This article aims to problematize, through the theoretical contributions of the post-colonial studies, the catholic church’s colonization project towards the Amapaense Amazon’s popular catholicism - such as the Myth of Cobra Grande - constituted as a project evolved around eurocentric and judeo-christian assumptions to the detriment of afro-amerindian cultural, identity and religious expressions, of catholic communities in the urban and rural areas of the brazilian Amazon. The amazonian population develops strategies of resistance and re-existence in order to maintain their (...) religious traditions around festa dos santos, pilgrimages, festivities, rosaries, quermesses, and other activities as forms of origins establishment or origins return for the foundation of a narrative identity.. (shrink)

By looking at a canonical article representing academic philosophy’s orthodox view against cultural relativism, James Rachels’ “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism,” this paper argues that current mainstream western academic philosophy’s fear of cultural relativism is premised on a fear of the racial Other. The examples that Rachels marshals against cultural relativism default to the persistent, ubiquitous, and age-old stereotypes about the savage/barbarian Other that have dominated the history of western engagement with the non-western world. What academic philosophy fears about cultural (...) relativism, it is argued, is the barbarians of the western imagination and not fellow human beings. The same structure that informs fears of cultural relativism, whereby people with different customs are reduced to the barbarian/savage of the western imagination, can be seen in the genesis of international law which arose as a justification for the domination of the Amerindian. It is argued that implicit in arguments against cultural relativism is the preservation of the same right to dominate the Other. Finally, it is argued that the appeal of the fear of cultural relativism is that, in directing moral outrage at others, one can avoid reflecting on the failures of one’s own cultural tradition. (shrink)

Contrary to conventional accounts, critical knowledge of the cultural differences of Amerindian peoples was not absent in the early Conquest of the Americas. It was indeed a constitutive element of that process. The knowledge, strategies, and institutions of early Conquest relied on, and reproduced, Amerindian difference within the Spanish Empire as an essential element of that empire’s continued claims to legitimate authority. I demonstrate this through a focus on three parallel and sometimes overlapping texts: Ramón Pané’s Indian Antiquities; (...) Peter Martyr d’Anghierra’s First Decade; and the first systematic attempt to govern colonized populations in the Americas, the Laws of Burgos. Not only did each text furnish the necessary material upon which the claims to intellectual, and so civilizational, superiority that were central to the justification of empire could be sustained. What is more, they transformed Amerindian difference from an object of knowledge into a subject of governance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek RebirthA. L. HermanImagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 448 pp.Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University, is probably one of the world's greatest living anthropologists. The proof of that assertion lies in this his latest work on comparative anthropology, a study of (...) the concept and practice of rebirth—"reincarnation" as he calls it—from ancient Greece and India to modern West Africa, Melanesia, and North America. In what follows let me briefly set forth what I understand his central thesis to be, the evidence for it, and the conclusions to be drawn from it. I will end with two very modest problems connected with this altogether intriguing and brilliant investigation into the doctrine of rebirth.As a modified structural anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere rejects the rationalist model structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. He follows instead the lead of two of his empiricist predecessors, Max Weber and Fernand Braudel, pointing out that structures, types, or models "are constructions of scholars, not universals waiting to be discovered" (p. 351). Consequently, as this book aptly proves, Obeyesekere's own "imagined" models are based on parole data following the actual language of the cultures being studied.Obeyesekere thus begins his book with an elementary rebirth structure based on such parole. He refers to this primitive, first structure as "rebirth eschatology," which entails the rebirth of a deceased's soul into the body of a newborn relative of the deceased but without any determining ethical component as found in the more sophisticated and complex "karmic eschatologies." Such ethically neutral kin group rebirths are found among certain small-scale societies in West Africa, the Trobriand Islands, the Northwest American coast tribes, and the Inuits (Eskimos). Obeyesekere [End Page 303] draws extensively on field studies of these groups to bolster his conclusions about them. This simple rebirth eschatology is non-Indic in origin, Obeyesekere claims, since no evidence of influences have been found between these practitioners of rebirth eschatology and work relating to the Indic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism). The entry of the soul into postdeath life, either in this world or the world of the ancestors, depends not at all, consequently, on one's this-worldly behavior such that "morality does not affect the fate of the soul after death" (p. 74).Obeyesekere turns next to the "transformation" of this rebirth eschatology. It occurs with the introduction of the concept of ethicization, "the processes whereby morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person's destiny after death" (p. 75). It is Obeyesekere's contention that when ethicization is systematically introduced into any rebirth eschatology the latter must logically transform itself into a so-called "karmic eschatology." In other words, this second topological model or conceptual structure, karmic eschatology, the new ethicized rebirth eschatology, says that the otherworld for the dead is not simply a way station for departed souls waiting to be reborn, but rather that otherworld is now a place of retribution and punishment. Kinship affiliation alone no longer determines who goes where after death but moral action does. My own guess is that rebirth eschatology was introduced to answer the question of why the grandchild resembles the deceased grandparent. Karmic eschatology, on the other hand, was probably introduced to solve a more complex and sophisticated puzzle: Why is it, if there really is justice in the universe, that the wicked never get appropriately punished and the good never get sufficiently rewarded? At this stage of transformation, the law of karma, or some other principle of universal justice, now says that everyone gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next, and that rebirth is necessary to make that principle of justice workable.1 In arguing that "rebirth cannot be divorced from ethics; it looks as if it is generated from ethics" (p. 82), Obeyesekere would seem to concur that karmic eschatology was introduced to answer the question: Why do the wicked seem to prosper and the good appear to suffer?Following... (shrink)

