by being pregnant with themselves in order to give birth and transform themselves into the other (ibid., 91). In particular, Baptandier shows us that the mythical heroine Chen Jinggu is made up of two counterparts: She is to be seen in the light of her sidekick, the white snake, because both were born respectively from the blood and a hair of Guanyin (the Chinese feminised version of the Bodhisattva). The character of Chen Jinggu, consequently a shaman and a demoness at the same time, is finally transformed (hua ) into a third character: the lady of the water’s edge, Linshuifuren: no longer a shaman or a demoness, she has become breath, a deity, shen , her death implying a return to primordial time, an ultimate transformation (ibid., 117). Baptandier speaks of “dialectic” to translate the phenomenon observable here, referring to the “dialectic” of yin and yang. She points out concerning the ritual practices of Daoist shamans that the talismans they draw, especially during exorcist practices, are seen as the spirits incorporated by the shaman. Through them, the officiant makes the divine spirit manifest, as he would do for a breath, by externalizing it. He gives it body, delegates it for a certain task. The relation of consubstantiality of these writings to the master has as its counterpart the use that is generally made of them by the patient. Of course, the patient will not read this writing. Perhaps he will not even look at it. He will burn it and absorb its ashes, coated with honey or dissolved in water. Moreover, in certain cases, a paper soaked in the blood flowing from the ritual wounds that a shaman sometimes inflicts on himself in a trance may also provide a talisman. (Baptandier 1994, 60)

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Consubstantiality and submutantiality are constantly mixed in practices and discourses. 3.10

Conclusion. Chinese Body-intentionality and the Descolian Naturalistic Classification

In her approach to the natural body and its representations in China, Baptandier notes the absence of distance, the absence of separation between the real body and the cosmic body, the body of the living or that of the dead (or immortals), or even that of the gods […], this moving approach to the body, elusive, in movement, in permanent transformation, always taken as a concretion of matter and living memory, of space and time, obliging one to be neither inside nor outside, but interested in the quality of exchanges. (2017, 13) The antithesis of inertia, the body is here a deployment of materials, essences, humours, forces, energies, flows. But to activate it, the intentionality yi  (in the Chinese sense of the term) is necessary: The acupuncturist, as well as the calligrapher, the painter, the practitioner of martial arts, or the Daoist Masters must project their intention of carrying out their actions (ibid., 23, see also Despeux 2017, 55). The Masters of Psalmody (bimo22) to whom I will refer to in Chapter 6 are also animated by the ritualising intention of expelling this or that evil spirit or of making offerings to others in order to be able to carry out their sacrificial rites and thus generate submutances (Névot 2013, 100–101). The idea of “intentionality” is in this case expressed by deu in their own language, an expression that could be translated as “to think about,” “to have the will to do something.” A primary impulse is therefore essential and it emanates from their own “metaphysics.” In the Chinese Daoist and shamanic framework that I have introduced here, the ritual body is the fruit of various transformation processes activated by the transmission of knowledge and essences. It is therefore “in essence” relational, a submutantial meeting point of cosmic elements. The role of religious specialists is to make the agents of the universe interact in such a way that they reach a balance and become a source of harmony and wellbeing for a patient as well as for a community. They are only specialists in ritual in insofar as they are specialists in submutances, that is, capable of setting them in motion, of embodying them as well as manipulating them to provoke and reveal their interconnections. Descola does not address the body-intentionality-submutance of Chinese conception. He considers the body through a binary structure constituted by interiority and exteriority, a notion of European inheritance, and he develops a theory based on a combinatorial approach, referring to a Husserlian matrix, by emphasising the relation, more precisely

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a “relative universal.” But in doing so, the anthropologist holds the relation to be an established fact, whereas it remains conceptually abstract and is never questioned (the relation is external, created by him). Nor does he question what is likely to constitute it. The body is put aside. Although he introduces, following Lévi-Strauss, the idea of movement in the relation and the possibility of structural hybridizations between ontologies, the system set up in Beyond Nature and Culture has a certain rigidity. Descola’s anthropology remains rooted in a relationism associated with formal logic. It may be based on ethnographic materials and it may attempt to penetrate to the universal foundations of human thought, but its references are very selective and one quickly moves “from intuition to truth” (Kapferer 2014, 393). Moreover, by using the double dimension of intentionality and corporeality he omits consideration, beyond the skeleton, of what gives flesh to the whole and precisely allows it to function, although Descola defends himself when he writes: [T]he relation is thus not understood here in a logical or mathematical sense, i.e., as an intellectual operation allowing the internal connection between two thought contents, but as those external relations between beings and things that can be spotted in typical behaviours and that can be partially translated into concrete social norms. (2005, 164–165) However, Descola’s relations are logical operations. We must “beware of the mirages of singularities,” says Descola, who is not inclined to let himself be carried away by bifurcations and is concerned to integrate any ethnographic element into his system. An anthropology of China is set apart from this, ignoring that Chinese perceptions may enrich the discussion about “ontologies,” relationist perspectives and “dividuality.” In the end, Beyond Nature and Culture is presented as a kind of system of classification that paradoxically runs counter to any consideration of ethnographic theory and even to what ethno-anthropology tries to defend: conceptual deconstruction, bifurcation, and the astonishment that does justice to the complexity and richness of all available ethnographic material. In the end, the question that arises is what the future would hold for anthropology if nothing can escape the Descola’s conceptual grid. He warns such critics that while he has found this combination “plausible from a philosophical and conceptual point of view,” he is waiting for it to be validated by empirical data. He then openly declares that basically, I may have stumbled upon a very powerful tool, the performance of which I did not realize at the outset, a sort of experimental machine that allows us to capture certain properties of reality and then organize them in a contrastive manner into meaningful sets. ([2014] 2017, 224)

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For Viveiros de Castro, Descola’s project is analogist in that it seeks to establish a correspondence between modes of thought and modes of action. He comments in a joking manner: “Locked up in the naturalist world, [Descola] has an analogist mind [with a] taste for correspondences, relations, whereas I have an animist soul.”23 While Descola remains post-Kantian and post-Humean, Viveiros de Castro in fact calls for a pre-Kantian, even premodern speculative preoccupation with ontological questions that are to be addressed through ethnographic material.24 But, paradoxically, if his Deleuzian philosophical horizon shifts him towards the world of the European Baroque, he inscribes this heritage in his anthropology that is in a tension with the then-predominant concept of substance. Viveiros de Castro gives precedence to relation in his theory (inherited from the Kantian perspective) to the detriment of any idea of substance (pre-Kantian) and thus rejects a certain form of pre-structuralism. Relationist and antisubstantialist, Viveiros de Castro thus seems more post-romantic than baroque. Let us take a closer look at his conception of anthropology. Notes 1 See the introduction. 2 One might wonder about this purported Chinese “dissatisfaction” and the underlying presupposition that, in this Asian cultural framework, heterogeneous things must absolutely be held together. Does this questioning really arise in this way on the local level? 3 I refer to the discussion entitled “Ontology is just another world for culture,” on the use of the term ontology in anthropology, see Venkatesan (2010). 4 Descola recalls his interest in hermeneutics and cognitivism in Descola (2008). 5 See E. Husserl, Thing and Space. Lessons of 1907. 6 See E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (especially the fifth Meditation). 7 In the case of China, this truth is somewhat shaken, as we will see. 8 That the problems within contemporary phenomenological research concerning the intersubjective constitution of transcendental subjectivity are by no means resolved see, for example, Bernet (1994), Richir (1995), Depraz (2000), Schnell (2010; 2013). 9 He states that he, like most of his colleagues in the late 1970s, was more precisely a structuralist-Marxist, the time of his fieldwork among the Achuar, see Disputatio (2009). 10 See William Matthews’ claim that “ontology” is “an analytical concept relevant to anthropology and the study of cognition” (2016, 174). He more specifically argues that Eight Trigrams cosmologists’ understandings are of a type not accounted for by Descola’s four ontologies, distinguishing between Descola’s “Analogism” and “a mode of identification” he terms “Homologism.” See also Matthews (2022). 11 I have taken up here the French translations proposed by Gernet in L’intelligence de la Chine (1994), while taking care to refer to the Chinese terms and concepts of shen and xing that are so particular to this cultural framework. 12 Concerning the “stellar body,” illuminated by the sun and the moon, see Despeux (2017, 63). 13 The shen, body-world in relation to the universe that surrounds it, recalls the being-in-the-world underpinned by the concept of Leiblichkeit developed by

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14 15 16 17

18 19 20

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Merleau-Ponty and then by Richir, notions that allow us to characterise the relation of the body to the world, to grasp how the living body (Leib) establishes itself within the world in order to communicate and enter into relation with what surrounds it (see Schnell 2009). If the term Leiblichkeit makes it possible to define such a connection, in China, the term shen implies this connection in itself. Let us note, moreover, that the expression body-self used by Lewis (2006) is all the more relevant since it includes (voluntarily?) the locution self, a Winnicottian notion which is subdivided into the true and false self, and which is put in parallel, by Winnicott himself, with the distinction established by Freud between a central part governed by the impulses, and a part turned towards the outside which establishes relations with the world ( Winnicott 1953). I take up the expressions of Lauwaert (1999, 38). Despeux (1994) speaks respectively of the body-person (shen), the body in its structural appearance (xing) and the physical body (ti). See also in the same book (2013, 114–115) for the combinatorics and connections established on the basis of the five agents as well as of the yin and yang. This title, which refers to Schipper’s seminal work, gives me the opportunity to pay tribute to this great sinologist, who died on 18 February 2021. Still translated as “true scriptures” or “true signs.” Matthews note “Whilst I agree that Chinese thought generally accords process and relation primacy over substance and intrinsic identity, those very processes and relations require existence; in Eight Trigrams cosmology, all things are composed of qi, for example—[ … ] and before they were considered processes what are now known as the Five Phases were considered materials ( cai)” (2016, 178). Sandrine Chenivesse (1996) quotes Schipper here, and I will quote him at greater length later on. I prefer to translate the term wu by “thing” because the idea of being has specific connections in English related to the ontological question. Jullien associates “Chinese thought” with immanence and “Western thought” with transcendence, an opposition endorsed by Billeter, who nevertheless stresses the importance of contextualising the point, namely of specifying that this “thought of immanence” is linked to the imperial order, “to a purpose that must not be questioned: power” (2007, 63). It is in fact inscribed in different sociological strata and for different purposes. See the work of Adeline Herrou (2013; 2017) on the subject, particularly on the elaboration of this Daoist body, which is based on a double asceticism: elaborating the temperament and its body and essences, and elaborating the Dao which is within itself. Bimo or pimo: both transcriptions are possible, as the vernacular language does not distinguish between muted and sonorous occlusive. See Disputatio (2009). He reiterated this in a 2014 lecture entitled “Who is afraid of the ontological wolf?” (CUSASU Marilyn Strathern Annual Lecture, 30 May 2014).

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Baptandier B. (2017) Introduction. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Le battement de la vie. Le corps naturel et ses représentations en Chine [The beat of life. The natural body and its representations in China]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 9–36. Bernet R. (1994) La vie du sujet. Recherches sur l’interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie [The life of the subject. Research on the interpretation of Husserl in phenomenology]. Paris: PUF. Billeter J. F. (2007) Contre François Jullien [Against François Jullien]. Paris: Éditions Allia. Bourgeois-Gironde S. (2002) Relations causales et propriétés temporelles [Causal relations and temporal properties]. In Bourgeois-Gironde S. (ed.), Temps et causalité [Time and causality]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 15–36. Breidbach O. (2001) Transformation statt Reihung. Naturdetail und Naturganzes in Goethes Metamorphosenlehre [Transformation instead of sequence. Natural Detail and Natural Whole in Goethe’s Metamorphosis Theory]. In Breidbach O. and Ziche P. (eds.), Naturwissenschaften um 1800. Wissenschaftskultur in JenaWeimar [Natural Sciences around 1800. Scientific Culture in Jena-Weimar]. Wien/ Köln: Böhlau, 46–64. Cheng A. (ed.). (1997) Histoire de la pensée chinoise [History of Chinese thought]. Paris: Le Seuil. Cheng F. (2000) Lacan et la pensée chinoise [Lacan and the Chinese thought]. In l’Ecole de la cause freudienne (éd.), Lacan, l’écrit, l’image [Lacan, writing, image]. Paris: Flammarion, 133–153. Chenivesse S. (1996) Écrit démonifuge et territorialité de la mort en Chine. Étude anthropologique du lien [Demonifuge writing and territoriality of death in China. An anthropological study of the link]. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Chine: facettes d’identité [China: facets of identity], L’Homme, tome 36 (137): 61–86. Deleuze G. [1967] (1973) A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme? [To what do we recognise structuralism?] Châtelet F. (ed.), Histoire de la philosophie. Le XXe siècle [History of philosophy. The XXth century]. Paris: Hachette. Depraz N. (2000) Transcendance et incarnation [Transcendance and incarnation]. Paris: Vrin. Derrida J. (1967) De la grammatologie [About grammatology]. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Descola P. (2005) Par-delà nature et culture [Beyong Nature and Culture]. Paris: NRF Gallimard. Descola P. (2008) Sur Lévi-Strauss, le structuralisme et l’anthropologie de la nature. Interview avec M. Hénaff [About Lévi-Strauss, structuralism and the anthropology of nature. Interview with M. Hénaff]. Philosophie 98: 8–36. Descola P. (2014a) Les deux natures de Lévi-Strauss [The two natures of LéviStrauss]. Les cahiers de L’Herne. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion. Descola P. (2014b) HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 431–443. Descola P. [2014] (2017) La composition des mondes [The composition of worlds]. Paris: Flammarion. Despeux C. (1994) Taoïsme et corps humain. Le Xiuzhen tu [Taoism and human body. The Xiuzhen tu]. Paris: Guy Trédaniel éditeur. Despeux C. (1996) Le corps, champ spatio-temporel, souche d’identité [The body, spatio-temporal field, strain of identity]. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Chine: facettes d’identité [China: facets of identity], L’Homme, tome 36 (137): 87–118.

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Despeux C. (2017) Soigner le corps par le nom et le geste. De la pratique de l’acupuncture [Healing the body by name and gesture. On the practice of acupuncture]. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Le battement de la vie. Le corps naturel et ses représentations en Chine [The beat of life. The natural body and its representations in China]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 49–77. Disputatio (2009) (with P. Descola, E. Viveiros de Castro, P. Maniglier and B. Latour): www.canal-u.tv/video/fmsh/perspectivisme_et_animisme_debat_avec_ philippe_descola.30901. Du X. (2011) Y a-t-il une traduction chinois du mot “être”? [Is there any Chinese translation of the word “being”?]. Rue Descartes 72: 17–29. Feuchtwang S. (2014) Too ontological, too rigid, too ahistorical but magnificent. HAU 4 (3): 383–387. Fossier A. and Gardella E. (2006) Interview avec Bruno Latour. Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines, n°10. DOI: 10.4000/traces.158. Foucault M. [1966] (1970) Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines [The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences]. New York: Pantheon Books. Gernet J. (1994) L’intelligence de la Chine. Le social et le mental [The intelligence of China. The social and the mental]. Paris: NRF, Gallimard. Granet M. [1933] (1990) La droite et la gauche en Chine [The right and the left in China]. In Granet M. (ed.), Etudes sociologiques sur la Chine [Sociological Studies about China]. Paris: PUF, 261–278. Granet M. [1934] (1968) La pensée chinoise [The Chinese Thought]. Paris: Albin Michel. Herrou A. (2013) A World of Their Own. Daoist Monks & Their Community in Contemporary China. St. Petersburg (Florida): Three Pines Press. Herrou A. (2017) La part essentielle de l’être n’est “ni dans le corps, ni hors du corps”: portrait d’un maître taoïste médecin et ascète [The essence of being is “neither in the body nor out of the body”: portrait of a master doctor and Taoist ascetic]. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Le battement de la vie. Le corps naturel et ses représentations en Chine [The beat of life. The natural body and its representations in China]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 359–399. Hume D. [1748] (2021) Enquête sur l’entendement humain [An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding], trans. Leroy A. Paris: Flammarion. Husserl E. (1997) Thing and Space. Lectures of 1907. Berlin: Springer Husserl E. (1990) Philosophie première I. Histoire critique des idées [First philosophy. Critical history of ideas]. Paris: PUF. Husserl E. (2009) Recherches logiques. Tome premier: Prolégomènes à la logique pure [Logical research. Volume One: Prolegomena to pure logic]. Paris: PUF. Jullien F. (2000) Penser d’un dehors (la Chine). Entretiens d’Extrême-Occident [Thinking from the outside (China). Conversations from the far West]. Paris: Seuil. Jullien F. (2003) La grande image n’a pas de forme ou du non-objet par la peintur [The big image has no form or non-object through painting]. Paris: Seuil. Kapferer B. (2014) Back to the future. Descola’s neostruturalism. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 389–400. Latour B. (2009) Perspectivism: “type” or “bomb”? Anthropology Today 25 (2): 1–2.

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Lauwaert F. (1999) Le meurtre en famille. Parricide et infanticide en Chine. XVIIIXIXème siècle [Murder in the family. Parricide and infanticide in China. XVIIIXIXth century]. Paris: Odile Jacob. Lenclud G. (2014) From one ontology to (an)other. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 363–372. Lévi-Strauss C. (1962) La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]. Paris: Plon. Lewis M. E. (2006) Writing and Authority in Early China. New York: SUNY Press, Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Matthews W. E. (2016) The Homological Cosmos. Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics in Yi Jing Prediction (thesis). Matthews W. E. (2022) Cosmic Coherence. A Cognitive Anthropology through Chinese Divination. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Névot A. (2013) Versets chamaniques. Le Livre du sacrifice à la terre (textes rituels du Yunnan, Chine) [Shamanic verses. The Book of Sacrifice to the Earth (ritual texts from Yunnan, China)]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Névot A. (2015) Corps démembré, corps sacrifié? Le “supplice chinois” lingchi [Dismembered body, sacrificed body? The lingchi “Chinese torture”]. Asdiwal, revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions, 61–78. Richir M. (1995) Intentionnalité et intersubjectivité. Commentaire de Husserliana XV [Intentionality and intersubjectivity. Commentary on Husserliana XV] (549–556). In Janicaud D. (ed.), L’intentionnalité en question [Intentionality in question]. Paris: Vrin, 147–162. Schipper K. [1982] (1997) Le corps taoïste [The Taoist Body]. Paris: Fayard. Schnell A. (2009) Leib et Leiblichkeit chez Maurice Merleau-Ponty et Marc Richir [Leib and Leiblichkeit in Maurice Melreau-Ponty and Marc Richir]. Annales de Phénoménologie 8: 139–162. Schnell A. (2010) Remarques sur le transcendantal chez Maurice Merleau-Ponty [Remarks on the transcendental in Maurice Merleau-Ponty]. Annales de Phénoménologie 9: 51–62. Schnell A. (2013) En voie du réel [On the way to the real]. Paris: Hermann. Trébinjac S. (2008) Le pouvoir en chantant. Une affaire d’État… impériale (tome 2) [Power in singing. An imperial affair of state (volume 2)]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Vandermeersch L. (2013) Les deux raisons de la pensée chinoise. Divination et idéographie [The two reasons of Chinese thought. Divination and ideography]. Paris: NRF, Gallimard. Venkatesan S. (2010) Introduction. Ontology is just another word for culture. Critique of Anthropology 30(2): 152–200. DOI: 10.1177/0308275X09364070. Viveiros de Castro E. (2014) Who is afraid of the ontological wolf? Some comments on an ongoing anthropological debate. CUSAS Annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture, 30 May 2014. Winnicott D. W. (1953) Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: a study of the first not-me possession. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34(2): 89–97.

4

The Body-Sign Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Anti-Substantialist Relationism

Far from the analysis of the body becoming that of our flesh and the principle, one day, of its explanation, the opposite is true: only our flesh allows us to know, within the limits prescribed by this inescapable presupposition, something like a “body.” Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair [Incarnation. Philosophy of the flesh] (2000, 10)

Descola aims to bring together (selected) plural ethnographies within a conceptual unit composed of four ontologies. His approach is influenced by Lévi-Strauss, as it is both derived from semiology and places itself at a distance from it. It also takes a strong (neo)Humean, Goethean, and Husserlian stance that is rooted in cognitive psychology. He attempts an anthropological synthesis within which any ethnography could be inscribed. Contrary to this, Viveiros de Castro gives priority to the Deleuzio-Guattarian “disjunctive synthesis,” which designates “the system of possible permutations between differences that always return to the same thing, while shifting, while sliding” (Guattari and Deleuze 1972, 18). He thus integrates this idea into his analytical method, while wishing to bring it to a political level and make it effective in a universal way—by deconstructing anthropology, which he aims to de-narcissize. This perspective has its origins in his observations of the Amazonia, where “perspectivism” predominates. The account that Viveiros de Castro gave in a radio programme describes his theoretical stance and project very clearly:1 My relationship with anthropology, with indigenous society, is a very intellectualistic one. What interests me is the way of thinking, which is obviously inseparable from the way of living, but it is above all their conceptual power of the way of life that has attracted and fascinated me. What makes my work “philosophical” is that I have a tendency to treat the ideas I find in indigenous cultures not as objects of scientific inquiry, cognition, determination, but in a philosophical way, as philosophical interlocutors, just as Leibniz,2 Aristotle can be interlocutors for a contemporary philosopher. DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-8

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Even though “perspectivism” is the term often used to designate Viveiros de Castro’s theoretical approach, he himself prefers “multi-naturalism,” a key concept that expresses the possibility of thinking the Self from the Other and not the Other from the Self: I use “perspectivism” as a label for a set of ideas and practices found throughout indigenous America and to which I shall refer, for simplicity’s sake, as though it were a cosmology. This cosmology imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective agencies, human as well as nonhuman, each endowed with the same generic type of soul, that is, the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities. […] Such difference of perspective—not a plurality of views of a single world, but a single view of different worlds—cannot derive from the soul, since the latter is the common original ground of being. Rather, such difference is located in the bodily differences between species, for the body and its affections (in Spinoza’s sense, the body’s capacities to affect and be affected by other bodies) is the site and instrument of ontological differentiation and referential disjunction. […] In other words, perspectivism supposes a constant epistemology and variable ontologies, the same representations and other objects, a single meaning and multiple referents. (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 6–7) Most of the concepts developed by Viveiros de Castro appear in his first book, published in 1986 and translated into English in 1992 under the title: From the Enemy’s Point of View. Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. After his ethnographic fieldwork among the Araweté, it was in the early 1990s that the pioneering work by Kaj Arhem (1993), Tania Stolze Lima (1995; 1996) and Aparecida Vilaça (1992) on perspectivism prompted him to develop his own theory on this topic. In 1996, he published a seminal article on the subject in the journal Mana that set the tone for his entire anthropology. This article, which was translated from Portuguese into French under the title: “Les pronoms cosmologiques et le perspectivisme amérindien” [“Cosmological pronouns and Amerindian perspectivism”] (1998), thus makes a good starting point for the considerations of this chapter. I will clarify Viveiros de Castro’s theses by drawing upon his other writings and in this way I will explore his thinking on other topics, notably cannibalism, which he analyses using through relationism and a-substantialism. 4.1

Natures-Culture: Perspectivism

Descola considers Viveiros de Castro’s 1996 study to be a standard reference in that it contains his “stroke of genius” (as Descola puts it), his analysis of the shifts in perspective between humans and non-humans, and his contrast between multi-culturalism and multi-naturalism that raises the conceptual question about the relation between naturalism and animism (Disputatio, 2009). Viveiros de

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Castro is in discussion with Descola as well as with Lévi-Strauss but distances himself from them both. He stresses that in animism “the nature/culture distinction is internal to the social world, humans and animals are immersed in the same socio-cosmic environment (nature is part of an all-encompassing sociality)” ([1996] 1998, 437). Contrary to this, in naturalism this same distinction is internal not to culture but to nature: “human society is a natural phenomenon among others” (ibid.). Viveiros de Castro further specifies that in animism, society is not a marked pole, unlike naturalism in which the unmarked pole is nature (ibid.). He thus carries out a radical reversal of these two polarities which do not come from Amazonia but from Lévi-Strauss, and more broadly from Western philosophy. He accordingly seeks to thematise them from out of the ethnographic field itself. The debate, originally internal to Amerindian structuralism, concerns a conceptual opposition that is fundamentally Eurocentric. It is this tension between ethnographic elements and the resumption of a European conceptuality in order to deconstruct it (based on this same ethnography) that predominates in Viveiros de Castro’s work. It is this that I propose clarifying with a view to questioning it. Returning to the aforementioned article, we can see that right at the outset Viveiros de Castro clearly defines perspectivism on the basis of very concrete examples (recalling the Deleuzian precepts of making the concept explicit in concrete terms). The following passage is worth quoting because it details the foundation of his conceptual edifice, which still stands today: Under normal conditions, humans typically see humans as humans, animals as animals, and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; but (predatory) animals and spirits see humans as (prey) animals, while (prey) animals see humans as spirits or as (predatory) animals. In turn, animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic when they are in their homes or villages, and apprehend their behaviours and characteristics in a cultural guise—they perceive their food as human food (jaguars see blood as caouin […]), they see their bodily attributes [fur, feather [etc]…] as adornments or implements, their social system is organized in the manner of human institutions […]. (ibid., 431–432) The relation established between predator and prey is thus at the heart of perspectivism—“the Amazonian metaphysics of predation is a pragmatic and theoretical context that is highly favourable to perspectivism” (2009, 22)—in that “predatory animals and spirits, for their part, see humans as prey, while prey see humans as spirits or as predators” (ibid., 21). Viveiros de Castro reminds us, in reference to Lévi-Strauss’ seminal work on the subject, that Amerindian mythology describes the undifferentiation between humans and animals, the latter being perceived as former humans. However, humans are not perceived as animals at the outset. He concludes: “The original condition common to humans and animals is not animality but

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humanity” ([1996] 1998, 434)3 because, as he further explains, “‘humanity’ is the name of the general form of the Subject” (ibid., 446). In the 2009 Disputatio, Viveiros de Castro stressed once again that “the universal ground of being is humanity; every entity that is capable of saying ‘I’ sees itself as human (for animism every entity is potentially capable of saying ‘I’).” In other words, “all beings see (‘represent’) the world in the same way—what changes is the world they see. Animals impose the same categories and values on reality as humans do” ([1996] 1998, 446). And because the former have different bodies from the latter, they “see in the same way that we [humans] see things that are different from what we see.”4 The body is thus central to perspectivism in that it appears as “the great differentiator in Amazonian cosmologies” (ibid., 449). It makes us see things differently, implying physical discontinuity, while the soul implies physical continuity (2009, 22)—these are Viveiros de Castro’s terms and their Eurocentrism should surely be questioned in the light of what the Amerindians themselves say, a point I will return to. When we keep in mind all of these perspectivist elements, we see that this stance cannot be associated with any form of relativism: [W]hile [modern “multiculturalist” cosmologies] are based on the mutual implication between the uniqueness of nature and the multiplicity of cultures […], the Amerindian conception would, on the contrary, suppose a unity of the spirit and a diversity of bodies. “Culture” or the subject would represent the form of the universal, “nature” or the object, the form of the particular. ([1996] 1998, 430) Viveiros de Castro returns to this idea a few pages later, pointing out that “[i]f Western multi-culturalism is relativism as public policy, American perspectivist shamanism is multi-naturalism as cosmic policy” (ibid., 436).5 In the 2009 Disputatio, Viveiros de Castro once again reminds us that the point is to propose a multi-naturalism that would be contrary to multi-culturalism: All species see the world in the same way, because they are all human; culture as a subjectivity endowed with a point of view on the world is universal, whereas nature, which corresponds to the body and no longer to the soul, would be in a state of continual variation. In this ontological universe (to use Viveiros de Castro’s own adjective), we would not have a shared physicality but a shared humanity, the former being modulable, “exchangeable and disposable,” unlike the latter for which the idea of metamorphosis seems to be central. In other words, perspectivism presupposes a “cosmological transformism” ([1996] 1998, 436) and it would be perceptible elsewhere as well (Viveiros de Castro also cites the boreal regions of North America and Asia [Siberia], the hunter-gatherers of

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Malaysia). He refines his point by focusing on Amerindian self-designations, which do not refer to the idea of humanity but function as pronouns that “indicate the position of the subject” (ibid., 443) and therefore have a great deal of contextual variability in that they are “enunciative markers” that “express the point of view of the speaking subject” (ibid., 443–444). To simplify, words that mean “people” “can be said by—and thus said of—very different classes of beings” (ibid., 445) and it can refer to pigs if it is used by a pig, to humans if it is used by a human, to jaguars if it is used by a jaguar. Viveiros de Castro concludes: A subject is one who has a soul, and a soul is one who is capable of having a point of view. Amerindian “souls,” whether human or animal, are thus perspective categories, cosmological deictics whose analysis requires less an animistic psychology or a substantialist ontology than a theory of the sign or an epistemological pragmatics. (ibid.) In this regard, we read in Métaphysiques Cannibales [Cannibal Metaphysics]: The ethnography of indigenous America is populated by references to a cosmopolitical theory that describes a universe inhabited by various types of subjective agents, human and non-human—gods, animals, the dead, plants, meteorological phenomena, and very often objects and artifacts as well—, all of which are endowed with the same general set of perceptual, appetitive, and cognitive dispositions, in other words, with a similar “soul.” This resemblance includes the same, so to speak performative, mode of apperception: animals and other soulful nonhumans “see themselves as persons” and thus “are persons,” i.e., intentional or twosided (visible and invisible) objects, constituted by social relations and existing in the double pronominal mode of the reflexive and the reciprocal, i.e., the collective. What these persons see, however—and thus what they are as persons—constitutes precisely the philosophical problem posed by and for indigenous thought. (2009, 21)

4.2

Shamanic-Deleuzian Foundations

Focusing on the 1996 text, we see that after presenting perspectivism and its implications in the theoretical field, Viveiros de Castro explains that it is the shamans “who are dedicated to the communication and management of these crossed perspectives” ([1996] 1998, 432). For this is indeed a shamanic discourse. When Viveiros de Castro writes that “[i]n sum, animals are people, or see themselves as people,” he is transcribing a shamanic conception (and not the “common” discourse of Amazonian populations): “the visible form of

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each species is a simple envelope […] that hides an internal human form, only normally visible to the eyes of the same species or to certain trans-species beings, such as shamans” (ibid., 432). Three pages later, he returns to the fact that “Amerindian perspectivism has an essential relationship with shamanism” (ibid., 435), finally emphasising that we are dealing with a ideology of shamans insofar as it is the shamans who manage the relations of humans with the spiritual component of the extra-humans, because of their capacity to assume the point of view of these beings, and especially to come back to them to tell the story.6 (ibid., 436) Similarly, in Cannibal Metaphysics, it is only on page 25 that Viveiros de Castro specifies that shamanism is the context of perspectivism. The reference to this form of religion is therefore not central to his remarks because he makes a conceptual generalisation from a singular, specialised discourse. In other words, he decontextualises perspectivism from its original anchorage (which is henceforth placed in the background) to bring this multi-naturalism to a degree of generality and reflexivity that it does not have in Amazonia. He does so in order to engage in a discussion, beyond ethnography, with anthropological theory and more broadly “thought.” He more specifically says that he is undertaking an Amerindianisation of thought. For him, structuralism is a transformation of Amerindian thought, having succeeded in transforming it in such a way that it can be placed in dialogue with any other body of thought and thus can give ethnologists or philosophers food for thought. In this sense, Lévi-Strauss anticipated the thesis that structuralism is an ethnoanthropology, i.e., that it studies the anthropology of others.7 Such an approach undoubtedly opens up a dialogue, but it is a rather questionable one for an ethnologist to take in seeking to grasp the logics of meaning in relation to their contexts of enunciation (ritual, social, etc.). However, Viveiros de Castro assumes that the process is not ethnological. What interests him, like Lévi-Strauss in his time, are intellectual structures, thought, the more abstract register of the mind, and not individual consciousness. If we are to understand his theoretical practice, we must therefore read him as a philosopher who makes ethnography speak not only through ethnography itself but also through Deleuze (and the latter’s own influences). This is not the idea that “the point of view creates the object” but that “the point of view creates the subject: the subject will be that which is activated or ‘arranged’ by the point of view” ([1996] 1998, 445). Viveiros de Castro refers to Deleuze directly in relation to the definition of perspectivism according to what “will be subject that which comes to the point of view” (ibid.). The passage in question is as follows: “This is the foundation of perspectivism. This does not mean dependence on a subject defined beforehand: on the contrary, what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains at the point of view, will be subject” (Deleuze 1988, 27). The question remains: Does

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Viveiros de Castro analyse Amazonian ethnography through the Deleuzian concept that he projects onto perspectivism or does he establish a meeting point, a comparatism, that is exogenous with respect to what is observed and Deleuzian perspectivism? He seems to proceed by chiasmus and, as argued earlier, by processes of agency between ethnography and Western philosophy. His insistence on returning to the nature-culture dualism invites us to ask what real influence Deleuze (and Guattari) plays in his project (and consequently the ethology of von Uexküll, the philosophies of Spinoza, Leibniz, Whitehead, and Simondon, to name but a few). The political theme of Mille plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus] is “multiplicity,” which is constitutive of the idea of “becoming a minority” and its aim is not that of taking power but of deploying lignes de fuite (leakage paths).8 This is very revealing of Viveiros de Castro’s making common cause with the fundamentally anti-substantialist ideas of these thinkers: So each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The level of consistency of Nature is like an immense abstract Machine, yet real and individual, whose parts are the various arrangements or individuals that each group an infinity of particles under an infinity of more or less compound relations. There is thus a unity of a plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and to the animate, to the artificial and to the natural. This plane has nothing to do with a form or figure, nor with a design or function. Its unity has nothing to do with a foundation buried in the depths of things, nor with an end or a project in the mind of God. It is a plane of spread, which is rather like the section of all forms, the machine of all functions, and yet whose dimensions grow with those of the multiplicities or individualities it intersects. A fixed plane, where things are distinguished only by speed and slowness. A plane of immanence or univocity, which is opposed to analogy. The One is said in one and the same sense of all the many, the Being is said in one and the same sense of all that differs. We are not speaking here of the unity of substance, but of the infinite number of modifications which are parts of each other on this one and the same plane of life. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 311) As Jean-Sébastien Laberge (2018) shows, ethology, insofar as it studies an organism in relation and links it to the whole of its relations, is the science that corresponds to Deleuze’s philosophical project of thinking multiplicity on the plane of nature. Deleuze read many works on the subject, especially those of von Uexküll, whom he saw as a mediator between Spinoza and modern science. Laberge insists especially on his revival of the concepts of milieu, counterpoint, and plane. As an ethologist, von Uexküll was a relationist for whom to understand an organism is to understand its relation with nature: It is not a matter of observing an isolated subject but always in

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relation to an object in its environment, in a subject-object relation, thus beyond substance. For von Uexküll, “relations are always external to the subject, they are in the environment, they are the environment” (ibid., 37). This exteriority of the relation is predominant in Deleuze and it implies a rejection of the body as an organism. Recall that the idea of the “body without organs” (“corps-sans-organes,” CsO) developed by Deleuze and Guattari is at the foundation of—or inherent to—their anti-substantialism. They consider the organic body as one stratum among others inscribed in an arrangement. They refuse to see the organism as closed, stable, nested in the world, but rather as caught up in flows that it temporarily stabilises. In sum, for them, the body-organism is a body-static while the relation is a ligne de fuite (leakage path)—the “becoming”—and as such is inorganic, asubstantial. Deleuze is critical of the substantialism of Spinoza—who asked what the body can do and concluded that “no one has as yet the limits of the body’s capabilities”— 9 as well as that of Leibniz. These are philosophers who influenced him fundamentally, although he remained in permanent tension with them concerning substance. Being first and foremost an ethnographer-ethnologist, Viveiros de Castro became a philosopher under the effects of ethnography, which he wants to engage in a broader anthropological debate. This is why he creates a field of communication, a dialogue, between different philosophical systems10 that turn out to be so close that we sometimes do not know who the enunciator is: the Indian11 (and which one?), Deleuze (and through him, Guattari, Leibniz, Spinoza, von Uexküll, etc.) or Viveiros de Castro? And if this is the case, it seems it is because Viveiros de Castro appeals to the Deleuzian fold in his work, a concept that is so complex that it takes different forms in the philosopher’s writings. Being both an aesthetic metaphor and epistemological metaphor, as Rainer Zaiser points out (2007), the notion of “fold” translates the physical world in relation to the metaphysical. It tends towards the infinite (Deleuze 1988, 164) and refers to the thought that can thus escape beyond any of thinking’s borders. Chapter 12 of Cannibal Metaphysics deals with the philosophicalmethodological question of the relation “between the discourses of the anthropologist and the indigenous” (2009, 162): To take indigenous ideas as concepts means to consider them as having a philosophical meaning, or as potentially capable of a philosophical use. […] Anthropological theories are situated in strict continuity with the intellectual pragmatics of the collectives they take as objects. (ibid., 161–162) Viveiros de Castro specifies that these anthropological concepts are neither true reflections of the culture of the native […], nor illusory projections of the culture of the anthropologist […]. What these concepts

