laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale

Peter William Skafish

Self-Presentation

I am writing to apply for a FAPESP Researcher Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year for
collaborative research at the Department of Anthropology at the Universidade de So Paulo.

I currently hold the position of Matre de Confrences associ at the Collge de France, a research-
only professorship reserved for invited foreign scholars. I was previously an Andrew W. Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University and,
prior to that, a Fondation Fyssen postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire dAnthropologie Sociale, also
at the Collge de France. My research, undertaken from the intersection of sociocultural
anthropology and continental philosophy, experimentally develops an anthropology of concepts in
order to address broad questions of subjectivity, modernity, science, religion, and ontology as these
are raised by United States spirit mediums known as channels. More recently, I have also begun
working on problems of ecology, animism, human-nonhuman relations, and planetarity raised by
channels.

I am interested in further developing my work at the Universidade de So Paulo because its

Anthropology Department is one of just a handful in the world where the contemporary dialogue
between anthropology and philosophy is being advanced, and the likelihood of productive, reciprocal
exchange is thus high. Brazilian anthropology, moreover, has played a crucial role in that dialogue,
and I am thus seeking to continue and strengthen it by forging new but enduring institutional bonds
between Brazilian anthropologists and philosophers and my own colleagues in the United States,
France, and Canada.

Introduction

What I mean by an anthropology of concepts is an anthropology concerned with the scientific,

theoretical, and philosophical ideas to be found in traditions, cosmologies, and cultural spaces
other to those of modernity, and the resources they offer for thinking reality outside what the large
part of modern thought has about it. Practically, this means that I study specific discourses and their
internal logics, styles of reasoning, and meanings (much more than I do practices and everyday life),
and the difference between how they and modern modes of thought define and approach problems.
Methodologically, I do this by isolating the concepts present in them, following the thinking done on
their basis, and analyzing how it exceeds the terms and reasoning of the social and critical theories
that would normally be used to interpret it. Theoretically, my examination of this discrepancy draws
on classic anthropology while connecting it to contemporary theoretical debates: in tandem with
anthropologists working in the disciplines ontological turn, I rehabilitate considerations of alterity in
thinkers like Mauss and Lvi-Strauss to show that simply understanding other modes of thought in
the above way requires us, additionally, to make significant revisions to our own concepts. Politically,
finally, putting the concepts of people(s) outside official thought on equal footing with those of
scientists and philosophers further reorients thinking away from Europe by making it
polytraditionalmodern thought, whether from center or margin, does not carry final authorityand
thus relevant to a truly multiversal world.

I arrived at this approach while working with channels, spirit mediums active during the moment of
New Age religion and after, and discovering that they were often formidable speculative thinkers. At
the same time I was doing fieldwork with them in the San Francisco area, I began writing on the 20+
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 laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale
published works of a founding figure of channeling by the name of Jane Roberts, on whom my book
manuscript focuses. She was famous in the 1970s as the medium for a personality named Seth,
who dictated over a dozen books through her and thereby helped launch the New Age (which she
nonetheless cannot easily be placed in). After a long period of being perplexed by the esoteric
concerns and terminology of these texts, I finally realized that they contain ideas about the psyche,
cosmology, and even anthropology profound enough to demand treating them as a body of rigorous
thoughtone Roberts herself called conceptual, theoretical, and metaphysicalthat offers on its
own terms novel ideas entirely relevant to the human sciences. However, it also became apparent
that showing this would require much less an analysis of the social and historical conditions of her
thinking than approaching from its own perspective the questions it raises. The results, as outlined
below concern some central problems of anthropological theory today.

Project Proposal

My research to date on Jane Roberts has yielded a series of papers of her, a book manuscript (in
progress), and a series of related theoretical papers on the implications of an anthropology of
concepts for social theory and continental philosophy. (Please see my CV.) My foremost goal while in
residence at USP would be to extend work on both projects through collaborative research and
dialogue, talks given in the Department of Anthropology and elsewhere (see schedule), and a
possible graduate seminar, co-taught with Renato Sztutman, on anthropology and philosophy. I will
focus on the following topics.