With Imagining Karma, Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the very first comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. Exploring in rich detail the beliefs of small-scale societies of West Africa, Melanesia, traditional Siberia, Canada, and the northwest coast of North America, Obeyesekere compares their ideas with those of the ancient and modern Indic civilizations and with the Greek rebirth theories of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Pindar, and Plato. His groundbreaking and authoritative discussion decenters the popular notion that India was (...) the origin and locus of ideas of rebirth. As Obeyesekere compares responses to the most fundamental questions of human existence, he challenges readers to reexamine accepted ideas about death, cosmology, morality, and eschatology. Obeyesekere's comprehensive inquiry shows that diverse societies have come through independent invention or borrowing to believe in reincarnation as an integral part of their larger cosmological systems. The author brings together into a coherent methodological framework the thought of such diverse thinkers as Weber, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche. In a contemporary intellectual context that celebrates difference and cultural relativism, this book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of "family resemblances" and differences across great cultural divides. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage (...) in interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

Socio-spatial diversity of environmental ethics and regional-ethnic identity in northern Brazil is examined with the aim of presenting a culturally complex account of Amazonian worldviews in the making. These worldviews involve the variable merging of Amerindian, riverine peasant and new settler beliefs. Interpretative and empiricist textual strategies are juxtaposed in order to explore both broad human-environmental relations, as seen through the prism of enchanted and disenchanted worldviews, as well as the subtlety of belief and disbelief in specific elements of (...) worldview, which reflect the different social backgrounds of individuals. The first part deals with the cultural significance of what is believed while the second part treats the socio-environmental implications of who believes and why. (shrink)

