The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn
Latour turns to Wittgensteinian or Lyotardian language games, and Silversteinian deixis and metapragmatics, as formal means of distinquishing modern European discursive categories and institutions, each defined by three criteria: the right pre-position, discontinuity from other language games, and f...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, University of Edinburgh, Department of Anthropology
2015
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96009 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2871-5943 |
| _version_ | 1826196529250041856 |
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| author | Fischer, Michael M. J. |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society Fischer, Michael M. J. |
| author_sort | Fischer, Michael M. J. |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Latour turns to Wittgensteinian or Lyotardian language games, and Silversteinian deixis and metapragmatics, as formal means of distinquishing modern European discursive categories and institutions, each defined by three criteria: the right pre-position, discontinuity from other language games, and felicity conditions. Double-click and the snake of knowledge are metaphorical reminders to not efface the labor of invention and maintenance. In lectures on Gaia, Latour turns toward a Durkheimian politics of the Anthropocene. Descola charts Siberian and North American groups on a north–south historical gradient from animism to analogism, and Amazonian cultural groups as animist transformational sets, reviving a human geography tradition, connecting to Latour’s project through wide-mesh networking of human–nonhuman cosmo-logical modes and relations, and contesting Viveiros de Castro’s uniform Amazonian predation cosmology and multinaturalism–uniculturalism, supporting the earlier work on contrastive Amazonian linguistics. We need not celebrate “humanity as technological detour,” but focus on the “peopling of technologies.” |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T10:28:47Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/96009 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T10:28:47Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, University of Edinburgh, Department of Anthropology |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/960092022-09-27T09:41:14Z The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn Fischer, Michael M. J. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society Fischer, Michael M. J. Latour turns to Wittgensteinian or Lyotardian language games, and Silversteinian deixis and metapragmatics, as formal means of distinquishing modern European discursive categories and institutions, each defined by three criteria: the right pre-position, discontinuity from other language games, and felicity conditions. Double-click and the snake of knowledge are metaphorical reminders to not efface the labor of invention and maintenance. In lectures on Gaia, Latour turns toward a Durkheimian politics of the Anthropocene. Descola charts Siberian and North American groups on a north–south historical gradient from animism to analogism, and Amazonian cultural groups as animist transformational sets, reviving a human geography tradition, connecting to Latour’s project through wide-mesh networking of human–nonhuman cosmo-logical modes and relations, and contesting Viveiros de Castro’s uniform Amazonian predation cosmology and multinaturalism–uniculturalism, supporting the earlier work on contrastive Amazonian linguistics. We need not celebrate “humanity as technological detour,” but focus on the “peopling of technologies.” 2015-03-13T13:59:04Z 2015-03-13T13:59:04Z 2014-06 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 2049-1115 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96009 Fischer, Michael M. J. “The Lightness of Existence and the Origami of ‘French’ Anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and Their so-Called Ontological Turn.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (June 23, 2014): 331. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2871-5943 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.018 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ application/pdf HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, University of Edinburgh, Department of Anthropology |
| spellingShingle | Fischer, Michael M. J. The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn |
| title | The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn |
| title_full | The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn |
| title_fullStr | The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn |
| title_full_unstemmed | The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn |
| title_short | The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn |
| title_sort | lightness of existence and the origami of french anthropology latour descola viveiros de castro meillassoux and their so called ontological turn |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96009 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2871-5943 |
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