ECOLOGIES OF PARTICIPATION:

IN BETWEEN SHAMANS, DIVINERS, AND METAPHYSICIANS

by

Zayin Lawrence Cabot

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty

of the California Institute of Integral Studies

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in East-West Psychology

California Institute of Integral Studies

San Francisco, CA

2013
 UMI Number: 3606921

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 CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read ECOLOGIES OF PARTICIPATION: IN

BETWEEN SHAMANS, DIVINERS, AND METAPHYSICIANS by Zayin

Lawrence Cabot, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving

a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of

Philosophy in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Jorge N. Ferrer, PhD, Chair

Professor East-West Psychology

Jacob H. Sherman, PhD

Assistant Professor Philosophy and Religion

Michel Weber, PhD

President Center for Philosophical Practice,
Chromatiques Whiteheadiennes
© 2013 Zayin Lawrence Cabot
Zayin Lawrence Cabot
California Institute of Integral Studies, 2013
Jorge N. Ferrer PhD East-West Psychology, Committee Chair

ECOLOGIES OF PARTICIPATION:
IN BETWEEN DIVINERS, SHAMANS, AND METAPHYSICIANS

ABSTRACT

This dissertation revolves around the riddle of how to honor seemingly

disparate traditions such as West African (Dagara) divinatory practices and

Western philosophical praxis. The project, following the participatory approach

of Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, sets out to honor these differences by

embracing the agapeic-erotic metaphysics of William Desmond, and in so doing

delimits modern distinctions between science, philosophy, religion, and

anthropology. Rather than move beyond the important scholarly contributions of

these fields, however, this dissertation embarks on an interdisciplinary

adventure between these traditions by critically reading the work of Philippe

Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in parallel with Desmond. This project

articulates multiple ecologies of participation, with totemism, animism, and

naturalism foremost among them. It clarifies how Descola and Viveiros de

Castro’s robust reading of animist/Amerindian shamanic perspectivism is in

keeping with Ferrer and Sherman’s participatory enaction. It is critical of Viveiros

de Castro’s dismissal of totemism as overly abstract, as well as Descola’s

conflation of naturalism solely with post-Enlightenment thought, and his broad

use of the category of analogism to include disparate traditions such as Vedic,

Ancient Chinese, Greek, West African, and Central American thought. By way of

iv
clarifying this critique, this dissertation applies the same participatory

understanding offered to animism by Descola and Viveiros de Castro to both

totemic (divinatory) and naturalist (metaphysical/philosophical) enactions,

placing all three under the broader heading of ecological perspectivism. The

subsequent comparative lens allows for a more balanced reading of these three

ecologies by broadening the use of these terms. By including the work of

Desmond, it also answers important concerns leveled by critics regarding the

metaphysical underpinnings of Descola and Viveiros de Castro’s assertions

regarding ontological relativity. In so doing, this project sets the stage for

renewed dialogue between what are often seen as radically divergent traditions

(e.g., the animism of the Achuar, the totemism of the Guugu Yimithirr, and the

naturalism of modern science).

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract .................................................................................................................. iv

List of Tables ....................................................................................................... viii

Chapter 1: Idiocy and Intimacy: An Introduction ................................................... 1

Married Life, Scholarship, and Participatory Communication ........................... 1

A Note on a Participatory Approach ................................................................. 19

Adventures in Interdisciplinary Method and Intimate Metaphysics ................. 26

Desmond’s Metaphysics: A Fourfold Way....................................................... 39

Chapter 2: Naturalism ........................................................................................... 61

Latour’s (Post)Modern Constitution ................................................................. 61

(Post)Modern Naturalism.................................................................................. 67

Analogy, Linguistic Anthropology, and Limitations on Analytic Naturalism . 72

Analytic Naturalism, Functional Pluralism, and Between ................................ 84

Chapter 3: Ecologies of Participation ................................................................... 96

Ecologies Instead of Ontologies ....................................................................... 96

Descola’s Anthropology: A Fourfold Way ..................................................... 103

A Critical Reading of Descola’s Ecologies .................................................... 107

Descola and Desmond: A First Glance ...................................................... 107

Linguistic vs. Ontological Relativity and a Primary Form Of Participation

..................................................................................................................... 117

Totemism and Polarity ................................................................................ 137

Totemism: Absolute Frames of Reference and Polarity ............................. 144

Analogies and Totemism ............................................................................. 149

vi
 Descola’s Invention of Analogism .............................................................. 157

Ecologies of Participation: A Fivefold Way ............................................... 168

Ecological Perspectivism ................................................................................ 169

Chapter 4: Cannibalism, Conversion, and Comparative Studies ........................ 180

My Life Among Contemporary Cannibals and Dagara Elders ....................... 180

Cannibalism, Relativism, and Multiple Ecologies .......................................... 192

Predation Before Guesthood in Comparative Studies .................................... 203

Cannibals, Missionaries, and Atheists ............................................................ 218

Inviting the Cannibal/Missionary In, A Cross-Ecological Guest Protocol ..... 224

Chapter 5: Ecological Perspectivism and Guest Protocols ................................. 230

Thinking Through Things ............................................................................... 230

Recursive Anthropology as a Guest Protocol ................................................. 241

Chapter 6: A Participatory Approach ................................................................. 272

Scholarly-Commuters, Alterity, and the Academy ......................................... 272

Transformation and Transspecific Scholars.................................................... 293

Following Lévy-Bruhl’s Example .................................................................. 302

The Enactive Approach and Participatory Evolution ..................................... 325

Chapter 7: Conclusion......................................................................................... 337

References ........................................................................................................... 352

vii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Descola's Ontologies............................................................................. 105  

Table 2: Levinson's Three Main Frames of Reference ....................................... 120  
Table 3: Levinson's Frames of Reference Compared Across Sample Languages
..................................................................................................................... 126  
Table 4: Ecological Perspectivism ...................................................................... 178  

viii
 Chapter 1: Idiocy and Intimacy: An Introduction

Married Life, Scholarship, and Participatory Communication

Let me just get this out now. To my mind, participation equals

communication. Philosophy, as in the search for wisdom, also requires

communication, especially with regard to our shared planetary predicament. As I

argue in these pages, our planetary predicament requires not only cross-cultural

communication, but cross-ecological communication. This last statement requires

the many pages that follow to unpack, but before doing so I feel it appropriate to

begin with a consideration of something far more ubiquitous, though maybe no

less difficult – cross-gender communication. I consider here my own attempts at

cross-gender communication within the context of my own life and eventual

marriage. In order to bring clarity to this discussion I utilize a set of concepts

borrowed from contemporary metaphysician William Desmond.

Desmond grounds his speculative work by recourse to three very different

reactions to lived experience: astonishment (agape), perplexity (eros), and

1
curiosity (abstractions that are not agapeic or erotic). For Desmond philosophy

and life begins with and is grounded in the shock of a profound and intimate

otherness that overwhelms, rends, and fascinates with its “too-much-ness.” He

understands this overwhelming intimacy as the play of agapeic union that is

beyond any attempts at understanding and determination, and hence is

experienced as overdetermined. It is crucial from the start to sit with astonishment.

Astonishment, as long as it holds, maintains the overwhelming overabundance of

otherness that has constellated the shock. Desmond references this astonishment

1
as “innocence,” agapeic in nature, that spontaneously transcends toward other that

maintains alterity as otherness, rather than seeking to limit, understand, consume,

or overcome. Desmond’s agape is largely in keeping with the very influential

work of Anders Nygren who tells us agape is: “God is agape,” “[that] comes
2
down,” “overflowing,” “spontaneous,” and “unmotivated.”

For Desmond, astonishing intimacy gives way to the erotic impulses and

singularity of idiocy. By idiocy Desmond points to particular privacies with

overabundance and agape. He writes, “There is a certain excess of being

characteristic of what it means to be a self, which can never be completely

objectified in an entirely determinate way. This is an affirmative

3
overdetermination.” This is affirmative overdetermination, stated elsewhere as

self-determination and/or dialectic, denotes idiocy. Idiocy, eros, and perplexity

arise when the hyperbolic perturbations of original excess become troubling and

require attempts at equilibrium, meaning, and some semblance of stability. While

the differences between agape and eros articulated by Desmond are helpful and

adopted in these pages, it must be noted that Desmond’s distinction and the strong
4
opposition set up between the two is not unproblematic. Following Nygren, it

could be argued that Desmond maintains an overemphasis on the status of

descending as well as Christian agape over and against ascending and Greek eros.

Yet it is not entirely clear to what extent Desmond maintains Nygren’s distinction,
5
a strong opposition that Thomism does not maintain. I find these two expressions

(eros and agape) deeply interrelated, and continue to find Desmond’s work

extremely helpful in this light. Eros can be understood as a complex tension that

2
nurtures both a strong self-determination alongside a patience with otherness and

radical alterity.

The idiocy of eros maintains patience with indeterminacy, and an ability to

be with the original excess of intimacy while seeking some modicum of self-

determination. Rather than being wholly overcome by this excess, the perplexed

seeks to overcome, not the other, but its own growing erotic tensions. There is an

attempt to be with that is crucial here. Rather than agape and astonishment, idiocy

underscores eros and a perplexed patience and drive to be with the shock of

otherness is a more singular way. It must be clarified that eros does not over

emphasize unity, determination, or comprehensive answers. When agape and eros

prove to be too much, something new enters into the equation, curiosity.

Curiosity, for Desmond, speaks to a turning away from agapeic intimacy

and the troubling perplexity of eros, toward particularity, determination, and

comprehension. “Curiosity is not vague,” writes Desmond, “though it may…

6
greedily extend itself to everything coming within its purview.” Here definite

questions and the potential for definite answers arise. Curiosity speaks to an

attempt at complete comprehension and theoretical unification (univocity for

Desmond). Much more will be said about these terms throughout these pages, but

for now I mean only to point to the distinctions between intimacy, idiocy, and

(Desmond’s use of the term) curiosity. Our contemporary academy all too often

tends toward the latter, leading to the degeneration of intimacy and a clear lack of

patience with eros and indeterminacy. All too often we seek clear and distinct

3
answers, the kind of answers that I have found tend not to have lasting affect in

the context of my home life and marriage, to which I now turn.

Before landing on marriage and gender, I considered many other ways of

grounding the style of communication that I flesh out in the pages in my own

daily life. I was sure that this was important, for if I cannot communicate or build

working relationships across differences, whatever they may be, in my daily

relationships, who am I to theorize about such things? In considering what

communication might mean, I thought of talks around my family’s dinner table

when I was growing up. There was a type of discourse that was allowed because

there was a foundation of unconditional acceptance that underlay whatever

difficult or illuminating struggles might arise in our regular conversations.

Certainly not all families share this ground, but I was fortunate enough to have

experienced this unconditional love as a child growing up. But this is not quite the

kind of participation that I am after in these pages.

This is largely because, at the end of the day, though we all love each

other very much, there is no commitment within this particular family dynamic

whereby we might overtly challenge one another in such a way that the world,

assumptions, or reality of the other might be radically changed in some way. Such

change could happen, but it is not really part of the agreement. It is also important

to remember that as a family we shared certain basic assumptions, and so our

communication with alterity, real difference, was also limited in important ways.

Recognizing the limits of this particular example of communication led me to

think of other options, and in the consideration of different relationships that I

4
have in my life, the obvious choice became the relationship that I have with my

wife, Elizabeth.

Again, I am well aware that there are any numbers of ways to share in a

relationship with one’s wife, husband, or partner. And in acknowledging this, I

am pointing the way toward a very particular form of relationship. By way of

clarifying the relationship I am considering, I must first admit that I was not

exactly the most mature teenager, if such a thing even exists. My life did not

automatically move toward maturity as I became a young man either. I enjoyed a

certain insight into the human condition, but I also enjoyed several forms of

largess, including but not limited to my relationships with both women and men.

It therefore came as something of a surprise – complete with more than a little

consternation – when I began to find my voice as a man, a lover, and a friend.

Cutting to the grist of this story, as I grew older I had the experience of

three relatively consecutive long-term relationships that spanned my later twenties

and on into my thirties. In the first relationship, I felt that I had found something,

some strength and knowledge within myself that was both particularly mine, and

at the same time applicable to the wider world. This was really the first adult

relationship that either my partner or I had been in, and for various reasons it did

not work. During this time, however, I was able to begin to practice a newly

realized strength of voice. Following Desmond’s terminology introduced above,

we could say that I was in touch with at least one expression of my own idiocy. I

was turning toward something larger than myself (an agapeic overabundance of

intimacy), and finding my own voice in doing so (my own form of patience

5
perplexity). As I did so, I was routinely rebuffed, and met with varying degrees of

hostility. As we were both trying to figure all this out, I often answered in kind.

We fell into habitual patterns that had far less to do with astonishment (intimacy)

and perplexity (idiocy), than to do with inherited and rather static cultural

conventions (curiosities). In the end we went our separate ways.

The next relationship took a decidedly different turn. I really felt that I had

found my voice, a kind of strength that I attributed to the masculine aspects of my

personality. The woman that I was dating at the time identified very strongly as a

woman of color. She shared with me that I was the “safest white man” that she

had met, and that she felt the freedom to share things that she had never shared

with someone who was not a person of color before. What followed was more

than a little rough on both of us. We began a brutal couple of years during which

time I vacillated between her overt statements relative to my basic openness and

safety regarding issues of privilege and race, and her subtle experience of me as

rapist, racist, and patriarchal colonizer.

As the relationship progressed, we got more and more lost in the trauma

(both personal and cultural) that underlay our attempts at communication. This

relationship did not exactly end well. I was left traumatized, convinced that I was

in fact all of these things. As my roommates at the time (an Indian man, a white

man, and a woman who was part Jordanian and part Palestinian) sat me down,

they shared with me something that struck a cord. “If you are all of these things,”

they told me, “then we are all in a lot of trouble.” For as it turned out, they also

experienced me in much the same way that the woman I had been in relationship

6
had done; as a very open non-judgmental person more than willing to look at my

own issues regarding privilege and race. If I was and am a racist, for example,

then we are all in a lot of trouble.

And of course the fact is, if I follow the subtlety and nuance of my cultural

inheritance, I was, am, and continue to be all of these things – rapist, racist, and

patriarchal colonizer – at least to the extent that I adopt the supposedly

comprehensive stance of my cultural milieu. Iterations of the rapist, racist,

colonizer each in their way speaks to attempts at the complete satisfaction of

peculiar curiosities, and all such attempts underline a lack of intimacy and

patience with the other. In fact, writes Desmond, “throughout the philosophical

tradition we find a very strong adherence to the view that to be is to be intelligible,

7
and to be intelligible is to be determinate.” The world is exactly as it is, based on

the curiosities and attempts at total comprehension of a small group of people

(mostly post-Enlightenment Euro-American men). Much of my own Euro-

American cultural inheritances come at the very high cost of the other. The

univocal curiosities of the moderns are not only harmful to nonmoderns, but tend

to find themselves severely lacking in intimacy (or even idiocy). This has led to a

postmodern turning toward what Desmond terms equivocity, a critical defense of

diversity in the face of overly determinate univocities of the moderns.

The ability to continually sit with these difficult truths did not come easily

for myself. I could not accept a wholly equivocal critique of my cultural

inheritances, no more than I could return to a naïve adoption of these modern

univocal certainties wholly lacking in intimacy and idiocy. It required something

7
larger than myself to push me so deeply into this crucial participation. This

woman and I fell in love, and it was in some way the depth of this experience that

allowed her to share her experiences of being a woman of color in the

contemporary world. It was also this love – which was beyond me – that kept me

in this relationship for so long, even after it had clearly gone in an unhealthy

direction. There had to be some basic agapeic force at play if I was every going to

be able to begin to examine some of the most basic assumptions, actions, and

histories that make up who I am and how I relate, as a white Euro-American male,

to the rest of the world. There are depths of suffering that can hardly be put to
8
paper, though many have tried. But it is not these two relationships, not exactly,

that I speak of when I talk of communication, but rather the relationship that I

have with my wife.

I met Elizabeth some years after the experience of the second relationship

considered above. I was still deeply troubled in many ways. I was scared of the

pain and suffering that I might inflict by just being me, and I was confused as to

where the voice of the colonizer and patriarchy ended and where I began. There

are many stories that can be recounted regarding the years of communication that

I have shared with my wife, but one particular event deserves special notice. We

were sitting together on the floor of a sleeping platform in the jungles of Manú

National Park, a remote biosphere reserve stretching from the Southwest Amazon

to the central Andes of Peru. I cannot remember the details of our conversation,

but as we sat across from each other I felt myself in contact with an incredible

strength and knowing. And patience with my own peculiar perplexities and idiocy.

8
At the time I thought of this as both myself, and as the masculine aspect of myself.

As I began to share from this place, my not yet wife, leaned back, surprise and

many other emotions crossing her face. My way of relating did not fit within our

assumed cultural habits and inherited curiosities. Then she did something that no

one else had ever done with me in the context of a significant relationship like this

before. She leaned back in. And in this leaning back in, I think, she also tasted her

own peculiar idiocy.

What I shared in that moment was difficult for her to hear, but she also

recognized and honored some depth in me, and so was able to allow it in. She was

patient with the intensity and shock of this momentary astonishment. She found

within this shared experience a certain singular ground that was her own to

nurture. It is from the profundity of this and other such experiences that we have

built our relationship. It is also from this same knowing that I put pen to paper,

and speak of participation and communication. There is a love that exists between

Elizabeth and myself that serves to buoy us through both lows and highs. But

there was also love in the first two relationships that I mentioned above, as well as

around the dinner table I grew up sharing around. The thing that exists between

Elizabeth and myself is something in addition to this love. It is a patience with our

own idiocy, and a subsequent patience with the eros, perplexity, and idiocy of the

other. It is a choice to honor and respect ourselves and one another in such a way

that we are able to risk radical and fundamental change brought to us from within

our own persons, and from without by another person.

9
 Let us take the example of women and men, for a brief moment to

underline this point. The most cursory glance in the direction of popular culture

would suggest that as women and men we seem to speak different languages. This
9
lived experienced of gendered alterity is emboldened by various studies, while
10
such simple gender binaries are easily complicated as well. But it is not toward

any particular field of academic study that I wish to guide this introductory

conversation, but to day-to-day life, in particular, my day-to-day life. I ask the

reader to imagine herself attempting to communicate with the opposite or a

different gender, and to honor how very difficult this can be at times. It is possible

to say that there are very different realities or ways of knowing at play within

these interactions.

This statement is of course too simple for our contemporary academia. It

does not account for the subtleties of third-wave feminism, contemporary gender

studies, post-colonial studies, and any number of other critical stances that one

might rightfully take. For my part, I am not a feminist scholar, am not well read in

gender theory, and cannot lay claim to any special knowledge in a plethora of

other fields and movements that are thriving today. But I am in a committed

relationship with a person of a different gender, and so speak not from theory so

much as from my own lived experience.

I do understand the need to critique earlier essentialist claims regarding

gender binaries, and my own marriage acknowledges this fact. Yet it is to the

maybe overly simple binary between a man and a woman that I speak at this

moment. There is something, in my own experience, that is different between

10
being a woman and being a man. What my wife and I have come to learn through

our interactions is that there is something like a feminine and masculine polarity

at play within our interactions, as well as within our individual selves. Two

different singularities or means of stabilizing patience in relation to the original

excess of intimacy we continually face. We have each identified, at different

times, and in different ways, with masculine and feminine tendencies, and this

style of communication has gone a long way toward emboldening our relationship.

I am not writing to give marital advice, and yet my marriage is certainly relevant

to my topic, and to my scholarship in general.

What I found in my relationship with my wife was a mutual respect,

grounded in unconditional love, and enlivened by very real differences. A

singular and idiotic patience with astonishment and intimacy. I do not know what

she knows. I am often struck by the almost alien quality of her desires, dreams,

and wishes. I am deeply challenged in my assumptions and way of being in the

world, often by her assumptions and way of being in the world. And yet when we

communicate, or participate, with one another, we are willing to risk

transformation and metamorphosis. Rather than turn toward determined univocal

theories about what should or should not be the case, we turn back toward the

shocking intimacy that enlivens and overcomes us. We are willing stand in our

own voice or experience, our idiocy, and respectfully challenge the other to

change. There are obvious limitations to my example. My wife and I share a

certain set of core values, or we would not be together. We live in a shared

community, and though we come from very different socio-economic and cultural

11
backgrounds (me from Western esoteric pagans/hippies from Wyoming, she from

devout Catholic doctors, therapists, and similar professionals living primarily in

Colombia and New Orleans), we share a common language (English, though she,

like our daughter, also speaks Spanish), similar goals, and host of other

commonalities. We are far more similar than I am to say the Guugu Yimithirr,

Dagara, and Achuar people who the reader will meet in some detail within these

pages, at least at first glance.

As I have already mentioned, one of the most striking differences that

Elizabeth and I have found that exists between us is the line we have been able to

discern between what we call “masculine” and “feminine.” What has both

challenged and enlivened our relationship is the recognition of this difference, in

conjunction with the recognition of my own feminine qualities, as well as her

masculine ones. Where at first there appeared a chasm that could not be crossed,

we have found the space to play, dance, and make love, with each other, and with

different aspects of our own selves. Desmond might ask us to consider the act of

wooing. Wooing does not designate the making of love, or the finding of that

same. “Rather,” Desmond writes, “there is a porosity to wooing prior to any

11
making; there is a ‘being found’ before finding.” There is a “more” that is no

thing, and yet this no-thing that is more

springs up in the ‘nothing’ of porosity [as] a certain energy, an inspiration,

a movement, a being moved. And all this before we move ourselves. The
12
‘more’ enabling the making is reserved in what we have made.

12
What you will find in the following pages follows a somewhat similar line. An

attention to the “more,” to that which is wooing, to which we are porous, and by

which we move.

In relation to this basic overabundance, several distinct ontologies are

demarcated below, with Guugu Yimithirr, Dagara, English, and Achuar speaking

people falling primarily into different ontological realities. We will see ways in

which the primary mode of participation engaged by the Achuar profoundly

challenge that of the every day English speaker, and vice versa. But we will also

see similarities, ways in which the ontological framework of the Achuar can be

found in the streets of London or New York, and where the framework (or

ecology) of the New Yorker can be easily identified in the Achuar. All of these

examples and more are illustrated below. But what is important at this juncture is

to consider that there are in fact real differences, ontological differences in fact,

that can create chasms between participants, and that there are also always

overlapping ontologies at play if we scratch a little deeper below the surface and

question some of our more hard fought assumptions about alterity.

My wife and I are in some important ways a woman and a man, feminine

and masculine, but we are also so much more complex than that. We tend to queer

these essentialist definitions and gender binaries. We are able to expand and

deepen our horizons and experiences by honoring the differences gifted to us by

the other, and by our ability to recognize these as not so different from aspects of

ourselves. What I hope to do in these pages is encourage the kind of

communication I share with my wife in a much broader, and potentially

13
challenging way. I hope to cross cultures, and ontologies, and gender identities. I

locate myself in these pages as ontologically androgynous, actively transgressing

generally held assumptions by way of nurturing communication between

seemingly disparate communities; each and every one of which is participating in

some way in our shared planetary predicament. Traditional Western conversations

regarding ontology still hold as we are all experiencing this earthly experience

together, replete as it is with globalization, global warming, industrialization, and

the imminence of a sixth mass extinction, to name but a few aspects of this

predicament. Yet these traditional conversations of ontology just as quickly falter

to the extent that they assume a shared being or existence. As I clarify throughout

these pages, such an existence is really nothing more than determinate curiosities

predicated on at worst narrow curiosities and at best idiocy and singular

perplexities. It is partially for this reason that I find myself considering ecologies

of participation. Following Desmond (as well as Alfred North Whitehead), I

argue that there is an agapeic overabundance of becoming, but that all attempts at

ontological assertions are limited at best. My androgynous stance is not meant to

reject ontological questions, but rather to revel in their erotic impulses and

profound inadequacies and particularities. By using the term ecology rather than

ontology, I mean to avoid protracted philosophical debate. To put this rather

simply, there are far more ontological starting points and questions than have

generally been allowed by the Western canon. We should not limit ourselves to

Western idiocy, or canonical curiosities. By speaking of multiple ecologies of

participation I clarify that I am not limiting myself to traditional conversations

14
and concepts of being and existence that disallow or ignore a plethora of human

experience that can be found through a simple examination of ethnographical data

available to us today.

As I take my first steps on this scholarly adventure, I must stress this point.

I do so by turning toward my relationship with my wife, which begins with the

assumption that communication is more important than any content that she or I

might come up with. My big idea, or her intense feeling, my frustration, her

desire; all of these must be weighed against the important goal of maintaining

open lines of communication. To put this in more philosophical terms, I place an

importance on communication that far exceeds any recourse I might have to

particular ontological or epistemological claims. I place intimacy above idiocy,

and well beyond what Desmond’s calls curiosity. In order that I might speculate,

as a contemporary philosopher, and assert myself in my marriage, I place the

greatest value on participation. This value, the importance of opening lines of

communication between disparate and diverse ways of knowing, trumps any

philosophical claims I might make, and this is always the case.

If I forget this, I fail in my speculative work. I will inevitably dishonor,

ignore, eat, and/or run over someone else’s assumptions, body, or knowledge.

This is not entirely a bad thing, as long as I am able to recognize what I have done

by bringing attention to whether or not we are all still available to the practice of

this participatory communication. All univocity is not bad, but it must always be

mediated by attention and deference to intimacy. If my wife begins to shut down

and turn away from me, even though I know without a shadow of a doubt that I

15
am right, I must stop and consider what she is feeling. I must place my big idea,

feeling, or desire aside, and ask her what is going on. To use Desmond’s terms,

our shared intimacy is finally more important than my particular idiocy or

curiosity. Our agapeic union is more fundamental, more lasting, than my erotic

impulse or particular curiosities. I must make sure that we are still participating

with one another, and if we are not, for whatever reason, I need to bring

awareness to this point and see what she has to teach me in this moment. Again

following Desmond, to the extent that my idiocy and eros lead me toward

curiosities and away from intimate participation, communication, and the agapeic

overabundance of becoming I am lost. I must inquire into what I have missed? I

need to make sure that she is invited back into the conversation, and she needs to

do the same for me. There must be some modicum of safety built between us,

some communicative bridge; some structure whereby we might risk real

transformation. Some agapeic ground. As I show in detail below, this means that

we must risk literal cannibalism (as with the Achuar of Amazonia), sorcery and

counter-sorcery (as with the Muedans of Mozambique), as well as relativism (as

with the academics of Euro-America) and conversion (as with the Christian

tradition and the modern scientific positivism that it gave birth to).

In these pages I turn to considerations of the specters of cannibalism,

relativism, and ecological border crossings. In doing so I mean to point toward

viable ontological assumptions that may be more than a little challenging for

many in the academy today. But in writing this introductory section I am also

struck by how considering my own marriage in this context might actually feel a

16
little too close to home to count as philosophy. It may strike the reader as odd that

a work ostensibly on comparative philosophy begins with a consideration of

marriage and gendered attempts at communication. This point was driven home to

me recently while attending a session of the American Philosophical Association

on “Teaching and Inclusivity.”

As I looked around the room, one that was largely full, I counted only four

men, one of whom was a presenter. It made me wonder if this simple opening

section might not be considered one of the most radical and/or ignorable

components of an otherwise rather challenging piece of scholarly work for the

average philosopher working in academia. As I sat in that room I was reminded of

the words of philosopher of science, Sandra Harding. She writes of “home,”

wondering what philosophy and science might look like if they were allowed to

arise out of the home-life, often the woman’s life. She tells us that modernity and

patriarchy are only “at home” to the extent that the distinction between public life

(comprehensible/determinate) and private life (indeterminate and full of

perturbations) can be maintained. She writes:

Household life in each of its global cultural settings-in its ethics,

responsibilities, and priorities-has arguably the densest and most
psychically compelling configurations of what modernity has defined
itself against. Yet households are not going to disappear or wither away-
ever. Moreover, the household and its kin relations are where the most
stubborn resistance is found to imperial and colonial projects, as noted
earlier. Of course, not all households are wonderful for women and
children. Households are also powerful sites of violence against them and
sites of their economic and political disempowerment. For these reasons, it
seems a big mistake for progressive action groups to ignore women's lives
in households as an origin of potential economic, political, and social
insight and of progressive social transformation; to do so is to take sides,
intentionally or not, with what is arguably the most resilient of patriarchal
13
and imperial projects.

17
To the extent that this project is successful, it must begin at home, in idiocy and in

deference to intimacy. If I cannot communicate with my wife, with my family, or

your family and the rest of our planetary community then my philosophical

practice may be suspect. This is not to conflate philosophical practice with

emotional intelligence, but rather to draw our attention to their commensurate and

parallel natures.

I do not pursue these correlations and considerations of home, marriage, or

gendered ontological starting points in the work that follows. To make a case for a

basic ontological difference between feminine and masculine, and to a lesser

extent female and male, starting points would require too many pages and a

scholarly expertise that is not mine to claim. And yet this basic difference has

been an important one to me, especially to the extent that I am a philosopher

who’s work is meaningful outside of the strong modern-postmodern chasm

between public and private, work and home, determinate and indeterminate.

It was the conversations with my mother, my sister, my wife, my daughter,

and my other significant attempts at cross-gender communication that led me, as

much as anything else, to attempt something like the cross-ecological

participation that I aim for in this work. Accordingly, it is to the women in my life

that I dedicate the work that follows. There is much to be said regarding what I

mean by ecologies, diverse ontologies, cannibals, and relativists, but before I

wade into these waters I must offer a more academic introduction of the

participatory approach wherein in locate myself during this project.

18
 A Note on a Participatory Approach

Why participatory? Because the goal and motivation for this project,

which has challenged me in ways that have changed me forever, stems from my

desire to encourage the kind of communication mentioned in the section above

within our academic institutions and hallways. Much of the initial impetus and

many of the insights that enabled this project come from my interactions with the

participatory approach in religious studies. The participatory approach to

comparative studies and academia in general, has allowed me several

opportunities. First, it asks me to not only recognize my lived experience, but to

share it in meaningful ways that are appropriate in the context of my academic

writing. I am challenged to not only come out of the closet as a (West African)

Dagara-inspired bokara (elder), diviner, and metaphysician for example, but also

to let go of the academic barriers that stand between public and private,

philosophy/academia and home, as well as scholar and practitioner. It would be

appropriate in this context to write that I am defending a greater emphasis on

intimacy than what currently exists in the academy and in the presuppositions of

the American cultural context I call home.

Second, the participatory approach, especially as outlined by Jorge Ferrer

and Jacob Sherman, offers the beginnings of a comparative lens and the potential

for an academic voice that allows me to face the immanent challenge of what I

referenced above as our planetary predicament. The nuances of the term

planetary as well as the assertion of some shared predicament is both asserted and

made obtuse by the diversity of ecologies of participation laid out in these pages.

19
For the time being I ask that the reader to allow these words to invoke whatever

they will in your imagination. Allow this phrase to inform and move you as you

read the following chapters. Lastly, the participatory approach referenced here

offers clues, guidance, and critical material that I can push up against, as I outline

my own iteration of this approach, in the form of ecologies of participation,

throughout the following pages. One of those clues can be found in Ferrer’s

statement that:

[the participatory understanding] I am advancing here is that no pregiven

ultimate reality exists, and that different spiritual ultimates can be enacted
through intentional or spontaneous cocreative participation in a dynamic
and undetermined mystery, spiritual power, and/or generative force of life
14
or reality.

The important point here is three-fold.

First, as Ferrer has already stated, there is no pregiven reality. The second

and third points come out of Ferrer’s emphasis on enaction and cocreation. These

two points of emphasis are deeply intertwined. Ferrer writes that participatory

knowing is “connected, and often passionate activity that can involve not only the

opening of the mind, but also of the body, vital energies, the heart, and subtle
15
forms of consciousness.” Here he points to an epistemic quality of enaction. But

for Ferrer this epistemic quality

is not a mental representation of pregiven, independent [integral] objects,

but an enaction, the ‘bringing forth’ of a world or domain of distinctions
16
cocreated by the different elements involved in the participatory event.

It is in the nature of this “bringing forth” or cocreation that my emphasis on

multiple ecologies differs tendencies in certain traditions to assume the necessity

of some ultimate and given One. It is the goal of this project to clarify such

20
statements further, but before continuing with this project, a very brief history of

the participatory approach may be of service to the reader unfamiliar with this

work.

The participatory approach mentioned here has developed over time

through the collaborations and individual journeys of a burgeoning network of

scholar-practitioners. In a recent anthology of authors writing under the

participatory banner (The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious

Studies), one of the most important criteria for the inclusion into the edited

volume was that the authors identified themselves as both practitioners within a

particular world-view or practice and as an academic or scholar. This is a

fundamental aspect of this approach to academic study, and one that is flesh out

and makes use of in much more detail in following chapters.

The authors included in the anthology mentioned above, as well as many

others, have overtly committed themselves to a participatory approach to their

17
scholarship. These commitments are not exclusive. The terms “turn” and

“approach” have been emphasized by way of communicating that this style of

scholarship does not denote an “epistemic rupture” from the past, some

revolutionary new paradigm, but rather a shared ethos that can be located in the
18
contemporary academy at large. Following from this point, Ferrer and Sherman,

the editors of the anthology, have recognized many new and exciting themes in

the academy that lend themselves to a participatory sensibility. They have

underlined seven trends in particular: (1) the postcolonial revaluation of emic

epistemological frameworks; (2) the postmodern and feminist emphasis on

21
embodiment and sacred immanence; (3) the resacralization of language; (4) the

"pragmatic turn" in contemporary philosophy; (5) the renewed interest in the

study of lived spirituality; (6) the question of religious truth in postmetaphysical

19
thinking; and (7) the irreducibility of religious pluralism. Sherman has added to
20
this list important trends in philosophy of science and contemplative studies.

Important themes in qualitative research , ecopsychology, indigenous studies ,

contemporary Christian theology and spirituality, anthropology, and ritual studies

must also be included. Other trends could certainly be found to help round out this

list, yet the important point is that there does appear to be such a sensibility taking

hold within the halls of academia. My own work sets out to bring this approach

more firmly to bear on the field of contemporary philosophy. This is a goal that

will take the rest of this project to unfold.

All of the fields and authors mentioned above might be understood to

emphasize the ethical, pragmatic, social, political, and/or speculative

21
ramifications of our pressing participatory predicament. This is an ontological

assertion that is unpacked throughout the following pages. Making such an

assertion in our postcolonial, postmodern, feminist, and scientific milieu cannot

be entered into lightly. My own path has lead me to consider the history of

modern thought in general, while taking in a breadth of contemporary writing in

the fields of religious studies, anthropology, Western and nonmodern philosophy,

philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and the history of process

philosophy (especially the work of Alfred North Whitehead).

22
 In light of the diverse body of literature and experiences that I draw on

throughout this project, I find myself making a rather interesting claim. I define

myself quite literally as a scholar-sorcerer, commuter cannibal, and contemporary

speculative philosopher. I locate most, if not all, contemporary comparative

academic work by reference to this same terminology. I underline this point by

honoring my multiple roles in this life as Dagara-inspired bokara and diviner,

father and husband, process-oriented philosopher, as well as a scholar and teacher

nurturing a participatory sensibility to my work. My own biography begins in the

high mountain deserts of Wyoming and Nevada and blends into the horizons and

personalities (of rocks, ancestors, and humans among others) I have had to good

fortune to meet along my journey. In keeping with the cross-cultural (or as I argue,

cross-ontological) nature of our contemporary context, I make consistent

reference to our planetary predicament. The depth and breadth of which can only

begin to be gleaned from continued forays in the company of radical alterity.

We cannot help but transform and be transformed by others if we engage

in this way. In order to begin to point to the vagaries of alterity available to us

through our planetary predicament, I flesh out a minimum of five fundamental

ecologies of participation: primary, totemism, naturalism, animism, and

analogism. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of ecologies available to us,

nor as an assertion of some final theory or truth. In keeping with my participatory

and planetary commitments, these pages can be read as a practice in

communication and as an invitation to participation. This as opposed to the more

abstract expressions and hierarchies of naturalist (e.g., Renaissance perennialism,

23
neo-Darwinian theories of adaptation, and four main traditions of Tibetan

Buddhist) and animist (i.e., Ifá odu, Tzeltal kalpul) ecologies of participation that

work to limit cross-ontological communication due to particular emphasis on

indigenous/local assumptions.

My work attempts to engage all of these ecologies, without leaning too

heavily in any one. I take the word ecology from the work of Isabelle Stengers
22
and Vikki Bell (both commentators on the work of Whitehead), as well of from

Philippe Descola who sees his own work as articulating multiple “ecologies of

relationships” in contrast to a multiplicity of given structures and/or constructions

23
based on the assumption of some given or ultimate ground. “Participation” is

clearly relevant to the participatory approach referenced already, but also owes

much to the work of French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his recent
24
commentators. And the terms naturalism, analogism, animism, and totemism are
25
taken from the very important work of Philippe Descola. At this point, I have

already introduced far too much, in so short of a time, and so I must now turn to a

more detailed consideration of these issues that inhabit the following pages.

As I do so, I must state that I am quite sure that I have failed to encourage

communication, interaction, touch, kindness, intimacy, and yes, participation

among all of “us.” Our basic struggle, I suggest, is a planetary predicament. This

is the issue that breathes life into these words. By committing to placing emphasis

on communication and practice before assertions, I at least open the door for the

Other that is left out to walk through the door. Tzutujil elder and shaman Martín

Prechtel references his teacher “Old Chiv” who offers words of advice for just

24
such an occasion when he writes, “[Old Chiv] taught me the magnificence of

human folly, and the value of doing something beautifully, no matter how
26
absurd.” However broadly one might define that word – and I do push some

boundaries of what can be included as “us” in these pages – I will inevitably leave

someone out that should have been invited in. What you have in your hand is

certainly absurd and prone to folly, few know this better than the author. Yet I

trust it also brings some beauty into this life. Prechtel goes on, “

We had no intention of shrinking from the challenge, as the liquor, the

excellent ceremony, our togetherness with Gods, and our pledge to carry
out this ceremony nudged our common sense completely out of the picture.
27
We entered the canoe with pure faith and a love for living.

I cannot hope to succeed, for all my frailty and short sightedness, for my lack of

understanding, and my faith in so many Gods. Ferrer stresses that:

Although [I believe] that this participatory approach is more sensitive to

the spiritual evidence and better honors the diversity of ways in which
spiritual awareness can be expressed, by no means do I claim that it
conveys the final truth about the mystery of being in which we creatively
participate. In contrast, my main intention is to open avenues to rethink
and live spirituality and religious diversity today in a different, and I
28
believe more fruitful, light.

I honor Ferrer’s words, and in doing so I go my own way. Not so distinct from

what he has already written, but different all the same.

For my part, I want to ground this whole experiment in love. The kind of

love I have for my wife, for example. Where I know that I am not right all of the

time, and she knows that she is not either. The kind of love where I can get upset,

curse, yell, and still be heard. I mean to ground this work in a kind of love

wherein you risk you for the other because they are so damn important. In such a

context you respect them for respecting you as they return the favor. I engage this

25
comparative folly for my daughter, and the world that she might inherent, if we

could just come up with some better ways of coming together, participating, and

transforming one another. This is no small task, and so one worthy of the title of

philosophy.

Adventures in Interdisciplinary Method and Intimate Metaphysics  

In order to clarify my approach to contemporary metaphysics in these

pages I find myself reading between the lines of religious studies, anthropology,

and philosophy. This is an adventure beyond Western curiosities and questions

regarding scientific, spiritual, and philosophical ultimates. I follow Ferrer once

again when he writes:

After the participatory turn . . . a more satisfactory response to this puzzle

naturally emerges. Once we give up Cartesian-Kantian assumptions about
a pregiven or noumenal spiritual reality common to all traditions, the so-
called problem of conflicting truth claims becomes, for the most part, a
pseudoproblem. In other words, the diversity of spiritual [or
scientific/philosophical] claims is a problem only when we have
previously presupposed that they are referring to a single, ready-made
29
reality.

This line between a single discoverable reality, essence, or ecology and my own

emphasis on multiple ecologies of participation is foundational to my approach to

metaphysics offered here. And though his work is not prominent in this particular

project, one of my most important guides in this journey has been the early

twentieth century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who writes,

Given the vigor of adventure, sooner or later the leap of imagination

reaches beyond the safe limits of the epoch, and beyond the safe limits of
learned rules of taste. It then produces the dislocations and confusions
30
marking the advent of new ideals for civilized life.

26
Following this statement, one might ask if intimacy and philosophy are even

possible within the context of a single worldview (modern/Western), when we are

in fact clearly living something more like a planetary and/or participatory

predicament. We are, quite literally, forced to communicate with one another.

Following in the spirit of George Yancy, though in a very different vein, I seek to

cause trouble and encourage philosophy in multiple voices, and in so doing

31
honoring this planetary predicament we are in.

Writing a Brief History of Analytic Philosophy, Stephen P. Schwartz

writes, “The methodology that gives analytic philosophy its strength and structure

is the logic and philosophy of language generated by the original work of Frege,
32
Russell, and Whitehead.” For his part Whitehead leaves the logical empiricism

of Russell in Britain, taking a position in the philosophy department of Harvard

across the Atlantic. Deeply influenced by William James, Whitehead clarifies his

own empiricism as beholden to an emotional tonality “throbbing” and “hurling

33
itself into [ever] new transcendent fact[s].” This feeling based empiricism can

be distinguished from the naturalism of one of Whitehead’s most famous students,

another esteemed analytic philosopher, Willard V. O. Quine. Quine writes, “that

it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be
34
identified and described.” Whitehead writes of scientific (and modern

philosophical) practitioners that they

utilize those elements in their own experience which lie clear and
distinct . . . it is tacitly assumed . . . that the more fundamental factors will
35
ever lend themselves for discrimination with peculiar clarity.

Quine, I think, would agree. For him science is nothing more than the careful and

27
systematic extension of common sense. “In science all is tentative, all admits of
36
revision,” writes Quine. It is careful. “But ontology is, pending revision more

clearly in hand than what may be called ideology,” he continues. It is systematic.

“We have found a tentative ontology in physical objects and classes,” concludes

Quine, an ontology that “should be relatively definite, pending revision, is

37
required by the mere presence of quantifiers in the language of science.”
38
Following Whitehead, “This assumption is here directly challenged.”

Quine’s empiricism and naturalism is limited to the extent that it assumes

some given, Nature, that can be discovered and clarified by the abstractions of the

scientific and analytic methods. His empiricism tends toward abstraction, while

Whitehead’s empiricism looks toward what Desmond would term agapeic

overabundance. To this end, Whitehead’s speculations lend themselves to the

dislocations and confusions of the concrete and intimacy. It must be noted that

Whitehead does not mean to dismiss Quinean naturalism. He writes,

Thus the business of Logic is not the analysis of generalities but their
mingling . . . . Philosophy is the ascent to the generalities with the view of
understanding their possibilities of combination. The discovery of new
39
generalities thus adds to the fruitfulness of those already known.

Philosophy does not aim only toward greater univocity and determination. Here

we can see one aspect regarding the nuance of idiocy I am after.

Theories and systems (attempts to outline univocity) proceed toward

curiosities, and curiosity (as used by Desmond) is a clear sign of narrowness,

abstraction, and lack of intimacy. This is the kind of univocity that Whitehead is

critical of when he writes, “There is no totality which is the harmony of all

perfections.” Whatever is made clear and distinct always and without exception
28
 40
“excludes the welter of contrary possibilities. There are always ‘others.’” In

honoring the importance of intimacy within our thought, we must be struck by the

limits of our ability to integrate new curiosities and idiocies. For my part, I find

myself needing to step beyond both the bounds of narrowly defined academic

specialty, as well as beyond the confines of post-Enlightenment fascinations with

clear and distinct univocities that rule not only the hallways of most Anglo-Saxon

analytic philosophy departments, but also academia in general. Whitehead brings

our attention back to these inherent limitations when he explains that by finite he

means there is no univocity that is complete. There are always “others” he writes,

and always a greater unbounded overflowing of potential. Metaphysics, on this

count, is always an adventure at play with and as an effusiveness of becoming.

Evil, for Whitehead, lies in the direction of “conjunction” and overly

generalized unifications. I imagine that most of scholars would agree with

Whitehead when he writes, “The chief error in philosophy [science, religion, etc.]

is overstatement. The aim at generalization is sound, but the estimate of success is

41
exaggerated.” Every civilization or culture carries within itself a certain

originality and perfection, right alongside what Whitehead terms “a learned

42
orthodoxy [that] suppresses adventure.” His emphasis on finitude is not meant

to completely do away with attempts at generalization. Rather, he means to place

crucial limitations – in service to the mystery and intimacy of becoming – on

idiocy and metaphysical practice. While Whitehead’s speculative work helps to

accentuate this point, I find the work of Desmond to be an invaluable resource in

clarifying both the limits and future possibilities of philosophical speculation, and

29
so it is to him that I now turn.

Almost one hundred years after Whitehead wrote the words above

Desmond defends the idea of philosophy as adventure by distinguishing between

the scholarly habits of what he terms the “wise homebodies” of academia and the

idiocy of singularity that is the hallmark of any would-be philosopher or

metaphysician. Desmond writes, “If the idiocy of being makes an intimate claim

on the philosopher, one cannot escape into the thought of mind in general. The
43
singularity of the philosopher has to be acknowledged.” Desmond is telling us

that too many in academia have lost their desire for the strange intimacy and

idiocy of adventure. They defend their narrow area of specialization in particular

and the walls of the academy in general, and yet my own idiocy moves me to

question the clear lines between philosophy and what those others – the ones

studied by scholars of religious studies and anthropology – do, practice, and think.

The history of anthropology (we could also add religious studies) and the

subsequent idea of cultural difference, writes Bernard McGrane, is the story of a

44
“great trivialization of the encounter with the Other.” Culture – and the study of

it – tends to rest on the metaphysical assumptions of certain wise homebodies

regarding the self-assured existence of what Eurocentric folk assume to be Nature.

45
But as Roy Wagner wrote quite some time ago, Nature was invented too. But

not only has Nature been invented, so has the sacred, the primitive, and the

secular. These inventions allow another set of scholars to offer their insights by

reference to religion and religious studies. Certainly no less problematic than the

invention of Culture, the invention of religion also trivializes our encounters with

30
 46
the Other. We begin to see the outlines of the idiocy that drives this project, for

if we are not so very different from them, then what is exactly that holds the line

between philosophy, science, religion, and ethnographic other?

Following Desmond, the idiocy of singularity drives the philosopher not

toward overgeneralized determinations and univocal truths, but rather back

toward intimacy. The lines between self and other fade just as quickly as they

come into view. If we remain academic specialists, we stand a chance of

maintaining the clarity we have invented (culture, nature, religion, science), the

one that stands between us and them. But if we falter, recognizing the complexity

(idiocy) of our particular moment, these clear lines fade. Desmond traces the

movement between intimacy and the comprehensive knowledge of specialists by

reference to agape, eros, and curiosity. Where agape and eros nurture intimacy in

different ways, curiosity seeks the distance of abstract observations and leads to a

severe lack of intimacy. What this means for us at this juncture is that the focus of

any one specialist (analytic philosopher, evolutionary biologist, religious studies

scholar) is predicated on distance from the concrete (the intimate). Metaphysics,

for Desmond, is a practice whereby this these abstractions can be both honored

and contextualized by reference to the hyperbolic nature of the concrete, and so

metaphysics, if it is to succeed, must at times work to break down walls between

specialists like those inhabiting various departments at your local university.

This is true, for Desmond, because philosophy (and lived experience)

begins in astonishment and agape. In every beginning, as opposed to the

beginning, there is the shock of alterity that begins in astonishment. To the extent

31
that agapeic beginnings maintain experience without reference to self in

contradistinction to other, metaphysics is not present. But this agapeic patience

inevitably gives way and leads to a perplexity that for Desmond underscores a

movement away from agape toward eros. Agapeic astonishment maintains and

nurtures difference without recourse to self for it feels no sense of lack. Desmond

writes, “mind others itself because it is about the otherness of being and not just
47
about itself.” We might say that there is a kind of reveling in and reverence for

diversity in agapeic abundance. This agapeic union, following Desmond, is

predicated on an overwhelming intensity of experience. To remain in

astonishment, without attempting to lessen its intensity, speaks to a profound

ability to be with difference and self as they are hardly discernable as other.

Agape seems to be a point at which equivocity (difference) and univocity

(sameness) are only vaguely noticed. There is enough individuality to create a

certain tension, but not enough to bring any awareness of lack or separation. If

this profound agapeic being-with gives way, there may arise a need to overcome

or be overcome by the other, for in Desmond’s careful consideration, agape

becomes eros.

Eros of perplexity is driven by a sense of lack, but also by a steady

patience. Erotic movements seek to transcend what is perceived as lack by

maintaining intimacy through a patient abiding with. Where agape revels in

astonishment, erotic perplexity is troubled by perturbations to the extent that it

feels a distance from the other and seeks to overcome this distance through its

profound willingness to endure the feelings of intensity that arise out of a sense of

32
lack, distance, difference, and indetermination. When eros can no longer endure,

it leads away from perplexity to what Desmond terms curiosity.

Curiosity is not to be confused with agapeic mind and its natural openness.

Curiosity, following Desmond, has latched on to some particular avenue of

inquiry. It has lost its sense of astonishment and even perplexity. Curiosity has

moved beyond all but the shallowest intimacy. Curiosity is able to be satiated

because it has found some small manageable aspect of the original intensity-

shock-astonishment that can be comprehended. Curiosity seeks a narrow

comprehension (like those found in analytic truths and instrumental knowledge),

total unification, and as such is drawn in sharp contrast to the idiocy of singularity

that is the purview of good metaphysics. This is a dry and abstract univocity that

both Whitehead and Desmond are wary of. Comprehensive management of the

shock of original astonishment can lead to the kind of instrumental efficacy that

we enjoy today (e.g., my computer), but can also lead to rigidity and monstrosity

due to a lack of intimacy.

It would be easy at this point to get lost in words, but the main point is this.

For Desmond, our thought begins in astonishment (a radical intimacy and vague

awareness of idiocy). We often experience this agape as “too-much-ness” and so

transition to eros and lack (seeking an intimate idiocy). If we cannot sustain this

level of intimacy and idiocy, we may seek to alleviate this tension by way of

curiosity and extreme specialization (an idiocy lacking in intimacy becomes

curiosity and particularity). Curiosities and subsequent attempts at comprehension

are not necessarily a problem. Scientific objects, lines, planes, and points can be

33
helpful to the extent that we realize their finitude in relation to their larger context

of intimacy and astonishment. What must be remembered – and here we find the

purview of metaphysics – is that no curiosity leads to the totality of all perfections,

as all univocity is merely an individual curiosity foregrounded against the

background of an effervescent intimacy.

To the extent that curiosity and idiocy are generalized beyond the limits of

their own singularity (the particulars of its intimacy) they risk monstrosity (a lack

of intimacy). Desmond tells us that those who are "saturated in knowings

48
[answers to curiosities] . . . may be malnourished in reverence." We assume to

know too much. Categories like culture, nature, religious, and secular all serve to

maintain narrow curiosities, not intimacy. The efficacy of our instrumental

sciences and our analytic logicians has beguiled us. “A human being without

reverence turns into a monster,” says Desmond,

the quest of science is not unequivocal release from [monstrosity]; it may

be complicit with it. A monster need not be a foaming brute, but can be
49
silky and sleek and sophisticated.

Desmond sees a clear indication of monstrosity in the “will-to-power of our

50
instrumental reason.” There is a dangerous lack of intimacy in our sciences and

in our academy. Clear departmental lines between the natural sciences and

humanities, as well as between disciplines like philosophy, religious studies, and

anthropology all serve to feed the assuredness of our peculiar (modern/Western)

curiosities.

Underlining this point, Desmond sees a similar kind of monstrosity in the

“hyperbolic vigilance” of critical equivocity, the left, the liberal, the postmodern,

34
postcolonial, deconstructive, and postmetaphysical. There is not only something

lifeless in our instrumental dreams, but also a lack of intimacy in the critique of

these hegemonic univocities. Critique is a sort of “disturbing perplexity” for

Desmond, one that points out the hegemony of insensate curiosities. It is clear

what the critique is attempting to wake us from, namely our fascinations and

monstrous curiosities that are lacking in intimacy. But what, Desmond asks, does

critique love? Who or what does critique woo? Is there something larger than life

that it aspires toward? For philosophy, on Desmond’s account, is a kind of love.

Metaphysics is a movement toward intimacy, not away. Participatory

knowing, says Ferrer, “[points to a] passionate activity that can involve not only

the opening of the mind, but also of the body, vital energies, the heart, and subtle
51
forms of consciousness.” Desmond agrees, telling us that philosophy is

inseparable from eros. The way to awaken from the aporia of critique is through a

“primal porosity.” By porosity Desmond means that we should put down our

curiosities and the narrowing that they enevitably bring about. The way forward is

by remembering our original astonishment, becoming porous to other-ness, and

moving toward the strange intimacy and intensity of idiocy, perplexity, and other.

For Desmond, metaphysics happens in the between, where the “language of

52
appropriating and overcoming other is not at all appropriate.” It does not

discount attempts at unification (univocity/curiosities), nor does it discount a

strong emphasis on diversity and difference (equivocity/critique). It exists as a

dialectic or mediation between curiosity and divergence, univocal and equivocal,

authority and diversity. But Desmond is quick to point out that metaphysics does

35
not rest here in some one Hegelian ultimate-dialectic, for that would be to move

too far from “the strange intimacy of being” (to use Desmond’s phrase).

I am not attempting to go beyond science, philosophy, religious studies, or

anthropology in these pages. Rather, I seek the between; I intend to travel

between them all. Rather than defend some one idiocy or articulation, Desmond

defends and encourages a complex ground of mediation between multiple

dialectics.