The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its “ontological turn,” offers a vision of anthropology as “the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.” After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours—in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own—he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such “other” (...) metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, Cannibal Metaphysics is one of the chief works marking anthropology's current return to the theoretical center stage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Roland Littlewood (bio)Keywordsreligion, innovation, psychosis, culture, diagnosisThis is an ambiguous though clinically valuable paper. Jackson and Fulford suggest that the distinction between their two categories, spiritual experience and mental illness, is conventional, yet their emphasis on issues of correct practice from the medical perspective threatens to return both into distinct ontological categories, albeit with a shared phenomenology. I do not understand why any single (...) instance must either be pathological or spiritual, except through clinical and clerical demands for clarity and order.Mental illness and spirituality are not two distinct natural phenomena “out there,” existing independently of human volition. They are both social—cultural if one prefers—ascriptions. Neither has some substantive core whose elucidation through psychophysiological, phenomenological or ultrahuman procedures could enable us to define its essence and thus differentiate it from the other. Neither experience is a self-evident datum. Both are easily susceptible to critiques, either that they do not exist as natural categories, or else that they should more properly be described as something else—as the workings out of social exclusion in the case of mental illness, as cosmological understanding or mass hysteria in the case of spirituality. Neither, I would suggest, can be specified by physiology or ultrahuman interventions respectively, but rather through shared cultural meanings which in turn are experientially validated by the biosocial phenomena themselves. It is not that we need to exclude the possibility of concurrences in brain states, but rather that these cannot specify the meaning and experience of the phenomena.Note that I emphasize “experienced through cultural meanings,” not “influenced by” culture: I do not accept that psychophysiology can have any existence independent of the social world through which it occurs. The psychiatrists’ form/content distinction, an optimistic proxy for nature/culture (Birnbaum 1923; Schneider 1928) may remain a convenient heuristic device, but it has a curious, perhaps doubtful, intellectual history (see the Endnote following).Cross-cultural comparisons argue that local idioms which we might approximate to current Western notions of mental illness and religion are quite varied. And the validity of particular instances of both “spiritual experience” and “psychopathology” may be contested in any society. While the social consequences of a pattern may determine the approbation accorded to a pattern such that patterns recalling chronic schizophrenia [End Page 67] are regarded as a deficit (and here I agree with James [1902] and the two authors), they are not necessarily aligned to categories of physical illness, but may be seen as a spiritual failure or obstruction. Unsuccessful or inappropriate shamanic practice among Amerindian and circumpolar societies is the classic instance (Eliade 1964). Within Western societies, demonic possession may be read by doctors as mental illness. (It is just as much a “spiritual experience”: why introduce the religionist’s distinctions between different types of ultrahuman agency? Compare Maslow on “peak” experiences. The terms “spiritual” and “religious world view” are naturalized idioms of late Christianity rather than cross-culturally valid terms [Tambiah 1990].) But also the converse (Koch 1972). And this depends on our professional interests. Clearly, psychiatrists prefer to perceive the world in a psychopathological idiom, while religious enthusiasts and clergy may favor divine intercession or demonic possession; and a Christian psychiatry not surprisingly may claim to act as arbiter (Sims 1991). Any specific instance may be perceived differently by individuals in accordance with their interests and affiliations.The paper’s terminology—“spiritual psychotic experience,” “genuine spiritual experience”—is confusing in that it does imply realist, not conventional claims (cf. Endnote 1, Jackson and Fulford). It is not necessary. A less laden idiom—such as “statistically or normatively unusual brain states and their experiential correlates” (Littlewood 1993, 257)—may be just too unwieldy for repetition, but I would propose that at this level of detail we need rather four categories depending or not on concordance with (i) something close to psychiatry’s recognition of a major mental illness, and (ii) something like an anthropological notion of religious or spiritual experience (cf. Littlewood 1991):[Table 1]PsychosisReligious ExperiencePresentAbsentPresentABAbsentCDSo Jackson and Fulford’s three cases fall into group “A” if the PSE was scored... (shrink)

The expression “ecological threat” refers to a dynamic of double intrusion: the intrusion of geological history in human history (the intrusion of Gaia) and the intrusion of human history in geological history (the Anthropocene). This double intrusion is founded on a series of major partitions (culture/nature; society/environment) that do not allow for the possibility of communication between the terms of these dichotomies unless it is in the form of reciprocal violation. In the article, the ontology of the flesh is used (...) in order to think the intrusion in a different way compared to the great partitions. Within a chiasmatic logic, the terms of each dichotomy are understood as inseparable moments of the same flesh which institutes a difference – inside/outside – through an infinite movement of folding and torsion. By thinking this common element, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh enters in dialogue with Amerindian mythocosmologies of the “first Anthropocene.” In these mythocosmologies, a humanity-flesh – understood as a transformative, pre-individual, and metastable potential – gives birth, through differentiation, to the multiple points of view that populate the cosmos. This dialogue allows us to think about the socialization of Gaia and to trace the contours of a general ecology understood as a thought that operates between – or beyond – major partitions. (shrink)