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reflect is a certain relation of intelligibility between the two cultures, and what they project is the two cultures as their own presuppositions. (ibid., 162) He therefore seems to mobilise a chiasmatic perspective to constitute “pluriverses.” The last lines of the same chapter clarify his theoretical position: [W]e cannot think like the Indians; we can, at most, think with them. And, in this regard—to try just for a moment to think “like them”—if there is a clear message in the Amerindian perspective, it is precisely the one that affirms that we must never try to actualize the world as it is expressed in the eyes of others. (ibid., 169) Viveiros de Castro allows himself infinite freedom while remaining firmly anchored in a structuralist apparatus, because he thinks of thought as a matter of engendering—with the interpretative freedom (including “betrayal” and “corruption” (ibid., 171)) such a perspective implies. Hence, his use of the expressions “anthropological fiction” and “thought experiment”: It is not a matter of imagining a form of experience, if you like, but of experiencing a form of imagination. The experience, in this case, is my own—as ethnographer, as well as reader of the ethnological literature about indigenous Amazonia—and the experiment is a fiction that is controlled by that experience. In other words, the fiction that is involved is anthropological, but the anthropology that it produces is not fictional! What does such a fiction consist in? It consists in taking indigenous ideas as concepts, and following through on the consequences of such a decision: to determine the preconceptual ground or plane of immanence that such concepts presuppose, the conceptual personae that they deploy, and the material realities that they create. And note that treating these ideas as concepts does not mean that, objectively or actually speaking, they are something else. Individual cognitions, collective representations, propositional attitudes, cosmological beliefs, unconscious schemata, embodied dispositions and so forth: these are the kinds of theoretical fictions I choose not to heed here. Thus, the type of work for which I am advocating is neither a study of “primitive mentality” (supposing such a notion might still make sense at all), nor an analysis of the natives’ “cognitive processes” (supposing these were accessible, given the current state of psychological and ethnographic knowledge). My object is less the indigenous manner of thinking than its objects, the possible world that its concepts project. (2015, 17) In other words, to each his own fiction! But the ease and conviction with which Viveiros de Castro expresses his ideas cannot hide a complex

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methodological reality that is far removed from the analytical paths usually taken by an ethnologist. Quoting Beckett in his May 13, 1986, lecture on Foucault, Deleuze asked whether one of his characters who declares that he is “like a cork on the raging sea” might not be referring to the Foucaultian idea of “constituting an interior of the exterior, being inside the exterior, being the passenger par excellence. The passenger par excellence is the one who is inside the outside. This is the fold of the line of the outside.” This refers to Leibnizian subjectivation and, for Viveiros de Castro, to the Amerindian perspectivism that he puts into practice in his own approach. Pirate, privateer, and rebel, Viveiros de Castro is perhaps above all that cork on the raging sea, in the interior of the exterior, on a vanishing line as well as on a vertiginous ridge, surrounded by the abysses and limbo of real and lived experience. 4.3

To Put Us in Perspective

As already seen, Viveiros de Castro affirms the importance of referring to the relations established between nature and culture or, in his words, to the “conditions of constitution of the relational contexts that can be designated by ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (2014, 164), a distinction that he recognises as being questionable, but which he decides to reinterrogate using Amerindian cosmologies.12 In Cannibal Metaphysics, the subject is again central. It is worth once again quoting a long passage in order to fully grasp the springs of Viveiros de Castro’s anthropo-philosophical reflection: Such resistance of Amerindian perspectivism to the terms of our epistemological debates casts doubt on the transportability of the ontological partitions that feed them. This is the conclusion that many anthropologists have reached (albeit for different reasons) when they argue that the distinction between Nature and Culture—the first article of the discipline’s Constitution, where it pledges allegiance to the old Western metaphysical matrix—cannot be used to describe certain internal dimensions or domains of non-Western cosmologies without first undergoing a rigorous ethnological critique. In the present case, such a critique imposed the redistribution of the predicates arranged in the two paradigmatic series of “Nature” and “Culture”: universal and particular, objective and subjective, physical and moral, fact and value, given and instituted, necessity and spontaneity, immanence and transcendence, body and mind, animality and humanity, etc. This new deal of conceptual maps has led us to suggest the use of the expression “multi-naturalism” to designate one of the distinctive features of Amerindian thought in relation to modern “multi-culturalist” cosmologies: whereas the latter rely on the mutual implication between the uniqueness of nature and the multiplicity of cultures—the former being guaranteed by the objective universality of bodies and substance, the latter being generated by the subjective

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particularity of minds and signifieds—, the Amerindian conception would, on the contrary, presuppose a unity of mind and a diversity of bodies.13 “Culture” or the subject would represent the form of the universal, “nature” or the object, the form of the particular. (2009, 20) This desire to translate the problem (in Deleuze’s sense) into terms that are understandable to us and to raise a question that would not make sense if kept stricto sensu in the language of the Tupi is obviously justified. But the question that arises concerns the universalism of this dualism, a dualism that Descola annihilates in favour of monism, as we already saw. Viveiros de Castro uses a strategy of opposition (for dialogical purposes between us and them): on the one hand, naturalism with nature (bodies/substance)-cultures (minds), and, on the other, perspectivism with natures (diversity of bodies)-culture (unity of the mind). Now, if Viveiros de Castro has to eliminate the substance of perspectivism in order to support his theory, i.e., to reverse the perspectives (European versus indigenous), the foundations of such a rejection remain to be defined with regard to the ethnographic data. Over and beyond the position he takes against Western metaphysics and thus against substance—“even before substantialism was established as a doctrine [sic!]” — (Disputatio, 2009) does the Amerindian world void its thought(s) of substance? Viveiros de Castro specifies that what he calls “‘body’ is not a synonym for distinctive substance or fixed shape; it is an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus” ([1996] 1998, 478). Olivier Allard (2006, 453) notes that the same argument can be found in Alexandre Surrallés (2003). Is the Amerindian body therefore de-substantiated, is the body an-organic, comparable to an empty shell that is only inscribed and traversed by flows, as Deleuze and Guattari affirmed? Such a disregard remains to be thought out and argued for, over and beyond the system established, which may seem more a matter of Deleuzian questioning than of anthropological reflection. While the debates on the Amazonian and more widely Amerindian world seems to avoid, or even reject, any kind of idea of substance, Robert Crépeau highlights the link between shamans and allied spirits through the acquisition of so called “substances,” specifying that “the source of the knowledge and powers of shamans often takes a tangible and material form for those concerned, a subject that is still largely neglected by researchers” (2007, 108). If this is true for Native American shamans, it is even more true for the societies in which they live and ritualise. In the Amerindian conception of kinship, what is important is not the biological relationship but the child’s body being as close as possible to that of its parents (Pérez 2010). Hence, the importance of “making this body” so that the child shares the same world as its parents: through the sperm during pregnancy, then the mother’s milk and the food chewed by the mother transmitted directly to the child. This mouthto-mouth communication seems crucial on the larger scale in that group members drink beers from the mouths of women (ibid.). These ethnographic

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elements underscore the importance of sharing fluids and foods within the community, which also maintains a specific diet. In other words, what the group ingests in common, what is in and between the bodies, also makes the group and creates this community of bodies that share the same point of view and whose members are potentially capable, through transvestism, of acquiring others. Carsten refers to an anecdote supporting this (1995, 139–140), reported by Mary Weismantel (1995, 690). It concerns a man from the Ecuadorian Andes who emphasises that he is the father of an orphaned child because he feeds it. Carsten also refers to Laura Rival (1998, 621), for whom the practices of Amerindian commensality generate the fact of being of the same flesh. Peter Gow evokes the idea of shared substance (1991, 161). Allard, who refers to those data (2006, 453–454), also mentions Viveiros de Castro, who opts for a radically different position on substance. He comments: The Amazonian body, far from being reduced to a substance, thus seems to be a disposition that could be defined as Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus—a pattern that determines ways of seeing (Amerindian perspectivism), feeling (affects) and acting (ethology)—, and which is a product of social practices, particularly commensal relations. But is the idiom of shared substance entirely an illusion? We can in fact try to reconcile the two approaches. The relation between substance and relation must in fact be reversed: substance is not the cause or the foundation of a relation of kinship, as in Janet Carsten and Maurice Godelier, but its consequence […]. This is why it is the support of the memory of the living: thus, among the Araweté, “it is the flesh that remembers” (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 207) —once the flesh of a deceased person has completely decomposed, it will no longer torment those with whom it lived. […] As a symbol of the acts and relations that produced it, and as a sign of their moral value, the bodily substance can be described as a “qualisign,” to use the expression that Nancy Munn (1992: 17, 74 ff.) has used with great fruitfulness. (2006, 454) I want far from wanting to rehash the conceptual relation-substance pairing in which all the anthropologists previously cited seem to be entangled. However, I see a key element of Allard’s attempt to reconcile these different ethnographic perspectives as one capable of integrating two camps: the proponents of the idea of Amerindian shared substance, on the one hand, and the proponents of Amerindian a-substantiality, on the other. By perceiving Amerindian substance not as the foundation but as the consequence of the relation, something both close to and different from my own perspective seems to emerge. Instead of bodily substance as “qualisign,” a term rooted in semiotics (Pierce is the originator of the term),14 I prefer the idea of bodily substance as submutance: Relation and substance intrude upon each other without one taking precedence over the other. As they both enter the sociological scene concomitantly, they are both embedded in processes of

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transmission, transformation, and community life. These ethnographies, when put in relation to each other, confirm the extent to which the approach to these themes through the notions of relation and substance distorts the issue at stake in the debate, which should be considered in a chiasmatic way and not in a binary mode. In this sense, we could say that perspectivism (linked to shamanism) presupposes trans-corporeal phenomena and “substances” in movement, i.e., submutances, a point that Viveiros de Castro hardly dwells upon but which nevertheless seems essential to understanding how the Amerindian “point of view” is constituted. It is apparently not as asubstantial as it appears from Viveiros de Castro’s interpretation alone. His latest work reveals how his anti-substantialism must be read in the light of the perspectivist theory he defends, namely the idea that all inhabitants of the cosmos are people in their own department, potential occupants of the deictic position of “first person” or “subject of cosmological discourse” […]. [T]he relations between species are marked by a perpetual struggle over this pronominal subject position, which cannot be occupied simultaneously by two distinct species […]. Life is spoliation, and being is devouring. This idea transforms humanity into something that is the antithesis of a substance with fixed contours, a “natural kind”: it becomes a position or a relation, marked by relativity, by uncertainty and by otherness. (2019, 108–109) But perspectivism is obviously not perspectivised: It is a human (shamanic) discourse on the relations to non-humans, and cannot be shared unless one knows what a jaguar may think. Viveiros de Castro refers to a discourse that emerges from myths, shamans, discursive, speaking instances… but not from apes. Perspectivism remains anthropocentric. In this system of thought, no distinction is made between the “I” and the “we,” although Viveiros de Castro asks us to make this epistemic translation towards the other by erasing the “I” from our understanding of the system in presence. Moreover, if it is indeed a matter of questioning head-on the nature-culture dualism internal to Western metaphysics, it is fitting to ask whether questioning this is really indispensable to the primary concern here: taking indigenous thought seriously. For Viveiros de Castro, the theoretical issue goes beyond the simple Amerindian framework. In the 2009 Disputatio, he explained that perspectivism responds to “this aporia, this classic antinomy of anthropological thought, an almost Kantian antinomy: nature-culture” (Disputatio, 2009). He therefore considers it in relation to his structuralist heritage, which he wants to undermine—which is a possible theoretical option—but, once again, does this dualism help us to better understand “Amazonian thought” and to dialogue with it? In the end, this is not the ultimate project. The point is to put ourselves in perspective. Cannibal Metaphysics gives a particular account of Viveiros de Castro’s political orientation in favour of a

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symmetrical anthropology in Latour’s sense ([1991] 2006). This book highlights his philosophical and political will to recast anthropology through the prism of multi-naturalism. Viveiros de Castro is indeed seeking to counter the current conceptions of anthropology as a mere reductive interpretationexplanation of allegorical meanings by proposing that we move away from the epistemological critique of ethnographic authority and towards the ontological determination of ethnographic otherness, towards the elucidation of the terms of the “ontological self-determination of the other,” in other words, towards a redefinition of anthropology as a comparative (i.e., expansive) description of tautegorical meanings. (2014) To this end, he proposes a Deleuzian re-reading of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, emphasising that indigenous metaphysics should no longer serve to develop an anthropological discourse on the other, but should instead encourage us to take the other’s point of view. He thus urges us to put into practice, within our own discipline, what he has grasped of indigenous thought in his own ethnographic field. He calls for a decolonisation of thought. If “anthropology is ready to fully assume its new mission, that of being the theory-practice of the decolonization of thought,” it is essential to proceed to a shift in perspective that would show that the most interesting concepts, problems, entities, and agents introduced by anthropological theories have their source in the imaginative powers of the societies (or peoples, or collectives) they propose to explain. (2009, 4)

4.4

Multi-Naturalism as “War Machine”

During the 2009 Disputatio, Viveiros de Castro once again asserted that perspectivism is more than an interesting ethnological phenomenon, it is a conceptual bomb [to] explode our own anthropology, because it is a counteranthropology, […] an anthropology that challenges our own. In this sense, perspectivism is “a concept that describes the relation of incompatibility between Amerindian thought and ours, in absolute discontinuity with ours” (ibid.). Viveiros de Castro reminds us that his approach is inspired by Jullien’s approach to China “because my Amerindian thought [sic!] has the same polemical status as François Jullien’s Chinese thought” (ibid.). He adds that he is generalising in a similar way to Jullien when the latter uses inspiration drawn from a singular Chinese thinker inscribed in a

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specific era to say something about Chinese versus Greek thought. But, as Billeter points out in relation to Jullien, this Foucauldian heterotopia, where the philosopher places himself in otherness in order to reconsider his thought from the outside, finally becomes “a topos of his own discourse” (Billeter 2007, 60). Descola rightly points out that Jullien does not take Chinese thought as seriously as Western thought, such that the latter could be penetrated through points of weakness or fault lines using the tools that Chinese thought provides. Yet this is the sense in which seeks to bring out submerged continents of Western thought, namely, by using the tools of Amerindian thought—I paraphrase Descola (Disputatio, 2009). Viveiros de Castro clearly states that he was interested in the Amerindian foundations of structuralism and wanted to use them “to undermine the Kantian, Cartesian […] Platonic foundations of anthropology” (ibid.). Moreover, he sees a paradox in Jullien’s work insofar as the latter came to the conclusion that by comparing comparable societies (ancient and literate Greece and China), one arrives at the incomparable, i.e., the conclusion that these societies are entirely foreign and have turned their backs on each other. While Viveiros de Castro finds such a conclusion convincing,15 he rejects the idea that only China can be involved in a face-to-face encounter with the West. He radically refuses this discrimination against the thought of people who do not write, against this idea that Indians are not capable of producing a thought in the same way that Jullien produces a Chinese thought from a few authors, a few details. (Disputatio, 2009) It is in this sense that Viveiros de Castro is universalist, whereas Jullien used China as a war machine; in [his] case, Amerindian thought is there to make our thought work, the virtualities of our thought. This does not mean that everyone will become Amerindian, but the fact that we can construct an Amerindian thought. (ibid.) Viveiros de Castro emphasises that he does not use the word “ontology” in the same way as Descola. He employs it more simply, in order to “block the movement of repression that anthropology produces whenever it reduces Indian thought to a representation of the world” (ibid.). He refers here to the unequal struggle described by Roy Wagner (1975) between the anthropologist and those he proposes to study: The anthropologist arrives in the field with his culture and his nature […] and in front of him he has the indigenous person who has only his culture because nature is ours. Roy Wagner says that you have to bring nature into the game to see what happens. We must give back to the indigenous people the nature from which they have been expropriated (Disputatio, 2009).

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For Viveiros de Castro, it is therefore a matter of blocking anthropology’s implicit and unconditioned reflex (which he attributes to Kant) of reducing everything to representations. This intellectual automatism, “let us see how they represent the world,” should be abolished because this approach implies that we will find a law that allows us to pass from our representations to theirs. In this understanding, our representations remain the point of reference from which our view of the other unfolds. Yet, for Viveiros de Castro, it is the worlds that turn, not our representations. Precisely, perspectivism is a multi-naturalism, because a perspective is not a representation. A perspective is not a representation because representations are properties of the mind, and the point of view is in the body. ([1996] 1998, 447)

4.5

A-Substantial Cannibalism: The Body-Sign

Cannibalism and sacrifice, which are simply mentioned in his 1996 article, subsequently become key elements in Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivist argument. His analysis allows the continuation of the questioning of the body as he understands it in the light of the structuralist-Deleuzian anchoring of his thinking. In the Disputatio of 2009, Viveiros de Castro expressed his theoretical position. For him, Tupinamba cannibalism and war translate an irreversible, unidirectional operation, linked to a phenomenon of transmission contrary to the totemism that is characterised by a certain rupture between the elements at stake: How can we use the language of structuralism to get out of totemism and savage mind? It is a matter of considering totemism and its reverse: sacrifice. For Lévi-Strauss, the passage to action, to ritual, is a decline, lived experience is ontologically minor compared to thought. Viveiros de Castro advocates the opposite. He does associate sacrifice with shamanism through a disjunction with totemism, whereas for Descola sacrifice belongs to analogism. Shamanism, Viveiros de Castro states, allows a “communication between incommunicable” (2009, 121) and establishes “correlations between the respective worlds of each natural species” (ibid., 122). He specifies that the concept of “becoming” used by Deleuze and Guattari (taken from Bergson) serves to designate this third type of relation, which differs from the totemic (which refers to a structural logic, to the “symbolic play of totemic classifications,” and to metaphorical oppositions) and from sacrificial (associated with a serial, imaginary logic, to a fusional continuum) (ibid., 129). Viveiros de Castro writes with reference to A Thousand Plateaus: Becoming […] is an “unnatural” participation of man and nature; it is an instantaneous movement of capture, symbiosis, transversal connection between the heterogeneous. (ibid., 134)

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Viveiros de Castro was particularly struck by a phrase from A Thousand Plateaus (Disputatio, 2009): Deleuze and Guattari state that when a man becomes a jaguar, the jaguar is imaginary but the becoming is real. He comments: So there is no question of belief here: a man does not actually become a jaguar, because jaguar is not an object of the verb to become; to be a jaguar is an aspect of the verb to become, almost like an intransitive verb that has many aspects: It is a property of the verb, not an object that one ends up with: [it is what] affects the action itself. (ibid.) Viveiros de Castro uses Simondon’s term “transduction” to designate the phenomenon that occurs in sacrifice. The transformation in question “calls for an energetics of continuity” (2009, 116). Placing Tupi ritual cannibalism and Amazonian shamanism in the sacrificial register, with shamanism passing “a beneficial semiotic flow between humans and non-humans” (ibid., 123) and sacrifice involving “a zone or moment of indiscernibility between two poles supposed to be self-identical” (ibid., 116), he adds that cannibalism would achieve a potentially reciprocal (the imperative of revenge that gave it meaning in Tupinamba society) but truly irreversible transformation between the terms it connects, by means of acts of supreme contiguity and “discontiguity” (the violent physical contact of the execution, the butchering and consumption of the victim’s body) that imply a movement of indefiniteness and the creation of a zone of indiscernibility between murderers and victims, devourers and devoured. (ibid., 119) Viveiros de Castro presents Amazonian sacrificial rites as theologicalpolitical devices in which supernatural entities do not have precedence. Without a recipient, without the sacred, he claims they diverge fundamentally from sacrifice as Hubert and Mauss defined it in France. This is a definition that “continues to serve as a general reference for the discipline, [and it] does not satisfactorily account for the complex of South American shamanism” (ibid., 110). Keck points out that it is therefore a sacrifice without sacredness: a pure metaphysical operation without intention or recipient. One might say that we are in the midst of metaphysical speculation here, or that we are hovering in the superstructures of thought. However, this solution to one of the most complex problems in the anthropology of religion allows Viveiros to answer a very concrete question […]: the [Deleuzian] question of the relations between alliance and filiation in the economic infrastructure of so-called “primitive” societies. (2011, 914)

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Indeed, the Deleuzian critique of structuralism is based on the relation between alliance and filiation. Following this philosophical tradition, Viveiros de Castro revises the opposition proposed in Anti-Oedipus between alliance/exchange and filiation/production through the prism of the notion of becoming developed in A Thousand Plateaus. In his analysis of cannibalism, he replaces alliance with affinity, the affine being the one with whom a psychic continuity is established (through sacrifice, therefore), namely a “becoming” in the Deleuzian sense: Political allies, those local groups that form a security (and uncertainty) belt around each local group, are always conceived, in the Amazon, under the species of potential affinity, i.e., as a qualified form of otherness (affinity), but an otherness that remains otherness (potential affinity), marked by aggressive and predatory connotations that are much more ritually productive than the simple generic and anonymous enmity, or the depotentialising reiteration of matrimonial exchanges, creators of social interiority. (2019, 96) Viveiros de Castro provides an analysis that encompasses both the divine cannibalism that he observed among the Araweté as well as that of Tupi human cannibalism dating back to the 16th century, whose ritual phases are difficult to reconstruct despite the testimonies to which we have access.16 His text on the latter, which he discusses in the light of his own observations in the field, posits that what was eaten was the relation of the enemy to his devourers, in other words his condition as an enemy. What was assimilated from the victim were the signs of his otherness, and what was aimed at was this otherness as a view of the Self. Cannibalism and the type of Indian warfare associated with it involved a paradoxical movement of reciprocal selfdetermination through the viewpoint of the enemy. (2009, 113) In sum, Viveiros de Castro rethinks “the meaning of warrior cannibalism and shamanism” (ibid., 110), cannibalism translating, according to him, an Amerindian metaphysics that makes sense in “perspectivism.” He also attempts to show, based on the Tupi sacrifice, that the enemy’s point of view is integrated into cannibal practices (ibid., 113): This idea came to me while listening to the Araweté war songs, in which the warrior, through a complex deictic and anaphoric play, speaks of himself from the point of view of the dead enemy: the victim, who is the subject (in both senses) of the song, speaks of the Araweté he has killed, and speaks of his murderer—who is the one who “speaks,” i.e., the one who sings the words of the dead enemy—as a cannibalistic enemy (although among the Araweté one eats only words). Through his enemy,

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the Araweté murderer sees or poses himself “as an enemy.” He apprehends himself as a subject from the moment when he sees himself through the eyes of his victim, or rather, when he pronounces his own singularity through the voice of his victim. Perspectivism. (ibid., 113–114) These war songs are more precisely described in From the Enemy’s Point of View, and it is difficult to fully grasp the passages concerning them in Cannibal Metaphysics without having consulted this previous study. In this ethnographic work, Viveiros de Castro states that the warrior who sings “has an essential affinity (in both senses) with his dead enemy” ([1986] 1992, 140), for it is the warrior’s enemy who sings through the warrior, and the warrior is an affinity of the dead enemy (war is the means of capturing women to marry who are the sisters of the enemies, i.e., in battle, brothersin-law are killed). The enemy is musicalised, so to speak, while the warrior would be his musician: “Seen from his good side—his dead side—the enemy is the one who brings music. Dance songs are awi maraka, songs of the enemy, sung by the killer” (ibid., 240): His efficacy depends on his being alive and bringing the dead. On the other hand, the killer represents no one, but incarnates the enemy with whom he is confounded; he is the place of a complex metamorphosis that only benefits himself. (ibid., 249–250) This idea is recalled in Politique des multiplicités [Politics of Multiplicities]: [A]mazonian predation modifies the predator as much or more than the prey, because it is a genetic device of individuation and not a mere “power” relation (in the sense of proprietary domination). (2019, 108 note 37) For Viveiros de Castro, there is a clear link between what he himself observed during his fieldwork and the 16th century accounts of Tupi cannibal practices. In both cases, he perceives a process of transmutation of perspectives, where the “I” is determined as “other” by the act of incorporation of that other, which in turn becomes an “I,” but always in the other, literally “through the other.” Such a definition proposed to resolve a simple but insistent question: what was truly devoured by this enemy? It could not be his matter or his “substance, ” since this was ritual cannibalism, where the consumption of the victim’s flesh was insignificant… . Thus, the “thing” eaten could not be a “thing” at the same time as being, and this is essential, a body.17 (2009, 112–113)

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In other words, cannibalism would establish an ultimate link of continuity with the other by the very fact of commuting into the other, the eater becoming the eaten, and not the other way around. In contrast to the idea that what one eats becomes a part of oneself, for the Tupinamba, what predominates is the idea that one becomes what one eats, because the self is determined by the other, by the enemy, namely the cannibal victim whose body is “a sign, a purely positional value” (2009, 113). Let us consider now this perspective on the body, which was mentioned earlier, and see how it is integrated into the analysis. According to Viveiros de Castro, when the Tupinamba ate their enemies (in the 16th century), they were not interested in their flesh as a “substance” because, he argues, many people ate the same corpse and therefore only ingested a “homeopathic amount.” He advances the same reasoning in “Le marbre et le myrte” (“Marble and Myrtle”) and he points out that substances are not relevant because the enemy was eaten by hundreds of people who ingested minute doses of their opponent’s flesh (1993, 402). But in the register of the symbolic, would the quantity of meat ingested be sufficient to account for the Tupi anti-substantialism that Viveiros de Castro claims to find here? Such an argument would be necessary to support the idea that what is eaten is not the flesh (which is seen as a substance in Viveiros de Castro’s conceptuality) but the relation to the enemy (the sign). For how could flesh be eaten to establish a relation (to use once more Viveiros de Castro’s conceptual register)? This does seem inconceivable in the anti-substantialist, anti-essentialist relationist field, although it is not in the submutantial theoretical field. Can we really dismiss the ingested meat substance with a wave of the hand on the grounds that it was taken in minute quantities? Hélène Clastres writes the following: Food, however, was not to be forgotten, since, after the palaver, those concerned (so to speak) were present at the sharing of their bodies. From that day on [which marked the arrival of the prisoner], each one was assigned the portion that would be his when the time came. A meticulous division, if we are to believe the witnesses, such that nothing of the limbs or organs remained that was not distributed. A few rules were always observed: the delicate pieces were reserved for the guests who were to be honoured—fingertips, fat surrounding the liver and heart; the brain and tongue for adolescents; the genitals for women. […] Everything was eaten, and except for the murderer, who was first forced to vomit and then subjected to a rigorous fast, everyone took part in the meal, including the wife and, if necessary, the mother. There were few restrictions, on the other hand, on human flesh: the main one being the genitals, the consumption of which was always reserved for someone of the other sex. Finally, the essential rule of anthropophagy is perhaps the requirement that everyone participate. From the youngest to the oldest, everyone had to be able to taste

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the enemy, no matter how little. When, for example, there was too little meat for too many guests, a foot or a hand would be boiled so that everyone would at least have some broth. Even the babies were not forgotten, whose mothers smeared their breasts with the blood of the victim. ([2020] 1972, 74; 81) Such ethnographic data completely call into question the idea of the bodyflesh and the decomposed body in the making. By removing the flesh from the analysis, Viveiros de Castro takes up a structuralist semiological perspective that turns the body into a sign among others, apprehensible in terms of the differences with other signs (other bodies, other natures). In this sense, the body, as a sign, and related to the Amazonian habitus, cannot be a substance. And ingesting it therefore refers, for Viveiros de Castro, to a process that has nothing to do with the ingestion of a substance, but with the ingestion of an (other) position. The theory here is mixed with arguments deeply rooted in the epistemological history of French anthropology as well as with data interpreted through the prism of structuralism—we have seen that in Descola and Lévi-Strauss the body was apprehended solely in the field of signs to be analysed with regard to the positioning of other signs, in a structuralist language, therefore, that discards all bodily reality and implies an abstractive essentialism of the body, otherwise inserted in cognitive perspectives. There is nothing at this stage that shows that the Tupi perceived what was ingested as a non-substance: this is a “structuralist” and Deleuzian assertion on Viveiros de Castro’s part. The main idea is the following: One devours the relation, not the substance, in order to enter into relation with the other, to ingest the other, and this implies a becoming by virtue of a taking the other’s point of view. But how can such a thesis be maintained when substances (in this case the “full” body, with organs, of the enemy) could potentially have a role to play not in opposition to cannibalistic relationism as Viveiros de Castro analyses it, but rather in supporting the argument concerning the relational metamorphosis? Reading the testimonies of 16th century Europeans, which are reported more precisely in “Marble and Myrtle,” raises a number of questions about the flesh. 4.6

Becoming an Animal

In the 16th century, being eaten transforms the body of the eater into the body of the enemy, who then acquires the enemy’s point of view. This is Viveiros de Castro’s hypothesis, which is based on 20th century Araweté war songs. Viveiros de Castro bases such conclusions on the way he apprehends the body (a “sign,” like an empty shell without substance). Yet, we do not know how the body was perceived by the Tupinamba of the 16th century. We have previously seen that other Amerindianists introduces the idea of “shared substance” into their analyses of Amazonian societies. Viveiros de

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Castro’s argument, which is strongly marked by his epistemic and philosophical anchorage, remains unproven, and because of this uncertainty, his analysis of what he calls “Tupi cannibalism,” to use the missionary expression, remains hypothetical. Let us return to both his arguments and these missionary “ethnographic” materials. Hélène Clastres notes that all the prisoners of war without exception were killed and eaten; there was no alternative here that would open up another way out. And if we add that the Tupi tribes spent most of their time at war with each other, and that, moreover, the purpose of the wars was to take captives, we will have an idea of the importance of their cannibalism. Remarkable, in the second place, the theatrical side of the rituals that took place with the prisoners: their arrival in the village of the victors, then, much later (often years), their killing, two moments which, sometimes echoing, sometimes in opposition, are like the high points of an astonishing staging where the roles are not only distributed in advance, but also regulated [by] the dialogues, dances and women’s choirs, scenery, movements in space… As if the Tupi had sought to make a spectacle of their cannibalism to themselves. Great cannibals, certainly, and with ostentation. ([2020] 1972, 72) If we start from the victim’s perspective, Viveiros de Castro says, cannibalism avoids the putrefaction of the dead body, the burial, and causes a lightening of the body (1993, 408): “Devouring by enemies was associated with a theme characteristic of Tupi-Guarani cosmologies, the horror of burial and the putrefaction of the corpse” (ibid., 393). In a word, Tupi exocannibalism was “a funerary system” (ibid., 392). If we start from the devourer’s perspective, one the one hand the eaten is the part and the form of revenge and on the other it is a specifically feminine method of obtaining a long life (“becoming a young girl”) or even immortality (which is possible for men through courage at the time of death in war) (ibid., 409). Finally, cannibalism is a carnivalesque staging of ferocity, a becoming-other, by absorbing the enemy; the social body becomes, at the moment of the rite, determined by the enemy, constituted by it (ibid.). Hélène Clastres speaks of theatrical staging and acting in “Les beaux-frères ennemis” [“The brotherin-laws enemies”] ([2020] 1972, 72). Viveiros de Castro thus touches on the idea, which he does not explore, that cannibalism has (and also perhaps above all?) to do with the feminine and female regeneration. Hélène Clastres recalls the importance of women in 16th century testimonies. For these were the first to receive the prisoners: From the outset, the status of the prisoners as food was signified by a subtle sharing of gesture and word. “I am coming, your future food”: it was to the

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women that the captive announced himself in these terms when, on the outskirts of the village, they were encountered in the plantations. To which the mimicry of the women who waited massed at the entrance of the village soon responded: indicating on his body, with a slap or a pinch, a piece of their choice, they then struck their mouths in rhythm. (ibid., 73) It was then the women who took charge of the captive, singing and dancing around him. Viveiros de Castro’s work does not address this gendered perspective on cannibalism at all, although some missionary testimonies report that only the old women ate the captive warrior (1993, 406). Viveiros de Castro favours the idea that everyone (men, women, children) had to eat the opponent (ibid.). In other words, he sets aside the reports that women saw the ingestion of the dead (even in tiny amounts) as having among its effects a new vitality. In Cannibal Metaphysics, Viveiros de Castro also does not interrogate the effects of such sacrificial ingestion on/for the “cannibal” community outside of his perspectivist system. Is it about incorporating the enemy’s forces? The explanation has fallen into disfavour. It is worth venturing another explanation, however, because the idea that one assimilates the virtues of what one ingests is not foreign to the Tupi (nor to most Indians): as proof, for example, of the prohibition made to young people (who are expected to be agile) on consuming the flesh of animals that are slow to run; or, on the contrary, the recommendations made to apprentice shamans (who must be able to sing very well) to look for birds with melodious songs for food and to prefer water from waterfalls for drinking. (H. Clastres [2020] 1972, 83) In the theory of sacrifice that he proposes—whose orientations are not “disjunctive” but “conjunctive”—Maurice Bloch puts forward the idea that rituals dramatise the journey of the person involved in the ritual to the afterlife and his conquering return: The first part of the rituals involves an experiential dichotomisation of the subjects into an over-vital side and a transcendental side. Then, as in the external drama, the transcendental drives out the vital so that the person becomes, for a time, entirely transcendental. This victory of one side of the person over the other is what requires the first element of violence in the rituals. This violence is, however, only a preliminary to a subsequent violence which involves the triumphant experiential recovery of vitality into the person by the transcendental element. However (and again as in the external drama), this recovery of vitality does not compromise the superiority of the transcendental identity, because the recovered vitality is mastered by the transcendental. Unlike the native

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vitality of the first stage which must be driven out of oneself, the vitality reintroduced in the second stage is taken from external sources and is consumed as the food of the transcendental subject, often literally through the mouth. This second violence can therefore be considered as the consequence of the first; it is the elimination of ordinary vitality which necessitates its replacement by a new, plundered vitality, and the contact with the transcendental which provides the impetus for this forced substitution. The whole ritual process can therefore be understood as the construction of a form of “rebounding violence” both at the public and at the experiential level. (1992, 5–6) This conquest and consumption explain, Bloch emphasises, the political effects of religious action. Unlike René Girard, he does not see any indestructible link between violence and religion, nor does he presume an innate aggressiveness in human beings that would be expressed and purged to a certain extent by ritual, but he considers that violence is itself the result of an attempt to create the transcendent in religion and politics (ibid., 7). It is questionable whether this theoretical proposal, which does not refer directly to the Amerindian framework, could be applied to the case of the warrior cannibalism that Viveiros de Castro discusses. It reintroduces the transcendent into the debate through the prism of the devoured captive and the executioner—not the devourer—a pair embodying, precisely, this fertilising social violence—the officiant can therefore have offspring just as old women become young girls and are therefore fertile again. Let us keep this idea in mind while returning to the phase that preceded the Amazonian eating. The prisoner could live for years before being eaten: Viveiros de Castro speaks of a “symbolic appropriation of the prisoner’s person” (1993, 402). The captive was in fact transformed into a brother-in-law: His sisters were captured to be married by the “predators” and he could also be “given” a wife. According to Hélène Clastres, this was precisely a condition sine qua non, the term tovaja meaning “enemy” and “brother-in-law” at the same time: “It is a tovaja who will be eaten. And with him his children. For after many years of captivity he may have children” ([2020] 1972, 77). The enemy also had to undergo a process of transformation so that he would be like the Tupinamba. He danced, drank, ate with his captors, dressed like them, and accompanied them to war: “Adorned with feathers, painted and coiffed like the others, so that nothing in appearance distinguished them any more” (ibid.). For Viveiros de Castro, it is a socialisation of the enemy: The Tupinamba wanted to be sure that this other they were going to kill and eat was fully determined as a man, capable of understanding and desiring his fate. (1993, 393)

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Does this socialisation mean that this enemy, as an Other (initially), was gradually sliding, through various transformations of his body (clothed and fed), towards the Self, and thus towards the local Subject? If we follow the previous reasoning, by having the same body, by imposing on him the having of a body common to them, the prisoner saw the same thing as his captors. He thus adopted their perspectives: He became one of them. Now Viveiros de Castro continually refers to exocannibalism. However, it can reasonably be asked if the fact of inserting the enemy into the socius, with shared food and alcohol, made him a man who was as close as possible to his future predators. He became “the same” as them, although his fateful fate was sealed and, as Hélène Clastres points out, he had to respect certain prohibitions, thus retaining the status of prisoner and foreigner at the same time ([2020] 1972, 75–76). Another question then arises: did one eat an enemy/ brother-in-law who was both Self and Other, and thus situated in a kind of in-between (ibid., 72)? Despite his bodily insertion into the socius, was he irremediably marked with a certain otherness? According to Clastres, the prisoner was painted by the women before his death, which suggests that the appearance of his body was then (re)transformed. The cannibalistic ritual framework imposed such a new bodily transformation, reversing, so to speak, any idea of a common body. However, did this “exocannibalism” reflect in the end the desire to incorporate the other closest to oneself, that is, the other who had shared local customs for a time? The enemy was socially like those who had taken him prisoner, but even more so, insofar as he was adorned with their bodily “covering,” he became like them for a while and thus changed perspective until the ritual that marked a fight and a rupture: At that precise moment, the brother-in-law was or became (?) fully the enemy and he had to try to defend himself. He would then resume his place as a warrior. But how could it be that the Tupinamba were ingesting a man they previously had partially integrated into their society? How can we grasp this killing in order to “give substance to the future” to quote Viveiros de Castro (1993, 397)? It is perhaps by leaving the debate about cannibalism, whether exogenous or endogenous, that it is possible to grasp what is at stake. The ethnographic elements transmitted by the missionaries (and by Viveiros de Castro) are worth looking at again here. We have seen that eating flesh implies the regeneration of female bodies and their renewed fertility. In this regard, one element seems important: Viveiros de Castro emphasises that the community was transformed into a ferocious and bloodthirsty horde, staging a becoming-enemy and a becoming-animal. “I am a jaguar.” Such is the expression that a European missionary would have heard from the mouth of a man eating his enemy (ibid., 413). Let us retain this becoming-animal reported in the 16th century testimonies and the becoming-enemy that Viveiros de Castro projects onto these materials by drawing upon 20th century Araweté songs (which may essentially concern the sacrificer and therefore, in the 16th century as well as in the 20th century, the murderous warrior).

