Revista Conexes Parciais Vol.1 N.1 Nov.

2011

ANTHROPOLOGY IS THE ETHNOGRAPHY PHILOSOPHY IS THE ETHNOGRAFY OF ITSELF.

OF

PHILOSOPHY:

A ANTROPOLOGIA A ETNOGRAFIA DA FILOSOFIA: A FILOSOFIA A ETNOGRAFIA DE SI MESMA. Roy Wagner Beginning with the philosophy of Heraclitus, and continuing through the twentieth century work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophy has been on a quest to make a selfevident statement about itself a single phrase or what Wittgenstein would call a proposition, so as to make further speculation unnecessary. Philosophy is into stopping the world. Lao Tse: The Named is the mother of the myriad creatures. Heraclitus: We live the gods deaths, and they live ours. Wittgenstein: Tractatus 5.631: There is no such thing as the subject that thinks and entertains ideas 5.632: The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world. 5.633: Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye. 5.634: This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is at the same time a priori. Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things. 5.641: The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world not a part of it. 6.1: The prepositions of logic are tautologies.

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After this, as Wittgenstein so blithely puts it, there is nothing more to say. The world of philosophy has been stopped. But not the world of anthropology; the world of anthropology has just been started; anthropology begins where philosophy leaves off. For the unstated assumption behind philosophical statements, such as the ones quoted above, is that they are meaningful propositions about the world, propositions that can be tested (if only against themselves) for truth-value, and then either believed in or disbelieved. And although the metaphysical subject in Wittgensteins sense is indifferent to the content and veracity of the world experience, Wittgensteins statement to that effect is not. In other words Wittgenstein, like the other philosophers quoted above, not only expects but actually demands that you believe in the results of his philosophy. Belief in the relative is not relative at all: it is absolute. This brings us to the testing point of the difference between philosophy and anthropology: philosophy demands that one believe in things even if only its own refusal to believe in them whereas anthropology encourages one to believe OUT of them. For most of us this is unfamiliar territory; what does it mean to believe out of something? If the philosophical subject, in Wittgensteins sense, is only the limit of the world, would it not be necessary to believe out of it in order even to believe in it? For the eye establishes its perspective in just precisely this way. The anthropologist is faced with the task of believing out of their indigenous subjects perspectives in order to recapture the vision of their own, but also with the task of believing out of their own perspectives just to be able to grasp what the indigenous folk are up to. Now we are back in familiar territory again, thanks to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, for what this savant has introduced to anthropology, perspectivism, is just exactly the thing Wittgenstein was not looking for the vantage afforded the metaphysical subject to see beyond the limits fixed by propositional reality. For the bias of philosophical vision is not only absurdly literal an inability to take metaphor at the more-than-face value its expression demands, but also absurdly visual. Unless the reader can see beyond the limits of the printed page, they will not hear Wittgenstein. And a proposition, no matter how aptly fixed in prose, is of little value without its resonance in other propositions. This brings us to the work of the ethnographer Steven Feld, a prodigy fieldworker among the Kaluli people of Mt. Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, who was the first anthropologist to determine and describe an acoustic world-perspective. As he puts it in his book, Sound and Sentiment: To you they are birds; to us they are voices in the forest. In the context of his efforts to establish visual recognition for the various bird species a task that failed miserably Felds confreres told him that the appearance of the birds themselves had nothing to do with the matter; their voices were the only thing that counted. And voice could be anything, the, the call of an identifiable bird species, a deceased relative who chose that form for purposes of communication, or

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even the dreaded triple-whistle of a sei sorcerer. Sound is the primary carrier of emotion, and emotion holds the central tenor of any communication. (Try this experiment: mute the sound on a motion picture or TV commercial, and you will wonder wherein the meaning has gone to.) As Feld once put it, the Kaluli do not inhabit a landscape but a soundscape, a panoramic 3D lifeworld where figures have vocal shapes, living species can change from one form to another, waterfalls are crescendos, distances are resonances, and overtones on drums speak with the voices of the dead. Perspectives, in other words, are not necessarily visual ones; how much of Felds discovery could be put in a proposition by Wittgenstein? Kaluli do not act out their rituals, they dance them advisedly so, since the organs of balance, the prime determiners of the bodys equilibrium, are located within the inner ear, and sensitive primarily to tactile effects, like the touch of vibrations upon the eardrum. Now back to Wittgenstein. Would it be logical or even possible for Wittgenstein to conceive a proposition like Nothing in an acoustical field allows you to infer that it has been heard by the ear? Decidedly not; though we can receive light waves from galaxies far away and long ago, acoustics is dependent upon tangency, proximity, and the very air that we breathe, and makes a poor substrate for abstraction or empty ideality. Believing in a symphony is not anything any of us is ever asked to do; just hearing it and acknowledging that it is there is quite enough; but believing out of it, engaging its invitation to fantasy as one does with a sonnet, is the stuff upon which whole lifetimes are made. Believing in, we are told, is an act of commitment, regardless of the subject involved, and the evidence is that the historical Jesus never really believed in anything, even himself, hence his seven last words upon the cross: Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani (My Lord, My Lord, why doest thou foresake me?) I would worry, too, given his situation, but the evidence is that he was not really worried about himself at all, but of Gods ability to believe in him. Now worrying about God in that way, whatever the consequences, is not only caring, resourceful, and charitable Christian in the extreme but also prima facie evidence of the Saviors ability to believe out of God, a thing the Creator Himself was obliged to do in conceiving Christ in the first place. As my New Ireland informants had often pointed out to me, Jesus Christ was first and foremost an anthropologist.