Concepts in Anthropology

Course Code: 155901517-A22/23

Course Convenor: Ben Bowles

"In what ways could Perspectivism be potentially transformative for

Word count: 2,740

Nature/Culture distinction as understood by Cartesian naturalism. I shall concisely elaborate how

this perspectivist ontology functions and then explain how anthropologists have sought to

extrapolate from perspectivism's implications. This results in a pragmatic endeavour to explore how

the dualisms that function as the foundation upon which a whole structural apparatus of concepts

and reality, or ontology, may be manifest in potentially infinite novel ways. I argue that this

"ontological turn" goes beyond, and even serves as a corrective, to earlier turnings, particularly

certain flavours of post-structuralism. I shall end with Tim Ingold's unique and innovative approach,

which may give the best account yet of how practically to move past the Cartesian legacy into a

superior new framework for analysis. This debate goes right to the core of what it means to exist in

a world of structures, symbols, interpretations, and so on. It is the cutting edge of anthropological

theory and research methods. The radical implications ought to extend to other areas of the social

and natural sciences, which in turn may affect the wider world in yet unforeseen ways.

Levi-Strauss' structuralism, what might be considered the high-water mark of enlightenment

thinking, is based on the observation that structures arise out of binary conceptual opposites, or

dualisms. The most salient such conceptual opposite, at the foundation of the (particularly western

enlightenment) scientific enterprise, is that of Nature and Culture. Layered on top of these

foundational poles exist a strata of correlative concepts that further colour our overall ontology.

Respectively, these include: "universal and particular, objective and subjective, physical and social,

fact and value, the given and the instituted, necessity and spontaneity, immanence and

transcendence, body and mind, animality and humanity, among many more" (Viveiros de Castro

1998: 469/70). The resulting ontological structure, known as naturalism, holds that Nature is a

unified whole, independent of the mind that perceives it. Culture is an infinite refraction of that
Nature, as perceived and experienced by individual subjective positions, hence the term

"multiculturalism." By cross-referencing a variety of ethnographic accounts of indigenous lowland

Amazonian tribes, Viveiros de Castro concluded that Amerindian belief posits an ontology

diametrically opposed to Cartesian multiculturalism, namely "multinaturalism." Multinaturalism

holds that there are multiple natures and yet the mind/soul that perceives and experiences the world

is essentially the same. He explains that Amerindians "suppose a spiritual unity and corporeal

diversity" (ibid). First, "spiritual unity" refers to all natural entities sharing a common humanity.

Humanity is understood here, fundamentally, as a reflexive condition of differentiating self from

other. An ontologically distinct being is necessarily defined by the capacity for such a reflexive

condition. The concept of humanity thus extends beyond beings with a human physical form, to

entities with any one of the multivarious natural, physical (or even non-physical) forms (corporeal

diversity) that one may observe in the world, hence "multinaturalism."

It is the capacity for conscious and intentional action that defines a subject and a subject

necessarily takes a point of view on the world and social environment in which it is enmeshed. The

self/other precondition means that there is a universal structure to how a subject ("human") relates

to their social environment. "Others" are perceived, relatively, as friend or foe, prey or predator etc.

Sociality is thus a precondition for humanity as we relate, socially, to the multiplicity of entities

within our environment. How we classify the various beings within our social world will determine

our relationship to that being. It is thus initially tempting to assume that this theory is simply

arguing in terms of animist psychology, in which non-human animals perceive the world,

analogously, along the same conceptual social boundaries as humans, i.e. they perceive what is

good or not to eat; they perceive bodily ornamentations and tools, eg. claws, teeth, talons; they

perceive social hierarchies with chiefs, shamans, exogamous moieties etc (ibid). However, Viveiros

de Castro goes further to argue that it is not merely the conceptual categories that extend across

species, but the literal phenomenological percepts of the environment. Critically, perceptual

representation is "purely pronominal or deictic," (1998: 478) which is to say that they manifest
within a specific spatial/temporal context. Thus, as perceptual representation (Culture) is universal

across all subjective positions then, it logically follows, that what is variable must be the worlds in

which such perceptions can occur (Nature.)

The key here is the distinction between representations as fundamentally a property of

mind/soul, whereas a perspective, or point of view, is "located in the body" (ibid). Different bodies

exist in their own "sphere" (ontological reality). The sphere of a Jaguar is different to the sphere of

humans. The sphere is thus determined by the body, and hence point of view, that different entities

posses. It is tempting, again, to presume this is saying that the physiological differences between

bodies causes corresponding variation in perceptual faculties but that is wrong because "bodies" are

to be understood not as the physically extended substance but, rather, as "a bundle of affects and

capacities" (ibid) that engenders a particular subject to engage with the world in specific ways such

as eating certain things and living in certain places etc. This will vary across species as Jaguars like

to eat people whereas people like to eat peccaries. Therefore, although Jaguars share a common

perceptual representation with humans, they do not perceive humans as humans do. Jaguars

perceive humans as humans perceive peccaries but the "spheres" in which these corporeal bodies

are being eaten are ultimately different. A body thus operates as a function for creating a

perspective, or point of view, onto the world. Indeed, a human shaman has the ability to shift

perspectives and traverse spheres. This is because, not all, but most animals have a kind of

archetypal, hypostatic "spirit master" with human intentionality, thus creating the conditions for an

"intersubjective field for human-animal relations" (1998: 471).