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The prisoner does indeed undergo a process of (local) humanisation during the period of ante mortem captivity: He has been socialised, he has become a member of the group. Yet the killer, i.e., the one who put him to death, was not allowed to eat him. A relation of identification linked the victim, once dead, with the officiant (this is where this “becoming an enemy” comes in, a point I will come back to). Moreover, the sacrifice served as an initiation for this executioner: For men, the rite of passage equivalent to the rites of first menstruation [key point] was the ceremonial execution of a prisoner. Unless he had killed a captive and gone through his first name change, a boy was not allowed to marry and have children […]. The reproduction of the group was thus ideally linked to the device of capture and ritual execution of enemies, that is, to the engine of war. (ibid., 391) So the executioner did not act as a cannibal. He too became an animal. According to Hélène Clastres, he was leaving his home with his retinue, relatives, and friends: covered with urucu on his face, his body entirely white, a long cape of feathers on his shoulders (the cloak of the chiefs), a feather headdress. He once went around the square mimicking a hawk ready to swoop down on its prey before stopping in front of its victim. ([2020] 1972, 80) Hence, he does not remain a human but is transformed into a bird of prey that kills a human (enemy/brother-in-law) and, without eating him, becomes the killed once the latter has been ingested by the other members of the community (this seems incontrovertible in view of the testimonies: He takes the perspective of the dead, he becomes the dead). The executioner then returns to funerary reclusion while engaging in a process of identification with “the opposite” (enemy/brother-in-law) (to use Viveiros de Castro’s terms) that he had just put to death. Can the sacrificer be considered the living substitute of the sacrificial victim, representing—presentifying—his part assimilated to the group? It should be recalled that the officiant, a member of the anthropophagous group, made himself other by changing his identity at the end of the sacrificial killing, and that from then on he could marry and thus have descendants. If he was “lived” finally as a/the dead (he lost his primary identity to integrate another by identifying himself with the sacrificial victim), could we not then suggest that the sacrificial victim, this enemy/brother-in-law, became (fully, ultimately) part of the tribe by being treated as a tribal dead person through the intermediary of the sacrificer, and that, through initiation, he became a full member of the group? The enemy continued to live on through the warrior who had killed him but not eaten

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him, on the one hand, and integrated the bodies of the others who had become animals to make the women fertile again and capable of having offspring, on the other. 4.7

Beyond Cannibalism

The killer is a hawk, the enemy-warrior is his prey, who he puts to death and then offers to eat to the community, which has become jaguars, while he, the killer, becomes the dead enemy-prey. If, for Viveiros de Castro, the enemy and the killer were the only truly human beings (1993, 413), they were, on the other hand, the ones who ensured the perpetuation of the local society by transforming themselves: The first by becoming an animal predator and then the dead enemy who will have descendants, the second by being the prey killed and then eaten by the local society animalised during the ritual. From then on, the whole society is fertile, carried towards a future (towards a “becoming” in Viveiros de Castro’s sense) because of this warrior who was killed and then devoured (who had himself undergone a change of perspective before his death to fully become once again this enemy/prey that was hunted at the time of the sacrificial ritual). If we follow the perspectivist logic, for the Tupinamba, it is not the humans who eat the human-prisoner (the one who has undergone a process of socialisation within them), but the rite makes them animals who eat the body of a human (the warrior is therefore, as Viveiros de Castro points out, the only truly human being) and therefore of a prey: It is a prey that is killed by a bird of prey (which on the other hand is not human but integrates the killed human in return for being able to join the society and perpetuate it) and is eaten by animals. According to the local perspective, the sacrificial rite is therefore not cannibal: There is indeed a warlike killing that implies a transformation of perspective for the community, which takes the point of view of the animal (the predator) at that very moment, but not necessarily that of the enemy (reserved for the sacrificer at the end of the killing). The slain warrior thus has two different futures: on the one hand, he is the eaten and regenerating prey, ensuring the renewal of female fertility; on the other hand, he commutes into the sacrificer who becomes the new body of the sacrificed one and thereby fully (re)integrates his human becoming. He is thus reincarnated in him (taking the flesh of the executioner as his body) and can have descendants (as the warrior songs of the 20th century Araweté say). But this human-enemy who has been socialised has undergone a prior integration so as to make him like them, is, strictly speaking, no longer the enemy who had been brought back to the village. He has undergone a process of transformation in his own body. As if it were a question of a village humanity renewed by the integration of an original otherness (which is what Viveiros de Castro says, but along other argumentative paths), inscribed in the future thanks to submutantial processes. And it is the man who

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kills who is assured of his social destiny at the same time that he animalises his society and also ensures the perpetuation of this local humanity. In the end, the rite does not seem to be cannibal for the Tupinamba but is rather perceived as a regular regeneration of their humanity through the prism of the other, certainly, but who is partially commuted into the Self (in its flesh?) before being eaten. Why is being an animal, the time of the rite, so important? It is at this moment that the Other perspective is experienced: at the moment of eating what one was before (a member of the community) at the same time as one is in the process of becoming other, that is to say, no longer animal but human again, that is to say, a reinforced humanity that cannot be by itself directly. More precisely, one does not eat one’s very similar fellow man; one eats one’s fellow man who has become close to oneself while being an enemy warrior. He is the closest “Other.” In the end, it is a particular humanity that one seeks to regenerate insatiably through the enemy humanised and partially transformed into a self. This ingestion of this “enemy” self, of this originally other self, is the condition of the possibility of this return to humanity or of his access to humanity and its reproduction. But it is always conceived with an “other” part. The Araweté song specifies this: the enemy-death that the warrior sings is this rediscovered humanity. Such a conclusion does not contradict that of Viveiros de Castro, but comes to it by other arguments: For what is at stake is not only the other in oneself, but the other-become-Self in the self that has become animal: The Tupinamba religion, rooted in the complex of exo-cannibal warriorism, draws a form in which the socius is constituted by the relation to the other, where incorporation into the other depends on a departure from oneself—the outside is in a constant process of interiorization, and the inside is nothing but a movement towards the outside. In this topology, there is no totality, monad, or identity bubble that relentlessly guards its borders and makes the outside a diacritical mirror of its coincidence with itself; the socius here is literally a “lower limit of predation” (Lévi-Strauss 1984, 144), the indigestible residue; what moves it is the relation to the Outside. The other is not a mirror, it is a destiny. (Viveiros de Castro, 1993, 386) But the claim there is no role for substance in this setting in relation through the manducation stands in need of justification. And the following statement by Viveiros de Castro is less than convincing: What I am saying is that Tupinamba philosophy affirmed an essential ontological incompleteness: the incompleteness of the socius, and, in general, of the human condition. It was an order in which interiority and

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identity were hierarchically subsumed by exteriority and difference, where becoming and relation prevailed over being and substance. (ibid., 387) It is equally possible to suggest that one assimilates the submutantial human condition of one’s victim in order to (re)become him while he transforms himself. In this sense, the eaten warrior embodies the submutual process essential to the community that he is finally fully integrated into. Hence the capture of a warrior was for this society the condition sine qua non of its perpetuation as seen in the light of perspectivism. And although perspectivism is indeed of central importance, its logic is by no means contradicted when it is approached in a substantial, or rather in a submutantial, way. Yet in doing so, we may be indulging in a simplistic reading of Tupi cannibalism as Viveiros de Castro states that “[r]eadings of Tupi cannibalism in simplistic terms of a devouring impulse of the other neglect this double face and double movement: To incorporate the other is to assume one’s otherness” (ibid., 388). 4.8

Conclusion. A Decolonised Thought?

Viveiros de Castro openly claims that he seizes on perspectivism to make it say something other than what it originally expresses. We can ask whether we actually find in his way of approaching anthropology through a becoming-Indian of the concept and politics instead a personal undertaking, i.e., a Viveiros de Castro-Deleuzian becoming of the concept and politics. It may seem paradoxical to call on anthropologists to ethnologise/indigenise anthropology while taking over a dualistic philosophical apparatus in order to make the Amerindians speak. In any case, perspectivism has the merit of placing the body at the origin of perspectives (Turner 2009). Viveiros de Castro, however, strongly criticises “pre-structuralist” theories and the idea of bodily fluids (2009, 144), asserting that a post-structuralist theory of relationality, i.e., a theory that “respects the ‘unfundamental’ compromise of structuralism with a relational ontology, cannot ignore […] the ideas of perspectives, force, affect, habit, event, process, prehension, transversality, becoming, and difference” (ibid., 145). Nor can the post-structuralist theory of “relationality”—of relationism—ignore the body over and beyond its being taken as a conceptual abstraction. Viveiros de Castro makes a primarily political use of the concept of perspectivism in order to “undermine the acquired truth of anthropology.” In the Disputatio of 2009, he expressed himself again on this issue as follows: Perspectivism is to be seen as a small cog in a machine within a political project: how to take these people seriously, which has nothing to do with believing, but refers to a methodological position, a radical methodological agnoticism. To take people seriously is not to neutralize

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the propositions of others, the affirmations of others, the ideas of others, it is not to reduce them to emanations of socio-political regimes, of a certain cognitive ethnology, of a certain way of transmitting knowledge, of a mode of production. Let us suspend these things (Disputatio, 2009). It is precisely necessary to “contemplate a thought that is in the process of being made, in the process of unfolding before us” (ibid.). No one could contradict such a position, but it remains to be seen what is more plausible here: What the people themselves say or what Viveiros de Castro says? I am the Deleuzian that I am who says that there are truths that are completely useless, silly, low, vile, trivial, truth follows interest not the other way around. Truth does not exist in a free state, in a wild state in the world. Perspectivism is one of those implausible stories that I especially want to tell and resist [in this way] the interrogations of the epistemological cops that surround us all, pursue us all (ibid.). Irreducibly inscribed in the Deleuzian fold by which he grants himself an undeniable freedom of thought, Viveiros de Castro, a sort of Jullien of the anthropology, remains caught, in many respects, in his own episteme and in the articulation of philosophy together with anthropology. He is not evidently in a dialogue between philosophy and Amerindian metacosmology. The decolonising illusion of its resultant a-substantial relationism can be observed elsewhere, in China especially, in yet other ways. The body, linked to habitus in Viveiros de Castro’s anthropology, is neglected in “the new Chinese anthropology” in favour of the “relation” as rooted in Chinese habitus. Hence, the habitus remains central but the focus is diverted from the body to the relation in which Self and Other are also at stake. The next chapter will accordingly tackle Chinese Self and Other relations, not only in the sense of inter-cultural relations (Wu [1926] 1990), but also in the sense of cosmo-political alterity (i.e., internal, external, and intermediary others) (Wang 2012, 338). Notes 1 Broadcast on France Culture on February 7, 2020. 2 Hamberger emphasises ( 2014, 350) that Lévi-Straussian presuppositions mix European rationalism and the cosmological conceptions of societies that have built what I have chosen to call here their metacosmologies on very different bases. He adds that this encounter made Leibniz and the Amerindians communicate with each other. It would seem preferable to say that structuralism provoked and made possible the meeting of these two symbolic institutions.

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3 Let us recall that for Descola “the common referent of the entities that inhabit the world is therefore not man as a species but humanity as a condition,” see Chapter 3. 4 In Cannibal Metaphysics, Viveiros de Castro does not speak so much of humans as of persons (perhaps it is not a matter of a semantic shift as it is of considering, upstream, humans as a generic concept, and here taking the concept of person to designate the existent in itself): “[W]hile not all the existents are necessarily de facto persons, the fundamental point is that there is nothing to prevent (de jure) any species or mode of being from being so. It is not, in short, a problem of taxonomy, of classification, of ‘ethno-science’. All animals and other components of the cosmos are intensively persons, virtually persons, because any of them can turn out to be (turn into) a person. This is not a mere logical possibility, but an ontological potentiality” ([1996] 1998, 447). 5 He repeats these arguments in Cannibal Metaphysics: “[M]any (presumably all) of the peoples of the New World share a conception according to which the world is composed of a multiplicity of points of view: all existents are centres of intentionality, which apprehend other existents according to their respective characteristics and powers. The presuppositions and consequences of this idea are irreducible to the common concept of relativism that they seem, at first sight, to evoke. They are, in fact, arranged on a plane orthogonal to the opposition between relativism and universalism” (2009, 19–20). 6 Patrick Pérez (2010) contests the idea that perspectivism would be the prerogative of shamanism because all the populations of America do not practice shamanism. Hence he claims shamanism is not a necessary condition of perspectivism. 7 I am transcribing here quite freely what Viveiros de Castro said in the 2009 Disputatio. He discusses this issue in chapter 13 of Cannibal Metaphysics (2009, 171). 8 These are ideas taken up even more openly in La politique des multiplicités (2019). 9 “Etenim, quid corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit!” (Spinoza, Ethics III, Scolia of Proposition II). 10 I reserve the term “philosophy” for the Euro-American world. Richir has shown, as already seen, that philosophy is the product of a particular symbolic institution, which cannot be common to that of the Amerindians or, more broadly, to populations located outside this symbolic field. 11 I borrow this formulation from Viveiros de Castro (Becoming-Indian). 12 I will come back to the parallel with François Jullien who decided to question the Greek world from China and the instrumentalisation of the Amerindian world (taken as a tool) to respond to Eurocentric philosophical issues. 13 Let us recall the thesis of the Americanist Désveaux (2017) on the subject, which associated substance with the West and speech with the Amerindians. Substance remains connected to Western naturalism without being questioned beyond this anchorage. 14 “Whenever a quality is a sign-foundation to be copied, imitated, mimicked, or reflected, that quality is a qualisign. Camouflage and animal mimicry are, in large part, interpreters of qualisigns. Qualisigns are of paramount importance. In fact, they are indispensable for the communication of qualities. Qualisigns are the origin of metaphor, similarity, and analogy” ( Savan, 1980, 14). 15 But for my part this is quite sclerotic in that it suggests that China is an incomparable “outside” even though anthropological comparisons can (obviously) be made with Chinese materials. 16 This is underlined by Hélène Clastres ([2020] 1972). 17 These assertions will be discussed later.

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Bibliography Allard O. (2006) La parenté en substance. La critique de Schneider et ses effets. [Kinship in substance. Schneider’s critique and its effects.] L’Homme 177–178: 437–466. Arhem K. (1993) Ecosofia makuna. La selva humanizada. Bogota: CEREC. Billeter J. F. (2007) Contre François Jullien [Against François Jullien]. Paris: Éditions Allia. Bloch M. (1992) Prey into hunter. The politics of religious experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten J. (1995) The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood and Relatedness Among Malays in Pulau Langkawi. American Ethnologist 22 (2): 223–241. Clastres H. [2020] (1972) Les beaux-frères ennemis. À propos du cannibalisme tupinamba [The enemy brothers-in-law. About Tupinamba cannibalism]. Revue du MAUSS 55: 53–68. 10.3917/rdm.055.0053. Crépeau R. (2007) Les substances du chamanisme: perspectives sud-amérindiennes [Shamanic Substances. South-Amerindian Perspectives]. Anthropologie et Sociétés 31 (3): 107–125. Deleuze G. (1986) Foucault. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Deleuze G. (1988) Le Pli. Leibniz et le Baroque [The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque]. Paris: Minuit. Deleuze G. and Guattari F. (1972) L’Anti-Œdipe [The Anti-Oedipus]. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Deleuze G. and Guattari F. (1980) Mille Plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus]. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Désveaux E. (2009) La parenté “nouvelle” ou le retour de la substance [The “new” kinship or the return of the substance]. Journal de la société des américanistes 95–1: 213–223. DOI: 10.4000/jsa.10809. Disputatio (2009) (with P. Descola, E. Viveiros de Castro, P. Maniglier and B. Latour): www.canal-u.tv/video/fmsh/perspectivisme_et_animisme_debat_avec_philippe_ descola.30901. Gow P. (1991) Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hamberger K. (2014) La pensée objectivée [The objective thought]. Les cahiers de L’Herne. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion, 339–346. Henry M. (2000) Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair [Incarnation. A philosophy of the flesh]. Paris: Seuil. Keck F. (2011) L’anthropologie intensifiée par la métaphysique [Anthropology intensified by metaphysics]. Critique 774: 909–926. Laberge J. S. (2018) L’ontoéthologie: Deleuze-Uexküll-Spinoza [The ontoethology: Deleuze-Uexküll-Spinoza]. In Couture Y. and Olivier L. (eds.), Vers Deleuze. Nature, pensée, politique [Toward Deleuze. Nature, thought, politics]. Québec: Presses de l’université Laval, 23–50. Latour B. [1991] (2006) Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique [We have never been modern. An essay in symmetrical anthropology]. Paris: La Découverte. Lima T. S. (1995) A Parte do Cauim. Etnografia Juruna, PhD thesis, PPGAS, Museu Nacional, UFRJ.

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Lima T. S. (1996) O dois e seu multiplo: reflexes sobre o perspectivismo emu ma cosmologia tupi. Mana 2 (2): 21–47. Munn N. [1986] (1992) The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham: Duke University Press. Pérez P. (2010) Des Américains très inquiétants, ou de quelques conséquences de la théorie du perspectivisme [Some very worrying Americans, or some consequences of the theory of perspectivism]. Joint Seminar “Philosophical Transversalities” ERRAPHIS (CNRS and ERASMUS Mundus) and CAS-LISST (EHESS, CNRS). University of Toulouse. Rival L. (1998) Androgynous Parents and Guest Children: The Huaorani Couvade. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (4): 619–642. Savan D. (1980) La séméiotique de Charles S. Peirce [The semiotics of Charles S. Peirce]. In Peraldi F. (ed.), La sémiotique de C.S Peirce, Languages 58: 9–23. DOI: 10.3406/lgge.1980.1844. Surrallés A. (2003) Au cœur du sens: perception, affectivité, action chez les Candoshi [At the heart of meaning: perception, affectivity, action among the Candoshi]. Paris: CNRS, Éditions de la MSH. Turner T. S. (2009) The crisis of Late Structuralism. Perspectivism and Animism: rethinking Culture, Nature, Spirit, and bodiliness. Tipiti. Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 7(1): 3–42. Vilaça A. (1992) Comendo como gente: Formas do canibalismo Wari (Pakaa-Nova). Rio de Janeiro: Editoria da UFRJ. Viveiros de Castro E. [1986] (1992) From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, trans. Howard C. V. of (1986) Arawete: Os Deuses Canibais. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar/ANPOCS Viveiros de Castro E. (1993) Le marbre et le myrte: de l’inconstance de l’âme sauvage [Marble and myrtle: of the fickleness of the savage soul]. In Monod-Becquelin A. and Molinié A. (eds.), Mémoire de la tradition [Memoir of the tradition]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 365–431. Viveiros de Castro E. [1996] (1998) Les pronoms cosmologiques et le perspectivisme amérindien [Cosmological pronouns and Amerindian perspectivism], trans. of (1996) Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio. Mana, 2 (2), 115–144. In Alliez E. (ed.), Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 429–462. Viveiros de Castro E. (2004) Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2 (1): 3–22. Viveiros de Castro E. (2009) Métaphysiques Cannibales [Cannibal Metaphysics]. Paris: PUF, Gallimard. Viveiros de Castro E. (2014) Perspectivism and Multinaturalism in Indigenous America. Journal of Anthropologists 138–139: 161–181. Viveiros de Castro E. (2015) Relative Native. Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago: HAU Books. Viveiros de Castro E. (2019) Politique des multiplicités. Pierre Clastres face à l’État [Politics of multiplicities. Pierre Clastres and the State]. Bellevaux: Éditions Dehors. Wagner R. (1975) The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

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Wang M. (2012) All under Heaven (Tianxia): Cosmological Perspectives and Political Ontologies in Pre-Modern China. HAU: Journal of ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 337–383. Weismantel M. (1995) Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions. American Ethnologist 22 (4): 685–704. Wu, W. [1926] (1990) Minzu yu Guojia [Nations and the state]. In Wu Wenzao Shehuixue Renleixue Yanjiu Wenji (Sociological and anthropological writings by Wu Wenzao). Beijing: Minzu Chubanshe, 19–36. Zaiser R. (2007), Le pli. Deleuze et le baroque [The Fold. Deleuze and the Baroque]. Œuvres et critiques XXXII (2): 155–170.

Conclusion to Part II

Descola’s structuralist ontology and Viveiros de Castro’s post-structuralist perspectivism, while fundamentally divergent on the theoretical level, both take as their point of departure the desire to conceive the relation between nature and culture in a new way with regard to the indigenous conceptions that emphasise the common subjectivity between humans and non-humans (Turner 2009, 11). Turner summarises animism as: “Nature as universal pan-spirituality” and perspectivism as: “Nature as anthropocentric pan-culturalism” (ibid., 14-17). While Descola attempts to identify four structural ontologies that would characterise the human being, this is based on a fundamentally European analytical approach. And while Viveiros de Castro seems to mobilise Amerindian ontology against Western ontology—and thus against the classical anthropological method—this is a theorical proposition which relies on a European system of thought. The way these thinkers treat ontology is radically opposed. Although these theories are powerful because of their underlying forces of dissolution, they are nevertheless marked by a methodological and ethnographic vagueness. Descola, who did an agrégation in philosophy but claims to be no longer a philosopher, subscribes to cognitivist psychology while, almost paradoxically, introducing the transcendental subject into anthropology by appealing to Husserl to advance the idea of a dualism between body and intentionality. He does not pay attention to the ongoing phenomenological debates in which the body in Husserl’s sense embodies intentionality (linked to the idea of submutance) rather than underlying it (and thus refers to the idea of substance). Descola, moreover, hijacks Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic body for his own purposes. We have seen, in fact, that following Lévi-Strauss—and on this point there is no distance between their approaches—he uses the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher of the flesh and the body, by integrating this into the structuralist programme while at the same time naturalising it. Viveiros de Castro, on the other hand, identifies himself as a philosopher. He openly declared in the Disputatio of 2009 that perspectivism does not exist anywhere, that it is a “pseudo-object,” an “optical illusion,” that DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-9

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he has never seen an Indian perspectivist, and that perspectivism is a concept. It is “an effect of Amerindian thought on ours, more than Amerindian thought as such; a concept that returns on our own conceptuality,” that “reverberates,” he specifies, and that has therefore no descriptive but only a performative interest. It “functions in reverse, [allowing us] to analyse our own anthropology more than to describe the anthropological area to them.” For him, perspectivism “exists everywhere if we take it at a certain level, and it only exists in Amazonia if we take it at another level.” His theory, which gives primacy to relationism, is fundamentally dualistic in that it is based on the paired concepts of nature and culture, soul (or spirit) and body, interiority and exteriority, and so on—in this, he is a naturalist anthropologist like Descola. He weaves a rich, puzzling, destabilising theory, but he does not necessarily win the ethnographic argument by seeing the body exclusively as a sign with no flesh. As Turner points out by way of criticism of Descola’s theoretical proposals, to base a theory on the body implies knowing more about how it is conceived: In short, the body, even as a physical entity, is not an abstract object with a fixed, culturally human perspective, but a process comprising a series of transformations, each of which entails a transformation of perspectives, not all of which are cultural. (2009, 28) The body is certainly not abstract, even if it is continuously the object of “local” abstractions. As Lévi-Strauss emphasised on the first page of The Savage Mind, abstract thought also exists among the so-called “primitives.” It is more precisely a matter of discussing this concrete body and this abstract thought that reflects it in order to enter into dialogue with the latter. In other words, it is important to fully consider the ethnographic data and to address abstraction of and with the other (and not with some theoretical abstraction inherited from philosophy). Turner urges that more attention be given to the detailed structures of indigenous conceptions of the body in order to avoid treating all Amazonian or even all Amerindian cultures as one homogeneous system of thought (ibid., 37). This is true for all other geographical areas. The aim is here not, it cannot be repeated often enough, the promotion of an unbridled cultural relativism, but instead avoiding any conceptual flattening that does not take into consideration the richness of humanity’s theoretical and conceptual productions. Thus, there can be no question of “elevating” indigenous conceptions of the body to structural thought (whatever its field of action—Lévi-Straussian, Descolian, Viveiros de Castrien—), but of integrating them fully into the debate by discarding a priori constructions in order to perceive them as they are and not as we would like them to be so as to carry out a kind of ventriloquism that would makes the self speaks and forgets the other. It means seeing these conceptions as thoughts in their own right and consequently

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integrating all their own complexities without reducing the body to a sign, to a cognitivist scheme, or even to an a-substantial arrangement. Note Turner T. S. (2009) The crisis of Late Structuralism. Perspectivism and Animism: rethinking Culture, Nature, Spirit, and bodiliness. Tipiti. Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 7(1), 3–42.

Part III

Chinese Relationisms and Submutances

5

The Lost Body Wang Mingming’s “Cosmology of Relationship” and Hierarchical Relationism

Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed. Authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance. Against the egalitarian order of persuasion stands the authoritarian order, which is always hierarchical. If authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments. (The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place.)1 Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority” ([2006] 1961, 92–93)

The simulacrum of decentring or the illusion of decolonised thought can be found in Descola and Viveiros de Castro, both of whom create theoretical constructions whose concepts stumble when they run up against degraded, even abandoned, ethnographic realities. The structural relation predominates; the body is instrumentalised and apprehended in such a way as to serve their theories by using the yardstick of European conceptuality; while substances appear to be irremediably blurred or erased. However, on another level, the current enterprise known as the “decolonisation of knowledge” (of EuroAmerican tradition, therefore) is accompanied by new “exogenous” theoretical and analytical options, that is to say non-Western, which themselves invite a decentring. Like the theories that emanate from “us,” this movement of the “reappropriation” of anthropology cannot escape an ethnography of concepts, i.e., an analytical focus on its theoretical aims. As was previously seen, Bhargava calls for the renewal of the social sciences on the basis of the “critical traditions” of India, Africa, China, Iran, Arabia, and Latin America (2013, 42). I propose to clarify here what such a project implies for the Chinese perspective in particular. For it turns out, on the one hand, that Self and Other relations, thus “relationism” (guanxi zhuyi
系) is acquiring a predominant place there today; on the other hand, DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-11

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that ethnographic practice and anthropology have a singular role. For observing Chinese populations has always been the subject of special considerations on the part of the various central powers that have succeeded one another since the foundations of the Empire in the 3rd century BCE. In situ observation of the other (the “barbarian”) was perpetually carried out in order to transform the latter, with a view to promoting and consolidating the extension of the Chinese point of view on the world while ensuring the “unity despite difference” of the country, which expression refers to the Confucian he er bu tong   , which means “united but different/unity despite difference.” Moreover, the institutionalisation of anthropology as a discipline in the late 1920s immediately provoked lively discussions about its adaptability to the Chinese context. The history of ethnology and anthropology in China, in its scientific constitution in the 1920s and 1930s, is the result of numerous exchanges between EuroAmerican and Chinese researchers. Let us recall, for example, the collaboration of Marcel Mauss and Marcel Granet with Yang Kun (a student of the latter from 1921 to 1930) as well as with Yang Chengzhi who studied in France in the early 1930s, and of Bronislaw Malinowski with Fei Xiatong, a graduate of the London School of Economics (1936–1938). Various anthropological currents (evolutionary, diffusionist, functionalist, Gestalttheorie, etc.) were then introduced into China and the Chinese Ethnological Society (Zhongguo minzuxue hui  ) was established in Nanjing in 1934 (Dirlik 2012, 13). For Wang Mingming (2014), this period marks the “age of isolation” of ethnology, that is, a distinctly Western perspective was projected by a number of Chinese scholars onto the populations of China which was from then on not perceived through the idea of interconnection but that of separation. Before coming back to this Wangian critique, let me emphasise that these debates about Western decentration were short-lived because of the political instability in China, which faced a civil war and the Japanese invasion. Then, the ban on social sciences by the People’s Republic of China interrupted any scientific approach for almost three decades. However, the Chinese people were not excluded from state directives during this long period, quite the contrary. Ethnographic practice was once again put at the service of the unification of the country and the consolidation of the Chinese central power, which had become communist. Scientific anthropology thus radically disappeared, giving way to the political ethnography of the imperial tradition, which was revised in the light of the new socialist orientations. The Maoist regime was followed by two decades in which the social sciences were rehabilitated—the Chinese Anthropological Association was created in 1980—to serve the communist party, which was also eager to unify the country and join the market economy. The “nativisation” of the social sciences was at the same time actively promoted through “Sinicisation” Zhongguohua  and “indigenisation” bentuhua , which set the tone for an anti-Western-imperialist Chinese approach. The idea was to shed the role of the “vassal” and to reconsider one’s own

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heritage while calling for self-assertion (Chang H. 2012, 225). For theorists in Taiwan, where this nativist movement (re)originated in the late 1970s, only those who had experienced the West, i.e., who had “entered” it (jinru ), were capable of “exiting” (chulai ) Westernisation, i.e., of acting in favour of the Sinicisation of social sciences (ibid., 226). This observation of the other is reminiscent of the ancestral ethnographic practice that had been previously practiced. This double movement of entry and exit remains in force today: It is accompanied by a sustained effort to train Chinese students abroad in anthropology and thus to acquire Western knowledge and practices in situ. Chinese intellectuals have to balance their own reflexive approaches with those imposed by the institutions on which they depend. There is dissension between intellectuals who collaborate to promote a unique China, inscribed in a civilisational exceptionalism that goes back thousands of years, who participate in the elaboration of new historical narratives and state narratives and are anxious to rethink the world order in the light of China, and others who focus on analysing the facts, basing their arguments on imperial documents without truncating them. The construction of a national history and identity in today’s China is as much a matter of statecraft as it is of historians. We will no doubt also have begun to perceive the complexity of the relations maintained by intellectuals with the authorities, insofar as they are not reduced to the caricature of muzzling by political censorship that the media are so fond of. (Cheng 2021, 19–20) The “new Chinese anthropology,”2 which crystallises different theoretical options developed in the 20th century, supports this “going out into the world.” Today, it is heard more particularly through the voice of Wang Mingming, a professor at Peking University, who is quite prominent in the current academic landscape. He first trained in archaeology and ethnohistory at Xiamen University—disciplines that are very much influenced by the ideological orientations of a China that is very keen to reconnect with its imperial past—and he then completed his doctoral studies in social anthropology at the University of London, where he defended his thesis. With this dual background, he calls for “dialogue” and “reciprocity” between China and “the West” (his words). I propose to show how the former is meant to serve the latter such that “Chinese anthropology” (Zhongguo renleixue  )3 becomes an alternative to Western anthropology and even more radically embodies an “anthropological otherness.” [P]olitics remains an issue in the practice of the social sciences, as well as in the problematic of indigenization. […] One of the most remarkable things (by no means uncommon in Chinese writings) is the status of Marxism as an integral part of the guiding ideology, already a fundamental part of a “Chineseness” to which the social sciences are to be

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indigenized. The implication here is that “Chineseness” itself is a historical category, formed out of the accretion of characteristics of a variety of origins. For the same reason, indigenization means incorporation in a historically changing cultural space with open boundaries, rather than capture in a bounded Chinese cultural space, as is often implied in culturalist uses of the term “Sinicization”: China and Chineseness themselves are subject to change as they indigenize cultural elements from abroad. In this case, moreover, the statement does not stop at the importation of cultural elements, but mentions also going out into the world (using a term that has become quite popular in recent years, zouxiang shijie ). Hence the use of the metaphor of “dialogue” as part of a process that involves in equal measure both indigenization and internationalization. (Dirlik 2012, 25–26) Wang’s training, both in China and in the United Kingdom, allows him to engage in a critique of the social sciences—he opens The West as the Other with the words cited above (2014, IX)—particularly through the analysis of anthropology as it is theorised in the Anglo-French world, on the one hand, and of “ethnology” (minzu xue  ) as it was practiced and professed in China in the 20th century, on the other hand. If minzu xue   is usually translated as “ethnology,” it should be specified that the word “nationality” (minzu  ) does not necessarily designate an ethnic group but refers to the classification of Chinese populations established in the 1950s under the Maoist regime. Apart from the Han, who form the majority nationality (92% of the Chinese population), some of the 55 so-called minority nationalities bring together different branches that do not necessarily share the same language or the same scripts. This is the case with the Yi nationality, discussed later in relation to Wang’s “three-circle theory” and more broadly in the next chapter in relation to submutantialism. Consisting of groups scattered throughout southwest China (Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi provinces) and speaking different Tibeto-Burmese languages, the so-called Yi do not necessarily recognise common ties and give themselves different endoethnonyms, depending on the territories they occupy. Eager to criticise Western anthropology and Chinese ethnology, Wang promotes the “de-scientification” of the discipline (2014, XIV), in other words, its decentring from the West so as to consider it through Chinese cosmology. In the end, it is a question of going beyond the opposition between an observed and thought East and an observant and knowing West.4 Beyond such epistemological considerations, Wang’s immersion in two different symbolic institutions has given rise to a form of anthropology that is highly invested in the history and readings of classical texts, a hybrid, but one that is resolutely Chinese. Wang identifies it as such in order to promote systematic studies of the other from a non-Western point of view (2014, IX), with incursions into a “Western” thought revisited by Chinese

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conceptuality. In this sense, Wang claims to be inspired by certain European concepts, notably the relationist perspectives inherited from a form of structural analysis (ibid., X-XI)—he refers in particular to “inter-societal and cross-cultural relatedness” from Marcel Mauss, Franz Boas, Claude LéviStrauss, Clifford Geertz, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Edmund Leach, Louis Dumont, Mary Douglas, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf, and Frederik Barth—in order to distance himself from this (Western) point of reference. Promoting in fact a hierarchical relationism and “the cosmology of relationship” (ibid., 279),5 he ultimately wants to integrate the Chinese reflexive dimension into anthropology, a theoretical project whose foundations and aims remain to be questioned. “The Chinese anthropology” implemented by Wang is not concerned with relation-substance dualism because his interpretation of Western anthropology does not involve Western epistemological issues. He changes the course of the debate (knowingly or unknowingly?) by inserting it into guanxi-ism, by reading Western sources from a (seemingly) Chinese perspective. The debate is shifted from “relation” as linked to (Western) philosophy to “relation/relationship” as linked to (Chinese) habitus. Wang, who uses both terms in English, thus focuses on sociality, relatedness, on the Self and the Other by inviting us to think not the idea of nation but the supra-societal (chaoshehui tixi  !系), which is based on the ancient concept of tianxia "#: “[everything] under the [same] sky.” Yet, this notion supports the idea of a China “Empire-World” (Ge 2021), which is given great emphasis in the new Confucianism. This current of thought, or state ideology,6 is based on the conviction that China must take full account of Far Eastern values without making a clean sweep of Western ones. It is a matter of extolling Confucian humanist virtues and a strongly marked social hierarchy, and therefore respect for the order established by the “virtuous man,” which implies giving precedence to the relations (hierarchical therefore) between all things in order to achieve Harmony. [Chinese] ritualistic philosophy bases the social order on a principle of hierarchical differentiation structuring all the constituted bodies following the example of the one that is the model of all, the family. The spirit that animates this philosophy is radically different from that of the juridism of the Christian tradition, which, on the contrary, consecrates the equality of principle between human beings, all of whom are similarly created in the image of God. (Vandermeersch 2013, 174) Since the 2000s7 (when Wang began to disseminate his theories) and especially since the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010 (Névot 2014), the Chinese leadership has advanced these ideals, suggesting that the world should be oriented from now on from the East by China. The expression “make the Orient a visual angle” or “East as a/the perspective” (yi dongfang

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wei shi jiao $%&'()*) suggests that the world is to shift its viewpoint from the West to the East. This repositioning is accompanied by the valorisation of the concept of “unity despite difference” ( he er bu tong) mentioned above, and its correlative (and homophone) precept: “harmony despite difference” (he er bu tong +). These expressions were previously reserved for China’s evoking of the political unity and stability of its vast territory, which is dependent on its great ethnic diversity. Today, they are used to think of China with regard to the whole world and thus with regard to international diversity. Wang’s anthropology reflects in every respect this Chinese recentring-decentring that is based on the notion of tianxia being exported beyond the country’s borders to place the world under the Chinese sky. The aim here is to analyse its significance in terms of the political and metaphysical philosophy8 that the neo-Confucians say this concept reflects. The starting point of Wang’s thinking goes back to 1996, when he first met Rzymond Firth, Malinowski’s successor in the so-called “functionalist” school. Firth had told him that he regretted that Chinese anthropological studies did not contribute to anthropology in general. Wishing to remedy this situation by integrating China into contemporary theoretical debates, Wang has since combined different approaches: the study of civilisations, the dynamic history of cultural systems, and the cosmology of the Chinese empire. His starting point is the idea that “Chinese civilisation” is constitutive of the different theoretical orientations that the concept of tianxia has been able to embody over the course of history and that this cosmological perspective, despite its different historical anchors, gives primacy to reciprocity and interrelation (relatedness), more precisely to hierarchical relationism, rather than to conflict.9 To him, such an approach should be applied to both the academic and analytical fields, and thus fully integrated into general anthropology, which is to be “rethought” in the light of China. More specifically, Wang promotes an “ethnology of relationism” (guanxizhuyi minzuxue
系 ) combined with an “anthropology of civilisation(s)”10 (wenming renleixue ,-), expressions that are difficult to translate as they draw upon specifically Chinese semantics. By ethnographing the key concepts used by Wang—not only tianxia "# (“under the sky”) but also guanxi
系 (“relation/relationship”) and wenming ,- (“civilisation”)—which are central to current state propaganda, this chapter proposes to show how this intellectual seems to invest in and promote the neo-Confucian relationist worldview through anthropology. In other words, I will suggest that Wang’s relationism, i.e., guanxiism, characterises a cosmopolitics in the service of the new Confucianism on the international scene. In particular, I will attempt to reveal how his theoretical approach envisages a form of relational continuity from East to West through the Tibetan-Yi corridor. Such a trans-civilisational perspective, placing “everyone under the same sky” with regard to China, which Wang resolutely places at the centre of his approach, refers to what other Chinese

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scholars (architects, philosophers) support: the Chinese point of view on the world while speaking of encouraging international dialogue and a specific form of relationism seen from China, the new starting point for orientation—and, consequently, the new centre of the world (Névot 2014). It will be necessary to consider four stages in investigating this question, which will be addressed through a gradual immersion in the “Chinese world,”11 since it is impossible to understand Wang’s anthropology without introducing the historical context and background in which his theoretical perspective is rooted. First, I will discuss the ancient and cosmopolitical foundations of Chinese ethnographic practices that aimed at placing the populations of China “under the sky” (tianxia), that is, under the authority of the holder of the celestial mandate: the emperor—a scheme referring to their submission, which was perpetuated under the central Republican and Communist powers. I will discuss Wang’s interpretations of this in contrast to other ethno-historical approaches, which will allow me to introduce his theoretical perspectives that extend the debates that began at the turn of the 21st century, inviting us to move from a problematic of the national (Chinese) to the supra-national (world) tianxia and to promote a “cosmologies of contraries” (Wang 2012a, 370). In a second step, the idea of guanxi (“relation(ship)”) will be presented in the light of Chinese “organic materialism,” which is connected to a hierarchical order (Wang 2014, X). After attempting to shed light on the use of the concept of wenming (“civilisation”), which Wang approaches through the ideas of relational structures and fusion on the basis of his “theory of the three circles,” the last part of this chapter will consider the Chinese Orientalism and the “reciprocal anthropology” that this same anthropologist promotes. 5.1

“Under the Sky” (tianxia). Chinese Cosmopolitical Ethnology as a “Cosmology of Contraries”?