Consecutive waves of paleolithic migrants crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America between 80,000 and 7,000 b.c. brought with them the shamanic way of harnessing supernatural powers. This way prevailed until the White intrusion 400 years ago, into the living space of the aboriginal peoples of North America. Wherever European political, religious, and economic dominance was established, shamanic institutions became the focus of negative attention. The shamanic practitioner was variously depicted by governmental and ecclesiastic authorities as a (...) charlatan and imposter or a purveyor of evil influence. Some well-known ethnological and medico-psychological experts have until very recently portrayed the shaman as a mentally deranged person whose “primitive” culture permits the acting-out of psychopathology in a prestigious role, a eurocentric and positivistic fallacy rooted in Western misinterpretations of learned behavior manifested during shamanic rituals involving altered states of consciousness. Legal measures to suppress shamanic ceremonials were taken in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance. This shaman-inspired movement, originating in the Prophet Dance of the Pacific Northwest (Spier 1935), sent waves of hectic sacro-nativistic ceremonial activity through many Amerindian tribes, and finally culminated in the Sioux uprising of 1890 which ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee (cf. Mooney 1896). (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to provide a diffractive reading of the concept of ressentiment through decolonial theory. I would like to see what sort of light this sheds on the psychological undercurrents that impose barriers on colonial and decolonial thought, as well as on the conceptual dynamism of ressentiment. This essay is split into two different experiments in thought. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and Gilles Deleuze. To this (...) end, I will begin by providing an analysis of ressentiment as developed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals and then supplement this with Deleuze’s analysis of ressentiment in Nietzsche & Philosophy. I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I will finish the first experiment by looking at ressentiment through some of the concepts Glissant offers us in the Poetics of Relation. In particular, I will argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all is the sign of a thinking that has overcome ressentiment. The second experiment is to diffract ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that text for our discussion then putting our diffracted version of ressentiment in conversation with Amerindian perspectivism. However, this does not mean that I am aiming at a synthesis of ressentiment with Amerindian perspectivism. Rather, in the spirit of the Brazilian author’s post-structural anthropology, this essay sees only a disjunctive synthesis of the two: a ressentiment becoming-Amerindian perspectivism and an Amerindian perspectivism-becoming-ressentiment (we will focus on developing the former). I hope that, by the end of this experiment, we may have a richer conceptual understanding of ressentiment by offering this concept an image of itself that only our decolonial thinkers and an Amerindian perspective can offer. (shrink)

This paper examines evidentiality and epistemic modality in Quechua narrative discourse from the central highlands of Peru. Huamalíes Quechua falls into the broad Quechua ‘I’ dialect grouping established by Alfredo Torero ; evidential usage here can be compared to that of southern Conchucos Quechua as studied by Diane and Daniel Hintz while it differs in interesting ways from the Quechua ‘II’ dialects of southern Peru as studied by Faller. The analysis focuses on an orally performed traditional narrative that deals with (...) the theme of social interaction between a human protagonist and a spirit being of the ‘other world’. It describes the human protagonist’s gradual realization of the nature of the spirit being with whom he has become involved; evidential and epistemic markings grammatically structure this transition from conjecture, to supposition, to direct witness. The aim is to show how the story’s cultural content, and the way in which evidentials and epistemic modality are operationalized, are mutually entailing. Form and content taken together throw light both on how evidentiality and epistemic modality work in social interaction and on how Amerindian understandings of the interface between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ worlds, and between ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, inform grammatical usage. (shrink)

The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its “ontological turn,” offers a vision of anthropology as “the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.” After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours—in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own—he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such “other” (...) metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, _Cannibal Metaphysics_ is one of the chief works marking anthropology’s current return to the theoretical center stage. (shrink)

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses his work on the Amerindian perspectivism, multinaturalism; the relation between nature, culture and technics in his ethnographic studies; as well as the necessity of a non-anthropocentric definition of technology. He also discusses a haunting futurism of ecological crisis and automation of the Anthropocene, and explores a “strategic primitivism” as survival tool.

One of the central problems of modernity has been the role race plays in politics. However, we are still not sure where the concept of race first emerges in the history of political thought. I argue that the first theorist to lay the grounds for a racial conception in politics is the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. In his effort to defend the 'rights' of the Amerindians, Las Casas constructs racial categories through his rhetorical enterprise. Rather than being (...) a historian, a proto- anthropologist, or a defender of the 'Indians', Las Casas was chiefly a rhetorician of empire. In this enterprise, his account of Amerindian identity, bodies, appearance and culture created a racialized understanding of the newly discovered peoples of the Americas. By examining the birth of race in the writings of Las Casas, we learn of his fundamentally rhetorical project, the centrality of race to modernity, and Las Casas' influence on the early-modern Latin American intellectual tradition. (shrink)