Remember Whitehead’s warning against overstatement above. The key to

defending the importance of idiocy lies in the parallel assertion regarding the

finitude of that same idiocy and the overabundance of intimacy it is grounded in.

No one idiocy or univocal curiosity could ever be complete, but this does not

mean that we should throw out all attempts at comprehensive answers to our

curiosities. Desmond tells us that an inter-participation of multiple mediations is

required. To the extent that religions have overplayed their unifications they must

submit to both post-Enlightenment instrumentation and critique. To the extent that

post-Enlightenment idiocies and curiosities with the clear and distinct have

become monstrosities, they must humble themselves before the overdeterminate

intimacy of becoming.

Religious mediations between curiosities, idiocy, and intimacy must

engage the various post-Enlightenment mediations that are available today. But to

the extent that religion points toward something meaningful, an intimacy beyond

our narrow modern curiosities, religion must be invited back into the conversation.

To this end, while offering resources for cross-traditional criticism, Ferrer writes:

36
 The diversity of spiritual truths and cosmologies, then, rather than being a
source of conflict or even cause for considerate tolerance, can now be
reason for wonder and celebration. Wonder in the wake of the
inexhaustible creative power of the self-unfolding of being; and
celebration in the wake of the recognition of both our participatory role in
such unfolding, and the emerging possibilities for mutual enrichment and
cross-fertilization out of the encounter of traditions and spiritual
53
perspectives.

In defending contemporary metaphysics, we find Desmond pointing us back

toward this “diversity of spiritual truths.” If we are to practice philosophy, writes

Desmond, we need to have more than a little “religious finesse” alongside the

idiocy of prayer, for true religion (according to Desmond) tends toward excess

and reverence in the face of the hyperbolic effusiveness that is the hallmark of the
54
intimate ground of metaphysics. To know with certainty is to move toward the

superficial, the domesticated, and tame. Whitehead writes that the comprehension

offered by satiated curiosity is “comparatively barren of objects of high

55
significance.” Desmond wonders aloud about the possibility of a two-way

communication between religion and philosophy.

Would this kind of participation put new demands on us as philosophers?

We turn toward the issue of good taste. The wise homebodies of academia that

have demarcated a non/postmetaphysical island of safety have no use for such

premodern fantasies. But is this predicated on a love of wisdom, or on something

far less enlivening, and potentially monstrous? It is the assumption of this project

that good metaphysics requires something like Desmond’s intimate metaphysical

ground. It requires an inter-dialogue between multiple mediations and lived

experiences. It requires a play of the intimate, idiocy, and curiosity.

In turning toward religion, Desmond calls us to prayer. Elsewhere he has

37
turned toward dance, music, and art. He writes of “thinking between three,” art,

religion, and philosophy. “Suppose in this triad we suggest that we have a

community of others,” he imagines, “each with its own identity . . . . Suppose we

56
say that to think what is ultimate . . . we need all three.” I take up Desmond’s

‘community of others,’ but go in search of someone a little more subaltern. For

my part I leave off “art” as it seems a thoroughly Western ideal, and I make an

addition to the religious, for the study of religion has also been narrowly
57
defined. I look to the alter other, the objects of so many ethnographies, and the

field of anthropology in general to flesh out the possibility of a contemporary

metaphysics. This is the only way I can imagine the possibility of practicing

contemporary metaphysics. At this point in my journey Desmond might call out a

warning:

There will be many who scoff on the dockside as [your] ship heaves off.
They will congratulate themselves on their prudence in valuing the
security of safe harbor, and the solid [generalizable] land. They will even
feel superior to [you] who [has launched] out into the unknown, [you who
have risked your] thinking. They feel sure in advance it will come to
58
shipwreck . . . . How dare you do metaphysics?

Following Desmond I respond, I do dare. And also following Desmond, it seems

clear that in order to proceed on this adventure that had me long before I was

aware of it, I must move toward an intimacy with Others, so many of whom have

turned out to be not unlike myself.

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin writes that

[an] anthropological manner is one that privileges a more holistic

approach—sometimes referred to as contextual studies—seeking to make
relationships and/or entanglements between canonically separated
domains visible. Such a procedure necessarily sacrifices depth and
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specialization.
38
This is a generous reading of anthropology as a whole, and to the extent that it is

true it speaks to the efficacy of turning toward such traditions in order to approach

my metaphysical impulse. I have found that the field of contemporary

anthropology offers some of the very best examples of metaphysical practice

today. Yet I do not move forward as an anthropologist or as a religious studies

scholar, but rather as a metaphysician in the between. I step out to meet the other,

which as often as not is part of myself, as one metaphysician to another. Would

these others recognize themselves as metaphysicians? Some would, some would

not. But it is not to locate them that I use the word, but rather to locate myself,

and to bring some modicum of symmetry to this practice. More will be said on

this in due time. For now I turn to a consideration of Desmond’s fourfold path

toward metaphysics.

Desmond’s Metaphysics: A Fourfold Way

These pages are motivated largely by a desire to practice speculative

philosophy in a contemporary academic context. This is no easy task, and

certainly not one to be entered into naïvely. It has been asserted from a variety of

angles that we cannot practice metaphysics in our contemporary milieu. As

Martin Hollis wrote some years ago, “[there are those who seek to] deprive

Reason of all her traditional autonomy and to place the study of the social world
60
on a thoroughly scientific footing.” This deprivation, writes Hollis, takes the

form of “wet rot” (mechanism) and “dry rot” (relativism). What is important here

is not Hollis’ choice in terms that is important; rather it is the prohibitions against

philosophical speculation he underlines that are of interest.

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 Hollis, for his part, is writing at the height of the realism-relativism
61
debates of the late twentieth-century. The wet rot that worries Hollis can be

understood by reference to the modern naturalism clarified above. Underlying this

naturalist expression is a positivist claim of objectivity, discovery, and Nature that

assumes (rather than leads to) a mechanistic worldview. This is what Desmond

generally refers to as instrumentalism or scientism, a stance that to his mind is

marked by an overemphasis on curiosity and univocity. The dry rot that worries

Hollis can be understood by reference to another form of naturalism, what we

might call the relativist expression of modern naturalism. The idea that relativism,

mechanism, and the assertion of Deism’s distant God all fall under the same basic

set of assumptions that are clarified in later chapters by reference to the modern

constitution articulated by Latour. For the time being it is only necessary to

understand this relativist iteration of modern naturalism by reference to its claims

of subjectivity, construction, and Culture. This is what Desmond tends to refer to

as critique, which he clarifies as an overindulgence in equivocity and defense of

diversity. Both the wet and dry rot versions of modern naturalism assert a brand

of non/postmetaphysical thought. For his part, Hollis yearns for what he calls a

“straight rationalist path” based on the assumption (not unlike van Inwagen and

Sider above) that there must be some shared external point/ground on which

relativists must stand to practice their equivocations. Here we see a clear

expression of the “core realism” Sider calls a shared “analytic dogma” above.

For his part, Desmond would not argue to that one should not hold or

pursue such an analytic dogma, no more than he would argue that Aquinas should

40
not have pursued his theistic dogma (the core realism of Christianity). Realism, as

we have seen above, is a hallmark of all naturalist thought. This is not the

problem. The problem, following Desmond, arises when realism and its

pretensions to univocity – whether overstated theistic naturalism, analytic

metametaphysics/naturalism, or modern mechanistic naturalism – cannot abide by

the equivocations of relativists. But this is not to say that we must abdicate all

attempts at univocity (e.g., God, ultimate quantifier) in favor of equivocity and

critique. Desmond’s metaphysical practice happens “in the between.” It is a

dialectic between univocity and equivocity, one that is always careful not to fall

too far on either side. Desmond asserts a tense and intimate plurivocal ground

wherein metaphysical practice is both possible and key.

I have found in Desmond a fellow metaphysician-cum-adventurer; one

who has taken seriously the prohibitions against metaphysics popular in academia

today. In light of the popular abdication of metaphysical practice, Desmond

concedes that no person needs to practice metaphysical speculation in order to

live a fruitful life. Yet he goes on to clarify that “one cannot be a good
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philosopher without being more or less a metaphysician.” According to

Desmond, all theory – whether scientific, analytic, critical, or postmetaphysical –

is in the end based on metaphysical presuppositions. This is not a problem. The

problem arises to the extent to which such philosophers covet their little piece

(univocity) of the profound intimacy of being (plurivocity) we all face in our daily

lives. Metaphysics, on this account, does not solely seek univocity, for as Aquinas

(regarding theistic realism) and Quine and Price (regarding analytic realism) have

41
already shown, a thoroughgoing univocal theory is a phantom that cannot be

caught. It is for this reason that I first turned toward his work, for he outlines a

kind of common sense view that is in keeping with both my early naïve

assumptions about philosophy as well as with the more nuanced view I hold today.

To put this succinctly, philosophical practice is foundational to all

academic/scientific pursuits, and metaphysical practice is foundational to

philosophy.

The key to contemporary metaphysics, I argue, is to look in exactly the

opposite direction of much of the relativism-realism debates mentioned above.

The entirety of these philosophical controversies tend to revolve around the

assumption that univocity is sought above all else. In the introduction to the

recently published collected works of Desmond, John D. Caputo writes that

Desmond’s is a different voice. A metaphysically realist voice that is continental

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to the extent that he turns toward the concrete and experiential. Remember to

point when I turn toward van Inwagen’s critique of Heidegger below. Van

Inwagen tells us that Heidegger in particular, and the phenomenological-

continental tradition in general, mixed up the meanings of being and nature, ‘that

it is’ for ‘what it is.’ Of course “it” is says van Inwagen – a true believer in the

analytic dogma – this is not the question. The analytic question is more akin to

“what it is;” assuming everything is, writes van Inwagen, we can most certainly
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speak to Martians in a valuable way. Plurivocity (ontological pluralism) on this
65
count is at best (following Carnap) shallow. But this is not the plurivocity of

Desmond. He really does mean to ask questions of ‘être’ or ‘esse’ or ‘exister’ or

42
‘Sein’ or ‘be’ or ‘is.’ If you first assume univocity and then seek univocity, as in

the analytic (and theistic) naturalisms, any kind of pluralism is shallow, but only

to the extent that your original dogma holds. Desmond’s is a post-Kantian and a

post-Derridean metaphysics. It honors critique, deconstruction, and equivocity,

without getting lost in them. His metaphysical plurivocity assumes multiple

equally interesting and relatively valid univocities. These are not shallow, in fact

quite the opposite. Desmond’s emphasis on plurivocity saves us from theistic and

analytic shallows, without falling into atheism or mechanism (another set of

shallows). It moves toward Being, without assuming first (as theistic and analytic

naturalisms do) a particular univocal truth or given (whether God or quantifier).

Desmond’s fourfold way and his metaphysical practice begin in agapeic realism,

rather than univocal realism, effectively clarifying the direction I plan to argue for

the rest of this project.

Desmond outlines a movement from agapeic being toward univocal

determination, subsequent critique/equivocity, and on to dialectic. He grounds this

threefold practice in the context of a plurivocal ground that he terms

metaxological. Within his fourfold process, Desmond sees the possibility for unity

and sameness (univocity), divergence and diversity (equivocity), mediation

between unity and diversity (dialectical), and a final metaxological arena of

metaphysics that encourages multiple such dialectics. We have already considered

Desmond’s triad of astonishment, perplexity, and curiosity above. We can see in

the movement toward univocity a trajectory from astonishment (intimacy) to

perplexity (intimate idiocy) and on to curiosity. Curiosity can be understood as a

43
latching on to some particularity or univocal sameness, for example, the assertion

of Nature underlying naturalist assumptions regarding the univocity of physicality,

and the subsequent naturalist-Western search for mereological sum and/or final

cause. On this count, univocity can be seen to paint a path from the

overdeteminedness of being toward determination, curiosity, and clarity.

Desmond offers the example of scientism or instrumentalism to underline

his point (the mechanistic expression of what I have called modern naturalism

above). Modern naturalism is beset by the assumption that, writes Desmond, “if
66
science is not now entirely comprehensive, science will be comprehensive.” He

paints this metaphysical assertion (hence scientism as opposed to science) as an

overreaching project meant to articulate the ends of “a specific curiosity and its
67
quest of determinate solutions to determinate problems.” Anything that cannot

be formulated within the purview of this narrow curiosity must be relegated to the

dustbin of history. It behooves the reader to take pause here.

Desmond begins and ends his speculative practice in agape. The potential

for speculation is born out of an original astonishment that overwhelms not only

speculation and metaphysics, but any kind of curiosity or understanding. This raw

agapeic intensity can give way to a sense of eros, lack, and perplexity. It is in this

state that metaphysics is possible. Philosophical speculation locates itself at a

point of patience and perseverance in the face of overabundance and hyperbolic

wonder. Scientific instrumentalism when pushed toward mathematical

materialisms and atheisms has no patience for such indeterminacy.

Instrumentalism makes two assumptions. Before it begins it asserts an object of

44
inquiry and a mode of inquiry, and to the extent that these assumptions are able to

hold, its conclusions are limited to the confines of its object-question. This entire

process occurs, for Desmond, within the realm of curiosity, particularity, narrow

focus, curiosity, and univocity. A question arises. Why would we assume that one

univocity – say a Christian God and scientism’s Nature – is better or more real

than another? For no other reason (following the various analytic philosophers

mentioned on this point in the previous chapter) than because we have decided to

believe in one rather than the other. Again it is important to pay attention. A

univocal assertion is only as good as its original assumption. Curiosity and its

answers cannot begin without first assuming a question or object. These narrow

questions and objects are abstractions, and so cannot lead one toward truth. In

choosing one set of assumptions, say naturalism and Nature, the game of

univocity is both begun and lost, based on it is on a rather arbitrary set of

curiosities and interests. Within such a limited purview, there is no intimacy with

anything other, and to the extent that this is true, truth is limited and inevitably out

of reach. Any attempt at truth is only as good as its very narrow curiosity.

An emphasis on equivocity and critique naturally pushes back on

hegemonies of sameness. An equivocal move notices the lack of intimacy in the

narrow unity, object, and curiosities of a univocal stance, and cries out for greater

diversity and divergence. We can see the modern-Nature-instrumental and

postmodern-Culture-critique camps both present here. The instrumentalist seeks

greater comprehension and determination. Those in the Nature camp humble

themselves, not before the radical intimacy and diversity of Being, but rather to

45
the possibility of a more encompassing integrity/univocity. Those in the Culture-
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critique camp, though they tend to assume the very same given Nature,

nonetheless set out to defend intimacy, diversity, and equivocity. But is there any

real intimacy without univocity? Desmond thinks not.

Following Hollis above, is it not true that most postmodern relativists

assume a shared ground or univocity in order to critique that same ground? This

of course is the reason for the continued interest in the realism-relativism debates,

the science wars, and theist-atheist debates that became so heated over the course

of post-Enlightenment Western history. What we require, says Desmond, is “the

mindfulness of a certain finesse: metaphysical finesse for the nuances of

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differences” that is also able to identify, assert, or say what or that something is.

We need some way whereby we mediate between these two poles, between the

nuances of difference and the subtly of unity. For Desmond this means a turning

toward dialectic.

“Socratic dialogue,” writes Desmond, “is a way of dealing with

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differences, not only of propositions, but of living interlocutors.” This style of

dialectic does not aim at particular determinations, and so narrow univocal

answers, but rather at more complex questions. Aristotelian dialectic, on the other

hand, tends toward determine answers. It scrutinizes accepted or persuasive

premises, and does so as a form of intellectual training that leads the practitioner
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toward “valid deductions from true and self-evident premises.” This Aristotelian

dialectic is a sort of cleaning up of premises, while Socratic dialectic values a

complexifying of questions. Both are necessary. Where Aristotle’s dialectic

46
becomes crucial for contemporary dialectic is in his dialectical consideration of

first principles. Desmond tells us that Aristotle’s dialectic opens an avenue

beyond the demonstrations and curiosities of science. Aristotelian dialectic points

toward underlying presuppositions and first principles that are not in themselves

demonstrable or available to the full light of day. A doorway is opened, writes

Desmond, one that Aristotle did not quite walk through, but that Hegelian

dialectic made primary.

“Hegel,” writes Desmond, “grasped the importance of the opening hinted

at in Aristotle’s point, namely, that there is a determination process more ultimate

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than determinate intelligibilities.” Hegel, says Desmond, admits to the

importance of Kant’s critical turn toward equivocity and the limits of metaphysics

as a search for solely univocity. Desmond clarifies that in Kant’s (transcendental)

dialectic transcendental illusions inevitably arise. That is to say that pure

understanding eventually transcends the intimacy and limits of its own experience.

Kant’s equivocating, says Desmond, becomes relevant as he sees beyond the

curiosities of scientifically determinate univocities. To the extent that this

metaphysical perplexity (read intimacy) might be termed illusory (Kant’s

transcendental illusion) speaks to the degree to which Kant assumed the

univocities validated by science. Kant, on this count, is a naturalist through and

through, but he was troubled.

To this end Desmond writes, “Kant was tortured by being between two

forms of bad conscience: a bad conscience concerning scientific univocity and a

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bad conscience concerning a stifled metaphysical mindfulness.” Kant cannot

47
simply oscillate between univocity and equivocity. To oscillate between, for

example, analytic naturalism with its assumption of some ultimate

quantifier/univocity and postmodern thought begs the point. This is true because

both assume the same ground, and to the extent that this is true, a simple

oscillation between analytic realism and postmodern relativism maintains the

same univocity. Nothing is ultimately gained or lost. Kant is enamored by the

univocity of science, but feels the lack of intimacy, and the subsequent

metaphysical dead-end that parallels an overindulgence of curiosity. Hegel’s

dialectic, following Desmond, strikes an interesting in the between.

Desmond sees Kant’s equivocity (critique) as a new opening to the

intimate strangeness of being whereby Hegel is able to inhabit a unique

conceptual space. Rather than oscillation between two poles, and the maintenance

of a dualism predicated on some univocal assumption (e.g., Nature), Hegel’s

dialectic is predicated on a new dynamism. Desmond traces a possibility that

comes from Kant’s transcendental subject, whereby “the self as process of

synthesizing” is understood as prior to all determinations. The transcendental self

points us to a regressive movement, on Desmond’s account, directing us toward

an over determination that is prior to. It follows that the “determination process
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[is] more ultimate than determinate intelligibilities.” This is a crucial point for

my overall project, and so it is necessary to closely consider what has just

happened.

Hegel’s dialectic, following Kant, points to a process of self-determination

that arises out of a play of self and other, univocity and equivocity. It is always

48
the case that such a “play” assumes a self (univocity) whereby it participates with

an other (equivocity). In naturalism there is an assumption of some univocal given

constantly perturbed by the great diversity/equivocity of other it faces. In

Desmond’s metaphysical practice, this determinable unity we think of as Nature

has given way. The process of becoming, the dialectic play of intimacy, univocity,

and equivocity has become ultimate, opening a new door whereby Hegel can
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assert his “absolute self-determination of the absolute whole.” Again, following

Desmond, Hegel begins with the realization of an exclusive self-determination,

whereby the indefinite becomes determined by a process of self-actualization and

the other is overcome. Hegel sees the problem is univocity here, and so in

deference to diversity and intimacy he articulates a process of mutual

determination; what Ferrer has termed communion and co-creative

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participation. But Ferrer’s co-creative participation is different from Hegel’s

mutual determination, for he writes:

A participatory understanding of spiritual knowing should not then be

confused with the view that mystics of the various kinds and traditions
simply access different dimensions or perspectives of a ready-made single
ultimate reality. This view merely admits that this pregiven spiritual
referent can be approached from different vantage points. In contrast, the
view I am advancing here is that no pregiven ultimate reality exists, and
that different spiritual ultimates can be enacted through intentional or
spontaneous cocreative participation in a dynamic and undetermined
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mystery, spiritual power, and/or generative force of life or reality.

Sure, writes Desmond, Hegel moves beyond mere subjectivism. Hegel’s is not a

simple transcendental idealism, it is a dialectical one that recognizes the

importance of co-creative play between self and other.

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 But, writes Desmond, Hegel’s dialectic “persists [in] the heritage of the

univocity of thought thinking itself, and of the privileging of the self in post-
78
Cartesian, and especially post-Kantian, transcendentalism.” His is a measured

idealism, but an idealism all the same. It is not an exclusive idealism, whereby

self is determined in opposition to the other (e.g., Brahman and samsara or

Bradley’s Appearance and Reality); Hegel’s idealism is an “inclusive self-

determination” (to use Desmond’s term) wherein the dialectical play of self and

other is finally included in some absolute whole. This is not the final cause or

mereological sum pondered in classic (Aristotelian) naturalism, nor the final

unmoved cause of theism, or the ultimate quantifier sought by some analytic

metametaphysicians. Hegel’s, rather, is an ultimate dialectic sum/play/inclusion.

Desmond writes that Hegel’s “absolute whole is inclusive self-

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determining.” Here we see Hegel privileging Aristotelian determinacy over

Platonic transcendence. Desmond concludes that Hegel finally could not escape

the univocity of an ultimate reality. To be sure, Hegel’s ultimate is processual and

self-determining, but it still remains that he subsumes all diversity and equivocity

within his dynamic integrity. He followed Aristotle’s lead in wandering out

beyond the determined curiosities of scientific method, but he could not quite find

his way to real over determinedness and agape.

Again we might ask, what has happened? Hegel’s dialectic is an example

of erotic perplexity, not agapeic. Desmond writes,

I say erotic perplexity rather than agapeic astonishment because Hegel’s

sense of the beginning is always that of a lack that must be progressively
80
overcome by a further process of development.

50
Hegel’s sense of lack is predicated on a basic fear, the one that haunts naturalism,

namely relativism. But I defend broad definition of Descola’s naturalism,

whereby naturalism is grounded in a univocal assumption of Nature, and the fear

of relativity and equivocity of Culture(s). Hegel called into question previous

articulations of univocity by introducing a dialectic/mediation between univocity

and equivocity. He followed Aristotle and Kant toward intimacy, but faltered for

the same reason they faltered. He cannot let go of his eros and wander into agape.

This is crucial, for what is eros on Desmond’s readings, but a sense of lack. And

how does one relate to this lack but by overcoming it. Agape and its parallel

experience of astonishment speaks to an immensity and tension that exists

between equivocity and intimacy. To the extent that these experiences are able to

remain parallel, without attempt to overcome the tension that arises between them,

agape persists. But when patience fails and/or the tension becomes too much, a

feeling of lack creeps in. What is lacking? Univocity.

Desmond tells us that perplexity does not have patience for equivocity and

otherness, for such intimacy is far too troubling and so becomes problematic. He

also writes that there is a “vector of self-transcendence” at play here, one that
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seeks to overcome lack (perplexity) by overcoming otherness (equivocity). So

what is it that troubles Hegel, Aristotle, and Kant? There is a drive toward

determination, toward curiosity, toward some final resting ground, where the

painful tension of intimacy might subside and give way to knowledge, whether

scientific, transcendental, or absolute. Desmond writes that Hegel not only places

too much emphasis on a Cartesian self, he “[continues] to be an Aristotelian in

51
 82
that determinacy still wins out, though in the form of self-determination.” Hegel

cannot shake his desire for absolute comprehension [self-determination,] even

when it means once again falling out of intimacy.

Regarding these authors, Desmond is concerned with what he terms

immanent only ontologies. He sees in Kant an “overcautious quasi-theism or

moral deism,” one that yields to “Hegel’s pantheistic overconfidence, [and] is

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replaced by a humanistic atheism, hubristically overconfident.” Desmond finds

Hegel, German Idealism, and much of contemporary philosophy (e.g., Deleuze)

still haunted by “Spinoza’s ghost.” For Desmond this means a kind of

“metaphysical violence” found in “Spinoza's claim to treat human beings and

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their emotions like he would treat solids, planes, and circles.” Spinoza, in his

assertion of his immanent univocity seems to have put an end to participation, and

opened the door for immanent only ontologies. Hegel and Spinoza, on Desmond’s

reading, have lost the finesse of analogical thought. He wonders if Aquinas and

his Thomistic analogical naturalism offers greater metaphysical finesse than

Hegel’s speculative dialectic. “Analogy,” says Desmond, “demands a finesse

85
which is itself a kind of reverence.” In Hegel Desmond finds a “rationalistic

recoil” alongside a “secret hostility” to mystery, while Aquinas offers something

more akin to the “primal porosity” between philosophy and reverence Desmond

defended in the opening chapter above.

Aquinas is open to the mystery, patient with the intimacy of other and the

overdeterminedness of being. Desmond credits Aquinas for his analogical thought,

for his ability to open to the hyperbolic effulgence of being by saying “as” instead

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of “is” or “as if.” He finds in Kant a timidity, for Kant cannot quite bring himself

to say that God is (not since Hume’s devastating critique), and so falls into an “as

if,” some early beginnings of a crossed out God. Not quite deist, not quite theist.

As I show in the next chapter, Latour comes to see the (post)modern struggle as

one with a God. On such an account, we should always think “as if” God existed,

and so are left with a moral deism. Hegel is far more confident, says Desmond,

and claims his self-determined immanence “is.” In so doing, he delineates an

ontology of immanence (a mereological sum) over transcendence (final cause).

Desmond finds Aquinas’ statements of “as” refreshing here, for he is not so quick

to solidify his God as some univocal final cause. “On the one hand,” writes
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Desmond, “God is said to be Being Itself. Thus Aquinas: verum ipsum esse.”

On the other hand, God is other. Desmond cites Plato’s Good here, and the One of

Plotinus, both in their own way asserting some univocity (finality), while also

calling out for the recognition of equivocity, diversity, and thereby intimacy. It is

here that Desmond offers his fourth way, metaxology, as a corrective for the lust

for univocal comprehension that plagues the Western tradition.

Desmond writes that metaxu is Platonic in nature, and can be seen

throughout the dialogues, though it is not clarified in any great detail. Desmond’s

is a participatory reading of Plato, meant to soften the “mimetic” dualism that can

be attributed to Plato’s work. Rather than two fixed worlds, writes Desmond,

where one mirrors the perfection of the other, we can see a methexis

(participation) mediated between divine mania and human eros. Human eros leads

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toward univocity, toward relatively shallow surfaces, and yet “the Platonic
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dialogue is a deep drama of surfaces,” says Desmond.

These dialogues are not determinations, they are dramatizations riding on

the backs of words. And what are words, wonders Desmond; they are signs of

excess and over determinedness. Platonic words are not analytic, they “reserve
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recesses, [and] there is always a significant silence.” Here silence is not failure,

but rather an indication of something more, something worth reverence.

Desmond’s is not an analytic metametaphysics aiming toward answers to

particular curiosities, univocity, and/or an ultimate quantifier. Nor is he aiming, as

so many analytic philosophers assume, at univocity above all else (for what else

could a metaphysician be after, says an analytic philosopher seeming to lack

references beyond her own narrow curiosities and that of her peers). “There is a

kind of ‘dialectical’ togetherness of saying and silence in the art of the Platonic
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dialogue,” says Desmond, “which points us in a metaxological direction.” What

lies in the silence? For Desmond it is the excess of the everyday.

We do not begin with coherence, curiosity, systematic understanding.

Metaphysics is struck by this, and is drawn toward astonishment, toward metaxu

and methexa. Desmond tells us that the domestication of the overdetermined

everyday into system, datum, or analytic given inevitably results in homelessness.

At the height of Hegel’s dialectical absolute a coherent and inclusive (immanent-

naturalist) home for thought is offered, and in the very self-coherence a new

homelessness emerges to drive us on toward participatory (metaxological)

communication. Attempts at univocity tend to fix meaning, and in their

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pretensions to coherence drive those who do not share their narrow curiosities

toward equivocity and potentially intimacy. But in the coherence of critique (a

univocal plea for intimacy thoroughly lacking in intimacy), we find a new

monster. This drives us to the dynamism of Hegel’s dialectic, yet his coherence

leaves us anxious. We feel at home in his clearly demarcated immanent space, but

what about over there! Dialectic requires other dialectics.

Each novel saying (dialectic) allows enough silence so that other

dialectical expressions might be heard. Metaxology seeks to maintain the tension

of agapeic astonishment. It is inter-dialectic. Desmond tells us:

The doctrine of analogy complexly qualifies the “is” of being with the “as”
of similitude, such that the temptations to univocal reduction or
assimilation are noted, guarded against, and transcended. It calls attention
to the participation of finite beings in being, a participation first made
possible as a gift of the origin, a participation pointing to both the intimacy
of the origin and also to an asymmetry, since the gift is exceeded by the
giver . . . . God's agapeic giving releases the creation into being its own
open whole, and hence not just a part of a more inclusive totality. In this
respect, the analogical “as” points us towards a metaxological
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understanding.

And here I wonder two things. First, if Desmond’s metaxological is a form of

post-Platonic Thomistic participation, then is his metaphysics really “after

dialectic”? What are we to think of Spinoza, Hegel, and Deleuze? Simply that

they overemphasized immanence at the risk of losing all reference to

transcendence?

Metaxological is said to be a mediation of inter dialectics, but where have

these mediations gone? Hegel’s dialectic is said to reference some new dynamism,

some interesting other. It is not an oscillation between integrity and intimacy, it is

some unique dance whereby something novel is ingressed; at least that is what he

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seems to be after. Hegel pushes too far. He cannot help his lust for comprehension.

And this seems to push Desmond toward Aquinas, for he is more in keeping with

agapeic astonishment on Desmond’s reading. So why not simply assert that

metaphysics requires univocity, equivocity, and analogical thought? Why bother

with dialectic at all?

Desmond tells us that Aquinas and Hegel are reverse images of one

another.

Hegel’s speculative dialectic would bring all transcendence home to

immanence . . . . Aquinas’ analogical thinking would open immanence to
transcendence, bring it home to God above all things . . . a sense of divine
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disproportion is more at home with the latter, I would say.

Why emphasize “divine disproportion? What is Desmond afraid of? He asks if we

can live with Aquinas’ analogy in service to God, and his answer is yes. Aquinas

offers a three-fold way, causality, remotion (negation), and eminence. His

causality is not the limited efficient-mechanistic causality of instrumentalism.

Causality understood as “be-cause” is suggestive of a “to be” that is more

originary and ultimate than the causality of scientism. Yet on Aquinas’ read, again

following Desmond, this ultimate ontological “to be” is not an unmoved mover,

some finite original motion before motion.

The via negativa of remotion becomes relevant. Desmond writes that an

emphasis on negation is foundational to Hegelian dialectic, and that to the extent

that negation is balanced by via eminentiae it is analogical and opens to the

hyperbolic, beyond dialectic. This beyond lack, away from perplexity, lusts after a

simple perfection and so is a movement toward finitude and curiosity, univocity

without intimacy. Desmond writes that Aquinas speaks of an analogical agent

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(agens analogicum). “This is deeply suggestive idea,” he tells us, “and at least

helps some way to thinking the togetherness of transcendence and immanence . . .

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Something about the be-causing of God is analogical.” An Thomistic God as

agens analogicum is in keeping with agapeic astonishment for Desmond, and as

such is grounded in a profound patience to be with the intensity and tension

between equivocity and intimacy. Hegel’s self-determining God is said to be an

erotic self-cloning Absolute, while Aquinas’ God is seen as the plenitude of self-
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exceeding generosity of agapeic origin.

By now you may have forgotten that I had a second point, but here it is. I

do find Hegel and Aquinas to be playing on opposite ends. And I find Desmond

unable or unwilling to follow Hegel’s emphasis on the immanent, and so I find

him grounding his metaxological ground of metaphysics in one particular

dialectic, namely Aquinas’ analogical metaphysics and God. What I assert in

these pages is that this does a disservice to Spinoza, Hegel, and Deleuze. That in

fact it ignores all together the important contributions of Whitehead. Rather than

locate Aquinas’ agens analogicum in the realm of agapeic patience, I actually

understand his analogical arguments to be an exceptionally well articulated

iteration of erotic naturalist perplexity. That is, I still find Aquinas lacking. I find

both Desmond and Aquinas turning too much toward a particular univocal

reading of transcendence, and turning away from – especially in the case of

Desmond for he has articulated his metaphysics as after dialectic as opposed to a

before – from another important possible erotic animist perplexity that is

fundamental to innumerable people throughout the (largely non-Western) world.

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 Desmond seems to believe that we should choose between Aquinas’ post-

Platonic participation or settle for an anemic atheism-materialism. But he has not

given Hegel enough credit. The solution I propose is not to disregard Aquinas, but

rather to try to understand Hegel’s insistence on dialectic (as well as Spinoza’s

and Deleuze’s respective immanent ontologies) in light of a contradistinctive

sense of lack that can be found in animist cosmologies held by West Africans,

Amerindians, and various others peoples throughout the world. In essence I am

after a participatory ground of metaphysics in the between, a metaxology that is

also a metaphysics after dialectic. Aquinas’ work can be seen as one naturalist

dialectic that goes a long way toward maintaining the tension of equivocity and

intimacy that we seek. Yet is only one, not the participatory (metaxological)

ground of agapeic astonishment and inter dialectic Desmond promised.

At this point is important to remember that I write these words in the hope

of clarifying some new potential for cross-cultural philosophy. Desmond’s

emphasis on Plato, Aquinas, and Hegel is both important and telling. In chapter 3

I turn to the anthropological work of Descola, who writes, “nothing is more

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relative than common sense.” Desmond makes an admirable call for renewed

intimacy and diversity. In doing so he turns toward religion and art, prayer and

dance, God and poetry. But these are all deeply informed by a Western (maybe

Indo-European) naturalist common sense. In the following pages I outline other

forms of common sense, or what I call ecologies of participation.

First I consider the totemism of the Guugu Yimithirr, the Tzeltal, and

Heraclitus. I show how such totemic ecologies are actually far more patient with

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agapeic astonishment and in relation to the play of intimacy and integrity than any

expression of naturalism (including that of Aquinas). There are subtleties to

totemism that are very hard to engage, and yet I imagine that this particular

ecology will be more available to the average reader. Plato, for example, has

inherited a very totemic ground from his pre-Socratic predecessors, and this

totemism has continued to show itself throughout the history of Western thought.

The hard part, secondly, will be in discerning the differences between

animist and naturalist ecologies below. Both assume a dualism, based on a

perceived lack of intimacy, but they go in opposite directions. There is a

pronounced naturalist dualism clearly at play in the works of Plato, but the real

naturalist is in fact Aristotle, and we are his heirs. It is because of the strength of

these ecological assumptions that the general reader will initially be perplexed by

animist ecologies. Animism offers us a dualism of an entirely different kind.

Aristotle assumed that there was a ground, and subsequently relativism with

regard to interiority, Culture, and subjectivity forces us to lose sleep. Where we

are scared of relativists, animists are afraid of cannibals, for they have made no

similar assumption about physicality.

Naturalists stand on stable ground (a univocity of physicality/Nature),

while animists assume a shared interiority, and so find stability there. Teleology

for animists is a given, hence the term animism; but they fear the diversities of the

body, the physical, the skin. They are multinaturalists rather than multiteologists.

And here we see a clue to my critique of Desmond above, for the animist there are

multiple physical realities, not one. For the naturalist there are multiple

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interiorities and subjectivities, not one. This is the line that Hegel walked, the line

that I believe Whitehead actually crossed, the line between the multiple

interiorities (integrities) of naturalist dualism and multiple physicalities

(integrities) of animist dualism. None of the assertions take away from

Desmond’s metaxological ground. In fact, they go a long way toward defending

his fourfold way. By developing his metaphysical practice within the context of

multiple ecologies of participation, I associate Desmond’s metaxology with what

I term ecological perspectivism in chapter 3. Such a perspectivism invites the

idiocy of each ecology, in the form of divination (totemism), shamanism

(animism), and metaphysics (naturalism). Of course all of this does not go without

further saying, so it is to Descola that I must eventually turn to further clarify my

metaxological-participatory ground of contemporary metaphysics in the between.

Before doing so, however, I must consider one of Descola’s ecologies of

participation slightly apart from his larger project, that of naturalism.

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 Chapter 2: Naturalism

Latour’s (post)modern Constitution

Whitehead is my man. It is with his help that I found a way to understand

my seemingly conflicting interests in philosophy, evolutionary theories,

divination, a Dagara inspired cosmology, multiple ecologies of participation, and

the diversity of other voices that have found some kind of home within these

pages. “There persists,” says Whitehead:

A fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an

irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of
configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless.
It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external
relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this
assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption
which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation
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at which we have now arrived.

Whitehead had a large part in springing me from the modern-postmodern,

Cartesian, neo-Kantian epistemological bind that has haunted so much of

academia since well before Whitehead took up these issues at the turn of the

twentieth-century. It is Bruno Latour’s work, however, that lays bare the

operating assumptions of the modern constitution – (post)modernism from now

on. Before proceeding with my comparative work any further I must give a short

account of what Latour has come to understand as this (post)modern constitution.

The (post)modern paradox unfolds like this. We begin with two distinct

areas of concern. We can term these the discovered and the created. (Post)modern

triumphalism rests on its ability to manipulate and utilize these categories in a

very particular way. Things, that which most interests inhabitants of naturalist

ecologies as defined in subsequent sections belong to the ream of the discovered.

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And in the following breath naturalists are found to understand the same things as

created. The first breath goes like this. We (post)moderns have exclusive access to

the world of fact, never before seen in the history of human kind. Scientific

objects are discovered. They are not created. In contrast, primitive objects are

created; they are not discovered. Scientific objects are facts, while primitive

objects are fetishes. Nature is the realm of fact, it is discovered by means of

appropriate scientific experiment. The supernatural, however, is that which is

created by fetishists. The “nature” of the Dagara speaking people of West Africa,

for example, is not fact. The Dagara cosmology is at best a romantic ideation and

at worst, a misguided creation. West African nature and West African things

denote primitive attempts to discover (post)modern (discovered) things.

Following from the assertion that Nature is fact (discovered), Culture can

be understood to represent that which is created. Culture is made up of constructs

or fabrications (in the pejorative sense of the word), which are minimally based

on interactions with the fact of Nature. It follows from this (post)modern assertion

of Fact, that the Dagara are not interacting “scientifically,” or in any way that is

recognizable as (post)modern. They have not discovered the actual facts of Nature,

much less the Western self-reflexivity to recognize that their constructs are bound

to cultural constructivism.

The second breath goes like this. We (post)moderns (post-Enlightenment,

post-Kantian, rational, scientific) are humble people. We do not step beyond the

bounds of reason. We understand that our view of Nature is based on hypothesis,

and therefore that our facts are created. We also understand that Culture is larger

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than us, and that our ability to observe the true facts of Nature are colored by

these creative cultural lenses. This humble position, writes, Latour, is a

positioning; one ostensibly between the counter arguments held by adherents of

realism and/or constructivism:

Whereas before we could only swing violently back and forth between the
two extremes of the [Post]Modern repertoire [realism and
constructivism] . . . . we can now choose between two repertoires . . . . On
the one hand we are paralyzed, like Buridan’s ass having to choose
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between facts and fetishes, on the other we pass thanks to factishes.

To put this simply, Latour sees in (post)modernism a dead end. The either-or of

realism and constructivism is quickly seen through, especially by those

nonmoderns (to use Latour’s term) who are not committed to a (post)modern

naturalism. The only answer that Latour finds is to realize the thoroughly

nonmodern actuality of (post)modern thought, and to assert the existence of

factishes, Latour’s basic co-created ontological unit (what I term an entanglement,

and define below). But the (post)moderns are not ready to give up the fight just

yet. They have one more trick up their positivist sleeve.

What if a nonmodern, a “primitive,” or pre-modern notices the second

statement, and congratulates the modern on their humility? She admires the

possibilities opened up by these (post)modern hypotheses, and yet warns that

applying some of these may lead to some less than desirable outcomes. “Au

contraire Madame,” says the modern, “your objects are fetishes, they are made up,

while my objects are actually facts. We have seen them! And others can see them

too.” “Yes, well,” she replies, “I thought you said they were hypotheses based on

other hypotheses.” “Why yes of course they are,” says the modern, “hypotheses

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that is. But I assure you that our objects are in fact discovered, not created. We

have facts, you have fetishes.” I am sure you can imagine this conversation going

on for hundreds of years. Latour notices the (post)modern bringing another player

into the mix at this point, to add to what appears to be a rather obvious smoke

screen. The player is God.

The nonmodern “pre-modern” asks, “So where did all these ‘facts’ come

from? Who created them?” The (post)modern reply, according to Latour, is to

proffer a crossed out God. Almost-(post)moderns like Sir Isaac Newton and

Gottfried Leibniz assert a God to make their respective points and monads make

sense, while thoroughly-(post)moderns like Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and

Spinoza relegate God to such an extreme distance that He can bother no one. In

effect creating a God.

Latour explains this triple entendre with the following words:

A threefold transcendence and a threefold immanence in a crisscrossed

schema that locks in all the possibilities: this is where I locate the power of
the [post]moderns. They have not made Nature, they make Society; they
make Nature; they have not made Society; they have not made either, God
has made everything; God has made nothing, they have made everything.
There is no way we can understand the moderns if we do not see that the
four guarantees serve as checks and balances for one another. The first
two make it possible to alternate the sources of power by moving directly
from pure natural force to pure political force and vice versa. The third
guarantee rules out any contamination between what belongs to Nature
and what belongs to politics, even though the first two guarantees allow a
rapid alternation between the two. Might the contradiction between the
third, which separates, and the first two, which alternate, be too obvious?
No, because the fourth constitutional guarantee establishes as arbiter an
infinitely remote God who is simultaneously totally impotent and
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sovereign judge.

What is hidden in this rather confusing back and forth is that facts are actually

created, they are factishes, and that this is totally ok.

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 In On the Modern of the Cult Factish Gods Latour uses the example of

Black and Portuguese mestizos in contemporary Rio de Janeiro to qualify this

point. He quotes a Condomblé initiate at some length: “I am from Oba, Oba is

almost dead already because no one knows how to seat [fabricate, enact, co-
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create] her, no one knows the craft . . . for making her.” It is the tendency of

Condomblé initiates to openly admit that reality is co-created – that it is never

wholly discovered – that makes the (post)modern’s jaw clinch. Prechtel

underlines this point when he writes that all of reality emerges from the co-

creative interaction of waking and dreaming life:

Life is the butterfly’s heart, and both dreaming and awake working life are
necessary to keep the heart alive. Our lives, like the butterfly’s heart, are
kept aloft by two opposing, mirroring, twinlike wings. This heart is the
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third thing, the Rukux heart that all ritual seeks to feed and keep alive.

Following Latour’s train of thought, the (post)moderns seek to erase one-half of

this equation. They recognize only the waking state. Where Prechtel would say

they lack dreams, Whitehead might say they lack imagination. He would go on to

say that like Bertrand Russell, (post)moderns are entirely too enamored with the

clarity of noontime light. “On what justifiable ground does the familiar

presumption rest,” writes Whitehead scholar George R. Lucas, Jr., “that

proponents of metaphysics in the classical systematic sense are merely

muddleheaded visionaries, [Continentals,] or otherwise represent a historical

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sideshow of not vital significance to contemporary philosophical thought?” To

cross the (post)modern line, to mix our creative dreaming and our awake

discoveries, is to risk the caricature muddleheadedness, yet this is the only viable

path forward. This is a point that is continually lost on analytic philosophers

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referenced within this chapter who assume metaphysics aims toward the

comprehensive clarity of the noonday sun. As metaphysicians we must risk our

dreams, for a viable metaphysics actually rests somewhere in between clear light

of day and vague dreamscapes of night. There are in fact multiple ecologies of

participation that are named in these pages, each one dealing with issues of

univocity and equivocity in different ways, but before we can approach them we

need to escape the (post)modern epistemological schism that has been mistaken

for actuality. Such an escape is mandatory if we are ever to enjoy not only a

sustainable but thriving future; one where communication of the sort that I

defended in the opening section is even possible.

In remembering the warning of the “primitive” Condomblé woman above

I close this section with another quotation from Prechtel:

True creativity doesn’t just make things, it feeds what feeds life. In
[post]modern culture where people are no longer initiated, the spirit goes
unfed. To be seen, the uninitiated create insane things, some destructive to
life, to feel visible and powerful. These creations are touted as the real
world. The are actually forms of untutored grief signaling a longing for the
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true reality of . . . togetherness.

The point, following the warning of the Condomblé initiate, is not merely to

recognize that (post)modernity does in fact co-create factish-things, but that in

ignoring this fact, it risks destructive, insane, and uninitiated things. Colonialism,

industrialization, global warming, and the subsequent sixth mass extinction come
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to mind.

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 (Post)Modern Naturalism

The term naturalism has had a long shelf life and seems to be

experiencing a resurgence of interest today. This is especially true within the field

of analytic philosophy, where we find naturalism alternatively defended as a

103 104 105
“thin” “methodological” “mainstream metaphysics,” while defined in
106 107
contrast to a “thick” “predatory” “quasi-religion.” In a recent text defending

the normativity of naturalism, Akeel Bilgrami traces the beginnings of the latter

through the halls of the Royal Society and the Boyle Lectures in England in the
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late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He identifies Robert Boyle and

Isaac Newton nurturing relationships both with the Anglican establishment and

merchant class in England through the auspices of the Royal Society in London.

In contrast to what he terms the freethinking pantheists of the time,

Bilgrami finds Boyle and Newton advocating for a disenchanted natural world

and a transcendent or other worldly God. They maintained a highly abstract telos

(God) to appease the Anglican Church, and in so doing eliminated all other

recourse to formal cause. Subsequently they were able to make room for what

Bilgrami terms a “thoroughly predatory” form of economic extraction of natural

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resources from a dead world. Bilgrami writes, “Religion, capital, nature,

metaphysics, rationality, and science were tied together in a highly deliberate

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integration, that is to say, in deliberately accruing worldly alliances.” This

(post)modern naturalism (naturalism without formal teleology, in parallel with an

overly abstract final telos/ God), made up of both a fully transcendent God and a

positivist set of assumption about “nature,” is in no way buttressed by scientific

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evidence and so has gone beyond what Bilgrami understands as a healthy (thin)

naturalism.

We are left with two important points to consider. The first is that analytic

philosophers like Bilgrami and others are at great pains to distinguish their “thin”

work from the “thick” overreach of (post)modern naturalism. The qualifier thin is

a favorite term of analytic thinkers, and is used to designate that perfect line

between what we can say (following from scientific and analytic methods), and

what we cannot say. Any statements that fall on the latter side are qualified as

thick and out of bounds. On this count, both (post)modern (God-mechanism =

natural resources) naturalism as well as pantheistic freethinkers have overreached

and gone into the thick. Good thin analytic thought does not cross the line, or at

least this is the intention. But in practice the line is not so easy to identify.

Bilgrami draws it along the sciences, and is kind enough to include the

social sciences in addition to the natural sciences. He writes,

So the world, in containing opportunities [properties pointing toward first-

person agential responses], contains things that go beyond what the natural
sciences study, but it contains nothing that this specific understanding of
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the social and behavioral sciences cannot bring within their purview.

Bilgrami is not alone in his efforts. In a similar vein Lynne Rudder Baker

has penned a book length consideration of first-person issues in analytic thought.

She offers what she calls a near-naturalism that, like Bilgrami, includes first-

person experiences within the purview of the scientific method, while invoking a

position of quietism on anything that might be considered transcendent or beyond

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science. Yet the question still haunts these thinkers: Can efficient causality (the

purview of the scientific method) really account for first-person experiences?

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 To the extent that the term naturalism is fundamental to the work of

Descola – whose work in turn is foundational for what I am here calling ecologies

of participation – some clarification is necessary on this issue. Descola writes,

“Naturalism can be defined by the continuity of the physicality of the entities of

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the world and the discontinuity of their respective interiorities.” Another

analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel, recently declared his naturalist agenda when

he wrote of his “ideal of discovering a single natural order that unifies everything
114
on the basis of a set of common elements and principles.” As I show below,

this is the dogma of analytic philosophy, and deep motivation for naturalist

thought. This is the shared assumption, following Latour above, of both the

modern and the postmodern, the champions of univocity and critique. But unlike

(post)modern naturalists (and many analytic naturalists we will meet), Nagel does

not assume that this goal of univocal comprehension is actually possible.

Univocity is a goal, a lure, but not an achievable end.

This open stance leads Nagel to consider the possibility that there are

experiences of reality that are so “remarkable” that they cannot be fully

understood by recourse to the “happy accidents” of neo-Darwinian evolutionary

115
theory. Here he is defending the inclusion of some version of formal causality

(and hence the classic naturalism like that of Aristotle), and prefaces his project

by writing

I realize that such doubts [regarding the explanatory power of mechanistic

naturalism] will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because
almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding
the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything
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else would not be science.

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It is due to the ubiquity of mechanistic explanations that I begin here. Nagel wants

to complicate naturalist assumptions about the immanent order of things. He

writes:

I agree with Alvin Plantinga that, unlike divine benevolence, the

application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of our own
cognitive capacities should undermine, though it need not completely
destroy, our confidence in them. Mechanisms of belief formation that have
selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant
our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a
117
whole.

Here Nagel is following Plantinga who has written extensively with regard to the

(post)modern naturalist (allegedly non-metaphysical) metaphysics defended by

the likes of Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins (and their fellow “quasi-religious”

followers; see Plantinga below). In contrast to (post)modern mechanistic

naturalism, Nagle offers a defense of teleological explanations in his text. The

“evolutionary [modern] naturalism” of these neo-Darwinians, writes Nagel,

“implies that we shouldn’t take any part of our convictions seriously, including

the scientific world picture on which evolutionary [modern] naturalism itself

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depends.” What is interesting is that while the neo-Darwinist expression of

(post)modern naturalism necessarily ends in failure (following Plantinga and

Nagel), theistic naturalism need not. And this is where we begin to lose Nagel, for

as clarifies in his text, he lacks the “sensus divinitatis” necessary to imagine a

divine, final, or theistic cause to things. Nagel in the end finds himself defending

a position not unlike Bilgrami and Baker above. This is where Plantinga steps in.

The issue at stake is this. The pragmatic and scientific successes of

Darwin’s evolutionary theory (as well as Newtonian physics) do not open the

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door for the practitioners of these theories to engage in their particular non-

metaphysical metaphysics. The best that they can hope for is to undermine their

own position, by reducing all knowledge to the movements of natural selection.

This is of course a metaphysical assertion. Underlining this point, Plantinga states

the thesis of his consideration regarding naturalism several times, “there is

superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but

superficial concord and deep conflict between science and [(post)modern]

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naturalism.” There are two points of importance for us here.

First, the “quasi-religious” (post)modern naturalism of theoreticians like

Dennett and Dawkins undermine the “methodological [analytic] naturalism”

defended by analytic philosophers cited in these pages. For it to continue to thrive,

analytic thought needs to be distinguished from (post)modern (mechanistic)

naturalisms. A task, as we shall see in the following pages, that has been

somewhat confused by recent attempts at metametaphysics in analytic circles. The

second point, which goes somewhat beyond Plantinga’s own reformed

epistemology (which defends the sensus divinitatis that Nagel asserts he lacks), is

twofold. The first point of argument is that Greek and Hellenic thought, various

versions of theism, medieval thought, Renaissance and Enlightenment thought, as

well as modern, analytic and postmodern traditions all fall clearly within a

particular set of assumptions we can (following Descola) frame as naturalism. The

second part of this argument is that naturalism is based on a limiting originary

assumption, and as such an argument can be made that what constitutes the real in

human experience goes well beyond the narrow blinders/focus of Western

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naturalism. I can summarize this twofold point in the following way: The dogma

that lies at the heart of the mainstream prevalent Western tradition – the givenness

of a univocal physicality/Nature - does not stand up against the vast amount of

ethnographical data available today. To the extent that we take this material

seriously, by looking to the field of linguistic anthropology, we call naturalist

ontological assumptions into question. The same dogma, held in different ways by

Aristotelians, theists, neo-Darwinians, and analytic philosophers alike, is not a

valid ground from which to attempt metaphysical speculation. This point holds as

true for theists and neo-Darwinians as it does for analytic philosophers. That said,

however, we must still discern the unfounded abstractions of (post)modernism

(contemporary mechanism and/or scientism as well as contemporary critical

theories), from healthy expressions of theistic and analytic thought. In order to

begin my clarifications, I now turn to a consideration of linguistic anthropology in

light of this conversation.

Analogy, Linguistic Anthropology, and Limitations on Analytic Naturalism

It is my assertion that to the extent that analytic philosophy moves into

metaphysics, it moves beyond its own self-defined limits, and so ventures into

(post)modern naturalism. (Post)modernism is a naturalist position that analytic

philosophers are at pains to distinguish themselves from. Though most analytic

philosophers would agree with the latter point, to the extent that they engage even

a thin methodological metaphysics they still risk blurring the lines between
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supposedly thin (analytic) and thick (theism and/or scientism) metaphysics.

There are many ways that one might go about articulating this argument, but for
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simplicity’s sake I focus most of my discussion around a recent collection of

analytic essays entitled Metametaphysics (edited by Chalmers, Manley, and

Wasserman). This choice allows me to engage a variety of well respected voices

in the field of analytic philosophy, while it also allows me to narrow the field in a

manageable way.

To begin this conversation let us consider the ontological realism offered

by Theodore Sider. In his essay, “Ontological Realism,” Sider considers a

question first asked by Peter van Inwagen in 1987 that he paraphrases in the

following way: “[Van Inwagen] asked: what do you have to do to some objects to

get them to compose something—to bring into existence some further thing made

up of those objects? Glue them together or what?” Now the careful reader might

already see where I am going with this. Remember the mereological question

Western naturalists only hesitantly ask, the question about final-material

causality; well van Inwagen asked it within the context of analytic philosophy.