A particular form of ethnology has developed in China, an eminently ethnically diverse country-continent. It has grown and intensified from the foundations of the Middle Kingdom to the present day, remaining in continuous contact with successive governing bodies. Since “ethnology” is two thousand years old on this side of the planet, Wang Mingming notes, following Cai Yuanpei, that Chinese anthropology/ethnology, i.e., the examination and compilation of data referring to a discourse on humans or on a population, historically precedes Western anthropology, the first beginnings of which date back (only) to the post-Renaissance period with the development of Western colonies (Wang 2012a, 361). Despite political upheavals and sociological changes, the observation of China’s populations by the ruling elites has, so to speak, constituted the unbreakable red thread that has run through the centuries. Brigitte Baptandier notes in this regard that

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this form of ethnology—the collection of materials for the study of populations in their differences—is at least as old as the empire to whose nature it is totally linked. Successive dynasties have set themselves the task of transforming the “raw” populations, as the “barbarians” were called in Chinese, into “cooked,” civilized peoples. The fact that one part of the population observes and studies the other has always existed. There is no such thing as innocent ethnology, as we know, but here, in a way, this official “ethnology” does not emanate from free thought, which is different. The materials collected are the raw material to be elaborated to govern. (2001,
13) The method of government rests, since its origins, on the cult of the unification of the country (Cheng 1997). During the reign of Qin Shi Huangdi (221–206 BCE), collections were organised for the first time in a multitude of fields (music, song, religion, festivals, weddings, etc.) in all parts of the country. Based on the information collected, the imperial authorities issued laws and established new institutions. By seeking information about the diverse customs of his people, the First Emperor consolidated his authority, a centralisation of politics that implies, in Chinese cosmology, the ordering of the universe. For, according to these perspectives, the Chinese emperor, the son of heaven and holder of the Celestial Mandate, was supposed to regulate the cosmos through his actions and regulations. Any disharmony was then seen as a deregulation emanating from the central power (Schipper [1982] 1997, 140). Conversely, any disagreement with the imperial regulations was seen as potentially leading to cataclysms: a general disharmony and a deregulation of (cosmological) power. To the misdeeds of men who disturb the mechanisms of nature, there is a response, through the disturbances themselves, of cosmic reactions which restore the course of things. […] Consequently, when society lacks a good government ensuring good order, the resonance of the law of Heaven produces extraordinary reactions of the cosmic mechanisms: eclipses, earthquakes, hurricanes, announcing calamities that will strike society or even a “change of celestial mandate” leading to the overthrow of the dynasty. (Vandermeersch 2013, 140) Consequently, observing and collecting (in other words, “ethnographing”) in order to transform the “habits and customs” of the populations newly integrated into the empire was a fundamentally cosmopolitical practice that made it possible to place the “barbarians” under the authority of the emperor and “under the sky” (tianxia), i.e., under the jurisdiction of this celestial agent.12 The Confucian concept of “rite” (li .) is central to this process, for rites condition the regulation of human relations and ensure harmony and, in so doing, universal order. The relations between the central

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power and the Chinese populations were thus instituted by rites and supported a very prevalent social hierarchy. This practice of observing the populations to extend, unify, and consolidate the central power has been perpetuated to this day—here I am of course greatly simplifying the complexity of Chinese history in order to emphasise the constancy of the relation established between the various central powers and the populations of the empire and then the republics. The research work undertaken by Sabine Trébinjac sheds light on what is at stake in such a governmental ethnology. At the end of the 20th century, she undertook the observation and analysis of the transformation of the Uyghur musical tradition into a state tradition in order to make it harmonious with Chinese power, concluding that “the world of sounds is envisaged as a symbolic field of the whole of politics” (2000, 375). Questioning the historical continuity between contemporary China and ancient China with regard to music and its institutions, Trébinjac then devoted further analysis to tracing the chronology of events (2008). She disclosed that the Confucians were the first to conceptualise the importance of music in China. In particular, her analysis of a text entitled Notes on Music (Yueji) reveals that practices related to “musical affairs” were more political than musical. Yue /, music—a word semantically associated with dance and poetry—was linked to the social structure through the rites that were supposed to regulate the world. In this sense, musical harmony underpinned cosmological and universal harmony. Conversely, the organisation of the world affected the music, which in turn affected the universal order (ibid., 50). In this way, observing the music of his people allowed the ruler to learn about the state of his government. Conversely, “good” music composed by a “good” ruler and heard by the people should generate virtuous feelings. As each new emperor was supposed to bring with him a new virtue linked to the celestial mandate, each dynasty was therefore marked by a particular musical style. A study of the various institutions responsible for “musical affairs” for more than two thousand years shows the persistence of this orientation. Trébinjac also emphasises that a real efficiency was attributed to the “music office” (yuefu) as early as the 2nd century BCE, when it was inaugurated by the Han emperor Wu. Its three highest officials had a military title: Although musicians, they were like soldiers in charge of preserving harmony (ibid., 79) and had to ensure territorial cohesion by integrating the musical traditions of the whole empire (ibid., 76). Hence the importance of musical collections used to integrate and then rework “barbarian” music: The incorporation of these foreign forms of music was to legitimate the expansion of the empire. Such a transmission between local repertoires and the imperial musical tradition was achieved through a change in the status of musicians, who went from being local to official. They then taught the official musicians and witnessed the transformation of their own tradition. Finally, they disseminated this reshaped music in their country of origin (ibid., 174).13 In this sense, the musical “ethnographies” made it possible at

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the same time to take the pulse of the people and to impose the power of the celestial mandate and thus the imperial power to such an extent that “presentation of songs and rumours” has become an expression synonymous with “administrative report” (ibid., 71).14 The first Chinese poetic-musical compilation born of this type of collection is the famous Book of Odes (Shijing 01). Chinese “ethnology” is thus attached to a specific and “traditional” internal (cosmo)politics, i.e., it concerns the ordering of the Middle Country, Zhongguo . Constitutive of centralising power (and vice versa), as well as its extension, it more precisely aims to bring the observed populations into line with the central power in order to ensure “universal harmony,” an imposition of a celestial order that some Chinese scholars refuse to perceive as such. For the philosopher Zhao Tingyang, the Shijing would be a model of the “tianxia philosophy” referring to a pacifist project. To prove this, he refers to a passage expressing the need “to include all peoples and all lands under the sky” (2008, 13). He thus associates this collection with the expression of an ideal concord without mentioning the process by which it was constituted, thus truncating a massive and crucial part of the understanding of the cosmopolitical system in place. The imperial texts reveal that the centre’s view of the periphery was predominant during the imperial period and remains so today, despite the changes of regimes. This kind of ethnology implemented by the central power was and still is not so much a matter of open-mindedness or neutral curiosity towards the other, but rather of a project of assimilating the “barbarians” by force into the Chinese cosmology, and integrating them all “under the sky”(tianxia).15 But according to Wang, if we draw such conclusions, we are the agents of a Eurocentrism; such a perception of things would in fact mean reading Chinese History through Western glasses, giving precedence to conflictual relations over fusion phenomena. In contrast to the research carried out by historians such as Takuji Ogawa, Takeo Abe, Xing Yitian, Lui Zhitian, and Ge Zhaoguang, who on the contrary emphasise “the fundamental dichotomies between ‘me’ and ‘you’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’” (Ge 2021, 64), Wang denounces such an analytical approach by taking as his focus not these Asian scholars, but the influence of Greek and Roman mythologies on modern anthropology, which, in his view, have prevented (Western) anthropologists from focusing on the relationships between societies and cultures and given priority to ideas about conquering the other who is perceived in terms of isolation and included in a system of exclusive opposition. This leads him to claim: When foreign anthropologists and historians see China now as a nation that has included minorities by conquest, they are opposed by Chinese anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians who use this argument of fusion. (Wang, Feucgtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 901)

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Being against any idea of isolation or exclusion, Wang gives primacy to “the flows and networks that link objects and persons in relational complexities” (2014, 21)16 with a view to being all under the same sky, tianxia. He thus projects “a cosmology of contraries” in his anthropological theories, a perspective that he inscribes in “immanent transcendence” (2012a, 366), as we shall see more precisely later. Accordingly, he distinguishes between ritualistic approaches to the other in an imperial China inclined towards this other versus Western warrior narratives in conflict with the other. The comparison between China and the West is recurrent among tianxia-ists, as this is one of the foundations of the new Confucianism. For example, Zhao Tingyang points out that the Chinese art of governing is radically different from that of the Greek polis, the former emphasising the world while the latter is said to be entrenched in its nationalism (2008, 7). Similarly, individuality is said to characterise the West, leading to its downfall: The Western metaphysical presupposition of absolute individuals inevitably leads to the Hobbesian myth of the war of all against all, which logically leads us to Carl Schmitt’s conception of politics as the politics of the enemy, a very accurate representation of Western political thinking. (ibid.) Wang’s remarks, highlighting a form of harmony that would characterise the relation to otherness in China versus the conflictual and battle-ridden West, also echo those of Chen Lai, a renowned specialist in Confucian philosophy, who cheerfully compares the “values of Chinese civilization” and those of the West (Makeham 2021, 41–44). Wang refers specifically to Chinese “manners and rituals of relations” (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 909). He develops his point: Imperial Chinese world often had a dual relationship with the “Barbarians” (Yi). On the one hand, it asserted great cultural difference between itself and the Barbarians; on the other hand it nurtured itself with the other. Critical reflections on imperial biases against the non-Chinese are common knowledge; what we need to emphasise now is the fact that the reverse was also true [sic!]. Consider that when the First Emperor seized power, he started to explore routes of pilgrimages to the Great Mountain in the East17 in the Qi Kingdom that he conquered. The First Emperor was from the West, from Shanxi, and he thus had to pay respect to the holy mountain in the East, in present-day Shandong. He was acting as a barbarian renewing and forming a civilization. (ibid., 911) For Wang, in whose work the theme of rituality is remarkably recurrent, the transition from the Shang Dynasty (1570–1045 BCE) to the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 BCE) marked the transition from verticality to horizontality in ritual and relationships, the latter dynasty having favoured interactions and

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transactions, he claims. He emphasises that the king did not make a clear demarcation between the interior and exterior of his kingdom, nor did he separate the real from the imaginary—Wang introduces the allegory of the two sides of the same coin to illustrate his point (2012a, 342–343).18 He argues that the Zhou kings thus established a new mode of relation between the centre and periphery while building the tianxia on the basis of a concentric system. Stressing that this centripetal aspect is only one of two complementary aspects of this complex system for knowing and describing “the world” under the sky, the integrity of which was ensured by ritual,19 Wang concludes that rituals were invaluable devices whereby “the world” as perceived by the Chinese could be orchestrated toward a higher harmony or Great Unity (Datong). (2012a, 347) Chinese rites undoubtedly had (and still have) a modelling effect, in that they model […] the conducts of effective action, in the sense of social order, by a mechanism of purely external empty conducts […]. Rites are “moral shoes,” ensuring good conduct without effort, just as shoes allow one to walk well without suffering from the roughness of the road.20 (Vandermeersch 2013, 175) The ritualisation of society is then the sine qua non of its virtue, in the sense that “the perfectly ritualised society functions all by itself, by the sheer force of virtue (de)” (ibid., 176). Accordingly, the Confucian ideal is, in the light of such perspectives, that of a society without a state through the internalisation of the mechanism of rites. Consequently, Confucians promote the cultivation of rituals among all those “under the sky” “so that perfect harmony rules ‘between the four seas’, without any need for state action” (ibid.). Indeed, when Wang supports a supra-national (state) perspective, while at the same time highlighting a form of what we may call, after Ge, “ritualistic diplomacy in force under the tianxia” (Ge 2021, 76), he is reworking the Confucian project common to modern tianxia-ists who wish to emphasise the idea of a respectful dialogue between peoples. For the philosopher Zhao Tingyang, for example, ritual instituted voluntary submission to the imperial system that transcends territoriality, locality, and nations. Wang thus seems to be expressing the idea of a China-World elaborated by some contemporary Chinese philosopher-ideologists, putting anthropology at the service of Chinese state ideology without openly advocating such an orientation. According to Wang, the concept of tianxia has a very broad potential for anthropology, in the same way that mana has influenced anthropology since Mauss introduced it to talk about magic. He states: Tianxia […] also means that China is not a single national state, among many Minzu (nationalities) included in the Chinese world. There are

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obvious factors of Indo-European Heritage—Tibet is the best example. A study of fusional zones such as the Tibet-Yi Corridor becomes important as an illumination of the “chaos” of the Type of Tianxia, the mixture of baked bread and sticky rice, of kingship and emperorship, of law and relationship, and of “purity” and “confusion.” (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 924) If, according to Wang, the Zhou Dynasty is the foundation of nondichotomous Chinese perceptions and the idea of mutuality as a source of harmony, then, for Zhao Tingyang, this historical period is a kind of golden age of tianxia, an “institutional model characterised by its mundialism and its principle of harmony of all nations” (2008, 10). In the period of the Warring Kingdoms (from the 5th century BCE to the Qin Dynasty founded in 221 BCE), it was even more important, Wang writes, to consider “the issue of how to create a better and more unified world” (2012a, 349). The views prevalent in this era were totally different from those of the Greeks, he points out, using the same rhetoric of contrasts as above, because relationships were hierarchically reciprocal rather than egalitarian (ibid., 350). Similarly, Wang asserts that under the Qin and then the Han, the quest for a unified tianxia would have been of extreme importance to the emperors, who were eager to build a country of peace and order in the long term (ibid., 353).21 He thus specifies that to solve the many problems created by the military expeditions of the barbarians, and following severe defeats, the Han resorted to non-military methods such as the establishment of family ties where the emperor could then occasionally marry a barbarian woman. As was the case with music, the process here too was duly thought out and inscribed in a cosmological logic in order to promote the cosmopolitical harmony of centralised imperial power: The holder of the celestial mandate had to embody the multiplicity of his territory by absorbing it. To govern well meant to incorporate the essences of each territory, the idea being that the centre collects “the essence of all that is life in the universe” (Granet [1934] 1968, 395)22 The ruler had to be in osmosis with his environment. In other words, the body of the son of Heaven, seen as a micro-cosmos, was to be composed of the essences of the whole of his territory, ensuring in return the macro-cosmic order and universal harmony. This incorporation of exogenous elements certainly implied the emergence of new relations of alliance, new imperial cults, and the integration of certain practices, music, myths, or food within the court. But this could not translate into any idea of peaceful reciprocity, nor a form of agreement between the parties, let alone imply that the colonising empire, sporadically encultured, did not expand by using force nor that it left the “barbarians” peacefully seclude themselves in a certain exteriority (the so-called barbarian women were raped!). Wang thus seems to offer an ideologically oriented reading of imperial texts that sets colonising processes in a relational light with relatively positive consequences.

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Included in the Chinese world, they [the savages] were disposed in a catalogue of humans, animals, moral types, and monsters, whose copresence was defined in terms of the harmony of difference in tianxia. (Wang 2012a, 364) Wang goes even further by asserting that the established relationship between China as the centre of the world and the peripheries of other countries was defined in terms of the son of heaven’s obligation to give gifts to tribal chiefs who in turn became the sons of their emperor, father (ibid.). According to him, the hierarchical relationship between the centre and the periphery was marked by the tribute of the former to the latter. Although Wang says that he keeps in mind the discriminations that existed in premodern China regarding the notion of tianxia, he confirms that this does not prevent him from maintaining that links were created between contraries (centres and margins, interior and exterior, subject and object, order and chaos, etc.), conceptions of the world that offer us a lesson, he adds.23 This allows him to conclude once again that Chinese systems of opposition were conceived in much more relative and flexible terms than in the West “for the purpose of forging mutual relations out of contrary oppositions” (ibid., 365). The historian Ge Zhaoguang takes issue with such assertions, as the reality was far from this historiographical “fantasy”: [B]ut when was China’s “tributary system” or “tianxia system” anything other than a strong imposing its rules on a weaker, and crushing it if it resists? Some people nowadays maintain that tianxia would be the name of a world without borders, without “inside” or “outside,” without “me” or “you,” a world of perfect equality. And while I do not dare to say that they are rambling, nor do I doubt their good intentions, one thing is certain: it is already no longer history. (2021, 81) If we go back to the sources (ibid., 63), “this tianxia of peaceful, tolerant, and harmonious coexistence (with ‘indistinct magnitudes and distances’),” permeated with wisdom, is purely and simply theoretical fancy (ibid., 71). To think that the imperial ritualistic system ensured transnational relations that were respectful of non-Chinese practices is a delusion (ibid., 80–81). The refusal to submit or pay tribute implied a fatal end (ibid., 73–77), as is recounted in the imperial histories Wang refers to while failing to emphasise this crucial point that runs counter to his thesis. Ge concludes: To maintain, as some do, that ritualistic diplomacy under Tianxia “emphasises mutual benevolence of hearts and respectful dialogue of minds” is once again […] fantasy and dreaming. (ibid., 76)

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Denying any idea of conflict, Wang gives precedence to Chinese hierarchical relationism translated in terms of flexibility, alternation, and movement between contraries and oppositions, which should be seen in the light of “organic materialism.” 5.2

Hierarchical Relationism and Organic Materialism

Wang is a relationship builder in the sense of the Chinese concept of guanxi. The “art of guanxi,” to use Mayfair Yang’s expression for guanxixue (1994), literally “the study of guanxi,” is based on the exchange of gifts, favours, and banquets; it involves networks of mutual dependence and the art of cultivating interpersonal relationships and entrance into a system of obligations for mutual support. More specifically, Yang refers to this fundamental sociological practice in China as the “gift economy.” In this sense, “relation/relationship” here does not refer to any Western philosophical abstraction constructed (consciously or unconsciously) in connection with the notion of substance, but to a particular habitus. Yang further shows that the concept of guanxi must be treated historically as a repertoire of cultural patterns and resources that are continuously transformed in their adaptation to new social institutions and structures and through the particular Chinese experience of globalisation. She therefore emphasises the actuality of this practice, which may decline in certain social domains, but may also find new domains in which to flourish, such as commercial transactions, and display new social forms and expressions (Yang 2002). Developing the subject in relation to a village in the province of Heilongjiang, Yan Yunxiang (1996) also highlights its topicality, no longer in the urban setting but in the village. Wang draws on these works, citing Yang and Yan to emphasise that the idea of reciprocity is fundamental in Chinese relationism, making it possible to revise Western relationism and to include, by feedback, Chinese relationism in a general anthropology. Moreover, this relational reciprocity, which is part of both the subject matter and the method to be applied, a point I will return to, does not presuppose any kind of equality in the relationships, since guanxi refers to a hierarchy,24 simultaneously implying a relationship between contraries: yi and hua, barbarians and civilised, raw and cooked, periphery and centre, outside and inside, as we have already seen, and also between below and above (Wang 2008, 186), there and here, the other and the self, the non-human and the human (Wang 2014, 283). Such conceptual pairs could be listed endlessly. It would not be a matter of the same system of opposition as in the West: Asymmetry would be relative and flexible (ibid., 365) in that it could be glimpsed through “organic materialism.” Wang takes this expression from the biologist, sinologist, and historian of science Joseph Needham, who used it in an attempt to describe what Jullien still calls “the totalisation of immanence” (1993, 74): “the organic conception in which each phenomenon was connected with every other according to a hierarchical order” (Wang 2014, X quoting Needham

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1981, 14). This perception dates back to the end of the Zhou Dynasty, i.e., to the historical period of the “axial age” (Wang 2012a, 351), an expression that Wang takes from Jaspers, who is often quoted by Chinese scholars wishing to promote the new Confucianism (Névot 2014, 12). Also, in this order of thought, the Chinese conception of the “universal” links humans to the deities and to all other things, and refers to the fact of “being among others,” in other words, to “confusion.” The other is then to be perceived no longer as “different from,” and thus as presupposing his or her isolation, but in a relationship of fusion: “you are a part of me, I am a part of you,” to use the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s formula that Wang quotes (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 904).25 Not content with supporting his theory by referring to Chinese concepts formulated by a British thinker influenced by Marxist dialectical materialism, Wang also supports his argument using the work of Granet who, as already pointed out in Chapter 3, showed with acuity that Chinese thought does not imply a system of opposition between left and right, or between inside and outside, but perceives the latter in correlation, that is, in a mutual relationship. With the help of numerous Western academic references, Wang invites us to revise our approach to the “us” and the “them” in the light of China (Viveiros de Castro, as seen in Chapter 4, proposed such a revision in the light of the socalled “Indian”), by integrating the idea that humans are components of the world among others, in reciprocal fusion with all the things that make it up. Wang sets this schema in opposition to the Foucauldian approach in the humanities, which he judges to be excessively anthropocentric. This Chinese philosophy in which there is no distinction between things and “I” (wu-wo bufen 234) seems to him preferable to a philosophy based on the subjectobject dichotomy.26 The emphasis on the supremacy of Chinese philosophical orientations seems to be in line with the claims of his fellow philosophers who are critics of “universal values” of Western origin (Cheng 2021, 10) and who support the idea of a borderless world that seeks to update a Confucian world interpreted anew in terms of fantastical perceptions (Ge 2021). We read the following from the pen of Zhao Tingyang: Chinese philosophy has a metaphysics of relations rather than an ontology of being. […] Relations are supposed to be the ontological condition for a thing to be as such, insofar as its existence presupposes coexistence, and the status of coexistence decides the status of existence. This philosophical logic is the key to understanding harmony as a principle of the relation of things. (2008, 21) Seemingly following this path promoted by the new Confucianism, Wang refuses to accept the individualistic classificatory discourses of the West in order to approach the reflexive “confusion” of peoples and things found in the Chinese imperial annals.27 He advocates disseminating this cosmology both in the academic field by countering what has been instituted as

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“sciences,” namely, the sociology, anthropology, and ethnology that have held to a nation-centric perspective and also by developing a relational or associative ethnology in the field of analytical practice (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 901). “Organic materialism” would, in fact, favour a holistic approach to civilisations, transnational and fusional. In this sense, the anthropology Wang promotes cannot be a science of the human but, so to speak, a supra-sociology that is based on ancient representations and that refers to a cosmological vision of the world. The ontological question is therefore irrelevant (as is the subject-object relation), since what is important here is a dynamic vision of the world in which the “relative” hierarchy is of primary importance. Chinese hierarchy defined the interiors of society, and was a kind of art for people to learn and define their own and others’ positions within the social terrains in which they resided. Hierarchy was simultaneously defined in relation to the exteriors. Sometimes the exteriors were higher and better than the interiors; sometimes they were lower but not necessarily worse.28 (Wang 2014, 251) Wang praises Granet, whom he thinks has been hitherto disregarded for his hierarchical perspective on the relationship. In doing so, he criticises LéviStrauss for ignoring this aspect of things (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 912). Wang’s comparison between structuralist relationism and guanxiism is, to say the least, daring, as are many of his assertions, since the former is, as already seen, part of a particular philosophical sphere, while the latter refers to Chinese sociology. It is difficult to see the commonalities at first glance. If Wang says that he wants to rehabilitate Granet and his hierarchical perception of relationism, we could argue that he refers to both Granet and Lévi-Strauss so as to better inscribe a specifically Chinese perspective into the concept of structural relation, thus making it possible to state that relationism (seen from China) implies fusion, hierarchy, and habitus. Such an approach seems to play on words and on semantic shifts from one language to another—as was also done with regard to the word wenming at the beginning of the 20th century, as we shall see. But here and precisely through the notion of reciprocity, Wang seeks to reinject hierarchy into relationism in anthropology by using the Chinese concept of guanxi. The process is thus reversed in relation to wenming, because this time, at the beginning of the 21st century, the concept leaves China and transits to “general anthropology,” and thus to the West. Although Wang refers relation to “organic materialism,” he discusses it in sociological and cosmo-hierarchical terms, not in terms of submutances. However, Wang acknowledges that “ancient Chinese” conceptions of the body seem comparable to Strathern’s notion of the “distributed person.” Stressing the connection between the body and the cosmos, he wonders to what extent the Chinese body could be dividual, but without entering into the

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debate (ibid.). He also reminds us, at least implicitly, that the emperor, son of the sky, had a consubstantial relationship with the cosmos (as he puts it), but if this could have been the case for certain great dignitaries, it was not so for everyone else (ibid., 915–913). In short, Wang remains extremely evasive on the subject of the possible substantive relations and does not mention the “material turn” in anthropology, since this problematic is not central to his approach. The Wangian project is that of considering, from a supra-social perspective, anthropology in the light of fusional sociological relationism. The notion of guanxi thus largely predominates over a possible idea of “submutance” (yi 5) (Vandermeersch 2013, 116–117) between all things in the universe. Wang seems to be taking functionalist and structuralist views and, paradoxically, moving in a very Western sphere of thought. This characterises the intellectual hybridity of his anthropology. By being exclusively relationist, Wang fully embraces a Western “norm” while deviating from it. This form of collegial sharing is necessary for him to establish his Chinese perspective in general anthropology, the better to transform it from within. The body-cosmos and all that emanates from it are thus erased in order to support the idea of a civilisational co-extensiveness. Individuals, cultures, and minorities are therefore banished as concepts in favour of a broader and more abstract historical and geographical panorama, aimed at affirming the notion that civilisations interpenetrate and are “all under the same sky” (tianxia), referring to the ideal of the great harmony under the sky (tianxia datong) (Cheng 2021, 11 and 17).29 By basing his argument on the relational flexibility inherent in the hierarchy of contraries, Wang appropriates the major concept of the new Confucianism, which he claims to update by drawing on classical Chinese texts. He proposes a more fluid conceptualization of the notion of civilisation—a discourse that is fully in line with Xu Jilin’s supranationalist tianxia-ism (Makeham 2021, 48)—an approach that Wang develops especially in his “theory of the three circles.” 5.3

The Anthropology of Civilisations and the Theory of the Three Circles

My thesis is that as a guanxi-ist and tianxia-ist, Wang aims to support the idea of a “wenming-world civilisation.” I propose to demonstrate this by addressing the third preponderant concept in Wang’s work: wenming. In classical Chinese, wenming refers to something refined and bright, such as talent or brilliance of mind, a form of intellectual civility. During the Meiji era (1868–1912), which was marked by an opening up to Western thought, wenming was borrowed from the ancient Chinese vocabulary by Japanese intellectuals to translate the Western idea of “civilisation.” At the beginning of the 20th century, as Japanese influence was strongly exerted in China, the Chinese vocabulary integrated the concept of wenming in its WesternJapanese version. This expression was thus rehabilitated in the Chinese

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language by being the bearer of this new conceptuality. Although it dates back to the Meiji era and has an originally Western meaning, according to Chinese official history, this idea of civilisation is said to have originated in antiquity. State discourse thereby seeks to revalorise the imperial past and this practice involves a certain (and undoubtedly strategic) confusion between the signified and the signifier. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has so reappropriated the concept that, since 2012, wenming has become one of the “twelve fundamental socialist values.” It is in fact extremely prevalent in the official discourse about the “harmonious society” as envisioned by the new Confucianism. Wang Mingming addresses the anthropologists Stephan Feuchtwang and Michael Rowlands, both of whom are eager to reintroduce the concept of civilisation into anthropology by undoing its European roots (see Feuchtwang and Rowlands 2019), as follows: I have learned a lot from you both. But that fact does not negate another: that is, I have thought of the word “civilization” in my own way. This is again related to my thinking that such social sciences concepts as “society,” “culture,” “nation” are inadequate as units of study for “civilizations” such as Europe, Islamic worlds, India, and China as well as the intermediaries between them. Civilization is, for me, always supra-societal, supra-national, and “multicultural,” and so should not be studied as a national social and political economic unit. (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands 2010, 918) The concept of civilisation that Wang develops using the idea of tianxia would thus be able to transcend the concept of “culture.” Referring to multiplicity, to a transversal and “horizontal” social phenomenon, to mergers constituted through exchanges and borrowings between different societies, it refers to the Maussian idea of “supra-sociality,” which in fact inspired Wang’s study of the “Chinese anthropology of civilisations” (2015): Mauss said, region and civilization are “prior,” in the sense that they are conditions for defining the inside and outside of peoples and societies. Region and civilization go beyond and question the totality of “society.” I agree that civilization is prior to political economy and to empire. This is a methodological point, for me. (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 918) Let us recall that in the early 1920s, Mauss preferred the term “civilisation” to “culture.” For him and Durkheim, in fact, “[t]here are social phenomena which are not strictly attached to a given social organism, they extend over areas which go beyond a national territory or they develop over periods of time which go beyond the history of a single society. They live a sort of supra-national life” (Mauss and Durkheim 1913, 47). Thus,

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[a]ll peoples who speak an Indo-European language have a common basis of ideas and institutions. There are not simply isolated facts, but complex and interdependent systems which, without being limited to a specific political organism, are nevertheless locatable in time and space. To these systems of facts, which have their own unity, their own way of being, it is appropriate to give a special name: that of civilization seems to us the most appropriate […]. A civilization constitutes a kind of moral environment in which a certain number of nations are immersed and of which each national culture is only a particular form. (ibid., 47–48) Wang explains that, in terms of the Chinese tradition (from out of which, it is understood, he establishes and defends his point of view), civilisation is not comparable to a clash of civilisations in Samuel Huntington’s sense30 nor to the idea of cultural self-consciousness (born from a polemic between what Foucault said in Madness and Civilization and Elias in The Civilizing Process). Civilisation is understood more in China, Wang further argues, as a form of oscillation between civilisation and savagery: wenzhi binbin ,67 7, which would imply a form of wisdom in being able to maintain relationships within a hierarchical arrangement. This expression comes from the Analects of Confucius: The Master said, “When there is a preponderance of native substance [zhi 6] over acquired refinement [wen ,], the result will be churlishness [savagery ye 8]. When there is a preponderance of acquired refinement over native substance, the result will be pedantry [li 9]. Only a wellbalanced admixture of these two [the exact balance of natural and culture wenzhibinbin ,677] will result in gentle manliness [the honest man junzi :;]. (Confucius 1979, 6:18) The Middle Circle: “The Tibetan-Yi Corridor” and the Rethinking of Anthropology (Wang 2008) provides a more detailed account of these theoretical options. In particular, Wang mentions his interest in the “Tibetan-Yi corridor,” an anthropological focus that is once again based on the work of Fei Xiaotong. Since the 1980s, the latter has pointed out that this geographical space is multi-ethnic, embedded between different traditions that merge with each other and local political formations that have developed in a diversified manner with shifting borders. From this “corridor,” which should not be seen as establishing borders or margins, but as creating “in between” zones where different civilisations were influential while being influenced (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 904), Wang introduces his theory of three circles. He distinguishes between the core or central circle (hexin quan ), the middle circle (zhongjian quan ?>), and the outer circle (wai quan @>), respectively:

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From the point of view of Chinese anthropology, the middle circle is the Han rural and folk Chinese culture we are studying, a circle that has been in “redistributive” interaction [in a process of constant exchange] with the centre since ancient times. […] The middle circle is what we now call the minority area [region]. The inhabitants of this area [region] are located there in a complex and not mono-ethnic [monolithic] way, and due to the movement of people, they have intermingled with each other, just as they have intermingled with the Han in the eastern part of the middle circle since ancient times. […] This circle is combined with the outer circle, sometimes on the border between the inner and outer, sometimes belonging to the outer, sometimes at the transition between the inner and outer. […] The third [outer] circle is the so-called “foreign” circle [which concerns] the “Chinese anthropology of the foreign and overseas.” (Wang 2008, 53–54) He summarises his thinking ten years later: The Chinese anthropology of civilisations has re-conceptualised “Chinese culture” as a much more complex and dynamic system, conceived in terms of the “sanquan A>” (three circles: the core, the intermediaries, and the outer rings). Through the synthesis, it has presented the civilisation of the Central Kingdom as a much less bounded, internally varied, and externally related world. Within a newly conceptualised civilisational whole, China is re-presented as a dynamic social world, a complexity of relations between different “central places,” minzu (nationalities), and “religions.” Within the “supra-societal” system, the consideration of the “vertical” relations is seen as inadequate unless combined with the enquiries into the “horizontal” circles and networks. (2018, 151) The central circle thus refers to the Han who form the majority Chinese population connected to the central state and displaying, according to Wang, a relatively high degree of jiaohua B. This Confucian concept refers to both self-transformation and training/teaching others. It is also very much in vogue in current state discourse promoting Chinese perspectives on the world: The historical conjuncture in which this idea of jiaohua is unfolding today involves not only the past of “tradition” but also a future made up of projects, realistic or utopian, aimed at affirming the future place of Chinese culture. The new Confucian commitments develop in an inbetween, between a post-communist “structure of experience,” in evolution, and a “horizon of expectation” suddenly enlarged, made possible by the development and the opening of the Chinese society. (Billioud and Thoraval 2007, 4)

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While he defends himself from any dichotomous perception, Wang seems to immediately adopt a “traditional” perspective on tianxia, literally making the “Chinese” the centre of “everything under heaven,” “a civilizing core whose refinement and enlightenment far surpass those of the ‘four corners’ [si yi], the ‘barbarians’ [man yi]” (Ge 2021, 68). Such was in fact, as was previously pointed out, the classical perception of tianxia, which was based on “structuring dichotomies,” to use Ge Zhaoguang’s words once again. While Wang argues strongly to the contrary, his exposition of the three circles paradoxically remains heir to the idea that China is representative of a high degree of civilisation and centrality. Let us try to understand more precisely how he thinks of the other two circles in the light of this circle, which is seen as the starting point for the new anthropological orientation he promotes. The intermediate circle is conceived as a dynamic geographical space without fixed boundaries. The Tibetan-Yi corridor is a perfect example of the fusion phenomenon that Wang emphasises in his approach (see Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands 2010, 905; 2014, 158–165). This area involves minority Chinese nationalities, which have a long history of interaction with the middle circle, Wang says, adding that the interactions between these two circles were essential to the constitution of the history of the Chinese empire and are at the origin of the tianxia cosmology of premodern China. He argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, while southwest China is generally perceived as multi-ethnic and as having been more or less assimilated by the Han majority and the southeast is generally treated being as Han, the southwest was in fact integrated into the empire a thousand years before the southeast became itself attached to the imperial administration (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 906). A historical approach would attest that “southwest China was not only a region of minority nationalities, but also one of copious ‘imperial culture’” (2012b, 173) and so far from being isolated. The anthropologist argues again that Sima Qian’s writings reveal that the Han did not pursue a “policy of extermination” toward the southwestern barbarians but a combination of feudal policies and imperial centralisation.31 He concludes: Studies of the southeast and of the southwest offer insight to one another, and they demonstrate that these two areas belong to a “world order” that is trans-local. The idea of “research regions” should be applied to the understanding of how local studies contribute to the mapping of such a “world order.” (ibid., 180) Hence the urgency, in Wang’s view, of decompartmentalising this regional ensemble in anthropological approaches: Why cross from the southeast to the southwest? What makes me, a researcher of the southeast, be interested in the southwest? Why should an

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anthropologist of the southeast engage in questions concerning the southwest? I have attempted to define the study of the Han as the “core” and that of other ethnic groups as the “intermediary” in Chinese anthropology. Why should researchers of the two circles, separated by such a distance, engage in dialogue with each other? The reason why I tried my best to forge a tie between the southeast and the southwest is because I believe, on the one hand, that the dividing of the “research regions” by local studies could reveal how regional typifications have affected the discourse of anthropology, and, on the other hand, that only through transcending “localism” can we solve problems within the “research regions” and widen our perspectives to discover innovative ideas for the discipline. (ibid., 162) According to Wang, this southwest/southeast dichotomy is inherited from the history of Chinese anthropology, which must be analysed in order to avoid perpetuating analytical practices that he claims do not make sense. In particular, he criticises the anthropologists Stevan Harrell, Nicholas Tapp, and G. William Skinner for having remained prisoners of a particular vision of Chinese anthropology, namely, for holding to the outdated idea of the “ethnic” southwest, which is more or less external to China, versus the Han southeast, which is therefore seen as properly Chinese (ibid., 170).32 Wang also encourages us to develop a more critical view of the practice of ethnologists do because they often remain caught up in logics of thought that escape them. More broadly, he claims the French-English tradition of social anthropology, the study of American cultures (culturalism), and Chinese sociologists and anthropologists have broken, in different ways, with the study of diffusion, reducing the object of study of anthropology to two subjects: the universals of human cognition and social and cultural life, on the one hand, and, on the other the particularities of socio-cultural differences based on the societal presupposition (in other words, on the idea that the concept of society is true) (Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 901). Beyond such epistemological and methodological considerations, Wang promotes the study of the relations developed within the Tibetan-Yi corridor in order to consider Han, Tibetan, and Yi cultures from the point of view of a comparatism that emphasises the relational structures and not the established differences between these populations. Taking up Dumézil’s theory that a trifunctionality (priests, warriors, and merchants) exists in each civilisation, he thinks that, unlike Europe and the Indo-European world, China is characterised by a dual-track politics that separates the royalty from the nobility (shuanggui zhengzhi CDEF). Now, according to him, in the middle circle, a triple structure is observable that is connected to both the Indo-European and Chinese structure. It must therefore be seen as a hybrid between the two circles (“central” and “foreign”). Through the intermediary of the Tibetan-Yi corridor, which remained relatively independent of neighbouring civilisations

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while assimilating various aspects of these same civilisations but nonetheless very heterogeneous (2008, 155), Wang thus seeks to open China up to the West. In the end, what he proposes is not the perception of this territory as a periphery of Chinese civilisation, but as a junction point (a “corridor”) between China and the civilisations of India and Europe. While Wang sees himself as having thought the word civilisation in his own way, it is clear that his use of this inclusive conception that transcends states and nationalism is fully aligned with the tianxia-ism of Xu Jilin, who promotes the concept of tianxia as an inclusive political institution (Makeham 2021, 47). It is opposed to the nationalism promoted by other followers of tianxia-ism. It is in this sense that Wang integrates anthropology into the philosophy-ideology of tianxia-ism and in this he demonstrates a certain originality: He inscribes tianxia in the world order that transcends nations, cultures, and humans, and thus goes beyond, through organic materialism (i.e., through totalising immanence), the opposition between the “barbarians” (of the foreign circle) and the Chinese, a distinction that has always characterised the notion of tianxia, as Makeham reminds us (ibid., 48). Tianxia is no longer based on Chinese civilisation alone, but on the entire universe—Xu Jilin emphasises that the values of tianxia as a civilisational tradition are universal and not specific to a particular civilisation or culture (ibid., 47). Civilisation therefore takes precedence over civilisations, the fantasised unity of a civilisation in diversity “all under the same sky.” 5.4

Orientalism from China and Reciprocal Anthropology

Under the guise of a “rethinking of anthropology”33 in general, and of the study of nationalities (minzuxue) in particular, which is to be decompartmentalised, Wang seems to set himself the task of rethinking the world in terms of China through new foundational myths.34 His theoretical options support a Copernican reversal (thus proposing a new cosmological perspective) in which concepts and theories are “no longer” rooted in the West but in the Far East and based on a revisited Orientalism. I take up this Saïdian formulations for two reasons. First, because Wang himself refers to Saïd (1978), whose thought finds wide resonances in China. Thus, according to Wang, while Saïd is rightly critical of the expansive power of Western knowledge, his work paradoxically functions as if the West were to be treated as the sole imaginative and perceptive subject. Orientalism renews a tendency to objectify the East and subjectify the West, or more precisely, to perceive the difference between the West and the East as the difference between the knowing and the represented. (Wang 2014, 9, see also 11–12, 22) What Wang promotes is an “inversion” (ibid., 12) through “Chinese anthropology,” i.e., the consideration of world civilisation(s) in terms of the

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Chinese conceptual sphere and its own cosmology. He claims to treat China in the same way as the West, thus as an imaginative and perceptive subject that considers “the other’s thinking capacities” (ibid., 15). This is the basis of the “reciprocal anthropology” that he promotes—a point I will return to—with a view to fundamentally modifying the conceptual bases of the “classical” scientific anthropology that obeyed Western precepts. It is also important to return to the terms “West” and “East” here for a second reason: These notions are used in Chinese state discourse for the strategic purposes of a geopolitical repositioning, of reversing the gaze and tilting the world hegemony from the West to China, which considers itself representative of this “East” that is now presented as omnipotent and eager to develop new networks of alliances, namely relations (guanxi), with the whole world. Thus, it is a matter of China considering itself as the new centre of the world. It is a question of translating the global (hegemonic) perspectives of the West over to the East. By adopting this last expression, China shows that it takes on board this exogenous geopolitical perspective that makes it an Eastern country, whereas it traditionally thinks of itself as “the country in the middle.” We are thus witnessing an objectification of China by itself, in which it adopts orientalist conceptuality in order to position itself geopolitically with regard to the West, which it thereby wants to fully consider in the light of its new perspective on the world (which can no longer be reduced to its own territory). But this in no way implies dependence on the West. On the contrary, the orientalism of the East promoted here implies the re-centring of the world from China.35 It is precisely a matter of questioning this universalist project and the conceptual connivance of the “Chinese anthropology” promoted by Wang with the ideology of the state. Some intellectuals turn out to be agents of a Chinese cosmopolitics promoted by the CCP, which “fantasises about a World-Empire,” to use Ge’s words and claims to be part of a universality whose content and container it would master in order to affirm “unity despite difference” and “harmony despite difference.” It was pointed out earlier that these two Confucian aphorisms are omnipresent in present-day China. The first was the motto of the World Expo held in Shanghai in 2010, while the second is now applied worldwide. China is part of this universal, or rather, it inscribes the universal in itself. It apprehends and assimilates the other (the “barbarians” of yesteryear) from all over the world and no longer only in the vicinity of its own territory in order to rethink the world order. To sum up, the “anthropology of civilization” represents the latest synthesis of Chinese anthropology: between “Sinological anthropology” and “historical anthropology,” between the French and Anglo-American traditions, between research on Chinese societies and research on nonChinese societies. It is clear that Wang’s concept of “civilization” has a political significance, linked to his dissatisfaction with the discourses of the “world system” and the nation-state, and to the redefinition of

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Chinese characteristics and China’s civilizational place in the world. Wang Mingming has previously used the Confucian concept of the AllUnder-the-Sky (Tianxia "#), seeing it as a Chinese source that can neutralize Western-centrism and discourses of the conflict of civilizations […]. In the end, however, it seems that he prefers to take up the concept of “civilization” as an entry point for understanding China’s characteristics, in order to avoid the polemics associated with the term All-Under-the-Sky, criticized by some as normative and Sinocentric.36 (Xu and Ji 2018, 49–50) Xu Lufeng and Ji Zhe translate wenming renleixue in the singular and not in the plural, as the expression might allow, and as Wang uses it in English publications (“Anthropology of Civilizations”) which leaves room for the ambiguity surrounding the plural of the word “civilization.” But what the preceding arguments reveal is that multiplicity has indeed no place except in terms of unity. Tianxia refers to a civilisational power with a universal value. It is therefore to be understood in the singular. Ji Zhe specifies that although he has criticised this concept “in part” for its implicit Sinocentric connotations, he nevertheless considers that it “can contribute fully to the construction of a kind of cosmopolitanism” (ibid., 50). However, it seems difficult not to perceive here a political discourse committed to a disciplinary soft power, claiming to be working for a transcultural dialogue that actually gives a central place to China, which is as a model in exporting its ideals. For Chen Bo, director of the Institute of Anthropology at Sichuan University, whose research focuses on Tibetan areas: This academic cosmology is by no means evolutionist or self-centrist, but rather other-centrist and more concerned on its relation with its multiple others.37 (2018, 113) To speak of “academic cosmology” is very revealing of what is at stake. But to what extent would anthropology, as it is developing today in the West in a self-critical way, be able to replace its relationist scientificity with this (allegedly universal Chinese) cosmology inscribed in a hierarchical relationism? Wang probably does not immediately aim at this goal, but rather sees it as a field of reciprocity in which Chinese anthropology could confront Western anthropology. This cosmology of contraries, in other words, this Chinese hierarchical relationism, is indeed supposed to fully participate in a more general and contemporary reflection on reflexive reciprocity. Reciprocity is in fact another key word in Wangian anthropology, a notion that we find again in Zhao Tingyang, according to whom “the strategy of harmony consists in creating a game of necessary and inevitable reciprocal perfection” (2008,

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22). The concepts of the tianxia-ists undeniably circulate across disciplines (with Chinese intellectuals applying this relationist metaphysics itself). Accordingly, Wang’s theoretical option engages in the idea of a “reciprocal anthropology” to signify an alternative worldview and practice, primarily recognizing the ontological significance of the conjunction of and exchange between cultural systems, and respecting efforts to create a “reciprocal disposition” or “co-presence” among different human cultures (Le Pichon 1995).38 This form of anthropology emphasizes the concept of “reciprocity,” that between different ways of perceiving the world. (Wang 2000, 65) To implement this thinking, Wang advocates a “re-evaluation” of disciplinary training, asking how it can be “distinguish[ed] … from structuralist, interpretive and post-colonial re-evaluations” (ibid., 66), because “reciprocal anthropology” implies no longer thinking “the West and the rest” but, as seen from China, “the West as the Other.” It is a matter of recognising the “other” as understood by the West as having the capacity to think for itself, and thus of undoing the West’s alleged hegemony of knowledge. Wang thus urges Chinese anthropology to reappropriate its tradition through readings of ancient texts and thus “on the basis of its own historical experience,” thereby founding its theoretical project on “the ideals of the world order of ancient China” (ibid.).39 In other words, this means giving Chinese anthropology its own ideological starting point and of applying this “Chinese view of the world” while taking inspiration from Western anthropology in order to better permute Eurocentrism and intellectual colonisation. Wang invites us to think of a more general “relational structure” that would embrace the world from China (the “central circle”). In doing so, we enter into a relationship of reciprocity with the observed, which has hitherto been the main observer of the world: I have challenged the national-centrism that is in vogue in the social science world. In recent years, there has been a tendency in the Chinese research community to study history, society, culture, and politics with China at the centre. This is a post-colonialist goodwill, but the relevance and originality of the analyses, explanations and judgments of this Chinese-centrism are not clear. In my view, in order to think globally about a given era, we need to build a mechanism of reciprocity on the cultural level. (2004, 267) In order to achieve this, Wang promotes the development of research on the West from a Chinese perspective. He thus undertook ethnography in France, developing a field of study near Briançon. He proposed to question the Chinese concepts of she  and hui  from this site. These are two

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writing characters which, when associated with each other, are translated as “society” in French, she referring more specifically to the gods of the Chinese soil and hui to an assembly, a meeting (etymologically to a banquet) (see Chavannes 1910). Wang specifies that she refers to the place where a community gathered to sacrifice to the sky, to the earth, to local deities, to ancestors, etc. (2012a, 355). He concludes with a straightforward statement: I dare to say that, from an etymological point of view, She and Hui, express well the meaning and the social relations between the church and the chapel in the French countryside. (2004, 272) For him, similarities are therefore perceptible between China and France not only concerning the Chinese notion of “society” but also that of “ancestor”—the soil gods being intimately linked in China with ancestor cults. It is only a short step to conclude that the French and the Chinese share the same conceptuality (even ancestrality!) beyond their cultural systems. In other words, Wang seems to imply that there is not a “them” (the French countryside) and an “us” (China), but civilisations shared between China and France. This approach, which could be described as Chinese-centric, cannot be so in Wang’s eyes, since it refers back to an idea where interconnections (reciprocal relationships) are predominant: He observes from his Chinese point of view while highlighting the connections between the Western observer and his own conceptual frame of reference. Precedence is thus given to Chinese concepts that make it possible to characterise French practices that would no longer be seen as specific to a culture or a nation but, because they are comparable to Chinese practices, would be part of the same civilisation. “Everyone under the same sky.” This approach, which is new in that Chinese anthropologists have not yet ventured to look beyond Asia, reveals that ethno-political concerns are shifting from the national to the global level. This is in line with the idea that it is relations rather than differences between ethnic groups that should be emphasised, which idea appeals to the notions of being among others and of unity despite difference that were introduced above. If these perspectives become predominant in China, they will also be applied beyond its borders in order to better think about civilisations in interaction, and ultimately about the “anthropology of civilisation(s)” in a way that transcends societal, national, and cultural characteristics to promote the great harmony under the sky (tianxia datong). The focus then shifts from the plural (differences) to the singular (unity). 5.5

Conclusion. The Metacosmology of Relationships, an Ideological Decentrering?

Wang closes The West as the Other by invoking the theme of hospitality and the wish to promote “a new kind of attitude to the other,” “a certain venture

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of the mind in inter-cultural conscience or trans-civilizational mutual disposition” (2014, 289). In the same vein, Kang Youwei, a late imperial and early modern leading thinker of tianxia-ism, projected the realisation of “an inclusive universal society, in which there would no longer be any territorial states” (Chang M. 1987, 62 quoted by Makeham 2021, 46). Following Fei Xiaotong, Wang thus seems not only to promote the extension of the Tibetan-Yi corridor to include a wider geographical space and dynamic relations, but also (and perhaps above all) to rethink the concept of anthropology from out of China and to extend beyond its borders the ideals promoted by the CCP, whose imperialist ambitions have been expressed very openly since the 2000s. This theoretical orientation of Chinese anthropology, while it may seem refreshing in some respects because it breaks the Euro-American conceptual hegemony, does not invite a decentring insofar as this latter means making the symbolic system of the other speak and not primarily what is one’s own through the other. The observation of the West through scientific dialogues in which “relationism” is central seems to be part of an ancestral process that aims at placing what comes from elsewhere “under the Chinese sky.” Today, as in the past, ethnology seems aligned with projects of Chinese global governance and cosmo-policy. While Zhao Tingyang proposes developing “a political philosophy expressed from the point of view of the world itself rather than that of a state, […] a vision embracing the world rather than a single nation” (2008, 6), envisaging giving voice to Chinese metaphysics, Wang seeks to develop, from his metacosmological perspective on Chinese anthropology, “a kind of dialectics of otherness and autonomy” (2014, 288), not hesitating to refer to Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. The concepts he invokes in his theories seem to be fully in the vein of tianxia-ism. Instead of witnessing any decolonisation of thought, we perceive in Wang a recolonisation of anthropology from China: a colonial reversal from West to East. The ethnography of the concepts employed by this anthropologist thus forces us to see Bhargava’s proposals in a different light, since China has never abandoned its own ethno-anthropological perspectives that are immersed in politics and thus in the projects of “Han” civilisation, i.e., imperialism. Relationism, or the “history of relational structures,” as it is expressed in China through the anthropology promoted by Wang, thus draws from a political project, but one that is very different in intent from that discussed in the previous chapter. Chinese relationist anthropology, although it deals with the Self and the Other and claims a structuralist and Maussian heritage, differs fundamentally from the relationisms of LéviStrauss, Descola, and Viveiros de Castro. Its claim serves precisely the placing of this reflection in an international framework with a view to decentring anthropology, which must here, in a manner of speaking, serve a national cause and support a global takeover anchored in a universalism thought from out of China. In such a framework, relationism is not connected to (Western) philosophy. It is therefore stripped of all materiality,

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thought strictly in terms of “relations” (guanxi
系) and thus in terms of the specifically Chinese networks of sociological influence (habitus) that are seen as developing—and developing hierarchically—from the central circle, that of the Han. The Confucian ideology of “relational rituality” is again at the forefront today, while being adapted to its context of enunciation: The universal is no longer to be understood only in the cosmological sense but together with the idea of transnationality. Wang takes up Western anthropology and makes great reference to it in order to establish it in a new Chinese conceptual substratum. Consequently, when Alain Le Pichon and Moussa Sow (2011) invite us to discuss the idea that Lévi-Strauss doubted whether an anthropology can be anything other than Western, entitling their collective work Le renversement du ciel. Parcours d’anthropologie réciproque [The reversal of the sky. A Journey of Reciprocal Anthropology] by referring to an expression borrowed by Wang from Zhuangzi, we must treat this with great caution. However attractive the idea of a “reciprocal knowledge” may be, and of paying attention to the specific perspectives of researchers in the human sciences belonging to cultures that have been and continue to be the subject of investigations by Western ethnologists, it is also necessary to know how to decipher some of their discourses so as not to naively promote a decentring that is actually not one at all, since it presupposes another centrism. The decolonial illusion seems to lurk in the shadows. These remarks confirm the importance of developing an ethnography of concepts and discourses with respect to the symbolic institutions from which they emerge in order to fully understand the debates at stake, without ingenuously integrating an anti-colonialist debate. Finally, this reversal of the conceptual focus from West to East reveals how much the encounter between different symbolic institutions must remain at the heart of our reflection. Notes 1 Arendt’s words echo those of Billeter who, after quoting La Boétie on voluntary servitude, says the following: “The Chinese empire is distinguished by the art with which it has institutionalised this kind of system. It has created a cleverly hierarchical machine for this purpose and has given it the appearance of greatness in order to perpetuate it better” ( 2007, 64). 2 “The New Chinese Anthropology” is the title of Issue 8 of cArgo. International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology, published in 2018 under the editorship of Ji Zhe and Liang Yongjia. I will discuss this publication later on. 3 Renleixue, , an expression usually translated as “anthropology,” literally means “study of the human species” or “study of kinds of people.” 4 Björn Kjellgren (2002, 173; 2003, 170) is highly critical of the nationalist-based Sinicisation of the social sciences. He questions the essentiality of the idea that one native researcher is superior to another, and questions the link of Chinese researchers with a regime that grants little freedom, the primary function of a state agent being to participate in the production of scientific propaganda. 5 This “cosmology of relationship” introduced into anthropology is comparable to the “Chinese metaphysics of relations” promoted by the philosopher Zhao Tingyang (2008, 13; 2021). I will return to this philosophical approach through

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the critical (and remarkably courageous in light of the political situation in China) analysis that the historian Ge Zhaoguang offers. As Schipper reminds us, it was Emperor Wu (140–86) under the Han dynasty (206 BCE–221 CE) who established Confucianism as a state ideology: “Strange fate for this ancient philosophy, which was completely committed to the feudal order, and which became the doctrine of imperial absolutism, the morality of centralizing statism! A deep cleavage then takes place, which will remain, in spite of significant variations, constant in Chinese history: on the one hand, the State and its administration, the official country claiming to be in the ‘Confucian’ tradition; on the other hand, the real country, the particularizing local structures expressed in regional cults and unofficial religion” ([1982] 1997, 21). Since the turn of the millennium, China has undergone profound changes, eager to take its place on the world stage with the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, and to give the world a new face to see, especially after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. I am quoting Zhao Tingyang (2008). On this topic, see especially “All under heaven (Tianxia): Cosmological Perspectives and Political Ontologies in Pre-Modern China” (2012a). Wang then indulges in a broad historical overview of the notion, from the foundations of Neolithic cosmological conceptions (archaic cosmos), which he holds as the primary condition for the development of tianxia (ibid, p. 340). On these different “schools of thought” in relation to tianxia, see more specifically Wang (2014, 284). The use of the singular or the plural will be discussed later. I have already pointed out that the use of the singular does not fit with China, which is characterised by a great heterogeneity of populations, which are constantly referred, as it is important to bear in mind, to a regulating and normative centre. Hence the idea of unity despite diversity/difference that predominates in the discourse. The concept of tianxia goes back to the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 BCE), a point I will return to. The same processes are applied today among other so-called minority populations/ nationalities. See for example, the institutionalisation of Yi-Sani shamanism and the establishment of an official shaman, working for the “Bureau of Religious Affairs” and responsible for teaching the state shamanic tradition to local shamans created from the transformation of lineage shamanic traditions ( Névot 2019). Trébinjac refers here to Diény (1968, 12). Once again, integrating the people of China into the Chinese cosmology is a practice that can be still observed today. He explains this in chapter 8 of The West as the Other in particular. One of the five sacred mountains of China. This “Mountain of the East” is more particularly called the Taishan, the Mount Tai. The same image referring to “the other side of the coin” is used in The West as the Other (2014, 251). On the ritualism of the Zhou, see in particular Vandermeersch (2013, 177–179). Vandermeersch points out that this metaphor is supported by the homophony (in ancient Chinese) between “shoes” (lü) and “rites” (li). In this, Wang opposes Zhao Tingyang, according to whom the political application of tianxia ended with the founding of the Qin Empire (see “The Philosophy of Tianxia” 2008, 10). According to this philosopher, the concept “declined because it was too perfect” (ibid. p. 11). See also Schipper [1982] 1997, 139. He makes the same point in The West as the Other (2014, 273).

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24 Pre-1911 Chinese society was based on the five fundamental shang-xia G# relationships, i.e., “superior-inferior”: ruler-subject, father-son, husband-wife, master-disciple, elder-cadet. Despite the political and sociological revolutions that marked the 20th century, respect for these hierarchical relationships remains important today insofar as they are valued by the new Confucianism. 25 “‘You are part of me, I am part of you’ (ni zhong you wo, wo zhong you ni) is a phrase that he [Fei Xiaotong] used to characterize the zone [the Tibetan-Yi corridor]. The fusions of cultural self and other had been the histories of most tribes before the teams doing identification work arrived” ( Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 904). 26 He also points out that the Han, who saw no distinction between subject and object, did not develop the concept of an Absolute other, of God or of Nature ( Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 919–920). 27 Zhao Tingyang, mentioned above, who is arguably the most prominent contemporary philosopher-ideologist of the utopia of tianxia, points out that “[t] here is no Chinese denial of the value of the individual, but rather a denial of the individual as a political foundation or starting point, because politics only makes sense when it deals with ‘relations’ rather than ‘individuals’, and politics is meant to talk about coexistence rather than mere existence” ( 2006, 34). 28 From this Chinese relationist perspective, Wang distils the idea, which is particularly striking in his discussions with Michael Rowlands and Stephan Feuchtwang (2010), that we need to relativise our views on the processes of colonisation. He encourages us to see colonisation as one factor among others in cultural interpenetrations and not in terms of the value judgement that colonisation is ipso facto destructive. He expresses himself on the subject in relation to India (ibid., 921). According to him, the colonisation of India should not to be seen from a conflictual perspective, as it was also constructive. Wang invites us to observe its effects over time, emphasising that India itself has not been without influence elsewhere. We can see here to what extent this cookie-cutter, ultra-relativistic comparatism mixes cultural and political phenomena: How can we compare, for example, the influence of Buddhism in the world and the effects of British colonisation? Or, how can it be said that if the Han cut down trees without worrying about the consequences, unlike the Tibetans, it is because for the former, inscribed in organic materialism, there is no distance between humans and nature? 29 Zhao Tingyang mentions this problematic in terms of a tianxia-state-family hierarchy far removed from Western abstract perspectives that emphasise the link between nation-states, communities and individuals. 30 Similarly, Zhao Tingyang writes that “[g]lobalization will not lead to worldbuilding if it is constantly misled by chimeras such as the ‘clash of civilizations’” (2008, 6). 31 “When modern ethnologists studied the southwest, they only paid attention to the classification of the ‘barbarians’ and ignored the complicated political relationship between the empire and its ‘periphery.’ […] The ethnological accounts from Sima Qian to Leach make clear that the so-called southwestern barbarians are a component belonging to the larger zone of contact between the Chinese and the Indian civilizations that have existed for two thousand years” ( Wang 2012b, 177–178). 32 For Wang, the foreigners’ view of this region is a legacy of the classifications made in the 1950s and of the Chinese cultural policies involved in the theory of “the large family of minorities (minzu dajiating).” These studies are limited, he adds, to describing and analysing a particular culture (a nationality) on the assumption that it is isolated from the others, and he here refers to the centre-periphery

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opposition, as well as to socialist perspectives that aim at studying each nationality for itself in order to specify its stage of evolution with regard to the five stages defined by Marxism ( Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 900). But this orientation cannot account for the local situation, which Wang considers, after Fei, to be much more fusional than that which some anthropologists claim to observe ( Wang 2012b, 172). He criticises the fact that the populations of the Tibetan-Yi corridor have been studied following Chinese social science norms that state that monographs should focus on a particular population and village monographs. Moreover, he claims this “village-peeping methodology” has to do with the political project of re-orienting China, that is to say, with a view to translating the idea that China has recently been industrialised and urbanised, which is part of an external political project and vision ( Wang, Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010, 908–909). The Western colonisation of anthropology is once again Wang’s target. “Zai gousi” can be translated as “reconceptualisation” or “rethinking.” David Ownby refers to “the common attempt on the part of Chinese intellectuals to ‘rethink China’ and to arrive at ‘new founding myths’, a challenge inspired by the rise of China at the beginning of the 21st century” ( 2021, 175). It seems that the anthropology Wang promotes is already posterior to this nationalist movement. Since the latter is now well established, it is now precisely a matter of going even further in the project that aims at orienting the world from China, which would be the bearer of a harmonious, non-conflictual universal thought and would therefore be taken as a “model.” This new theoretical perspective was monumentally displayed in Shanghai in 2010 through a gigantic ritual building called “The Crown of the East,” namely the China Pavilion, built at the heart of the World Expo. This palace, which expresses the direction that China wants to give to the world, implies putting the Hua (the ancestors of the Han) back at the centre of the universe. See Névot (2014). See furthermore Ji Zhe (2008 and 2013). Chen refers here to Wang (2009). Le Pichon, who is often cited by Wang when he talks about reciprocity, is supported by the European Commission in his development of international research programs in anthropology and the social sciences that are based on transcultural methodologies. Zhao Tingyang, the defender of the ideological philosophy of tianxia, published “Compréhension et acceptation” [“Understanding and acceptation”] in a book edited by Le Pichon in 2003. In the conclusion of this chapter, I will return to the consequences of such academic projects, which are part of political projects and are supported by Western readers who seem to be unaware of the ideological foundations of these Chinese approaches. It is on the condition of its relating to Chinese traditions and positioning in the world that an anthropology will be conceivable from China, an idea developed in particular in Wang (2005).

Bibliography Arendt H. [2006] (1961) Between Past and Future. New York: Viking. Penguin Publishing Group. Baptandier B. (2001) En guise d’introduction. Chine et anthropologie [By way of introduction: China and anthropology]. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Chiner la Chine. Ateliers 24. DOI: 10.4000/ateliers.8714. Bhargava R. (2013) Overcoming the Epistemic Injustice of Colonialism. Global Policy 4 (4): 413–417.

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Billeter J. F. (2007) Contre François Jullien [Against François Jullien]. Paris: Éditions Allia. Billioud S. and Thoraval J. (2007) Jiaohua: Le renouveau confucéen en Chine comme projet éducatif [Jiaohua: Confucian Revival in China as an Educational Project]. Perspectives chinoises 101: 4–21. Chang H. (1987) Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis. Search for Order and Meaning (1890–1911). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chang M. (2012) The Movement to Indigenize the Social Sciences in Taiwan: Origin and Predicaments. In Dirlik A., Li G. and Yen H.-P. [eds.], Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth-Century China. Between Universalism and Indigenism. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 221–260. Chavannes E. (1910) Le dieu du sol dans la Chine antique [The god of the soil in ancient China], appendix to Le T’ai Chan. Essai de monographie d’un culte chinois [The T’ai Chan. An attempt at a monograph on a Chinese cult]. Paris: E. Leroux, 437–526. Cheng A. (1997) (ed.) Histoire de la pensée chinoise [History of Chinese thought]. Paris: Le Seuil. Cheng A. (2021) (ed.) Penser en Chine [To think in China]. Paris: Gallimard. Chen B. (2018) Writing Chinese Ethnography of Foreign Societies. cArgo. International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology 8: 109–128. Confucius (1979) Analects: The Saying of Confucius. Trans. By Lau D. C. London: Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics. Diény J.-P. (1968) Aux origines de la poésie classique en Chine. Étude sur la poésie lyrique à l‘époque des Han [The origins of classical poetry in China. Study on lyric poetry in the Han period]. Monographie du T’oung Pao, VI. Leiden: Brill. Dirlik A. (2012) Zhongguohua: Worlding China. The Case of Sociology and Anthropology in 20th century China. In Dirlik A., Li G. and Yen H.-P. (eds.), Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth-Century China. Between Universalism and Indigenism. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1–39. Feuchtwang S. and Rowlands M. (2019) Civilisation recast: theoritical and historical perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault M. (2001) Madness and Civilization. London: Routledge. Ge Z. (2021) L’Empire-Monde fantasmé [The fantasised Empire-World]. In Cheng A. (ed.), Penser en Chine [To think in China]. Paris: Gallimard, 58–105. Granet M. [1934] (1968) La pensée chinoise [The Chinese Thought]. Paris: Albin Michel. Huntington S. P. (1924) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ji Z. (2008) Tianxia, retour en force d’un concept oublié. Portrait des nouveaux penseurs confucianistes [Tianxia, a comeback of a forgotten concept. Portrait of the new confucianist thinkers]. La Vie des Idées. URL: http://laviedesidees.fr/ Tianxia-retour-en-force-d-un.html. Ji Z. (2013) Return to Durkheim: Civil Religion and the Moral Reconstruction of China. In Hausner S. L. (ed.), Durkheim in Disciplinary Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life”. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 47–66. Ji Z. and Liang Y. Introduction. Toward a New Chinese Anthropology. cArgo. International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology 8: 7–16. Jullien F. (1993) Figures de l’immanence [Figures of Immanence]. Paris: Grasset.

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Kjellgren B. (2002) The Sinization of the Social Sciences and the Chinese Mind. In Buen J. and Kjellgren B. (eds.), China at the turn of the 21st Century. Nordic association for Chinese studies, 161–177. Kjellgren B. (2003) The Predicament of Indigenisation: Constructions and Methodological Consequences of Otherness in Chinese Ethnography. Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 1(1): 147–178. Le Pichon A. (1995) The Sound of the Rain: Poetic Reason and Reciprocal Knowledge. In Fernandez J. and Singer M. (eds.), The Conditions of Reciprocal Understanding. Chicago: Transcultura/Center for International Studies, 348–351. Le Pichon A. (2003) Les assises de la connaissance réciproque [The foundations of mutual knowledge]. Paris: Le Robert. Le Pichon A. and Sow M. (2011) Le renversement du ciel. Parcours d’anthropologie réciproque [The reversal of the sky. A journey of reciprocal anthropology]. Paris: CNRS éditions. Makeham J. (2021) Philosophie chinoise et valeurs universelles dans la Chine d’aujourd’hui [Chinese philosophy and universal values in today’s China]. In Cheng A. (ed.) Penser en Chine [To think in China]. Paris: Gallimard, 31–57. Mauss M. and Durkheim E. (1913) Note sur la notion de civilisation [Note on the notion of civilisation]. L’Année sociologique 12: 46–50. Text reproduced in Mauss M. (1969) Œuvres. 2. Représentations collectives et diversité des civilisations. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 451–455. Névot A. (2014) La Couronne de l’Orient. Le centre du monde à Shanghai. [The Crown of the East. The Centre of the World in Shanghai]. Paris: CNRS éditions. Névot A. (2019) Masters of Psalmody. Scriptural Shamanism in Southwestern China. Boston and Leiden: Brill. Norbert E. (1995) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Ownby D. (2021) “Sortir du système impérial” avec Qin Hui. In Cheng A. (ed.), Penser en Chine [To think in China]. Paris: Gallimard, 162–204. Saïd E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Schipper K. [1982] (1997) Le corps taoïste [The Taoist Body]. Paris: Fayard. Trébinjac S. (2000) Le pouvoir en chantant. L’art de fabriquer une musique chinoise (tome 1), [Power in singing. The art of creating a Chinese Music (volume 1)]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Trébinjac S. (2008) Le pouvoir en chantant. Une affaire d’État… … impériale (tome 2) [Power in singing. An imperial affair of state (volume 2)]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Vandermeersch L. (2013) Les deux raisons de la pensée chinoise. Divination et idéographie [The two reasons of Chinese thought. Divination and ideography]. Paris: NRF, Gallimard. Wang Mingming (2000) Le renversement du Ciel. De l’Empire devenu une nation et de la pertinence de la compréhension réciproque pour la Chine [The reversal of the Sky. From Empire to Nation and the Relevance of Mutual Understanding for China]. Alliage 45-46: 65–80. Wang Mingming (2004) L’Europe, une “terre sans ancêtres”?. Alliage 55–56: 267–272. Wang Mingming (2005) Xixue “Zhongguo hua” de li shi kun jing, H

IJ KLM [the historical dilemma of the “Sinicization” of Western studies], Guilin: Guangxi shi fan da xue chu ban she.