In his latest book, Descola analyzes more than 150 graphic works from all over the world, among which are animal statuettes of the Koryaks, a people of the Kamchatka region of Russia. Those figurines always represent animals lying in wait, ready to jump or already running. Such representations, the anthropologist argues, incline us to pay attention to what motivates and what troubles the animals: “All those animals that we see undertaking an action manifestly intentional or properly responding to unexpected events (...) cannot but impose on the observers of their image the idea that they are moved by aims, that they have an interiority just like humans.” This type of animal figuration is especially common in peoples that in Descola's previous book, Beyond Nature and Culture, he referred to as “animist.”In that book, published in 2005, he described the animist ontology and three other modes of paying attention to continuities and differences between humans and animals: naturalism, analogism, and totemism. At the time, he focused exclusively on the description of those ontologies, as opposed to any study of their evolution. He begins his study of the genesis of ontologies in Les formes du visible by suggesting that each type of graphic work induces a different way of paying attention to psychological and physical continuities and differences. For instance, in contrast to a Koryak statuette, an anatomical plate (to use a simple example not covered in the book) depicts only the body of a dead and dissected specimen. By referring simultaneously to an anatomical description of the human body and to that of another mammal, we tend to see how similar our bodies are. Whereas the animist ontology emphasizes the psychological continuity of humans and animals, the naturalist ontology insists instead on their physical continuity. By producing and using repeatedly some kinds of graphic works, each society comes to favor one or another ontology, one or another way of paying attention to the world. (Descola never says so in these words, but what he seems to mean by ontologies are modes of attention).Descola's questions in this new book are engaging: What do images make us pay attention to? What modes of attention do images stimulate? Each case study selected by the author is, moreover, fascinating in itself: an Amerindian mask, an Aboriginal painting on a piece of bark, a sixteenth-century Mongolian drawing of an elephant. The answers offered for the questions asked are unfortunately always already canvassed by the theory of the four ontologies. In previous work, Descola built that theory based on discursive and ethnographic material; sometimes we are left with the impression that images (as opposed to spoken words) do not make any significant difference, since they did not motivate him to modify in any way his theory in his new book.In addition, Descola's framework brings him to focus only on a particular aspect of what images induce in our modes of attention: in his thinking, ontologies are defined solely by the way we notice (or do not notice) differences and continuities between beings on two levels, physical and psychological, which respectively he terms the exteriority and the interiority of beings. By combining these two pairs of opposing features (continuity/difference, interiority/exteriority), he constitutes his four ontologies. But depictions can produce more fine-grained ontologies by making us pay attention to, say, the separation or the blending of bodies, the stability or fluidity of souls, the equality or inequality of power between beings. Moment by moment, while reading Descola, we find ourselves tied to his four ontologies and indeed find it almost impossible to imagine ontologies other than the four he has set out. In a structuralist vein, he even presents that number as a necessary, logical, and cognitive limit to the construction of ontologies. Nevertheless, by opening the analysis of the modes of attention to more than just the double pair of features picked out by the anthropologist, we could well unearth more diversified ontologies, induced by images (and by other cultural and technical particulars). We could detect, in other words, more than four modes of paying attention to our environment and to our companion beings. (shrink)

During our current free market era, a prevailing utilitarian ethics centered on monetary cost benefit analyses continues overriding incessantly a plethora of diverse forms of ecological knowledge and ethics present in the communities of South America, and other regions of the world. For the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and speaks only one of eleven dominant languages, loosing contact with the vast biodiversity and the 7,000 languages that are still spoken (...) around the planet. This global urban enclosure and biocultural homogenization generates physical barriers and conceptual barriers that hinder the understanding of the inextricable links between the habitats of a region, the inhabitants and their habits. However, these vital links are acutely recognized in at least three families of worldviews: contemporary ecological sciences, ancestral Amerindian ecological knowledge, and Western pre-Socratic philosophical roots expressed in the archaic meaning of ethos, and ethics. South American post-Columbian history shows that large-scale exploitation, as well as monocultures that replace native habitats, have been repeatedly associated with ephemeral economic booms that left behind degraded social and ecological environments. A historical analysis of post-Columbian Chile illustrates how a unique mosaic of ecosystems and biological species, cultures, and languages have been progressively replaced by a few biological species and a uniform language and culture. These biocultural homogenization processes are the outcome of a violent conquest, overpowering the resistance of local inhabitants, and today’s scale of violent suppression of biological and cultural diversity is greater than ever. Instead of a post-colonial period we are living in the middle of an ultra-colonial era. To counterbalance these trends, at the southern end of the Americas, through inter-institutional and international collaborations led by the Chilean University of Magallanes and the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity and the University of North Texas in the US, we developed a methodological approach that we call “field environmental philosophy.". (shrink)