Some analytic philosophers rose to the challenge writes Sider, and some “lost
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their metaphysical nerve.” For his part, Sider proceeds to clarify some

arguments regarding various “deflationist” critiques of analytic metaphysics:

equivocation, indeterminacy, obviousness, and skepticism. If we disagree on the

answer to the metaphysical riddle “what glues all this stuff together,” writes Sider,

we might be arguing for no better reason than we are embroiled in an

equivocation or simple verbal disagreement (there is not real difference, just a

difference in word use). There may also be a problem with our proposition.

Maybe it is indeterminate and so our debate simply requires sharper or new

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propositions. Alternatively, the whole debate may be silly or obvious; upon closer

examination we find that in fact our proposition does have a clear truth value.

And finally, we might find ourselves face to face with a skeptic, someone who

engages in frivolous propositions to which no truth or value could ever be

assigned. It is the so-called “skeptics” that I find most interesting.

Having offered his four forms of ontological deflationism, Sider puts

skepticism aside. For, he implies, he wants to deal primarily with real

metaphysical issues, not pointless conversations (like those metaphysicians of old

got embroiled in). After dealing with each of the first three problems, Sider does

eventually return to skepticism, and at this point he writes some very interesting
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words. “We ought to believe in an objective structure to reality,” Sider tells us.

The person who originally asked the question (van Inwagen) does (as I clarify

shortly), but what is interesting right now is why Sider is advocating for as much.

Remember the distinction between silly (the solution to the problem is

obvious, I have the analytic-solution, so you Mr. deflationist are silly) and

pointless (the person we have run into is a skeptic and therefore it is pointless to

talk to such a person). Sider aims to “put his cards on the table” when he writes,

“I think that there is indeed a single best quantifier meaning, a single inferentially

adequate candidate meaning that . . . carves at the [metaphysical] joints. That is: I
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accept ontological realism.” Sider confronts equivocation, indeterminacy, and

obviousness and manages each in turn. He then declares the game won (a game of

univocity and total comprehension it is crucial to point out); he does all this

before addressing skepticism.

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 When he does address skepticism in the following section, Sider points to

Nelson Goodman’s skepticism in particular. Because of its relevance for the rest

of my project, I find it worthwhile to quote Sider at some length:

Thoroughgoing Goodmanian skepticism about similarity is a

breathtakingly radical metaphysical hypothesis, and is utterly unbelievable.
Just try to believe that every grouping of objects is just as good,
objectively speaking, as every other, that no objects ‘go together’ simply
because of the nature of things. I predict you will fail. If all groupings are
equally good, then the world is an amorphous collection of objects. Any
linguistic community is free to choose any groupings they like for their
predicates, describe their surroundings in those terms, and formulate laws
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of nature using those groupings.

This is of course exactly what animists do face. Animists assume a univocity of

interiority, and then face the subsequent fear and anxiety that Sider is sure is so

breathtakingly radical that is ultimately nonsensical. They engage a multiplicity of

worlds, rather than one world. As different bodies are embodied different worlds
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are enacted and made relevant.

For his part, Goodman opens the door for his own version of animist

world-making when he writes, “We risk confusion when we speak of pictures or

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predicates as ‘true of’ what they depict or apply to.” Wait, what? You can

begin to see why Sider is hesitant to deal with this mad man. Our predicates (and

pictures) do not point us toward truth? Goodman goes on,

The whole truth would be too much; it is too vast, variable, and clogged
with trivia. The truth alone would be too little, for some right versions are
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not true . . . and even for true versions rightness may matter more.

Animists (as I clarify in some detail below) are shocked by the shear and radical

equivocity of physicality. But they do not shy away from it.

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 They are also shocked by naturalist pretenses to univocal knowledge of

this materiality, for any knowledge (truth) of the real necessarily falls short of the

overabundance of physicalities they experience. This seems to be something that

Sider simply cannot fathom; something that many of my readers will also find

hard to fathom. Such a radical equivocity of physicality is something that many

indigenous people all around the world live with on a daily basis. Sider continues:

Surely that is wrong. The world has an objective structure; truth-seekers

must discern that structure; they must carve at the joints; communities that
choose the wrong groupings may get at the truth, but they nevertheless fail
badly in their attempt to understand the world . . . . then the world would,
really, be just a structureless blob. There is more to be discovered, more
that is mandatory for inquirers to think about. The world has objective
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streaks in it; it has structure.

Goodman asks us if we should not return from this edge of madness that threatens

our sanity. Should we not assume some “neutral and underlying world?” A “solid

plenum” as Sider calls it, the “shared dogma of analytic philosophers . . . the
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world is out there, waiting to be discovered, it’s not constituted by us.” And

here we have the univocity-dogma of analytic thinkers, material/mereological

univocity, the foundational assumption of naturalism. If this falters, naturalism

falters.

Now here is the interesting point. Goodman is not a world denier; he is a

one-world skeptic. Does this mean that he is going to put down his analytic tools?

No. But we must understand the limits of our endeavor, as Nagel himself pointed

out, for a wholly univocal materiality, says Goodman, is a world lacking in order,
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motion, rest, or pattern. So should we give up all pretense of understanding the

world? No, writes Goodman (and Nagel), for a “broad mind is no substitute for

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 131
hard work.” Univocal assertions deaden the world, but this does not mean we

are left with nothing but articulations of equivocation. There must be some middle

way between these two poles, univocity and equivocity. At this point Goodman

considers the matter of style.

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“Synonymy [univocity] is suspect,” he tells us (following Quine), and
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overly negative and nihilistic equivocal “style” is no good either. “The
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prospect of paradox looms here,” he writes. Careful dear reader, I must warn

you, the pointless madman has returned. “What is said,” Goodman writes, “rather

than being a way of saying what is said, may be a way of talking about something
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else.” Something else? Sider (and analytic philosophy in general) has ways of

rectifying failed attempts (equivocation, obviousness, and indeterminacy) at

univocal statements, but what could this “something else” be? What follows is a

crucial point to my overall project. It underlines my inclusion of Desmond’s

metaphysical practice in this chapter, as well as an important aspect of my

inclusion and critique of Descola. Goodman offers us a glimpse of what Desmond

might think of as metaphysical style, a style that is inherently analogical

(following in critical ways both the analogical natures of both Aquinas’

metaphysics and Hegel’s dialectic).

Goodman writes, “Saying different things may count as different ways of

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talking about something more comprehensive that embraces both.” In recent

and fascinating work in analytic philosophy, Thomas Norton-Smith pens a

defense of American Indian thought based on Goodman’s ontological pluralism.

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Norton-Smith tells us, “Different words make different worlds.” He then goes

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on to argue, “From a culturally sophisticated constructivist perspective grounded

in the philosophy of Nelson Goodman, an American Indian world version

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constructs an actual, well-made world.” Maybe Goodman was not a madman

after all. Maybe he just went beyond the bounds of naturalist dogma. Norton-

smith finds in Goodman’s work the grounds for an animist philosophy of

becoming, understood as the dance between person and place. It must be said that

this was not Goodman’s intention necessarily. Norton-Smith finds Goodman

using an example common among Native American cosmologies – namely that

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the earth rests on the back of a tortoise – as an example of faulty worldmaking.

If he is going to defend the viability of Native American worldmaking, Norton-

Smith must also do some work to contrast his own constructive realism from

Goodman’s constructive nominalism. This task is undertaken, making Norton-

Smith’s work a fascinating exercise in contemporary philosophy, and worth

considering in some detail, but I must return to my consideration of Sider’s

analytic dogma read in conjunction with other essays included within the

anthology Metametaphysics.

To this end, I now turn to Kris McDaniel to set up my next point. For his

part, McDaniel defends the analogical thought of Heidegger, but he could just as

easily have looked to the analogical thought of Aquinas or Hegel (who are so

important to Desmond) or even Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking cited above.

Finding Heidegger enamored with the analogical suggestions of Aristotle,

McDaniel writes,

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 Sider claims that exactly one (existential) quantifier expression is
privileged. Heidegger holds that many but not all are equally
metaphysically basic . . . If ‘being’ is analogical, then Sider’s formulation
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of ontological realism is false.

Is being analogical? Aquinas certainly thought so. Heidegger asserts as much.

Both do so for clearly different purposes, yet are Aquinas and Heidegger not

closer to Being than Sider?

In another essay in this volume van Inwagen tries to defend Sider’s point

and answer this very question by offering a series of Quinean-naturalist theses in

response to Heidegger: “Being is not an activity,” “Being is the same as existence,”

“Existence is univocal,” and “The single sense of being or existence is adequately

captured by the existential quantifier of formal logic.” Van Inwagen finds

Heidegger to have made a basic mistake. He understands Heidegger to have

defined the basic problem like this: if Being is universal, indefinable, and self-
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explanatory, then “Being is the most barren and abstract of all categories.” The

remedy for Heidegger’s feelings of barrenness, writes Van Inwagen, is “ontology.”

But not the phenomenological-historical variety offered by Heidegger. What

Heidegger needs, writes van Inwagen, is exactly the kind of “ontic” ontology he

dismisses as barren, the very same kind of analytical ontology practiced by Quine.

Where Heidegger would see Quine’s answer to the ontological question of

“What is being?” as a further refinement of the univocity of Being he has already

rejected, van Inwagen begs to differ. According to van Inwagen, Heidegger has

mistakenly understood nature for being – formal cause for material cause – and in

so doing has confused his ontological question with reference to needless

questions of phenomenology. Let us assume, writes van Inwagen, that Socrates is

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engaged in an activity. If he is engaged in one activity, does not this imply that

there is also some terminal activity, and even further, that there must be some one

ultimate or always activity.

Remember Aristotle’s questions about movement, and his subsequent

postulation of some unmoved original mover. This ultimate activity, writes van

Inwagen, is the Being that Heidegger finds vapid. But, asks van Inwagen, would

all existential-phenomenologists assume that this ultimate Being is the same for

everything else? His answer, following Sartre, is no. The most general activity of

Socrates, Being, is not the same as the most general activity of a table. He writes

that though Heidegger is a little trickier case, it seems that Heidegger would

assent to the fact that there is a difference between the general activity (Being) of

conscious beings and the general activity of non-conscious beings. It is here that

van Inwagen feels he has caught both Sartre and Heidegger in a paradox. He

writes, “From the point of view of the Quinean meta-ontology, this [seeming
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paradox] is all wrong.” The most general activity of a human being must be

something like “living” or “getting older,” not “being.”

Van Inwagen tells as that it is simply wrong to associate the most general

activity of anything with root words related to ‘être’ or ‘esse’ or ‘exister’ or ‘Sein’

or ‘be’ or ‘is.’ “The vast difference between me and a table,” he writes, “does not

consist in our having vastly different sorts of being (Dasein, dass sein, ‘that it is’);

it consists rather in our having vastly different sorts of nature (Wesen, was sein,
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‘what it is’).” This leads van Inwagen to that most favorite of analytic

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distinctions between “thick” and “thin” understandings of Being, metaphysics, or

what have you.

Sartre and Heidegger are guilty of the thick version, while Quinean

analytic naturalism defends the thin. These two thinkers, on van Inwagen’s point,

have confused the “that it is “ of being for the “what it is” of nature. At this point

van Inwagen writes that those who hold such a thick conception of being will find

van Inwagen’s thin (analytic naturalism) version wholly unsatisfying. But, he

assures us, a Martian lacking all ability to reference being, ‘être’ or ‘esse’ or

‘exister’ or ‘Sein’ or ‘be’ or ‘is’ would have no problem communicating with us.

To put it bluntly, they would simply use a pronoun like the word everything in

place of these problematic root words. They could, he basically says, speak of a

shared materiality or physicality without recourse or reference to formal

interiorities.

Sure, his hypothetical Martians could assume the same natural plenum that

Sider calls the dogma of analytic thinkers, but what if they did not? Lucky we do

not have to look to Mars or hypothetical language speakers to contradict van

Inwagen’s assured point. We need only look to the Pirahã speakers of Brazil,

whom Daniel L. Everett assures get by just fine with limited recourse to
144 145
pronouns, or even for that matter numbers or quantifiers. This means there is

no need for a word like every, and certainly no recourse to “everything.” Everett

has termed the Pirahã tendency to maintain a strict linguistic adherence to

immediate experience experientialism. Pirahã experientialism has been called a

“bomb thrown into the party” of Chomskian universalism (after the important

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 146
work of Noam Chomsky), the very kind of universalism Sider and van
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Inwagen assume with their emphasis on some one ultimate quantifier.
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Following a somewhat different train of thought from Everett, neo-Whorfian

linguist Stephen C. Levinson writes:

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists [and analytic

philosophers] the impression that languages are all built to a common
pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the
direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be
found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally
changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science [or analytic
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naturalist] perspective.

This not only problematizes van Inwagen’s hypothetical use of a Martian tongue,

but also seems to seriously call into the question the necessity of some one

numerical quantifier or Chomskian universalism (the very assumption upon which

both Sider and van Inwagen’s analytic metametaphysics rests). The matter is

certainly not resolved regarding the potential for some

analytic/linguistic/cognitive universal, but a vast amount of recent work calls

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comprehensive univocities into question.

But wait says van Inwagen, there are at least two problems here. First,

why should we assume anything other than that the Pirahã are simply working

with an inadequate semantics? This point goes directly against the thrust of

project, whereby philosophy invites the other in. Following Desmond we can see

the narrow focus of analytic thought (to the extent that it excludes alterity) falling

into curiosity rather than eros. Following Levinson directly above, this tendency

to limit diversity in deference to linguistic universals is suspect at best when

considered in light of recent work offered by Levinson and his neo-Whorfian

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peers. Everett’s work with the Pirahã has been taken seriously by linguistic

anthropologists, and to the extent that they engage the complexity of the the

linguistic data available today, such experientialism cannot be easily dismissed by

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analytic philosophers. Secondly, even if we accept this Pirahã-experientialist-

point not only problematizes the univocities sought by analytic naturalism; it also

makes any reliance on ‘être’ or ‘esse’ or ‘exister’ or ‘Sein’ or ‘be’ or ‘is’ full of

problems as well. This of course is true if Being is simply understood as some

iteration of univocity (final/mereological), but this is not what Heidegger was

after, no more than it is what Goodman, Aquinas, and Hegel all in their own ways

are after. Being is not just everything (Nature as mereological sum/ultimate telos)

as van Inwagen would have it, it is also activity. And though Sartre might not

agree, animists assume that there is an activity akin to formal causality that runs

through all of experience (both that of people, rocks, and tables). But we do not

have to go so far just yet. My Pirahã-experientialist (or neo-Whorfian linguistic

relativist) point seeks only to reestablish a thick reading of being; an analogical

reading if you will.

McDaniel writes,

Even those analytic metaphysicians suspicious about the notion of

metaphysically fundamentality [thick-ness] . . . should realize that their
own view is a substantive metaphysical (or meta-ontological) claim, to
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which Heidegger’s [analogical] position poses a serious challenge.

Establishing the exact line between thick and thin is proving to be more than a

little problematic, and to the extent that Sider and van Inwagen are speculating

about anything, they risk crossing this line. This quotation leaves me with a point,

and a question. The question is this: Can thin analytic naturalism with its dogma

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regarding univocity of physicality make robust metaphysical statements?

Following Huw Price, another contributor to this anthology, the point, or rather

answer to this question is no. It is to his work that I now turn.

Analytic Naturalism, Functional Pluralism, and Between

Locating himself in the pragmatic-analytic tradition following from

Carnap, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty, Price voices concerns that go

right to the heart of Sider and van Inwagen’s ultimate quantifier, and lead us

toward what he calls functional pluralism. Remember Sider’s very clear

declaration: We cannot be skeptical regarding the univocity of nature. It must be

so, says Sider, there must be some shared univocal quantifier that we might call

Nature. But following in the good company mentioned above, though we might

agree with Sider (and van Inwagen) regarding the dogma of analytic philosophers,

we certainly cannot prove the existence of a univocal quantifier; a point brought

home by Carnap (as well us the other authors mentioned above) some years ago.

Following his analytic-synthetic distinction, Carnap showed that we

cannot be certain of the external nature of our assertions. Carnap cites the likes of

Berkeley, Hume, and Russel, all of whom were unable to locate abstract/external

quantifiers within the realm of sense data (a point reminiscent of so many

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critiques leveled at theism ). Carnap tells us that just because someone has

accepted “thing-language” like the language of naturalists (scientific, analytic, or

otherwise), it does not necessarily follow that they have also accepted some

external reality like Nature (the “thing-world” for Carnap). Taking this point

further, it is possible for those using the “thing-language” (naturalist language) to

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test their assumptions in a pragmatic way. What cannot be tested or verified, he

tells us, is the actual reality of Nature (thing-world). This is an external assertion

that cannot be articulated by means of the internal limits of naturalism (thing-

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language). Just because Plato, Aristotle, C.S. Peirce, and Frege all assumed

there were abstract, univocal, external quantifiers, it does not follow that this is so.

And in fact, following Carnap, it is not possible to state such assumptions in a

univocal manner. Carnap’s conclusion is that metaphysics, understood as a search

for univocal-external truths, is dead. In its place we are left with more pragmatic
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concerns regarding the efficacy of our instruments, theories, and practices.

Internal questions naturally fall within the purview of a given framework;

they are analytic and verifiable. Synthetic statements of truth follow from the

nature of reality, but they are not analytic, they are not verifiable a priori. External

questions reside outside of these verifiable frameworks, and so are not analytic.

Carnap understands certain questions regarding the existence of things and

numbers to be metaphysical in nature, and he sees the asking of such questions as

beholden to a basic mistake. Here we find what Price refers to as Carnap’s use-

mention distinction. The line of argument follows a distinction between the

legitimate use of a word and the mention of that same word outside of its

legitimate use. Carnap tells us that words like object, things, and numbers only

have an internal legitimate use. They only legitimately have meaning within a

particular linguistic framework. Metaphysical (here conflated with search for

univocity) questions mention these words, but in doing so they attempt to extract

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them from an internal-analytic context and use them to demarcate meaning where

they have no legitimate use.

Price turns to Quine at this point by way of clarifying a quotation that has

been misunderstood and used to promote analytic metametaphysics. Quine writes:

If there is no proper distinction between analytic and synthetic, then no

basis at all remains for the contrast which Carnap urges between
ontological statements [i.e., the metaphysical statements that Carnap wants
to disallow] and empirical statements of existence. Ontological questions
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then end up on a par with the questions of natural science.

As Price points out, statements like the one above have led authors to assume that

while traditional metaphysics (like theism) is disallowed, the natural sciences (or

the analytic naturalists that hold the thin line) allow for some form of ontological

realism, some Siderian or Inwagian ultimate quantifier. Price clarifies that the

traditional role of the (univocity seeking) metaphysician has been sunk. Just

because Quine was critical of Carnap’s distinction between internal and external

uses, does not mean he opened the door for analytic metaphysics. In fact, he

closed it further.

Internal and supposedly analytic truths are limited, following Carnap and

Quine; they are ultimately pragmatic and subject to change. Following a

somewhat similar line to the neo-Whorfian thought defended by Levinson above,

Quine writes, “[linguistic universalism] rests on the notion of linguistic

equivalence, or sameness of meaning; and this has seemed dubious as a tool of

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philosophical analysis.” Quine goes on to argue that we should relax our need

for univocal propositions. “Certainly,” he tells us,

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 positing of first objects makes no sense except as keyed to identity
[univocity]; but those patterns of thing talk, once firmly inculcated, have
in fact enabled us to talk of attributes and propositions in partial
grammatical analogy . . . Why not just accept them thus, as twilight half-
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entities to which the identity concept is not to apply?

Science gets on well without recourse to mereological sum, says Quine. Science

can continue its work without needing to figure out exactly what is the nature of

the whole (Nature), and philosophy will have to find ways to “accommodate the
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half-entities in a second grade system.” Quine (and Price) is not interested in

second grade practices. Abstract and mathematical objects are crystal-clear, writes

Quine, but they are neither assured for future purposes, nor are they safely

correlated cross-linguistically. To the extent that this is true, and that we also

assume that metaphysics equals the search for the crystal-clear, metaphysics has

no purpose for us going forward (following Desmond, such a search could hardly

be considered metaphysical, rather it would be seen as beholden to abstract

curiosities and antithetical to metaphysics).

Quine, along with Carnap, agreed that external quantifiers are necessarily

suspect. Any recourse to a metaphysical univocity is dead in the water. The

argument at this point, I am sure, could go on and on. I am not an analytic

philosopher, and so though I am sure that most of the authors in the anthology

Metametaphysics have a ready answer for Price, I am actually not that concerned.

For my own purposes I am more concerned with the flexibility offered by what

Price terms functional pluralism than I am interested in the exact nature of exactly

how thin is thin when it comes to respectable analytic metametaphysics.

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 By way of clarifying what Price means by functional pluralism, I look

beyond the essays contained in Metametaphysics, and consider Price’s larger

body of work. As Price has argued, the possibility that we might comprehensively

clarify the univocity of Nature via analytic thought is dicey at best. While issues

of efficient causality can be left as unproblematic, the assertion of a mereological

sum like Nature is not so easily managed. Having made this point, we must turn

to another specter haunting not only analytic thought, but science in general. We

can look to Nagel, cited above, for clarification here:

The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made
possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has
permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed in timeless,
mathematically formulated physical laws. But at some point it will be
necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding
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that includes the mind.

Price refers to this as the problem of M-worlds or M-concepts (i.e., morality,

161
modality, meaning, mental). If we are really going to acknowledge not only the

complexity of our lived experiences, but also the complexity faced by

contemporary sciences, what do we do with these M-worlds (like the teleology,

formal, and final causes I have placed emphasis on)?

He begins by following the rescue strategy of the non-cognitivist who

attempts to save the day by first recognizing that M-concepts have different

linguistic functions than traditional analytic concepts. Statements like “that is cool”

(cool used here as a slang terminology for good, as opposed to low temperature)

are not meant as representations of reality – which is assumed to be Nature – and

to the extent that this is true they are not meant to connect to reality. Once this

difference has been clarified, the non-cognitivist hopes to alleviate the tension

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created by M-worlds by brushing them to the side as irrelevant concepts in

relation to the naturalist’s task. But Price wonders what sort of world it would be

if there were no such things as moral facts or formal causality.

A functional pluralist, on Price’s reading, is someone who accepts the

descriptive, fact-stating, truth-apt nature of moral, modal, mental, and meaning

based language. Price writes that such a pluralist risks being labeled a (Moorean)

non-naturalist. A non-naturalist, on this account, is someone who assumes that the

world is made up of not only scientific things, but meaningful things as well. We

can see the difference here between modern and classic naturalisms mentioned

above, whereby the modern naturalist cannot allow anything but the most anemic

caricature of naturalism to stand. But this is not just about a suitable definition

(whether modern or classic) of naturalism. Price pushes the conversation beyond

naturalism (the assumption that there is some univocal continuous thing-world

called Nature).

Price writes, “The difference is that pluralism rejects the idea of a single
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world, containing both moral and natural entities." Upon writing these words,

he is quick to clarify that he is not pushing us into some expression of vulgar

relativism, whereby any world we dream up is real. He is actually remembering

Carnap’s external/internal distinction noted above. "The point is that the judgment

of unity or plurality,” he writes,

could only be made from the framework-independent external stance,

which the Carnap thesis disallows . . . . The multiplicity that the pluralist
does recognize is one of linguistic function, and therefore naturalistically
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respectable.

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This is an interesting door that has opened, for Price is not claiming that there are

in fact animist/multinaturalist possibilities. He is not making a metaphysical claim

regarding multiple physicalities; rather, he is defending the pluralist for her stance

in regard to any kind of univocal statement. Price’s pluralism is functional, not

metaphysical. He simply cannot be certain whether the Christian, analytic, or

Buddhist dogma is finally true, so for pragmatic reasons he adopts a negative

view (we cannot prove univocity) that parallels a positive view (we do have

recourse to the pragmatic outcomes of both natural and social sciences).

Price continues this point when he writes, “The multiplicity of worlds,

such as it is, is merely what follows from the fact that more than one linguistic
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function may be exercised at the same time." The example he offers is

instructive. When we say something like “electrons are terrific little particles,” we

do not have to consider if “terrific” and “little” are meant to represent or mirror

actual Reality or Nature. Terrific has a different function than electron. Similarly

if we reference some particular dance move as cool, we do not necessarily mean

that cool represents some physical measurable particularity. Linguistic functions,

for Price, becomes like different tools. Language is understood as a “multi-

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purpose tool” that can be put to different purposes. His functional pluralism

can be seen here to align with Everett’s similar assertion that language is a
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cultural tool. For both of these authors language is used and/or has different

functions. But the question arises, did Culture make language, or language

Culture? To put this slightly differently, did Nature make language, or did

language make Nature?

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 For his part, Price professes quietism regarding the latter, and seems to fall

positively on the side of the former. Culture/Nature makes use of language.

Language, he tells us, points more toward sociology and the natural sciences than

it does to metaphysics. By examining language, Price tells us, we learn about “the
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behaviors of natural creatures (ourselves).” We can also, it would seem, learn

about the behaviors of natural things, electrons. But what of the nature of cool?

Price offers a functional pluralism that allows us a broader definition of Nature,

but to my mind he has two problems. First, in considering the point above, for all

his efforts to the contrary, Price still seems to be assuming some univocal Nature.

And here is the second point (largely related to the first). His functional pluralism

allows for the so-called “soft” and “hard” sciences, but are the soft/sociological

sciences really adequate for the task of clarifying what is meant by cool? My

answer, which requires some explication, is no.

Following the same basic line of thought penned by Price, Bilgrami writes

of a “wider significance of naturalism.” We need to find a way to not only include

the natural sciences in our discourse, but also the social sciences. “So the world,”

writes Bilgrami,

in containing opportunities [relevant to our desires], contains things that

go beyond what the natural sciences study, but it contains nothing that this
specific understanding of the social and behavioral sciences cannot bring
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with their purview.

But do the social and natural sciences really assume different worlds,

frameworks, or realities? Though Price seems to assume this, I cannot see how we

could think as much. While the natural sciences are clearly concerned with

efficient causality (while assuming Nature as mereological sum), the social

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sciences are predicated largely on the attempt to replicate a science of efficient

causality in the realm of what Price calls M-worlds. The problem is that Price’s

functional pluralism clarifies different functions that seem to revolve around

“natural creatures.” And what could “natural” mean here, but in reference to some

mereological sum (e.g., Nature). This functional pluralism is not the metaphysical

pluralism defended in these pages.

Notice, for example, how for Bilgrami the extent that language points

toward what he termed opportunities above, such things can become the objects

of science (social sciences in this case). Following a similar line of thought, Price

declares quietism regarding the matter of some external univocity called Nature,

yet still tends to assume it. This point is not lost on Frank Jackson, who authored a

parallel reply to Price’s original publication of the essay regarding M-worlds we

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are considering here. Jackson offers what he terms an “orthodox view” of

naturalist representationalism. Price argues a little too strongly, says Jackson, for

his naturalism without representationalism. Of course we use terms to represent

things, says Jackson: if this were not the case then why do we bother writing

down street addresses when trying to get somewhere? For Jackson, this is as true

for cool and terrific as it is for the word electron and the intersection between
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Fifth and Claremont streets. We are clearly meaning to represent something,

and it works. He argues further that we often find ourselves in situations whereby

one assertion is clearly better than another (e.g., the discovery of cell division

overthrows any recourse to vitalist theories in biology; or the combined discovery

of the causal roles temperate and molecular properties of gases clarifies for us that

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gases do not think/have psychology). We found an efficient cause, Jackson

appears to say, so we can be sure that there are no formal or teleological

explanations necessary.

And this of course is exactly where Price interjects his functional

pluralism. Talk of psychology and thought has different functions than does talk

of temperature and molecular properties. The functions of M-languages are

descriptive to be sure, says Jackson, but not to the extent that analytic and

scientific functions of language are “genuinely” descriptive. It would seem (says

Jackson) that Price assumes psychology and beliefs (M-worlds) cause things in

different ways than scientific objects do. If this is in fact the case, writes Jackson,

Price’s functional pluralism is not a new avenue toward the problem of “too much

causation,” “but instead is an instance of a rather bountiful traditional

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metaphysics.” Jackson sees Price falling short on two separate issues. Price

must address the problem of exactly how different frameworks can be

differentiated, and he must account for how they causally interact with one

another. To put this succinctly, how does Price demarcate M-worlds from the

scientifically objective world?

In the essay being considered here, Price acknowledges the first half of the

critique (more on that point later), and offers a defense of his position regarding

the latter. By way of considering Jackson’s critique, Price looks to the word I

have already mentioned, cool. If the use of the term cool is used in a descriptive

manner, says Price, and we accept the functional pluralist’s assertion that

language is amenable to different descriptive functions (i.e., not all scientific),

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then we can assert that cool-ness does not necessarily (to the extent that it is

descriptive) assume a physical/natural object. Description is not necessarily

relevant to scientific physicality or objectivity. But, wonders Jackson, what of the

problem of supervenience? How does a moral property supervene with a physical

property, without describing that same physical property? If the use of the word

cool is to be verifiable or meaningful, when I say “that is cool,” I must be

referencing some physical attribute, right? No, writes Price, for M-concepts are

more like applause than like physical properties. When two ball players make a

similar pivot that is unequivocally recognized as cool, what is being ascribed is

something more like applause than any physical object or movement. Is the pivot

(marked as cool) of the first player identical to the move of the second player?

And is the pivot understood by reference to cool-applause identical to the pivot

understood by reference to foot-movement (scientifically measurable objects)?

Where is the line between these worlds, asks Price (and Jackson)? He

wonders how we can be sure of sharp distinctions between frameworks. Is there a

single world? And is it that of Nature, God, Brahman, or something entirely

different? These are important question, and by his own admission, Price does not

have answers. His work is meant only to show the limitations of a single-world

hypothesis. Following Carnap, such a thesis is not verifiable. Naturalists

(especially of the thin analytic or thick modern kind) will find all this talk of

multiple worlds hard to take seriously, writes Price. But they must, at least to the

extent that they accept Carnap’s limitations on univocity alongside the realization

that there are other viable functions for language beyond referencing natural

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objects (thing-language) in a thing-world (Nature).

My own work seeks to defend a metaphysical pluralism, not a functional

one. I have looked to Price by way of clarifying the limitations of analytic

metametaphysics, something I find he has done admirably well. But I find myself

in agreement with Jackson on at least one point, for it does seem that Price

assumes some natural ground of supervenience, even though he does not state as

much. The work that follows clarifies one set of grounds for demarcation between

frameworks (following from Descola’s fourfold way). It adopts an intimate

metaphysics that must be distinguished from the univocal variety assumed by

almost all analytic thinkers (Desmond’s fourfold way). In so doing it articulates

the potential for univocal assertions in the context of an intimate plurivocity (and

so is metaphysically pluralist). It honors various non-Western traditions that assert

exactly the kind of multiple world/nature Price’s functional pluralism makes

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hypothetical, but in a far more empirical way. It also follows the Yoruba, the
173 174
Dagara, American Indian pragmatism, ancient Chinese theories of
175 176
correlations, and contemporary Japanese language of becoming in asserting

that we actually can develop a science and/or philosophy of the cool. By way of

clarifying these assertions I now turn to a detailed consideration of Descola’s

fourfold way, critically engaged through a parallel reading of Desmond’s own

fourfold way.

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 Chapter 3: Ecologies of Participation
Ecologies Instead of Ontologies

For my own purposes I adopt the term ecologies at this point. I reserve the

term ontology to point toward the four distinct ontological systems found in

Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture. I assume, based on his work, that there are

several ontological starting points available to us, but in utilizing the term ecology

I attempt to clarify my position in conversation with the intimate metaxological

metaphysics of Desmond, the process metaphysics of Whitehead, and the

participatory predicament of Ferrer. In a recent anthology entitle Thinking

Through Things, the editors of this volume write,

In keeping with its monotheistic origins (Viveiros de Castro 1998a: 91),

ours is an ontology of one ontology. If ontology simply means the study of
the nature of reality, then to speak of multiple ontologies seems an
oxymoron at best, or a sign of social pathology and schizophrenia at
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worst.

As I show in some detail below, I find Descola’s ontological relativity in need of

a primary frame of reference (or ecology), some shared intimate metaxological

ground like that found in Desmond. Desmond’s work allows us to invite the

naturalists (whether Greek, theist, modern, or analytic) and their ontological

assumptions in, effectively negating the attribution of pathology of schizophrenia

cited above. Rather than speak of ontological pluralism, we find ourselves

speaking of participatory ground compromised of multiple dialectics (see

Desmond), radical constructions (see Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell), a

constructive realism (see Norton-Smith), or participatory enactions (see Ferrer

and Sherman).

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 For Descola, each ontological starting point has its own basic framework

whereby assumptions regarding actuality arise out of identification with a

continuous and discoverable physicality (naturalism), identification with a

continuous and discoverable interiority (animism), identification with a

continuous and discoverable physicality paralleling identification of a shared

interiority (totemism), or a splintering of physicality and interiority into atomic,

independent, non-shared units (atomism). While all of these ontological starting

points can be understood as clear and distinct from one another in abstraction,

they cannot be so clearly delineated in our ethnographic literature. All four

ontological assumptions can be seen to play out through the variety of what I term
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ecologies present throughout human history. Contemporary philosophers and
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Harvard students are discovered to be nurturing animist assumptions,
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Empedocles and Schelling are found to have totemic tendencies, clear

differences between ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers are maintained and
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problematized by reference to both animist and naturalist tendencies, Tzeltal

Mayans, Ewe West Africans, Tamil South Asians engage multiple frames of
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reference that could be considered totemic and animist, and Guugu Yimithirr
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speaking people have naturalist notions of being. I use the term ecology along

similar lines to the way that Latour and Descola look to the term collective above.

It points to the agapeic astonishment of lived experience, the blending of these

ontological starting points in all kinds of creative ways. By using this term I adopt

an open stance that does not require naturalist or animist dualisms that can lead to

rigid atomist hierarches, all the while being capable of honoring both.

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 I have made this choice following the work of Isabella Stengers and Vikki

Bell. The use of the term ecologies by Stengers and Bell works to move the

human agent and/or the scientific object off of center stage. Following

Whitehead’s philosophy these authors throw the human agent or subject into the

chaosmos of subjectivities that is available to the Achuar and other animist

ontologies. Bell writes, “Human subjectivity is joined by many other

subjectivities, as Whitehead would not flinch from calling them, and vitality is no
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longer the preserve of the human or the animal.” Whatever term we adopt will

have to be up to the challenge of bridging the strong antimonies held between

animist and naturalist dualisms, and the term ecologies may allow for just that.

Following Stengers, Bell draws up a defense of the term ecology based on

three criteria. First, the use of this term maintains a rudimentary openness to

complexity or what Desmond terms agapeic astonishment above. It allows us to

envision a multiplicity of entities that come into being via a diversity of

causalities. We find here discernable qualities of a shared physicality (naturalism),

similarly shared qualities of a basic interiority (animism), concrescing out of some

basic tension or polarity that comes from identifying with both interiority and

physicality of the other (totemism), and capable of being arranged via diverse

logics (atomic hierarchies) that underlie the ontological systems of Descola’s

analysis. Using the term ecology as opposed to ontology allows us to steer clear of

simple reductionisms that may arise out of the naturalist assumptions that often

undergird much of Western thought with regard to ontology.

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 Secondly, there is an inherent uncertainty that is fundamental to an

ecological understanding. This points to the relational quality of experience that

animist ontologies assume, the dynamic polarities attributed to totemic ontologies,

and the rigidity of atomisms that are clarified later in this chapter. (Post)modern

thought (an atomistic form of naturalism) ignores the complex relationality of

animism (it cannot properly account for subjectivity), while attempting to

universalize the atomic and discontinuous abstractions of mathematics across

ecologies that are not beholden to any mathematical forms currently understood

by scientists today.

Following Desmond we can say that the (post)modern naturalist-atomism

we have inherited has overstepped its erotic impulse toward self-determination,

leaving agapeic astonishment behind in its lust to overcome the tension of other

once and for all through total comprehension (univocal emphasis on unity) or

critique (equivocal emphasis on difference). In so doing, it has essentialized

distinctions and concretized difference in a way that is not adequate to the erotic

nature of totemic polarities, animist relationalities, and naturalist substance. Nor

are these overly abstract (post)modern assumptions in accord with different

atomisms available to us throughout human experience like those of the Vedic

caste system, the Ifá odu, or the Neo-Platonic, post-Plotinus, Renaissance version

of the Great-Chain-of-Being. Bell’s second defense of ecology warns that we

cannot know in advance the outcome of our actions, for our movements are not

beholden to some one set of logical abstractions (atomism), nor one clearly

defined true absolute ontological ground (naturalism). Here she can be read to

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defend Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell’s “things-as-heuristic” approach, which

demands that we meet “things” on their own ground (without analytic

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assumptions).

The term ecology can include these important aspects of our experience,

while inviting in the dynamism of the concrete polarities of totemic ontologies

and the cannibal tendencies and issues of concern that arise out of animist

ontologies. Put simply, the term ecology includes the relational, complex, and

dynamic aspects of our lived experience that are often lost on naturalist-atomic

assumptions about the True and Correct with regard to a single given

cosmos/universe or the basic properties of some abstract Nature or other local

logical assertion. As much as modern science and philosophy would love to

assume that their particular logic (algebraic, geometric, symbolic, modal, etc.) is

universal – in the sense of adequate to all assumptions across ecologies – the

reality is that each relative logic is universalizable only within the limits of its

very narrow sets of questions (and hence subsequent answers). As I show later in

this chapter, the neo-Whorfian work Levinson bears this point out.

If we seek to affirm the hyperbolic overdetermined nature of agapeic

astonishment, writes Desmond, there can be no prescribed method or analytic

technique that will suffice. He writes,

The intimacy of being points to an idiotic source beyond determinate

thinking. To ask for a method would be already to determine this source,
in advance of the challenge it might pose to metaphysics, and hence to
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domesticate this challenge before it is even allowed to pose itself.

Remember, agapeic astonishment revels in the overdeterminate otherness of

experience, while erotic perplexity seeks self-determination (an overcoming of

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other) in the face of such intensity and tension. The singularity or idiocy of any

theoretician moves away from the immediacy of intensity and intimacy as it turns

toward specific questions, and verifiable answers. Curiosity (atomism) at this

level has splintered all recourse to the overabundance of being.

Bell means “to take up this point in more Whiteheadian language,” when

she writes,

one might argue that an actual entity concerns itself and is a matter of
concern for other aspects of its environment or ecology, such that the
emergence or sustenance of each actual entity depends upon its sustenance
by other entities, and that emergence is both dependent and qualified in
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the process.

An actually entity, here, assumes intimacy, and nurtures reverence. It does not

seek to move beyond its own idiocy into curiosity and so abstraction beyond

intimacy. Falling on the side of Leibniz as well as Whitehead, Bell’s use of the

term ecology points to the relational-erotic dynamism of naturalist, animist, and

totemic ontological beginnings; that which is always more complex than any one

abstraction could attempt to contextualize.

On Whitehead’s account, the point of philosophical speculation is not to

get the right answer – some atomic, discontinuous, and abstract curiosities - but

rather to approximate beauty. Following a similar line of thought, Desmond

writes that he does mean to defend some “confused promiscuity, but a certain
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philosophical fidelity.” Metaphysics lies somewhere within the strange

intimacy of animist, naturalist, and totemic erotic impulses toward self-

determination. Speculative philosophy should not lend itself to the defense of

particularities of some one set of atomic assumptions. Atomisms of every kind are

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always local to a particular and more or less stable set of appropriate questions or

curiosities (without such stability abstractions would be meaningless). It is

perfectly fine for Aristotle to nurture his naturalist tendencies (articulating

efficient, final, material, and formal causes) and his analogistic dreams

(categorical logic). This is only problematic to the extent that we forget his

Socratic roots and the limits of naturalism. Socrates could not articulate the Truth,

rather he facilitated a journey always toward, never actually arriving on any stable

ground. This does not mean stable ground is not out there, but rather that we

cannot assume to have found it via any single univocal assumption/articulation.

Our reliance on Aristotelian naturalism and the rest of the Western tradition is

only problematic to the extent that we forget its limited applicability. By using the

term ecology we invite the others in. The incredible diversity of subjectivities

available to animist ontologies, the foundational polarities of totemic ontologies,

as well as the diversity of Truths, Goods, Gods, enlightenments, patterns,

abstractions, and hierarchies of other naturalist and analogistic ontologies that are

not our own.

Bell’s third reason for adopting the term ecology follows directly from the

acknowledgement of such complexity. To articulate her point, she looks to the

term symbiosis (following both Stengers and contemporary biological sciences).

There is a basic uncertainty that arises out of our ecologies of participation.

Whatever we are, if we take all of Descola’s ontologies seriously, we must be

constituted by a variety of correlations and physical becomings (animism), causes

(naturalism), polarities or tensions (totemism), and abstract patterns of meaning

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(atomism). The majority of the Western academic tradition is predicated on

naturalist thought, which assumes that there is one world, one truth, and one basic

uni-linear line of progression. There are those who equivocate, but following

Latour, they can be located as part and parcel of one (post)modern constitution.

Though the journey is never fully articulated in a satisfactory way, the

naturalist search for solid ground offers a kind of fleeting respite from the

entangled ecologies discussed here. There is a certainty or univocity that can be

assumed when operating in a (post)modern naturalist ontology of Nature that is

not available to those who are aware of the ecologies of others. My actions have

efficacy over some objective world (naturalism), as do the logical patterns and

laws of my relative frame of reference (see Levinson below), and the actions of

other subjectivities, as well as the cosmic forces that are at play in making me up

(totemism). All of this leads Bell to proffer the idea of symbiosis, whereby one

cannot assume superiority by consensus, conformation, coherency, or necessity.

All of these factors are at play in such a way that “symbiotic agreements” must be

made that nurture the needs, concerns, etc. of others. Whitehead writes, “[such]

‘concern’ at once places the object as a component in the experience of the

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subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it.”

The use of the term ecology points us toward participation and just this sort of

concern. I now turn to a brief consideration of Descola’s fourfold way.

Descola’s Anthropology: A Fourfold Way  

Descola offers us a fourfold way of engaging cross-ecological dialogue.

After his own careful reading of the ethnographical and psychological literature

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available to him, he makes the conjecture that all have some form of relationship

to physicality and interiority. It is crucial from the outset to recognize that

Descola is far less interested in the diversity of structures (i.e., kinship, economic,

ritual, and/or cosmological) available to people than he is interested in the

relations to physicality and interiority that he sees holding these structures

together. People, he tells us, tend to identify with other-ness in at least one of the

four following ways: totemism whereby identification occurs in reference to both

the interiorities and the physicalities of alterity, and so subsequently experience

no discontinuity between self and other, an iguana potentially shares a similar

interiority and physicality with a totemic person; animism whereby identification

occurs with only the interiors of other-ness, and so subsequently animists

experience a discontinuity of physicalities, an iguana shares the same interiority

(humanity) but has a different physicality; naturalism whereby identification

occurs with the physicalities of other, and so subsequently naturalist experience a

discontinuity of interiorities, the iguana is made up of the same physical stuff

(Nature) but has a very different interiority no interiority; and analogism whereby

identification is with neither the interior nor the physicality of other, and so

subsequently analogical thinkers experience a discontinuity in both whereby no

shared physicality or interiority is understood in relation to the iguana (as I argue,

in contrast to Descola below, this seems a highly abstract nihilism that might be

imagined, but hardly assumed as an originary assumption) (see Table 1)

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Table 1. Descola's Ontologies

Totemism Animism Analogism Naturalism

Interiority Continuous/Shared Continuous/Shared Discontinuous Discontinuous

Physicality Continuous/Shared Discontinuous Discontinuous Continuous/Shar

ed

Perspective absolute/cosmic the People relative to univocity, Being relative to

Polarity Becoming comprehensive Nature

(multinaturalist) abstractions (multiteleogist)

dualism Atomism dualism

Source: Descola (2013).

 Descola writes that this basic relationality (identification/non-

identification-physicality/interiority) seems to be present in all persons, no matter

their form of participation. Despite the known diversity of conceptions regarding

basic structures undergirding actuality, notions of physicality and interiority seem

to be universally present, although with an infinite variety of modalities of

connections and interactions between the two planes. He tells us that

a proof of this would be that there is no known case of a conception of the

ordinary living human person that would be based on interiority alone –
let’s call it a mind without a body – or on physicality alone – a body
without a mind –, or not at least, in the latter case, until the advent of
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materialist theories of consciousness of the late twentieth century.

Descola qualifies this basic relationality by writing that it is not one of Greek

origin, Christian theology, or Cartesian mechanism. It should not be seen as some

form of ethnocentrism. Rather, Euro-American naturalism and analogism can be

understood as particular relational assumptions regarding interiority and

physicality.

Here Descola looks to the work of Edmund Husserl and Paul Bloom.
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While Husserl identifies the importance of body and intentionality, Bloom

writes of a basic polarity is at the heart of what it to be human. Our reproductive

success requires of us the ability to understand the world as made up of both static

experiences that follow fairly clear patterns, and more fluid experiences that move
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with the ease of thoughts and emotions. If there is a critique to be leveled at

Descola, it would most likely be taken up here. This basic shared starting point

limits possible forms of participation available to human beings. It could be that

there are more ecological starting points available to us, or that this polarity is not

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nearly as universal as Descola would have us believe. For my part, I defend

Descola’s use of this basic polarity, as I see it as a turning toward the variety of

more-or-less concrete experiences available to us. This point is arguable, and yet

fundamental to my overall assertions in this project. My project rests in large part

on the conjecture made by Descola that there are in fact a finite number of starting

points whereby people might organize and co-create their worlds. In the following

pages I offer a critical reading of Descola’s fourfold way. I find Descola in need

of a primary ecology, find his conflation of analogy with extreme abstraction and

atomism suspect, and so reimagine a broad definition of naturalism and animism

in relation to my critical reassessment of Descola’s analogical ontology. In the

end I find myself with a fivefold way that aligns more clearly with the available

ethnographic and historical data, recent trends in linguistic anthropology, and well

as with my goal to articulate a comparative lens by way of reference to various

ecologies of participation.

A Critical Reading of Descola’s Ecologies

Descola and Desmond: A First Glance

It is helpful from the very outset to clarify Descola’s work in relationship

to that of Desmond. Descola’s work is predicated on two different conjectures.

The first is that all people everywhere generally articulate meaning and reality

based on a diversity of possible relationships to the experiences of interiority and

physicality. The second conjecture rests on the idea that there are a limited

number of relationships (rather than structures, see above) available with regard to

interiority and physicality. We can either identify with the interiority and

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physicality of that which we perceive as other-ness (totemism); only the

interiority, but not the physicality (animism); only the physicality, but not the

interiority (naturalism); or we might not identify with either the interiority or

physicality of that which we perceive to be other (analogism).

In order to read Descola’s work in light of Desmond several things need to

be clarified. Desmond also outlines his metaphysical speculations by reference to

a fourfold way. “This fourfold way is not at all indefinite,” he tells us, “but

complexly defined by the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the
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metaxological understandings of being.” While univocity and equivocity are

clear enough, dialectic is understood as an analogical play between sameness and

diversity. The fourth way, metaxology, can be understood by reference to a

multiplicity of attempts at metaphysical practice or dialectics. These dialectics can

take several different forms.

We can trace the tensions of the dialectical process between univocity and

equivocity through multiple relationships, including but not necessarily limited to

agape, eros, and curiosity. Curiosities exist at the extremities of abstraction from

intimacy and agape, and can either seek answers to curiosity (ultimate univocity)

or critique (an equivocation or reaction against assumptions of

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comprehension). For Desmond life begins with the shock of difference. To say

that there is someone (univocity) who is awed by such an experience is to talk

rather loosely, for the distinction between self (univocity) and other (equivocity)

is hardly discernable in this originary state of agapeic union. Desmond’s work is

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predicated on this assumption of a minimally differentiated hyperbolic intimacy

or being.

While agape underscores a supreme patience and being-with univocity and

equivocity, the second relationship (erotic perplexity) moves toward univocity the

discernment of a more coherent self. Erotic perplexity describes a process of self-

determination that manages to both articulate a modicum of self, while conjointly

nurturing some aspect of equivocity or other-ness. It is important to note that this

erotic self-determination does not seek to wholly overcome equivocity (diversity).

It does not seek complete univocity or sameness by way of defining self. Rather it

underlines an attempt at self-determination that continues to nurture and be

patient with difference.

When equivocity becomes too troubling for this erotic sense of self, some

particular curiosity becomes interesting as an avenue toward relief from the

uncertainty of other-ness and difference. Curiosities are enacted by reference to an

original univocal assumption-question (at this point the original question and

assumption are intimately linked). A stronger sense of self can be clarified out the

background of equivocal blooming and buzzing. Such a self is clearly delineated

to the extent that the background noise of diversity can be overcome. The

originary assumption of self in such a case delimits the context by drastically

reducing what can be articulated as being or potentially existent. Curiosities

narrow the field of difference and intimacy, while promising the possibility of

comprehension.

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 Complete comprehension of being is not possible for Desmond, as

curiosities assume some particular univocity at the expense of the radical intimacy

and diversity of actuality. Curisoties denote a univocal dream that lies at the

furthest extremes of abstraction imaginable, beyond the overwhelming intimacy

of agape, beyond the tension between self and other maintained in eros, and

beyond even the first strong attempts at sameness encouraged by particular

curiosities. For Desmond, curiosity and comprehensive dreams of univocity belie

an attempt at self-determination that moves toward sameness, away from diversity,

and away from the overabundance of intimacy that is our concrete experience.

Any truths discovered within such a profoundly limited setting, though

efficacious in their austerity, risk monstrosity. They risk hegemony and the

subsequent loss of intimacy and diversity that follows a willful or unintentional

ignorance of other. Dreams of comprehension are highly abstract, having little or

nothing to do with what Desmond calls the strange intimacy of being, and to the

extent that they do violence by ignoring other-ness they invite critique. Critique is

the equivocal opposite of comprehension in the name of curiosity. The

(post)modern constitution outlined by reference to the work of Latour above is an

exemplar of a contemporary struggle with a particular curiosity, namely modern

Nature (and it’s postmodern counterpart Culture). These distinctions, made by

Desmond, between agape, eros, and curiosity prove fruitful for clarifying

Descola’s own recent work with its intent to move beyond the (post)modern

curiosities of Nature and Culture.

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 Following my assertion that Desmond’s work helps to clarify Descola’s

own fourfold way, I now turn to a parallel reading of them both. First, beginning

with agape, we can assume that there must be some primary form of agapeic

participation within which the distinction between self and other is minimal at

best. Agape, for Desmond, is predicated more on union than distinction.

Descola’s four ecologies come about by a process of identification, and to the

extent that this is true, seem not to make reference to such primary participation.

Descola’s ecologies can be understood in the light of Desmond’s erotic and

curious-comprehensive impulses toward self-determination. Following

Desmond’s work, it seems more than likely that a primary ecology prior to these

impulses toward self-determination should at least in theory be recognizable.

Such an ecology is in fact key to understanding some basic difficulties I have

found in Descola’s own fourfold way.

Descola’s own work puts forward four different manners of self-

determination: animism, naturalism, totemism, and analogism. We can read the

first three of these ecologies as divergent attempts at erotic self-determination by

identification with some univocity or original assumption (though some

clarification is necessary with regard to totemism). To the extent that a process of

self-determination maintains eros, it also maintains a modicum of diversity

(equivocity) and so we can also imagine that each erotic process of self-

determination also nurtures a particular kind of discontinuity. In reading Descola

next to Desmond, it becomes interesting to clarify exactly what the self that is

determined for any given ecology looks like. It also becomes necessary to clarify

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exactly what is left out of this process of self-determination, and subsequently to

articulate the particular equivocities that are nurtured and maintained via these

particular erotic impulses.

It is my assertion that totemism, in identifying with both interiority and

physicality of other-ness, engages a process of erotic self-determination by

reference to some Polarity. Totemic ecologies, on this account are in a state of

perplexed tension between the univocity that undergirds their Polarity and that

equivocity which is not included within the confines of this somewhat arbitrary

absolute. Animist and naturalist ecologies, following my parallel reading of

Descola and Desmond, follow an erotic impulse toward opposite dialectics.

Animism emphasizes a univocity of interiority (the People) and is subsequently

troubled by the equivocity of physicalities (multinaturalism). Animist ecologies

are thus forced over and again to by their erotic impulses to clarify the People as

in a constant state of maintenance (Becoming) in relation to a dizzying array of

bodies, skins, and clothing (physicalities). Raven-People, Wari-People, Dagara-

People, and Kangaroo-People are all People, people who inhabit different realities
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or perspecitves based on their particular body or skin (physicality). Animists

may express varying degrees of curiosity regarding this univocity, but rarely ever

question this originary assumption. Naturalist ecologies are moved by the

opposite erotic impulse. They are perplexed and so drawn toward self-

determination by reference to a Nature-physicality that is continuous and shared.

To the extent that this Nature is assumed, it can be approached with a modicum of

curiosity, while requiring a constant process of erotic self-determination (Being)

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in the face of a maddening diversity of interiorities, subjectivities, spiritual

Ultimates (e.g., God, Yahweh, Brahman), and cultures. Christians, Sikhs,

Vedantans, Jews, Pagans, Aristotelians, and Neo-Platonists can argue all day

about the superiority of their particular creator or final cause, while relatively few

arguments are engaged regarding the givenness of the created, some continuous

Nature. Following this twofold approach to the problem of dualism, we find in the

animist a constant inquiry into the nature Becoming, while the naturalist is

troubled by the nature of Being.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has written that while naturalists are scared of
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solipsism and relativism, animists fear cannibalism. Naturalists worry the line

between self (Being) and other in relation to an equivocity of interiorities, while

animists are troubled by the grey areas between self and other in relation to an

equivocity of physicalities (Becoming). Naturalists fear for their sanity

(interiority/Being), while naturalists fear for their stability (physicality/Becoming).

