Religious perception and the education of attention

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What lines, rats, and sheep can tell us

In his 2015 Research Through Design provocation, Tim Ingold invites his audience to think with string, lines, and meshworks. In this article I use Ingold's concepts to explore an orientation to design—one that threads through both Ingold's ideas and Vinciane Despret's vivid and moving accounts of human-animal relations. This is a “thinking and doing” through design that seeks to be expansive to the capacities of humans and non-humans in relation to one another

That's enough about ethnography

Ethnography has become a term so overused, both in anthropology and in contingent disciplines, that it has lost much of its meaning. I argue that to attribute “ethnographicness” to encounters with those among whom we carry on our research, or more generally to fieldwork, is to undermine both the ontological commitment and the educational purpose of anthropology as a discipline, and of its principal way of working—namely participant observation. It is also to reproduce a pernicious distinction between those with whom we study and learn, respectively within and beyond the academy. Anthropology’s obsession with ethnography, more than anything else, is curtailing its public voice. The way to regain it is through reasserting the value of anthropology as a forward-moving discipline dedicated to healing the rupture between imagination and real life

From science to art and back again : The pendulum of an anthropologist

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Los Materiales contra la materialidad

This article seeks to reverse the emphasis, in current studies of material culture, on the materiality of objects, as against the properties of material. Drawing on James Gibson`s tripartite division of the inhabited environment into médium, substances and surfaces, it is argued that the forms of things are not imposed from without upon an inert substrate of matter, but are continually generated and disolved within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that surrounds them. Thus things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in wich they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories

Tachar y borrar: Tácticas para cambiar el pasado

When editing text by hand, lines may be struck out, in acts of deletion, or rubbed out, in acts of erasure. This article argues that deletion and erasure are opposed, both operationally and in their surface effects. While the strike-through physically crosses words out, ontologically it makes no more contact with the surface on which they are written than does a line inscribed on a mirror with that which is reflected in the glass. It is as if the stroke were drawn across another plane, layered over the page of writing. Rubbing or scratching out, however, erodes the surface itself. When the same surface if repeatedly reused, as was common with writing on parchment, past traces come up while the traces of the present sink down. The same goes for the reuse of the ground, in cycles of cultivation. Both lead to the formation of a palimpsest. With the palimpsest, turning over is fundamental to renewal. The territorial state, by contrast, assumes the ground to be stratified into layers, stacked up in a temporal sequence. Renewal, then, can come only by adding further layers. We thus arrive at a distinction between two kinds of surface: the layered surface, covering up what went before and closed to what follows; and the deep surface, that covers nothing but itself yet nevertheless rises into the open. These surfaces embody, respectively, the contrary principles of stratigraphy and anti-stratigraphy. Camouflage works by tricking us into taking one kind of surface for another. The example of burial, however, shows how both principles can combine. Burying the past puts it down but will not make it go away. Only when it finally rises to the surface can the past be wiped out by the ravages of time.Al editar un texto a mano, las líneas pueden tacharse, o eliminarse, en actos de borrado. Este artículo sostiene que el tachado y la supresión son opuestos, tanto operacionalmente como en sus efectos superficiales. Mientras que el tachado raya físicamente las palabras, ontológicamente no hace más contacto con la superficie sobre la que están escritas que una línea inscrita en un espejo con lo que se refleja en el vidrio. Es como si el trazo se dibujara a través de otro plano, superpuesto a la página de escritura. Sin embargo, frotar o rayar erosiona la superficie misma. Cuando la misma superficie se reutiliza repetidamente, como era común con la escritura en pergamino, surgen huellas del pasado mientras que las huellas del presente se hunden. Lo mismo ocurre con la reutilización del suelo, en ciclos de cultivo. Ambos conducen a la formación de un palimpsesto. Con el palimpsesto, darse la vuelta es fundamental para la renovación. El estado territorial, por el contrario, asume que el suelo está estratificado en capas, apilado en una secuencia temporal. La renovación, entonces, solo puede llegar agregando más capas. Llegamos así a una distinción entre dos tipos de superficie: la superficie estratificada, que cubre lo anterior y se cierra a lo que sigue; y la superficie profunda, que no cubre nada más que a sí misma y, sin embargo, se eleva al aire libre. Estas superficies encarnan, respectivamente, los principios contrarios de estratigrafía y antiestratigrafía. El camuflaje funciona engañándonos para que tomemos un tipo de superficie por otra. El ejemplo del entierro, sin embargo, muestra cómo ambos principios pueden combinarse. Enterrar el pasado lo pone a un lado, pero no lo hará desaparecer. Solo cuando finalmente salga a la superficie, el pasado podrá ser borrado por los estragos del tiempo

One world anthropology

I first presented a preliminary sketch for this paper at the conference The Human Condition: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Aarhus, in June 2015. The first written version was presented as a seminar at the Department of Anthropology, McGill University, the following October. Since then the paper has continued to evolve, with presentations to the Creation of Reality Group conference at the University of Edinburgh in December 2015, as the J. J. Bachofen Lecture at the University of Basel in March 2016, and a month later as the 2016 inaugural lecture for the Anthropology Programme at the Catholic University of Chile, Santiago. In September 2016 I presented a version of the paper under the title “An Ecology of Life” at the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, as part of the 2nd International Conference of the Network of Iberoamerican Anthropologists (AIBR), and again in October 2016 at the School of Humanistic Studies of the University of Bologna. I have thoroughly revised the paper for each occasion. I would like to thank the European Research Council for the award of an Advanced Grant (323677-KFI, 2013-18) that released me from other obligations to work on the paper, and the audience on every occasion of its presentation for much tremendously helpful feedback, without which it would never have progressed in the way it has. For any remaining shortcomings, which I am sure are many, I accept full responsibility.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

From science to art and back again : The pendulum of an anthropologist

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