Anthropology has always been concerned with documenting the various epistemologies

(ways of knowing/understanding the world) of people. However, some would argue that the

naturalist persepctive has been fundamentally taken for granted. The ontological turn attempts to go

further, by extrapolating from the revelations of the Amerinidians' multinaturalism, to argue that

anthropologists should likewise adopt a theoretical approach whereby the various human (and even
non-human) agents of this world do not only understand and interpret the world in multiple varieties

(multiculturalism) but in fact inhabit and exist in truly distinct ontological realities

(multinaturalism). To elaborate this debate we will first see Carrithers' critique that common usage

of ontology is merely a repackaging of well-established anthropological concerns with

epistemological alterity. This will set the context to explain how the ontological turn, properly

applied, does in fact proffer a theoretical and methodological approach with radical implications for

the discipline.

Carrithers argues, admittedly very convincingly, that a successful ethnography ought to attend

to a number of variables including: types of person/relations, techniques du corps, imagery,

narrative templates, concepts, ontologies, styles, skills, practices, procedures, cognitive systems,

pragmatics/semantics (161). Humans co-construct reality, in a Geertzian hermeneutic fashion, by

combining and mixing these various "cultural rhetorical resources" (ibid) in novel and particular

ways. Ontology, defined as "propositional assertions about **the sense of reality** that one group

or another might have" (160), although surely a particularly relevant and interesting category, is

thus but one amongst a multiplicity of variables. He goes on to say that "an ontology is words and

concepts, not reality itself" (ibid). Carrithers therefore argues from within a naturalist ontology in

which "words and concepts" (culture/epistemology) may well vary widely across cultures but that is

not to say that the fundamental "reality" (ontology/nature) varies accordingly. The argument is that

these various terms of Culture, Epistemology, Ontology etc. all seek to uncover some difference, or

alterity, between people. Alterity must necessarily be underpinned by a sense of some universal

background, or foundation, upon which this variation expresses itself and the term designated for

that universal seems to be Nature. However, this rather disingenuous conflation of terms only leaves

us in a definitional stalemate since if we can only understand variations in "sense(s) of reality" then

the ontological turn is methodologically doomed. This Popperian "closed system" precludes us from

talking about potential alterity at the level of "reality itself" because any claims of an alternative

ontology are immediately reinterpreted as but just another conceptual representation. I conclude,
therefore, that this critique is not valid as it does not allow for genuine considerations of alterity

based at the level of ontology.

Henare et al attempt to move beyond Carrithers' equivalence of conceptual variation with

epistemological variation by arguing that “concepts are real and reality is conceptual” (Henare,

Holbraad and Wastell 2006: 9). This is to say that the reality a person exists in is necessarily

dependent upon the concepts (epistemology) that a person recognises. Therefore, given the variation

in conceptual apparatus that different people employ in their understanding of the world, the reality

they experience (ontology) is correspondingly variable. Henare et al, citing Deleuze as a proponent,

has called this position "radical constructivism" (Henare et al. 28 note 9). This extends past the,

apparently less-radical, constructivism of Foucauldian ‘regimes of truth' in which the cultural

discourse sets the parameters for what are considered proper concepts within a given episteme, as

seen for example in the categories of gender or madness (ibid). The Foucauldian view is essentially

naturalist but for Deleuze there exist multiple realities at the level of the "virtual plane" in which

concepts are real according to their virtual effects on the world of the subject that recognises them.

Methodologically, Henare et al. employ this framework but in reverse, which is to say they advocate

a radical essentialist perspective which takes "things" (essentially) as "heuristics" not as "analytics."

This means "things," whether concepts or artefacts, are taken on their own terms according to the

people that use them, and not processed through a filter of interpretation. Examples of this are in the

Nuer saying that "birds are twins." Post-structural relativists would insist that such claims are

merely representational, given that our own naturalist ontology would necessitate such claims as

logically impossible. Ontological turners would alternatively insist that we should take the Nuer as

indicating a new conceptual category entirely (thing as heuristic) and not impose our interpretive

lens (thing as analytic).

This rendering of the theoretical anthropological discourse seems to posit the progressive

transition from the semiotic, representationalism of Levi-Strauss' structuralism, through the post-
structuralism of constructivist discourse analysis (in which cultural relativism thrives), and finally

to this radical constructivism. The ontological turn at first seems to mirror post-structuralism more

generally by relativising the category of truth to extend beyond a single ontology. However, where

post-structuralists apparently want to eliminate the category of conceptual truth in favour of never

ending process of interpreting representations upon representations, the ontological turn moves

beyond questions of representation to the question of the raw effect (heuristic not analytic) of

concepts as they function in the worlds of the people who understand them. Concepts are true, or

real, for the people that use them. The radical constructivists emphasise that concepts are not

equivalent to representations in the same way that Viveiros de Castro emphasises that points of

view/perspectives are not the same as representations. Both argue that we can meaningfully discuss

the nature of conceptual and perspectival alterity as a layer beyond that of mere epistemological

representation and the ground of such discussion, inverting Carrithers, should be called 'ontology.'