If we bring Desmond’s fourfold metaphysics to bear on this situation, we might

wonder what happens when the fear or anxiety – solipsism and relativity of

interiority for naturalists, metamorphosis and instability of physicality for

animists – becomes too much. For clarification on this point we can consider the

possibility of animist and naturalist curiosities.

If the naturalist’s fear of solipsism begins to overwhelm, she may begin to

question the originary impulse toward self-determination underlying naturalism.

She may grasp at this self to such an extent that the equivocity of interiorities

begin to be pushed aside in service to her desire for complete comprehension with

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regard her curiosities. This could result in an attempt at to answer all narrow

curiosities regarding the univocity of interiority (e.g., strong monotheism verging

on literalism and fundamentalism), and the subsequent fear of solipsism. On the

other side, it could lead to an attempt to fully comprehend the intricacies of

naturalisms original assumption (Nature) and to assert some one ultimate

univocity with regard to physicality (e.g., analytic metametaphysics). Either way,

these attempts to alleviate narrow and peculiar curiosities by recourse to univocal

answers naturally invite a defense of diversity, and so equivocity and critique.

They also lead to what I term an ecology of atomism, whereby a discontinuity

and/or lack of interiority can be seen paralleling a discontinuity of physicality

(e.g., Greek atomism, contemporary mechanism or scientism verging on literalism

and fundamentalism). There is a clear difference here between Descola’s

analogism and what I term atomism, for where Descola understands analogism as

an originary relational assumption, I see atomism as a movement from an erotic

originary assumption (in this case naturalism) toward the aleviation of abstract

curiosities. Where Descola assumes that some ecology could begin by assuming

absolute discontinuity of interiority and physicality, I assert that all ecologies – to

the extent that they move from eros to curiosity – risk abstractions that flirt with

this brand of radical discontinuity. To be clear, I doubt that any originary impulse

could begin in ontological nihilism, but that many ecologies as they move toward

abstraction – from eros to curiosity – flirt with such radical discontinuity. This is

an important distinction between my own work and that of Descola, one that is

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predicated on my reading of Desmond’s distinctions between agape, eros, and

curiosity.

It follows that animist and totemic anxieties and subsequent abstractions

also flirt with atomisms of their own. At this stage the case for animist atomisms

(strong curiosities bordering on nihilism) remains unclear to me. Where the

naturalist assumes a discontinuity of interiority, they risk atomism when they

imagine a discontinuity of physicality (hence atomism). Do Achuar animists (who

by definition assume a discontinuity of physicality), ever toy with the idea of a

distcontinuity of the People (the shared interiority)? More research must be done

to clarify this point. The case for totemic atomism is much more obvious. The

more theories of correlation attributable to the Han Dynasty in China as well as

the Yoruba influenced Ifá system of odu might both be considered here. As I

show below, such Polarities can also become abstract, and overly rigid.

What is important is to consider at this juncture is that Desmond’s

distinction between eros and curiosity. For Desmond, curiosity pushes past some

particular erotic impulse in an attempt to articulate a comprehensive univocal

understanding. Descola does not utilize this sense of movement from intimate to

abstract. He reads the Han and Ifá traditions emphasis on theories of correlations

as beholden to a radical discontinuity (which he calls analogism). I argue that they

are totemic articulations or theories of correlation based on some underlying

Polarity, as opposed to the constant Becoming of animist ecologies. As I

mentioned above, Descola asserts an ecology (analogism) autonomous in its

assumption of radical discontinuity. I find this ecology problematic, for I ask

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 197
whether any originary assumption could really begin in ontological nihilism.

Further, I wonder if this categorization really suits not only the Han and Ifá

traditions mentioned here, but the majority of the Vedic, Central American, and

Western traditions as well. Traditions Descola sees predicated on just such a

nihilistic relational assumption. As I point out below, the Polarities assumed by

what I want to call totemic ecologies can be more-or-less abstract and more-or-

less beholden to particular curiosities.

With the naturalist ecologies we find an erotic dialectic that assumes

Nature as its originary univocity. This originary erotic impulse leads to an

equivocity of teleologies (which can be more-or-less abstract/literal), is haunted

by relativism and solipsism, and as such risks radical discontinuity or atomism. It

follows that the same would be true of both animist and totemic ecologies.

Now at this point it must be said that we may have wandered away from

Descola’s fourfold way. Staying with Desmond’s own fourfold speculations for a

moment, I read Descola’s totemism, animism, and naturalism as beholden to

divergent erotic impulses toward self-determination and assert the possibility of a

fourth ecology emerging out of the curiosities of these ecologies, namely atomism.

This is not what Descola has in mind. Though he does attribute to his analogical
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ecology a lust for answers to particular curiosities and univocity, Descola is

very clear that his ecology of analogism is distinct from both animism and

naturalism for it confuses the distinctions these ecologies make between

interiority and physicality. On this account the majority of Vedic, Western,

Chinese, West African, and some Central American traditions are based on the

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assumption of a radical discontinuity or atomism. Agape assumes union to point

of minimal self-determination, whereas Descola’s ecology of analogism assumes

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radical discontinuity to the point of desperation and monstrosity.

Can a process of self-determination (eros) begin in radical nihilism? Is this

is an appropriate characterization of the Vedic, Western, and Chinese traditions

(not to mention West African and Central American traditions also included in

Descola’s analogism)? My answer to such questions is a clear no. It makes more

sense to postulate a primary form of participation beholden to agape, three

different ecologies (relationships of identification to interiority and physicality)

beholden to eros (totemism, naturalism, and animism), and a fifth ecology of

more-or-less extreme abstractions that we can make reference to by the term

atomism (where we could find totemic, animist, and naturalist atomisms). Though

this fivefold (agape-primary, eros-totemism-animism-naturalism, curiosity-

atomism) path seems relatively straightforward, I require the rest of the pages in

this chapter to bolster my critical reading of Descola’s work.

Linguistic vs. Ontological Relativity and a Primary Form of Participation

In two recent and wide-ranging texts (Cognitive Variations and Being,

Humanity, and Understanding) the historian of ancient Greek and Chinese

science Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd has taken up the question as to whether there is

some shared psychic unity underlying all human endeavors. Lloyd undertakes a

vast interdisciplinary endeavor, bringing his considerable knowledge of ancient

traditions (including Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, and Chinese) to bear on

recent conversations in cognitive science, linguistics, and anthropology. Drawing

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out parallels between such recent work and his own comparisons between ancient

traditions, Lloyd quickly complexifies the conversation surrounding strong

assertions of psychic unity, a universal grammar, and the “analytic dogma” (see

chapter 2) regarding the givenness of a continuous physicality/Nature.

In considering the potential for communication and translation between

the diversity of linguistic groups available, Lloyd makes a three-fold distinction

that is helpful here. Throughout his two texts, Lloyd distinguishes between the

Chomskian-style universalism assumed by many analytic philosophers that I

critically engaged above, a neo-Whorfian assertion of linguistic relativity (the

position Lloyd seems to feel most comfortable with), and a stronger more radical

assertion of ontological relativity. Lloyd associates the latter strong ontological

claims with the work of Viveiros de Castro and Descola: a position I defend here.

In order to better understand Lloyd’s claims, it is important to consider the

differences between these three positions.

In order to help clarify these distinctions I look to the work of Levinson

and his neo-Whorfian peers, who assert that there are three basic frames of

reference identifiable in human language with regard to spatial assumptions. This

is asserted in an overt critique of analytic universalism, and the assumption that

there is one ultimate frame of reference shared by all. For his part, Levinson has

written at length about the “original sin of cognitive science and linguists” (we

might also include contemporary metaphysical presumptions of analytic

philosophy here), the assumption that there is some one universal conceptual
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representation possible.

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 In contrast to this universalism, it the linguistically relative positions of

theorists like Levinson that Lloyd is at pains to defend. Underlining the major

thrust of this linguistically relativist position, Levinson and David Wilkins write,

Frames of reference are coordinate systems whose function it is to

designate angles or directions [relationships] in which a figure [self-
determination] can be found with respect to a ground [univocal
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assumption].

Levinson and Wilkins outline their three-fold distinction by distinguishing

between intrinsic, relative, and absolute frames of reference (see Table 2). Each of

which are expressed with regard to some particular relationship (binary, triadic,

arbitrary-absolute-polarity respectively) between figure and ground.

It is worthwhile to consider this threefold schema in relation to Descola’s

modes of identification. We can start with binary relations, which Levinson and

Wilkins characterize as the closest frame of reference that we have to a universal.

But this intrinsic frame of reference is quite different from the relative one

assumed by analytic philosophers (and the Western tradition in general). Intrinsic

binaries, which I associate with animism, articulate a variety of topological

intricacies (facets of particular physicality) without reference to a third viewer or

absolute set of bearings. Animists, remember, assume the People (the

third/interiority), and then engage a process of self-determination in relation to a

diversity of physicalities. We can see animism, then, as a binary frame of

reference with little or no reference to an interior. On the extreme side, a purely

intrinsic frame of reference without recourse to relative or absolute position is rare,

but also very instructive.

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Table 2. Levinson's Three Main Frames of Reference
Intrinsic various facets of object designated; topological geometry of

simple figure – ground binary object

Absolute arbitrary absolute bearings north, west, east, south

designated uphill/downhill

Relative mapping bodily coordinates; front, back, side, right, left

triangulation of three points with reference to a viewer/

relative position

Source: Levinson and Wilkins (2006)

The work of Eve Danziger with the Mopan (Mayan) of Central America
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offers one very good example. Danziger’s work with the Mopan points to an

intrinsic (animist) frame of reference that makes very little or no reference to

relative frames (naturalisms diversity of interiorities). Danziger makes this point

in an early paper wherein she distinguishes between relative (orientation-bound,

e.g., those found in Euro-American languages) and intrinsic (orientation-free, e.g.,

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frames of reference like those found in Mopan Mayan languages). “In short,”

she writes, “Mopan speakers do not refer to spatial location in ways that

presuppose information other than that present in an original dyadic

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configuration.” I argue that they assume an interiority (People), and so can be

found to emphasize binary relations present in some particular physicality. The

physicality/body clarifies the perspective rather than some triadic frame of

reference (relative position of viewer/Being in naturalism and absolute position of

cosmos/Polarity in totemism). The strong emphasis on intrinsic binaries leads the

Mopan to several unique ways of configuring spatial relationships that are quite

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distinct from relative frames and absolute frames of reference. Some examples

might help to clarify this articulation of what I term primary participation.

With regard to the perception of parts/objects an English speaking person

(relative frame of reference/naturalism) might say that a boat is traveling on a

river or that a picture is hung on a wall. A Warrwa speaker (one of the few

languages that makes no reference to intrinsic binaries) might say boat water
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float or picture wall attached and use certain locative markers to clarify “float”

and “attached” to encode a “static spatial-locational” relation from the point of

view of an absolute (we might say cosmic) position, rather than a relative
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position. Both of these frames of reference express a triadic relationship,

whereby the boat on the river is understood as such from the point of view of a

perceiver (English) or located in absolute space (Warrwa). In contrast, the Mopan

speaker might say something more like the boat is on the torso of the river or the

picture is in the belly of the house. In such cases the third variant

(perceiver/absolute-cosmic position) is not necessarily present.

Danziger explains this intrinsic ecology by writing that the Mopan

language limits the relational information available to the object (boat/picture)

itself, without reference to an external landscape (continuous physicality/Nature

or continuous physicality and interiority/Polarity), which would require a third

variable (a naturalist Being or a totemic Polarity determined in relation to these

assumptions). In a potentially more telling example, Danziger placed three objects

in a line (a toy person, pig, and cow), and asked various Mopan speakers to locate

the center object. The toys are aligned with the toy person closest to the Mopan

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speaker, while the pig is in the middle facing away from the toy person, and the

cow is on the right facing the toy person. Where an English speaker might say that

the pig is at the right foreleg of the cow or alternatively at the left hand of the toy

person, the Mopan replies by saying that the pig is “Inside her right ‘hand’ to the
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cow” and/or “Inside his left hand to the man.” The Mopan, Danziger tells us,

understand the object as “a configuration of specifically related and non-separable

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internal parts.” Right and left in this case do not make reference to a viewer,

but rather are internal to the configurations (topology) of objects. It is also worth

noting that Warrwa speakers do not utilize either relative (naturalist) or intrinsic
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(animist) spatial indicators. I assert that these binary relations are at the heart of

animist ecologies.

It is at this point that the naturalist might point out that such parts must be

asserted in relation to a whole, which brings us to the another crucial difference

that arises between the intrinsic frame of referenced engaged by the Mopan and

the relative frame assumed by the naturalist. The Mopan speaker finds the

assertion of a whole (univocity) separate from the parts (equivocity) nonsensical.

Nature, God, Absolute-Polarity, mereological sum, final cause; each of these

univocal assertions appears ridiculous to the Mopan Mayan. When the Mopan

speaker references parts (boat, river, picture, house), she does so by referencing a

binary relationship between possessor (river, house) and possessed (boat, picture).

The Mopan might reference an object as at the dog’s side, but in doing so only the

binary relationship between dog and object is clarified. This is something like the

use of a definite article in English where “the” is used in reference to an assumed

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context. When a Mopan speaker references the boat on the torso of the river he is

not assuming an inclusive continuity of physicality (Nature, naturalist oriented

relative frame of reference), or some univocity of interiority (Being, final cause),

or a continuity of interiority and physicality (Polarity, totemic oriented absolute

frame of reference). There is no whole that can be extrapolated from the

assertions of the possessor-possessed (whole-part) context. The semantic whole is

mutually constituted, not assumed or given. Any reference to some univocity

beyond the particular physicality, what Viveiros de Castro terms animist

perspectivism, is meaningless.

In a further point of clarification between intrinsic (animist) and relative

frames of reference Danziger looks at the way Mopan speaking persons enact

relationships. The term enaction is appropriate here, for relationships are not

thought to exist externally to the actual speech act that brings the relationship into

existence. Danziger offers the example of a newly wed couple and the

relationship of what English speakers would understand as a brother-in-law to his

new in-laws. The Mopan remember do not assume some larger continuity or

transitive whole. They do not make reference to a biological/physicality hierarchy

like blood line or shared DNA (naturalism), and they do not make reference to a

hierarchy of correlations that might exist externally to a speech act (totemism).

What English speakers might assume to be an uncle is not related to the man who

has married into the family unless that uncle refers to that man in a familial way

in an actual interaction. If no performative act is shared, then no relationship

exists.

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 Danziger tells us that though a person might be seen as the blood relative

of a man newly married into the family by English speakers, if this relationship

has not been performed/enacted (for example if that person was not at the

wedding) then he is not considered to be related to the new brother-in-law. The

relationship literally does not exist unless it has been spoken, and there is no

guarantee what relationship will be spoken into existence if these two people meet.

It is within reason to assume that the two could meet on several occasions, and for

various reasons greet each other in a host of ways that make no reference to the

marriage. After meeting on numerous occasions, if one of them does not actually
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greet the other as in-law, then they are not related. Following Danziger and

Levinson, we can understand Mopan speakers as exemplars of an intrinsic

(animist) frame of reference; a frame of reference wherein Nature cannot be

distinguished from physicalities (equivocity), where a third variant

(Being/Cosmos) is not used, and hierarchies of relationship are not based on an

assumption of Nature (univocity of physicality) or Polarity (univocity of

interiority and physicality). In such an animist language, attempts at self-

determination assume an interiority, and are subsequently fascinated by the

intricacies and perspectives available via multiple physicalities.

The neo-Whorfian linguistic relativity that follows from linguists like

Levinson, Wilkins, and Danziger, says Lloyd, goes a long way toward

overthrowing many traditional assumptions regarding spatial cognition. As one

example, Lloyd makes reference to Tzeltal children growing up in what Levinson

would call an absolute framework. In a clear divergence from Piaget’s traditional

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developmental model, writes Lloyd, such children are found to be competent

“Euclidean thinkers” by age 2 ½, capable of a complex mastery of geometrical

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forms by 3 ½. Lloyd goes on to write, “Levinson’s explanatory hypothesis

[neo-Whorfian linguistic relativity] offers the sharpest challenge to the psychic

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unity position.” As should be clear by this statement, Lloyd is in favor of

Levinson’s work, but what about Viveiros de Castro and Descola’s ontological

relativism? Do animists really enact multiple physicalities? Lloyd considers these

authors work in some detail, but finds their ontological position too strong in the
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end.

Lloyd critiques their stronger ontologically relativist position by reference

to the necessity and possibility of translation, effectively arguing that there is a

degree of linguistic relativity (as opposed to psychic unity), but that the idea that
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this relativity belongs to the ontological level is too much. The defense of

diverse ontologically distinct realities would seem to undermine the possibility of

communication across such radical differences. Lloyd writes,

Clearly the vocabularies [e.g., totemism, animism, naturalism, analogism]

in question do not readily map onto one another. Yet given that
ethnographers proved us with the makings of a translation manual, that
should give us pause before we conclude that we are faced with irresoluble
215
incommensurabilities.

Levinson, for his part, locates several instances of overlap, whereby two or more
216
frames of reference can be found within the context of one language. As a

general rule he also finds that it is possible to have an absolute framework with
217
little or no reference to intrinsic frames and vice-versa, and that wherever one

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finds relative frames of reference, intrinsic frames are necessarily present (see
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Table 3).

Lloyd makes a similar point in a somewhat different fashion by

distinguishing similar and divergent ontological assumptions within both Greek

and Chinese traditions. In fact, the entirety of Lloyd’s work can be seen in this

light, as an attempt to critically engage theories of psychic unity through

variations of linguistic relativity (including but not limited to Levinson’s neo-

Whorfian approach), while steering clear of stronger ontological claims like those

offered by Viveiros de Castro and Descola.

Table 3: Levinson's Frames of Reference Compared Across Sample Languages

Absolute, relative, and Tamil, Yukateca, Tiriyó, Ewe, Kgalagadi

intrinsic

Absolute and intrinsic Warrwa, Arrernte, Jaminjung, Yélî Dnye, Tzeltal

Relative and intrinsic Japanese and Dutch

Absolute only Guugu Yimithirr and Warrwa, both Australian

Aboriginal languages

Intrinsic only Mopan

Source: Levinson and Wilkins (2006).

For his part, Descola follows the basic argument of Levinson and Lloyd

throughout his own writings, clarifying time and again that each of his ecologies

can and do overlap within different linguistic groups and traditions, while also
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asserting that one ecology tends to take precedence over the others. To the

extent that this is true, the problem of translatability does not seem to bother

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Descola, and yet he insists that each of his four relational sensibilities references a

distinct ontology.

The question naturally arises: what does Descola mean by ontology? The

term is not well defined. At one point he tells us that an ontology is a system of

properties of existing beings that allows for “contrasting forms of cosmologies,

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models of social links, and theories of identity and alterity.” Elsewhere Descola

seems to define ontology by deference to his relational schema, whereby plasticity

of forms of identification point toward the possibility of divergent ontologies.

Though one can make out a basic definition from these statements, it will be

helpful at this point to ask Desmond how he defines ontology.

Desmond tells us, “It helps here to remember a double sense to the word

‘meta’— meta can mean both ‘in the midst’ but also ‘over and above,’
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‘beyond.’” Desmond relates this double meaning to an assumption regarding

the nature of humanity. Namely that we experience an inside and an outside

(interiority and physicality), a distinction Desmond utilizes to clarify the

difference between the “meta” of ontology (immanence/physicality) and that of

metaphysics (transcendence/interiority). Ontology, for Desmond, speaks to the

exploration of what is given (immanence/nature in the case of (post)modern

thought), while metaphysics speaks to the exploration of that which surpasses or

is more than immanence. We can easily discern in this definition, and in

assumptions regarding ontology in general, very clear naturalist assumptions. The

dogma of the linguistic traditions that gave rise to the word (ontology) is that

there is some given continuity of physicality/immanence (Descola uses the term

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physicality in a similar way to Desmond’s immanence). This can be critically

engaged, and one might fall on the side of Heidegger and the continental tradition

or Carnap and the analytic tradition, but either way, all talk of ontology is in

deference to or critique of this naturalist dogma.

This is where Descola’s work becomes so important. He tells us that there

are multiple ontological starting points. In a broad sense ontology speaks to our

assumptions about the given, while metaphysics challenges these assumptions by

inviting something more. If we assume that there is a given (univocity)

ontological ground, once again following Desmond, we must invite metaphysical

practice. Where univocity leads us away from intimacy, and equivocity leads us

away from self-determination, metaphysics (dialectic) is at play in the between

sameness and diversity. For Desmond, this practice does not lead to ontological

givens, it leads toward metaxological metaphysics. Metaxu, for Desmond, is a

participatory intermingling of multiple metaphysical dialects between univocity

(ontological assumptions) and equivocity (the diversity that is necessarily ignored

via curiosities and assumptions). Descola’s ethnographically based ecologies

point toward distinct dialectics based on identification (self-determination) in the

face of the complexity of our lived experience.

Descola’s definition regarding ontology given above refers to diverse

systems of properties of existing beings. Each of his diverse ontologies (systems)

can be enacted by recourse to the plasticity of our attempts at self-determination

(identification). This is interesting, and shows a strong corollary to Desmond’s

own metaxological beginning point for metaphysical practice. This becomes more

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transparent when we ask Descola to tell us about that which goes through this

process of erotic self-determination. The problem, however, is that Descola has

not asked this question. He has asserted multiple ontologies whereby multiple

expressions of self-determination regarding different givenness-systems-

ontologies can be understood. But he has not asked the question, what holds it all

together. What is it that allows translation across his ontologies? Desmond’s

answer is of course the strange intimacy (hyperbolic overabundance) of being. We

must be careful here, for being bears a very strong resemblance to an ontology of

continuous immanence, something that Desmond does not mean.

He tells us that “meta” is meant to point us toward “a porous boundary

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between.” Desmond writes,

This is not a matter of designating being as ‘substance,’ nor simply of

juxtaposing ‘becoming’ and ‘being.’ We find ourselves in a dynamic
world and must acknowledge the tumultuous happening of ‘becoming.’
But there is also a ‘coming to be’ which is not just a ‘becoming’ of this or
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that, but a coming to be at all.

It is important at this point to clarify the import of Desmond’s metaxological

ground for Descola’s work, and vice-versa. I turn briefly to a recent essay by

Webb Keane, who follows Lloyd through his recent readings of Viveiros de

Castro and Descola’s work, for in their ontological stance Keane finds a helpful

paradox. Keane writes:

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 The symptom of the paradox is that it turns out to be hard to speak
ethnographically about a strong ontology, some fully inhabited reality
distinct from other equally fully inhabited ones, without falling back on
[linguistic relativity], that is on indigenous theories and representations.
Thus in places Lloyd (2012: 20) reads Descola as giving us ‘a concept, a
theory,’ which focuses on whether beings differ in terms of either
physicality or interiority, or neither, or both. This seems to presuppose that
there is some pre-theoretical physical experience that is construed in the
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theory, or [linguistic relativity with regard a shared reality].

Keane of course has seen the same problem I have pointed out, but being

something of a naturalist himself, he assumes that the shared givenness is a

univocity or single ontological ground (i.e., Nature). This again is the analytic-

naturalist dogma, there must be a continuity-givenness-immanence-nature or

actuality does not make sense. But Desmond’s metaxological point is subtle, and

is able accommodate Keane’s critique without falling too far on the side of

univocity or equivocity, ontology or critique. Desmond can manage the possibility

of an enactive approach, whereby multiple ontological givens become relevant,

without falling into more traditional (naturalist) positions of social

constructionism. Keane attributes just such a constructionist position to Viveiros

de Castro and Descola through his critical reading of Lloyd. More than anything

this helps to clarify the naturalist assumptions of both Keane and Lloyd, a position

that I find Viveiros de Castro and Descola to be moving beyond.

These naturalist assumptions come to the foreground when Keane

critically engages Lloyd’s constructionist reading of Viveiros de Castro and

Descola. Lloyd writes with regard to Viveiros de Castro and Descola’s multiple

ontologies:

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 What is suggested here is that within this – single-universe, different
beings, different animals, and also different members of the human race
have such different experiences, perceptions, and ways of interacting with
their environment that we should think of them as living in different
worlds. Somewhat stronger, but still close to conventional views of culture
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is this: ‘conscious beings construct their world as they interact with it.’

Keane writes that “The verb ‘construct,’ however, tends to smuggle in a host of

unstated arguments, and plays so central a role in the taken-for-granted of

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contemporary anthropology that it can be hard to reflect on.” Steven Engler

underlines this point in his thoroughgoing consideration of constructionism

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(which he prefers over constructivism). After careful reading, I do not find

Viveiros de Castro and Descola to making the constructionist point Lloyd

references. It is not exactly obvious, however, whether Lloyd is attributing this

constructionist stance to Viveiros de Castro and Descola, or simply adopting it

himself. Either way, it is a clear articulation of his linguistically relativist position,

and as such is not parallel to the assertion of multiple ontologies offered by

Descola and Viveiros de Castro. Keane’s naturalist critique of Lloyd holds, to the

extent that Lloyd is also making a naturalist assumption. But it is far less relevant

to Descola and Viveiros de Castro’s position. The clue is not in Lloyd’s use of

“contruct,” and Keane and Engler warning about the different uses of this word,

but in the opening line of Lloyd’s quote above where he writes, “a single-

universe.”

Engler tells us that when speaking of constructionism the added social (as

in, social constructionism) is redundant. Following Ian Hacking he sees

constructionism as not at all antithetical to realism, as commonly assumed. His

point is that the scientist and the theorist share the same basic reality, and that the

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former focuses on looking at atoms while the latter focuses on the (social)

historical and and cultural constructionism that lead to the discovery of the atom.

Remember the title of Descola’s most recent text: Beyond Nature and Culture.

Hacking, Engler, Keane, and Lloyd are all debating the details of constructionism

(culture), while assuming a single-universe or shared reality. Descola is making

no such assumption, and in fact, is asserting a much stronger point, what I term
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here enaction (following Ferrer’s participatory enaction) rather than

constructionism. The latter assumes a shared (singular/given) reality, while the

latter makes no such assumption.

I find that the solution to this problem is not so much in what Descola has

asserted, but rather in what he has left unsaid. It is for this reason that Desmond’s

work becomes so very important if Descola’s project is to continue to be viable.

Descola outlines four different expressions of what could easily be identified

erotic attempts at self-determination. These ecologies go a long way toward

buttressing Desmond’s own metaxological ground. Desmond assumes a

hyperbolic overabundance as his metaphysical starting point. To the extent that

this position remains ontologically agnostic and metaphysically realist it serves as

philosophical ground for Descola’s ontological relativity. If we follow Levinson’s

linguistic frames of reference, we can say that totemism makes an ontological

assumption of an absolute Cosmos in relation to some assumed Polarity, while

animist ecologies make assertions based on a binary frame of reference (univocity

of interiority is assumed), and naturalist ecologies make assertions based on a

relative frame of reference (a univocity of physicality is assumed, and a relative

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position or interiority is suggested). What Desmond is pointing toward is some

underlying agapeic relationality, a form of agapeic participation that would be

hard to find in linguistic frames of references due to the lack of erotic self-

determination (Cosmos via Polarity assumed interiority and physicality,

Becoming via People assumed-interiority, Being via Nature assumed-physicality).

This is a ground of participation that is not found in Descola, who like Levinson is

concerned primarily with ethnographic materials, and as I have said it is hard to

imagine finding a linguistic system built on agapeic participation. Such an agapeic

participation would answer Lloyd’s criticism of incommensurability, without the

need to assert some erotic impulse (Cosmos-Polarity, Becoming-People, Being-

Nature) over another.

Though a purely agapeic language seems implausible, we can look to the

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Pirahã of the Brazilian Amazon, and the work of Daniel L. Everett, by way of

illustrating as close an approximation as may be possible. Following Everett, the

Pirahã make little or no reference to quantity, color, relative tenses (e.g., past,

future, present), or fiction/creation myths. They do not draw, make use of only the

simplest pronouns, and nurture a rudimentary collective memory that can be

230
traced back no further than two generations. In Everett’s own words, “[the

Pirahã’s] grammar and other ways of living are restricted to concrete, immediate

experience . . . and immediacy of experience is reflected in immediacy of

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information encoding—one event per utterance.” In an interesting example of

the simple binaries used by the Pirahã, Everett illustrates the example of lighting a

match. When the match is lit, the Pirahã speaker says that the fire has arrived

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(ibipíai), and when the match goes out they use the same word to say that the fire
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has left. Arrived and left where, one might ask. Everett tells us that the Pirahã

understand the fire to have left experience, effectively going into non-experience.

What is experienced in the immediacy of the moment is what is most real.

Anything else has basically left reality. Another example is found in their kinship

terms, the entirety of which can be related as ‘ego’s generation,’ ‘above ego’s

generation,’ ‘below ego’s generation,’ ‘biological son’ (literally come next to)

and/or ‘biological daughter’ (a house is a daughter thing). Self-determination in

such a setting is kept to a bare minimum, with very little continuity assumed

outside the immediacy of a momentary experience.

Though it is not (and I would argue, cannot be) a perfect example, the

Pirahã language offers a window into a linguistic ecology approximating

something like what Desmond would term agapeic patience. There is a constant

influx of diversity, yet very little effort is made to define or discern continuity or

univocity in the face of this equivocity. The People (Pirahã) are assumed, but their

clarifications regarding physicality (equivocity) are limited, and so relatively

agapeic when compared to other animist ecologies. There is no sense of self as in

Levinson’s relative frames of reference (naturalist ecologies), or complex

topologies found in intrinsic frames of reference (animist ecologies), and no sense

of an absolute polarity as in totemic ecologies.

Even further from such an agapeic form of participation is the assumption

of discontinuity or atomism necessary for Descola’s analogical ecology. Reading

Descola alongside Desmond allows us to answer Descola’s critics (Keane and

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Lloyd) who assert that his use of ontology is too strong. Desmond’s work allows

us to ground Descola’s fourfold way in a primary or agapeic form of participation.

One that, in keeping with Desmond, does not assert some univocity, and so

maintains the possibility of agapeic overabundance as a viable participatory

ground whereby multiple dialects (between ontological assertions and subsequent

critique) are invited into participation. We find ourselves once again walking a

line of ontological relativity defended by both Viveiros de Castro and Descola in

different ways.

In reading Descola next Desmond, we also find an avenue toward

answering another one of Lloyd’s critiques regarding Descola’s ecology of

analogism. Lloyd writes,

It may be a statement of the obvious to remark that, faced with the obscure
or the mysterious, humans everywhere will use their imaginations to try to
get to grips with what happens and why, exploiting some real or supposed
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analogy.

With these words Lloyd points us toward something like Desmond’s agapeic

being, while offering an important reappraisal of the importance of analogy to

ancient Greek and Chinese thought. Descola conflates analogy with extreme

abstractions and an emphasis on discontinuity or atomism and characterizes both

Chinese and Greek traditions as beholden to such extreme equivocity. For his part,

Lloyd agrees that these traditions are fond of analogical thought, but he wonders

if this means they necessarily engage in atomism (which in the case of the Greeks

means an emphasis on the void).

For example, Lloyd finds the use of analogy in both the Greek tradition’s

naturalism (with its theory of causes, and an assumption of things) and its

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atomism (with an emphasis on the void), and the Chinese traditions totemism
234
(with its theory of correlations, and assumption of phases). This leads one to

suspect that analogy cannot be conflated with extreme abstractions. Lloyd is

puzzled by Descola’s attribution of naturalism to seventeenth-century thought.

Why not see the Greeks as naturalists as well? It follows from his clarifications

here that Descola’s naturalist and analogical ecologies need to be rethought, but

also his animist frame of reference. Lloyd contrasts the Greek theory of nature

(and its subsequent atomism), with what he sees as a Chinese theory of

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correlations and processes. Again, this point of clarification serves as a critical

reevaluation of Descola’s use of analogical-atomism to characterize the majority

of ancient Chinese traditions. The Chinese are capable of abstractions to be sure,

but this does not mean they begin and end with atomism. Lloyd defines the

Greeks as naturalists obsessed with methodology. Aristotle defended the need in

mathematics and thought in general for valid deductive arguments proceeding

from self-evident axioms or hypotheses and, yet the Chinese got on perfectly well
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in both arithmetic and geometry without such axioms. The Greeks offer a

theory of causation and things (Nature) while the Chinese enumerate a theory of

correlations and events (Polarity). The question, says Lloyd, is not why the

Chinese do not engage the Greek methodological strictures, but rather why the

Greeks ever got involved in their axiomatic-deductive arguments.

My own short answer is that while the Greeks eventually assumed Nature,

the Chinese maintained an assumption of Polarity at the core of their thought.

While the former can be seen as working with abstractions and theories regarding

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Nature and things, the latter can be understood to be utilizing abstractions and

theories regarding People and correlations. This point is argued in more detail

below. For now it is important to clarify that where Descola finds analogy to be a

desperate attempt at univocity (by analogy), I argue that both animists and

naturalists tend to value analogical thought as a particularly good method of

maintaining intimacy and eros. The major difference is their distinct relative

frames of reference (to use Levinson's terminology), their originary univocal

assumptions (Nature for the Greeks, People for the Chinese). More needs to be

said on this topic, but before doing so I turn toward Descola’s totemic ecology of

participation.

In an interesting twist, Levinson includes both Australian Aboriginal

languages and Tzeltal Mayan languages in this absolute frame of reference, while

Descola would characterize the former as totemic and the latter as analogical.

Where Descola locates these two groups on opposite extremes, Levinson finds

strong similarities. This again points to problems in Descola’s analogism, a point

that I draw out in more detail in the following section.

Totemism and Polarity

It must be said, at this point, that as much as I am drawn to Descola’s

work, I am also troubled by it. In order to highlight my issue with Descola’s use

of analogism I begin by taking the reader on a short journey. As Latour has

written elsewhere, it has been a great shame that Descola’s work took so long to
237
be translated into English. Not able to read the text in its original French

myself, I penned early drafts of the ideas found in these pages based on a short

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introduction to Descola’s work he offered as the 2005 Radcliffe-Browne Lecture
238
in Social Anthropology. Upon reading this short introduction to his most recent

work I found myself looking for outside resources by way of attempting a better

estimation of what he meant by totemism. In doing so I fleshed out a basic

understanding of totemism that is in an important way quite distinct from

Descola’s own understanding. Rather than give away my issue with Descola’s

reading too quickly, I invite the reader to first consider my own articulation of

totemic thought, before considering Descola’s opposition between totemism and

analogism.

Descola sees the ecology of totemism exemplified most clearly by

Australian Aborigines. As the term has a history of its own, Descola finds it

necessary to distinguish his own use of the word from that of Levi-Strauss. Levi-

Strauss attempted to explain totemic distinctions away by recourse to algebraic

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categories of relationship. In so doing, he reduced totemism to mere illusion.

Carl Georg von Brandenstein has written extensively on the subject of totemic
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thought, clearly defending totemism against Lévi-Strauss particular reading.

His work is well worth the effort for those who are not familiar with the truly

radical alterity of Aboriginal Australian ecologies.

For this reason, I begin my consideration of totemism by looking to

Brandenstein who gives a brief introduction to Australian totemic ecologies in

this way:

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 It has been shown by the author (1966, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1974) and in the
meantime been acknowledged by Claude Lévi-Strauss in written
communication (1971) and by Rodney Needham (1974:30-37) that the
long sought essence of Australian totemism as an early classification
system embracing the whole universe, is condensed in the polarity of the
four basic qualities of temperature and energy display: ‘dry’ opposing
‘moist,’ and ‘warm’ opposing ‘cold’: of these ‘dry’ corresponds also to the
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‘active/male’ and ‘moist’ to ‘passive/female.’

For his part, Lévi-Strauss could only imagine a system whereby a Kangaroo

stands as the ideal archetype of the Kangaroo totem, an algebraic placeholder. But

this is not what Brandenstein is explaining above.

Kangaroo is not the archetypal symbol, like in a naturalist ecology where

the interiorities of some person are like the archetypal Kangaroo, or in the animist

ecology where Kangaroo People all wear the same flesh-clothing-physicality-

world. In a totemic ecology a particular Kangaroo is seen as being more-or-less

warm or cold and more-or-less quick or slow. The Kangaroo is not the

archetype/symbolic reference of the totemic clan; rather the Kangaroo is

understood as a particularly good example of an absolute and dipolar set of

coordinates or analogies that are fundamental to the cosmos.

A kangaroo is just one possible expression of a shared interiority and

physicality that might include my brother, my daughter, and the reptile at my feet,

but not myself, the reptile on the wall, or the other kinds of kangaroos sitting

nearby. Kangaroos are all understood to be warm-blooded, but some are quick

and some are slow. Reptiles are all understood to be cold-blooded, but again,

some are thought of quick and some as slow. It follows that you can have a warm-

quick totem that includes myself and a kangaroo, but that my dad could be more
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like a warm-slow kangaroo, and my sister more like a cold-quick reptile. Such

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distinctions are literal. In this scenario I am more like the kangaroo than I am my

sister. We are different expressions of the absolute Polarity. Totemic ecologies do

not emphasize a single shared physicality (naturalism) or a single shared

interiority (animism). Totemic ecologies emphasize a limited number (e.g.,

hot/cold, dry/wet, slow/quick) of shared physicalities and interiorities. Totemism

assumes a univocity (what Brandenstein has referred to as “Aboriginal Ecological

Order”) regarding a basic cosmic Polarity that allows for a complex system of
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classifications based on a multiplicity of properties.

Considering Brandenstein’s clarification above, it is not surprising that

Descola seeks to establish his understanding on different grounds than Lévi-

Strauss’ traditional anthropological stance (as well as from Descola’s own earlier
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Lévi-Straussian assumptions). In fact, rather than making sense of totemism

via recourse to algebraic formulae (a naturalist reduction of totemic thought) and

thereby stripping it of its distinctness, Descola is struck by the radical alterity of

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this “very original ontology.” He writes that

the main totem of a group of humans, most often an animal or a plant, and
all the human and non-human beings that are affiliated to it, are said to
share certain general attributes of physical conformation, substance,
temperament and behavior by virtue of a common origin emplaced in the
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land.

Following Brandenstein, Descola writes that a totem does not reference an

animal, but rather that it is a more abstract (e.g., not biological) property (rather

than a symbol) can include both a kangaroo and a particular person within its

context.

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 Underlining this point, Brandenstein references the Aboriginal ability to

organize qualities into absolute universal categories. He writes:

Modern efforts are, of course, not significant enough to be compared with

the Australian section system. Even our scientific century, more in need of
universal classification than any other, has failed to produce anything
really universal. So the great achievement of early mankind still towers in
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the far distance of prehistory, unequalled and hardly known.

Brandenstein’s statement should give us pause. Polarities are univocal

abstractions from the strange intimacy of being to be sure, but they are more

concrete than the dualistic univocities of animist and naturalist ecologies. Do to

the broad originary abstraction (Polarity) that defines totemic self in an absolute

and cosmic sense, totemic attempts at univocity are more concrete than either

naturalists or animists ecologies can ever hope to be. This is not to say that

totemic polarities are true in an absolute sense. Levinson is clear on this point.

Absolute frames of reference are based on more-or-less arbitrary univocities.

Different Aboriginal groups will choose different polarities based largely on, for

example, cardinal directions (e.g., east, west, north, south) while Tzeltal Mayans

articulate an absolute frame of reference based on geographical absolute (e.g.,

uphill, downhill).

Following Desmond we have already called into question the possibility of

a perfect univocity. Totemic univocities are not ultimate, but rather the closest

approximation of an absolute available through univocal self-determination.

Aborigines are more likely to reference objects from the absolute perspective of

Cosmos in relation to an absolute Polarity, rather than in a intrinsic frame like in

animism (third thing, People, assumed) or relative frame like in naturalism where

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the “viewer” is located in a relative way based on their peculiar dialects. By

determining self as totem or Cosmos by reference to Polarity, and so thereby

nurturing a kind of patience with equivocity, there is a particular expression of

erotic impulse toward self-determination in totemic ecologies. Animists and

naturalists are driven toward relative determinations of multiple bodies (animists)

and subjectivities (naturalists), why totemic ecologies identify self with Polarity.

Brandenstein clarifies that totemic ecologies are far more absolute and
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concrete than our scientific-naturalist ecologies. A truly totemic ecology could

not enact a modern Western “I” no more than it could enact a Wari or Dagara

sense of People. Relative frames of reference over exaggerate the importance of

their assumed univocity (e.g., Nature/ People). It follows that Locke’s primary

and secondary properties have been inversed; Hume’s skepticism and Kant’s

critique are limited to the extent that they do not understand this point. Naturalist

abstractions like algebra, geometry, and calculus are severely limited in scope.

They are actually not as concrete or absolute as totemic thought. They are also

incredibly efficacious, and seemingly universal. For example, my computer

manages my keystrokes and make words, and an airplane can fly. Modern

mechanism is powerful and efficacious, exactly to the extent that it puts on

blinders and ignores the hyperbolic intimacy of becoming. I quoted Nagel to this

end above. He assures us that “the more we learn about the intricacy of the

genetic code and its control of the chemical processes of life, the harder those
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[teleological] problems [of interiority] seem.” Following Brandenstein, we

might say that totemic ecologies are the closest we can come to a univocity that

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maintains some relevance to the concrete, intimate, agapeic, hyperbole of

becoming defended by Desmond. Enlightenment thought, for its part, directs us

toward the abstract, the secondary, the far less than concrete but more

comprehensive. The key to future attempts at univocity lie in assertions based on

Polarity.

Rather than associate a particular totemic clan with a particular animal, the

Nungar and other Aboriginal people of Australia use what Brandenstein terms a

“vertical polarity” (light/warm-dark/cold) and a “horizontal polarity”

(abstract/dry-concrete/moist) to organize animals and people alike into totemic

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archetypes. To the extent that they avoid particularities and attempts (whether

erotic or comprehensive) at self-determination, they maintain an erotic

relationship to being. For instance, the Nungar of South-West Australia have two

totemic moieties, respectively called maarnetj, that can be translated as ‘the

getter’, and waardar, which means ‘the watcher.’ These terms denote the warm

and cold ends of the vertical polarity that can be used to demarcate all animals
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and people in the world. Though the White Cockatoo and the Crow are used to

reference the maarnetji and waardar moieties respectively, they are not

understood as the primary character of the moiety. Rather they are simply one of

many animals and persons that are included within the totemic designation. To

clarify this important ecology the assertion that totemic ecologies nurture a

process of self-determination where self is understood as absolute Polarity needs

to be teased out in more detail. I turn now to Levinson and some of his peers to

illustrate this point.

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Totemism: Absolute Frames of Reference and Polarity

By way of further illustrating Brandenstein’s point regarding the universal

qualities of totemic societies it is worth considering the fascinating work of John

B. Haviland, Levinson and Penelope Brown. Levinson, in considering the

language of the Guugu Yimithirr of Northern Australia, writes:

Such a language makes elaborate and detailed reference to an absolute set

of angles: absolute in the sense that they do not depend on the angle of the
human frame (unlike left and right) nor, essentially, on the speaker's
viewpoint (unlike in front of the tree), although ego's position may
optionally be used as a reference point (as in north of me). If you describe
the layout of a room in an absolute system, the description does not vary
whether you look through the window or the door: for example, the lamp
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is north of the sofa, with the table to the west.

The Guugu Yimithirr language utilizes absolute space, rather than prepositional

language like right, left, in front, behind, and across. It is worth taking a moment

to consider the very different ecology that arises from these Aboriginal languages.

Haviland writes that the ability to conceptualize space in this way requires

a complex “juggling” of multiple frames of reference, in parallel with a keen

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“sense of direction.” Remember, following Desmond, agape is maintained to

the extent that we are patient with difference. The particular complexity of such

non-prepositional and non-dualistic totemic thought led Levinson to consider the

limits of Western ontology. In one essay, “Language and Space,” he sets up a

thought experiment. Kant and others have grounded their philosophical

assumptions on the assertion that our cognitive categories determine our linguistic

ones. On this account, linguistic categories like right and left, for example, require

an “antecedently given” set of innate cognitive categories. This point is further

elaborated by Levinson and Brown as they assure us, following from their work

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with Guugu Yimithirr and Tenejapan speakers (Tzeltal Mayan dialectic), that
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such “innate” categories like left and right are not necessary or given.

Following his neo-Whorfian set of findings, Levinson writes,

Where languages encode spatial concepts different from our familiar ones,
speakers of those languages can be shown to use correspondingly different
spatial concepts in nonlinguistic reasoning; in short, language may
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determine the cognitive categories rather than the other way around.

Referencing the work of Haviland, Levinson points to the gestures of Guugu

Yimithirr speakers and there differences from the Euro-American explorers they

came in contact with.

Haviland tells us that Guugu Yimithirr speech revolves around a variety of

deitic devices that cannot be understood apart from the contextual information of

the speech act. These “devices” are far more absolute and concrete, and hence

cannot be abstracted from the actual speech act. He gives the example of yii (here,

this) and nhaa (there, that) as one common contextual device. He then considers
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the deitics yarra (presentational, there [look!]) and yarrba (thus). These may

seem like simple enough speech devices. When I lived and studied at the

University of Hawaii as an undergraduate I often found myself utilizing the local

deitics mauka and makai (mountain side and ocean side respectively). But my

adoption of this terminology did not even hint at the complexity whereby such

deitic devices might be utilized in a totemic society.

Speaking to this point, Haviland writes, “The morphological possibilities

endow the cardinal direction roots with considerable expressive potential,

allowing speakers to encode location, distance, accessibility, presupposability,

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definiteness, and perspective all at once.” Among Guugu Yimithirr speakers,
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writes Haviland, most expressions include both a deitic speech device and a

relevant gesture. In this culture, gestures are intimately tied to linguistic structures.
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These include iconic gestures, metaphoric gestures, beats, and deictic gestures.

Utilizing the diversity of gestures available to them a native speaker telling a story

of past exploits might point jibaar (southwest) to indicate a point far northeast of

the contemporaneous context of the telling occurs. Another person might recount

a story one day using gestures to indicate a boat he was in flipped over in an east

to west manner. The story told some years later requires a completely different set
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of gestures to indicate once again the east to west direction of the flip. Such

stories do not reference the location of the person in the story, and as such do not

aim at self-determination. Rather they point toward an absolute location that

contextualizes the original event. This absolute location is what is conveyed in the

re-telling, more often than not with the aid of all variety of body gesticulations.

Haviland lists a host of possible forms of communication available to the Guugu

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Yimithirr speaker, which I reproduce with slight modification here:

1. At the anchored local space of the speech situation, where he can

a. Point at a copresent protagonist who figures in the narrative, either

directly or indirectly through links of kinship or historical

association

b. Exploit more mediating links from the current interpersonal

context to the intended referent

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 2. Still within the locus of the immediate interaction, at the interactional

space in which a narrator can arbitrarily

a. Demonstrate, or

b. Locate in an act of gestural baptism

3. At a narrated space, anchored on a discursively established origo

[reference point] and laminated over local space so as to inherit its

cardinal orientation, thereby locating referents by their indicated positions,

either

a. Presupposably, when relative narrated positions are known to

interlocutors

b. Calculably, recoverable by inference

4. At a narrated interactional space, established discursively, but providing

an autonomous locus of reanimated narrated interactions of both types (l)

and (2) above, which may depict, for example:

a. Unoriented narrated gestures

b. Oriented narrated gestures

The distinctions above give a hint of the complexities of communication available

to the Guugu Yimithirr simply by reference to gestures. These gestures are

anchored in absolute space, and have led Levinson to use such speech acts as an

exemplar of what his absolute frame of reference. Levinson asserts that intrinsic

and relative frames assume an internal logic that is not necessarily translatable

across frames of reference. Top, bottom, and side can mean different things in
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different languages, while the assertion of “front” is found to be far more

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 262
relative than statements regarding “back.” Intrinsic frames of reference are

local in that their primary focus is on what Levinson calls topological distinctions
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(equivocity of physicalities) that cannot be abstracted for any given context.

Relative frames of reference – in which we can include a wide diversity of

languages (English, Dutch, Japanese, Yukatek in Central America, Tiriyó in

South America, and Ewe in West African) that place varying degrees of

importance on such relative assumptions – are local, limited, and relative with

regard to the point of view assumed in relation to an object (and haunted by

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relativism or equivocity). In contrast, it seems that totemic ecologies are far

more absolute in their assumptions, though not completely so.

For his part, Haviland is not convinced that the Guugu Yimithirr speakers

are located solely within an absolute framework. He argues that these people are

prone to both absolute (in Levinson’s sense) statements as well as some form of
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intrinsic frames of reference like the use of left and right. Haviland’s point only

works to embolden Descola’s claims however that all of these ecological starting

points are available to people in multiple ecologies.

But beyond this subtlety, it still follows that there are distinct ecologies

available to different people across cultures and times, though certain contexts do

appear to place emphasis on one ecology or another. The work of Haviland and

Levinson goes a long way toward buttressing Descola’s argument, and his

consideration of Brandenstein’s anthropological work in Australia. Yet, as I have

asserted above, there are important clarifications that need to be made with regard

to Descola’s fourfold way.

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Analogies and Totemism

It is at this point that I must bring the readers attention back to my critique

of Descola’s characterization of totemic thought promised above. As I said, most

of the groundwork for this chapter occurred before a translation of Descola’s text

was available in English. This I suppose is rather serendipitous as I was not

availed to take Descola’s own consideration of totemic thought at face value.

Upon receiving the newly translated text, I was struck to find the following

words:

It is remarkable that there is no trace of a general hot/cold polarity in

totemic Australia, nor in Siberia, subarctic America, or indigenous
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Amazonia, which are animist regions par excellence.

Descola goes on:

Another way of imparting order and meaning to a world full of

singularities is to distribute these into great inclusive structures that stretch
between two poles . . . . Two such nomenclatures are very common: That
which opposes the hot and the cold and, sometimes combined with this,
that which opposes the dry and the wet. In fact, these perhaps constitute
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the most obvious indications of an analogical [ecology].

While Descola is clear that analogy is not an aspect of totemic ecologies, it

follows from the consideration of Brandenstein and Levinson’s work above that

totemic thinkers in Australia actually ground the entirety of their ecology by

recourse to what Descola calls hot/cold and dry/wet polarities above. There is a

certain dissonance between these two positions that must be thought through.

Descola begins his consideration of totemic thought by reference to the

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early work of Adolphus P. Elkin. He finds Elkin classifying several different

forms of totemism, including but not limited to: individual-sorcerer, sexual, clan,

conceptual, and dream/religious totemisms. Descola quotes Elkin who writes, “[a

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totem] is more than a name or emblem; something of the life of man is in the life
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of the totemic species, and vice-versa.” Elkin tells us that there are shared

properties and/or essences that mark these totems. Descola writes:

At the very most, [Elkin’s] inventory indicates the prevalence of two

major varieties of hybridization between humans and nonhumans, totems
included. One type refers to the sharing of one and the same substance
(flesh, blood, skin) . . . the other is based on an identical essence or
principle of individuation that is engendered by the regular incorporation
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of the child-souls of a totemic site into both humans and non-humans.

The former speaks to a shared physicality and is associated with matrilineal and

clan totemic systems, as well as those religious totemisms linked to particular

local sites of religious import. The latter, with its emphasis on shared interiority,

is most manifest in patrilineal, conceptual, and religious totemic systems. While

sorcery (individual totemism) seems to be the only totemism within which both

shared physicality and shared interiority are mixed, any given Aboriginal tribe can
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and does make use of multiple forms of totemism at the same time. This leads

to Descola’s own assertions regarding totemism. He writes that though Elkin was

convinced of some unity or pattern underlying all totemic ecologies, he does not

quite discern that pattern. Elkin writes, “We have still to wait for some thorough

studies of increase rites and the beliefs expressed in them, by students versed in
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the tribal tongue.” For this person Descola turns to Brandenstein.

Descola bases the vast majority of the rest of his consideration of

totemism on Brandenstein’s book, Names and Substances of the Australian

Subsection System. In this very technical account I have found numerous

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mentions of the basic polarity of warm/cold and dry/moist that Brandenstein

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 274
tells us is at the very heart of totemism. Descola writes,

Brandenstein argues that the whole Australian totemic system is governed

by a single immanent logic whose most complete expression, in societies
with subsections, is based on eight combinations of three pairs of primary
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properties.

What are these three pairs, and why are they assumed to be properties rather than

polarities? Descola lists them as quick-slow, hot-cold, and round-flat. And what is

the single immanent logic that holds them all together? Descola tells us that

Brandenstein’s work helps to confirm Elkin’s earlier study, in effect showing that

totemism is predicated on an “interspecies continuity of both physicalities and

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interiorities.” Yet Descola seems to shy away from Brandenstein’s own

characterization of this pattern.

For his part, Brandenstein makes reference to the double polarity of

warm/cold and quick/slow throughout the text cited by Descola. He writes,

One can abstract the information of Aboriginal conceptions of

classification . . . in a theoretical way as the Aboriginal recognition of
balanced polarity in the physical and temperamental characteristics shared
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alike by all phenomena in the universe.

Yet Descola is clear in the quotations cited above. Polarities like those

Brandenstein finds crucial to totemism do not belong to totemic ecologies.

Descola is not consistent on this point. He agrees that polarities are important to

totemic ecologies, and he asserts that wherever we find such polarities (underlined

by analogy) we can be sure we have found his ecology of analogism. This does

not follow. Totemic ecologies are based on polarities like quick-slow, hot-cold,

and round-flat, and these are sure signs that we are not dealing with totemic

ecologies. What is going on here?