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Wang Mingming (2008) Zhongjian Quan: “Zang-Yi zoulang” yu renleixue de zai gousi ( ?> NOPIQRS) [The Intermediate Circle: “the Tibetan-Yi Corridor” and the Recasting of Anthropology]. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe. Wang Mingming (2012a) All under Heaven (Tianxia): Cosmological Perspectives and Political Ontologies in Pre-Modern China. HAU: Journal of ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 337–383. Wang Mingming (2012b) Southeast and Southwest: Searching for the Link between “Research Regions”. In Dirlik A., Li G. and Yen H.-P. (eds.), Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth-Century China. Between Universalism and Indigenism. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 161–190. Wang Mingming (2014) The West as The Other. A Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Wang Mingming (2015) Chaoshehui tixi: wenming yu Zhongguo  !系: ,- T [Suprasocial system: China and civilisation]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, Beijing, Sanlian shudian. Wang Mingming (2018) Afterword: A View from a Relationist Standpoint. cArgo. International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology 8: 149–166. Wang Mingming, Feuchtwang S. and Rowlands M. (2010) Some Chinese Directions in Anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly 83 (4). Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research, 897–925. Xu L. and Ji Z. (2018) For a Revaluation of History and Civilization. The French Sources of Chinese Anthropology. cArgo. International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology 8: 49–50. Yan Y. (1996) The Culture of Guanxi in a North China Village. The China Journal 35: 1–25. Yang M. (1994) Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Yang M. (2002) The Resilience of Guanxi and Its New Deployments: A Critique of Some New Guanxi Scholarship. The China Quarterly 170: 459–476. Zhao T. (2006) Rethinking Empire from a Chinese concept “All-under-Heaven” (Tian-xia). Social Identities 12 (1): 29–41. Zhao T. (2008) La philosophie du tianxia [The philosophy of tianxia]. Diogènes 221: 4–25. Zhao T. (2021) All Under Heaven. The Tianxia System for a Possible World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universitsy of California Press.

6

Shamanic Bodies and Submutances The Course of Writing, Blood, Breath, and Water

Our existence is of such a kind, not only that movement belongs to it by essence, but that it is, by all its nature, movement. Jan Patočka, Papiers phénoménologiques [Phenomelogical Papers] (1995, 107)

In the conceptual evolution of the substance-relation dualism and the contemporary relationist theories defended by Descola, Viveiros de Castro and Wang, the body appears irremediably “effacé” (blurred or erased) for various reasons. If “Chinese thought” is something of a turn-off for Descola’s analogical approach, it attracts Viveiros de Castro who sees a plausible extension of perspectivism in it. And for Wang, it embodies a paradigm that allows us to see processes of fusion and to extend inter-civilisational relations. In this chapter I shall attempt to rid this so-called “Chinese thought” of all anthropological fiction and “fantasy” and to unravel the use of this expression in the singular so as to articulate it in terms of the plurality that it really conceals. This means not seeking to approach it in the light of any theoretical presuppositions nor viewing it as a unified thought but instead addressing it in its particularities testified to in ethnographical data that is all the more peculiar as these stem from southwestern China and were collected among a Chinese minority speaking a Tibeto-Burmese language. This shamanic tradition developed more particularly in the Yunnan province, a region influenced by different religious traditions and also by the shamanisms that originated in the Himalayan regions. I want here to question macro-anthropology from microethnographies, an expression I will also use in the plural form because one aim of this chapter is to compare the analysis of ethnographical material I collected (and which will receive the most attention in this chapter) with data from other Chinese southwestern areas in which bodies and submutances are also central.1 More specifically, I seek to question relationism as it is envisioned in this diffuse and plural cultural area, constituted on the basis of multiple influences, and where we can observe “the absolute priority of the human body,” to use Schipper’s expression once again ([1982] 1997, 141). Here we also (I could say de facto) observe different writings put into connection with the submutances of the universe—and this specificity, already introduced in Chapter 3, is far DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-12

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from negligible as we will see in the present chapter when discussing three nonHan writings. For Jean-Luc Nancy, writing allows us to “touch the world,” to enter in relation with exteriority: “The body is in limit, in extremity: It comes to us from the farthest, the horizon is its multitude which comes. To write: to touch the extremity” (2000, 12). We will see that the shamanic body as understood in southwestern China is without “limit” because it is “extensive,” precisely through the means of ritual writings and submutances. Whatever the conjectures of Descola, Viveiros de Castro, and Wang may be (structuralist and/or functionalist) and despite the decentrings they all promote, in their thinking the body either radically withdraws or is considered but without being conceived in the light of indigenous perceptions. The analytical veil that covers the body expresses a constitutive problem: How can be it apprehended? The importance of dealing with this question was raised early on by the father of French anthropology himself. Mauss advocated a sociological analysis of body techniques in a lecture given in 1934 (and published in 1936). Through a perspective that was both biological and psychological, he invited us to look at how humans use their bodies (1936, 1), an object of study so essential that he placed it at the heart of a more general understanding of any society. I do not want to take up his approach to the “art of using the human body” (ibid., 8) here, which he had referred more specifically to the incorporation of knowledge, but to emphasise the importance, even today, of questioning head-on by what means, what uses, what techniques, what logic of thought, humans, in all their multiplicity, enact and think about the movements of their bodies. This means promoting an indigenous reappropriation of the body’s thinking, which seems all the more important when, as in China, one regards thought as “in” the body. As was already seen, until the 19th century which was marked by the influence of Western sciences, thinking was understood as located in the heart, as incorporated, and as having no exteriority. It is flesh, organic. As outlined in the introduction with reference to India and Oceania, and more extensively in Chapter 3 in questioning the notion of analogism Descola introduces to characterise China, the notions of substance and relation are unsuitable for describing certain ethnographic contexts, which justifies addressing them by decentring our episteme. China, known for its ancient scholars, its bureaucracy, its central powers, is also characterised by shamanic traditions, which were locally present since the origin of this civilisation. As already emphasised in their “submutantial” practices, the Daoist Masters are religious practitioners affiliated to shamanism—“the nature of the religious ground on which Chinese culture has sprouted” is more globally that of shamanism (Vandermeersch 2013, 14–15). I propose examining this topic by exploring shamanism over and beyond the so-called Han Chinese by focusing on the Masters of Psalmody (bimo), who are inscribed in a Sino-Tibetan-Burmese framework. I will address what they put into practice during their ritual activities in close relation to what is constitutive of their shamanic bodies, which are initiated

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by copying their lineage scriptures, themselves seen as their shamanic blood and breath that has been transmitted from one generation to another. At the same time, I will also examine their shamanic movements when chanting their ritual manuscripts, which will allow a more complete view on the submutances they enact and animate in order to be then animated in return. Ritual—sacrificial—and sung to the rhythm of pentasyllables, the bimo writing, called nise,2 is in no way a means of communication between human beings. It is not used to transcribe the Tibeto-Burmese idiom of the Nip’a (Yi-Sani), but rather allows the bimo to deploy and inhabit a “metaphysical” space, or to put it better, a “metacosmic” or “metacosmological” space.3 In this cultic environment, a book is literally called “mountain-writing,” sebeu; it refers to the supramundane landscape in which each religious specialist says he walks, rides, swirls, or even flows like the water of a river. This scroll is rolled up when the bimo carries it and is unrolled on the ground once the ritual area has been reached, generally at the foot of the tree where the altar will be built and the bloody sacrifice will be done. In a crouched position the bimo then turns the pages with his right hand, one after the other, chanting to the rhythm of his lines of writing, while he keeps the beat with a bell he waves with his left hand, warning the spirits of his presence. Verses from bimo ritual texts state that, jumping like the locusts, the first bimo sent to earth were rejected by the spirits while those capable of chanting books were accepted. Movements do not predominate over voices and writings. On the contrary, the voicing of writing-submutances (blood and breath) initiates movements. A bimo travels in the cosmos using his poetic and scriptural chants that enable his journey in the other world. He thus says that he sets out in search of the tools and plants necessary for the construction of his altar, which are also indispensable for the smooth running of his ritual: namely, ritual knife, pot(s), bowls, alcohol, different types of trees, and pine thorns, which are at the same time brought to the ritual area by him or by his assistants, depending on whether the ritual is domestic or communal. In doing so, the Master of Psalmody says that he jointly crosses many celestial and terrestrial territories to reach the spirits he needs to solicit and convince to guide him in his quest or to bring help to a family or the village community. The musical writing of these ritualists thus allows them to enter into communication with the spirits of the local pantheon, some of whom respond to the shamans through the prism of writing. These responses confirm to the shaman that he is on the right path in ultimately seeking to summon the spirits to whom his ritual activity is devoted (founding ancestors, healing spirits, providers of crops, wild game or livestock, etc., see Névot 2013, 139). Even though he continually addresses the latter, he does not speak (and therefore does not hear or make audible) their responses to his injunctions (“come again!”). The outcome of the ritual is therefore uncertain; the positive responses of the spirits to the shaman’s requests will later be given through the healing of a patient, the resolution of a problem, or a bountiful harvest. If not, a new

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ritual will have to be organised. Placed at the interface of the human and spiritual worlds—and we shall see how literally this idea must be taken—the two pages of an open book are called “two cheeks” and the writing of the Masters of Psalmody is in this sense dialogical. It is a language at the same time ritual and divine, shared between the shamans and the spirits and it is in relation to shamanic animation, that is to say, to the activation of one’s own body and chant by ritual writing. The metacosmology of the bimo is “written” in relation to the bookish and human bodies. It will thus be a matter of coming back to the assertion that shamanism is not written while emphasising that if it is written, it is removed from the common language insofar as it does not concern communication between humans but between the shamans and the spirits for whom the shamanic body, taken in its totality, is a major point of interaction/meeting thanks to submutances. Scriptural shamanism can therefore only be realised in the most trans-substantial, abstract, and rhythmic forms of writing: blood and breath in its graphic dimension, poetry in its verbal dimension, dance in its gestural dimension. Thus, in a more general perspective, it is also a matter here of discussing shamanic movement by addressing the shaman’s “play” as Roberte Hamayon introduced this notion, and the idea of feeling and of the shaman as a “being-seized,” to use Erwin Straus’ expression (das Ergriffenwerden) by taking recourse to the most recent reflections on movement and music, notably through the prism of Anne Boissière’s work. 6.1

Nise and Submutantial Processes: Transmission and Sacrifice 4

The bimo shamanic writing is reserved for seasonal cults, for funerals, and also for exorcist practices. Deaths, epidemics, shortages, etc., are signs that can be associated with the actions of disgruntled spirits who must be appeased with offerings and chants. Depending on the ritual context, the bimo will build wooden figures that have to take on the misfortunes of a family; the end of the ritual will be marked by their expulsion (they then have to be accompanied beyond the village borders). All these rituals involve bloody sacrifices accompanied by the vocalisation of the writing. These only become efficacious through shamanic sacrifice and chanting. The chanting is considered effective because it emanates from bimo writing seen as a submutance: the blood and breath of the shamanic lineage at the basis of the shamanic voice that communicates with the spirits. The bimo writing is not perceived as transcribing the ritual language onto paper but as its substratum—it is literally what gives it substance (i.e., the “matter from which something is formed”). More precisely, it is inscribed in two respects in submutantial processes: in the transmission from master to disciple, which is echoed in the sacrificial register, and in a different way still by another ritual movement that takes the officiant as its starting point and the spirits as its ending point. I will first focus on these two submutance-based

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processes and then I will more broadly discuss the submutantial and dancing movements of the bimo. Before the ritual and scriptural unification of the bimo promoted by the Chinese authorities from the 1980s onwards and with a still greater vigour from the 2000s onwards, this script was characterised by a high degree of heterogeneity. Numerous variants existed within the corpus that only the bimo were deemed capable of handling and that they transmitted from father to son or from grandfather to grandson by copying. Each patrilineal lineage preserved certain scriptural specificities linked to the idea that writing is the ritual blood proper to the lineage of initiates. To put it differently, the Masters of Psalmody base their shamanic chants on ritual texts composed of writings specific to these shamans in that they are associated with their body “substances” which, as they are not inert, should rather be characterised as submutances. The bimo thus have the particularity of not entirely sharing the same ritual writing: If the contents of shamanic corpus of the different ritual lineages are relatively close and composed of mostly identical writing characters, there are also graphic variants in accordance with their lineage affiliation. One term in particular of these specific lineage characters should be especially considered: It is called se and covers the meanings of “writing” and “blood” at the same time. This implies that what must be constantly born in mind is that writing and blood are one and the same phonetically and graphically. They are written in the same way, while varying from one ritual lineage to another, such that to speak of writing is to refer to the lineage blood and vice versa. Hence the need to use the expression “blood-writing” to emphasise the submutantiality of the shamanic sign and to remain as close as possible to the vernacular meaning of writing in relation to corporeality, that is to say, to the ritual and secret meaning, for we are here in a shamanic register that refers to ritual secrets and to a form of lineage exclusivity. Like Ni society, the practices of the bimo are segmented;5 the religious officiants are not grouped together under a clergy nor do they consider themselves to be a community.6 From the outset, a close proximity between writing and life (the term life is, moreover, a homophone of the term “blood-writing”) is established, between writing and the breaths of the shaman for “without blood there is no breath and without breath there is no blood,” as one of them said to me. Consequently, this relation extends to the arterial beat and to the body of the officiant, in short, to his bodily rhythms and his movements. Such a configuration requires attention to the bimo’s body techniques. The scriptural chanting of this religious officiant is acquired through and inspired by an apprenticeship with a master (his father or grandfather) from whom he inherits, by birth, the agnatic bodily submutances. As is commonly understood in China, a father is said to pass on his bones to his descendants, the flesh and blood being transmitted by maternal means. Conceiving a shaman rather than a little man means that a different trans-corporeal process is supposed to take place and one that only concerns one of the sons

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of the patrilineage. This ritual transmission then passes through the act of writing and is thus a blood transmission. The copying of the manuscripts of the shaman-father comes into play here for the handwriting of the Masters of Psalmody is associated with the blood of the ritual lineage to which they belong. Like the Daoist Masters and the Red-Head Masters discussed in Chapter 3, the feminine part of the body is thus omnipresent in the practices of these shamans (Névot 2019a, 115–117). But the shamanic blood manipulated and transmitted by the bimo though the writing from father to son differs from the maternal blood. It is black and linked to vision and the cosmos; it is the blood transformed and transmitted by the male initiates. The blood transmitted by men is writing. Among the bimo, a specific form of male gestation can thus be observed, one carried out through writing. The transmission through the incorporation of these submutantial writings conditions the shamanic becoming (maieutic), namely the vocality of each officiant, which translates his personal power. This close relation established by the Masters of Psalmody between their ritual language, their writing, and their shamanic submutances is supposed to condition their movements in different landscapes that, they claim, they alone can see and cross. In this framework, ritual speech therefore passes through the bloodwriting. This speech is not thought of as transcribed by the writing but as emerging from the writing which, enlivened by the voice of the officiant, generates the ritual speech, i.e., it is a graphic vocality. It is precisely when he sings and thus ritualises his writing for the first time that the disciple is named “Master of Psalmody.” In fact, a disciple takes on voice, he begins to sing, at the end of his scriptural apprenticeship. The idea is that after having copied his master’s texts as many times as possible, he acquires the ability to sing them, hence the first chant is perceived as spontaneous. The ritual speech is supposed to “spring forth of its own accord” as the shamans say. It expresses the shamanic personhood in its own right. This singing to the rhythm of pentasyllables is of course acquired by impregnation, because the disciple has heard his father, even his grandfather, as well as other bimo officers in the village. It is therefore not a virginal sonority but is always already filled with shamanic musicalities. In this religious framework, body, writing, and ritual language are thus one. Speech is only writing insofar as writing is body, and vice versa. To put it another way: speech and ritual writing, both in relation to the body, are consubstantial and involved in submutations. It can thus be said that the bimo does not learn to write, but he copies the writing of his master, which allows him to access the meaning as well as the feeling of the texts, a complex sensory universe that is forbidden to the uninitiated and through which the bimo sings and moves like a bird, circling, hunting, and migrating, without having learned to do so. Indeed, this scriptural voicing is supposed to set all the energies of the universe into motion and to condition the movements of the shamans in different landscapes that are populated by spirits that, the bimo claim, only

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they can see. Having fully incorporated the shamanic script through copying, the Master of Psalmody can move (to be an “agent”) in the landscapes inscribed in the lines of his script. By having integrated the blood-writing of his master, he acquires the ability to travel in the other world while at the same time having this ritual language in common with certain spirits who speak through the writing as the shaman speaks to them through this same writing. In so doing, the Master of Psalmody is not only a “chimera of sound,” to use Carlo Severi’s expression (2007), but also a scriptural chimera. Another trans-substantial process can be observed in the sacrificial framework of the Masters of Psalmody in addition to these different forms of consubstantiality linked to submutantial and matrix processes. The blood substance also prevails in the whole ritual apparatus (transmission, writing, sacrifice) and extends to many other entities (spirits, trees, etc.) through a “semantic stretch.” I borrow this expression from Geoffrey Lloyd (2015) who suggests that we should go beyond the dichotomy of “literal versus metaphorical,” which is too Eurocentric and often proves inadequate for describing exo-European phenomena. I cannot enter the complexity of the observed system here,7 but I want to point out that, just as in the case of transmission from master to disciple, the ritual apparatus of the bimo calls upon the se, thus the writing-blood of the manuscript, but also the se which designates the blood of the sacrificial animal (named mo whose graph is the same as the mo of bimo), which, by its flow (once again, the idea of “exit,” of “expulsion,” predominates), is said to allow the transmission of the human speech, contained in the ritual text (full of shamanic lineage se), to allow it to be put into voice, to rise up to the spirits (who are also said to be se, in a different tone in the local language that counts five, a tone that disappears in the course of the shamanic chant). An in-depth study of the ritual structure (see Névot 2019a) reveals that the sacrifice still calls upon other forms of bodies (as they are called), notably arboreal bodies, made up of plant blood—sap is analogously linked to blood—and these arboreal bodies full of plant blood are indispensable to the constitution of the altar and more broadly to the sacrificial scheme. Se: blood and/or writing, sap, in yet another tone “spirit,” thus appears to be a sort of sacrificial leitmotif that could be perceived as an “operative concept” (in Fink’s sense (1957)) in the sacrifice as conceived by the local shamans. The ritual officiant allows precisely the animation of the se and their intercommunication. This is underpinned by the breaths of the shaman and the sacrificial animal as well as by cosmic forces called yi (in relation to the sun) and an “essence” called la, considered to be pure, about which I could not find out any more. Sacrifice is thus the generative of connections between bodies (human, animal, vegetable) through the submutances that constitute and cross them. The relations established between the beings that interact during rituals are thought of in their processual dimension, in their co-extensibility, which implies following the genesis of the ways in which these entities are linked, and thus the constitution, the matter, the “substance” of these relations. It is

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therefore important to ask after the meaning of “what constitutes the relation” and the “paths it takes.” Ethnography obliges us to reflect on the matter of the relation and not simply to limit our reflection to the study of relations that ultimately remain abstract. With reference to the bimo, it could be said that the shaman gives himself the possibility of creating, through ritual and writing, a particular space-time in which and by means of which he opens himself to the world and deploys his body towards the divine through the intermediary of the animal and the vegetable. The sacrificial rite allows the various se to put themselves into relation (to each other) on the altar, seen at the centre of the universe (see Névot 2019a). As a kind of matrix, it ensures a setting in movement and allows the gathering of the se and the inclusion of them in a rhythm and in bodies so as to create a link between the sacrificer and the divine. The shaman sees (literally) and reads the discontinuity of the se (blood, writing, sap, spirit, etc.) as it is inscribed in his manuscript but sings to ensure its continuity. Sacrifice is thus what makes possible, through the setting in voice and song of the secret and ritual writing of the Masters of Psalmody, a continuity between elements that are discontinuous but that contain in themselves an underlying continuity through the se. In this sense, sacrifice implies, in essence, discontinuity and continuity “in the same movement.” Transcendence and pluralisation are intertwined. The being se transcends itself in the being se. The latter is not an avatar of the former during the sacrifice, but another: It is itself and another, it is the other in the same. Therefore, the shaman is a being “deployed” in the time of the ritual. Is the divine thus a part of the self for the bimo? As for the Daoists, is the human capable of becoming divine? The shaman himself contains the divine in his body, he perceives it as accessible from his body; the divine—to speak one of the forms taken by the se—is thus also linked by discontinuity to the shaman. Now it is the latter who makes it accessible, not because the divine is external to him but because the divine is in him. Through the medium of the animal and the vegetable, he fully penetrates it, he manages to unfold himself towards this otherness that he contains—who contains him? To summarise: It is impossible to speak of bimo writing and of bimo orality in isolation from each other. Neither this specifically Western dichotomy nor the relation-substance dichotomy are adapted to those shamans’ system of representation. They think of their shamanic vocality through writing-bodily submutances and vice versa. For the Masters of Psalmody, the bloody sacrifice establishes a link of “consubstantiation” and “submutantiation” between the shamanic, animal, and vegetable bodies. This relation is based on the voicing of ritual texts, and thus on the animation of the se. If we ascribe the same importance to this process as the shamans do, we find that submutances are at the foundation of the ritual relations. This submutantial process ensures a symbolic melding between universes that are usually perceived as separate (outside the ritual time). And

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this sealing takes shape through the se: blood, writing, sap, spirit. These different bundles of se are animated by the sè breaths, the solar force yi, by the pure essence la, and the shamanic chant links them together. What emerges from the sacrificial conception of these shamans is an energetic of ritual that is based on submutantialism. 6.2

Dancing Though the Voicing of Writing-Blood

The word bimo is composed of two writing characters: bi and mo. Mo refers to a person who has knowledge, a wise man, a master. This term thus evokes the notion of eldership. In the sacrificial register, it also refers to the sacrificial animal. According to the people I spoke with, bi means “to chant” or “to psalmody.” Informants of the Catholic missionary Paul Vial (1855–1917), who was the first ethnographer of the Nip’a and who published a dictionary on the bimo script in 1909, told him that bi was written differently while having the same phoneme. This character means “to dance” (Vial 1909, 110). In the dictionary published in Chinese in 1984, this same character refers to the step or the fact of moving (Yi Han jianming cidian
 1984, 1). With this spelling, bimo could therefore be translated textually as “master of dance” or “master of movement.” The two aforementioned characters bi are homophones and only slightly heterogeneous. Indeed, the character , which means “psalmody” becomes, with the addition of two dots, the character , which refers to the dance, the step, the movement. Hence, there is no terminological ambiguity but a semantic and graphic superposition, a form of visual and semiotic intertwining, a bit like what we would see in a kaleidoscope: a variation on the same theme. It can also be noted that the concept of “writing” has its exact graphic double “blood.” The character “psalmody” has its graphic extension “dance.” I want to explore these graphic and semantic elasticities here. They have the particularity of being inscribed in the bimo writing and therefore of being scriptural elasticities. I want to stretch this cognitive elastic as far as possible, while avoiding breaking it, in order to see how far it can go. This is not a matter of finding out who is right or wrong concerning the translation of bi or se, the two central terms of this shamanic tradition, nor even of which spelling is to be used, but rather of analysing the different meanings that the field brings to light at more than a century’s interval. It is thus a question of going beyond any attempt at a comparison of each “graphic unit” by placing oneself ipso facto in a unitary mode of thought, in order to instead inquire head-on into the plurality concealed by a single graphic and of doing so by using the thought of the multiplicity of the society in presence. The following question also emerges in view of these philological considerations about the different historical periods: Should we consider these graphic distinctions, however small, as testifying to an evolution of the shamanic concept or to the continual coexistence of scriptural variants

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among the bimo? Should we “read” a shift in register from gesture to sound, as Roberte Hamayon has proposed in relation to the Buryat shamans (2006), or should we see the two meanings given to the “bi” of “bimo” as parallel? The missionary Vial never observed any shamanic dances nor did he mention any movements that would have accompanied these shamans’ ritual practices. On the other hand, he did not cease to emphasise how boring he found their textual chants, which chants seems to have prevailed down to today. It should be noted that the bimo I met who called themselves “Masters of Psalmody” compared themselves to the wild duck, which is called “the dancing bird.” This last term corresponding to the bi mentioned above, which can be translated as “dance,” “steps,” or “move.” Their speeches thus mix the gesture and the sound and this double meaning of bi should be fully considered because it seems to belong to the bimo’s own perspective. This semantic plurality refers to the idea of the sense of the senses to take up again the title of the work by Erwin Straus (Vom Sinn der Sinne [1935] 1989), who was attentive to feeling, as distinguished from the sensations, and was interested in how the subject participated in the world. His analyses of the spatio-temporal forms of feeling and self-movement, further studied and explored by Anne Boissière (2014 and 2018), provide important conceptual orientations for extending the ongoing discussions about the relation of shamans to the world. These shamanic senses that we observe among the bimo are simultaneously related to the voice (to singing), to dance (to movement) and to writing, which is itself associated with blood, with breaths, with a pulsation, with a rhythm. We thus find a kind of phenomenological wholeness, a total sensory universe surrounding the person of the shaman as a being inscribed by essence in the porous worlds. He inhabits and journeys through these worlds through writing, which he learns to draw at the same time as he copies his master’s manuscripts during his initiation, and then through the results of this, namely his own writings, which he must put into voice within the ritual framework. In this sense, the practices associated with multidimensional writing constitute access points between different space-times and fundamental elements of the transformation of a man into a subject at the same time invested by the human and the supramundane. This writing makes the bimo shaman a metacosmic subject with the capacity to split himself, to be on the ritual scene while also claiming to be exploring the different strata of the universe that are reserved for the initiated men. As a result, some of his actions are visible solely to the uninitiated while others are not. This co-extensiveness of the shamanic body is made possible by means of its blood-writing, which gives access to a beyond inhabited by him alone. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense (2000), writing is the touch that refers to an ontology of the body, it supposes an opening to the world and here more particularly to a metacosmic space. But the shamanic inscription and excription do not respond to any dualism nor to any limit. We have to see these notions in a chiasmatic and coextensive way where the inscription feeds the excription and vice versa.

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Indeed, this shamanic configuration, which refers in turn to chant, dance, writing, movement, or even the rhythm of the shaman, is intangible to the uninitiated. Just as his writing refers to a secret ritual word and his singing is incomprehensible to the uninitiated, the peregrinations of the bimo in the para-human world are also invisible to them. The sensory universe of the bimo is secret, and no one sees them dance, no one outside their circle knows what relation their writing has to their blood, still less the graphic specificities of the lineage. Primacy is thus accorded to sound over gesture in relation to humans, the two intertwining in the world of the spirits where shamanic movements often prevail over exchanges with the spirits. As we will see, in mythology, gestures corresponding to drinking precede and provoke sounds. But before discussing this, I want to focus on the bimo dance and this musical writing. In this shamanic framework, there is no question of the bimo making the audience dance, but of them making themselves dance without anybody noticing; we thus witness both a form of withdrawal into the shaman’s own corporeality and an opening towards another world reserved for him alone. The movement does not refer in any way to an empirical reality. Once again, no one on the ritual scene can experience it; we are in a “beyond” here. The shamanic rhythm and melody support a scriptural dance, i.e., a movement that is inscribed and described in the ritual text, which is therefore said to be performed by the officiant at the very moment he sings it. In other words, only the bimo performs it while reading that he is performing it. The movement refers, to take up the reflection proposed by Boissière and to integrate it into this shamanic framework, to “a change, undergone at the same time as radical, for those who live it or are its beneficiaries. […] Such a change on the one hand is experienced, or better lived, and its mode of manifestation is given as an energy, as a life force” (2014, 11–12). The bimo sings that he is going in circles, putting both the text in voice and himself into movement likened to a whirling round. Verses from different textual melodies shed light on this point: djo n’ djo n’ m’ yisa za valé

I turn around the tree in all directions. The left hand of the son full of venerable life force [expression for bimo], valé la ké nu his left hand grasps the stem, jalé deu mi ko his right hand grasps the branches. la dze dze vi li He maintains the tree, chi chlo va li beu he goes seven times to the left, lé chlo va li beu and with his right hand uproots the tree. ma tche deu nè tche The place that I/the son full of venerable life force has not yet reached is reached. tsi neu djo la teu I/he turns around three times, ma ga neu dje dja I/he yells three times!

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The bimo chants allegorically: ba tcha za ka lo djo n’ djo n’ m’

[Like] the spinning top that the child plays with, [I] turn in all directions.

These songs are sometimes accompanied by “slight” movements. Some bimo punctuate their singing with a back and forth body beat, itself punctuated by a bell, when facing their manuscripts. The wide swirls they say they make in/through their chants are worth looking at in more detail. Apart from the bimo, no one understands these ritual melodies which do not respect the five tones of the local language. These songs have a laconic style, based on pentasyllables. They are also ambiguous because of the absence of graphic indicators that could clarify their meaning, the absence or ambiguity of grammatical markers, the functional versatility of words, etc. However, the ritual language of the bimo shares some characteristics with the vernacular. Most of the characters in the text, when read and made explicit but not sung during the learning sessions, correspond to syllabicsemantic units of the local idiom. Since only descendants of shamans have access to this education, no one outside the ritual lineages can grasp the relative proximity of the ritual language to the local speech. The average person only perceives a melody, a rhythm, an incomprehensible language and it is commonly said that shamans meow. For the bimo, a parallel and completely different dynamic is put into play: These religious specialists know what they are talking about because they are initiated into their writing and the meaning of their ritual texts. Moreover, they associate their chanting and celestial whirling with the screeching and flying of the falcon. The bimo also say, as was emphasised, that they sing and fly like a wild duck, literally “the dancing bird.” Whether it is a hissing in one case, a quacking, or a nasal sound in the other, the shamanic chant is, for the uninitiated, of the order of glossolalia, but for the religious specialists, it is hardly more than an indefinite chattering of nature because it refers to the cries of a bird of prey and a migratory bird. While hunting and migration/movement are thus associated with bimo, the chant is in any case never given a human voice. Shamanic writing is thus related to the sounds of nature, to birdsongs. It is also important to note that the bimo do not say that their manuscripts have chapters but melodies. The vocabulary related to the book is “musical.” Here again, there is no a priori dissociation between writing and vocality; orality and writing are not dichotomous. The bimo characters are “graphic chants” and not written words. They constitute graphic melodies.8 Just as the shaman whose body is in the ritual area and in the shamanic space at the same time, these characters are coextensive: They refer to a “scriptorality,” they are inscribed and excribed in a chiasmatic way, belonging to and opening up sonic and topographic spaces at the same time. The idea that birdsong turns out to be the sound of bimo writing leads me to introduce

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another natural element also related to voice and shamanic movement in the metacosmic landscape: water. 6.3

The Shamanic Ineffable: The Paths and the Sounds of Water

It is said that in ancient times, a child herdsman who was roaming the region through the pastures, one day reached a mountain where there was a cave with a pond fed by the water of a river. There he met an old man who began to speak to him without him being able to understand. The old man drank the river water and then spoke, drank, and then spoke, drank and then spoke… Finding this behaviour very strange, the young boy approached the water to observe this enigmatic man more closely, which the old man then transformed into alcohol. The next day, the cowherd returned to the scene. Again, the man in the cave began to speak, again his words were incomprehensible, again he drank and then spoke, drank, and then spoke… so much so that he was in a slight state of drunkenness which slowed the flow of his utterance. The herdsman then grabbed a stick to record what the old man was saying. The collection of this speech was so rich that many books were written. When the old man had finished speaking, the young man went home. On the way, a strong wind blew, and the books flew away. There were only two books left [the ones that the bimo use today for funeral rites, each consisting of twelve chapters]. As a result, the herdsman decided to return to the old man in the cave [to try to recover what was lost]. But the old man said nothing more and went away. The herdsman finally returned home to study the two remaining books. At first, he did not understand the meaning of the books, so he used his own method to try to understand it. He then passed these manuscripts on to his son, who in turn passed them on, and so on. The men who had this knowledge used the books inherited from the herdsman to perform rituals. At the beginning, they were not called bimo, this expression appeared gradually. Much could be said about this story reported by two bimo on different occasions and we know how inexhaustible myths are, revealing a new meaning with each utterance and each reading. I will therefore confine myself to the essential. What seems fascinating at first glance is the incessant movement inscribed in the very structure of this story: the transhumance, the drinking then the speaking, the saying then the writing, the movements in and out of the cave, everything implies a kind of back and forth, a double movement until the end, when it is a question of transmission from father to son. The narrative does not refer so much to the deposit of a writing as to the movements that lead to it and allow it to endure. It translates the original and generative dynamism of the shamanic writing of the bimo.9 The content obviously brings us into a masculine matrix with two very strong symbolic elements: the cave and the water. We are at the birthplace of

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speech and writing which is enacted by two men, an old man and a child, who symbolise two phases of learning and a form of masculine entity in evolution, from the beginning to the end, namely from the apprentice, who does not know and does not understand, to the elder who pronounces something ineffable, which is not put into human words and proves to be of the unspeakable order. In the light of the preceding what is more interesting here is that writing is first of all the transcription of a cavernous and liquid word, the incomprehensible voice of water. Somehow the cowherd child manages to understand, to decipher this, it could be said. The child cannot do so at once but a second time and not as a sensible but as an audible word: a sound that he is able to put on paper. In the cave, this child is thus unable to decipher the meaning of the old man’s words while he nonetheless grasps the sounds of the words: these precede the meaning. The sound is not semantic. The shamanic word is related to the auditory sense before making sense. And writing is this original sound; it is outside language while leading to the meaning of primordial sounds. It is only through the prism of writing and the study of his own texts, which graphically hold the cavernous words, that the herdsman manages to access the meaning of speech, the meaning of sounds. One finds here a form of asceticism, a term I understand here in the Greek sense of askèsis, whose proper meaning is “exercise,” “practice,” or “training.” Such a scriptural asceticism does not take place in the cave, the matrix of the original, masculine word and writing where the old man and the child meet, but in a home outside the matrix. It is thus through the writing extracted from the cave, and in this sense “born,” that the herdsman accesses meaning, it is through this whole scheme of the transcription of sound and through the study of sound texts that he accesses meaning: He is in the position of the apprentice while also receiving revealed words that are to be deciphered. He thereby also embodies the figure of the original master of writing who transmits his understanding of the texts that he holds, presented as incomplete, because of the ineluctably lost primordial texts, which blew away. It should also be noted that there are two occasions for speech in the cave. It is at the end of a transformation of the original speech that the cowherd reaches the audible. This transformation is supported by another transformation: that of water into alcohol. It is not the content of the old man’s speech that is modified, but its rhythm. What is said first by the old man is inspired by the water, his speech is punctuated by the flow of the ingestion of this liquid. It is a speech beyond language, perhaps a soliloquy, a belch, a dismissal, in any case, a speech coming from the absorbed water following a particular cadence: He drinks, he speaks, he drinks, he speaks, etc. Then the water becomes alcohol, and slows down the flow of his utterance. We thus observe a rather fascinating device that sets a rhythm, a glossolalia, a speech that is not so much semantic as sonorous, and drunkenness into a movement that returns us to a change of state.10

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This myth describes a maieutic and allows us to understand that the writing of the bimo is sound expelled from water before it is meaning and that it only takes on full meaning for the one who hears it for the first time when uttered in drunkenness. It depicts the enigmatic character of the first master who holds the word of the bimo and the reflexive character of the one who transcribes it. Drinking seems to be a crucial element here. “Drinking” is in local speech like “swallowing” or “smoking tobacco,” it is something that enters the body through the mouth without being chewed. If, in French, the expression “boire les paroles de quelqu’un” (to drink someone’s words) exists, we notice that here the ingestion of water and then of alcohol provokes an execution, an expression, something that turns away from the interior of the body to be heard outside and that this movement engenders an inscription-excription: Writing is born of this primordial utterance from which a second exteriorisation follows, leading the scribe from the interior of the cave to its home. The meeting of speech and writing, in other words, the transcription of a revealed-erupted speech in the form of an inscription (with the help of a stick), provoked an excription (the emergence of a writing outside the cave and projected into the air) and then gave birth to the bimo. The “old man” (mo) belches out sounds and experiences a kind of verbal ecstasy. His change of state is well and truly staged and appears as a determining factor. His inebriation generates, or rather reveals, the writing. In the myth, the sounds of the bimo writing are thus those of the primordial drunkenness, those of the cave-water. Outside of mythology, water and alcohol turn out to play major roles in shamanic texts, alcohol referring to speech, water to the shamanic journey. Thus, once a year, in each village, a shaman elected by the community makes offerings of alcohol to the word itself. A very beautiful text, published elsewhere (Névot 2013, 189–192), refers to this: bé dje chi josé

It is necessary to make offerings of alcohol to the word. gni deu se ra gni The mouth moves and the breath passes, gni deu dza dza gni the mouth moves and the food is eaten, gni deu dza bé gni the mouth moves and the word grows [like a plant]. cha deu dla ma ba The tongue is not comparable to a bone, gu ga gu di ma it is possible to make noises and cries, gu sa gu yi ma it is possible to utter venerable words full of wisdom, mu mi ka ga dze heaven and earth love to hear them, mu mi ka go dze the sky and the earth like to see them. gni da gni bé tu As the heart speaks, the mouth speaks. gu go la ma bi We do not “give” cries of pain.