Viveiros De Castro has demonstrated the antimony of our "western thought" (1998: 474). We

explain things in terms of either "naturalistic monism" as rendered by the term "sociobiology" or

else in terms of "ontological dualism" as per "nature/culture culturalism" (ibid). It is time to move

beyond the dualism of Nature and Culture. One novel, and deeply insightful, attempt in this regard

comes from Tim Ingold. He sees the separation of Humanity from Nature as the "underlying fault"

(2000: 1) of the western scientific paradigm. He seeks to dissolve this dualism by arguing that

organic life, including humans, grow in reciprocal conjunction with the environment in which they

are enmeshed. It is not the case that Nature exists "out there" for the mind to represent. Rather, the

mind is immanent in the world and actively constructs the ontological field.

To explain this point, he compares Levi-Strauss with Bateson: Both view the mind as an

information processor. However, Levi-Strauss sees the external world as fundamentally uniform and

unchanging. The mind passively receives sensory information and repackages it into coherent

structures based off of analogies of binary opposition. There is a gap between the representational
signifier and the concrete signified. The external world and the mind are thus two distinct categories

that do not interpenetrate. The mind according to Bateson, however, is an active process of

uncovering what would otherwise remain hidden to the perceiver. It is never merely about

representing the environment. It also about probing deeper into what is available to the organism as

it gleans more insight into what the world might contain.

Epistemological concepts are not so much a matter of 'constructing' the representational

world of Culture, but rather function as "clues" that reveal greater depth and complexity in the

world as experienced. Indeed, Csordas' 'somatic modes of attention' have demonstrated that paying

attention to the world in certain ways can open up possibilities for previously inconceivable

experiences of reality. An example of this is that some people learn to recognise the perception of

certain sensations in the body called qi. One can then develop this skill to the point that experience

realms quite different from that of someone who has never learned to apply this skill. Qi sensations

are therefore not simply mental representations of a perception but rather function as a "clue" to

probe deeper into the world as you go deeper into the practice. Furthermore, Ingold goes so far as to

suggest that what we know as cultural variation is in fact best understood as variations in relative

enskilment. Since skills become embedded in the organism (once you identify the perception of qi

you cannot un-perceive it) they are "indissolubly mind and body ... as much biological as they are

cultural" (2000: 5).

For Ingold the mind is not separate from the environment but is immanent in the network of

relations in the environment. All organisms actively engage with their environment but each "arises

as a singular centre of awareness and agency" (2000: 19). The likeness to Viveiros de Castro's

perspectivism here is striking. Both describe a reflexive condition of awareness (what Viveiros de

Castro calls "humanity") as made apparent through a subjective perspective within a distinct

environment. The organism is always necessarily situated in an ontological reality. That ontological

reality exists as an object only in as far as there is there is an organism there to perceive it. They are

therefore not two distinct categories but necessarily co-dependent. The overall experience of mind
or consciousness is a singular ontological field of existence. Therefore "‘organism plus

environment’ should denote not a compound of two things, but one indivisible totality" (Ingold

2000: 19). Our language just seems stuck in depending on dualisms so that a context of relationality

can occur. We tend to say "my experience of reality is different to your experience of reality" but in

fact it is more logically coherent to insist that "my subjective organism plus environment totality is

necessarily different from your subjective organism plus environment totality." This is not to say

that we each do not have a comparable subjective, representational experience of the world, but

rather, that the world that we experience is not one and the same.

To conclude, perspectivism coherently described an ontology that radically inverts Cartesian

naturalism. Anthropologists have been bold in their efforts to develop on this revelation and push

the boundaries of how we might understand alterity, not as a matter of representation, but at the

level of ontology. Ingold's approach of the mind's immanence in the environment is truly innovative

ought to empower individuals to see themselves as active creators of their own worlds. This debate

absolutely has the potential to transform the way one understands both the capacity for ontological

alterity and the way in which their own ontology can be experienced with ever increasing depth,

complexity and significance.

Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, Sari Wastell ed. 2006. Thinking Through Things: Theorising
Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge

Bateson, Gregory (1980) Mind and nature : a necessary unity, New York: Dutton

Carrithers, Michael, Matei Candea, Karen Sykes, Martin Holbraad and Soumhya Venkatesan. 2010.
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for
Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology. 30(2):152-
200

Csordas, J. Thomas. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology, 8(2):135-56.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? (trans. H. Tomlinson and G.
Burchell) New York: Columbia University Press

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political
institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York:
Vintage Books.

Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill,
London: Routledge.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1978. “Primitive” Thinking and the “Civilized” Mind’ in Myth and Meaning.
2003 (1978) London: Routledge

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. ‘Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism’, Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3): 469–88.