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 The problem is not found in Descola’s consideration of totemism, for he

seems to agree with Brandenstein with regard to the importance of some basic

polarity for a totemic ecology throughout his writings on the topic. The problem

arises with Descola’s consideration of analogism. I ask the reader to remember at

this point that Descola associates analogical ecologies with extreme forms of

abstraction, while my own consideration of naturalism, totemism, and Desmond’s

metaphysical dialectic and metaxological ground point in the exact opposite

direction; namely that the use of analogy is often a sign of healthy and balanced

abstractions, not extremes. Following Desmond we find that analogy can act as

something of an avenue toward intimacy for those who have followed univocity

into a dry arid landscape of curiosity or equivocity into the moist decomposition

of univocity in the face of diversity. While Desmond speaks from within a largely

naturalist ecology, as a working diviner in the Dagara tradition of West Africa, I

can also speak from within an animist ecology, an ecology that Descola has

largely portrayed in terms of analogism.

Again, looking to the quotation offered by Descola above, we find that he

sees a complete lack of polarity and/or analogy within the animist traditions he is

most familiar with. Wherever we find such polarities, Descola writes, we can be

certain that we have found an ecology of analogism, which we must remember

has an originary assumption of atomism. Analogy, on Descola’s account, is a

desperate attempt to assuage the anxiety of atomism and radical discontinuity. So

West African traditions, Chinese, Central American, and Renaissance traditions of

philosophy and divination are immersed in a desperate struggle with radical

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abstractions, while European post-Enlightenment scientists (naturalists) are not.

If we follow Levinson, we can find that if there is such a thing as a

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universal it is not a semantic one (univocity relevant to an ultimate quantifier),
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but rather a relational frame of reference based on intrinsic binaries. These

intrinsic frames of reference do not necessarily identify a self (either absolute or

relative, Polarity or Being ), they are based on binary relationships between figure

and ground, and as such assume an interiority (the People). The binaries that arise

from such intrinsic frames of reference can express varying degrees of complexity

and abstraction based on different “topological” interests, whereby following

Descola we can discern a process of self-determination relevant to a diversity of

physicalities or bodily worlds.

The issue at this point is not with Descola animist ecology, but rather with

his association of analogy with what I term atomism, and his subsequent assertion

that totemic ecologies do not engage in analogy. I argue instead that analogy is a

prevalent and useful form of abstraction that can be found throughout linguistic

traditions that Descola alternatively associates with analogism, totemism, and

naturalism (e.g., Tzeltal Mayan is beholden to analogism for Descola, while it

falls it falls largely within the context of totemism/absolute frames of reference

for other authors, while Australian Aboriginal totemism is said to make no use of

analogy by Descola, while most other authors cited here find the exact opposite to

be true).

We can look to a variety of authors in the field of archaeology,

anthropology, cognitive science and linguistics for a defense of analogy. After

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detailing the historical reaction against the inconclusiveness of analogical thought

by “self-consciously scientific” researchers, Alison Wylie offers a thoroughgoing

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defense of the use of analogical thought in the social sciences. Following a

somewhat similar vein, cognitive linguist Douglas R. Hofstadter writes:

If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies

way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the
broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a
bitty blip – rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition –
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analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.

Linguist Esa Itkonen – “in the spirit of Humboldt’s 1812 and Whitney’s 1875

dictum” – contributes to this defense of analogy by claiming it is the most

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fundamental aspect of human language. Itkonen develops his argument by

postulating a continuum from mechanical (abstract/atomism) to creative (primary)

forms of analogy, speculating in the end that analogy is our primary means of
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ordering the chaos of concrete experience.

He makes a distinction between concrete-horizontal analogies that are

largely binary (e.g., here/there, dry/moist, warm/cold analogies used in totemic

ecologies) and linguistically internal (they do not seek a relative frame of

reference), and abstract-vertical analogies that are ontologically motivated to

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reference some external marker (genus vs. species or universal vs. particular).

Itkonen traces the history of the latter “ontological” analogies, which I associate

with naturalism, through the Western tradition, from Pythagoras to Plato and

Aristotle, and on to Galileo, Newton, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Lyell and Darwin.

Itkonen also takes time to draw parallels between Hegel’s use of (meta)-analogy
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with the use of the same by analytic philosophy. His work, at this point, seems

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to bolster Descola’s assertions above that when we look to the Western tradition,

we see analogy everywhere. Yet contrary to Descola, by articulating the

importance of binary analogies above, Itkonen effectively locates analogies in

totemic linguistic expressions as well.

He singles out the Nyoro of East Africa, the ancient Chinese system of

yin-yang, and the Greek Pythagorean cosmology as exemplars of concrete-

horizontal analogies. Brandenstein, Descola’s most important theorist regarding

totemic ecologies, clearly follows this same line of thought in aligning early
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Greek thought with the totemism of Australian Aborigines. If we follow

Itkonen and Brandenstein, there seems to be a strong parallel between totemism

and many of the ecologies Descola has termed analogical. Analogy is not the

opposite of totemism it seems, but rather a fundamental component of totemic

thought. Not only does this point seem to hold, but it also seems clear that there is

a strong likelihood that totemic thought in ancient Greece gave way to naturalism.

In effect, the analogy shifted from reference to Polarity to reference to Being. To

this end Brandenstein writes, “The oldest Greek reference to ‘hot’: ‘cold’,
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‘dry’:’wet’ is in Heraklitus Fr. 126 according to Lloyd (1966:44).”

Brandenstein then goes on to follow this tradition from Anaxagoras, Anaximander,

and then Empedocles in the Greek tradition. Brandenstein proceeds to develop his

comparison between “identical Australian and Greek elementary system[s]” based

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on six and eight subsections.

A similar case could just as easily be made in the case of West African

and Chinese elementary systems, with one important clarification. Following

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Lloyd we must distinguish between elementary systems that emphasize

things/substance and those that emphasize correlations and process. A distinction

that he makes between Greek and Chinese thought, and one that can be traced

between naturalist and totemic ecologies. The point that follows is that analogy is

existent everywhere, and can be found in more-or-less abstract forms. Analogy

can just as easily be found in (post)modernity, a tradition that Descola defends as

the exemplar of naturalist thought.

Itkonen bolsters this claim when he asserts that (arguably) the most

important analogy in the history of science is that of mind to machine, though we

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might also include here the analogy of Nature to mechanism. This means that

the very post-Enlightenment thought that Descola has highlighted as naturalist, is

in fact analogical as well. Instead of finding analogy used only as a desperate

attempt to overcome extreme atomism, we actually find it a healthy response to

means toward meaning making, one that can be found throughout our various

ecologies of participation. A linguistic style that can also lead to extreme atomism

(e.g., (post)modernity) and/or more absolute expressions of totemism (e.g., Guugu

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Yimithirr and Warrwa Aboriginal languages). We find, following Itkonen, a

range of analogies including binary correlations (totemism) and triadic causal

explanations (naturalism), all moving potentially toward highly abstract absolutes

(totemism) or radical discontinuity (atomism).

What is needed in the end is a broad definition of totemism – one that

includes Chinese, West African, and Central American thought – and a broad

definition of naturalism – that includes much of Ancient Greek, Hellenic, and

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Vedic thought and the traditions that follow from them. In order to adopt these

broad definitions in the context of Descola’s work, we need to clarify the

reasoning behind his particular associations of analogy with atomism.

Descola’s Invention of Analogism

Descola writes that the framework of analogism is one of complex

hierarchies, castes, and sub-castes if you will. He tells us that analogism

is predicated on the idea that all the entities in the world are fragmented
into a multiplicity of essences, forms and substances separated by minute
intervals, often ordered along a graded scale, such as in the Great Chain of
Being that served as the main cosmological model during the Middle Ages
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and the Renaissance.

The basic assumption here is one of equivocity and discontinuity. There is

no ground assumed in such abstract ecologies (no univocity), and so a radical

difference is experienced between both the physicality and interiority of others.

One might argue that the Great Chain itself is a univocity, but Descola tells us this

is a desperate attempt at meaning making predicated on an actual assumption of

radical discontinuity. Descola notes the importance of analogical ecologies for

Central American and Western African cosmologies, Vedic thought, Ancient

China, and the vast majority of the Western tradition (Classic, Hellenic, Medieval,

Renaissance, and Modern philosophy can all be included here).

It is crucial at this juncture to be clear that what Descola means by analogy

in this section is not what I clarified as analogy in the last section. Descola

conflates analogy with desperate attempts at meaning making, based on an

assumption of radical discontinuity or nihilism, and the subsequent assertion of

arbitrary and rigid hierarchies. I argue in this section, and throughout this project,

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that analogy is a healthy and ubiquitous response to life carried out in a variety of

different ways throughout animist, naturalist, and totemic ecologies. It is

necessary that this distinction be kept in mind throughout the rest of this section in

particular and project in general. I defend a much broader definition of analogy –

which as I show in some detail is far more in keeping with the literature – and

subsequently eliminate Descola’s use of analogism as a viable starting point for

human experience. In its place I assert that each ecology (animism, naturalism,

and totemism) can be beholden to eros, while also falling into more-or-less

abstract forms of curiosity or atomism (where atomism points to nihilism and

radical distcontinuity). In contrast to Descola, I cannot imagine any experience

beginning in curiosity and abstraction, especially of such a radical kind, and so

offer my ecology of atomism as an abstract horizon of curiosities, rather than an

actual starting point for lived experience. Returning to Descola, it is important to

note that his analogism is the newest addition to his thought (a point clarified in

more detail below), while also the least necessary.

Descola is at pains to distinguish this ecology from totemic ecologies, and

to this end, he mentions the kalpul system established by the Tzotzil and Tzeltal

speaking people of Chiapas, the same Mayan speakers that Levinson and his peers

locate primarily by reference to absolute or totemic frames of reference. Descola

writes that kalpul segments could hardly be considered moieties (totemic). “The

kalpul are social and cosmic segments mixing humans and non-humans,” says

Descola, “as well as corporate units exerting a control on land tenure and on the
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individuals incorporated under their jurisdiction.” The cosmic segments

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referenced by the Tzeltal are uphill (south) and downhill (north), which Levinson

and Brown have both clearly delineated with regard to an absolute frame of

reference (totemism). As for the social units, Descola offers the example of “elder”

and “younger” to make his point and writes,

the analogic collective is unique, divided into hierarchized segments and

in almost exclusive relation with itself, by contrast with the egalitarian and
monospecific collectives of animism, and the egalitarian and
heterogeneous collectives of totemism that are all bound to enter into
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relation with each other.

What bothers Descola is that ecologies of analogism make reference to

hierarchies (elder-younger) that are almost exclusively internal. Animism and

totemism are said to be egalitarian, while the Tzeltal cosmology is said to be

rigidly hierarchical and internal.

But one wonders if this egalitarian assertion holds. Brandenstein locates a

similar younger/elder distinction in Aboriginal totemism as that found in the

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Tzeltal language. He also finds the Aboriginal speakers inclined toward using

the colloquialisms of clever and fool to stand in for the polar distinctions between

quick and slow mentioned earlier in reference to totemic ecologies. Brandenstein

writes, “Apparently the Aborigines applied what we could call moral judgment

[hierarchy] to the (tempera)mental qualities of their representative head totems in

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both areas.” To the extent that both Aboriginal Languages and Tzeltal Mayan

languages are found to prefer absolute or totemic frames of references, while also

making use of some modicum of hierarchy, Descola’s distinction between

totemism and analogism begins to fray. Yes, Australian Aboriginal languages

assume an absolute frame of reference, but so do Tzeltal Mayans. Both of these

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groups make reference to internal hierarchies that may not translate from one to

the other. Levinson is clear on this point. Absolute frames of reference are
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relatively arbitrary and internal. But the somewhat arbitrary nature of these

choices does not necessarily point toward atomism. It is a hallmark of totemism.

Descola seems to have identified Australian absolutes as totemic, but

Central American absolutes as extreme abstractions based on an internal logic. He

has written similarly with regard to West African traditions like that of the Dagara,

Yoruba, and Ewe. Levinson locates all of these traditions as beholden, at least to

some extent, to what we are calling totemic ecologies. In order to continue, we

must question at this point how and why Descola began to use his category of

analogism.

Descola underlines the basic anxiety that looms over such an ecology

when he writes:

A world saturated with singularities is almost inconceivable and is in any

case extremely inhospitable; so among its premises analogism must
include the possibility of modifying that infinitely teeming mass of
ontological differences by means of a reassuring continuity that is
ceaselessly woven together by correspondences and analogies between
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disparate elements.

Descola clarifies that such an ecology begins with an initial atomism (in contrast

to my own work, where I find atomism at the abstract horizons of curiosity, never

fully realized, but always lurking at the edges of extreme univocation). Such

extreme equivocity is said to be a logically necessary non-univocity (non-ground)

whereby analogical attempts to order this atomism in reference to some ultimate

unity can take place. Notice Descola’s use of analogical here to denote a response

to an assumption of extreme discontinuity. This is a very particular understanding

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of analogy that does not hold up against the literature.

“In short,” says Descola, “analogy is a hermeneutic dream of plenitude

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that arises out of a sense of dissatisfaction.” Is this all that analogy is? It hardly

seems so. Descola sees the “great chain of being” most clearly articulated within

Medieval and Renaissance thought as the primary example in the West of such a

hermeneutical dream. The atomistic dissatisfaction that an ecology of analogism

is founded on is first located by Descola in Plato (following Arthur Lovejoy) and

his emphasis on a multiplicity of Ideas (discontinuity of interiorities) and the

synoptic unity of physicality as evidenced by reference to the Good (the

beginnings of a discontinuity of physicalities). Descola traces this basic anxiety of

atomism through Aristotle, Plotinus (and the neo-Platonists), St. Augustine’s,

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Thomas Aquinas, and on to Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Buffon, and Kant.

In earlier works Descola characterized all of the authors above as

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beholden to an ancient version of naturalism. At that point in his scholarly life,

rather than clarifying what he meant by naturalism, Descola was at greater pains

to differentiate the diverse social/cultural structures that he termed animist and

totemic. By way of making this distinction, Descola wrote, “the principles of the

construction of social reality are primarily to be sought in the relations between

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human beings and their natural environment.” Descola lays out a three-fold

system that includes the naturalism of Plato and Aristotle (and the subsequent

Western tradition) as well as totemic and animist systems. Totemic systems

(follow Lévi-Strauss) are understood to order nature in relation to abstract

metaphors/categories, while animist systems order nature in relation to proper

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persons.

In an important paper some years later, Viveiros de Castro was critical of

Descola’s reliance on the idea that there is some nature that could be objectified,

and subsequent differences in cultures that could be clarified (constructed in

relation to this shared natural environment). Rather than totemic and animist

thought being antithetical, naturalist and animist thought made opposite

assumptions according to Viveiros de Castro, who writes:

The classic distinction between Nature and Culture cannot be used to

describe domains internal to non-Western cosmologies without first
undergoing a rigorous ethnographic critique . . . Such an ethnographically-
based reshuffling of our conceptual schemes leads me to suggest the
expression, 'multi- naturalism', to designate one of the contrastive features
of Amerindian thought in relation to Western 'multiculturalist'
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cosmologies.

In his very important essay, Viveiros de Castro (following Kaj Århem and

Andrew Gray) clarified that animists do not have a different way of constructing
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culture in relation to nature; rather, they construct or enact natures - plural.

Viveiros de Castro writes:

The subject of these lectures [animist perspectivism] is that aspect of

Amerindian thought which has been called its ‘perspectival quality’
(Århem 1993) or ‘perspectival relativity’ (Gray 1996): the conception,
common to many peoples of the continent, according to which the world is
inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human,
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which apprehend reality from distinct points of view.

It must be stressed that the perspectivism (taking on distinct points of view)

articulated by Viveiros de Castro deviates from more traditional uses of the word.

Perspectivism is not meant to conjure images of Nietzche’s critical perspectivism

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in his Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche assumes a single world (a continuity of

physicality/Nature), and asserts multiple perspectives (equivocity of interiorities)

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in relation to that world. Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the subsequent concerns

of relativism that follow his work are a clear indication of a naturalist ecology.

Viveiros de Castro is asserting something quite distinct. “In fact,” he writes,

“[animist perspectivism] is at right angles, so to speak, to the opposition between

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relativism and universalism.” Here Viveiros de Castro is calling into question

the viability of using naturalist (Nature – Culture) distinctions to consider

nonmodern traditions.

Animists assume a continuity of interiority (the People), and understand

perspective to be dependent upon the body or clothing that the People have taken

on. If you are dressed as a beaver, you have the perspective of a beaver, and this

enacts a whole different world than the one enacted by those wearing Achuar or

jaguar clothing. Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism does not assert multiple

perspectives of one given world. That would be naturalism. Animist

perspectivism enacts different worlds, relavent to the body-perspective-clothing

that is worn. Animists are multinaturalists to the extent that there is no stable or

given univocity conceived of as Nature or body. Animists are involved in a

dizzying multiplicity of natures, and so physicality is understood in the plural.

There are two points to follow here, the first having to do with totemism,

the second with naturalism. First, Viveiros de Castro locates totemism by

discerning between hierarchies of relations and emphasis on analogy (especially

correlations). Animists formulate hierarchies of sociality in relation to the People,

while naturalists formulate hierarchies of categories in relation to Nature. By way

of contrast Viveiros de Castro writes,

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 Totemism is not an ontology, but a form of classification – it would not
belong, therefore, to the category of ‘modes of identification,’ but rather to
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that, left vacant by Descola, of ‘modes of categorization.’

Modes of identification, remember, are Descola’s way of defining different

relational dispositions or ontological starting points like animism, naturalism, and

totemism. What I want to point out in referencing this quote is that Descola and

Viveiros de Castro are making a very similar point, to somewhat different ends.

Both are suspicious of analogy, but the locate the practice differently.

Correlations (analogies), writes Viveiros de Castro, are “purely logical and

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differential” based on equipollent relationships (polarities). This is a very

narrow reading of analogy quite in contrast to the one defended here. Both

Viveiros de Castro and Descola associate analogy with abstraction, and limit its

usefulness in understanding animist and naturalist ecologies. But Levinson, and

the other linguists referenced above, finds analogy fundamental to totemism

(absolute frames of reference) and naturalism (relative frames of reference). They

defend a much broader definition of analogy, that can be utilized in a variety of

healthy ways throughout diverse ecologies. Viveiros de Castro wants to take

considerations of totemism off the table, but following Levinson’s assertion of

three major frames of reference this does not make sense. Descola, for his part,

wants to assert a totemic ecology, and so invents his analogical ecology as its

opposite, a point I have already shown to not make sense, as analogies are

fundamental to totemic frames of reference, and to naturalist ecologies. It may be

necessary to pause at this juncture and consider again why Descola has invented

his analogism. He is at pains to defend a fourfold way, as as such he means to

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maintain something like totemism. He adopts Viveiros de Castro’s critical stand

toward correlations (analogies), and so assumes that they cannot have any part in

his totemic ecology, even while it is clear following Brandenstein and Levinson

that they do. Totemism is based on polarities and theories of correlations, both

forms of analogical thought. Following his defense of totemism (defined narrowly

without recourse to polarities), Descola assumes there must be an exact opposite,

which he terms analogism. This is necessary to maintain his fourfold way. For my

part, I have teased out a more generous reading of the importance of analogy to

human language, a point that helps clarify certain difficulties faced by Descola’s

fourfold way.

Regarding the second point mentioned above, Viveiros de Castro

understands naturalism as opposite of the multinaturalism of animism, and uses

the term multiculturalism to denote this. Descola has taken Viveiros de Castro’s
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critique to heart and adopted this terminology. In so doing, he identifies his

naturalist ecology by reference to the natural and social sciences out of which

cognitive science emerges. To this end Descola writes:

Naturalism also implies a counterpart, a world of artifice and freewill the

complexity of which has progressively emerged under the scrutiny of
analysts, until it rendered necessary, in the course of the nineteenth
century, the institution of special sciences which were given the task of
stabilizing its boundaries and characteristics: that is, the diversity of
expressions of the creativity of humans as producers of signs, norms and
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goods.

Descola tells us that this naturalism is most aligned with modernity. He sees the

basic univocal assumption of naturalism to be “the coexistence of a single

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unifying nature and a multiplicity of cultures.” On this account, naturalism is

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an ecology illuminated equally by the natural sciences of the seventeenth-century

onward, and the social sciences that originated in the nineteenth-century and

remain dominate in the academy today. We might go so far as to say that on

Descola’s read, naturalism parallels the history of the modern academy.

If this is true, one might rightly ask at this point, what about the classics?

Or alternatively, what do we do with Hellenic and Medieval thought? Remember,

analogism points to a radical originary assumption, an extremely abstract atomism

that engenders fear and anxiety. An ecology of atomism that propels adherents

into desperate attempts at univocity by way of analogy. If we take Descola at his

word here, those traditions that seem (at least to my mind) to be most abstract

within our academic halls, the natural and social sciences, are found to be less

atomistic, less abstract, and more intimate than those subjects studied in the

dustier halls of the so-called humanities. Ecologies do not begin in atomism and

abstract curiosities, rather they risk them to the extent that they move away from

agape and eros. Now for many scholars this distinction may seem perfectly

obvious. Of course those old timers (e.g., Plato, Shakespeare, Aquinas, Kant, and

Leibniz) were dealing in abstractions. They were metaphysicians, poets, and

rationalists. We (natural and social scientists) are empiricists.

Descola is highly critical of modernity and its empiricism, yet he seems to

maintain the basic assumption within his fourfold way that the history of ancient

Western (as well as Chinese, Vedic, Central American, and West African) thought

is a story of desperate attempts to make sense out of an inhospitable world. I

honestly do not think that this is what Descola is trying to assert, yet it follows

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from his basic set of ecological starting points. To my mind, Descola has made

several important mistakes by recourse to his ecology of analogism. First, he has

maligned the practice of analogy in a way that does not seem in keeping with the

history of the practice. Second, following this reading of analogy, Descola is clear

that analogical thought is not present in totemic and naturalist ecologies, an

assertion that does not hold up against the linguistic evidence. Third, he has

portrayed the entirety of the Western Canon as predicated on an “extremely

inhospitable” cosmological assumption, a radical atomism that is abstract in the

ultimate. This is a great disservice to the variety of expressions available to

Western thought, and so must be questioned here.

I think in the end that Descola has taken Viveiros de Castro too literally.

He takes the use of the term culture (as in multiculturalism), and looks to

nineteenth-century social sciences to clarify its beginnings. Culture on this count,

is an obvious outcome of the seventeenth century natural sciences, but is this what

Viveiros de Castro means by “culture?” He tells us that

Culture is the modern name of Spirit—let us recall the distinction between

Naturwissenschaften [natural sciences] and Geisteswissenschaften [social
sciences]—or at the least it is the name of the compromise between Nature
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and Grace.

This quotation can certainly be read in the way that Descola has taken it,

but I think it is more helpful if read in a slightly different way. Viveiros clarifies

that Culture is the modern name for the compromise between Nature and Grace. It

is a superficial modern term used to point toward something far more robust,

Spirit. As I show in the last section of this chapter, this is not quite the generous

reading that even Viveiros de Castro has given. In the end, Descola’s

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naturalism—which is defined as a univocal assumption regarding physicality

alongside an experience of equivocity regarding interiority—if defined in a

narrow Nature-Culture way, becomes stripped of all interiority. It becomes the

atomism of the Greeks and the (post)moderns. Analogy and atomism must finally

be separated, so that analogy can be seen as primary, while atomism can be

understood to reference the extremities of abstraction available to various frames

of reference like those found in naturalist, totemic, and animist ecologies.

Ecologies of Participation: A Fivefold Way

At this point it is possible to put forward a fivefold way that is more in line

with the various authors mentioned above than Descola’s own fourfold way. To

this end, I have clarified three basic issues with Descola’s fourfold way above.

First, if Descola is going to make a strong claim with regard to ontological

relativity, as opposed to a weaker claim of linguistic relativity, then he needs to

establish a ground of participation. Such a participatory starting point has been

established by reference to Desmond’s agapeic participation and his

metaxological ground.

Second, Descola’s characterization of analogy is called into question by

reference to a diversity of authors. Analogy, which is conflated with extreme

hierarchical abstraction in Descola’s work, is placed on a more generous footing.

This allows us to locate analogies within totemic and naturalistic ecologies alike.

In so doing, it becomes necessary to clarify that analogical binaries can be

expressed by reference to the erotic self-determinations of Polarities and theories

of correlations found in totemic (absolute) ecologies. We can also clarify that

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analogies used in relative frames of reference (naturalism) need not assume

radical discontinuity and atomism. A variety of healthy uses of analogy can be

found, not the least of which in the philosophical speculations of Desmond (as

well as Aquinas, Hegel, Heidegger, and Goodman, see chapter 2).

Third, following from the addition of an atomistic ecology to account for

naturalist curiosities, we are freed to define naturalism in a broad way that is more

in keeping with the historical account offered by Lloyd and other authors. In sum,

the addition of a primary form of participation alongside that of an atomistic

ecology allows for the assertion of what I am calling a fivefold way. This fivefold

way (comprised of primary participation, totemic, animist, and naturalist

ecologies of participation, as well as the more abstract atomist expressions of

each) outlines the basic structure of my comparative lens, identifiable by

reference to what I am calling ecologies of participation. Having articulated the

basic outlines of this fivefold way, I now turn to a consideration of the broader

definitions of totemism, animism, and naturalism below. This endeavor is

especially relevant to the extent that these ecologies of participation can be related

to sorcery, shamanism, and metaphysics in particular, and the future of

comparative philosophy in general.

Ecological Perspectivism

In order to make sense of the interdisciplinary data (ethnographic,

linguistic, philosophical) presented in these pages I find it necessary to defend a

broad definition of both animism and naturalism. I have cited Viveiros de Castro

at length throughout these pages, and I turn to him again, and to a series of

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lectures he gave at the University of Cambridge, February-March 1998, for a

definition of these two ecologies:

Our traditional [naturalist] problem is how to connect and universalize—

individual substances are given, relations have to be made—the
Amerindian’s is how to separate and particularize—relations are given,
substances must be defined. You will certainly recall [Roy] Wagner’s
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[1975, 1977] formulation of this contrast.)

Viveiros de Castro articulates a similar definition to that attributed to Descola

throughout these pages, a definition that is overtly critical of Descola’s early

tripartite constructivism (animism, totemism, and naturalism), wherein all three

ecologies can be characterized as different ways of representing or constructing in

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relation to a given Nature.

Viveiros de Castro’s lecture series cited above has been recently published

by the Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and in the introduction of which Wagner

alludes to the idea that Viveiros de Castro’s work may signify a paradigm shift (á

la Kuhn) in academia. He quickly decides that such an assertion is almost

meaningless in the context of a postmodern academy, and in the end writes, “To

me, this magisterial essay is the benchmark of 21st century anthropology, not so
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much a new beginning, as a figure-ground reversal of the old one.” By “figure-

ground reversal,” Wagner follows the Barok and Tolai people of Papua New

Guinea by asserting that a figure-ground reversal occurs when a perspective

changes.

How does a perspective change? Power in the form of alterity becomes

embodied. Something beyond the bodily perspective is desired, and the realization

of that alterity literally transforms the body or reality, the perspective, of the

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desirer, effectively transforming the physicality, world, and perspective found in

the original body. A cycle ensues, whereby the new and novel perspective

reminds the tabapot (Tolai reference to an animist idea of “person”) between

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physicalities of the body that has now been lost. It is just such a radical shift in

realities that Wagner sees in Viveiros de Castro’s words and his writings.

As mentioned earlier, Viveiros de Castro’s work enacted just such a

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figure-ground reversal for Descola. Descola’s social constructivist position (his

naturalism) was turned upside down. The idea that there may not be some one

given Nature struck a cord. Descola adopted Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism,

changing his own ideas about what animism might mean. This, I think, is all for

the good: but this figure-ground reversal also changed Descola’s ideas regarding

naturalism, this time for the worse. He writes, “When, in earlier works, I

characterized naturalism as a straightforward belief in the self-evidence of nature,

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I was simply following a positive definition that goes back to the Greeks.”

Unfortunately Descola goes on to conflate this positive (though limited) definition

with (post)modern atomism. He continues, “This reductionist definition remained

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imprisoned within a conceptual genealogy internal to Western cosmology.”

The important considerations of animist ecologies, like those of Viveiros de

Castro, allowed Descola and other authors to break free of naturalism, and thereby

open the way for a the kind of multiple ecology approach endorsed here. But this

does not mean that Descola and Viveiros de Castro have understood naturalism in

the full light of their own broad definition, and yet this is where it gets interesting.

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 Viveiros de Castro finds naturalism haunted by relativism, which

supposes a multiplicity of subjective and partial representations of an

external and unified nature, while [perspectivism] proposes a
representational or subjective unity which is applied to an objective
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multiplicity, generated by bodily differences.

Viveiros de Castro is interested in the “objective multiplicity” of animist

ecologies (multiple natures/worlds), but seems to miss altogether a more robust

reading of naturalism that asserts a multiplicity of teological ultimates that are just

as real and efficacious as animisms multiple natures. He writes of solipsism and

the continual threat it holds for naturalist ecologies. On his account, naturalists

fear that in looking into the eyes of someone who is supposedly of their “own

kind,” they might not recognize themselves in the other. Imagine a Christian, a

Muslim, a Sikh, and a neo-Darwinian all standing in the same room looking to

one another. They all assume, more or less, the same givenness of the room, but

where they differ is in their teleological assumptions. On Viveiros de Castro’s

account, these differences are imagined in relation to the absolute singularity of

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minds; but in writing this he has reduced God, Allah, and non-teleological

Nature to the singularity of the Christian, Muslim, and neo-Darwinian mind. He

has perpetrated the same reduction he is so quick to dismiss as superficial in

(post)modernity.

For Viveiros de Castro, naturalism’s teleological ultimates are reducible to

(post)modern non-teleological assumptions (social constructivism), while animist

physicalities are given a far more robust reading. “Perspectivism implies

multinaturalism,” says Viveiros de Castro, “for a perspective is not a

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representation.” For there to be a representation, there must be a shared given

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like Nature. This is not the case within animist perspectivism. Perspectivism

points to a process of enacting multiple worlds (hence multinaturalism) based on

diverse bodies/perpsectives/ways of worldmaking.

I agree with Viveiros de Castro up to this point, but must take a more

robust stance in defense of naturalism. Contrary to Viveiros de Castro,

teleological ultimates of naturalism are not necessarily reducible to

representations either. He tells us that animists’ bodies are not substantive or fixed

in the way naturalists imagine bodies (the givenness of the room informs the fear

of solipsism for the naturalist); animists bodies are “an assemblage of affects or

ways of being that constitute a habitus.” Such a “habitus” is literally a different

nature/world, and this, Viveiros de Castro assures us, is the origin of

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perspectives.

My simple suggestion is that we afford naturalism the same robust reading.

On such a reading, naturalist perspectivism cannot be reduced to representation.

We can begin to understand the diversity of interiorities available to naturalists as

an “assemblage of affects or ways of being” that enact different but equally

efficacious teleological ultimates: whether Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s unmoved

mover, variations on a monotheistic creator, or Descartes’ mind. I quote Ferrer at

length on this point as he asserts a participatory predicament wherein knowledge

(perspectivism) is not representational but cocreative and enactive:

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 I suggest that human spirituality emerges from cocreative participation in
an always dynamic and undetermined mystery, spiritual power, and/or
creative energy of life or reality . . . . This relation is not one of
appropriation, possession, or passive representation of pregiven
knowledge or truths, but of communion and cocreative participation….
Spiritual knowing is not a mental representation of pregiven, independent
spiritual objects, but an enaction, the ‘bringing forth’ of a world or domain
of distinctions cocreated by the different elements involved in the
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participatory event.

The assemblage of affects that make up a particular perspectivism may enact

either a world (animist multinaturalism) or a domain of distinctions (naturalist

multiteleology). Ferrer’s work can be seen to parallel Desmond’s whereby erotic

dialectics of self-determination (enaction), framed against a backdrop of agape

(dynamic and undetermined mystery), lead toward a metaxological ground of

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plurivocity (participatory predicament; multiple ecologies). Descola and

Viveiros de Castro have maintained the eros of animism, and at the same time

have reduced naturalist eros to naturalist curiosities. Naturalism is relegated to

attempts at univocal curiosities and equivocal critique. Animism is given the

benefit of a broad definition, while naturalism is confined to (post)modernity.

As a corrective, I propose to adopt Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism and

broaden its application across ecologies of participation. Viveiros de Castro

associates animism with structural perspectivism and the willingness of shamans

in animist ecologies to risk bodily metamorphosis. To this end he writes,

[Perspectivism] is considered by Amerindians to be an attribute of the

body, as something that happens in, to, and through the body. The clearest
example is shamanism, which we would consider as the ‘spiritual’ activity
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par excellence, but which Amerindians sees as a bodily condition.

Viveiros de Castro locates animist perspectivism in parts of South and North

America, northern Asia, and Papua New Guinea.

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 It is my assertion that we can broaden the scope of animist perspectivism

to begin to include traditions found throughout the world (e.g., West Africa,

China, and Central America) that take animism’s binary relations (Levinson’s

intrinsic frame of reference) and extrapolate theories of correlations or polarities

with them. There appears to be a wide swath of middle ground between the truly

absolute Polarities of some Australian Aboriginal languages and the totemic

polarities articulated in the traditions mentioned above. It is reasonable to assume

a form of perspectivism that utilizes analogy within this grey area. Following the

importance of divination to meaning making in Central America, China, and West

Africa, I speculate that diviners can be understood as those most involved in the

perspectivism inherent to such totemic frames of reference. We can find in

Viveiros de Castro’s animist hierarchies the potential for more abstract and
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diverse theories of correlations found in ancient China or West Africa.
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Viveiros de Castro does not have a clear way of referencing these traditions,

while Descola relegates them all to his own ecology of abstraction (analogism)

that I have critiqued above.

I follow Holbraad on this point. He wonders aloud, what makes divination

so special? His answer, “The logic of divination, I claim, turns on the idea that

what makes divinatory verdicts worth interpreting in the first place is the fact that
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they must be true.” This is not because such verdicts relate to fact (naturalism),

or to bodily perspectivism (animism), rather they are enactions of oracular truth.

This is an important clarification, especially with regard to shamanic (animist)

and divinatory (totemic) forms of participation that might be easily confused if

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my distinction is not fully grasped. Divinatory truths are not analytic or

methodological in the tradition of naturalism, nor does divination aim toward the

taking on of diverse bodies/worlds (this is shamanic perspectivism). “The task

that divination seems to force upon us,” writes Holbraad, “is that of articulating
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an altogether counterintuitive conceptual repertoire for truth.” Such a practice

results from a double-identification with transcendence (interiority) and

immanence (physicality), and is motivated by the fear of overindulging either to

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the detriment of the Polarity. Divination is a process of worldmaking, the

power of which lies in the enaction of a figure–ground reversal or “(re)generative

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process of intertwinement.” This point is clarified in greater detail in chapter 5,

where I engage a more detailed reading of Holbraad’s work in relation to

divination and its process of worldmaking. For now, the important point to

consider is that divination offers another form of perspectivism. Totemic

perspectivism has less to do with Being-Nature, or People-Becoming, than it does

with equipollent correlations (Polarities) and their many unique configurations

leading to novel forms of worldmaking.

There is one more form of worldmaking that must be considered here. If

we adopt my broad definition (include both erotic impulses and curiosities) of

naturalist ecologies, we can assume that like the shamans in animist traditions

(who risk cannibalism and a potential loss of meaning due to the instability of the

body), we will find some persons willing to risk relativism and the loss of

meaning due to the instability of interiorities within naturalist ecologies. I call

these people metaphysicians in the best sense of the word defended by Desmond

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and Whitehead above. Here we find those willing to move beyond the gates

populated by the “wise homebodies” of any given naturalist context.

Metaphysicians become “transspecific beings,” the naturalist counterpart to the

animist shamans and the totemic diviners (see Table 4, noting the absence of

primary participation; primary participation does not engagement univocity

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enough to have a particular perspective).

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Table 4. Ecological Perspectivism

Totemism   Animism   Atomism   Naturalism  

Transspecific   Diviner   Shaman   Univocalist   Metaphysician  
Idiocy  
Risks   Univocity Metamorphosis/physical Equivocity Conversion
transformation
Basic Over Cannibalism Nihilism Relativism
anxiety   familiarity
Multiple correlations/ physicalities (e.g., no commuting interiorities (e.g.,
realities   polarities worlds, natures, bodies, (e.g., scientific, spiritual and
religious, philosophical
theoretical ultimates, cultures,
literalism and/or subjectivities
fundamentalism
Note. Author’s own creation.
 Shamans, diviners, and metaphysicians countenance a greater tolerance for

risk. Shamans risk bodies, and engage a process of enaction whereby worlds are

co-created based on what body/physicality/clothing is worn. Nature is not given it

is enacted by the taking on of differenct skins. Diviners risk familiarity and the

collapse of the tension necessary to their Polarity. If the diviner identifies too

much with transcendence and/or interiority the tension would collapse into

something like naturalism. If the diviner identifies too much with the immanent

physicality, the tension of Polarity would collapse into something like animism.

The diviner risks the creative tension of the Polarity to enact the Polarity over and

again via oracular truth. The metaphysician pursues the logic of the one, and is
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troubled by questions of relativity. The animist changes bodies, the diviner

oracular truths/correlations, while the metaphysician risks interiorities and enacts

multiple spiritual/teleological/subjective/natural ultimates. These folks are

engaged in radical forms of worldmaking and subsequently are not necessarily the

ones you want to maintain the boundaries of your particular ecology. Rather they

are the ones who are transspecific and in the between, fully participating in and as

a plurivocity or metaxological ground.

 Chapter 4: Cannibalism, Conversion, and Comparative Studies

My Life Among Contemporary Cannibals and Dagara elders

How dare I. How dare I write of comparative things, and cross-cultural

things, and metaphysical things? As Jeffrey J. Kripal has written so eloquently,

knowledge has in effect become a form of evil, a sin, and the petty god of
Genesis is now joined by the petty gods of every other religion and culture
in a desperate attempt to keep us all locked with a thousand premodern
gardens of imagined ethnic, religious, and political purity. I can think of
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few worlds more dangerous than this one.

The dangerous world of sin that Kripal writes of is a (post)modern world, where

any theory must prostrate before the “abuses of postcolonial theory” or face the

charge of epistemological imperialism and colonization. Throughout this project,

I dare to speculate, and seek to utilize an enactive approach to evolutionary

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theories to do so. Speculation is bad enough, but evolution? How dare I think

of differences in evolutionary terms? By recognizing myself as a dangerous eater

of flesh I strive to honor both the other and myself by identifying us, all of us, as

literal cannibals. I reference contemporary comparative studies as commuter

cannibalism, which seems innocuous or flippant enough, but I do not use such

terminology in jest. I find comparative scholars (and scholars in general) to be

flesh eating novelty invoking others with a long and troubling history. To this

extent I do not shy away from postcolonial discourse; by clarifying an animist

understanding of cannibalism I actually mean to honor postcolonial thought, as

well as contextualize it.

Jack Goody, in defending the use of evolutionary frameworks to consider

differences among people has bemoaned the current state of affairs. He tells us

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that about all we are left is “either largely non-developmental or else
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simplistically so.” Most postcolonial anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars

within academia have distanced themselves from developmental, historical, and

evolutionary theoretical models. Apffel-Marglin clarifies that “The view of

history as the recording of the acts of humans ordered along a homogenous

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timeline is a modern European invention.” Following Marcel Détienne she sees

Thucydides and the Greek mind distinguishing between muthos and logos,
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hearsay and verifiable accounts of events respectively. This is the Greek

fascination with methodology already outline by Lloyd above. We find in Greek

methodological concerns a historical background leading toward the thin

methodological stance of analytic and scientific methodologies (as opposed to

thick and metaphysical); a stance that lays claim to the clear lines of positivist

science and history. When these methodological stances venture into speculative

philosophy they concretize naturalist eros and curiosity by way of comprehensive

distinctions that lead to ontological and epistemological chasms, what I call

atomistic ecologies. These univocal curiosities are of course called into question

by postmodern critiques, where the observer and the fact cannot be separated

from gender, culture, religion, and familial dynamics.

Apffel-Marglin asserts that while postmodern hybridity has become the

fashionable form of historical account within the academy, there are many people
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for whom the framework of history is neither necessary nor meaningful. At the

same time Goody writes, “Any resort to comparative work necessarily raises the
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evolutionary issue.” How could this be true, that contemporary comparisons

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necessarily fall into evolutionary thinking, and that at the same time there are

cultures that simply do not have any need for historical accounts, hybrid or other?

Goody tells us that the ethnocentric binaries of Euro-American thought

have promulgated a “theft of history” via recourse to terms like “democracy,”

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“individualism,” “freedom,” and “capitalism.” He clarifies that there is nothing

inherently wrong with binary and historical thinking (e.g., the relative frame of

reference I have associated with naturalism). We do not need to dismiss binary

historical thought as in the work of Apffel-Marglin who offers a deliberately

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alternative stance, one “made by acts of inclusion and simultaneity.” The kinds

of inclusion and simultaneity defended by Apffel-Marglin are noble goals. They

are in fact animist and totemic goals. But to fall completely on the side of either

(animism or totemism) is to negate the diversity of interiorities found in

naturalism, as well as the directional, and often progress-oriented, understanding

of causality predicated on the assumption of Nature. What we need to do, writes,

Goody, is to recognize the ethnocentric beginning points of such thought, limit the

universalizing attempts of Euro-American (naturalist) historical accounts, seek to

honor non-Western thought, while also limiting the positivist tendencies of this
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mode. We can do this, Goody tells us, by inviting the “dilemma of the
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participant observer.”

This is the “participatory” dilemma that I accept within these pages. I look

to the work of Descola and others to help clarify what might be meant by the

words “participant” and “observer” (or some similar terminology) throughout a

wide diversity of people and self-understandings. Following this line of thought,

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the stance offered by Apffel-Marglin could be understood as emerging from a

primarily animist ecology, while the ethnocentric dualism considered by Goody

can be found at the extremities of naturalist abstraction, an ecology of atomism.

To the extent that Apffel-Marglin prefers animist ecologies over naturalist ones,

she is not associating herself with this participatory approach, but rather

defending animism over and against naturalism. A participatory approach has no

more room for animist triumphalism than it does triumphalist naturalist assertions.

Both animist and naturalist ecologies are welcome, to the extent that they are

available to the participation of the other. This is Desmond’s metaxological

ground, a defense of both animist and naturalist dialectics, alongside the

assumption that by inviting a plurivocity of dialectics we lay the ground for a

more encompassing participatory communication.

These comparative categories bring us full circle to the assertion that we

are all, everyone of us, cannibals in the most literal sense of the term. In his

important article on the subject of animism Viveirós de Castro writes:

Bodily metamorphosis is the Amerindian counterpart to the European

theme of spiritual conversion . . . The phantom of cannibalism is the
Amerindian equivalent to the problem of solipsism: if the latter derives
from the uncertainty as to whether the natural similarity of bodies
guarantees a real community of spirit, then the former suspects that the
similarity of souls might prevail over the real differences of body and that
all animals that are eaten might, despite the shamanistic efforts to de-
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subjectivize them, remain human.

Viveiros de Castro tells us that these concerns do not in any way mitigate the very

real personage of radical solipsists (relativists) and cannibals within our respective

cultures. To be a citizen of our contemporary planetary milieu is to be, to some

extent, a comparativist. To be a comparativist is to be, at least to some extent, a

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 347
relativist. If we take our comparisons seriously, we must assert our literal

cannibalism. To the extent that we take our comparative project seriously, we

must acknowledge animist ecologies, and the potential for cannibalism that haunts

them. I go so far as to suggest that it is to the extent to which we are able to

accomplish this contextualization of our contemporary selves that we are able to

interact in an honoring way with the alterity we cannot help but meet along our

travels.

I, then, am a cannibal. This is not a trivial point. My own cannibalism was

driven home for me shortly after I accepted the invitation to begin initiation as a

bokara (elder) within the Euro-American Dagara tradition that is burgeoning

outside the traditional boundaries of Burkina Faso, West Africa, in large part do

to the work of Malidoma Somé. For his part, Malidoma would not find it

necessary to find it necessary to make the clarification of Euro-American. In

Dagaraland, if you do Dagara ritual, and speak Dagara words, then you are

Dagara. When I bring this point up with Malidoma in conversation he pushes me

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to accept the inevitable, that I too am part Dagara. For my part, this is a subtle

point that is not settled within myself, yet by way of honoring and taking

Malidoma and the Dagara at their word, I drop the Euro-American clarification

within throughout the rest of this project. In doing so I adopt more of an animist

multinaturalism, rather than a naturalist multiculturalism.

Having accepted an invitation to initiation as a bokara and mentoring as a

bobuura (diviner), I speak in these pages with some familiarity of the Dagara

tradition. I write, however, not as a trained anthropologist. I write more as a

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philosopher in conversation with other philosophers or an animist and totemic

persuasion (or diviners as they would be called in Dagaraland). Malidoma (as

well as Sobonfu Somé) is a highly articulate and competent diviner, elder, and so

philosopher within the Dagara tradition. That being said, when I speak of the
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“Dagara” I am generally making reference to those “whom I know best.” It is

important to note that what I share in the following paragraphs is extrapolated

from my own experiences garnered from my three year long initiation into and via

the creation story of the Dagara people, as first enacted by Malidoma during a

sixteen day ritual that I participated in in upstate New York in the summer months

of 2012. On this point, Goody (who established his anthropological career

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through his work with the Dagara/LoDagaa ) writes that there is very little

institutionalized narrative among the Dagara. While there are overtures to a

correct version of their mythology, in practice the Dagara are continually

incorporating novel elements into their cosmology through a kind of efficacious

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poetic license. To be an elder in Dagara tradition is to carry in a unique way the

cosmological story that has been passed down for millennia. To be a diviner is to

engage the story in a more creative way, effectively enacting the cosmology in

unique ways following any given divination. To be a bobuura (diviner) is not

necessarily to be a bokara (elder) within the Dagara tradition. In my own case, the

designations bokara and bobuura find a home within the same personage, in some
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real way marking me as a philosopher within the Dagara tradition generally.

Some of my very first steps (literally) through the initiatory process of

becoming a bokara in the Dagara tradition led me to come to terms with the

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necessity we all face, the need to take life to nurture life. We were given a task to

walk through the woods of upstate New York without taking a single life. We

found ourselves carrying not only our own lives, but also the life of our

community close to our chests as well. As we proceeded in silence in a single file

line through the forest undergrowth, I came face to face with the maddening

impossibility we must encounter in attempting nonviolence in our daily lives. At

one point during our walk I exploded in the middle of the silence that was

imposed upon the initiates by the elders who were present. I found myself yelling

at one of these elders, horrified by the carnage all around me as elders and

initiates alike took life after life as they moved through the dense undergrowth

(simply by walking there). The context of initiation clearly amplified the emotions

and challenges I faced, bringing me to this heightened state where I felt the

senseless violence of our footsteps on the moist forest floor. Yet the lesson

remains.

This is just as much a metaphysical lesson as it is an ethical one. Within

the Dagara cosmology there is nothing that is not included by a broad definition

of the People. What distinguishes one People from another is the clothing or the

bodies they wear. The very real possibility of cannibalism becomes ever present,

for they are working within a largely animist ecology, and as such there are only

differences in body separating the insect, plant, and forest creature from

identifying itself as Dagara (what a naturalist would think of as human), or vice-

versa. To be present, as rock, tree, or person, is to be both purposeful and

potential cannibal. At least this is how the creation story unfolded for me.

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 I found that those that are most gifted at living life in relation to the need

to take life, are the trees, plants, and shrubs. The fauna, if you will. They feed off

those that have already fallen to decay, fleshing out this process by some complex

relationship to both water and sun (the elements of water and fire which play out

interesting totemic tensions within the Dagara cosmology). The Dagara situate

these wise elders, the fauna, on the highest rung of relational maturity. Animals

come somewhere below, and humans are all included here. It follows that to take

the life of a tree is more problematic than to take the life of a spider, a chicken, or

a goat. As I walked through the forest with my fellow initiates, it was the

innumerable insects, plants, and lichen that held my rapt attention. How could we

go on like this I wondered, taking life after life after life? And for what? For the

sake of our own movements? What kind of world did we live in, where not only

humans, but other people like plants and colonies of ants were rolled over by

bulldozer, foot, and blade for the sake of our own nourishment and desire? And

yet I knew that we have to move; we have to walk through the deep undergrowth.

After days of eating a strictly vegetarian diet, we were each given a

Dagara bow and set of arrows. The initiates were mostly omnivores, and if we
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wanted to eat meat (as most of us did), we must go and take life. We were told

that our initiation could not move forward without doing so, without providing for

the nourishment of the village through the hunt. The lesson was shared through

actions rather than words. Your community will fade away without the resources

provided by the sacrifice of another’s life. After a few days we finally killed a

female woodchuck. Her skin was taken to make a bag traditionally worn by

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bokara in Dagaraland, where the mother of the initiation, Malidoma, is from. The

woodchucks entrails and other non-edible parts were utilized to make an

important kind of medicine crucial to the survival of a Dagara community. We ate

everything else, and in the eating of her flesh I finally understood why the Dagara

draw a line in the sand with blood that most Euro-American’s in their experience
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cannot cross.

Before the days that I describe here I had participated in several rituals

wherein the life of an animal was taken in a sacrificial manner. There is any

number of reasons that one might participate with another life in such a way. A

popular, though now discredited, Euro-American understanding of sacrifices by

so-called primitive peoples revolves around the illogical need to appease various

gods and powers. Sacrifice, in this context, is the impotent act of illogical or pre-

logical people who must act on their fear without the benefits of post-

Enlightenment science or psychology. This was not my experience of sacrifice

leading up to my initiation. And it certainly was not the lesson that I left my

bokara initiation caring as part of my body.

The first time that I ever found myself with both knife and chicken in hand

I was more than a little nervous. I was not sure if I was doing the right thing, and

could not quite understand why I need take the life of a chicken to proceed on this

path. As I stepped into the ritual space and placed blade to neck, the world made

as much sense as it had ever done. This was something quite distinct from the

power and unease I felt upon looking down the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun

toward a group of startled chukar as a boy (a bird that is commonly found in

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Nevada where I grew up). The boy in the desert mountains and valleys of

Northern Nevada understood deep down inside the normalcy of the hunt, but

always felt a little perturbed by how it was engaged by his stepfather and his peers.

These kinds of experiences led me to become a vegetarian for some twelve years

of my life. I continued this practice of eating only vegetables and grains right up

until I stepped on the path that eventually led me to bokara initiation with the

Dagara. It was at this time that I had a powerful dream wherein I was a bear

eating the flesh of salmon and trout and knew that it was time to starting eating

meat again.

Returning to that first sacrifice, the knife moved across the neck of the

chicken. I felt my own life beat through the veins of the chicken, felt the flesh of

my hand through the breath and life of that same chicken, felt the mingling of

bodies, and the understanding of vitality, blood, efficacy, and force. In hindsight I

was experiencing the animist multinaturalism and the subsequent possibility of

cannibalism that I identify scholarly work with in these pages. There was a

rattling and a tingling that was beholden to something quite different than what I

thought of as my body. I felt more than I understood that we, the chicken and I,

had given ourselves over as gift and as an explication of life in participation with

the five elements, the ancestors, and our shared vision of the world.

Having experience several more experiences like this in the subsequent

years, sacrifice made sense to me on a very physical fleshy level as I entered into

bokara initiation. Even so, it had not quite reached the depth of cosmological

understanding with which it was about to become imbued. Here I was, walking

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toward life as a bokara, someone responsible for life in the village, in the forest,

in the fiery home of the ancestors, and everywhere in between. In the failed

attempt to ensure that no harm came to any other life, and the subsequent hunt, I

learned a lesson that cannot be transmitted on this page. No matter how much you

think you understand, what happened in those woods will remain my own little

corner of the mystery. This does not provide me an excuse to hide what I learned,

nor to pretend in some scholarly voice that I do not engage such practices or that I

am somehow above the life and death we face every day.

The crude version of this lesson goes something like this: there is no thing

or person that is not in some way similar to and/or part of me. To walk, talk, type,

and listen is to take life. Not the life of the so-radically-other-that-I-cannot-feel-

the-emotional-tone-of-their-life-and-death alterities, but of my fellow travelers on

the road. This is the assumption of animism. Everything I experience as physical

shares an interiority similar to my own. I include here the road, itself, and the

stones, the earth, the ants, and the feet that walk with it. Every single day of that

sixteen day initiation we greeted the road, and the mystery that road is, with

everything that it brings to the table. In assuming the terminology of cannibalism,

I remind myself of the lesson the Dagara taught me, the lesson of the road, the one

that has been largely lost in the culture of my origin. We are not only like them,

whoever they may be; they are us, we make each other up, co-creating one

another through our moment-to-moment practice of becoming. We literally

exchange bodies.

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 You find repeated references in these pages regarding the speculative

work of Whitehead and Desmond. These may seem funny bedfellows,

cannibalism and contemporary metaphysics. A fellow graduate student and

roommate of mine who studied the intricacies of Kant’s thought summed up the

correlation quite nicely when he shared the views of one of his professors on the

focus of my studies. “Whitehead,” shared his philosophy professor, “well he

actually believes that everything in the world is conscious. Everything!?” And

there it is - our cannibalism rolled up into a neat little gift from me to you. It is my

assertion in these pages that contemporary philosophy, if it is ever to be viable for

future generations, will have to take into account the assumptions, world-views,

logics, and modes of participation of at least primary, animist, and totemic others.

As a contemporary philosopher I am faced with the dilemma of others knocking,

pounding, and lounging at my door. This is certainly not a majority position

shared in the halls of philosophy departments around the world. Even in academic

departments more open to the other – anthropology, religious studies, postcolonial

cultural studies, feminist studies – there is at least the complications of thinking

about, with, and through the other that are detailed in the following section.