On the occasion of Peru’s Independence, the champions of the Creole nation elevated the Inca State Indian to the status of a respectable ancestor, thus eliminating the Amerindian historicity of the population. The archaeological remains provide support to an indigenist ideology that ignores the sociological Indian, considered to be ontologically inferior. Today, these Inca vestiges contribute to the construction of the national narrative: the Inca solar cult is thus reinvented on the site of Sacsayhuaman. To what extent can the (...) work of archaeologists serve to corroborate partisan ideologies? The presidents of the Peruvian and Bolivian Republics were inducted as pre-Hispanic rulers, the first on the Inca site of Machu Picchu, the second at the Tiwanaku Sun gate. To what extent can the vestiges of a civilization be instrumentalized by politics? The Inca sites are now assailed by New Age mystics from the United States and Europe under the leadership of local neo-shamans. They are indeed reputed to carry positive “energy”, one that is exploited by mystical tourism agencies. To what extent can the heritage of the nation, maintained by public services, be the object of private profits, ideologies that may be sectarian and possibly irreparable damages? In the culture of traditional Andean communities, the pre-Hispanic ruins had a classificatory and symbolic function. This function disappears when the setting of a myth is replaced by a historical site. How can we respect the indigenous perception of archaeological remains? These are the ethical questions that this article seeks to raise on the basis of specific and concrete cases of archaeological sites on which the author has carried out excavations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 545 Congratulations to the publisher must be qualified only with regret that a work so valuable to students should be available only in a hardback edition costing nearly twenty dollars. Wabash College Crawfordsville, Indiana WILLIAM c. PLACHER God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. By MEROLD WESTPHAL. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Pp. xiv+ 305. $27.50. At each stage of its history existential thought has (...) been deeply engaged with the phenomena of religion. However, the appeal to the existence has produced starkly opposed responses to the question of the significance of religion. The original and most obvious contrast is that between Kierkegaard and his near-conternpomry, Nietzsche. Where the first reflects on the existence of the " single one " as a way of defending religious consciousness against Hegelian rationalism; the latter makes a similar turn to existence (as the will to power of life) precisely in order to " unmask " the " lies " that tempt one to the religious life. Or, more recently, one could contrast the efforts of Marcel and Bultmann, who find in existential thinking the key to a deeper appreciation of traditional religiosity, with the resolutely atheistic project of Sartre, for whom "we are in a situation where there are only human beings," where "even if God existed it wouldn't make any difference." In spite of such controversy over the value of religion, the philosophical approach to religion in terms of existence has had the beneficial effect of shifting the locus of questioning from the cognitive status of religious utterances to the problem of the meaning of the religious life. An existentail approach does not exhaust itself in analyzing the evidential structure of propositions about God, the soul, etc., as though religion were simply a mode of cognition, but rather explores the question of "what it is (means) to be religious." In our own time Paul Ricoeur has taken up this issue in a way that seeks to do justice both to the critical moment in existential thought and to its promise of a deepened religious sensibility. Along with a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (grounded in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) Ricoeur calls for a "hermeneutics of recovery " which would reinvest the " symbolism of the sacred " with a depth drawn from consciousness of our existential situation. It is in the horizon of this latter project that we may locate Merold Westphal's sig- 546 BOOK REVIEWS nificant contribution, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. This book, addressed to a general audience of believer and unbeliever alike, has many virtues. While it draws judiciously from the central works of existentialism and phenomenology, as well as from a wide variety of literature on the world's religions. it is written in clear and engaging prose, entirely free from tedious jargon. And while vYestphal's sympathies are clearly with those who find a continued vitality in religious eonsciousness today, his book is written in the spirit of inquiry; it gracefully avoids the twin dangers of polemics and devotionality. He is sensitive to objections without allowing them to paralyze his arguments, and he offers some bold, important generalizations without being blind to the limits of his evidence. Finally, the book contains original phenomenological investigations, striving after eidetic insight through study of personal experience, world literature, and (mostly standard) works on other cultures and their religious life (including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, various forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Amerindian religions). Because Westphal draws on such a diversity of materials, there are likely to be many points with which the specialist will take issue. But an ad.equate phenomenology of religion must tackle this diversity, and Westphal has certainly given us one of the most accessible examples of such an enterprise. Westphal's approach to the existential question-What does it mean to be religious ~-is phenomenolog'ical. This means, first, that we are interested in the significance of religion from the descriptive first person perspective of the believing soul. The believing soul (a term borrowed from Ricoeur) is not simply "one who believes or affirms this or that proposition," but one. "who sees things in a certain way" (257). vYe are concerned here with a form... (shrink)