A. Jane Roberts and Channeling

(1.) Consciousness and Subjectivity. Once I began experimenting with the approach to anthropology
outlined above, I was able to discern a truly remarkable thing about Roberts: she hit upon inventive
conceptions of consciousness and the subject not already present in any body of theory in the human
sciences. After some years of channeling in a way that involved her consciousness being, in her
words, absent, to the side, and on hold, Roberts started to experience her trances as states in
which she remained partially displaced while finding part of her consciousness present to and
partially coinciding with the other current of thought and speech that was Seth. As the years went
by, she dubbed this state other-consciousness in order to capture how it involved, as she put it, the
merger of ordinary, apperceptive consciousness with a foreign current of thought that nonetheless
paradoxically retained its alien status. If taken only as a rather singular cultural interpretation of a
universal psychological condition, like dissociation of possession, the broad implications of this idea
could be lost. But when viewed from a more comparative vantage, a strange fact emerges. Robertss
understanding of consciousness is very much at odds with the claim, so important both to
psychoanalysis and nearly the whole generation of French theory, that states of madness,
possession, and unconscious thought involve the occlusion of the subject, in the sense of an
individual always capable, in principle, of possessing its thoughts and actions. She instead managed
to conceive how subjectivity can change in them from a state of cognitive self-possession, or
apperception, to one in which the self also identifies with thoughts radically not its own but without
absorbing and cancelling their otherness. To put things differently, unlike philosophers like Derrida
and Deleuze, who thought experiences of alterity mark the impossibility or limit of subjectivity,
Roberts saw them as leading to another kind of consciousness whose basic form involves being
simultaneously oneself and another. She thereby articulated, I argue, a notion of the subject that may
prove to be of serious importance for reactualizing postructuralist theories of immanence and
difference, both within anthropology and beyond.

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 laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale
However apparently abstract, this concept concerns more familiar matters in a way that holds broad
implications for key theoretical debatesabout modernity, secularity, and ontologyin contemporary
anthropology. I make what I intend to be critical interventions in all three debates as follows.

(2) The Anthropology of Modernity. I take as my point of departure the question of whether Robertss
notion of subjectivity can be understood, as a certain current of U.S. anthropology would have it,
through a historico-genealogical approach concerned with technoscience and the contemporary. In
order to do this, I show that her initial response to Seths appearanceto seek confirmation from
psychoanalysts that he was not a hysterical second personalityundermines the claim, which both
the facts and certain authorities suggest, that channeling could be an effect of the psychiatry of
multiple personality disorder (both became widespread in the same decades). I argue that the chief
link between the phenomena lies not at all, as Ian Hackings genealogy of the disorder could lead one
to think, in the role that the psychiatric category of multiple personality might have played in the wide
proliferation of channeling during the 1980s and 1990s. Rather, it lies in the fact that 19th century
psychology was forced to create with the diagnosis a secular idiom for preexisting mediumistic and
possession behaviors that were thus far more the condition of later clinical multiple personality than
shifts in scientific and medical knowledge. In brief, channeling turns out to be an instance of a kind of
spirit possession that the psychiatry of multiple personality (and perhaps in certain ways the
psychoanalysis of hysteria!) derives from, not the other way around. Yet if this is the case, it raises
the question of why a thinker as perspicuous as Hacking fails to notice it. My response is that a
Foucaultian historical ontology like his takes as too self-evident modernity and its categories to be
capable of perceiving when elements of them arise from worlds radically foreign to them. The solution
I propose is to adopt a more truly anthropological approach: a horizontal and comparative method
that better estranges modernity from itself by contrasting it with ontologies far more divergent than
those in its own past.