There is a quiet revolution going on in anthropology, writes Henare,

Holbraad, and Wastell. This revolution is underlined by a shift from

considerations of epistemology and knowledge, to questions of ontology. Inherent

to this anthropological shift toward ontology, writes Henare, Holbraad, and

Wastell, “instead of just adapting or elaborating theoretical perspectives . . . to

reconfigure the parameters of 'our' knowledge to suit informants' representations

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of reality, it opens the way for genuinely novel concepts to be produced out of the
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ethnographic encounter.” The question is, following Desmond, do we maintain

the ecstatic intimacy and tension that exists somewhere between univocity and

equivocity, threatening to overwhelm and/or encourage our philosophical

discernment, or to do we falter. Do we cut the line, ease the tension, and turn our

backs to agape? Is even eros too much? In the face of uncertainty, and in service

to curiosity and the disconnected atomisms such truths offer, do we forget about

the other? The quiet revolution in anthropology (and religious studies) mentioned

throughout these pages says no. If we take the other seriously, we find avenues

beyond the (post)modern constitution and its limits on thought. No longer

postmodern, we are free to speculate as nonmoderns, and in doing so a return to

eros and even agape is possible. This is as true for us as it is for them. To be a

cannibal in the sense that haunts the animist is of philosophical import, just as the

potential for relativism continues to be that specter that lives in the halls of

philosophy and the academy.

Cannibalism, Relativism, and Multiple Ecologies

It is necessary to clarify this statement, for it does not go without saying.

To be Dagara (and an animist in general), is in some important way, to risk

cannibalism. This is not a metaphor, or a theory, but a lived fact that must be dealt

with if one is to philosophize, conceptualize, or simply converse among the

diversity of others co-inhabiting this planet today. I argue that this cannibal nature,

so radically other in the Western imagination, is far more dangerous and harmful

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among those who have disowned the cannibal and the animist within themselves.

See for example the work of Cătălin Avramescu who writes,

In the Kantian analysis, the power of the modern Christian sovereign

grows according to an ascendant and implacable logic, which leads to a
devastating denouement of universal signification. This is the moment at
which the cannibal disappears as a subject of the science of moral order,
because he has been eclipsed by the State, the new agent of absolute
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cruelty.

In essence, Cartesian dualisms and Kantian epistemological chasms are symptoms

of a lack of not only agape but eros. In both of these strong dualisms we find

intimations of an ecology of atomism. Not only is the agapeic overabundance of

mystery that bubbles forth (making life possible) ignored, the erotic act of self-

determination is denied.

Remember that the starting point for the naturalist ecology is an

identification with the physicality and a disidentification with the interiority of

alterity. This leads to a naturalist form of self-determination, an erotic perplexity

and impulse whereby shared physicality is assumed and diversity of interiority is

more-or-less overcome (self-determination). This “more-or-less” is important.

When Descartes marks an absolute distinction between mind and body, he

disidentifies with all of physicality in general, but he also risks solipsism. The

assumption of shared intimacy, whereby erotic self-determination is made

possible, is lost. Such a double disidentification, as I have shown above, leads to

an atomism that is overly abstract.

Avramescu surveys our modern world and finds a level of industrialized

cruelty that boggles his imagination. But if we were to look carefully at a host of

animist ecologies, we could also find a level of violence that boggles the

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 357 358
imagination. The industrialized world certainly did not invent violence. The

lesson learned in my bokara initiation with the Dagara was not one of

nonviolence, but rather the pragmatic necessity of sharing bodies, a particular

kind of violence to be sure. Viveiros de Castro writes that the fundamental motif

of an animist ontology belies

the fact that one does not have to literally eat the others in order to
continue depending on them as sources for the very substance of the social
body, a substance that was nothing more than this cannibal relation to
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alterity.

Animism assures us that we depend on one another’s bodies for the stability or

coherence of our own.

I learned that we cannot ignore our cannibal ways, and so I adopt the cry

of Brazilian proto-nonmodernist, Oswald de Andrade. “Cannibalism alone unites

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us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.” I agree, and I add – relativism as

well as cannibalism unites us – for both offer keys into our fears and our potential.

I follow Andrade’s line of thought in asserting that there is a primary mode of

participation, “a participatory consciousness, a religious rhythmics,” Desmond’s

agape. But unlike Andrade, I do not identify wholly with this “[participatory
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mystique] for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study.” I accept Lévy-Bruhl’s discernment

between multiple modes of participation, but I do not mean to overemphasize any

one of them. Like the cannibalism Andrade defended, and the tropicalia tradition

that came after him, I riff on multiple sources of sustenance, and as I chase the

mystery of contemporary comparative studies, the question will arise over and

again, how dare I?

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 I eat the post-modern, the post-human, the critical, the more critical, and

even the more than more critical, as well as the post-post-post-modern critique of

the modern, but I do not stop there. I eat the Christian, the neo-Darwinian, the

Buddhist (all of them), the Sikhs, and the Jews. As I eat this funny meal

something all together new comes out the other side. In the Amerindian traditions

studied by Viveiros de Castro, you are what you eat. I am a relativist and a

cannibal, at least in potential, and here is the punch line, lost on both the modern

and the postmodern in different ways. Against the modern who seeks to

Enlighten(ment) or convert, I remain a relativist that refuses to rest on ultimate or

solid ground. In doing so I am practicing an excess of relationality, for as I look

around I find a plethora of givens, spiritual ultimates, and other One(s) asserted

and defended (I say enacted) by different traditions around the world (e.g., Nature,
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God, Brahman, and Goddess). Against the postmodern – as a cannibal, a

dangerous killer and eater of flesh – I am practicing an excess of sociability. To

the extent that I walk the line of cannibalism, it is my emotional and relational

intelligence that leads me to these extremes, not the lack there of. Viveiros de

Castro writes that for the Tupinambá of Brazil (prior to the mid-sixteenth century),

a turning away from the act of eating human flesh relates directly to the inability
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to identify with and as the Other. I argue that the turning away from the act of

converting other interiorities similarly relates directly to my inability to identify

with and as the Other. Guesthood, as I detail shortly, requires the

acknowledgement of one’s cannibal nature. But in our contemporary milieu, it

also requires the acknowledgement of our relativist nature as well.

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 From a naturalist ecological perspective, a literal cannibal is a far less

robust notion than the same one found in an animist ecology. This point is not lost

on Viveiros de Castro, yet is worth repeating here. For both the animist and the

naturalist, flesh is physical, but where the naturalist (especially the (post)modern

naturalist) draws a somewhat arbitrary and problematic line regarding the what

and the where that constitutes fleshy objectivity (Nature), the animist allows for

flesh wherever there is interiority (i.e. emotions have bodies, as do ancestors,

angels, and thoughts). In an animist ecology, unlike the (post)modern,

cannibalism is not only literal, but also unavoidable.

Similarly, from an animist ecological perspective, a relativist is hardly

anything to fear, for relativity (of interiority) is a far less robust notion than the

same one found in a naturalist ecology. Of course both the animist and the

naturalist assume some form of interiority, but the naturalist assumes far more

diversity here than does the animist. For both the animist and the naturalist,

subjectivity relates to the interior, but where the animist assumes a somewhat

arbitrary univocity regarding the what and the where that constitutes subjectivity

(People), the naturalist allows for diverse subjectivities wherever there is

physicality (i.e., desks invoke a subjective experience, as do cartwheels, angels,

and potatoes). Of course some naturalists will argue against the existence of

angels, but this is the manner of naturalist ecologies. They do not question the

continuity of physicality, nor the fact that there was a subjective experience of an

angel; rather they argue for centuries and millennia over exactly what the nature

of that subjective experience is. In a naturalist ecology, relativity is not only literal,

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but also unavoidable. Where animists try to overcome diversity by way of

cannibalism, naturalists try to overcome diversity by way of conversion.

This is a reminder to the more extreme expressions of postmodern,

postcolonial, feminist, and critical authors that our proclivity for violence cannot

be overcome. The veracity of this point is made that much stronger by veracity

whereby the (post)modern (e.g., neo-Darwinian or critical theorist) tries to make

their point. Comparative scholarship is cannibalistic, as are the dietary habits of

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Tupinambá women, the postcolonial thought of Tuhiwai Smith, and the

feminist critique of bell hooks. Comparative scholarship promotes conversion to

the extent that it promotes sameness and univocity. It also promotes conversion to

the extent that it promotes diversity and equivocity.

Against modernism, I am most certainly a relativist, but again, this is not

as damnable a position as might sometimes be remarked. I am not advocating

relativism, but rather noting the important specter of relativity. We can frame this

question by wondering exactly what Bernard Williams was concerned with when

he made reference to “vulgar relativism” some years ago. In attempting to save

‘the truth in relativism,’ Williams made clear that relativism only works in so far

as it does not strip us of our ability to appraise one culture or another as beholden

to something that is transgressive and/or wrong. To do so would be to fall into the

category of vulgar. On Williams’ account, vulgar relativism confuses “real

confrontation” between ecologies, and “notional confrontations.” Notional

confrontations are more theoretical in nature, and so a vulgar relativism that

allows for all truths to stand on equal footing because they are all located in a

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particular ecology ignores the real confrontation or divergences between
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ecologies. Did Tupinambá cannibalism need to be stopped? The following

sections of this chapter try to answer this question by considering differences

between community building activities of Amazonian animism (cannibalism) and

Western naturalism (missionary work). This is only one small step toward a

greater contribution the cross-ecological work articulated in these pages has to

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offer this crucial conversation.

Williams considers a second issue when he writes, “we can nevertheless

recognize that there can be many Ss [ecologies] which have insufficient relation to
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our concerns for our judgments to have any grip on them.” Williams’s

application of this point is of interest. He references an ancient Greek theory of

phlogiston that was used prior to the scientific theory of oxidation to explain

instances of combustion and rusting. For Williams, this elemental theory of

phlogiston, whereby the presence or lack of the element of “fire” has to do with

the nature of combustion or rust, is not a “real option.”

Williams saves the truth in relativism by limiting what can be construed as

a real option for any given relativist. The life of samurais and/or Bronze Age

chiefs are not “real options” for industrialized scientifically minded people; at
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least not on Williams’ account. Why are the lives of a samurai, a phyloginist, a

Nazi, and a Zen monk not real options for “us?” The socially and historically

remote are useful fantasies, say Williams, but not real options. They are notional,

not confrontational. A reflective person cannot literally move outside of their

ecology, at least on Williams’ account. The truth in relativism, writes Williams,

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assumes this point. By way of underlining this point, Williams clarifies two

important propositions. First, he says, “we must have a form of thought not

relativized to our own existing S for thinking about other Ss which may be of
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concern to us.” We can restate this by saying that in order to be aware of some

other ecology, we have to first have a coherent ecology of our own. Second, we

can recognize that there are other socially and historically remote experiences that

are coherent and truth-ful in that context. The problem, he tells us, is that too

many people have ignored the first proposition.

Vulgar relativism comes into play when we emphasize the second and

ignore the first in the context of a confrontation. When we try to deny real

confrontations by characterizing them as notional. In such a case we might

concede the point by stating, “well, it’s true for them.” At this point we have

ignored the fact that we inhabit a coherent ecology, that they inhabit a coherent

ecology, and that there may be a real confrontation existing between us. My own

cross-ecological assertions do not ignore Williams’ first proposition. Animists,

naturalists, and totemic “selves” inhabit very different and yet coherent ecologies.

Yet I also assert something rather stronger than Williams allows by way of his

distinction between real and notional confrontations. The truth in relativity, on my

account, is far more challenging, for I assert that we actually can inhabit multiple

ecologies. We can have simultaneous experiences that are antithetical to one

another. There really is some continuous physicality like Nature that lends itself

to the natural and social sciences, and there is also an equivocity of physicalities

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that lends itself to animist accounts of metamorphoses, cannibalism, and

multinaturalism (multiple worlds).

Speaking directly to this point, Williams brings his consideration of

relativity to an end by writing the following words:

One reason that phlogiston theory is not a real option is that it cannot be
squared with a lot that we know to be true. These considerations, if
pursued, would lead us to the subject of realism . . . [And] scientific
realism could be true, and if it is, relativism for scientific theories must be
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false.

William’s scientific realism falls short of the Carnapian-Quinean restrictions

against metaphysics adopted already in chapter 2 of this work (where metaphysics

is conflated with univocity, and the attempt to articulate an ultimate quantifier).

Williams has clearly made an appraisal from his own ecology, giving preference

to the theory of oxidation that comes out of a naturalist ecology over and against

animist ecologies like those of the ancient Greek philoginists and the Dagara

cosmologists that state quite clearly that the presence or lack of fire is conditional

for combustion and/or rust. Williams, following Carnap and Quine, can state his

preferences for scientific methodologies over animist ones, but he cannot assert

that his favored theories are ultimately true. I defend a stronger relativity than

Williams wants to allow, and yet I heed his warning with regard to his first

proposition, and so my emphasis on ecologies of participation does not fall into

vulgar relativism.

This is all a very long way of saying that relativism is not dangerous to a

naturalist ecology, no more than cannibalism is to an animist one. Relativism and

cannibalism will always haunt these ecologies, and so a self-conscious awareness

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of this fact speaks to naturalist and animist ecologies done well. This path of
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relativity is not one of moral degeneration, evil, and fascism, but rather leads
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toward what David Parusek has called the making of “participant-observers”

and what Michael F. Brown has termed “cultural relativism 2.0,” a helpful
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intellectual rule of thumb. Speculative philosophy, writes Whitehead, mandates

that we not overstate our conclusions. Relativism (symmetrical and recursive

anthropology), as described here, ensures that we continually inhabit the

interiorities of the alterity, while cannibalism ensures that we continually put on

the flesh of Others. To the extent that we adopt a modified animist reading of

Williams’ two propositions, we can also be sure that we do not fall into vulgar

cannibalism. There is a coherency to our physicality/world, and to the extent that

this is true, we do not have to fear the eating of other as if it were our self. Yet we

can never be totally sure, and so like relativity, we find an interesting truth in

cannibalism.

The road ahead for the relativist is not solely one of critique, for as Latour
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has shown so clearly, that would just be more of the same. Relativism is not

fascism. And so I define myself not as a (post)modern, but as something like

Latour’s nonmodern, a harbinger of participatory thought; one who has eaten of

the (post)modern fruits, and become something novel and not so different after all.

What makes the (post)modern so very modern is the attempt by the modern to

distinguish herself as somehow different in kind. Different how? By recourse to

naturalism and relativity. Latour writes, “There have never been any Barbarians;
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we have never been Modern.” He tells us that when comparing Catholic-

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Portuguese amulet wearers and iconoclastic Brahmins with Guinean amulet

wearers and saligram worshippers (anti-sorcerers and sorcerers respectively), we

cannot distinguish civilized from barbarian, scientist from magician, or priest

from heretic. Not only have we never been modern, but they have never been

barbarians. The question is not how dare I. The question is, “How can I proceed

knowing full well that I do?” Latour’s point is not to relegate Euro-American

science or Dagara divinatory practices to the dustbin of history. We cannot be

post-anything. We have eaten of the (post)modern fruit, just as we have eaten of

the traditional and contemporary animist fruits of West Africa. Viveiros de Castro

writes:

It is important to note that these Amerindian bodies are not thought of as

given but rather as made. Therefore, an emphasis on the methods for the
continuous fabrication of the body (Viveiros de Castro 1979); a notion of
kinship as a process of active assimilation of individuals (Gow 1989;
1991) through the sharing of bodily substances, sexual and alimentary -
and not as a passive inheritance of some substantial essence; the theory of
memory which inscribes it in the flesh (Viveiros de Castro 1992a: 201-7),
and more generally the theory which situates knowledge in the body
(Kensinger 1995: ch. 22; McCallum 1996) . . . We are dealing with
societies which inscribe efficacious meanings onto the skin . . . To put on
mask-clothing is not so much to conceal a human essence beneath an
animal appearance, but rather to activate the powers of a different body.
The animal clothes that shamans use to travel the cosmos are not fantasies
but instruments: they are akin to diving equipment, or space suits, and not
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to carnival mask.

I do not mean to dismiss Euro-American thought (beholden to a naturalist

ecology), anymore than I mean to dismiss Amerindian thought. Rather I argue for

an enactive/participatory approach to this situation, whereby we come to

understand that not only are our interiorities constructed/enacted, but so are our

physicalities and worlds. I mean to put them all on and wear them; a kind of

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scholarly cross-dressing with cannibalistic and relativistic undertones.

Writing within the Euro-American academic tradition, it is important to

stress Amerindian and West African ways of self-definition (among others), as

these are what have been relegated to the category of pre-modern and barbarian. If

I am to take their ecologies seriously I must bring awareness to those parts of

myself that are afraid to be caught in public (academia) wearing such garb (i.e.

that of a diviner, elder, or shaman). To this end, I am a cannibal, just like you,

mostly because we cannot help but bump into one another. I consider this

cannibalism in some detail below.

Predation Before Guesthood in Comparative Studies

In considering what he calls the “traffic of souls” Descola offers three

distinct forms of maintaining relationships between self and other within any

given ecology. Following his work we can term these relational styles: predation,

obligation, and sharing. By way of simplifying my own consideration of these

relational styles as they relate to contemporary comparative studies, I follow

Descola’s lead by focusing primarily on animist ecologies. I add to this

conversation with brief references to naturalist ecologies, and forgo consideration

of totemic ecologies all together in my considerations here. Rather than offer

Descola’s own definitions of these terms, I begin by considering these issues

through various other authors writing on the topic of comparative studies.

To this end, I assert once again that we cannot help but bump into one

another. This point is driven home by the ethnographic work of Harry G. West. In

working closely with Muedan sorcerers and other people local to Mueda in

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Northern Mozambique, West walks away with a challenge to (post)modern

thought. At the end of one long period with his Muedan compatriots, West gives a

talk wherein he asserts that the common practice of turning from sorcerer into lion

should be understood metaphorically, rather than literally. He sees himself as

having pointed out the “made” quality of the Muedan reality. In effect, he hopes

his work can be seen as a kind of uwavi wa etinogalafia or “ethnographic

sorcery.” Where, according to West, the postmodern critic might see his work as

“silencing” the Muedan people, he sees himself as doing something quite

different.

West writes, “I dare say the Muedans with whom I worked expected me –

like anyone else – to speak assertively and authoritatively, articulating as

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convincingly as I was able my vision of the world we shared.” To be an

anthropologist is to have a vision or interpretation. One cannot deny this point.

Within the Muedan context, persons who do not engage others with their visions
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“are often said, to sit at home and pick fleas from their feet.” This is not a good

thing. A good Muedan sorcerer knows that every attempt to manipulate, create, or

influence actuality, is liable to face a countermaneuver. The world is not given, in

the Muedan context (similarly to the animist ecologies of the Amerindian and

Dagara), and so must be visioned and (re)visioned, over and again. We cannot

help but eat one another, and to be transformed. This shared creation is not

without its dangers.

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 Viveiros de Castro writes,

If solipsism is the phantom that continuously threatens our [Euro-

American/naturalist] cosmology . . . . then the possibility of
metamorphosis [through cannibalism] expresses the opposite fear . . . the
fear of seeing the human who lurks within the body of the animal one
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eats.

During my bokara initiation I saw the human in the other, and now I cannot but

see the human-like everywhere. West is also aware of the dangers. He concludes

his consideration of ethnographic sorcery with the following words,

To the extent that I have (re)made the world I shared with Muedans, I
have done so with great ambivalence, having learned from them the
valuable lesson that, even as we necessarily (re)make the world in which
we live, we do so at great risk to ourselves and to others. It is best, in such
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matters, to proceed cautiously, and with great humility.

It is my assertion in these pages that we (who have eaten and been clothed in the

garb of the (post)moderns) have distanced ourselves from our dangerous natures

through the process of modernization.

We have made them the cannibals – which in a naturalist ecology speaks

to a kind of relativizing of their interiority – while dislocating and ignoring the

cannibals that we ourselves are. Such acts fall under the relational style of

predation, which in a naturalist ecology looks like conversion. This distancing has

allowed us to follow our imperialist, colonialist, and paternalistic impulses – all

tools of predation and conversion – to the determent and horror of not only our

fellow humans, but also the environment and the rest of the more-than-human and

non-human worlds. In her attempts to decolonize contemporary academic

methodologies, Tuhiwai Smith has written that one should start out by not

identifying as a traveller. There are two important points to consider here.

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 First, Tuhiwai Smith’s critical stance is inherently a naturalist one. She is

critical of imperialist, colonialist, and paternalistic interiorities, not physicalities.

To the extent that she encourages the practices of critical theory, her work

remains within an ecology of naturalism. To this end we might ask, what is

critical theory if not an attempt to convert the colonialist, the imperialist, and the

patriarchal other? But Tuhiwai Smith’s work is not limited to conversations

around interiorities. Her indigenous (largely Maori) methodology requires the

consideration of whanau. Whanau is understood as the core social unit, the shared

interiority, of the Maori, and is offered as a contrast to naturalist relativity. “All

Maori initiatives,” writes Tuhiwai Smith, “have attempted to organize the basic
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decision making and participation within and around the concept of whanau.”

It is around whanau that non-Maori’s can be invited to participate. In this way,

participation begins within an animist ecology and a self-determination that is not

one of individuality and relativity (naturalism), but rather constellated around a

shared interiority (whanau). But this leads us toward an animist version of

predation, namely cannibalism.

For my second point – and following from my attribution of predation and

cannibalism to participation constellated around Maori whanau - it is worth

considering that animists travel across bodies and worlds (physicalities), and that

like naturalist forms of travel endangers to some extent those they come in contact

with. Naturalists travel via a shared physicality and can cause harm to bodies for
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sure, but it is the relativizing harm of conversion done to interiorities that is

most lasting. Tuhiwai Smith writes,

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 One of the supposed characteristics of primitive peoples was that we could
not use our minds or intellects . . . . Imperialism provided the means
through which concepts of what could be counted as human could be
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applied systematically.

She goes on to offer the examples of hierarchies based on differences in

interiority like race and culture. It is not that animists do no harm, while

naturalists rape and colonize. Both travel, and both can do harm. But Tuhiwai

Smith is critical of naturalist travelling in particular, and for good reason.

There is a subtle difference at play here, and I argue that we should

recognize both forms of travel; animist travels via a shared interiority across

worlds-physicalities, as well naturalist travels via one world-nature relativizing

interiorities. But this does not take away from Tuhiwai Smith’s point regarding

the violence of the latter. She writes:

There has been recent theorizing of the significance of travel, and of

location, on shaping Western understanding of the Other and producing
more critical understandings of the nature of theory. bell hooks, in
describing black representations of whiteness, writes of these journeys as
being acts of terror which have become part of our memory. While
travelling theory may focus on the location of those who travel, the
attention here is on the people whose bodies, territories, beliefs and values
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have been travelled through.

I have been in enough countries with a backpack on to know that my fellow

“travellers” do not want to be identified as such. There is a common bond among

many of these people (naturalists mostly), held together by the insistence that we

are not tourists. They are tourists, those other travellers; the ones that keep a safe

distance from the locals, whomever they may be.

And yet I have brought home pictures and stories of the people and the

places I have seen. I have changed the landscape through my clumsy travels. I

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have relativized and even tried to convert the other, most often through my

ignorance of my naturalist tendency to privilege my own interiority over that of

the other. I have been, and continue to catch myself being, a traveller in exactly

the sense that Tuhiwai Smith is referencing above. Including, but not limited to,

my comparative scholarly work. Many if not most of my peers (both in academia

and outside) have done the same. At worst, I am a colonizing traveler, the kind

that Tuhiwai Smith and hooks point out. At best I am a commuter, a shaman and a

pluralist, bumping into the seemingly alter, while bringing awareness to the

dangers we pose for one another and the necessity we all face with regard to

communication across ecologies.

I use the term commuter in place of Tuhiwai Smith’s traveller, in

recognition of the work of Nikki Bado-Fralick who tells us that the idea of a

commuter is an especially productive way of referencing the practices of a

scholar-practitioner in academia. She writes, “As commuters, we can begin to

encounter and explore the plurality of perspectives within the diverse spectrum of
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both scholarly and religious communities.” Commuters, like travellers, are in

motion, but unlike travellers they are not visiting far off and exotic places. They

have a certain fluency regarding the variety of experiences they engage. They are

willing to risk be cannibalized (animism) as well as conversion (naturalism). To

the extent that they nurture the stance of a commuter, they may communicate with

the Other by putting on their body (animism) or inhabiting their subjectivity

(naturalism), and thereby lessening the sense of anxiety regarding the equivocity

of physicalities and of interiorities. There is a kind of ho-hum to commuting, a

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mundaneness if you will. Following Bado-Fralick, scholar-practitioners who

understand themselves as commuters have a particular facility for moving

between ecologies, thereby rendering journeys that might seem radically other

common place.

The hope is that the recognition of the other as not so dissimilar from

oneself might open new avenues of communication necessary for comparative

studies and cross-ecological participation. Commuters, following Descola, take on

obligations to the other, and may engage in sharing. Descola writes, “For the

Desana [animist], the relation between the hunter and his prey is above all of an

erotic nature.” For the Desana, to hunt is rendered as “to make love to
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animals.” The erotic nature of this interaction assumes certain obligations

between both parties. There is a kind of complementary exchange that occurs in

such a situation. Descola turns to another Amazonian group to clarify what he

means by sharing. The Campa set assume a dualistic principle that distinguishes

between those who share a common essence (reference as “our people”), and

those others who are not of “our people.” Physicalities (bodies, skin, clothing) is

shared among the people. A bird offers its skin to the body of the arrow,

something the hunter has asked for. But no harm comes of the bird. No obligation

is owed. Among the people, sharing of bodies is assumed. Those outside the

people (Campa), are seen as in a more problematic light, and are avoided, and

certainly not engaged in this form of sharing. While these examples are clearly

taken from animist ecologies, we can imagine similar forms of interaction in

naturalist ecologies. Christians might easily share interiority with other Christians,

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and be perfectly capable of entering into obligatory relations with non-Christians

for example.

While obligation and sharing are ideals of interaction to be sought, I find

that we must place greater emphasis on our tendencies toward predation; in effect

calling into question any assumptions that we might have that our interactions are

innocuous and/or in line with obligations and sharing as described by Descola.

For all the efforts of Goody, West, Tuhiwai Smith, and Bado-Fralick to note the

dangers of commuting and/or travelling (comparative studies in general), I find it

necessary to place greater emphasis on the predation that is innate to our

interactions. It is for this reason that I emphasis not only commuting but

cannibalism and conversion. The notion of nonviolent interactions is too easily

held out as a possibility; something that I learned for myself during bokara

initiation is in fact impossible. It is not enough to locate violence and the

predatory instinct in the colonizer and the traveller, as important as that is.

In a telling example, Graham Harvey takes Tuhiwai Smith’s critique

seriously, and in considering his own work with the Maori in New Zealand, he
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considers the gifts he has been given. He offers a framework of guesthood for

comparative studies that means to accommodate and recognize the violent

transformations inherent to interactions between others. In particular, Harvey tells

us, the gifts offered by and learned from the Maori take the form of hospitality.

The Maori gift can be seen in their invitation extended to Harvey to enter the

community whare (meeting house or ancestor house).

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 The whare is located within marae atea, sacred land or space, where a

guest is generally received. Harvey writes of the different “guest-making”

protocols, and of the sense that upon entering the whare, the stranger or guest has
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“entered the community in some way.” This ‘in some way’ is important, says

Harvey, for a person who enters the whare as a guest does so in a different way

than the local person who is intimately related to the ancestral lineage of the

place. Harvey writes that it is crucial that the Maori’s have identified themselves

in the past as cannibals. “It is significant,” says Harvey, “[that] strangers who

became guests ate with their hosts, [while] strangers who insisted on being
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enemies might either eat or be eaten by the locals.” Following Harvey, there is

a distinct difference between locals and guests.

Local persons are already part of the body of the place. Remember that

while animist ecologies assume a univocity of interiority (the People), they

experience an equivocity of physicalities or bodies. Perspective, for the animist, is

lost and gained based upon the body that is inhabited. Everyone identified by

reference to the People (as in the Maori, where Maori is equivalent to saying the

People who share a Maori body) shares a body. Harvey writes,

[locals] are already members of the body of the ancestor from whom they
are descended and who they enter by right. Guests cannot become
descendants. Even if they reside for a long time in a place, their
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relationships to the ancestor(s) are different.

In order to become a guest, both parties must risk cannibalism.

A person cannot enter into the ancestral whare of a community without

being consumed by the house, the ancestral line, and by the persons local to the

whare. Strangers who insist on maintaining an oppositional outside stance are

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either cannibals (as they eat the locals) or cannibalized (eaten by the locals). In

the end, there is no way out of the cannibalistic contortions of Maori society. You

will be eaten, and you will eat, like it or not. This is the way of the land. There are

of course different ways to go about it, as guest and host, as enemy and stranger,

or presumably different shades of grey in between. Harvey characterizes his own

methodological choices by the term guesthood.

He is a scholar coming to visit the whare of a particular Maori community.

A local warrior meets him before he enters the marae atea and lays a taki in front

of the visitor (scholar). Harvey writes:

This symbolises the God of war, and thereby symbolises conflict. This and
the performance of haka, warrior posture songs, honor the visitors as
potentially worthy enemies. However, the visitors are expected to pick up
the taki and face the challenge of haka without reciprocating violence. By
this means, locals and visitors initiate the process of accepting the roles
and responsibilities of host- and guesthood (The alternative would be
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indicated by attacking the warrior who offers the challenge).

Harvey goes on to clarify that his operating assumption as a scholar is that

guesthood is the only viable path by which the researcher might proceed to

interact with persons outside of his or her local community. He continues:

By the time guests enter the whare they have established a level of
intimacy. This does not mean that harmony reigns inside. The new
intimacy allows hosts and guests to speak freely of concerns and needs,
sometimes quite strongly, but always (or so it is intended) on the
foundational understanding that a resolution is sought that will not
completely diminish either side. Furthermore, guests can seek knowledge
or offer skills - both of which might entail change for one side or other, or
both. Since this takes place within the ancestor's body (see Harvey 2000)
and therefore inside the ‘body politic,’ there is strong encouragement to
respect the prestige, priority, needs and desires of the hosts. It is, after all,
their turangawaewae, ‘standing place,’ and when they stand they can lean
against the ribs or point to the heart and spine of the ancestor who
generated them. They can make explicit that which is locally
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normative.

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During the dialogue that naturally ensues, the guests and the hosts literally sit on

opposite sides of the whare. Harvey writes that a fundamental step is concretized

here.

The differences between the guests and the hosts are made explicit from

the beginning. These differences are prerequisites for any form of relationship that

might unfold. The guest is invited to bring both knowledge and gifts. Both sides

want something. The hosts, as all of these interactions are taking place within

their whare, are free to accept of reject whatever is offered. There is no guarantee

that the researcher will be allowed status as a guest. He may be seen as a visitor, a

shade of grey, or as an enemy. It is to the customs of the locals that the

conversation defaults, meaning that the researcher does not decide their role. If

the scholar (or anyone else) is invited in as a guest, it is a gift, not a right. Harvey

writes:

My argument is not that noble savages could teach us a thing or two about
being gracious and long- suffering hosts. It is not that Maori are unique in
having methods for converting strangers into more acceptable kinds of
role players, and that these roles are emblematic of new research
relationships. The precise point is that marae protocols and structures
were elaborated in the encounter with visitors whose motives and
knowledges were often thoroughly colonialist . . . [where colonial is]
defined as the refusal to accede to the authority of locals in defining
guesthood, kinship, normality, the application of new technologies, and so
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much more.

The point, as it were, is not that the Maori have the market on how to be a

gracious host. The point is that the Maori’s have an overt protocol, whereby one’s

motivations are not assumed, but rather discovered through the process of guest-

making. A colonizer is someone unwilling to accept such protocol, while a

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commuter is potentially a guest. This is dependent of course on their facility in

engaging the guesthood protocol to the satisfaction of the locals.

The assumption is not that we are harmless commuters or travellers

bumping into one another, but that we are cannibals, both you and I. We are

dangerous. All of us. Not just the Euro-Americans, the colonizers, or

(post)moderns. Everyone of us must be eaten in order to engage. Harvey adopts

the metaphor of guesthood for his research, a commendable goal to be sure. For

myself, I remind both myself as well as my potential host that I (like them) am a

cannibal. I cannot be trusted unless we bring awareness to the fact that difference

and strangers can be more than a little disruptive within the context of any

communal setting.

As hooks and Tuhiwai Smith point out above, it is all too easy to “travel

through.” Yet, following the Maori guest-making protocol, and West’s invitation

to ethnographic sorcery, as well as my own line of comparative thought, we do

travel, think, and consume through. To interact is to risk novelty and

transformation. To be a comparative scholar, or a passenger on the 22 Fillmore

line in San Francisco, or an Achuar hunter walking along a small tributary of the

Amazon is to be a cannibal, at least to some degree. But also need to look beyond

animist protocols of guesthood, toward naturalist ones.

I have just argued that in the context of an ecology of animism, when one

finds themselves in a unique physicality/world, if one wants to be considered a

guest in this new local, one must first recognize the violence and/or danger that is

present. There is a danger present for those already inhabiting this local

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physicality, for your presence presents the People here with a new body and a

unique perspective that threatens to destabilize the coherence of their particular

physicality/world. What goes for them, holds true for you, for to the extent that

you are not from this world, you inhabit a different world/body and so belong to a

different enactment of the People. The avenue offered by the Maori toward

guesthood requires that both parties honor this inherent danger by recognizing the

potential for cannibalism within themselves. Cannibalism, on this account, honors

both the univocity (the People) and the equivocity (multinaturalism) that is

foundational to an animist ecology. Descola characterizes naturalism as the polar

opposite of animism, and so some similar path toward guesthood must exist

within naturalist ecologies.

Where animists fear cannibalism and metamorphosis, naturalists

(following Descola and Viveiros de Castro) fear relativism and conversion. It

could be argued at this point that certain Christian values like “love thy neighbor,”

and “thou shalt not kill,” are of a similar flavor to the Maori protocols mentioned

here. It could also be argued that certain aspects of the Hippocratic Oath

championed by scientists offers another version of naturalist protocols. This is

true, and yet there is a long and well documented history of colonization,

conversion, and warfare that can be traced through the history of religious and

modern-scientific traditions. Violence exists within the history of Christianity and

(post)modernity. Conversion, which I relate to Descola’s relational style of

predation, maintains the social fabric of many naturalist ecologies (this is

arguably as true for Christian traditions as it is for atheists, neo-Darwinists, and

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 394
contemporary capitalist, democratic states). The comparative stance taken here

argues that like the Christians one should love their neighbor, and also like the

Christians (Mathew 5:43-48), one must also love and pray for their enemies. But

that this is not enough. We must recognize the animist tendency toward

cannibalism in relation to the fear of metamorphosis, as well as the tendency

toward conversion (in relation to the specter of relativity) engaged by neo-

Darwinians, Christians, and other naturalists.

To this end, I do not mean to dismiss all attempts at comparative work

born out of naturalist ecologies (including most of our scholarly academy). Rather

I seek to locate the practice of comparative studies, which currently occurs largely

within a naturalist ecology, within an animist context as well. Animist ecologies

are not free from violence, and certainly do not always love their enemies or their

neighbors. Underlining this point Descola writes:

Until they were ‘pacified’ by missionaries between 1950 and 1970, the
various Jivaro tribes were reputed to be of a bellicose disposition and
seemingly anarchic in their collective life. Their ceaseless wars were a
source of perplexity to observers and a motive for anathema. Yet they did
no indicate any disintegration of the social fabric or an irrepressible
propensity for violence. On the contrary, they constituted the principal
mechanism for structuring individual destinies and links of solidarity and
also the most visible expression of one key value: namely the obligation to
acquire from other the individuals, substances, and principles of identity
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that were reputed to be necessary perpetuation of the self.

In part, this is the lesson learned during my own bokara initiation. We cannot

sustain the life of the village without some kind of violence. Loving one’s

neighbors or one’s enemies is not enough. Violence happens. Bodies come and go,

but the underlying shared interiority is always there. They are like me, says the

animist, and if I am not careful I may end up eating myself.

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 Descola continues, “Both vendettas and head-hunting were carried out
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against persons that the Jivaros classified as [in-laws].” Head-hunting (one

might call this a form of cannibalism) is necessary for the maintenance of the

social fabric. In order to maintain the stability of the physicality of the People,

Jivaros engage a practice that we might call animist conversion. Through intricate

rituals they transform the body of the other into the body of the particular Jivaro

People. Both the Christian and the neo-Darwinist might balk at such a wild idea,

but remember Viveiros de Castro’s assertion; cannibalism is to the animist as

conversion is to the naturalist. Why do the Jivaro engage in endless warfare? They

engage in warfare for the same reason that naturalists do; but rather than attempt

to maintain the integrity of the interiority of the chosen interiority

(Christianity/neo-Darwinism/capitalist democracy), animists are at pains to

maintain the cohesion of the chosen physicality. While the multinaturalist in an

animist ecology cannibalizes bodies (natures), the multiculturalist (e.g., a

Christian, capitalist, or a neo-Darwinian) finds it necessary to convert souls

(interiorities/cultures).

Rather than disparage either one, the way forward that I propose is that we

learn from both cannibalism and relativism. Animism is not the corrective, and

should not replace naturalism. Rather the two should be engaged together; lessons

offered by the specter of cannibalism have much to offer naturalist traditions, just

as the lessons offered by the specter of relativism (and the naturalist’s interest in a

diversity of interiorities) have much to offer animist ecologies. By way of

clarifying the importance of cannibalism, I consider the practice of animal

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sacrifice in relation to naturalism in general, the Judeo-Christian tradition in

particular, and the academy at large.

Cannibals, Missionaries, and Atheists

In a chapter of his book Native Pragmatism entitled “Welcoming the

Cannibals,” Scott L. Pratt considers two distinct possibilities laid out in the Maori

guest protocol. First, he details the tendency within the European tradition to

understand cannibals not only as radically other, but others of the enemy

persuasion. Pratt notes the prevalence of cannibalism in Greek mythology, and the

use of the term to point to Christian rituals by the Greco-Roman authorities. As

Christianity took on dominance, Christians saw their Jewish neighbors as

cannibals and heretical others. While the Catholic Fathers thought of the Jews as

cannibals, the Protestant reformers turned on the Catholics and the tradition of

Judaism; cannibals are found in the other, but not recognized in or likened to

notions of self. R. Po-Chia Hsia writes,

Luther raises the charges of ritual murder many times in On the Ineffable
Name and On the Jews and Their Lies. He repeats over and over again that
he has learned from history that Jews had often been burnt for poisoning
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wells and murdering Christian children for their blood.

In each of these cases, cannibals are seen only as the dangerous other. Following

the work of Avramescu and his An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, we see

how various European intellectuals struggled with the issue of cannibalism as

they spread out into the new worlds.

As Avramescu makes clear, the use of the term cannibal to denote

strangers did not begin nor end with the Reformation or Counter-Reformation. It

did, however, gain traction as Western travellers ventured into the new world.
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Avramescu looks to texts like Peter the Martyr’s De novo orbe (1530), Jean de

Léry’s A Journey to the Land of Brazil, otherwise called America (1578),

Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), and Juan de Mariana’s General

History of Spain to develop his thesis. He writes that the “new world” provides

countless images of anthropophagi (cannibals) eating their own children, and

asking their daughters to fatten up enemies so that they might be enjoyed around a

ritual feast. These cannibal tales provide the Christian colonialist with a series of

philosophical and practical challenges. In tracing this history along with

Avramescu, there seems to be two distinct lines of argument that unfold. While on

one side the colonial powers and State increasingly distance themselves from

issues (both metaphorical and literal) of cannibalism. On the other side it becomes

clear to critics of the colonial project and the modern State that as this distancing

unfolds, these movements become more and more prone to outrageous acts of

cannibalism heretofore unheard of in the world. Throughout the rest of this

section I lean heavily on the work of Avramescu by way of fleshing out the

dangers of distancing ourselves from our cannibal context.

Following the publication of Francisco de Vitoria’s De potestate civili (On

Civil Power, 1528), a legal ground is carved whereby Christian people in the

“new world” might take justice into their own hands. It follows from Vitoria’s

writings that the innocent, wherever they are, must be protected. Avramescu

writes, “If [Christian colonialists] have any right to wage a just war against the

American Indian anthropophagi, then this happens because human sacrifice and
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cannibalism are acts of injustice (injuria).” It is a Christian duty, following

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Vitoria, to seek out the cannibals and deal with them. But, according to Vitoria,

not all American Indians could be cannibals.

There are clearly civilized persons living in the Americas, who cannot be

colonized based on their cannibalism. A diversity of authors join Vitoria in

arguing some version of a natural law theory relevant to the colonization of the

Americas, including but not limited to Richard Baxter (A Holy Commonwealth,

1659), Hugo Grotius (The Free Sea, 1609), and Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf

(Law of Nature and of Nations, 1672). While these authors are critical of certain

aspects of Vitoria’s thought, they follow his example of limiting the extent to

which Christian colonists can go to secure land and wage war against the people

that they come into contact with in the new world. Coming from the pens of these

authors, natural law upholds certain rights for these people just as it does for the

Christians.

Following Avramescu, there is another version of natural law that takes on

importance, and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) provides his example. For

Hobbes the state of nature is a situation in which there is no sovereign law. With

no one to impose order, people are left with primitivism, “natural anarchy,”

savagery and brutality. There is no place in this primitive and natural state for

industry or commodification, for people are surrounded by danger, and life is both

“short and brutish.” Hobbes is writing in a time when travel literature is at its

height. He has available to him various accounts of cannibalism, and it follows

that in a Hobbesian world cannibalism is a natural state that must be gone through

to get to civilized man (a very naturalist-linear way of seeing). Hobbes does not

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make this point so overtly, but as Avramescu points out, cannibalism must be

dealt with in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Hobbes’ Leviathan

provides for one means to this end.

Again, following Avramescu’s consideration of the logical outcomes of

Hobbes philosophy, the idea that cannibalism is innate to humanity is not

acceptable to the eighteenth century philosopher. There is a turning from away

from discussions of natural or divine law (naturalism); a movement away from

considerations of the innate qualities of persons, toward the depersonalized and

abstract considerations of a positivist science of law (a naturalist ecology with

strong analogisms). To this end, Avramescu writes,

Had the modern philosophers tackled the problem of the existence of

anthropophagy in the state of nature, they would have been faced with an
extremely difficult dilemma. Is the anthropophagy of the natural man
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legitimate under the species of natural law?

Where authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dealt directly with

instances of cannibalism, the Enlightenment authors turn away from such

accounts.

If there was cannibalism, it can likely be attributed to hunger and poverty,

rather than to moral depravity or considered along instinctual grounds. The

positivist science of law that began in Germany in the 1830s turns away from all

such considerations. Legislation takes on a pragmatic role, and Avramescu writes,

“Increasingly, it is depersonalized, against the backdrop of what has become the

‘political system.’ The law is now understood as a sum of artifices of the ruling
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class.” To illustrate his point, Avramescu looks to the work of John Austin and

his book, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), as it had the greatest

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early influence on the Anglo-Saxon world of Britain and America.

Austin wrote that jurisprudence, or law, pointed to the role of political

superiors imposing sets of rules that political inferiors must follow. This might at

first blush seem a rather Hobbesian idea, but Austin makes no effort to consider

issues of divine or innate morality. His rules are not derived from natural or

divine sources, but from a thoroughgoing examination of the pragmatic norms

that could be extrapolated from civil order. Public utility becomes the source of

law, rather than morality or religious sentiment. Avramescu sees Austin’s political

writing lacking in subtlety. His pragmatic utilitarianism can manage issues

regarding the right to eat, and the right to self-defense, for example, but not cases

of cannibalism. Austin steers clear of cannibalism and similar challenges, even

though these problems were ubiquitous in earlier treatises on natural law, of

which he is well aware. He rejects the naturalist writings of the Roman jurist

Ulpian (170-220), as well as the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), and the

French Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu (1689-1755). Naturalism has no part

in Austin’s philosophy of law; instincts play no role in jurisprudence, and have no

401
bearing on Roman law.

Avramescu sees a problem, “The gradual disappearance of the

anthropophagus from the territories of philosophy does not leave behind it

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brighter skies for the moral imagination." Quite to the contrary, according to

Avramescu, the sixteenth century finds itself in the company of a greater moral

depravity than anything ever attributed to a cannibal. The degradations of

colonialism and the State are not lost on the critical voices of the day. Jean de

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Léry, David Hume (An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals), Lord

Kames (Sketches of the History of Man), Lafitau (Moeurs des sauvages

amériquains), Voltaire (Essays on Morals, “Flesh” in Yverdon Encyclopaedia,

and “Resurrection” in Dictionnaire philosophique), and Rousseau (Discourse on

the Origin of Inequality, Émile) all utilize the specter of the cannibal alongside a

vision of the noble savage as a critical foil for colonialism, the modern State,

capitalism, and individualism. The latter writes,

like the waves of the sea . . . by men gathered in a few places . . . in order
to devour one another and make a terrible desert of the rest of the world, a
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worthy monument to social union and the utility of the arts.

In the realm of political law and jurisprudence, cannibalism (as well as the body,

passions, natural and divine morality) is completely washed away.

The State, having cleansed itself of its cannibal context, is seen by its

critics as cannibal-like and all consuming. In closing his text, Avramescu quotes

Kant at some length:

The main difference between the savage nations of Europe and those of
America is that while some American tribes have been entirely eaten up
by their enemies, the Europeans know how to make better use of those
they have defeated than merely by making a meal of them. They would
rather use them to increase the number of their own subjects, thereby
augmenting their stock of instruments for conducting even more extensive
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wars.

The cannibal has been forgotten by the State, or maybe intentionally ignored, and

in the process it becomes clear to those watching this transition that the State itself

has become the most dangerous cannibal of all. Avramescu ends his erudite work

with these words:

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 In Kantian analysis, the power of the modern Christian sovereign grows
according to an ascendant and implacable logic, which leads to a
devastating denouement of universal signification. This is the moment at
which the cannibal disappears as a subject of the science of moral order,
because he has been eclipsed by the State, the new agent of absolute
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cruelty.

While the State becomes the cannibal it ignores, it is my own assertion that we

have always been cannibals.

If we take animist ecologies seriously (like the Maori above, the Dagara,

and the Amerindians of Brazil), we are all cannibals. We all risk seeing ourselves

in the other, and thereby risk feeding off ourselves. This is in fact the means

whereby animists create interesting and novel People and things. The State is just

one brand of flesh-eater, the colonial kind; the kind that ignores the hospitality of

those whom extend their hands. It does this by skipping the Maori protocols of

guest-making, declaring itself a guest, adventurer, and harmless passer through.

This is the very crux of my argument regarding contemporary comparative

(commuter) cannibalism. Rather than deal in gifts and the possibility of critical

rejection, the State commodifies and consumes its very own flesh. All the while

the Maori scream, you are passing through our bodies, our sacred spaces and

whare. The solution is not to somehow rise above our cannibal context, the

necessity we all face to take and consume life, but rather to face this part of

ourselves squarely with an open hand and a warm hearth.

Inviting the Cannibal/Missionary in, a Cross-Ecological Guest Protocol

I am a cannibal, and so are you. So what are we to do? Pratt tells the story

of Roger Williams, author of A Key into the Language of America. Williams was

a Puritan preacher who got on the wrong side of Cotton Mather (another Puritan
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preacher who was a leading voice within the New England of the later

seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), and was banished from the New

England colony in which he lived. He was forced to roam out into the wilderness

on his own. At this time, such a punishment was considered a sure death sentence.

To Williams’ surprise, the Narragansett people who were local to the land took

him in.

Miantonomi, a person of some authority among the Narragansett,

extended his hand to Williams, inviting him into the community as an honored,

though dangerous, guest. In his Key, Williams ponders the implications of this

offer. In trying to understand how his own people could throw him out while

these “others” invite him in, he wrestles with the word wunnégin (welcome),

which Pratt understands to imply three things: 1) Respect for difference. This is

honed through interactions with others, and cannot be found solely within the

isolated person. 2) The practice of mutual cooperation, which is contrasted by

Pratt with patterns of assimilation and segregation. Dangerous others, in this case

Williams and other European colonists, are invited into the community. 3) The

good is seen as that which contributes to the concrete growth and well-being of

those involved. Wunnégin does not denote conformity to some abstract principle,

but rather a dynamic bond that is formed between what is known and what is

novel. Regarding this Pratt writes, “In the contrasting responses to outsiders, the

Narragansett and the English colonials provided competing conceptions of

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community and practices of interaction in the face of difference.” While the

colonial approach seeks to diminish or even eradicate difference, the Narragansett

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approach offers something quite different. For Williams, their welcoming of him,

not through ignoring the danger that he brings as an outsider (a cannibal), opens

the door for the foundations of a pluralistic community.

Pratt guesses that Williams must have come to understand these principles

both by benefiting from their extension to his situation, and by the cannibal stories

he was likely to have heard while among the Narragansett. Williams articulates

what he understands to be contrasting reactions to outsiders found among the

Narragansett and the European colonists. As Pratt made clear above, the colonial

attitude meant to eliminate difference, while the Narragansett offered a protocol

(not unlike that of the Maori) that allowed Williams to find refuge within their

community. Williams’ work is often associated with that of John Locke, writes

Pratt, and yet there are important differences between the two authors. Pratt
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quotes Locke who asserts that there is “one truth [and] one way to heaven.”

Locke’s work is predicated on the assumption that there is, in Pratt’s words, “a
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single timeline and single hierarchy of value.” This is in keeping with a basic

naturalist ecology. This is in sharp contrast to the American Indian cannibal

stories like the Penobscot one that follows:

A man, his wife, and little girl were living far from other people in the
woods. They heard someone coming. Suddenly a noise was heard in the
smoke hole of the wigwam and looking up they saw a Ki.wá’kwe
[cannibal] peering down. The old woman of the wigwam said aloud, ‘Oh!
Your grandfather has come,’ speaking to her husband. The monster was
pleased at this and grew small. He came around and entered the camp. The
woman tried to feed him but he would not eat in spite of her coaxing. He
said, ‘I shall meet somebody here and we will fight.’ Then he sent them
away across a lake and he fought with the other Ki.wá’kwe. He had told
them to leave the place if he got killed by the other. But he won the fight
and when it was over he ate with them, becoming again an ordinary
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man.

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Pratt sees the beginnings of the three lessons of wunnégin formulated here. First,

outsiders are dangerous and disruptive. Second, responding with hospitality and

kindness can be an effective way to engage the novel occasions. And last,

sometimes these outsiders can be transformed to insiders, and at other times they

can at least become peaceful neighbors. These lessons are foundational to an

animist ecology.

We can take this point one step further and say that cannibals and

missionaries (strangers) can become welcomed and honored guests, but it is never

assumed that outsiders are not dangerous. Pratt notes similar stories among the

Narragansett in relation to the Mohawks, as well as cannibal lessons among the

Wyandot, the Haudenosaunee, and the Algonquians. It is my assertion, following

from these stories and my own experiences, that as academics we should follow

Harvey’s methodological guesthood, but with a caveat. Rather than place

emphasis on the potential of guesthood that resides within each of us, I think it

crucial that we recognize the cannibal that lives within first and foremost. This is

in keeping with West’s ethnographic sorcery mentioned above.

The Meudans West does his ethnographic studies with are clear on a

similar point to the one attributed to the Maori by Harvey. In affect, they ask West

to come clean to his own thoughts and opinions. Rather than hide these, West is

encouraged to acknowledge what we might call his missionary nature. As West

takes a step forward and makes his cultural constructivist claim with regard to the

ability of sorcerers to transform into lions, he knows that there will be other

critical theorists quick with remonstrations. But what would it mean to hide his

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own confidence in his particular style of thinking or interiority? This would be a

disservice to both West and to his Muedan compatriots. Remember once again the

guest protocol of the Maori. The colonizer is not the one that is predatory or

violent; the colonizer is the one that does not recognize the predatory tendencies

(cannibalism/conversion) within themselves, thereby ignoring the very dangerous

position her simple presence has brought about for the locals.

As I write these words, I must recognize my presence brings novelties and

disruptions. I inhabit certain bodies, as well as certain interiorities that are

different from your own. Rather than distance myself from the transformative

power of my presence, I should recognize that I fully intend to eat and convert,

not only you, but also all the authors and traditions found within these pages. This

is the nature of who we are. I am not asking that you excuse my behavior, but

rather that you recognize it in yourself.

In the end I turn to words like sorcerer (totemism), shaman (animism), and

metaphysician (naturalism) to honor our transspecific comparative tendencies

within ourselves. The point is not that only naturalists travel through others and

do harm, but rather that there are those who have commuter tendencies in all of

the ecologies of participation considered here. We can turn to these commuters,

and I include myself here, to bring us closer together by way of recognizing both

our similarities and our differences. We find these comparativists crossing

ecological boundaries, and with them locate the potential for enacting some most

amazing things. I turn now to the important work of Henare, Holbraad, and

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Wastell by way of further underling the importance of guest protocols with regard

to such travel.

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 Chapter 5: Ecological Perspectivism and Guest Protocols

Thinking Through Things

Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell have entitled their recent edited volume

within the field of anthropology, Thinking Through Things. One of the first

questions that might jump to mind when reading this title is why ‘things?’ The

editors of this volume see their work in the context of an artefact-oriented

anthropology. They locate their work as such largely by way of recognizing a

basic struggle concomitant with our (post)modern ecologies. We, to the extent

that we fall within such a (post)modern atomism, have gotten hung up on objects,

datum, atomic units, and things.

Because of this, things mark the path by which we must return if we are

going to make sense of our modernist, postmodernist, positivist, postpositivist,

realist, constructivist, and relativist stances. The methodology put forward in their

text relies on the notion of ‘things-as-heuristic.’ They do not begin by comparing

and contrasting our various epistemic concerns regarding things. Henare,

Holbraad, and Wastell are not so concerned with our academic affiliations.