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; renewed attention to the institutional environments of cultural studies; (...) and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

This article critically examines common criticisms of Saudi Arabia’s sports strategy, particularly its impact on professional football. Central to Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is a significant investment in sports, demonstrated by hosting major international events and acquiring both domestic and foreign sports teams. Critics argue that this approach risks undermining football as a sport, and some claim that foreign players who join Saudi clubs engage in morally questionable behavior. This article challenges these critiques. While acknowledging the moral shortcomings of Saudi (...) Arabia’s political system, it contends that the prevailing criticisms about state-owned clubs ‘ruining’ football and the moral culpability of foreign players are flawed. A key conclusion is that the commercial interactions of foreign football players (e.g. Ronaldo) and multinational corporations (e.g. IKEA) with the Saudi regime must be assessed consistently. These interactions are either all morally permissible or all morally impermissible; there is no defensible middle ground for differing moral evaluations. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce donc que la musique des aliens ou pour les aliens? Des cinq notes de la mélodie de Rencontres du troisième type aux explorations sonores de Sun Ra ou des intelligents dansants de l’électro, elle n’est peut-être que l’expression la plus accomplie d’une tendance très humaine à projeter sur l’extraterrestre certains reflets plus ou moins déformés de soi, surjouant quelque insaisissable mystère, révélation ou écart incompressible venu de l’ailleurs pour retrouver finalement, tout là-bas, une bribe d’ici.

This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

Following the Gaza events of 2023/24, this study examines how Palestinians understand mass death and mass destruction, exploring how can such a humanitarian catastrophe be framed within a coherent narrative. The focus is on the concept of sacrifice, analysed through a theoretical framework that distinguishes between meaningful sacrifices and absurd, meaningless deaths that categorises the victims as homo-sacer. Hence, this study aims to investigate the language and literature of the Palestinian people that regards to the 2023/24 Gaza events, and the (...) way it re-conceptualises the mass death and destruction and its victims, between the concepts of sacrifice and homo-sacer. A sample of 120 literary and creative texts from the cultural magazine ‘Fusha for Palestinian Culture,’,Footnote1 was examined using the methodology of thematic analysis. Four primary themes emerged from the texts: the active documentation, the speed and intensity of death and destruction, the form of death, namely handling of bodies and burial rituals, and lastly the implementation of myths from various traditions, including the duality of mythologising and demythologising Gaza and its inhabitants. I conclude that these four themes were elemental in the rhetoric process of sanctification of the mass and random death and destruction. (shrink)

SummaryThe problem of converting the Amerindian world to Catholicism was given a radically new solution, both at a theoretical and a missionary level, by the Jesuit Acosta: since American societies were of a completely different nature to Mediterranean ones, the preaching of the Gospel, too, had to be different from the classical approach. He gave a new definition to both preaching and American societies, especially the latter's religion and social organisation. Acosta's approach to American sauvagerie was pioneering; he conceptualised (...) ideas that had never been thought of before. There existed societies which were neither barbarous nor political (like the empires of Incan Peru and Aztec Mexico), which nonetheless had social organisation. With regard to their religious life, Acosta maintained that cult and belief without faith was not a sign of atheism, but of an early form of religion. These two reassessments gave rise to a new image of the savage society, which attained enormous success, even outside the missionary world. Fitting the theological structure into the secularised theories of radical enlightenment, both Locke and Hume had recourse to the ethnologic aspects which Acosta had set out. (shrink)

This work documents the ethical dilemmas faced by anthropologists and researchers in general when investigating Amerindian communities.

This paper examines the phenomenon of individual Athenians adopting elements of Persian clothing, making use of exotic items such as gold and silver drinking vessels, and the like, by comparison to what I argue is a similar sort of contact and exchange involving the European fabric trade and evolving standards of dress and fashion in the Early Modern Atlantic. The ancient literary and archaeological sources discussed document the reaction of a relatively insignificant, marginal people to the dress practices of a (...) more powerful and arguably far more sophisticated imperial power. I suggest that an appreciation of the character and intentions of the much better documented encounter between the English court and Amerindian ambassadors who visited it in the early 18th century provides a potentially useful corrective to the indigenous perspective of our Athenian sources. (shrink)