(3) Secularity. I begin developing such an approach by following an insight from the anthropology of
secularism and then proposing a critical revision of it. Rather than accept that a figure like Roberts is
simply religious in nature, I situate her in a field of thought that emerged midcentury at the
intersection of religion, the natural sciences, and literature (it includes figures as various as Philipp
Dick, James Merrill, and Carlos Castaeda). A defining trait of this sort of thought is a relativism,
borrowed from anthropology and science fiction, that treats the natural sciences and supernaturalist
religion alike as being only partially valid, and then reckons with the general consequences for how
modernity carves up reality. Instead of arguing, however, that this pluralistic religion is just another
compromise with political liberalism, I show how in Roberts hands it turns representational,
multicultural pluralism on its head by radicalizing its extent and removing its foundations. By
conducting quasi-scientific experiments (a term I do not use casually) in order to conceive
manifestations of her spirits, Roberts was led to discard the idea that nature, the human, and the
divine are basic substances composing reality, and even decided that the first two are not the basis
for distinguishing between cultures. In the absence of these categories, she proposed treating
various kinds of nonhumans, humans, and supranaturals as belonging to specific worlds, each of
which offers a perspective on how reality is arranged that is distinct from that of moderns. Religion
thus went in her thought from being, according to the classic modern categories, natural or
revealed to a sort of anthropology, but in reverse: modernity is characterized by Seth from the
outside, with the aim of transforming the foundations and content of its thinking.

(4) Anthropology, Ontology and Difference. From there, I go on to show how Roberts invented novel
metaphysical coordinates in order to accomplish this. My focus is on the way she contrasted a series
of core modern concepts, including the person, the human, time, and the universe, with what her
multiplied structure of subjectivity told her about other, divergent notions of them, both actual and
possible. Forms of multipersonhood, where either a single body accommodates several selves or
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 laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale
one self several bodies, not only in her view fatally undermine the universality ascribed to the one
self/one body equation of modernity; they also expose the way it conceives collective existence and
thereby divides proper, viable humanity from both the marginally human and the nonhuman. By
recasting the modern individual as a rare exception to a broader kind of personhood that is
essentially multiple, Roberts was able to engage in a far-reaching critique of modern ontology, and a
recharacterization of many of its central terms: humans become just one kind of sentient being;
ecology and politics a way of engaging them as persons; sequential, linear time a means of
segregating us from moments in which other ontological arrangements prevail (versus a plural time in
which those moments can be experienced simultaneously), and the natural universe just one world in
a decentralized multiverse. Now as metaphysical, fantastic, and sometimes difficult as these ideas
are, their stakes are quite high: beyond launching a novel critique of modernity, they make a strong
case for why any truly relevant philosophy or body of theory must be engaged with anthropology and
the decolonization of the structures of human scientific thoughta point I make by reading major
theorists through Jane Roberts, rather than vice versa.

B. Anthropological Theory

Apart from work on articles and my book manuscript, I have also played a significant role in
developing ontological thought in anthropology through collaborative projects. In recent years, I did
this through two major translations: an English version of the philosopher Catherine Malabous Le
Change Heidegger: Du fantastique en philosophie, which bears in its own way on the relation
between divergent modes of thought, and now Eduardo Viveiros de Castros Mtaphysiques
Cannibales: Lignes pour une anthropologie post-structurel, the work that most develops the idea of
anthropology as a conceptual project, and that may become a major reference in anthropological
theory. I also organized with Viveiros de Castro (with whom I conceived the project), two young
French philosophers, and the institutional support of Philippe Descola a colloquium at le Centre
Culturel Internationale de Cerisy entitled Mtaphysiques Compares: Philosophie lpreuve
danthropologie. It was held in July 2013 and brought together a number of leading anthropologists,
philosophers, and comparativists working at the intersection of anthropology, ontology, and
comparison, including Marilyn Strathern, Veena Das, Elizabeth Povinelli, Stefania Pandolfo, Isabelle
Stengers, Bruno Latour, Patrice Maniglier, and Martin Holbraad. My French co-organizers and I are
currently editing the papers into a volume titled Comparative Metaphysics: The Ontological Turn in
Anthropology (Rowan Little International 2016), which is the first collective book, with most of the key
figures, on what is arguably one of the most important contemporary theoretical paradigms in
anthropology. Finally, I have also been writing directly on some of the above material, with full-length
texts on Viveiros de Castro (the introduction to Cannibal Metaphysics) and Philippe Descolas
Beyond Nature and Culture, and the introduction to our volume complete. More will follow.

My talks, course, and co-taught seminar would be drawn from this theoretical line of work as much as
from my ethnographic research, focusing on the general theoretical implications for philosophy,
anthropology, and other human sciences.

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