Instead of comparing theories, where ‘thing-as-analytic’ takes precedent, they ask

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us, as Husserl did so many years ago, to go back to the things themselves. This

is not because the “life-world” is said to have some priority of our theoretical

world, a la Husserl, “but precisely because our experience of things, if you will,
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can be conceptual (see also Holbraad, this volume).” What do Henare,

Holbraad, and Wastell mean when they write “things” can be “conceptual?” There

is a mystery here that must be solved.

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 Their method, being anthropologists, requires ethnography. One might

argue that philosophy departments are not the places where one should engage

ethnographic data, but as I show throughout these pages, this is not only what I

overtly set out to do, it is also a valuable endeavor contemporary philosophy

412
moving forward. Clifford Geertz has written of “outside psychology.” What I

propose is an “outside philosophy.” One that takes place outside of laboratories,

computers, analytically inclined minds, buildings, Descartes’ mind and/or body,

Hume’s skepticism, Kant’s categories, and the Newtonian physics they all

presuppose. It is not that I propose to relegate these things that have been created
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by reference to a particular inside to the dustbin of theoretical history. This is

where ethnography comes in.

Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell note their debt to the work of Latour, who

shifted his post-Heidegerrian talk of things from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of

414
concern.’ Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell write, “Latour has rehabilitated this

sense of the term [thing] as a way out of the twin culs-de-sac of constructivism
415
and objectivity.” It is worth comparing this point regarding the subjectivity and

concern of and for things to the assertion made by Ferrer and Sherman regarding

the participatory approach fleshed out in these pages. Critical of the

epistemological chasm created by Kant’s reliance on Newtonian things, Ferrer

and Sherman look to an “enactive approach” to undergird their thought whereby

416
the possibility of multiple ontological realities is considered. “Participatory

enaction” they write, “is epistemologically constructivist and metaphysically

417
realist.” Herein lies the simple point put forward by Henare, Holbraad, and

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Wastell.

Considerations regarding positivist, analytic, and critical postmodern

epistemology revolve around a single ontology, a single set of things, and what I

would call a naturalist ecology. Through a recursive practice of symmetrical

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anthropology, Holbraad adequately challenges such assumptions. He does not

do this via some new theory about things (e.g., Baconian, Einsteinian, Freudian,

or Marxist); rather he looks to the most challenging ethnographical data he can

find, those having to do with mana-terms, and takes them seriously and on their

own terms. He proceeds to take the emic assumptions regarding aché (power-

powder) held by Cuban Ifá diviners earnestly. If we consider Holbraad’s exercise

alongside those performed by anthropologists and sociologists of science like

Latour, Steven Shapin, Roy Wagner, Mary Strathern, Viveiros de Castro, Isabella

Stengers, and Sandra Harding and we start to get a sense of what a working

symmetrical anthropology might look like.

Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell mean to move past the efficacy of dualist

difference that lays out the foundation of Latour’s (post)modern constitution.

Following from this ‘constitution,’ differences are not ontological, but

epistemological. As I show in more detail in the following chapter, these

(post)modern assertions are predicated on an extreme explication of an atomist

ecology that assumes only one univocal reality is possible. Henare, Holbraad, and

Wastell follow Viveiros de Castro when they write, “in keeping with its

monotheistic origins (Viveiros de Castro 1998a: 91), ours is an ontology of one

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ontology.” In writing these words, they are committing themselves to an

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ecology of naturalism. In starting with the assumption of one viable ontology,

anthropological work, religious studies, and philosophical dialogue can revolve

around attempts to see how we can fit irrational, naïve, and/or primitive ideas

about things into our understanding of the one and only reality. This is not what

Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell propose, for they ask us to actually take “them”

(the nonnaturalists) seriously, whom ever they me be. If we take God, Allah,

Yahweh, mana, aché, atoms, and Raven-People (as in ravens are people just like

us) seriously, we find ourselves with a recursive practice that opens doors

whereby we can take Ferrer and Sherman’s commitment to metaphysical realism

to heart. We effectively turn from considerations of epistemology to concerns

about ontology. Moving toward questions of ontology allow for what Henare,

Holbraad, and Wastell term thinking through. We are now headed into the

company of our comparative transspecific commuters: sorcerers (totemism),

shamans (animism), and metaphysicians (naturalism).

As I mentioned above, this recursive methodology takes a “things-as-

heuristic” approach. This approach is predicated on the distinction between

thinking about (modernist positivism/univocity), thinking with (postmodern

constructivism/equivocity), and thinking through. The first two (about and with)

can be understood to relate to what Guy Stroumsa (whose work is considered in

more detail in following chapters) has termed the “externalization” that occurred

in the “new science” of religious and anthropological studies over the course of

sixteenth and seventeenth century encounters between European missionaries,

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explorers, et cetera and the people whom they encountered in the “new world.”

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 This externalization can be seen to take two general paths, the first toward

thinking about (associated most directly with British empiricism later in this

chapter) and the second toward thinking with (associated more with French and

American turns in anthropology in this chapter). Michael Taussig has framed the

former as a kind of colonial cannibalism that is in keeping with Tuhiwai Smith’

characterization of “travellers” above. He asks

where does the heart of darkness lie, in the fleshy body-tearing rites of the
cannibals, or in the photographing eye of the beholder exposing them
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naked and deformed piece by piece to the world?

The beginnings of post-Enlightenment fascinations with penis size, digestion, and

422
objective observation (chronicled in gruesome detail by Daniel Cottom ) gives

way to a kind of thinking with in the hands of nineteenth and twentieth-century

authors like Durkheim and Franz Boas. Tomoko Masuzawa has come to

understand the more extreme cases of thinking with as expressions of postcolonial

solipsism. In committing to this critical ‘ascetic practice’ that mandates that thou

shall not violate, reduce, or seek, the ‘great fathers’ of our academy are left with

no recourse but to do just what they set out not to do (i.e. violate, reduce, and
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seek). Remember the Maori guest protocol above, as well as West’s

ethnographic sorcery. It is to their credit, she tells us, that they have implicated

themselves within this process. But what is interesting is that by self-implicating

(thinking with) in this particular way, the violence is not only inflicted on the

other, but the self, no matter how well located. We have run into a complication

regarding our naturalist guest protocol.

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 Remember once again Viveiros de Castro who has written that while

animist traditions like the Amazonian Achuar live in constant fear of cannibalism,

our postmodern critiques (thinking with) are stuck between a dual-edged fear;

conversion of the other and/or relativity. If we are going to adopt a practice of

thinking through we will have to risk both cannibalism and conversion, quite

literally. We must recognize ourselves as commuters between ecologies,

emulating the animist shamans who risk metamorphosis and the naturalist

pluralists who invite conversion. We must risk the transformation of not only our

interiors (naturalism), but of our physicality (animism). To this end we must

remember that thinking through, on Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell’s account,

marks a sea change from conversations around epistemology to ontology.

Thinking through requires that we assert something; and as Masuzawa and West

have both pointed out in some detail, even with the best of intentions, we have not

been able to help ourselves anyway. As commuters between ecologies we

recognize our plight.

The problem, I think, is that we assumed at some point (when thinking

about) that we were not cannibalizing the other. The possibility of academic

practice was eviscerated when – while attempting to think with – we imagined

that we could practice scholarship without harming one another. Thinking through

requires that we risk both kinds of danger, conversion and metamorphosis. As

animists we cannot help but eat the physicalities of one another, and potentially

the flesh of our very own kind. We are haunted by cannibalism and our shared

interiority with others. As naturalists we cannot help but convert the interiorities

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of one another. We are haunted by relativism and our shared physicality with the

other. The thrust here is not that we seek comprehensive answers to our narrow

curiosities. We cannot explain and/or consume alterity away. The point, following

Desmond, is that we maintain an erotic intimacy between our particular process of

self-determination in relation to the other (dialectic between univocity and

equivocity), and as such the other is never be too far from our awareness.

Moderns did not invent violence against others with their epistemological dictum

that others believe, no more than postmoderns managed to eradicate violence with

their own epistemological assertion that we all believe.

The methodology championed by Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell is

recursive because it directs us back toward our own way dialectic; our particular

process of erotic self-determination. Their recursive practice moves us away from

thinking about alterity or with alterity. This recursive anthropology serves as a

guest protocol for our academic endeavors. It is not about them, per se, it is about

us. This methodology directs us back toward our own erotic impulses, and our

particular ways of engaging with alterity. To put it another way, thinking through

things is a necessary step forward for academics interested in reading words like

the ones found in these pages. We are after all the ones playing the ‘game of
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anthropology’ and scholarship. It is all of us – the philosophers and academics

– who are trying to figure out how to fit all of them (diviners, Christians, witches,

pagans, Buddhists, Dagara) into our ecology. Therefore it is our ecology

(naturalism) that is at risk of transformation. Can we meet their God or inhabit a

raven’s body? Do atoms really exist? For myself, the answer is yes, He does exist,

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I can, and they do. To this end I am an avowed comparativist and commuter, a

shaman moving between bodies and a pluralist moving between interiorities. If

you find for yourself that the answer is no, then at least four avenues are open to

you: 1) you can move toward a cross-ecological metaxological ground; 2) defend

the integrity of your particular ecology (dialectic) against all others; 3) or place

further limits on diversity event within the context of your peculiar ecological

curiosities; 4) react to position three and assert an extreme equivocity (e.g., vulgar

relativism).

Number two can be understood as a kind of intimate ecological stance. As

such, looking to an example from a naturalist ecology one could follow Plantinga

and defend potential validity of both theism and science (God and atoms might

both exist), but come up short of saying that animist ecologies are viable

(shamans can inhabit ravens bodies, and vice-versa). An alternative intimate

ecological stance can be found by looking to American Indian philosopher Viola

F. Cordova, who defends multiple enactments of indigenous (animist) ecologies,

while drawing a line when it comes to considering the viability of Euro-American

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(naturalist) considerations with regard to Being. Number three comes into play

in ecologies of atomism, which are in essence highly abstract-comprehensive

articulations of either animist or naturalist assumptions. This is where thinking

about comes into play, whereby these abstractions find themselves in conflict with

other abstractions within the same ecology and so seek to delimit them. Following

from our example above, a neo-Darwinian might say that atoms exist, but God

does not. They are in affect thinking about theism from within their own limited

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set of curiosities. Number four comes into play in the case of thinking with.

Thinking with arises as a reaction to univocal statements of three, thinking about.

This critical stance conflates all processes of self-determination (univocity) –

agapeic, erotic, and comprehensive – with the latter, and reacts by attempting to

defend some form of vulgar relativism in parallel to an unconscious assumption of

the same comprehensive univocity it reacted against. For their part, Henare,

Holbraad, and Wastell choose number one.

These authors come to understand their methodology as an ‘infinitely

regressive stick.’ Whatever end we may try to grab “will not be so much wrong,
426 427
as a-visible in principle.” Wait. What? A-visible things! Exactly, write

Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, “We need a methodology that allows for concept
428
production and the creation of multiple worlds.” For their part, these authors

have chosen to follow a path toward intimacy and multiple ecologies of

participation. Intimacy lies in the direction of agape and eros, in the direction of

what Desmond would call a metaxological ground, and what I have been

defending as multiple ecologies of participation. This is the choice defended in

these pages.

For his part, Ferrer understands this intimate ground in the context of a

participatory predicament whereby our ability to know is predicated on the fact

that we are in relationship with multiple ontologically real worlds. As such he is

defending something like the activities of an animist commuter, a shaman risking

metamorphosis by inhabiting a raven’s body. This is a radical claim, and so the

reader may find himself overly challenged, and looking to retreat to well worn

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curiosities, questions, and their subsequent answers. Henare, Holbraad, and

Wastell’s push on, informing us that we must take other people’s radically alter

things seriously, be they communicative rocks, efficacious powder, or meaningful

totemic similarities and indications of order. Ferrer further explains that within

this participatory predicament, the natural mode of cognition is not one of

representation (comprehensive univocity), but more like agapeic and/or erotic

participation or play. This points to the kind of communication wherein a subject

does not simply observe an object (that would relate only to an ecology of

naturalism), but where multiple players or revelers co-create a participatory event

in relation to multiple realities. For Ferrer, such intra- and inter-relational play

proceeds by concept production (or more specifically enaction), not unlike the

recursive methodology of Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell. He writes,

Participatory refers to the epistemic role that human faculties play during
most spiritual and transpersonal events. This relation is not one of
appropriation, possession, or passive representation of pregiven
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knowledge or truths, but of communion and cocreative participation.

It should be clear already, but must be mentioned again, that this kind of ‘concept

production’ is not understood as simply constructivist and epistemological. Rather

enaction, production, and creation are all understood in relation to multiple

ecological claims and the diversity of polarities, physicalities, and interiorities that

follow.

Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell illustrate this point by offering two valid

but distinguishable readings of Maussian approaches to ethnography. The first

path is an epistemological one, whereby Marcel Mauss is seen to maintain a safe

distance between person/subjects and thing/objects. They cite Chris Gregory’s

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‘inalienable objects’ and Alfred Gell’s ‘artefacts’ as important objects of this

epistemological chasm. How might an object come to have person-like qualities

like social agency? The answer for Gell, writes James Leach (another contributor

to the anthology Thinking Through Things), is that he makes the agency

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dependent on the social context out of which it arises.

The second Maussian approach differs in that it is ontological.

Remembering Ferrer’s emphasis on cognition as activity within a relational

context (as opposed to objective observation), the ontological interpretation of

thinking through offered by Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell is further elaborated

by Morten A. Pedersen who writes that “the artefacts themselves enacting a

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certain intuitive theory of the world within the agents engaging with them.”

Pedersen’s basic point is that things enact or produce us, just as much as we enact

or produce them. If we are going to engage them we identify as comparative

commuters risking metamorphosis (as shamans) and conversion (as pluralists).

Humans do not just think through things, they come to be via the actions of the
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things themselves. Comparative scholars, to the extent that they are commuter

shamans and/or pluralists, risk the integrity of their own erotic impulses

(ecological dialectics), and as such invite the shock of agapeic intimacy and a

primary form of participation into their lives.

The point elaborated by both this recursive methodology and the

participatory approach of Ferrer and Sherman is that as scholars we need to

reimagine how we relate to things, to ourselves and to others. The punchline is

that what necessarily arises out of this endeavor is what Ferrer has termed a

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participatory predicament. A recursive anthropology that defends thinking

through, also becomes a defense of multiple ecologies of participation, or

Desmond’s metaxological ground. If we are honest in our symmetrical practices

of dialogue and communication across ecologies, we will find that the naturalist

assumption (Nature) around which most of our academic conversations have been

organized may not be the only thing there. The obvious step forward is to find

useful ways to articulate or engage multiple ecologies. I turn now to an essay

(included in Thinking Through Things) and a recent text written by Holbraad by

way of further illuminating the important contributions a recursive

methodological approach like the one defended by Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell

as viable version of a guest protocol for cross-ecological comparative studies.

Recursive Anthropology as a Guest Protocol

Holbraad has given the academy a very important contribution in the field

of comparative ecologies that is at the heart of this text. Following the work of
433 434 435 436
Terrence M. S. Evens, Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, Latour, and
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Viveiros de Castro, Holbraad has penned a series of essays and a recent book

wherein he articulates the kind of symmetrical anthropology (to use Latour’s

term) that is crucial to the project that I flesh out in these pages. Referencing a

conversation with Viveiros de Castro, Holbraad reflects on his work and finds it
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to be post-Kantian, non-Kantian, and post-, non-, and/or anti-recursive. My

intention within this section is to follow Holbraad’s self-reflection, tracing ways

in which these three movements express themselves in academia. In joining

Holbraad in his considerations I show the limits of the recursive methodology

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introduced in the previous section, by way of underlining my ecological approach

which parallels Descola’s assertion regarding the need for considering ‘other

peoples ontologies.’

Holbraad’s emphasis on what he terms recursive anthropology is critical

(post-Kantian) in as far as he follows Kant’s lead in utilizing subjective

experiences of the world to say something meaningful about the nature of our

categories of thought. Kant’s is a subjective or epistemological turn, as opposed to

a speculative or metaphysical practice that utilizes such categories to say

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something about the world. One of Kant’s great contributions was to recognize

the necessity of examining our experience of the sensible (Newtonian) world by

way of critically evaluating our assumptions. Holbraad sees his work as an

amplification of this process, whereby the sources of critique are multiplied by the

diversity of ethnographies available to us regarding different experiences of the

“sensible world.” This is also where Holbraad’s work begins to diverge from Kant,
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becoming, as he writes, a “critique of the Critique.”

Where Kant’s transcendental categories are beholden to a single given

Newtonian reality (a straight forward naturalism), Holbraad’s non-Kantian move

replaces “categories of thought” with “analytic concepts.” These concepts are

derivatives of particular recursive anthropological practices. For example,

Holbraad looks to issues of motility and truth in Cuban Ifá divination by way of

calling into question naturalist ontological assumptions of Euro-American

anthropologists attempting to make sense of apparently “irrational” mana-terms

(power). Holbraad offers the use of aché (power = powder = power) in Ifá

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divinatory practices as his example of such a mana-term. Where Kant’s world is

one (a naturalist ecology), Holbraad’s is overflowing with “others” and alterity

(the Ifá ecology he references is a relatively abstract animist ecology bordering on

atomism). Where Kant relies on a given experience of the world, Holbraad looks

to the incredible diversity of ethnographies available to us (including, but not

limited to those that consider the particular practices and ontological assumptions
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of (post)modernity and its sciences). What Holbraad discovers is that

by virtue of just such a non-Kantianism . . . recursive anthropological

arguments can, depending on the ethnographic circumstances, engender
explicitly anti- Kantian (anti-Newtonian, anti-Durkheimian, or anti–
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anything else) conceptualizations.

One might wonder at this point if we are headed over a cliff of vulgar relativism,

or maybe bordering on solipsism.

This, of course, is not a new question. In an early and nuanced

contribution to this conversation Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes lay out what

they see as the basic “sources” and “forms” of relativism before falling on slightly
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different sides of the question, realism or relativism. Careers are made as

scholars identify themselves with rationalism, relativism, and grey areas in

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between. Many possibilities arise out of this relativist-rationalist project,

including variations of a postpositivist philosophy where multiple objective

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worlds are possible. I locate the participatory approach here, referencing the

play of shamans and pluralists navigating between naturalist and animist

ecologies, but we are not there yet.

Holbraad sees his work as post-, anti-, and non-recursive. He delimits his

work by locating it as a “move,” one that cannot make pretenses toward a

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working set of conditions or categories for the “possibility of all knowledge.”

Rather than attempting an overarching theory, he emphasizes instead the

transformative aspects of his recursive anthropology, not unlike Ferrer and

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Sherman do with their own “participatory approach.” The practice of

comparison, following Holbraad, becomes an opportunity for transformation. The

potential for transformation is made obvious in the company of pronounced

alterity.

Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss recognized this fact, as well as the

challenges that ethnographers face when confronted with what have since been
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called “mana-terms.” Emic nonmodern (nonnaturalist) references to “power”

seem to violate and/or contradict what are assumed to be the natural laws of the

world. Those who continue to believe in the efficacy of such expressions of power

have long been labeled irrational, childish, or primitive. There is a long tradition

of wrestling with these mana-struggles, from early encounters between Catholic

missionaries and Native Americans, to E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s important

Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, to the rationality debates

referenced above, and on to the various contemporary voices I draw on

throughout these pages to make assertions more in keeping with those made by

Holbraad here. The whole of this conversation brings us back to the possibility
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thinking through.

Holbraad begins his essay on philosophy and Cuban Ifá divination

(included in Thinking Through Things) by writing that what is most important

about ethnographic data is not our ability to extend our theories over it, but rather

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to what degree we can allow such datum to expand our own “theoretical

imagination.” As pluralists we do not risk their assumptions (that is the

missionary work of conversion), but our own. Holbraad goes on to write,

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“anthropological analysis is best compared not to science but to philosophy.”

As a philosopher working in our contemporary milieu, I find these words striking,

as well as edifying.

Holbraad is assuming that philosophy is a speculative pursuit, one aimed

toward wisdom and the broadening of one’s horizons. Philosophy, on this account,

is more in keeping with Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics than with an

analytic understanding that conflates metaphysics with the search for univocity

and ultimate truth, or to a scientific methodology that limits what we can know

about a gazelle to what scientist can quantify and comprehend. This may seem

obvious, and yet it is more than a little controversial. To what extent does Kant’s

critical work depend upon a Newtonian universe? To what extent does philosophy,

often conflated with the analytic tradition, require its representations? To what

extent – and this is crucial – are conversations around relativism circling around

the assumption that there is one single essential ontological reality (e.g., ecologies

of naturalism)? Philosophy, at least in this speculative-realist vein is largely

absent in many philosophy departments around the world. Having moved toward

analytic thought, we have tried to make the pursuit of a very specific logic

emerging out of a Cartesian worldview the only viable goal.

As I have outlined in detail in ch. 2 above, our analytic traditions are

severely limited in their ability to do metaphysics, largely because they are so

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inclined toward physics, which is clearly not to be associated with other

expressions of naturalism (e.g., the teleology of Plato and Aristotle, the theism of

Aquinas), or worse yet, primary, animist, and totemic ecologies. The shared

assumption is that if you want your particular discipline to survive you had better

get on board with this program. If you doubt this point, writes Holbraad, imagine

the possibility of oracular truth. As in, I know it is true because the oracle told me

so. Continental philosophers might tithe their thoughts to a muse or lived

experience, but this is not really philosophy (again, so the story goes). Oracles are

not modern (other people believe in oracles) or postmodern (we all believe, so we

cannot say if there are oracles or not, but in general, there are not). Oracular truth

might be continental, or maybe primitive, but should not really enter into the

conversations around realism. But Holbraad is saying something quite alter.

Magic (practiced by Ifá diviners and shamans) does what science cannot, and
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what relativism forbids; it makes meaning.

In the introductory essay to his edited book Thinking Through Myths:

Philosophical Perspectives, Kevin Schilbrack takes a similar stance to Holbraad’s

above. He does not use the phrase ‘thinking through’ in quite the same way that

Holbraad offers, and yet there is an important similarity. Following the critical

work of Bruce Lincoln in the field of religious studies, Schilbrack offers a

particular definition of myth. Lincoln established a four-fold understanding of

shared discourse. On his account we have fables (stories that are clearly fictional),

legends (stories that lack credibility), histories (stories that have credibility), and
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myths (stories that have both credibility and authority or efficacy). Lincoln

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writes that a myth can contest the authority of another myth, thereby reducing it to

the role of history, legend, or fable. A myth can also invest one of these three with

credibility and/or authority, or bring about completely novel lines of

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interpretation. The point that I wish to address at this juncture regarding

Holbraad’s thinking through is twofold. First, there is the critical engagement

with alterity that allows for the most irrational of ‘their’ beliefs (myths) to be

considered on their own terms. The second point is the notion that one can be

transformed by an encounter with alterity. In fact, the first point assumes the

second. Here come our commuter comparativists, the shamans and the pluralists.

Rather than seeing the myths of others as nothing more than stories (fables

or legends following Lincoln), Schilbrack and those that have contributed to his

edited volume have allowed themselves to be affected by the myths and rituals of

others. They are pluralists, to the extent that they have risked conversion. So

much so, that they have been able to turn around and see their own assumptions as

mythological, and not find this an offense to the Euro-American education they

have inherited. They have been converted. This thinking through (comparative

commuter jaunts between ecologies that risk ones assumptions regarding self and

other) is quite distinct from the traditional ‘thinking about’ (univocity) or

‘thinking with’ (equivocity) that takes place in the academy. In risking

transformation, our commuter comparativists posit at least the potential for a non-

Kantian articulation of multiple ecologies of participation. Again, Lincoln spells

this out with simplicity.

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 To do this, he sets up a three-tiered argument in the first chapter of his
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recent book. Lincoln begins by considering the phrase, “History of Religion.”

History, he states, can be seen as the method, while religion can be understood as

the object of the study. Arvind Sharma’s Homo religiosus and Homo academeicus

can be stipulated here. Where Homo religiosus seeks a dialogue with the

transcendent – a naturalists form of eros/curiosity that is quite distinct from Ifá

“transcendence” that is animist in inclination and is something altogether alter –

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the latter, the academics, think about Homo religiosus. These designations are

of course problematic, and Lincoln reminds us of this point that cannot be ignored.
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It is made even more explicit in the work of Masuzawa and Daniel
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Dubuisson in the field of “religious” studies. Both of these authors bring

awareness to the problematic use of the term religion, in effect seeing through

Sharma’s categories.

Lincoln sums this up when he writes, “Religion, I submit, is that discourse

whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and

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transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal.” Lincoln’s

discourse on method follows this statement by clarifying that both the

methodology (History) and the object (Religion) are, not surprisingly, beholden to

a particular context, one that I call naturalism (following Descola).

Lincoln does not stop here. He does not simply point out the now obvious

assumptions underlying such a Homo academeicus style methodology. He goes

on to write that inherent to a contemporary understanding of this (post)modern

academic methodology, is a critical defensiveness whereby it is argued under the

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rubric of “cultural relativism” that one should not turn their critical eye toward

another tradition for fear of affecting an expression of neo-colonialism. We find

such scholars thinking with rather than about. Lincoln is moving us beyond

naturalist assumptions regarding realism (in a positivist sense, thinking about) and

relativism (in a postpositivist sense, thinking with). Thinking about has caused

more than its fair share of problems; largely imperialist and colonialist problems

that have violently and unintentionally consumed, mutilated, raped, and ignored
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the fleshy lives of others. This has lead to a critical turn toward equivocity and

cultural relativism (which pays lip service at times to the vulgar).

In an important essay on the topic of thinking about-with-through diverse

groups of people, languages, and ontologies, Richard A. Shweder imagines a

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contemporary relativist’s lecture, given to a “modern educated audience.”

Shweder begins his imagination regarding such a lecture by quoting Kurt

Vonnegut (the author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions), who

studied anthropology at the University of Chicago after the Second World War.

When pressed by his father shortly before his father’s death as to why Vonnegut

did not have villains in his stories, Vonnegut replied that this is what he had

learned in school after the war. There are no villains, no bad guys, or evil others.

Shweder’s imaginary relativist’s lecture, in a style immolating the one Vonnegut

learned in Chicago, does two things.

She assumes that the audience has a particular habit of mind called

“ethnocentrism,” whereby the members of the audience think their own ways are

somehow closer to the good and the true than those of the others, who ever they

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may be. The lecturer also assumes that these ethnocentric assumptions are more-

or-less hidden from the awareness of these same people. So the lecturer begins by

asking which language is the proper language for human beings: English, Tamil,

Chinese, or French? She goes on to ask about the makeup of the proper human

diet, whether it is vegetarian, nonvegetarian, or relevant today, gluten-free. The

lecture continues in this vein, the audience becomes more and more

uncomfortable, and in the end the punch line is delivered. The only universally

applicable moral principle is that there are no universally authoritative moral

principles.

Shweder imagines Vonnegut’s classmates from the University of Chicago

“et cetera pondering” all through the night. If there are no universal moral

guideposts, then all customary practices, and ethical and metaphysical assertions,

can be considered different and equal. What naturally follows, writes Shweder, is

that Vonnegut’s assertion that no one is “‘ridiculous or bad or disgusting,’ or

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wrong or deluded or confused, et cetera,” holds true. Following this abuse of
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post-colonial theory, Shweder writes,

That conclusion, of course, is fallacious. Just because there is no single

valid mode of artistic expression does not mean that any doodling with
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paint on canvas is a work of art or is entitled to respect.

Now here is the thrust of Shweder’s article. He writes, “the fallacy can be stated

in quite general terms: Just because there is no one uniform objective reality . . .
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does not mean there are no objective realities.” The line between thinking with

and thinking through offered by Holbraad follows the line Shweder has

demarcated between the University of Chicago anthropology student’s

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cultural/moral relativism. There is a similar line of thought drawn out by

Desmond, self-determination is achieved by dialectic whereby thinking with

(equivocity) is placed in relationship with thinking about (univocity), becoming

something like thinking through.

Holbraad, for his part, promotes a broadening or challenging of

assumptions. Where science starts from a basic univocal assumption (Nature) and
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begins to collect datum, philosophy carries with it the possibility of

challenging these assumptions. Philosophy can be understood as the pursuit of

wisdom (“now rare” according the Oxford English Dictionary), or as Desmond

would have it, metaxology. A line is drawn between noontime clarity (univocity)

and analogical revelation. The recursive realism, if you will, of Holbraad requires

rational truths to associate themselves with oracular revelations. Holbraad is

asking the philosopher to wander beyond the clear day light, into the vague,

intense, and overabundance of lived experience.

For his part, Shweder wonders aloud regarding the possibility that

Nietzsche was aware that he was “stuck in a prison of positivism.” On Shweder’s

account Nietzsche followed a basic positivist dichotomy. Either we can apprehend

goddesses, mana, souls, sorcery, and God directly through our sensorial suite, or

“God is dead.” Shweder notes that to believe that one can perceive such “super-

natural” Natures will likely get one laughed out of positivist – read (post)modern

– room. The first time I admitted to something like this in an American

Philosophy Association (APA) conference quite a stir followed, including but not

limited to disdain, laughter, and nervousness. This was not a positivist or wholly

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analytic room, but rather a group of philosophers defending an ethics of cross-

cultural inclusion. The general response, once they realized I was both serious and

sane, was to associate my position – lets call it the knowledge of angels – with the

views of sexists and holocaust deniers. The underlying message of these rather

odd associations seems to have at least two layers. On one side the assertion is

that in defending the existence of angels I am taking a radical and indefensible

stance. The sexist and the holocaust denier are wrong because the facts clearly

otherwise (genders are equal and the holocaust happened). The same argument is

applied to belief in angels, the facts clearly suggest otherwise. This is arguable

from my cross-ecological perspective, but what is interesting is the second

emotional layer behind the associations above. Experiences beyond the limited

purview of a (post)modern science are morally reprehensible. Knowledge of

angels, at least in the context of the APA session mentioned above, was in the

heat of the moment equated with some of the most abhorrent social stances

thinkable.

At this point I wondered aloud, to a largely African-American panel,

whether being a West African Ifá diviner is like being a holocaust denier? The

response was tepid, and the reply quick – and this is where it gets interesting. I

was told, by way of silencing my query, that my views needed to be held to the

rigorous standards of philosophy if I mean to engage in dialogue in this particular

room. I was, after all, participating as a philosopher in a professional context.

What was lost on the room and the panel was Holbraad’s recursive point above.

The assumption that this response is founded on is that there is only one ecology,

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(post)modern naturalism, and one kind of room; the one that exists as an

expression of a mechanistic Nature. A cross-ecological approach must include the

bodily sensual awareness of animist ecologies, ecologies for which belief (a

purely naturalist form of participation) has no ground (literally) to stand on. But

this was not a cross-ecological conversation. It existed completely within the

context of a naturalist ecology (angels and theism, mechanism and

(post)modernism).

Shweder considers the outcome of such a conversation in relation to the

orthodox Hindu conceptions of karma and reincarnation with which he is most

familiar:

a) The other does not view his own ideas arbitrary, conventional,

consensus-based, or as emotive expressions of imagination, desire, or

will.

b) The other believes his reality-posits express significant insights into

what the world is like and that the reality posited can be used to

illuminate or interpret the facts of experience.

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c) The other does not reason irrationally with his ideas.

d) The other remains convinced that his reality-posits are a form of

knowledge about the world, even after we explain that he is suffering

from a deluded false consciousness or that it is all imaginary or made

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up.

Falling clearly within the general argument articulated by recent scholars from

José Ignacio Cabezón to Donald Lopez and Richard King (see chapter on scholar-

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practitioners below), Shweder takes the positivist (Nietzschian) line of argument

to task.

My colleagues in the APA conference wanted to point out that I was

deluded. But this was more than a little problematic, and many of the people in

the room (recognizable by how many people came up to me after the session)

were well aware of it. One problem arose because I was and am one of them as

well as one of the alter, a scholar-shaman if you will. They had not considered the

enormous and overwhelming data available regarding viable ontological

assumptions alive and well in alterity (alter at least from a (post)modern set of

ontological assumptions). In fact, they were very suspicious of me because I had.

Why not do this kind of theorizing in an anthropology or religious studies

conference they asked. My short answer is that that if contemporary philosophy is

going to be saved from itself, it must venture out, not only across disciplines, but

also across cultural and ecological alterities. I am certainly not the first to make

the claim that different voices should be included within our philosophical
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halls, but I do so in my own unique way. By adopting a cross-ecological

approach I am following Descola and Viveiros de Castro, but also Desmond (and

Whitehead) who sees the future of philosophy shifting onto metaxological ground.

The long answer must be found throughout the pages of this work. For his part,

Shweder opts for his own third path beyond or around the Nietzschian positivist

bind that still plagues contemporary philosophy.

Following in the footsteps of various postpositivist thinkers (i.e. Kuhn,

Hanson, Toulmin, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Hesse, and Goodman), Shweder lays out

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 468
a new path. In his first step along this road he asserts that there is no particular

that can exist independently of our interpretation (or participation). Step two

Shweder tells us, is to recognize the accomplishments of what he terms “normal

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science.” These are real, and cannot be dismissed. Following Derrida first and
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then Robert Horton, Shweder adds a third step. He asserts Derrida’s

“metaphysics of presence,” whereby “reality is not something we can do without,

[nor is it something that be reached] except by an act of imaginative projection

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implicating the knower as well as the known.” Horton adds to this metaphysics

of presence the important stipulation that is drawn out by Shweder and so many

authors referenced throughout this project. Namely, that step two, whereby the

accomplishments of science cannot be denied, must also relate to “the others”

with markedly different accomplishments that do not fall within the purview of

Euro-American science. In effect, this is a kind of Latourian move, whereby a

system of symmetrical anthropology is set up, and scientific knowledge of

(post)modernity is understood to be just as dependent on imaginative projection

(read dialectic, enaction, and/or participation) as the knowledge of any other

group of people.

As Latour would have it, we have never been modern, no more than we

have ever been barbarian. “A Modern,” writes Latour, “is someone who believes
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that others believe.” This is where the (post)modern denies their own inherent

drive toward conversion of the other, and so fails in our recursive guest protocol.

Scientists, positivists, and Nietzsche must all acknowledge the role they play in

the enaction of their world. Ferrer and Sherman write:

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 In its most radical version, a participatory perspective does not contend
that there are two, three, or any limited quantity of pregiven spiritual
ultimates, but rather that the radical openness, interrelatedness, and
creativity of the mystery and/or the cosmos allows for the participatory
enaction of an indefinite number of possible self-disclosures of reality and
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corresponding metaphysical or religious worlds.

Shweder posits two basic responses to the postpositivist stance that suggests that

physics cannot be isolated from meta-physics. The first, a positivist response, is to

bemoan the state of the profession, and say so much the worse for physics. Nature

and science forced into a corner with the super-natural and religious is not really

scientific at all. This is what my colleagues assumed during the APA conference

mentioned above. The second response is to recognize that science has nothing to

fear at all in this postpositivist world. This seems to be in keeping with the

pluralist line I draw out throughout this work, but there is a difference.

Shweder’s postpositivist stance is not lacking in concern for the real. He

references the “continental chorus singing with Kuhnian overtones that it is our

prejudices and partialities that make it possible for us to see, if not everything,
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then at least something.” On Shweder’s account, God is not dead; only

positivism, monotheism, and exclusivism (scientific, theistic, or otherwise) are

dead. He is trying to find a path here between ontological atheism (God is dead,

there is one objective world) and ontological polytheism (there are multiple

objective worlds). He writes, “Thus spake Zarathustra . . . [and] ontological

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atheism was born.” Following from this atheist stance, if one is to posit the

existence of anything that challenges this single Nietzschian positivist reality,

then they are surely wandering into vulgar relativism. Ontological polytheism is

clearly nonsensical from the positivist-atheist-Nietzschian perspective. Shweder’s

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is a middle road between these two, and it is at this point that I begin to part ways

with his work.

There is a slight naturalist tinge to Shweder’s account from this point on

that leans toward a single objective reality. Shweder’s reality is one that cannot be

articulated, because all perspectives, prejudices, and/or truths are only partial. The

real can be clarified from any one partial understanding, and yet to try to put all

the possible partial truths into some perspective blender is to muddy the waters to

such an extent that nothing can be known. On this account, there seems to be

some one reality, one that we cannot know in particularity, and one they we

cannot know collectively either. Shweder writes:

For if there is no reality without “meta”-physics and each reality-testing

meta-physic (i.e. cultural or tradition) is but a partial representation of the
multiplicity of the objective world, it becomes possible to transcend
tradition by showing how each tradition lights some plane of reality but
not all of it. Since each is but a partial representation, it lends itself to a
process of rational reconstruction through which is may become an object
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of respect.

This is not how I use the words “multiple objective worlds” – the subtitle of

Shweder’s essay I am considering – throughout these pages. While Shweder is

clearly a pluralist willing to risk multiple interiorities, he is not available to the

kind of commuting I compare to shamanism. He is not willing to risk multiple

physicalities.

I am attempting something far more “other” than Shweder’s self-styled

“casuist” stance harkening back to the Stoic and Sophist precursors to the

(post)modern worldview. In the end, Shweder holds on too strongly to his single

given reality. This, as I show in some detail below, is an expression of a naturalist

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ontology. It is useful at this point to return to Holbraad’s recursive anthropology,

as it seems that while Shweder is aware of the problems both with what Holbraad

terms thinking about (colonialist scholarship) and thinking with

(relativist/postmodern scholarship), he has not quite allowed himself to think

through the alterity available to someone committed to a thoroughgoing

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symmetrical anthropology of human experience.

Regarding the alterity of Ifá divination and similar enactments of truth,

Holbraad writes, “Few data on the ethnographic canon could be more

theoretically enticing than mana. If ‘alterity’ is a tag for phenomena that do not
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‘make sense’ to us, then mana-terms are ‘alter’ in the most literal way.” If this

is so, then this is where we must begin to push Shweder’s postpositivist post-

Nietzschian scholarship beyond the horizons of a single ontological ground and

the Euro-American conceptualization of representational truth. To put this another

way, if we are going to move from Shweder’s multiple (perspectives on) objective

worlds (commuter as pluralist) to the literal objective worlds I defend in these

pages (commuter as shaman), we must begin by considering something far more

alter than karma and reincarnation. My cross-ecological point is that we must

allow animist ecologies of participation and their emphasis on multiple objective

worlds into dialogue with our naturalist ecologies and the assumption of a single

ontological given.

For Holbraad’s part he considers the ramifications of one particular mana-

term, aché, originating from the West African influenced Ifá divinatory cults of

Cuba. He writes that Cuban Ifá diviners refer to the nebulous notion of aché and

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the “anomalies” that follow in the wake of this mana-term throughout their

regular practice of divination (and sorcery). For my present purposes it is

important to tease out Holbraad’s thesis regarding the importance of thinking

through mana for contemporary philosophy and anthropology (and academia in

general), as opposed to either thinking about or thinking with. I follow Holbraad

as he proceeds by “pursuing rationalist ends with empirical means [effectually]

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jeopardizing the foundations of both.” Where positivist thinkers are scared by

the possibility of falling into a regress of meta-meta-meta-physics, and Shweder is

concerned with multiple metas- having to do with one Physic (pluralism), I

propose that we risk the physics all together (shamanism). By this I do not mean

to reject naturalist sciences, but rather to put them into conversation with

multinaturalists from animist ecologies.

This turn toward mana-terms (divination, shamanism, and magic) is not

new. French rationalism, writes Holbraad, adopts terms like mana by way of

accentuating and challenging philosophical debate. Auguste Comte is given as

one early example of a French intellectual who used the idea of ‘force’ (a mana-

term) to challenge his own views regarding the origins of thought. Also of interest

for my purposes here, is the difference between French and British treatments of

such terms. Where the French can often be seen attempting at least a thinking

with, if not a thinking through mana-terms like aché, the British can just as often

be seen to emphasize a thinking about.

Holbraad asserts that while certain British intellectuals like Edward B.

Tylor, James G. Frazer, and Robert R. Marett did consider mana-terms, especially

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with regard to their debates regarding ‘magic’ and ‘religion,’ the ethnographical

work of Anglican missionary Robert Henry Codrington is more in keeping with

the tradition of British Empiricism. On numerous occasions, Codrington

documents the use of the term ‘mana’ among the Melanesian people in his text,

The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-Lore, published in 1891.

Nowhere in this work does he consider the philosophical ramifications of such a

term; instead he simply documents its use. Where British thought tends to think

about mana, the French attempt to wrestle with the term.

By way of further underlining this point about British empiricism

Holbraad quotes Malinowski, who writes:

The theory of mana as the essence of primitive magic and religion has
been so brilliantly advocated and so recklessly handled that it must be
realized first that our knowledge of the mana, notably in Melanesia, is
somewhat contradictory, and especially that we have hardly any data at all
showing just how this conception enters into religious or magical cult and
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belief.

Following the work of Marett, Mauss and Hubert, and Durkheim, Malinowski

recognizes the lack of knowledge regarding mana in the academic literature. In

keeping with the British tradition, he calls for more data. As I show below, Mauss,

writing in the French tradition, struggles with this material in the face of the lack

of understanding (risking his own assumptions), while Malinowski (writing in the

British tradition) sees a need for more data whereby the idiosyncratic emic

understandings of the Melanesian people can be explained away.

In the pages that follow the quote above, Malinowski lays out his own

theory of magic, wherein he explains away magic as an emotional or

psychological reaction to a lack of understanding and rationality on the part of a

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hunter (whether “savage” or “civilized”). Magic becomes an emotional

overflowing that is just poorly understood. The magician or the hunter is not

lacking in logic. He is capable of understanding that magical rites are fallible. In

order to accommodate this fact, the savage introduces the idea of counter-magic

to manage the failures of her explanatory schema. When failure occurs, which it

must do unless the person just happens to be lucky enough to align their

emotional outburst with an outcome that resembles their intention, two

explanations are possible. Either the person did not perform the magical rite well,

or someone or something has blocked the person’s magic by way of a counter-

spell. Malinowski writes,

In Melanesia, where I have studied this problem at firsthand, there is not a

single magical act which is not firmly believed to possess a counter-act,
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which when stronger, can completely annihilate its effects.

Throughout Magic, Science, Religion, and other Essays, Malinowski fails

to engage emic understandings of what he termed magic. As such, he fails to

engage the recursive guest protocol that I seek to establish for comparative work

going forward. For his part, Malinowski is not interested in how such self-

understanding of the Melanesian people might be coherent and logical within

their own ontological framework. He is not thinking with (in a relativist sense),

and certainly not risking his own assumptions about what is possible, true, and

natural (the pluralist step toward thinking through). In his defense, it must be said

that Malinowski did not simply relegate all magical thinking to “savage”

populations. He allowed that both magical and scientific ways of knowing are

available to Melanesian fisherman as well as city-dwelling Londoners. But he

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subsumes the magical thought by imagining it as a temporary and/or lesser

(prelogical) alternative where scientific knowledge is not available. Here he falls

into relativizing and conversion. Magic is just a functional response to the anxiety

of not having a scientific explanation. Through all of this speculation, Malinowski

simply continues to do the work he is so well known for; he collects ethnographic

data. He observes and collects accounts about magic, without ever allowing the
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alterity of mana to challenge his own beliefs.

Referencing the Malinowski quote above, Holbraad writes that it is not a

lack of ethnographical datum that led to contradictions regarding our knowledge

of mana. The collection of more data will not solve the contradictions, because

mana-terms are contradictory by their nature. Holbraad traces a long lineage of

British thinkers (Hocart, Hogbin, Firth and Keesing) that continue to collect data

in order to subsume mana-terms within their own ontological framework, ending

most recently with the work of Bradd Shore. It is worth noting, if only in passing,
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that Holbraad cites an early article written by Shore. Shore’s more recent work

breaks with the empiricist tradition he has inherited, and attempts to follow the
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rationalist tradition equated here with the French.

In the end, what is important is not so much who falls into which camp.

Rather it is crucial to consider Holbraad’s point that there is a very different way

of approaching the challenges offered by mana-terminology than the practice of

collecting ethnographic data alongside in parallel with the maintenance of

established worldviews. Holbraad writes that the French understood this point,

while the British continued to try to wrangle mana into coherence with

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established Western assumptions regarding rationality and ontology. If you are

still not convinced of this point, writes Holbraad,

consider the sting in characterizing the style of a piece of intellectual work

as ‘oracular’ [as in truth is what the oracle says it is], as self-consciously
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Anglo-Saxon intellectuals often do for the writings of ‘Continentals.’

Returning to my own experiences at APA conferences, once I have introduced

myself, and the general direction of my work, the way of framing (and thereby

explaining away) what I have said is for my colleague to say, “Oh, you must be

working in the Continental tradition.” Following Holbraad’s argument, we should

invite the challenges offered by mana and aché into our philosophical and

scientific considerations, rather than containing them by reference to primitive,

savage, or magical mentalities. We should be aware of our British-American

tendencies to rely too heavily on “data,” while safely limiting the work of others

by thinking of it as oracular.

It is worth considering Holbraad’s treatment of the French tradition to

further underline this point. He cites the publication in 1902 of Marcel Mauss and

Henri Hubert’s A General Theory of Magic as a first important step along the path

toward what he terms thinking through. Referencing this work, Claude Lévi-

Strauss wrote, “Magical thinking offers other [as compared to science], different

methods of channeling and containment, with different results, and all these
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methods can very well coexist.” Holbraad writes that the excessive quality of

mana is deemed transgressive from the very start; a viable challenge to accepted

axiomatic norms. He suggests that rather than assuming that axioms are axiomatic,

and that mana should somehow fit within these established laws and principles,

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we should consider the very interesting possibility that mana points us toward

something altogether alter or novel. What if, he wonders, the association of

mystical (used in a derogatory sense) thought with so-called primitives minds is

nothing more than an anthropological projection on a perfectly coherent ontology

or framework.

According to Holbraad, Mauss and Hubert could not quite go this far.

Their positivist leanings would not allow a real ‘thinking through’ of mana. Lévi-

Strauss, for all his defense of the “insoluble anomolies attaching themselves to the
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notion of mana,” could not meet mana on its own terms either. He contained

mana in a similar fashion to the well-documented ways whereby he subsumed

totemic thought into algebraic logic.

Lévi-Strauss critiqued anthropologists for writing that totems can be

understood by considering the connection between totem and totemic clan

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(signifier and signified). Following Lévi-Strauss, Holbraad writes that

signifiers (totems) do not gain meaning by reference to a signified (clan). They

have meaning in relation to other signifiers. So dog does not mean anything in

relation to the animal that it points to, but in relation to other signifiers like gray

wolf (Canis lupus), Canidae family, mammal, cat, or ball. Holbraad writes,

“Meaning is a function, in the algebraic sense (Lévi-Strauss 1987:42–3), of a

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signifier's position within a structured series.” Lévi-Straus writes, “Mauss'

suggestion that the ambiguity of mana is what makes it 'magical' since magic is

itself an inherently ambiguous phenomenon . . . paradoxically places limits on the

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ambiguity of mana by tying it to magic as signifier to signified.” As signifiers,

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mana-terms do not stay within a recognizable categorical pattern. Without this

order, they seem to reference something rather ambiguous, and therefore seem to

be lack meaning in some fundamental way. This point cuts right to the center of

my project here. Mana falls within the realm of overabundant becomings that

philosophers like Whitehead, William James, and others understand to be more

rather than less concrete. Holbraad seems to smile as he writes, “Whatever mana

may be, it certainly isn't a thingamajig or a whatyoumay-callit to those who are

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concerned with it.” Mana-terms, which are vague by Euro-American account,

are the epitome of efficacy for emic practitioners. At the same time, for contrast,

the efficacy of modern medicine is highly suspect, clearly lacking in efficacy, for
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many etic observers. If our path is to think through rather than about mana,

Lévi-Strauss has fallen short in telling way.

It is important to mention Durkheim as well within this French tradition,

as his work paves the way for later social constructivist movements that have

become so important in academic thought. Holbraad quotes Durkheim who writes,

“[Robert R. Marett] traces the origins of religious representations to the notion of

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a 'sort of diffuse power that permeates things.'” Durkheim follows Marett’s

argument (coming out of the British tradition) that notions like mana, wakan

(Sioux), and orenda (Iroquois) are examples of impersonal forces that lie at the

very heart of elementary forms of religious life. Durkheim allows that these

‘forces’ are real, but not in the way understood by either the Sioux or Iroquois.

Mana (as well as wakan and orenda) can be seen as referencing a very real force

– the force society imposes on its members. Holbraad explains Durkheim’s theory

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as a referencing of native projections onto something they do not fully understand.

He goes on,

The only illusion on the part of the religious is that of mistaking social
origins for sacred ones. Thus, effectively, the transgression of mana is
absorbed into sociological theory in the form of its central concept, that of
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society.

It can be argued that within Durkheim’s theoretical reimagining of mana found

here there lies the beginnings of social constructivism; a move from thinking

about, to thinking with. Where moderns, on Latour’s account, believe that others

believe, postmoderns could be understood to believe that everyone believes –

period.

So as not to get stalled in this constructivist turn, Holbraad calls for

another step along the path. He points out that

the fact that mana was invariably relegated all the way back, to the
beginning of whatever was at issue for each theorist (as we'll see, religion
and magic for Mauss, society too for Durkheim, knowledge for Lévi-
Strauss and Sperber), just proves my earlier point about its maximum
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alterity.

It is this ‘maximum alterity’ that most interests Holbraad, as well as the French

intellectual in whom he observes the clearest attempt to think through mana,

magic, and the radically alter.

Holbraad turns to lead us toward the possibility of thinking through is

Lévy-Bruhl, whose work is so pivotal to the participatory approach articulated in

these pages. If we are truly committed to the use of the term mana we might be

forced to step beyond our own axiomatic thought. In seriously considering mana

on its own terms, we are forced to face a complexity beyond (post)modern

theoretical frameworks (they believe/we all believe). On Holbraad’s point, it is

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not enough to think with mana-terminology and “go native.” To simply adopt the

framework of the alter as if it were our own does a disservice to both. Herein lie

the roots of appropriation, and what Philip J. Deloria among so many others has
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ruefully seen as “playing Indian.” Contemporary academics and people in

general are cannibals and missionaries out to maintain their particular version of

eros and curiosities by overcoming diversity by way of co-opting the other.

Following the work of Bado-Fralick, Harvey, and West, I argue along the lines of

Holbraad that we cannot help but cannibalize and convert the other. If we are

going to bump into one another due to our planetary predicament, we must

consume and engage what is not us, and we will certainly be changed or

transformed by the experience. The early French tradition (including Mauss,

Hubert, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss) allowed itself to be challenged by mana, but

only to a degree. This is better than what we have inherited from the British

tradition, but not enough. Rather than thinking through, allowing mana to stand

on its own and transform the scholar of others, these authors stopped short.

Thinking with, at times, and more often than not, about mana and other alterities.

Holbraad asks us to invite such alterities into our lives, in affect risking the

transgression of our own comfortable frameworks and ontologies. This does not

mean that we can ignore the very real efficacy of Durkheimian social facts. The

ecological approach defended in these pages adopts Holbraad and companies’

recursive methodology as a guest protocol similar to that of the Maori. Such a

protocol asks of us to consider our own cannibalistic and missionary proclivities,

as well as theirs. It asks of us to invite the other in, especially that which seems

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beholden to some radical alterity, not because they are right and we are wrong, or

because we are all equally right. Holbraad’s recursive guest protocol is subtle on

this point.

On this point, Holbraad looks to the work of Lévy-Bruhl when he writes,

“The closest French mana-theory came to this tack was with Lévy-Bruhl's
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argument about the primitive 'law of participation' (1926).” Holbraad qualifies

this assertion by referencing the important critical assessments offered by Evans-

Pritchard and others (see ch. 6). He then continues,

Nevertheless, in substance Lévy-Bruhl's approach is much more

interesting than it is in this aspect of its form. For what does Lévy-Bruhl's
law of participation amount to other than an attempt on his part to
elaborate an analytical frame in which notions like mana no longer appear
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transgressive?

What is so interesting about Lévy-Bruhl’s approach, who was trained as a

philosopher not an anthropologist, is that he allowed himself to be challenged by

mana-terminology in such a way that he invited the possibility of distinct coherent

logical systems and their subsequent ontological frameworks. Multiple objective

worlds, not in Shweder’s postpositivist sense of multiple representations, but

rather in Holbraad’s recursive anthropology, wherein different ecologies can co-

exist simultaneously.

Lévy-Bruhl broke ranks with the Durkheimian school, of which he was a

member early in his career, and began to think through mana in such a way that it

began to transform his understanding of logic and philosophy. He did not place

mana as an earlier precursor to contemporary science and logic, but rather

recognized the inherent coherency and independence of a different way of

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knowing and living; One that was not located in some deep past, but rather could

be found in groups of hunter-gatherers and city-dwellers alike. It is to this kind of

thinking through that this text aims.

But we must remember Holbraad’s own characterization of his work. He

sees it first as post-Kantian in as far as it is in keeping with the critical tradition

inherited from Kant. It is non-Kantian in that it assumes something more than

Kant’s own reliance on Newtonian physics. In this way, says Holbraad, his work

is a ‘critique of the Critique.’ Holbraad then characterizes his work as non-, anti-,

or post-recursivity. Holbraad limits his work because he understands that his

recursive move is just one of many. He considers (post)modernist ecology

recursively in light of Cuban Ifá divination. He could have used some other

ethnographical data. He has challenged this (post)modern ecology on the grounds

of one particular alterity, but there could obviously be more radically other

ecologies. So he has posited a non-Kantian critique by questioning the validity of

a single ontological world, but he is aware that this same critique borders on a

kind infinitely recursive potential, whereby no matter how many recursive

ethnographies are considered, there will always be more. I turn to Descola

because he underlines the point that there are multiple ecological realities

available. He makes his own case based on a survey of the available

ethnographical data at his disposal. What is interesting, however, is that Descola

finds a limited number of ecological starting points. By beginning with a limited

number of potential ecological beginnings, Descola overcomes the non- or post-

recursivity that Holbraad brings to our awareness. Yes there are multiple recursive

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ethnographical sets that one could bring to bear on any given conversation, but

following Descola, these are actually quite limited.