Unlike alcohol, water is not logically related to speech but to the shamanic path, which is comparable to the flow of water:

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tsa dè je tsi tchu

Salt mixes with water, [Salt goes like water, salt mixes with water and goes like it] tchu do tchu gh’eu m’ I [bimo] move like water. [Like salt, I follow the course of the water]. ma tche deu nè tche The locality that I have not yet reached, I reach it.

The shaman then says that he follows a path that leads him through the ten strata of the universe (the terrestrial stratum being situated below the nine celestial strata). These pentasyllables translate the fluid movement of the shaman who blends into the landscapes he crosses; he can thus access all the territories and migrate from one stratum to another. This fluidity associated with the movements of the officiant is manifested by the use of the same writing character to signify “water” and “going somewhere.” The water to which the shaman refers here is said to emanate from a cave. The bimo still sings as it reads: tchu do gh’eu do m’ ma tche deu nè tche

Like water, I travel in all places/localities, there is no village where I do not go.

Or: ludi je beu ga I beu ludi ga

The water that flows towards Luliang [toponym], it guides me to Luliang.

Located on the stratum of white clouds that turn into black clouds, the bimo also sings: ra se jo la ga

I come down [to earth] with the rain.

The Master of Psalmody thus crosses scriptural landscapes by commuting himself into a landscape element. The bimo is water, he moves with and in it, his song is that of birds, his writing is related to the sounds given impulse by water. By chanting his writing lines, which are vertical and parallel, the shaman makes a path (gh’eu) and opens a space. In other words, the shamanic chant is spatialised in that it is borne by writing characters aligned in columns read from left to right, which themselves refer to a space beyond the acoustic, a landscape of movements. In relation to another scriptural shamanic tradition of Yunnan, that of the dongba, who are religious specialists of the Naxi, Erik Mueggler also emphasises the link established between the reading of ritual texts and the movement of the dongba. He writes: The structure of writing in these texts imitated the structure of walking. Each place name occupied a panel, followed by a name on the next panel.

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When the names were repeated, as in the “Origin of Sorrow,” the repetition occurred within the frame of a single panel. This footsteplike pattern was emphasized in recitation. Voiced at a rapid clip, each verse went by at about the same pace as a footstep in a deliberate walk, and the simple syntactical and semantic parallelism of the verses lined them up in alternating pairs like walking feet. The written text made a list of place names into a visual map depicting the stages of the journey in successive panels. (2011, 106) Parallel actions can be perceived between the dongba’s eyes and mouth moving along a page of writing and his feet following a path (ibid., p. 107). According to such Tibeto-Burmese perspectives, shamanic movements are generated by the voicing of ritual scriptures. The Master of Psalmody merges (literally) with his writings thanks to the submutantial force of the writing he inherited, inscriptions that are animated in relation to his blood, and thus to the pulsations of his body that must take on sounds in order to be vivified. In this sense, the co-extensive shamanic space refers to the inscribed and the excribed: It is a space of writing that allows an exit out of oneself, a movement in and a touching of the worldly beyond. And the shaman is at the same time a place and a passageway; the link that allows these spaces to be open and porous and that puts them in relation thanks to submutances. The parallel lines the bimo uses to describe his journey, inscribed and excribed, allow for the construction of a supramundane dimension in a world with a parallel existence (superimposed in different layers) to that of humans. The book itself, which is at the interface between the world of humans and that of spirits, is a mountain whose pages are called “slopes” and is thus situated halfway between heaven and earth according to the ritual texts that report the ascents of the bimo. The open book is also “two cheeks.” Indeed, “ba, cheek, designates one side, front or back, of a sheet of paper […]. The two pages, open in front of you, i.e., the back of one sheet and the front of another, are called gni ba” (Vial 1909, 242). In the course of his rituals, the bimo thus enters into a kind of face-to-face encounter with a face of writing. If his book, a mountain, refers to the exploration of a landscape when the shaman immerses himself in it, it is also a form of scriptural mask, an intermediary between earth and sky, and between the self (the bimo of the ritual scene) and the self (the bimo traveling within the book). Do not we find here the idea of a theatrical play through the prism of this persona that allows the doubling of the shaman who calls himself “I” and “son of bimo” at the same time in the texts, thus acquiring the capacity to speak in his own name and, by reflexivity, of himself in the third person? It is this book-mountain, book-face, that constitutes the space where the bimo moves to the rhythm of his songs. This space of the psalmodic that I describe is not far from the acoustic space to which Boissière refers:

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Space that no cartography nor that no tracing will be able to figure […]. To this space, given in the rhythm and in the listening, would be however suspended the possibility of a living relation to the world. Invisible and yet active, this space is the source of a life that bears on the whole. (2014, 13) It is a matter here of addressing the question of this space in relation to its “affective content, precisely insofar as it belongs to the feeling and to the movement” (Boissière 2018, 34). It seems to me important to refer to Boissière on this point because I have encountered difficulties comparable to those she found in thinking space in the aesthetic and philosophical field. It is necessary to think about this virtual space which refers to a shamanic landscape even though it is not intellectually, that is to say empirically, conceivable. 6.4

In Order Not to Finish with Trance and Ecstasy: 11 Submutances at Play

Do these doubled bodily animations, one on the ritual stage, the other in a metacosmic landscape, refer to a certain trance state12 that is not expressed with emphasis and theatricality in front of humans, but precisely in a measured, tempered way, and yet still differently, that is to say, with much more magnitude and vitality, in the supramundane? In his book dedicated to trance (2006), Luc de Heusch introduces the notion of “restrained trance” to characterise this type of shaman who does not ostentatiously express their change of state. The bimo do not express anything of the sort: They are carried by their blood-writing and breath, which allows them to enter a sensory world that the uninitiated cannot reach and it is in this space that they say they move and spin. It seems indisputable that they master their actions: Each verse defines a gesture to be performed, a place to be traversed, a dialogue to be initiated with the spirits, but this mastery does not necessarily refer to restraint. By saying that he performs movements by means of his psalmody, the shaman grants his chant a performativity that is duplicated by his own body insofar as the melodies he intones stimulate his submutances and movements both in the world of humans, as can be observed during the ritual, and in the other world, that of the spirits, insofar as the psalmody lets us to hear it. De Heusch asks himself more specifically: “But is not the rhythm that unfolds in all directions of sensibility expressed first and foremost in the techniques of the body, in a physical exaltation?” (2006, 19). He refers here to Mauss quoted in the introduction to this chapter, and more explicitly to Franz Boas, for whom chant is the only universal manifestation of music and for whom the exaltation provoked by the song leads to the dance (ibid.). The latter thought that dance was solicited for expressive purposes among those who were then called “peoples without writing,” referring in particular to the gestures that tell a story and mime certain predatory animals. Could

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dance thus be a form of writing? Among the bimo, dance is seen through and in writing, it is writing in that it is carried out, enacted in written and sung verses, and it remains invisible. In this sense, the dance and the movements of the bimo exist and are in relation to the body, because they are (in the) writing-blood. Hence one could say that the blood-writing of the Masters of Psalmody provokes a dance. It contains it. De Heusch proposes tackling head on the epistemological problem raised by Hamayon, who suggests doing away with trance and ecstasy in the study of shamanism in order to privilege the idea of “play.” She rightly stresses that all the proposed definitions of trance or ecstasy are psychological, that they are often tainted with mysticism, and that there is no unitary form of what we would call trance or ecstasy. These terms are therefore unsuited to anthropological analysis, she claims, which must be based on the systems of representation, on the logic of thought of the populations observed. It is indeed a matter here of staying as close as possible to ethnography while granting oneself the right to weave an anthropology, that is to say, a more general reflection on the human. This is what Hamayon undertakes in her work entitled Jouer (2012) [Why we play] (2016), where she explains that in her fieldwork, which covers the Mongolian and Siberian areas, the vocabulary of play is omnipresent in ritual life. In Siberian shamanism, the term “play” refers more precisely to “mimic” or “imitate,” expressions associated with those of “dance,” “wrestle,” and “sing” (by imitating animals). Moreover, “shaman” and “wrestler” are written with the same word. Hamayon goes even further by suggesting that we should not see the trance as the common denominator of possession and shamanism but should instead only see a theatrical play in shamanism. The bimo I met never explicitly mentioned the idea of playing in the ritual setting. Only two ethnographic textual references refer to it. Among the ritual songs that I collected—either by copying them, photocopying them, or photographing them—one verse compares the shaman to a toy, namely a top, which has to be moved in order to turn and move. Its movement thus depends on an external impulse. It should be noted that the top is a wellknown toy in China. It is animated with a whip or a rolled-up rope which allows its movement to begin and be maintained. From this perspective, the bimo would be played more than it would play. The shamans often present themselves in this way, in the passive voice, as driven by a vocation inherited from the spirits of their lineages and so not as being actors in the primary sense. Indeed, when a man expresses the desire to follow a shamanic initiation, his choice is not considered to be his own; the spirits of his lineage are said to be at the origin of this desire to which a shaman master (his father, his grandfather) must respond by transmitting his texts and his knowledge. A second ethnographic element relates to play: A bimo faces his bookmountain-face which, as mentioned above, could be compared to a maskpersona that evokes a theatrical play (if we retain the secondary meaning

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given to the book, the idea of the mountain being predominant in the discourses). In the Ni shamanic framework, play does not appear to be a central concept at all and the voice of writing and submutances predominate. However, in the understanding of ritual play in the Altaic world, a certain primacy seems to be given to the gesture at the expense of the sound of the voice that accompanies their animation. Hence, how are we to understand the concept of play in shamanism? And does play exclude forms of trance or ecstasy? Does play exclude submutances? It is obvious that a distinction must be made between different shamanic states of relation to the world. Play, while universally shared, cannot be one of the main common denominators to all shamans. What seems to be prevalent among them, however, is their relation to rhythm, music, and movement which are linked to the metacosmic space they create and inhabit. In all cases, a resonance with the world implies a leap into the beyond and a connection with the spirits, of the order of a trance, therefore, in the etymological sense of the term, because a passage between these porous and coextensive worlds is made. Perhaps the movement of the shamans from the Altaic world could be considered presential in Straus’ sense, i.e., that “which arises independently of the conscious strategies of the subject, and which is inseparable from a global experience formulated in terms of intensity of life” (Boissière 2018, 9). Boissière brings precisely this idea into proximity with the play she characterises as follows: One will end up recognizing there the experience of “playing” in what it has of the improbable, of the astonishing, of the infinitely precious and of the disconcerting at the same time. The experience of the play in its primitive form implies not only the motricity in its spontaneity, but a tonality of set which connects to oneself and to what surrounds: one is there, present, tasting, and existing a not-known, a non-reflected knowledge. (ibid.) Among the bimo, movement is not presential in the sense defined above, it is hardly spontaneous in the sense that it is made present by the writing (submutance) that generates it: The bimo must start singing the movements he makes in order to make them effective; the blood-writing is a kind of essential intermediary for vivifying it; singing his manuscripts animates a sensory and submutantial universe that sets him in motion. One thus finds a form of activation by the sign, simultaneously to a form of shift with the body. It is as if something was played elsewhere and in a doubled and consubstantial way, as though before a distorting mirror. Hamayon speaks of a connection, in the electrical sense of the term, in talking about the shaman’s contact, a connection that remains codified and formalised while leaving room for innovation (1990, 150). In another register, but in the same sphere of reflection, Boissière writes that music, through rhythm, puts the

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body under tension and transforms the quality of the relation to the world (2018, 45). In this respect, it is remarkable that a bimo never walks to the rhythm of his chant and his reading in our world: He is seated or crouched, not standing in front of the altar but in the place where he says he moves, he walks, he flows, he rides, and swirls incessantly in a radically different physical position. This accords well with the idea that “[t]he acoustic space is the one that makes possible the animated step, and colours with vitality and lightness the relation to oneself and to the world. Its activity holds to its belonging to the feeling” (ibid., 47). Boissière specifically introduces the concept of tonicity to evoke this tension produced by the music which implies motricity and lived experience (ibid., 48). This tonicity exists among the bimo but can only be observed by the spirits: The shamans stand in front of these, not humans. The body in bimo writing dances, not the shaman on the ritual stage, who does not show any “connection” or “tonicity.” He is above all a psalmodist crossed by submutances and a binding agent of submutances that he disseminates all around. Seen from the outside, he moves very little precisely because everything is being simultaneously played out on another stage. The movement of/in the text is indeed thought in the present time. “Here we are,” “things are happening,” “they are becoming,” it is with these different possible translations of the expression gha that the bimo opens and/or ends each of his chapters. This term implies the activation of the voice and thus of the submutances by the officiant, that is, the beginning or the end of a textual proclamation. In sum, the reading of the word gha “sets the tone” and gives an impulse. It implies the efficacity of the words being spoken. But if the bimo acts, this does not imply a spontaneity that gives free rein to movements. At each reading, the bimo performs identical movements inscribed in his ritual text. He is not, therefore, in a state of “seizure” in Straus’ sense, to whom Boissière refers once again the notion of play: “The being-seized manifests itself in the experience as unexpected, surprising, even foreign” (2018, 11). The bimo knows what he expects: He knows what movements he is going to make. It is only when he ritualises for the first time and thus when he finally gives voice to his texts that he acts spontaneously. Let us recall that his chant is said to come from himself at the end of his apprenticeship, i.e, of the incorporation of the writing-blood and breath of his master. There would thus be a certain form of a state of pathos here in the Strausian sense, of spontaneity in this setting in voice, that starts from the incorporation of writings. For the bimo exposes himself to an unregulated experience (Boissière writes again to clarify and deepen the term). But this action is limited to a very precise moment in case of the bimo, namely, the end of the learning of the writing, and thus at the time of his taking on of the shamanic function, but not in the movements that the Master of Psalmody carries out while singing. The shaman then intones his melodies without improvising. A musicological analysis makes it possible to highlight the great mastery and vocal regularity of these officiants (see Névot 2019a).

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There is thus life in the bimo by virtue of the writing-blood put in voice. And there would be play in Boissière’s sense in this birth of the shamanic voice through writing: “Acoustic space, such would be my hypothesis, belongs to the primary experience of play, insofar as it is alive” (2018, 23). The bimo is in play in this precise sense: “to be in play defines existence in its capacity for opening; and as susceptible to the encounter” (ibid., 175). But the idea of an encounter “implies a being-seized which thwarts all that one could foresee and expect. From the play, one should not expect anything; at the same time the play can do what one does not expect. That is its power […]” (ibid.). Following Straus, one could say that the bimo is “being-seized” by the sound of the writing-blood on the basis of a primordial spontaneity (comparable to the primordial inscription of the water-sound spelled in the cave). In this resides the bimo’s capacity to move. It is precisely in his book-mountain, bookface (book-mask?), that he sings like a bird or flows like the water of a river. He moves to the rhythm of the matrix sounds of water and drunkenness, as described in mythology. Would these chants allow the one who sings them to return to the primordial state of drunkenness and to live this change of state in going out of himself, implying perhaps an original regression, a return to the source (of water) by which and near which the original word and then the first writing were revealed? By this acoustic and scriptural and thus bodily means, would not the bimo follow the submutantial ways of ecstasy and the trance? He is out of himself/the human when he deciphers the face of his book and faces it during the rite. The face of the bimo, the one that belongs to the human world, does not show ecstasy but asceticism, the exercise of reading, studying (the copying of shamanic texts), and the chanting that makes the journey is possible. During his walks in the book and through the book, the bimo expresses his exit from himself as a human (the landscapes he says he travels through refer to real places, to a regional cartography and, at the same time, to places that no one except these shamans is ever likely to travel through). He also expresses his entering into his shamanic self (a form of bodily introspection through the book, which, it must not be forgotten, is related to the blood of the officiant and to study). The bimo is thus inscribed in two concomitant states and the landscape he explores is interior and exterior. Here, ecstasy is conditioned by asceticism, which presupposes the original verbal ecstasy, that primordial belching described in mythology. Both refer to the book, to the manuscript, which bears in it this double face: Mountain and visage. Their setting in movement implies an extensive link between the human-self and the shaman-self, he who sings in front of the face that carries the ritual blood and breath of the shamans of his lineage. 6.5

Graphic Bodies and Manifestations: Yi Perspectives on Submutances

For other shamans from Yunnan (southwestern China) belonging to other branches of the Yi nationality, the “notion of textuality” (Mueggler 2017, 50)

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is also central to their ritual practices. They interact with what Mueggler calls “substances,” but which could probably be seen as submutances, since they are traversed by the movements and transformations that the local shamans make them experience. In his study of the Lolop’o funerals, Mueggler shows to what extent this is also “a world of substances connected by paths travelled by insubstantial beings” (ibid., 46). If the adjective ‘insubstantial” needs to be questioned, we should note that this ethnologist, who refers to Strathern’s concept of “dividuality,” ultimately shows that funeral rites aim to return the forgotten ancestral soul to the animated and undifferentiated “substance” of the world (ibid., 48). This funerary treatment reveals the importance of the body which is, in the Lolop’o context, to be transmuted into an equally organic effigy (ibid., 78), a body that presupposes sociological connections with all the entities of the cosmos (ibid., 262). This ethnography underscores the extent to which different forms of body, which are crucial during funeral rites (goats, rice loaves, corpses), form a whole, each one being analogous to the others (ibid., 133). To become a body, the effigy of the dead must become a whole rather than an assembly of specific parts. It can only borrow this wholeness (this whole) from a living body, in this case that of the shaman (ibid., 284). Through their materials and representations, the dead and the living interact and cooperate; they remain in relation through the matters they share. This is what Alain Arrault shows in a different way, in another ritual framework, through the analysis of Hunan statues. The substitute bodies of deified ancestors should be endowed with viscera and treated in order to heal a living relative through this bodily transfer (2017, 2020). The analysis Mueggler (2022) proposes of divination among the Nasu, another Yi group located in Yunnan, refers to the marking on a bone that establishes the message of the non-humans, the sounds of the cosmos, the “images” that are then translated (copied) into shamanic writing (Né writing) by male ritual specialists called pemo (counterparts of the Nip’a bimo). These are finally vocalised, recited in a ritual language that expresses (transcribes) therefore the language of the cosmos in the human world. Among the Nip’a as well, it seems a form of epiphany of the non-humans, of their bodies as well as of their voices, can be witnessed. This proves possible thanks to the scriptural vector and the different figurations that are not discarded from the vocality and submutances, whether these emanate from the non-humans or from the ritual specialists. The interaction between humans and non-humans finally takes place through different types of figurations and voices. Here writings literally condition their understanding and their “good hearing.” Mueggler introduces a “theory of writing” specific to the Nasu pemo. This allows him to take issue with the “modernist” theories of writing and the “literacy thesis” (promoted in particular by Goody, Havelock, and Ong) that developed through an extension of theories on language. These state that writing aims to represent spoken language. Mueggler challenges the idea of the encoding of semantic sequences by writing—and thus implicitly

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challenges the Saussurian heritage, although he does not mention this filiation. His analysis shows the extent to which writing escapes, so to speak, and cannot be as legible and decipherable as certain theories imply and that the meaning of a writing character could not appear independently of the verse or even of the writing page and the ritual area in which it is inscribed. Indeterminate meaning and nonsense circulate, which is related to the fact that writing draws the bodies and voices of non-humans. This is linked, I would say, with submutances. Mueggler wants to show that the meaning is not necessarily visible. If it does not appear, it is precisely to translate the untranslatable character of certain messages coming from the non-humans. Or if it appears, it is not possible to grasp it word by word or character by character, but instead through knowledge of the graphic network constituted by the parallel structures of the verses and the pages, or between the book and the ritual area. The Né writing is characterised by being at the crossroads between the language and the image. Mueggler develops his thesis by referring to three levels of analysis: Concerning the Né script as such, he emphasises the correspondences established between different characters that are associated on the basis of phonetic, semantic, or indexical similarities. Without using the term “play,” he underscores the existence of a form of play on the forms, which refer to bodies or to parts of bodies which prove to be at the foundation of graphic “series,” in the sense that it is from these that other writing characters are created which henceforth appear as bodies in mutation, materialisations of the bodies of the non-human entities. The Né writing is thus composed of numerous series of unstable “body-like” forms which transform themselves through each text. Different bodies can thus be seen and manifested through writing: The power of Né writing was not limited to encoding and expressing language; it extended to shaping relations among bodies—graphic, sculptural, and enfleshed. […] [T]he force of Né writing did not lie merely in its faculty of representing a sequence of semantic values but in its capacity to manifest a distinctive form of life for humans, ancestors and spirits. (Mueggler 2022, 2) The second level of reflection concerns verse. This ritual writing is also a poetic language. Mueggler bases his analysis on the scapulomancy practiced by the pemo and shows that writing is the copy, in the form of lines, of the marks on the bones mentioned above. The meaning of the verses punctuating the ritual texts, written on the basis of parallel structures, only emerges thanks to the network that they constitute, which implies different possible readings and the importance of contextualising the subject. Mueggler highlights the similarities the writing page as it appears in the pemo ritual books shares with the ritual area. The close relation between the pages of a

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book and the ritual surface is not metaphorical but reflects the fact that they are extensions of each other: All the bodies mentioned in the text literally take shape through the sacrificial flesh, the stones, the branches of the altar, etc. Based on her own ethnography in another Yi branch in southwestern China, Katherine Swancutt (2022) suggests, but in a different way again, “understand[ing] indigenous textuality in this region as a form of life” (Mueggler 2022, 20). It floods the world around it with its vital power, making it far more than a mere manuscript. She describes the activation of the bodies by placing the English term “to manifest,” which Mueggler also uses in his considerations, at the centre of her analysis. She recalls its Latin etymology, manus, which refers to the hand, to the exercise and expression of a force, as well as to writing. This notion is an interesting way of characterising the polysemic concept of bbur, which she translates as “writing” or “that which manifests itself,” an expression whose origin is found in the writings of the bimox of the Nuosu (counterparts of the bimo of the Nip’a and the pemo of the Nasu). It plays a preponderant role in this shamanic society beyond the strictly ritual framework. Other religious specialists, common people, and even spirits, can potentially inscribe this bbur in bodies and things. It is polysemic and therefore also polymorphic. Swancutt explores the different meanings of bbur, which implies the animation of forces and the vivification of all that it permeates. In the ritual framework of scriptural transmission, the greatest power is attributed to ancient manuscripts written with the blood of a bimox or a child (considered pure). The link between writing and blood is not allegorical here, as it is in the case of Ni writing (although the bimo of the Nip’a also refer to the past existence of manuscripts written with the blood of the officiating scriptor and/or sacrificial animals). The writing of the bimox is supposed to make the powers of the spirits manifest and made them present. The female undertaking of invigorating and protective embroidery, as well as tattoos (linked to death and post-mortem life, as well as to the identity of Nuosu women), implies in another way the manifestation of the bbur, which can also take place in the body of a statue representing a mythical hero, or impregnate livestock in order to enable them to be trained (for example, to pull ploughs) and to manifest the animacy and potency of the mountain spirit. This leads me to wonder, extrapolating from Swancutt’s words and placing myself on the side of the bimox who remain, after all, the original “manipulators” of the bbur, if the manifestation of all things does not suppose, among the Nuosu, that writing is present to give them life and body, so as to integrate them fully into the world of humans, whose submutances they would then share through these representations which interact between the visible and the invisible, writing being at their interface as an “in-between.” These diverse Yunnanese shamanic writings imply movement, touch, and vocality that all together bring about a circulation of vivifying energies and

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submutances between humans and non-humans, which “co-generate,” so to speak, into “graphic bodies” (Mueggler 2022, 6). 6.6

Conclusion: Submutances and Metacosmologic Relationism

Bimo submutantial phenomena are different from those of pemo and bimox, but in some respects comparable. They are also comparable to Daoist shamanism. The bimo shamans do not say they follow the five wuxing agents but more particularly follow the course of water. This specific agent (“water” and “go” are said and written the same way in their secret language-writing) is fundamental both in mythology and in their supramundane paths. Just as in so-called Daoist China, what predominates is the shamanic action intimately connected with the actions of the agents of the cosmos. The se that the Masters of Psalmody put into relation in its multiple forms weaves the framework that allows the ethnologist to appropriately inquire into sacrifice, sacrificial relationalism, and hence anthropological theory insofar as it is (trans-)substance, i.e., the substratum from which relations are deployed through sacrifice. With regard to these ethnographic data, it is more specifically a question of taking into consideration the “matter” of the ritual structure. This is why it seems preferable not to place this structure at the centre of the subject—hence the idea of situating oneself beyond it—but to take what constitutes the relation (its “sub-mutance”) as the object of analysis—and therefore to try to perceive its underlying nature—thus responding to the representations specific to the Masters of Psalmody. In the eyes of these shamans, the se is what holds the world together—in the case of the bimox, it is the bbur. It is “shared” (it sustains the relations of human beings with the spirits, it is what ensures the universal order) and, moreover, it is what belongs to the shaman himself. Embodied and incarnating—and in this sense more “concretely material” than the Merleau-Pontian perspective on the body (see Chapter 2)—proper to the subject and instituting the relation to the world, it holds the whole and the parts in itself. To be more specific: the relation between unity and plurality that the se sets in motion cannot be reduced to Descola’s duality of interiority/physicality. The different aspects at stake here, which we must distinguish for the sake of clarity but which cannot refer to realities that are unrelated for local shamans—blood (referring to the lineage), writing (with a largely common corpus but which can vary in turn according to the lineage), trans-corporation (taking place through different mediations specific to shamanic learning and to the sacrificial device)—exclude the possibility of proceeding with a combinatorial process based on a binary principle. However and contrary to what the use of the Merleau-Pontian expression “trans-substantiation” might suggest, the trans-substantial perspective on the se is not based on a unitary principle (and therefore obviously does not refer to the Judeo-Christian monotheism of which Merleau-Pontian philosophy undoubtedly bears traces). Hence the importance of using instead the expression “submutance.” The Masters of Psalmody’s “metaphysics,” or rather, their

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“metacosmology,” does not fit into the simple duality of thought/corporality. I have tried to show that other Chinese shamans reflect this dynamic of matter. “Integrating flesh into relation” establishes the relation between unity and difference in a different way than in the Western ontological tradition. In the mythology of the bimo, ingestion (drinking) precedes expression (the sounds), which only become writing after their inscription in the cave and then their excription outside the matrix. In the ritual activity, the singing of the writing takes precedence, it allows the bimo to move. In the transmission from master to disciple, the copying of the writing and the learning precede any giving voice and therefore any ritual activity announcing the first escapades of the bimo in the other world. Asceticism, ecstasy, and trance are interrelated in these shamanic processes, which also highlights the fact that the bimo is indisputably the master of the bi: he is continuously at the interface between song and dance, sound, and movement. The bi gathers in itself the gesture, the sound and the blood-writing. The writing of the bimo reveals its chant (transmission) and then the metacosmic landscapes and the spirits without ever revealing anything to the uninitiated. The bimo is a transcriber of a primordial sound in mythology, a writer/copier and a reader/singer in practice. He is a submutance as well as a submutantial transmitter. Thanks to other ethnographic approaches that help to put into perspective some ongoing reflections on play among Yunnanese shamans, we can see that chanting, writing, and movement could be perceived as the fundamental modes of shamanic interactions. What is woven from them is an opening to the world and a setting in relation between different entities and bodies located in the acoustic and metacosmic space created by the shaman who fills it with movement. The bimo is in a tension (tonicity?), in a body-to-body and in a face-toface with his book of writing, blood and sound, book-mountain, book-face. Is it a place, a landscape in mirror of itself? It is the utterance of the invisible world. It is space and spacing, submutance and submutantiating at the same time, a distance from oneself to oneself that is essential to touching the world: humans and the divine. He has a written bodily extension, the book, which contains his shamanic “I” while remaining a human, social “I,” capable by reflexivity of speaking about the action of the bimo. These two bodies that come to life by turning the pages with one hand and shaking a bell with the other, these two bodies that grasp each other with the two hands they share, they touch the visible (human) and invisible (spirit) worlds. For Nancy, the body is the ontological seat that unfolds through writing because writing is in essence what allows one to touch the world: “but what must be said is that this—touching on the body, touching the body, finally touching—happens all the time in writing” (Nancy 2000, 13). In the Yunnanese cultic frameworks that I have tried to present and analyse here, writing is the touch, the medium of the relation to the world, the living force of the body that excretes itself. It is what, the material as well

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as the spiritual, the bimo (I may also add the pemo and the bimox) deploys in the world in order to interact with the spirits. To write here is not so much to signify as to touch and to vivify: to touch and vivify the spirits, the humans, the space of submutantial interaction between worlds. The bimo opens up a psalmodic space (through a chant based on writings), sets itself in motion and dialogues with the spirits. It is through this writing seen as a submutance and the touching in Nancy’s sense it implies that a circulation of energies that are life-giving for the shaman’s community takes place. And there can be no doubt that these shamanic written voices beyond our world are intentionally poetic. The movement of the bimo could not be enacted nor translated into our linguistic banalities: It is exceptional. We can recall here what Anne Boissière writes about Baldine Saint Girons (2008) on the peace of the evening: In these escapes, the pathic holding of feeling is manifested at its most vivid, in connection with the space in its resonant quality. It takes the words of a poet to express the atmosphere of the peace of the evening, at dusk. […] The experience for that has something cosmic: the felt opening is an opening to the world, as if the objects as objects were neutralized, leaving place to another relation. (Boissière 2018, 51) The bimo are sensitive to the resonance of the cosmos: Claiming to be chosen by the spirits, they put humans in relation to the supramundane through the prism of their blood-writing thrown onto the paper from out of the bodily-self that is essential to the mediation they renew by the ritual chant. It is in this that these beings-seized prove to be so seizing. Notes 1 This chapter is the result of a fusion of recent reflections discussed in Névot (2021 and 2022), articles that I here translate and revise to focusing on the submutual theme. 2 Ni is the endoethnonym of the population at issue and se means “writing” as well as “blood.” This homographic character is linked to pluri-semantic meanings that I will discuss later. 3 “Metaphysics” is to be taken in its literal sense, that is to say “beyond physical nature,” whose limits I recognise as regards a notion inscribed in a register of Greco-centric thought. This expression should be understood here in the light of the rehabilitation of metaphysics promoted by Viveiros de Castro who takes a radical position on this. As seen in Chapter 4, he claims anthropology should become a metaphysics, i.e., fully adopt the perspective of the Other through the decolonisation of its thought and concepts. Anthropologists should thus translate the metaphysics of “primitive societies” through their deconstructed and depresupposed intellectual engagement and integrate them into their reflexivity thus constituted and elaborated in contact with the Other. Rather than this notion of “metaphysics” and in reference to recent anthropological debates, I prefer the term “metacosmology,” which is less dependent on Western representations of

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6

7 8 9 10 11 12

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the world. It was introduced by Vandermeersch (2013) (see foreward) and it echoes the cultic framework I am dealing with here, wherein divination and cosmological representations predominate. For more details on these subjects, see Névot (2019a). The Nip’a are segmented in the sense that they live in villages comparable to “small” worlds: Each village has its own foundation and mythological stories, its chieftaincy, its scriptural and shamanic practices. A bimo is also strongly attached to the village in which he was born, officiating exclusively within it. The Chinese government’s project, on the other hand, is to create a bimo community by de-segmenting their practices. The shamans become the actors in a religious organisation totally controlled by the Chinese central power. From now on, they have to follow a common apprenticeship, share the same script, sing, and ritualise in the same way, and respect the orthographic rules established by this same administrative body, notably the graphic distinction between “blood” and “script.” See Névot (2019a). For more details, see Névot 2013 and 2019a. I develop further this topic in Masters of Psalmody ( 2019a) as well as in “Trembling Voices Echo. Yi Shamanistic and Mediumnistic Speech” ( 2019b). The cave is a recurrent element in Ni mythology; here it refers to the matrix and the feminine part of the bimo that was previously mentioned. The bimo do not drink during the ritual action. Their blood-writing chant involves a change of state, as I will show. These shamans use this scriptural submutance alone to travel through the cosmos. This title obviously alludes to Roberte Hamayon’s article ( 1995) entitled “Pour en finir avec la ‘trance’ et l’‘extase’ dans l’étude du chamanisme” [“In order to finish with trance and ecstasy in the study of shamanism”]. Trance refers to a passage towards a beyond of the human world, and ecstasy to a “beyond oneself.”

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bard. A Buryat example of “decoupling” between form, meaning and function]. Cahiers de musiques traditionnelles 19: 21–35. Hamayon R. (2012) Jouer. Étude anthropologique à partir d’exemples sibériens [Playing. An anthropological study based on Siberian examples]. Paris: La Découverte. Hamayon R. (2016) Why we play. An anthropological Study. Trans. Simon D. Chicago: HAU Books. (de) Heusch L. (2006). La transe et ses entours. La sorcellerie, l’amour fou, saint Jean de la Croix, etc. [Trance and its surroundings. Witchcraft, mad love, St John of the Cross, etc.]. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe. Lloyd G. (2015) Analogical Investigations. Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauss M. (1936) Les techniques du corps [Body techniques]. Journal de Psychologie 32 (3–4), 271–293. Mueggler E. (2011) The Paper Road. Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mueggler E. (2017) Songs for Dead Parents. Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mueggler E. (2022) Divination and the scapular theory of writing in north Yunnan: graph, verse, page. In Névot A. (ed.), Figurations chamaniques. Écritures, dessins et broderies de Haute Asie [Shamanic figures. Writings, drawings and embroideries of High Asia], Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et sibériennes (EMSCAT) 53. DOI: 10.4000/emscat.5992. Nancy J.-L. (2000). Corpus. Paris: Éditions Métailié. Névot A. (2013) Versets chamaniques. Le Livre du sacrifice à la terre (textes rituels du Yunnan, Chine) [Shamanic verses. The Book of Sacrifice to the Earth (ritual texts from Yunnan, China)]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Névot A. (2019a) Masters of Psalmody. Scriptural Shamanism in Southwestern China. Boston and Leiden: Brill. Névot A. (2019b) Trembling Voices Echo. Yi Shamanistic and Mediumnistic Speech. In Yelle R., Lehrich C. and Handman C. (eds.), Language and Religion. Oxford: De Gruyter Mouton, 114–136. Névot A. (2021) Danser par la voix de l’écriture. À propos des chamanes scripteurs des Yi-Sani [Dancing through the voice of writing. About the scriptors shamans of the Yi-Sani]. In Allio F. and David B. (eds.), The influence of Roberte Hamayon on Religious Studies in the Chinese World. Cahiers d’Extrême Asie n°30. Paris: EFEO, 113–141. Névot A. (2022) Introduction. Comparatisme en esquisse [Introduction. Comparatism in outline]. In Névot A. (ed.), Figurations chamaniques. Écritures, dessins et broderies de Haute Asie [Shamanic figures. Writings, drawings and embroideries of High Asia], Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et sibériennes (EMSCAT) 53. DOI: 10.4000/emscat.5613. Patočka J. (1995). Papiers phénoménologiques [Phenomelogical Papers]. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Saint Girons B. (2008) L’acte esthétique: cinq réels, cinq risques de se perdre [The aesthetic act: five realities, five risks of getting lost]. Paris: Klincksieck, 2008. Schipper K. [1982] (1997) Le corps taoïste [The Taoist Body]. Paris: Fayard.

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Severi C. (2007) Le principe de la chimère. Une anthropologie de la mémoire [The chimera principle. An anthropology of memory]. Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm-Musée du quai Branly. Straus E. ([1935] 1989) Du sens des sens. Contribution à l’étude des fondements de la psychologie [On the Sense of the Senses: A Contribution to the Foundation of Psychology/VomSinn der Sinne: ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie]. Trans. Thinès G. and Legrand J._P. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Swancutt K. (2022) Manifesting the invisible. Writing, piercing, shaping, and taming potency in Southwest China. In Névot A. (ed.), Figurations chamaniques. Écritures, dessins et broderies de Haute Asie [Shamanic figures. Writings, drawings and embroideries of High Asia], Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et sibériennes (EMSCAT) 53. DOI: 10.4000/emscat.5813. Vandermeersch L. (2013) Les deux raisons de la pensée chinoise. Divination et idéographie [The two reasons of Chinese thought. Divination and ideography]. Paris: NRF, Gallimard. Vial P. (1909) Dictionnaire français-lolo. Dialecte Gni tribu située dans les souspréfectures de Loú nân tcheou, Lou leâng tcheou et Koùang-si tcheou, province du Yunnan [French-Lolo dictionary. Gni dialect tribe located in the sub-prefectures of Loú nân tcheou, Lou leâng tcheou and Koùang-si tcheou, Yunnan province]. Hong Kong: Imprimerie de la Société des Missions Étrangères. Yi Han jianming cidian
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Conclusion to Part III

I have attempted to decentralise, that is, to analyse our conceptuality by taking a step back from other theoretical anchors, in this case Chinese, and to do so by taking into account, on the one hand, a process of “decolonisation of thought” initiated in China itself by anthropology through relationalism, and, on the other hand, an analytical proposal about Chinese anthropology that is free of cosmopolitical presuppositions and no longer refers to an abstract relationalism but to the idea of body-intentionality that implies submutantial processes. After recalling the close relation established between the Chinese central power (imperial, republican, and then communist) and a form of ethnology developed since the foundations of the Empire, it became clear that relationalist ethnology is today caught in the net of decentring on the Chinese side. Wang Mingming’s relationist anthropology sets up a particular kind of universalism which implicitly refers to a “hegemonic” reversal, i.e., to a new colonisation of thought, one that no longer proceeds from the West but from the East, i.e., from China, which plans to lay the foundations for a relationist thinking in terms of its own concepts (as relation in the sense of guanxi) that are supposed to be applied everywhere. More precisely, the “anthropology of civilisation(s)” invites us to reconsider Western dichotomies in the light of Chinese conceptual schemes that are not exclusive but inclusive: Reciprocity—and no longer conflict—is supposed to predominate. Wang thus anchors his theory in a structural comparatism in which “fusional” and “hierarchical” relationalism predominates over any other concept. His deconstructivist approach, which promotes the indigenisation/Sinicisation of the discipline, takes the opposite view of Euro-American anthropology and proposes decentrings in relation to a particular cosmology that inevitably resonates, in the Chinese context, with politics and an exacerbated nationalism. Although Wang evokes the idea of “an organic materialism” and incessantly refers to processes, correlativity, and (dif)fusion, the body, which is so essential to the metacosmology developed in this part of the world, appears more erased than ever in this project that is ultimately more sociological (“supranational”) than anthropological. It is dissolved into a politically oriented reflection. DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-13

Conclusion to Part III 241 In order to give the body back its full place by focusing on some Chinese submutantial processes, I had to get rid of the latent Confucianism as well as structuralism or functionalism, and to take a few steps away from the universalist theories discussed so far. I focused on shamanic practices in which the body and the cosmos are preponderant and connected through submutances. My aim was to elucidate shamanic movements as well as the “substances” that give them their impulse. Taking a kind of holistic perspective on the bimo body as connected to “graphic bodies,” I tried to take the shaman’s point of view to explain, as far as possible, the openness of his body onto different worlds and species and the interactions it engenders as far as it is initiated and crossed by submutances. This approach commits to “fully” considering the body that appears inscribed under various aspects in different arrangements and movements, in continuous flows and in an inter-penetration with all the elements of the cosmos. Stripped of its Western epistemic anchorage, the body reappropriates its essences, its humours, its so-called “substances,” its dynamics, and its forces. It is also fully connected to writings that support transformations and flows of life. It (re)becomes a submutantial element among others. It is therefore not so much a question of developing an anthropology of the body as of promoting a reflection on the Chinese bodies in order to question their multiple, intersubjective, and substantive dimensions through a focus on Yunnanese shamanic bodies in particular. In short, it is a matter of questioning the imaginary of the Chinese body in a dimension less known than that of the “classical texts.” By taking into consideration the living words and writings of the bimo, pemo, and bimox, writing, flesh, blood, breath, forces, etc. are rehabilitated since these notions are preponderant in the relationist discourses analysed. Finally, Chinese writings, submutances, and bodies are intertwined, regardless of whether they come from scholars’ or shamans’ imaginaries. The writings grounded in shamanic perspectives are breaths of life and abound in submutances. They are at the origin of their proliferation and their tranvestibility, their inscription and excription in all things of the universe. The bodies, dividual and anthropological as well as a-anthropological, are from then on in resonance and in submutantial sharing.

Conclusion “What the body can do”

I began writing this book by trying to consider the materiality of the body only to find that the thought of materiality invariably moved me into other domains. I tried to discipline myself to stay on the subject, but found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought. Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies “are.” I kept losing track of the subject. I proved resistant to discipline. Inevitably, I began to consider that perhaps this resistance to fixing the subject was essential to the matter at hand. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993, ix)

The key word in this book is decentring. It is declined in two main directions. First, it concerns the areal decentring of theoretical anthropology, which is still very much rooted in the Amerindian field among anthropologists of a structuralist heritage. It then refers to the conceptual and systematic decentring of all theoretical content by questioning the tradition in which the anthropology at stake is rooted. From this perspective, I have suggested that the conceptual couple substance-relation be substituted for nature-culture dualism as a subject of discussion and brought to the forefront of anthropological debates. This new reflexive axis echoes a current philosophical problematic concerning the questioning of relationism and substance. The new realisms and phenomenology, the thinkers of ontogenesis who question the relation to being (Renaud Barbaras and Grégori Jean in particular) or those who invite us to glimpse the relation through its materiality (Vishnu Spaak, István Fazakas, for example) are all associated with this. This book is in fact a call for dialogue between philosophers and ethnologists. Indeed, another point, and constitutive of the previous ones, is central to this theoretical attempt: underscoring the importance of developing, as a “Western” ethnologist, a philosophical awareness in order to better grasp what anthropology undertakes. For the decentring advocated can only take place if one is aware of the conceptual and methodological unconsciousness DOI: 10.4324/9781003363699-14

Conclusion 243 that governs us and that must therefore be addressed head on. This is a field of analysis of epistemic schemes parallel to ethnographic fields and it is essential to carry this out in order not to remain satisfied with a conceptual superficiality. By using the notions of substance and relation, we are drawing upon a thousand-year-old philosophical history without necessarily knowing what underlies these terms and what they imply in our analytical schemes. This is why I have chosen to question the relationisms of Descola, Viveiros de Castro, and Wang, who pose as the champions of decentring by combining philosophies and ethnologies in their works. My aim was to examine in detail how each of them describes and carries out this decentring. What does this act of ex-centricity mean not only for us, inscribed in the European heritage, but also for the other? How does the latter fit into this decolonisation which presupposes knowledge of our European concepts? These were the initial questions. As one who sees from the point of view of the other, Bhargava is able to give a clear account of the paradoxical situation in which we find ourselves: We must reckon with the fact that western people, including those who have disassociated themselves from colonialism, continue to function with little knowledge of the nonwestern world. This is not the case with nonwestern intellectuals. Indeed, it is impossible for them to function as intellectuals without a great deal of knowledge about western intellectual traditions. Here I do not mean merely that there are inequities of empirical knowledge of each other. I have in mind something deeper. The very assumptions and presuppositions underlying our enquiries into our own world are shot through with categories derived from western experience. […] In short, the deep problem today for the sufferers of epistemic injustice is that western categories both have an undeniable universal potential and are fully intermingled with the specificity of western practices; worse, they possess a deep imprint of western domination and hegemony. We can neither ignore western ideas nor fully show how they can be rescued from the pernicious effects of their own imperial imprint. To nonwestern people, western thought is both recognizably their own and alien. (Bhargava 2013, 416) However, “Western thought” cannot be seen as unitary, stable, and impervious to exogenous thoughts. In anthropology alone, we have seen that structuralism owed a great deal to Amerindian thought; similarly, the notion of “dividuality” was introduced from India and then Melanesia; the notion of “submutance,” for its part, is rooted in China. These Western reflexive proposals, impregnated with the other, obviously find echoes in other geographical areas, and even in other historical periods, where they are capable of being intertwined with different interpretative possibilities. It is only in such a ferment that humanity can be conceived. Its “thought”

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seems far too rich to be seen in the light of a single theoretical system to the exclusion of all others. By the specificity of its approach, anthropology forces us to explore new perspectives, to deconstruct the constructed, to rethink thought, to reinterrogate what was taken for granted and to avoid resignation to the comfort of a theoretical system that would risk subjecting us to conceptual immobilism. Each ethnologist lays the foundations of this modest revolution in the intimacy of his/ her ethnographic field and then in the academic circle where he/she tries to understand the logic of the thought in the symbolic system he/she has observed. These two parallel fields of expertise are constitutive of any theoretical project in anthropology, which is inexorably caught up in a doubly penetrating reflexive vortex. For it acts both where the ethnologist has thrown his/her bags, on a territory more or less distant from his/her original place of life, and in the place where he/she elaborates his/her activities as a “reflector” of ethnographic data on an even more fundamental level. A double movement, therefore, a double intrusion into two symbolic systems of which he/she is the point of union, that continually exposes him/ her to “logical scandals” to use Descola’s expression, and should therefore encourage him/her to take bifurcations fully into consideration in order to open up new conceptual horizons. It appears that the conceptual couple substance-relation has been broken down by ethnography. By moving from a properly philosophical, and therefore European, use to the anthropological sphere in order to translate other thoughts, it has lost its original basis and has metamorphosed, giving rise to both confusion and semantic deviations. These conceptual shifts “from one genre to another” (I refer again to the Aristotelian expression metabasis eis allo genos with which I began this book) that can be observed not only in Chinese (my main concern in the present book) but also in Indian and Melanesian ethnographies (discussed in the introduction) do not so much express errors of method or problems of reasoning on the part of anthropologists as rather epistemic deviations and jolts caused by the encounter, through these concepts, of different symbolic systems. They are comparable to the melodic “slap” that Michaël Levinas speaks of in relation to Beethoven’s first sonata (France Culture broadcast on April 9, 2021); these deviations from the previous register allow the rupture that launches a new process to be seen. Finally, the translations of logics of thought outside the European field based on these concepts of “substance” and “relation” reveal both the limits of the latter and the need to rethink them beyond the symbolic institution in which they were born. Hence, it could be said that the conceptual bifurcation reflects the ethnographic bifurcation. As such, this should also be an object of study for anthropology. It is clear that the concept has a life beyond us and follows its course in language beyond our theoretical sketches. It is interfered in discourses that project it into the unconscious and peddle it into new spheres of thought. Unfixable, inapprehensible, it is constantly in rebound, like a ball constantly inflated with

Conclusion 245 a generative air that allows it to pass from one sphere of thought to another, in an inexhaustible way, enriching itself in the course of its journey. These semantic rebounds reveal that the concept contorts itself without our knowledge and takes on new forms without fitting into the boxes we usually assign it to. Free from any external interference, it carries within itself configurations of meaning that we must analyse in order to grasp its life course, which reveals encounters, interferences, and breaks in trajectories. In order to compensate for the unsuitability of the concepts of substance and relation in certain ethnographic contexts, I have therefore proposed the introduction of an anthropology of submutance that invites us to reassess the analysis of corporeality. In the anthropological theories of the structuralist tradition, I have emphasised that the body is an abstract concept, at the service of the theory: The body in the structural sense of the term is central in the relationalist theories of Descola and Viveiros de Castro, whereas it is completely expunged from the discussion by Wang. In all cases, the body of indigenous conceptions is erased. In the submutantial approach, on the contrary, the body becomes again a subject of analysis by being “fully” reinvested; it interrogates the question of the feminine both in the academic field and in the ethnographic data. Indeed the women ethnographers, ethnologists, and anthropologists who were the very first to introduce questions on gender in the 1970s, developed questions on this theme, evoking the essences, humours, and bodily substances that their informants spoke of into the relations they observed and analysed, and thus risked being accused of being essentialism (as happened to Héritier). However, as Malabou reminds us, eidos refers to a movement for the Greeks, “the dynamics of an entry into presence or an appearance” (2020, 73). In other words, essentialism is quite contrary to the idea of any kind of fixity. The word, which is inadequate when used to criticise these women pioneers of feminist anthropology, is a paradoxically appropriate characterisation of their approach to substances in movement, to essences characterised by a certain plasticity, as indicating the multiple and dynamic nature of the body. It is remarkable that this notion of essence has been frozen over time, even though it originally referred to a metamorphosis… a metamorphosis that is being redeployed precisely by the feminine side of anthropology. In the end, why have so many anthropological theories fixated on the body, even though it is moved into the background? Is it because, in order to erase it, it still needs to be thought (!)? Seen from China, it is the intentionality of the “body with organs” that needs to be fully questioned, all the more so because it disappears in Chinese relationalist anthropology. For we need to see the flour as well as the mill. This metaphor refers to Schelling’s criticism of Fichte and Hegel: “One does not demand the flour, but is satisfied with the mere ticking of the mill” (Schelling [1858] 1970, 53). Schelling was criticising the mechanistic, formal, Kantian-inspired philosophy, although Kant himself had argued that his transcendental (relational)

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philosophy is not pure formalism (like formal logic), but that the transcendental constitutes a kind of content that is precisely the relation. According to the relationism at issue in China, the relation is not necessarily transcendental, abstract, and stripped of all materiality: The relation as content, that is, but also as a container that cannot be separated from another problematic—precisely that of the body, to which I must return one last time. Ethnographies invite us not to a decision about a primary definition of the body, but to apprehend it from a multiplicity of points of view, as if the body were the vector of bifurcations par excellence through which the human being could not submit to a homogeneity of thought. Something always escapes, as Baptandier points out, referring to the bodies of Chinese perception: “Why then do we have this feeling that we never really talk about the human body, that it appears rather as the support of more vast entities, which go beyond it?” (2017, 14). The body is also central in the philosophical field but continually escapes it too: witness Spinoza’s questioning (discussed in the chapter devoted to Viveiros de Castro and given as a title to the present conclusion), and Butler’s revelations (see the excerpt placed at the start of this conclusion) concerning the difficulties she encountered in dealing with it. At a distance of more than three hundred years, whether the theme is raised by a man or a woman, inscribed in different systems of thought and theoretical projects, whether the body slips from Aristotelian “substance” to an all-powerful Spinozist God-substance to Butler’s “materiality” borne by a reflection on gender, passing through Strathern’s reflection on the Melanesian “personhood,” the body is not so easily identified. And it would seem that this elusiveness is inscribed in its very essence … or submutance. The “micro-philosophies” of the body accessible through ethnology enrich reflection on the subject, hence the necessity for collaboration between different approaches. Strathern, who has reflected on gender as relationality, could therefore draw upon Butler’s reflections in her Before and After Gender. Cross-readings of specialists from the Melanesian, Indian, and Chinese worlds reveal more precisely that the body is “beyond its own borders”; it consequently proves, as Butler experienced, resistant to any fixity. Relational and material at the same time, it transcends the simple apprehension of the “individual” in order to orient itself towards a beyond, “dividual.” And if we add what underlies this movement of the body to these relationist perspectives from Oceania and Asia, if we combine sub-stare with relationism, it is submutantialism that is fully in question. A close examination of the use of the terms “substance” and “relation” throughout ethnography reveals the importance of considering them, in certain symbolic frameworks, one within the other and one through the other, in a dialectical chiasm, in order to substitute the concept of submutance. If the latter is applicable to different ethnographies, I have chosen to introduce it here from different Chinese perspectives. My aim here was

Conclusion 247 also to make other voices heard in theoretical anthropology. There is no need to express them through our own system of notation, no need to put them in tune with our thinking. These new sounds can be heard in their own musicality, carrying us to other horizons. It is this “exoticism,” and it alone, that must be promoted. Finally, this book promotes a more hermeneutic anthropology: that is, a tradition of interpretation that reveals the meaning of actions and discourses by social actors, but also the meaning as it is treated by anthropologists themselves. It is therefore a question of looking at the narratives of anthropology and of questioning the categories and the concepts introduced by anthropologists insofar as they are taken from a specific culture and society as well as those they observe and question. Because of the double movement that drives such an anthropology, one must enter into the categories of the ethnographed as well as in those of the ethnographers in order to have a complete account of the anthropological phenomenon that one seeks to apprehend. Bibliography Baptandier B. (2017) Introduction. In Baptandier B. (ed.), Le battement de la vie. Le corps naturel et ses représentations en Chine [The Beat of Life. The Natural Body and Its Representations in China]. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 9–36. Bhargava R. (2013) Overcoming the Epistemic Injustice of Colonialism. Global Policy 4 (4): 413–417. Butler J. (1993) Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge. Malabou C. (2020) Le plaisir effacé. Clitoris et pensée [The erased pleasure. Clitoris and thought]. Paris: Éditions Payot et Rivages. (von) Schelling F. W. [1858] (1970) Schellings Werke [Schellings Work]. Ergänzungsband, vol. 6, Philosophie der Offenbarung. PU: C.H. Beck. Strathern M. (2016) Before and After Gender. Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life (Introduction by Franklin S., Afterword by Butler J.). Chicago: Hau Books.

Index

Amazonia 20, 81, 82, 83, 96–97, 133–153, 156, 168 Amerindian(ist)s xii, xvi, 1, 14, 15, 21, 29n12, 30n15, 31n27, 54, 81, 83, 84, 96, 134–162, 163n10, n11, n12, n13, 167, 168, 188, 242, 243 Analogism 5, 24, 28, 94, 98–100, 107, 110–112, 128n10, 148, 210 Animal(s), animality 7, 11, 28, 81, 97, 135–137, 142, 153, 155, 157–160, 163n4, 163n14, 186, 215–217, 226, 227, 233 Animism 81, 82, 97–102, 107, 134–136, 167 Aristotle 7, 11, 22, 24, 39–46, 57n2, 88, 133 Baptandier (Brigitte) 114, 121, 124, 125, 179, 246 Barbarian 117, 174, 180–183, 185, 187, 194, 196, 197, 204n31 Being (to on, ousia, Dasein) xxin2, 5, 11, 29n8, 40, 43, 46, 65, 95, 120, 128n13, 139, 229 Bergson (Henri) xvi, 24, 68, 79, 148 Bhargava (Rajeev) xii, 3, 10, 27, 173, 201, 243 Bifurcation x, xii, xv, 14, 19, 20, 21, 25, 28, 82, 83, 95, 127, 244, 246 Bimo (Ni ritualist) vii, 28, 32n33, 126, 129n22, 210–236, 237n5, n6, n9, n10, 241 Bimox (Nuosu ritualist) 28, 233, 234, 236, 241 Biology, biologist 52, 76, 79, 187 Blood xvi, 7, 11, 12, 39, 116, 117, 120, 123–125, 135, 153, 157,

209–236, 236n2, 237n6, n10, 241 Boas (Franz) 53–54, 177, 226 Body i, ix, x, xi, xiv, xv, xvi, xxiin4, n8, 2, 7, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29n14, 30n24, 43, 63, 67–80, 93, 94, 95, 100, 106, 108, 111–119, 126, 128n12, n13, n14, 167, 168, 169, 173, 185, 189, 190, 209–235, 237n6, 240–246; Body-intentionality 26, 74; Chapter 3 94, 95, 111, 125, 126; Daoist body 120–125, 129n21; Body-Sign 26, 74; Chapter 4; Living body (Leib) 68, 106, 128n13, 231 Boissière (Anne) 212, 218, 219, 225–230, 236, 237 Butler (Judith) 242, 246 Cannibalism 4, 27, 81, 134, 148–161 Carsten (Janet) 11, 13, 14, 16, 29n11, 75, 79, 144 Cassirer (Ernst) xvi, 26, 31n24, 50, 57n7, 66, 75–79, 84n4, n5 Chant(ing) (voicing) 3, 211–220, 224–226, 229, 230, 235, 236, 237n10 Cheng (Anne) x, xxin3, 31n28, 115, 117, 175, 180, 188, 190 Cheng (François) 119 Chiasm, chiasmus x, xi, xvi, xix, 4, 14, 19, 24, 30n21, 69, 73, 74, 139, 141, 145, 167, 218, 220, 246 China xv–xvi, 16, 21–22, 24–28, 28n3, 29n14, 30n23, 31n27, n28, n31, 57n4, 96, 102, 110–125, 127,

Index 128n7, n13, 146–147, 162, 163n12, n15; Chapters 5 and 6 240, 243, 245, 246 Chinese thought(s) xxiin8, 24, 31n28, 85n9, 110, 114, 115, 116, 129n17, n20, 146, 147, 188, 209 Civilisation (cf. also wenming) 3, 15, 17, 27, 30n23, 31n28, 47, 49, 112, 115, 175, 178, 179, 183, 189–201, 204n30, n31, 209, 210, 240 Cognitive psychology xxiiin10, 54, 63, 74, 80, 81, 94, 95, 109, 133 Cognitivism xi, xii, xiii, xxiin10, xxiiin10, 5, 26, 39, 40, 56, 62, 80, 81, 82, 88, 94, 96, 109, 128n3, 167, 169 Consciousness xxviii, 23, 48, 51, 54, 62, 64, 66, 69, 71, 77, 95, 102, 104, 105, 138, 192 Cosmology(ies) viii, xvii, xviii, xxin2, 22, 23, 27, 28, 31, 74, 80, 93, 94, 98, 102, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 128n10, 129n17, 134, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145, 154, 162, 162n2, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 188, 189, 194, 196, 198, 200, 201, 202, 202n5, 203n9, n15, 211, 212, 234, 235, 236n3, 237n3, 240 Dance 32, 124, 151, 154, 156, 181, 212, 217, 218, 219, 226, 227, 229, 235 Dao (Daoism) 26, 28, 94, 119–126, 129n21, 210, 214, 216, 234 Decentring i, vii, ix, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, 3, 14, 15, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 68, 83, 109, 113, 173, 174, 176, 178, 200, 201, 202, 210, 240, 242, 243 Decolonisation (epistemical) ix, xi, 5, 14, 146, 161, 162, 173, 201, 202, 236, 240, 243 Deleuze (Gilles) xiii, xvi, 1, 2, 14, 24, 26, 30n19, 48, 63, 80, 83, 84, 93, 101, 109, 127, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149, 150, 153, 161, 162 Desanti (Toussaint) xx Descartes (René) 26, 39, 42, 43 Descola (Philippe) i, ix, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xxi, xxiin9, n10, xxiiin19, 2, 4, 5,

249

13, 18, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29n13, 30n20, 53, 54, 57n9, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72–85, 88; Chapter 3 133, 134, 135, 143, 147, 148, 153, 162n3, 167, 168, 173, 201, 209, 210, 234, 243, 244, 245 Descombes (Vincent) 8, 23 Dividuality xvii, 7, 13, 19, 22, 29n11, 95, 127, 189, 231, 241, 243, 246 Dongba 224, 225 Durkheim (Emile) 12, 13, 17, 49, 51, 52, 63, 78, 191 East(ern) 176, 177, 178, 183, 196, 197, 201, 202, 240 Ecstasy (ritual) 119, 223, 226, 227, 228, 230, 235, 237n11 Egology, cf. transcendental subject Episteme, epistemology vii, xi, xii, xv, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 28, 46, 50, 57n11, 79, 81, 83, 88, 104, 105, 109, 113, 134, 137, 140, 142, 145, 146, 153, 162, 176, 177, 195, 210, 227, 241, 243, 244 Eurocentrism ix, 74, 136, 182, 199 Exteriority 5, 26, 94, 96, 106, 112, 126, 140, 142, 160, 168, 185, 186, 189, 210, 223, 230 Fei (Xiaotong) 174, 188, 192, 201, 204n25, n32 Feuchtwang (Stephan) 103, 114, 118, 120, 191, 204n28 Freud (Sigmund) 30n24, 54, 57, 128n13 Ge (Zhaoguang) 177, 182, 184, 186, 188, 194, 202n5 Gernet (Jacques) 31n28, 115, 116, 118, 128n11 Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von) xvi, 26, 47, 63, 76, 80, 82, 83, 96, 99, 101, 109, 133 Granet (Marcel) xxiiin15, 21, 22, 24, 30n23, 78, 110, 111, 115, 174, 185, 188, 189 Guanxi (Chinese social relation(s) and Chinese relationism) 27, 173, 177, 178, 179, 187, 189, 190, 197, 201, 240 Guattari (Félix) xvi, 133, 139, 140, 143, 148, 149

250

Index

Habitus xi, xiii, xv, 2, 26, 27, 95, 143, 144, 153, 162, 177, 187, 189, 201 Hamayon (Roberte) 212, 218, 227, 228, 237n11 Heidegger (Martin) xvi, 8, 9, 10, 62, 102, 103, 104, 105 Héritier (Françoise) 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 30n24, 73, 75, 245 Hierarchy 30n23, 98, 99, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 160, 173, 177, 178, 179, 181, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 198, 201, 202n1, 204n24, n29, 240 Hume (David) xvi, 63, 82, 99, 101, 109, 127, 133 Husserl (Edmund) xiii, xvi, xxin2, 26, 30n17, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 74, 80, 94, 99–107, 126, 128n5, n6, 133, 167 India(n) 7, 8, 10, 22, 23, 31n26, 97, 173, 191, 196, 204n28, n31, 210, 243, 244, 246 Indigenisation xiii, 174, 175, 176, 240 Individual(ity), individuation xvii, 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29n11, 30n24, 41, 42, 49, 50, 51, 53, 74, 77, 93, 95, 98, 101, 102, 116, 119, 138, 139, 141, 151, 183, 188, 190, 204n27, 246 Ingold (Tim) xiii, xiv, xx, 2, 10, 21, 62, 79, 80 Intentionality xi, 26, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 93, 94, 95, 96, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 125, 126, 137, 163n5, 167, 240, 245 Interiority xi, 22, 23, 26, 31n25, 81, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112, 126, 142, 150, 160, 168, 184, 186, 189, 223, 230, 234 Jakobson (Roman) 51, 75, 76, 78, 112 Jullien (François) 28n4, 113, 114, 119, 129n20, 146, 147, 162, 163n16, 187 Kant (Immanuel) x, xii, xviii, 1, 10, 11, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28n1, 39, 40, 42, 44–47, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, 66, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 80, 88, 102,

103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 127, 145, 147, 148, 245; Neo-Kantians 40, 47, 66, 76 Kinship xvi, 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 16, 20, 21, 29n10, n14, 30n23, 52, 76, 78, 101, 118, 120, 143, 144 Latour (Bruno) xiii, 2, 82, 98, 102, 108, 146 Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm) 11, 23, 26, 39, 44, 133, 139, 140, 142, 162n2 Lévi-Strauss (Claude) ix, xiii, xviii, xix, xxin3, xxiin3, n10, xxiiin10, n15, 1, 3, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 26, 30n20, n23, n24, 31n30, 39, 40, 51–57, 63–67, 68, 70–80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 84n2, n4, n5, 88, 89, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 108, 112, 126, 133, 135, 138, 146, 148, 153, 160, 162n2, 167, 168, 177, 189, 201, 202 Levinas (Emmanuel) xvi, xxiiin20, 209, 244 Lewis (Mark Edward) 117, 118, 128n13 Lolop’a (Yi) 231 Manifestation(s) 49, 52, 219, 226, 230, 233 Maniglier (Patrice) 29n13, 50, 51, 84, 98, 109 Marx(ism) 5, 15, 17, 18, 52, 53, 65, 128n9, 175, 188, 204n32 Material (turn), materiality xiii, xiv, xviii, xx, xxiiin13, 1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 21, 42, 44, 54, 56, 57n4, 68, 70, 95, 102, 111, 116, 117, 126, 129n17, 141, 143, 190, 201, 234, 235, 242, 246 Materialism (organic) 179, 187, 188, 189, 196, 204n28, 240 Melanesia 7, 8, 19, 22, 31n26, 78, 97, 243, 244, 246 Merleau-Ponty (Maurice) xiv, xvi, 1, 3, 14, 18, 19, 21, 26, 30n21, 62, 67–79, 84, 84n3, n5, 104, 128n3, 167, 234 Metaphysical turn 80–81 Metaphysics ix, xvii, xviii, xxin2, 22, 26, 31n26, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 49, 50, 57n11, 65, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85n7, 107, 126,

Index 135, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 178, 183, 188, 198, 201, 202n5, 211, 234, 236n3 Minorities (Chinese) vii, 176, 182, 190, 193, 194, 203n13, 204n32, 209 Monism 67, 102, 143 Movement x, xv, xviii, xix, 7, 22, 24, 25, 28, 44, 47, 50, 68, 69, 70, 73, 77, 79, 112, 113, 119, 121, 125, 126, 145, 148, 154, 160, 161, 175, 186, 193, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216–231, 233, 235, 236, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247 Mueggler (Erik) 224, 203, 231, 232, 233, 234 Multi-naturalism (cf. also perspectivism) 2, 27, 63, 75, 83, 134, 136, 142, 146, 148 Nasu (Yi) 28, 231, 233 Naturalism xii, 56, 57, 57n11, 58n11, 73, 83, 98, 99, 107, 135, 143, 163n13 Nature-culture (dualism) i, ix, 3, 4, 18, 27, 31n27, 56, 81, 82, 88, 102, 113, 145, 242 Ni (Nip’a, Yi-Sani) 28, 32, 211, 213, 217, 228, 231, 233, 237n5, n9 Nuosu (Yi) 28, 233 Ontology xiv, xvii, xxiiin13, 1, 10, 22, 25, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 57n11, 69, 70, 80, 81, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 114, 127, 128n3, n10, 129n19, n24, 134, 136, 137, 142, 146, 147, 160, 161, 162n4, 167, 188, 189, 199, 203n9, 218, 235; Ontologies (Descola) xi, xiii, 23, 63, 81, 82, 83, 93, 94, 96–100, 103, 105, 107, 110, 111, 113, 126, 133, 167 Orient(alism) (cf. also Saïd, Wang) 3, 77, 179, 196–197 Pemo (cf. bimo, bimox) (Nasu ritualist) 28, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 241 Perspectivism 2, 23, 81, 82, 83, 97, 99, 133–148, 150, 151, 160, 161, 162, 163n6, 167, 168, 209 Phenomenology xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, 30n16, 9, 10, 17, 26, 52,

251

57n8, 62–76, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85n7, 89, 94, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107, 109, 128n8, 167, 242 Physicality xi, xiii, 81, 94–100, 106, 107, 110, 111, 136, 234 Piette (Albert) 9, 10, 29n7 Plato xii, xvii, 11, 28n1, 40, 42, 84, 147 Psychology (cf. cognitive psychology) Relationism (cf. also guanxi): foreword 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30n14, 31n25, 39, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, 63, 69, 73, 75, 79, 80, 83, 88, 103, 105, 108, 112, 126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 139, 152, 153, 161, 162, 168, 187, 198, 201, 209, 234, 241, 242, 243, 246 Richir (Marc) vii, xii, xxin2, xxiin7, 40, 57n8, 128n13, 163n10 Ricoeur (Paul) 55, 56, 84, 105 Rite, ritual xv, xv, xviii, 18, 52, 77, 78, 79, 81, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 138, 143, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 177, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 202, 203n19, n20, 205n35, 210, 210–221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230–236, 237n10 Rowlands (Michael) 191, 204n28 Sacrifice 81, 96, 114, 121, 123, 148–150, 155, 157, 158, 159, 199, 211, 212, 215, 216, 234 Saïd (Edouard) 3, 196 Sartre (Jean-Paul) 51 Saussure (Ferdinand de) xxiin5, 50, 53 Schipper (Kristofer) 26, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129n18, 180, 203n6, n22 Script, cf. writing Se (writing-blood, Ni writing) (cf. also bimo) xvi, 32n33, 213, 215, 216, 217, 223, 234, 236n2 Severi (Carlo) 78, 215 Shaman 31n31, 125, 203n13, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235 Shamanism vii, 24, 28, 96, 114, 124, 136, 138, 145, 148, 149, 150,

252

Index

163n6, 203n13, 210, 212, 227, 228, 234, 237n11 Sign xi, 26, 50, 51, 55, 63, 72, 74, 95, 137, 144, 148, 152, 153, 163n15, 168, 169 Sinisisation 174, 175, 176, 202n4, 240 Speech (ritual, shamanic) xvi, 214, 220, 221, 222, 223, 237n8 Spinoza (Baruch) 26, 39, 43, 139, 140, 163n9 Static 8, 24, 25, 44, 47, 49, 140 Strathern (Marilyn) 12, xxiiin17, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 19, 20, 23, 29n5, 75, 79, 95, 246 Straus (Erwin) 212, 218, 228, 229, 230 Structural Anthropology i, ix, xxiin5, xxiiin15, 13, 21, 26, 30n24, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 64, 66, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 80, 84n4, 94, 98, 108, 120, 126, 168, 173, 177, 189, 245 Structuralism (linguistic) 50, 75, 77, 84, 112 Submutance(s) i, xv, xvi, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 79, 110, 111, 112, 115, 120, 126, 144, 167, 190, 212, 228, 264, 235, 236, 337n10, 243, 245, 246 Substance(s) i, vii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xxiiin16; Introduction, Chapter 1 73, 77, 80, 88, 95, 103, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 122, 127, 140–145, 151–153, 157, 160, 163n13, 167, 177, 187, 192, 209, 210, 212, 215, 216, 231, 234, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246 Swancutt (Katherine) 233 Taoism, cf. Dao (Daoism) Textuality (cf. also writing) 230, 233 Tianxia (Under the Sky) 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 203n9, n12, n24, 204n27, n29, 205n38 Tibet-Yi corridor 184, 185, 194, 195, 196, 201, 204n25, 205n32 Tibeto-burman (cf. also Nasu, Ni, Nuosu, Yi) 16, 176, 209, 211, 225 Thomson (D’Arcy Wentworth) 26, 54, 110

Totemism xxiiin10, 81, 84, 97, 100, 102, 107, 148 Trance 125, 226–228, 230, 235, 237n11, n12 Transmission 18, 98, 118, 120, 122, 123, 126, 145, 148, 181, 212, 214, 215, 221, 233, 235 Transcendental subject (egology) 26, 44, 45, 46, 49, 55, 56, 66, 68, 70, 80, 98, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 128n8, 155, 156, 167, 245, 246 Unconscious xxvii, 5, 10, 40, 53–54, 57, 72, 80, 94, 141, 244 Universalism xiii, xvii, xix, xxin2, 4, 14, 16, 19, 22, 24, 30, 31n27, 42, 47, 48, 54, 82, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 104, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 126, 133, 136, 142, 143, 167, 180, 181, 182, 185, 188, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 205n34, 226, 234, 243 Vandermeersch (Léon) xv, xvi, xvii, xxin2, 22, 24, 31n29, n31, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 177, 180, 184, 190, 203n19, n20, 210, 237n3 Viveiros de Castro (Eduardo) i, ix, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xxin2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 14, 15, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28n1, n2, 29n12, n13, 30n15, n22, 31n27, 48, 49, 57n4, n9, 63, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 114, 127, 128; Chapter 4 167, 168, 173, 188, 201, 209, 210, 236n3, 243, 245, 246 Wang (Mingming) i, xiii, xv, xxiiin12, 2, 5, 21, 23, 27, 30n23, 49, 115, 162; Chapter 5 209, 210, 240, 243, 245 Warburg (Aby) xvi, 50, 77, 78, 79 Weiner (James F.) 8–9, 10 Wenming (civilisation) 178, 179, 189, 190, 191, 198 West(ern) (cf. also Occident) 3, 29n11, 80, 147, 163n13, 175, 176, 178, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 240

Index Whitehead (Alfred North) 20, 24, 48, 49, 139 Writing (cf. also se) 25, 28, 57n4, 97, 118, 120–121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 175, 199, 209, 210–212, 241; Né writing 231–233; Ni writing, cf. se; Nuosu writing (bbur) 233

253

Yi (nationality) (cf. also Lolop’o, Nasu, Ni, Nuosu, Tibet-Yi corridor) 32, 176, 195, 211, 230, 231, 233 Yi-Sani, cf. Ni Zhao (Tingyang) 182, 183, 184, 185, 188, 198, 201, 202n5, 203n8, n21, 204n27, n29, n30, 205n38