There is an obvious point of contention that can arise at this point. Why,

and maybe more importantly, how, can we limit the field of potential ecological

starting points to four as Descola does? It is this just an arbitrary and/or

ethnocentric assumption? Descola argues that it is not. He begins with a basic

starting assumption that all ecologies are relating to physical and internal

experiences. This is a simple and viable starting point that leads Descola to posit

four basic frames of reference, or ways of relating to interiority and physicality.

As I have argued in some detail above, Descola’s fourfold way is not without its

own flaws. I have offered a critical reassessment of his use of analogy and an

ecology of atomism that allowed me to broaden the use of animist and naturalist

ways of relating – and the question quickly arises, relating to what – I find it

necessary to also add a primary/agapeic participation to Descola’s fourfold way. I

find this new fivefold way to be more in keeping with the historical and

ethnographic data available, as well as to recent work in linguistic anthropology,

and the participatory (metaxological) metaphysics of Desmond. Am I right in all

of this?

The obvious answer is no, but I have added my own little piece to the

cross-ecological puzzle. Something that I of course find necessary; the work of

comparative commuters that requires some version of a guest protocol if it is

going to be successful. The recursive methodology articulated in these pages is

one viable key to such a protocol, something that can be placed in conversation

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with the Maori guest protocol detailed above. It is highly likely that there are

other ways to articulate a diversity of ecologies, as well as a multiplicity of

protocols we can abide by to ensure that we do no egregious harm. We cannot

help but be cannibals and missionaries, but as shamans and pluralists with clear

guest protocols we are likely to engage our cross-ecological commutes in more

constructive ways.

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 Chapter 6: A Participatory Approach
Scholarly-Commuters, Alterity, and the Academy

When I was growing up in the high mountain deserts of Wyoming and

Nevada I wanted to be either a Socrates-like Platonic philosopher walking around

talking to my daemon, or alternatively an arbiter of the Christian religious faith.

While my formal excursions with Plato would have to wait until I was older, as a

boy I walked into every church I could find, and found myself uninvited or

cautiously watched in each and everyone. I asked too many questions, believed in

evolution and magic, and considered my ongoing conversations with the

sagebrush and mountains a normal pastime for a young boy. Several things

happened to me when I left my small town life: I found God while scrubbing

floors in a Hare Krishna temple in Portland, Oregon; my daemon at a keg party at

the University of Nevada; (post)modern meaninglessness and depression in the

philosophy department at the University of Hawaii; the shocking groundlessness

of Emptiness while sitting with a Zen monk at a weeklong workshop on Integral

Consciousness in Boulder, Colorado; God again at the back of a cave carved out

of the side of a hill by a holy man in Kerala, India; Self, the infinite only, that is,

the Light while standing in a field in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming with my

sister; Christ my blood and savior and Mary my heart and mother after ingesting

eight grams of mushrooms with a guide in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California.

I offer only a select handful of these stories here; there are countless other tales of

this nature that make up my biography.

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 I hope to illustrate in sharing the brief glimpses into my life the

motivations behind the comparative work you hold in your hands. These pages

are a direct outcome of my Socratic dreams. When pressed by Phaedrus as to the

truth of certain Greek mythologies, Socrates replies that he has no time for such
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endeavors, for he is following the Delphic order to know himself. I have

continued to be very involved with this philosophical project, and though there is

a certain continuity when looking back, the story has its disjunctive qualities and

sudden turns. The more I went to Sunday school, the harder it became to imagine

myself as a Christian. As an undergraduate I quickly tired of the dead end I

experienced as contemporary philosophy. The obvious path ahead, it seemed to

me at the time, was to deepen my practice as a Buddhist. I sat zazen for a couple

years at the Zen Center in San Francisco, California, and at that same time I began

my studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) a mile or so down

the road. Once at CIIS, I promptly came in contact with Ferrer, his participatory

approach to comparative studies, and the comparative hermeneutics he utilized in

the classroom following his years of work with a very totemic ecology of
500
participation developed by Ramon V. Albareda and Marina T. Romero.

Ferrer’s work is comparative in nature, and promotes the coming out of the closet

of religious studies scholar as scholar-practitioners. It fit well with my own

trajectory and the brief biographical sketch given above.

Where, for example, the anthropologist Paul Stoller had to worry about

letting down his idol E. E. Evans-Pritchard (framed as the “Evans-Pritchard

Question”) in becoming an anthropologist turned sorcerer, I was and am a

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sorcerer becoming an academic. Stoller asks himself the “Evans-Pritchard

Question” which he frames this way: “When does the anthropologist say:
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‘Enough. I cannot become more subjectively involved.’” The interesting thing

is that he is worried about becoming too involved with sorcery, not academia. I

have had to face the opposite problem. I have been raised to become a shaman,

and have had to worry that I might let down many of my mentors (Michael

Harner, Marina T. Romero, and Malidoma Somé chief among them) by becoming
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too involved with academia.

Considering the history I have shared so far it would appear that my

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scholarly life was headed toward what Kripal calls a comparative mystics. A

comparative mystics, writes Kripal, is based upon what he terms a mystical

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humanism. In their introduction to The Participatory Turn: Spirituality,

Mysticism, Religious Studies, Ferrer and Jacob Sherman write,

Although such self-implication has been traditionally looked at as

contaminating inquiry, a number of notable scholars within Religious
Studies (from Robert A. Orsi to Kripal) would join hands here with those
pioneering the field of Spirituality in recognizing the futility of excising
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one's own religious journey from scholarly endeavor.

Kripal tells us that the study of religion can, though it need not, be viewed as “a

mystical-critical practice [that develops] out of the discipline’s dual

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Romantic/Enlightenment heritage.” He cites Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade,
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and Henry Corbin as early exemplars of such a tradition. Ferrer and Sherman

also include the recent works of Don Cupitt, Grace Jantzen, Hunt Overzee, James

Taylor, and Stoller (mentioned above). Countless others could be included in this

list of self-implicating scholars. Kripal’s way of involving himself is to turn to the

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spiritual pluralism of Ramakrishna, attempting to both assert and say-away his

humanism.

Kripal lays out an apophatic (equivocal) “(non) ground” for his ‘mystical

humanism,’ while calling for the “intellectual courage of a truly open-ended

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anthropology.” This mystical humanism is grounded in the human being,

though a human being defined as broadly as possible. He means to take into

account unfathomable horizons. Including, but not limited to scientific, Advaita

Vedantan, Tibetan, Islamic, and Amazonian ways of engaging as human

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beings. Kripal’s humanism relies on his reading of Ludwig Andreas
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Feuerbach’s mystical humanism, which is turned toward a contemporary

reimagining of Indian mystic and saint Ramakrishna’s experiments in spiritual

pluralism. Ramakrishna’s humanism emerges out of the dual roles of Hindu

cataphatic inclusivism and apophatic traditions of saying-away. In laying out his

‘(non) ground’ Kripal is well aware of various postmodern, critical, feminist, and

postcolonial traditions within the academy. He does not want to become a simple

cultural cheerleader (a kind of naïve cataphatic perennialist), nor a heartless

destroyer of worldviews (apophatic postmodern deconstruction and/or

constructivism leading to solipsism). He acknowledges the possibilities of

“epistemological imperialism” and “neocolonialism,” and continues in his

practice of comparative mystics. He uses the term mystics rather than mysticism

following the work of French anthropologist Michel de Certeau (who emphasizes

the dynamic la mystique as opposed to the more general le mysticisme). In

emphasizing the term comparative he writes:

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 The qualifier comparative [is used] to indicate a discourse that undermines
the doctrinal claims of individual religions by setting them beside the
claims of other religions. The purpose of such a comparative mystics is to
expose all doctrinal claims as historically and culturally relative
expressions of a deeper mystery or ontological ground (the gnostic
Pleroma) that nevertheless requires these relative expressions for its self-
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revelation.

Kripal grounds his comparative mystics in the work of Ramakrishna because of

Ramakrishna’s ability to both celebrate and deny (assert and say-away) within the

context of an ontology of human being (however broadly defined), or ‘mystical

humanism.’ He clarifies that while

cultural differences and local knowledges are socially and politically

important [they are] not ontologically ultimate, and that the gnostic
deconstruction or saying-away of cultural and religious “essences” –
which flourishes especially in the subversive countercultures of the
mystical traditions – is the level at which deep communication may be
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realizable.

I find myself bowing deeply to Kripal’s work, and to the motivations behind what

he writes. Yet something does not quite feel right.

As he is saying-away various cultural and religious essences, I struggle

with Kripal’s emphasis on apophasis, as well as the cataphatic assertion of an

ontology of human being, no matter how broadly defined. By way of balancing

what I have termed univocity (following Desmond) above, Kripal places too

strong of an emphasis on equivocity (again following Desmond). But the point is

not only that he has missed Desmond’s important emphasis on dialectic

(following Hegel) and analogical thought (following Aquinas), but that Kripal’s

apophatic postmodernism (equivocity) and cataphatic human being (univocity)

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fall well within the bounds of a naturalist ecology of participation. Naturalist

ecologies of this kind denote a step toward a particular dialectic and erotic

impulse that invites a certain diversity with regard to interiorities and Being.

Though such naturalist ecologies can be for the good, they do not account for the

whole story. They not only move away from their primary agapeic experiences,

but totemic ecologies of Polarity, as well as anti-thetical (when compared to

naturalist) animist ecologies like those of the Achuar, the Sioux, and Mopan that

engage an erotic perplexity around the Becoming of physicalities in relation to the

People.

Kripal references the works of Latour, Viveiros de Castro, and Tobie

Nathan. In considering our shared participatory predicament and the current state

of comparative studies, Nathan writes the following words:

We [have] to find representatives for the gods among those strange human
beings who, without abandoning their own kind, without renouncing their
divine owners, love their neighbors’ gods as well—love all gods so much
that the differences between gods, their peculiarities, become a deep
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concern.

If the choice had been mine, I would have stayed well within the various

traditions that are often associated with one or another Book, especially those

sprung out of the Indo-European linguistic lineage. I would have been a naturalist,

a Christian, a Buddhist, a critical neo-perennialist, or a Platonic philosopher of

some kind. But the choice was not mine for the making, not solely mine.

Once my existential angst and deep depression really set in after the

completion of my undergraduate studies in philosophy I spent some time couch

surfing and working in an Irish pub in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was profoundly lost

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when an old friend called me out of the blue one day and asked if I would like to

go with him to South America. I wrote in a journal that day that “South America

sounds like salvation if you say it enough times.” We bought one-way tickets to

Santiago, Chile, and I began running as fast as I could from something I could

hardly fathom. After many adventures I found myself walking into the sacred

temple of the Inca people (Machu Picchu, Peru) in the Andes Mountains on the

winter solstice of 2000. At the behest of my guide I placed my hand next to a

“hitching post,” a rock used to tie the sun to the temple every year on this day.

As I placed my hand a few inches from the rock, a loud sucking and

popping noise overcame me and I was catapulted into the rock. Did the group of

people I was with see me literally disappear? Probably not, and yet there I was,

having taken on the body of the rock/hitching post, experiencing something like a

life review that people speak of during near death experiences. But this was not

my life; it was the life of the Incan Empire. At some point the sucking popping

noise returned and I found myself thrust back into the “real world,” but everything

had changed. Where once there had been solid ground, everything had shattered;

everything, absolutely everything, was made up of vibrating white light. I

stumbled and fell to a knee. A friend helped me to my feet, and walked me down

some steps to sit on a lawn below. I sat there reeling in this new world of light,

and at the same time was inundated by spirits of the place. I was visited by a

twelve foot purple condor, a couple (man and woman) who introduced themselves

as the earth mother and father of this place, as well as innumerable other beings

that clamored for my attention. Seeing such beings was not new to me – I had

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engaged with them all of my life – but now I could not shut them out.

Stuck in a world of vibrating white light and purple condors my hopes of

being a Buddhist or a Christian began to seem distant. I could not turn this off,

and an all-encompassing fear began to stalk my every waking moment. The

naturalist and atomist ecologies of my Euro-American (post)modern upbringing

assume a solid given ground, but this was giving way to more totemic and

animistic ecologies of participation. Quite unlike Socrates sitting under a tree with

Phaedrus, I cannot ignore the landscape. When Socrates tells his companion that

he is “devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me,” my

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lived experience tells me that something is wrong. Yet like Socrates, who

makes this rather naturalist statement, I find a certain divinity and sacredness in

such places, and am inspired by the oracular. Boreas, Orithuia, and Zeus, they are

not so far away. In following the Delphi oracle myself, I have to account for these

Socratic things and stories not as if they were cursory to myself. When I look at

me, I see them, looking back at me. As I clarify in some detail below, I am not

only a naturalist seeking insight among the people of the city, I am an animist

personifying the physicalities I met both at Machu Pichu and in the forest. I had

always lived with one foot outside of the naturalist ecology so important to the

Greeks and the variations on the Indo-European tradition I had admired growing

up, but that morning on the mountain in Peru I was thrown out of any

unencumbered association with that reality for good. The Greeks had chosen a
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very different path than the one I was on.

Several things happened next over the following years. I met and began to

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work with one of the first American anthropologists to have “gone native,”

Harner. Working several decades before Stoller, Bado-Fralick, and West, Harner

tried to write as a respectable anthropologist (see The Jivaro: People of the

Sacred Waterfall), but quickly turned his back on the academy, penning The Way

of the Shaman. Harner told me that I was not crazy; I just needed a dimmer switch.

Though I still held out hope of getting through this “stage in my development” (I

was reading a lot of the popular perennialist author Ken Wilber at the time), and

finding my way toward a more respectable Tibetan or Zen Buddhist tradition, the

neo-shamanism offered by Harner held me fast.

As I pursued and eventually completed a long training with Harner, the

word “shaman” began to stalk me as well. As much as I held out hope for a higher

road (I was holding on to a linear “evolutionary” scheme still popular, though not

overtly so, in academic and popular imagination today), people in my community

began to use the word shaman to refer to me. As much as I shied away from such

work, people began to come to me seeking cures for what ailed them. In hindsight,

I was deepening into what I term an animist ecology of participation within these

pages.

At this same time I began to study very closely with Ferrer’s mentors,

Albareda and Romero. For all the initiation and training with Harner, I found that

I was still running, still scared, and it was not until practicing for some time in an

intensive setting with Albareda and Romero that I had the great good fortune to

look down one day and realize that I was not scared. Through their body of work I

had begun to sink ever deeper down into a dark warm sensuous abyss. I found that

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I was not just the Light, the Self that I had become aware of first on a mountain in

Peru, and later in a mountain in Wyoming. I was the deep dark undifferentiated

potentiality as well, and something in between. Turning from a naturalist ecology

to an animist one did not alleviate my fear and anxiety, for these are two sides of

the same coin. Rather, my fear fell away as I turned toward a the correlations and

polarities offered by a totemic ecology, like the one enacted by Albareda and

Romero. In the end I suppose you could say that I had taken Nathan’s advice and

fallen in love with many gods, or rather ecologies. It is from this carnal,

communal, transcendent comparative lens that I wonder again about the

comparative mystics of Kripal.

In reading Kripal I wonder to what extent he is still working under the

umbrella of Latour’s (post)modern constitution. To what extent is Kripal leaning

too heavily on a naturalist ontology. In primarily referencing comparative

attempts coming out of an Indo-European linguistic lineage, to what extent has

Kripal really invited in the dangerous other into his comparative scheme? He has,

while referencing mostly traditions that would fall easily within the category of

East-West studies, at least looked to the work of Viveiros de Castro. Following

the work of Viveiros de Castro he writes, “[we must take the] risk of mutual
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contamination and transformation across worldviews.” Kripal is invoking

something like an ecological perspectivism defended here. Viveiros de Castro has

developed his ethnographical work primarily through association with the Achuar

and other Amerindian people of South America (some of the same people that

first “corrupted” Harner’s academic dreams). To the extent that Kripal references

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a truly open anthropology like that of Viveiros de Castro, he does seem to be

moving beyond the (post)modern constitution so prevalent in our academy; he

does seem to invite the work of comparative ecologies defended here. The animist

ecologies engaged by Viveiros de Castro are in some ways quite distinct from the

naturalist thought so foundational to both Western and Eastern thought.

As I have written above, Viveiros de Castro makes the distinction between

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multinaturalist and multiculturalist ways of framing experience. This line of

thought follows a distinction that Descola has made between animist and
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naturalist thought. Animist thought like that of the Achuar people of Amazonia

details a reality that is grounded in a shared subjectivity and a discontinuous

objectivity. Here multiple objective realities are possible in ways that seem

irrational to the naturalist. This is because the opposite is true from the naturalist

standpoint (positivist science and Christianity offer two examples) where what is

shared or public is objectivity (Nature and/or the body), while subjectivity is

either private (the domain of God or an individual) or epiphenomena (reducible to

the “objective”). Where the animist enacts objective realities by personifying the

other, naturalist ecologies enact a naturalist perspectivism (i.e. Brahman, man,

God) by reference to different things. The crucial point we must consider here, in

relation to Kripal’s mystical humanism, is that both the Achuar shaman and the

British scientist live within a dualistic ecology.

The ecologies are opposite one another, and can be more or less rigid

(consider the difference between Cartesian dualism and a Platonic or Aristotelian

dualism for example), but in the end they both rely on different ways of relating to

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an inherent dualism in actuality. These ecologies, though opposite, and sometime

antagonistic toward one another, can live in harmony alongside one another as

well. The Hindu tradition is a case in point, where animism and Vedic naturalism
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can both be found.

Viveiros de Castro writes that when he uses the word shamanism he

means to point to “the capacity evinced by some individuals to cross ontological

boundaries deliberately and adopt the perspective of nonhuman subjectivities in

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order to administer the relations between humans and nonhumans.” I fell in

love with the gods of the Inca people, with the plethora of physicalities that have

become available to me since, and with the perspectival possibilities that were

opened to me via my work with Harner. I also fell in love with the gods of the

Dagara people of Burkina Faso, West Africa (more on this later), and throughout

have maintained an abiding love for God, Christ, and Mary. I came kicking and

screaming, fighting the word shaman at every turn. To the extent that it can be

used to point to someone who is competent at crossing ecological boundaries, the

term shaman does seem to apply. As do the terms metaphysician and diviner. I

must remark, as a scholarly sort of ecological border crosser, that in my

wandering between ecologies, I seem to have found something that challenges the

unfathomable horizons of Kripal’s humanism.

In addition to the apophatic and cataphatic naturalist traditions referenced

by Kripal, I delved into the totemic ecologies of the Dagara people as well as that

of Holistic Integration (Albareda and Romero). Both are largely oral traditions

that articulate actuality as continually enacted via the play of a vertical polarity

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(fire-water, light-dark respectively), and a horizontal polarity (nature-mineral,
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centrifugal-centripetal respectively). Guided by my lived experience within

these traditions, and the trickster-like interactions with mentors, I found more than

enough to challenge my hard won naturalist assumptions. In emphasizing the

human being (naturalism and Indo-European traditions), Kripal has missed at

least two very important ecologies available to “human beings” that are

referenced in the work of Descola – totemism (e.g., pre-Socratic and West

African elemental theories and Australian aboriginal absolute frames of reference)

and animist ecologies (e.g., Amerindian hierarchies of relationship).

José Ignacio Cabezón writes that our academic studies naturally lead to an

encounter with the “Other.” In his essay “The Discipline and Its Other: The

Dialectic of Alterity in the Study of Religion,” he brings awareness to three stages

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within our interactions with such alterity. First, he writes, we assume they are

not like us. Second, we (post)moderns assume they are like us, but we are more

rational. This is the stance that I took early in my own trajectory, when my
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journey led me along a neoperennialist path. This second stage can be found

not only in the linear discernment of naturalism, but also in the circular

inclusivism of animist thought. For example when Cordova distinguishes between

Native American and Euro-American ways of knowing she tells us that Native

American thought is more complex (inclusive) than Euro-American attempts to

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discern the truth. Cordova’s claims to complexity must not be assumed

uncritically. Animist complexities and naturalist complexities are different,

though not necessarily better or worse.

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 Stage three unfolds with the realization that “they are like us, but . . .” It is

this last category that can get us into trouble in our contemporary milieu. Cabezón

sees categories like “Buddhist Philosophy” and “African Philosophy” stemming

from this last stage. It suggests that we all share some innate rationality,

something universally human that can be categorized by reference to different

cultural variations. When Kripal references Ramakrishna and writes:

In numerous places in the Bengali texts, Ramakrishna’s metaphors and

teachings employ a kind of deconstruction, suggesting in effect that all
religious beliefs or attitudes are products of the environment and the
mind’s ability to take on the ‘color’ or ‘dye’ of its immediate
surroundings: ‘The mind takes on the color of whatever color it is dyed in.
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The mind is the cloth of the dyer’s room’ (KA 5:119).

These stages are good in that they weaken the foundational structures of a Self -

Other dichotomy, and yet they still nurture a subtle oppression.

There is an identification with the other via shared traits. They have

rationality, philosophy, religion, etc., but . . . it is different. They lack the highly

developed kind of self-reflexivity that we have. Ferrer and Sherman tell us that

what they term “enactive participation” can be distinguished from “archaic

participation” on the basis that the former is informed by a self-reflexivity that is

not available to the latter. We find here an emphasis on naturalist analogisms,

while Cordova emphasizes animist analogical traditions. She writes that Euro-

American traditions (naturalism) lack the depth and complexity of Native

American self-reflexivity (animism) and therefore inhabit a more superficial

ontology.

Cabezón asserts that the academy more often than not defines itself

through this polarity; we are critical, they are not. We have methodological rigor,

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theory, and self-awareness. We, the academics, the (post)moderns, still win out as

superior in this way. Cabezón clarifies that this tendency is not always overt.

Academics do not articulate an explicit difference based on (post)modern critical

awareness, rather they tend to imply it. If this assertion strikes the reader as

suspect, simply consider the following statement. I am a working diviner, learned

in various Western esoteric, neo-shamanic, and Dagara expressions of the practice.

When people come to see me as a diviner I utilize a variety of bones, shells, and

found objects to ingratiate what I referred to above as an intertwining field –

object reversal; a practice clearly different from that engaged in the day-to-day

lives of most people I meet (outside the Bay Area). I also engage spirits, ancestors,

plants, and animals through a process of personification (shamanism) whereby I

am freed to enter into various distinct realities/physicalities to receive important

information for my clients. I look to the elemental cosmology of the Dagara and

the natural sensuous dynamism and novelty that arise out of the polarities and

tensions of my lived experience. Out of these sessions, I tend to prescribe rituals,

some of which the clients do for themselves, some of which I might facilitate with

the assistance of my community. I hold a clear role within this community, one

that is found in many West African indigenous settings, that of a ritual

choreographer. During these rituals it is often necessary and beneficial to accept-

sacrifice the life of an animal or a bird (e.g., a goat or a chicken), first because

these people (e.g., Goat and Chicken People) have certain skills that I do not

possess and am in need of, and second, as a gift and offering to the ancestors or

other less earthly people of some given context. There is a certain efficacy to such

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work that can create, manipulate, and/or embolden actuality in novel and dynamic

ways. Now here is the test.

What are your immediate reactions to what you have just read? Is this the

kind of thing an academic should write about? Have you already dismissed the

argument that I have worked so hard to unfold in the pages? Cabezón writes:

An increasing number of scholars are choosing to ‘come out’ as believers

and practitioners. While professing religious belief/practice may, once
again, seem relatively unproblematic to those who work in the area of
western religions, the use of the term ‘coming out’ signals the (still)
problematic nature of such disclosure in fields like Hindu and Buddhist
Studies, and perhaps more widely. How widely? There is good reason to
think that there is still a widespread reticence to engage the question of the
religious (or nonreligious) identity of the scholar within religious studies
as a whole…. despite this, scholars of nonwestern religions continue to
‘come out,’ and by coming out—by disclosing their religious identity (or
identities, in the case of those who self-identify as belonging to multiple
religious traditions)—scholars (Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, etc.) have
complexified through their person, as it were, the all-too-easy divide
between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the facile distinction between those who are
critical and self-reflective and those who are not. This is because those of
us who have (to use a problematic expression that is still in circulation)
‘gone native’ embody a commitment to both the first-order discourses of
religion and to those meta-discourses upon which we build our identity as
scholars of religion. As Smith reminds us, ‘the ‘other’ . . . is, in fact, most
problematic when he is TOO-MUCH-LIKE-US, or when he claims to BE-
US.’ This is true, but it is equally true that the Other becomes problematic
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when we claim to BE-THEM.

I am claiming to be them, but a “them” that is potentially even more problematic

than the claims of say David S. Lopez, Richard King, or Cabezón himself. I am

claiming to be, at least partially, of the non-naturalist (Indo-European in the

context of the authors above) Other. I have accepted initiation as a bokara in the

totemic and animist inflected ecology of the Dagara tradition that is finding roots

within the “Western” context in American soil. I have accepted the great diversity

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of requests that have and will be made of me due to this choice. I ‘hold the keys’

as it were, to the ancestor house, the holiest of the holy for the Dagara. I have

agreed to walk into the inner sanctum, and have accepted the responsibilities that

trouble the honorary of this gift. I regularly perform animal sacrifice, make what

is called “black magic” in the tradition, and have accepted very particular duties

as a sob with regard to certain “deities” within the Dagara cosmology. When my

in-laws who live in New Orleans ask me what exactly it is I do, I make reference

to the voodoo culture alive and well in that fair city. They laugh, but I do not.

Voodoo, an honorable Euro-American tradition with West African roots, bears a

striking resemblance to the ways I spend my Sunday afternoons in the Bay Area.

Religious studies scholar Bado-Fralick sums up what I have just written

quite well. “According to a kind of scholarly thinking once quite common in both

ethnography and the academic study of religions,” says Bado-Fralick, “the

previous paragraphs label me an ‘insider,’ a believer, and that immediately makes

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my scholarship suspect.” But suspect to who? Here Sherman pushes me to

consider the changing landscape of academia, and to wonder what etic even
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means. Rather than some one outsider academic stance, does not etic refer

more accurately to whatever current context (made up of particular scholars and

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changing norms of scholarship) we find ourselves in? The paragraphs Bado-

Fralick mentions paint a picture of her initiatory rite of passage whereby she

became a witch in the tradition of Wicca. Her work as a scholar-witch make her

work especially relevant to my own purposes, maybe even more so than the work

of Kripal and Cabezón. Yet we are all part of the changing norms of our fields of

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study. In her discussion of her role as a scholar-practitioner that follows the words

I have quoted above, Bado-Fralick asks the following question: Is the

insider/outsider distinction even a helpful or valid one for academics today.

She writes that such distinctions tend to be used far too quickly. They

often maintain assumptions about what is considered objective-outsider-theory

contrasted with what is considered subjective-insider-practice. This point is

fundamental to the thesis of my project, namely that there are multiple ecologies

of participation available to us that either, manage categories like objective,

scholarly, subjective, and consistent in different ways, or simply do not utilize

them at all. We need to invoke an ecological perspectivism, and stand on

transspecific ground (e.g., the metaxological ground of Desmond). This is where

my critique of Kripal (as well as Cordova), comes in. This is where Cabezón’s

third stage becomes so important. We are like them, but . . .

Bado-Fralick writes that the insider/outsider distinction all too often

undergirds the assertion that there is only one objective voice. This is something,

she confirms, that most scholars do not except. Most scholars like Ferrer and

Sherman, Cordova, and Kripal try to overtly bring awareness to the dangers of

“epistemological colonialism.” Yet as evidenced by Cabezon’s third stage above,

this critical stance is not always held in the most honoring of ways. Underlining

this issue further, my own work takes steps outside of the fields of inquiry where
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the insider/outsider distinction is most often referenced. I place my project
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squarely in the hallways of contemporary philosophy. This is complicated

territory to tread for a scholar-practitioner who takes seriously the multiple and

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diverse emic understandings of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, West Africa

and the totemic absolutes of the Guugu Yimithirr of Northern Australia.

In place of strong boundaries between objective researcher and subjective

believer, Bado-Fralick suggests a shifting play of light and dark, whereby the

“wondrous multitude of sights and perspectives possible in the human experience”

are produced. These words may strike the reader as metaphorical, or even fanciful,

but Bado-Fralick is offering something far more concrete. She writes,

All knowledge – including scholarly knowledge – is a mixture of shifting

degrees of objectivity and subjectivity, distance and closeness, outsider
and insider, theory and practice. Knowing is an activity; it is a doing, a
praxis – the dynamic participation in and creation of a ‘discourse of lights
and shadows’ that constantly shifts and changes to reveal new perspectives
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or to accommodate new voices.

This sounds an awful like Desmond’s dialectic and his one given, the radical

overabundance of agapeic participation. Bado-Fralick asserts that knowledge is

dynamic and experiential. She suggests that by focusing on this play (rather than

on the dichotomy of subject-object), multiple perspectives are possible through

this practice of a scholar-practitioner. She is defending an ecological

perspectivism that seeks a metaxological ground. For my own part, and in keeping
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with Ferrer and Sherman, I go so far as to say that multiple ecologies (you

might call them worlds, though we might disagree on the meaning of the word)

are made possible through such practice. To this end, I find that it is necessary to

offer one final “coming-out-of-closet” at this point in the project.

I identify myself as a metaphysician, which in turn points to my intention

to practice speculative philosophy in the tradition of Aquinas, Hegel, Bergson,

James, Whitehead, and Desmond to name but a few. Bado-Fralick writes,

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 philosophy is itself a doing, a practice, a temperament, an engaging of
oneself with the world, a way of living in the world, a way of asking
questions, a deep curiosity about the ways we are and why. In some
important way I had never left philosophy. Its familiar presence runs along
all of the threads in my tapestry, and in no particular one. Philosophy was
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not a thread in the tapestry-it was the process of weaving itself.

The punch line is that philosophy cannot be separated from action as scholarship

and practice are inherently tied to one another. Bado-Fralick tells us that

philosophy “weaves together the disparate and sometimes competing threads of

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my scholarly training and my life experiences into a coherent whole.” I came

to speculative thought in general, and the work of Whitehead and Desmond in

particular, because I needed to make sense of my practice (lived experience

including totemism, animism, naturalism, and analogism). I needed my own

naturalist perspectivism. And here we come back to the discomfort I feel with

Kripal’s work above.

I want to assert something, and to speculate, without always needing to

revert to an apophatic stance for safety. I want to say something, without

immediately needing to say it away, without always worrying that I might

colonize the other with my words and practices. David Hufford writes that the

kind of reflexivity that is needed by all scholars, “necessarily introduces the

individual: individual scholars including ourselves as scholars, and individual

believers including all scholars, whether their beliefs be positive or negative or

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agnostic regarding the beliefs in question.” In Hufford’s account, all scholars

become scholar-practitioners. Following from Bado-Fralick’s writing a diversity

of practices (beginning with different ontological commitments, enacting different

ecologies of participation, based on different assumptions about our participatory

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predicament) serves the common good. The more ontological assertions the better

if you ask me. But this is not enough. My actions will inevitably place someone

else in danger, and I have to own this somehow. There is a dialectic here between

univocity and equivocity, assertion and critique.

Bado-Fralick utilizes the term commuter in her work, postulating that we

are all commuters to some extent, but that as scholars and practitioners we could

all work on our (re)flexibility a little bit more. Longer, broader, more challenging

commutes could go a long way toward bringing fresh air and a feeling of renewed

health into our academic halls. This kind of (re)flexibility, on Bado-Fralick’s own

account, is both good for us, and not easy to do. I agree, and yet I find it to be

essential to my sense of eros – this tendency of mine to be a transspecific

commuter between ecologies. I am somehow deeply intertwined with those words,

shamanism and divination, after all. It is a peculiar path, and I doubt for everyone,

but it is my own, and so I defend it here with the help of Kripal, Cabezón, and

Bado-Fralick among many others.

And this is where some of the self-implicating statements I have penned

above come to take their seat at the table. “Such thought,” writes Whitehead,

supplies the differences which the direct observation lacks. It can even
play with inconsistency; and can thus throw light on the consistent, and
persistent, elements in experience by comparison with what in imagination
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is inconsistent with them.

I have defended the possibility of cross-ecological perspectivism, and I have

attempted to outline important guest protocols. Cabezón writes, “I am often struck

by how overly optimistic we are concerning our ability to expose our own
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intellectual baggage.” There is no doubt that I have ‘baggage’ that I have not

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seen. We all do. The only way forward that I can imagine is to go ahead and

bump into one another and see what happens. As Viveiros de Castro wrote above,

we need to risk transformation. The Meudans of Mozambique would agree, but

they would likely phrase it differently. Following West I consider this point below,

effectively locating myself as a transspecific scholar.

Transformation and Transspecific Scholars

The presential aspect of knowing challenges the observer to face actuality

in a potentially transformative way. Writing specifically within the field of

religious studies and comparative mysticism Ferrer aligns his work with G.
539 540 541
William Barnard, Donald D. Evans, Jess Byron Hollenbeck, and Frits
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Staal. He points to Evans who understands one of the main dogmas or

impediments to the acknowledgement of spiritual realities to be “impersonalism.”

Ferrer quotes Evans who writes, “[such impersonalism is] the dogmatic rejection

of any truth claim that requires personal transformation to be adequately

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understood and appraised.” Contrasting this view B. Allan Wallace writes in

the conclusion to his book, The Taboo of Subjectivity, that for many science
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becomes a profoundly self-transformative endeavor. Where Wallace notes the

potential for transformation, Latour takes this possibility a step further when he

writes of factishes and our thoroughly modern tendency to distance ourselves

from what we are observing. By implementing what he terms “symmetrical

anthropology,” Latour juxtaposes the beliefs of a Brazilian Condomblé initiate

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and those of the “Fontenelles, the Voltaires, and Feuerbachs of the world.” The

distinction that Latour draws circles around what he understands as the creative
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chasm (post)moderns have “fabricated” between the idea of belief and reality. The

use of the term factish points to the inherently transformative nature of knowing

in general (as opposed to the potentially transformative a la Wallace above),

including the inquiries of (post)moderns.

In We Have Never Been Modern Latour writes that the Condomblé initiate

does not imagine her deity to be fully autonomous, nor does she assume it is

wholly created. The actions of the initiate affect the actuality of the deity, and the

“seating” of the deity affects the initiate in turn. To Latour’s point, the

Condomblé initiate does not hide her participation in the co-creation of her deity,

no more than she believes such participation lessens the reality of that same being.

On the other side of this equation we also find the deity co-creating

(transforming) the initiate. Latour has been reading the important work of

Viveiros de Castro. Following Descola’s early writings Viveiros de Castro writes

that a Western naturalist ontology assumes and explicates a nature-society

dualism. This is the basis of the contract Latour calls the (post)modern
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constitution.

He goes on to say that animist traditions internalize this distinction. Where

the (post)modern naturalist understands nature (exterior) to be found, and society

(interior) to be created, the animist thinks of the interior as continuous, while the

exterior (nature) is co-created. Viveiros de Castro writes:

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 Thus, every being to whom a point of view is attributed would be a
subject; or better, wherever there is a point of view there is a subject
position. Whilst our constructionist epistemology can be summed up in the
Saussurean formula: the point of view creates the object - the subject
being the original, fixed condition whence the point of view emanates -
Amerindian ontological perspectivism proceeds along the lines that the
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point of view creates the subject.

It is important to note that these Amerindian bodies are not thought of as

given but rather as made. Therefore, an emphasis on the methods for the
continuous fabrication of the body (Viveiros de Castro 1979); a notion of
kinship as a process of active assimilation of individuals (Gow 1989;
1991) through the sharing of bodily substances, sexual and alimentary -
and not as a passive inheritance of some substantial essence; the theory of
memory which inscribes it in the flesh (Viveiros de Castro 1992a: 201-7),
and more generally the theory which situates knowledge in the body
(Kensinger 1995: ch. 22; McCallum 1996). The Amerindian Bildung
happens in the body more than in the spirit: there is no 'spiritual' change
which is not a bodily transformation, a redefinition of its affects and
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capacities.

Going back to Latour’s example, both the deity and the initiate in the Condomblé

tradition are ‘made.’ They are practicing an animist form of ecological

perspectivism.

They are, following Ferrer, transformed by their dialogical interaction.

The word “they” is used intentionally. Ferrer includes both “self and world” when
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he writes of the power of participatory knowing to “bring forth.” In

emphasizing the mutuality or shared transformative power of participation, Ferrer

is placing himself on the side of Latour and the Condomblé initiate. He is

challenging us as scholars and as practitioners to engage the world in such a way

that we risk transformation and co-creation. To make this point stronger, Ferrer

and Latour are asserting that there is really no other way. Just to be clear, they are

speaking of a radical transformation of materiality, bodies, and reality.

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 Paul Stoller, an anthropologist who did his first field work in late 1980 is

well aware of these issues. He writes, “The Songhay world challenged the basic

premises of my scientific training. Living in Songhay [West Africa] forced me to

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confront the limitations of the Western philosophical tradition.” Stoller pens

these words in an epilogue to a text in which he outlines his initiatory experiences

as a Songhay sorcerer. An experience that paralleled his fieldwork as an

anthropologist struggling to emulate the model set by his scholarly idol, Evans E.
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Pritchard.

Throughout Stoller’s text he wonders if he is doing the right thing by

agreeing to be initiated as a sorcerer. He troubles himself with questions of why

he is engaging the person’s he is supposed to be observing in such a way. He

frames this as the “Evans-Pritchard Question.” Evans-Pritchard sent his cook to

be initiated in “witch-doctoring” because he did not want to get too involved. “No

red-blooded anthropologist would send a proxy,” writes Stoller, “[yet] the

question still stood: When does the anthropologist say: ‘Enough. I cannot become
552
more subjectively involved.’” While part of him wants to maintain the distance

afforded by his role as scientific observer, another part is not only drawn into the

Songhay world of sorcery but also changed by it.

Stoller finishes the epilogue of his most recent book, some twenty years

later, with these words: “Below me, I have left traces of my knowledge for the

next generation of anthropologists. Above me, the ancestors patiently await my

553
arrival.” These lines speak to a “between place” walked by Stoller and other

scholars (as well as non-scholars) who have been transformed, holding

296
commitments in multiple, sometimes seemingly discordant, ecologies. Stoller’s

struggle is especially important for my purposes here, as I weave my work within

the fields of philosophy and religious studies alongside my own initiatory

experiences with an anthropologist turned shaman and a West African diviner and

elder who holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature (Harner and Somé, respectively).

Stoller is an anthropologist and a scholar struggling with the ramifications of his

burgeoning role as a sorcerer and practitioner. It would not be wholly wrong to

write that I am a sorcerer and a philosopher (in both cases a practitioner)

struggling with my role as an academic.

Following West, we could say that the role of an academic is a relatively

new form of sorcery, one that he hopes in his case is “uwavi wa kudenga”
554
(sorcery of construction). In his book Ethnographic Sorcery, West learns an

important and subtle lesson. In respecting the Muedans he works with (inhabitants

of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique) West finds himself challenged

and left in a between place not unlike Stoller above. He marks the Muedans’

sorcery as “made up” and sees their insistence that sorcerer’s can turn into lions as

“metaphor.” In sharing these views, by his own account, West has engaged in

sorcery (a naturalist kind of teological relativity as I have argued already).

He has not left his scholarly world behind, but neither has he dismissed the

Muedans with whom he works. He understands his own ethnographic work as a

kind of “(re)making” of the Muedan world, one that can just as easily be (re)made

by a Muedan sorcerer or another scholarly colleague. The key for West is that in

defending his own epistemological and ontological assertions in relation to those

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of the Muedan, he has also risked their assertions. He has come to see his

ethnographical work and their uwavi as the play of sorcery and counter-sorcery.

West writes,

Whereas postmodern critics might suggest that my interpretative vision of

the Muedan life-world has ‘silenced’ Muedans themselves, I dare say the
Muedans with whom I worked expected me - like anyone else - to speak
assertively and authoritatively, articulating as convincingly as I was able
555
my vision of the world we shared.

To the extent that both parties are able to fully articulate their own views, or

inhabit diverse bodies (animist perspectivism), while allowing for the potentially

greater efficacy of the others views/bodies, the ground is prepared for

transformation. The point is not that they are right and so I will necessarily be

transformed, or alternatively, that I am write and so they will necessarily be

converted. At first glance it might seem that where Stoller has been transformed

by accepting initiation as a sorcerer, West has not gone quite so far. He has held

his previous position in the face of the alterity of sorcery, adopting the stance of

sorcerer, but in some ways bending it to his own ends. It would be almost

impossible to account for the degree of transformation that either of these

anthropologists has experienced in these pages, and yet Stoller does seem to have

given some ground (he has allowed himself, at least marginally, to be converted,

but he has also tried to convert them).

Both Stoller and West are wrestling with a kind of symmetrical

anthropology championed by Latour and others. In contrast to those who assume

we cannot escape our social or human context, West comes to understand sorcery,

under the guidance of the Meudans, as the transcendence of our worldly

298
perspectives. To transcend the world in this way ensures both that the world has

been (re)made, and that someone else will almost certainly come along and

(re)make it again. In this way, West has certainly transformed any (post)modern

tendencies to explain away the efficacy of this kind of transcendence. Following

Desmond’s defense of an intimate empiricism (wherein the overabundance of

agape takes precedent over any univocity), we cannot save ourselves (naturalism)

or the world (animism) from transformation. We walk a metaxological ground of

diverse ecologies and dialectics. Following the Amazonian animist traditions

referred to by Viveiros de Castro above, we have to be careful how we engage the

co-fabrication of our collective bodies. Reality can be transformed ‘through the

sharing of bodily substances, sexual and alimentary.’ But if we follow Descola

and Viveiros de Castro carefully, Stoller and Ferrer may be up to something

somewhat different than strictly available within animist ecologies.

I take them both to be suggesting something like the possibility of

transformation of interiors (possible within a naturalist ecology, e.g., conversion

and/or enlightenment), right along side the metamorphosis of the body (as

documented in animist ecologies above). They are defending both animist and

naturalist forms of world enacting perspectivism. Remember Descola’s point that

animism and naturalism are the inverse of one another, in that naturalism assumes

“nature” is found/given, while the animist assumes that people/interiors are

unchanging in the same way. For the animist, the making of materiality is

common place, while the nature of the interior, the People (whether Achuar,

Raven, or Tapir), cannot really be made nor found. Viveiros de Castro writes,

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“Bodily metamorphosis is the Amerindian counterpart to the European theme of
556
spiritual conversion.” He goes on:

The phantom of cannibalism is the Amerindian equivalent to the problem

of solipsism: if the latter derives from the uncertainty as to whether the
natural similarity of bodies guarantees a real community of spirit, then the
former suspects that the similarity of souls might prevail over the real
differences of body and that all animals that are eaten might, despite the
shamanistic efforts to de-subjectivize them, remain human. This, of course,
does not prevent us having amongst ourselves more or less radical
solipsists, such as the relativists, nor that various Amerindian societies be
557
purposefully and more or less literally cannibalistic.

I have defended both the role of cannibalism and relativism in these pages, for

they play somewhat similar and important roles. While the cannibal lurks in the

Amerindian cosmology, the relativist haunts the truth of naturalism. Cannibalism

cannot be helped, and works to destabilize the materiality of the animist tradition.

Relativism cannot be helped either, always working at the edge, and sometimes in

the center stage, to shake up the assumptions of the givens of naturalist traditions.

Cannibals eat the outsides, and relativists eat the insides, and both are necessary.

Latour, for one, has recognized the importance of animist traditions like

those of the Achuar and the Condomblé. They maintain that we co-fabricate our

bodies; that both the scientist and the Condomblé initiate are at pains to make

rather than find materiality. Animals and humans are all people, sharing a

common or similar interiority, and are differentiated based on the kind of bodies
558
they have made on any particular occasion. Just as there is an efficacy that

parallels different bodies and the ability to put on different “clothing” (bodies)
559
within animist traditions, I suggest that there are different forms of efficacy

that can be attributed to different interiorities (i.e., Tibetan Buddhist, Japanese

300
Zen Buddhist, Catholic Christian, Protestant Christian, and various forms of

Islam).

While this is a point not wholly grasped by Latour, it is a place where

Ferrer and the participatory approach excel. Where Latour is critically examining

the assumption of continuous physicality held by the scientist, Ferrer is critically

engaging the interiorities of the different naturalist traditions, claiming that not

only are their different interiors real, they are also co-created or enacted along

similar lines as the animist bodies.

The transformation and sorcery realized by engaging Latour, Viveiros de

Castro, West, and Ferrer is a metamorphosis of both interior and exterior, both

body and soul. Viveiros de Castro writes,

For the Europeans, the issue was to decide whether the others possessed a
soul; for the Indians, the aim was to find out what kind of body the others
had . . . In sum: European ethnocentrism consisted in doubting whether
other bodies have the same souls as they themselves; Amerindian
560
ethnocentrism in doubting whether other souls had the same bodies.

Following the work of all of these authors, the participatory approach I am

attempting to flesh out seeks to overcome both naturalist and animist

ethnocentrism by locating the scholar and practitioner alike as transspecific border

crossers. We can see the dangers inherent to ecological perspectivism both in

animism (in which one cannot help but cannibalize someone like oneself do to

shared interiorities and diverse bodies), and naturalism (in which one cannot help

but relativize and convert others do to distinct or different interiorities). In our

participatory milieu cannibalism and conversion happens, we cannot help but

transform and enact one another in new and interesting ways. Heeding West’s

301
warning above, we should not seek to ignore this fact and pretend that our

presence is innocuous. To do so is to disempower (or at least attempt to) the

Meudans and whoever is experienced as alter. To recognize the risk of

transformation inherent in any given interaction, both for ourselves and for the

other, is to honor the role of both parties in our comparative cross-ecological

endeavors. I now find myself turning to one of the original cross-ecological

metaphysicians in the more recent Western canon, Lévy-Bruhl.

Following Lévy-Bruhl’s Example

561 562
Following the work of Benson Saler, Stanley J. Tambiah, and
563
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Ferrer and Sherman develop a theory of multiple modes

of participation in relation to the work of early twentieth century French

philosopher Lévy-Bruhl. In the introduction their text The Participatory Turn,

Ferrer and Sherman outline three different modes of participation: archaic,

romantic, and enactive. One motivation for developing this three-fold distinction

is to assuage critics who might frame their participatory approach as nothing but a

turning back toward romantic and/or archaic modes of participation. The idea of

an archaic form of participation is rooted in the work of Lévy-Bruhl, who first

564
introduced the term participation mystique in 1910.

Ferrer and Sherman assert that contemporary participation (enactive) is in

some important way different from modes of participation that have been engaged

at other times. They hold up their enactive form of participatory knowing as a

remaking of the term participation. On this account, archaic participation is more

affectational, and tends to lack the strong subject-object division of modernity.

302
We might relate such an “archaic” form of participation with either totemic or

animistic ecologies. Enactive participation is post-Cartesian, with a strong

emphasis on naturalist and atomistic ecologies (single world, naturalism,

understood by reference to abstract space, atomism), and therefore must cope with

a strong subject-object dualism in a “self-reflexive” manner. Ferrer and Sherman

understand this enactive self-awareness as beholden to a “highly differentiated

though permeable individuality or participatory self” that is arguably different

from the “interconnected” (more communal, less differentiated) sense of self

565
found among people beholden to an expression of archaic participation. Both

pre-Cartesian and post-Cartesian people, on this account, are capable of some

form of participatory knowing, and yet there is some important distinction that

must be made between the two modes.

The distinction revolves around Ferrer and Sherman’s notion of what it

means to be self-reflexive. They write,

Whereas archaic participation (as articulated by Lévy-Bruhl) avoids the

subject/object divide through a prereflective mystical fusion with the other
and the natural world, emerging modes of participation overcome
Cartesian dualism self-reflexively by preserving a highly differentiated
though permeable individuality or participatory self as the agent of
566
religious knowing.

This distinction is problematic to the extent that it locates Lévy-Bruhl’s

participation mystique solely within archaic participation. To clarify, the potential

problem lies in linear or historical readings of these modes of participation which

come out of naturalist ecology. Locating Lévy-Bruhl’s participation mystique

solely within confines of a naturalist ecology of linear development leads to the

kind of Romantic perennialist assumptions that Ferrer and Sherman are working

303
hard to overcome. Emphasis on linearity and hierarchies of development are

exactly what Lévy-Bruhl himself worked so hard to rectify and clarify throughout
567
the entirety of his career, something Ferrer and Sherman are quite aware of.

The solution is look to Ferrer and Sherman’s enactive participation as a parallel to

what Desmond call metaxology and what I have called ecological perspectivism.

Linearity is perfectly acceptable within a naturalist ecology, but is complicated by

cross-ecological commutes. I believe this to be the basic thrust of Ferrer and

Sherman’s enactive participation, and yet a certain amount of clarification is

necessary to ensure that Ferrer and Sherman’s modes of participation do not slip

into an overly linear developmental model (a naturalist ecology).

Returning to Lévy-Bruhl, we find that he brought his book How Natives

Think to a close with these words,

If it is true that our mental activity is logical and prelogical at one and the
same time, the history of religious dogmas and of philosophical systems
568
may henceforth be explained in a new light.

Lévy-Bruhl will eventually drop the term prelogical from his work, a word he

originally used to underline the contrast he meant to illustrate through his work.

The emphasis in the citation above should be placed on the words “one and the

same time,” as well as the potential Lévy-Bruhl sees for a new explanation of age

old (at least in the case of naturalism) problems.

After writing several texts in the field of philosophy Lévy-Bruhl published

569
his first sociological work, Ethics and Moral Science, in 1902. Influenced to

some extent by Durkheim, this text garnered a certain amount of acclaim for

Lévy-Bruhl, who accepted a position as chair of the History of Philosophy

304
Department at the Sorbonne two years later. In this text, Lévy-Bruhl argues that

there can be no universal or absolute ethic, in large part due to the

incommensurability of different cultural landscapes, including what he termed

“primitive mentality.”

Emboldened by the possibility of new insights, Lévy-Bruhl focused the

rest of his career on the distinctions afforded him by considering “native” or

“primitive” thought. In these later writings Lévy-Bruhl is inspired by what he

understands, through reading ethnographical and popular accounts, as a distinct

way of imagining and relating to the world that he finds most pronounced among

“primitive peoples.” To this point he writes, “The collective representation of

primitives . . . differ very profoundly from our ideas or concepts, nor are they
570
equivalent either.” Where the ideas or concepts “we” ((post)moderns) are

familiar with follow rules of naturalism and atomism, especially the rule of non-

contradiction, the “primitive representations” are not subject to such rules.

Furthermore, Lévy-Bruhl writes,

not being genuine representations, in the strict sense of the term, they
express, or rather imply, not only that the primitive actually has an image
of the object in his mind, and thinks it real, but also that he has some hope
571
or fear connected with it, that some definite influence emanates from it.

In these passages, Lévy-Bruhl is wrestling with the knowledge that there are

people who think in very different ways from the one associated with post-

Enlightenment, post-Romantic Euro-American thought. A mistake would be made,

however, if one were to assume that Lévy-Bruhl located what he thinks of as

affective participation solely in “primitive peoples,” while defending the thesis

that only post- Greek and Hellenic Western thought relied on logic. Lévy-Bruhl

305
did not defend this position, yet many critics understood his work to be doing just

this, among other questionable things.

Lévy-Bruhl has been roundly criticized for being an armchair

572
ethnographer, for his tendency to generalize all “primitive people” as if they
573
made up some one universal category, and for clearly demarcating a primitive

form of participation wherein so called primitive people did not have logical or

rational thought available to them. In the introduction to the 1985 edition of How

Natives Think, C. Scott Littleton counters these criticisms by offering a strong

defense of Lévy-Bruhl’s original contributions to the field of anthropology and

574
academia at large. In considering Littleton’s defense, it is appropriate to

consider the letters and critical papers exchanged between Lévy-Bruhl and E. E.

Evans-Pritchard, one of the earliest and most respected social anthropologists.

Evans-Pritchard, who was one of Lévy-Bruhl earliest supporters, was also

one of the first authors to recognize Lévy-Bruhl’s serious lack of fieldwork.

Littleton writes that Lévy-Bruhl was well aware of his lack of actual contact with

the people he was considering. Lévy-Bruhl responded to Evans-Pritchard’s

criticism on this lack of fieldwork by replying to Evans-Pritchard that he

understood the dangers of using technical ethnographies and the memoirs and

traveller’s tales that were so popular throughout the last several hundred years. He

defends his use of some ethnographies and Jesuit memoirs, not because they

understood or interpreted what they saw in any acceptable way, but that they

managed to record experiences outside the norms of European culture. This is an

important point when considering Lévy-Bruhl’s contribution to the academy. In

306
reference to Holbraad’s work above, Lévy-Bruhl’s work is attempting to think

through alterity, to be transformed by it, rather than keep it at a distance (think

about, modernity) or place it out of reach of critique and/or mutual transformation

(thinking with, postmodernity). For his part, Holbraad writes that Lévy-Bruhl’s

work is the very best example of the twentieth century French anthropological
575
tradition and its attempts to think through and be transformed by the alterity.

Lévy-Bruhl finds in these ethnographic works a worthwhile starting point

for his own assertions that there are in fact different ways of knowing available to
576
human beings. He is most concerned with the possibility of multiple ways of

knowing, and less concerned with the accuracy of these memoirs and early

ethnographies. As Maurice Leenhardt notes, Lévy-Bruhl never attempted to

describe any particular group of people (“primitives”); and “it would even be

possible to say that the primitive man of whom he speaks does not really
577
exist.” Lévy-Bruhl’s contribution is not ethnographical – as in the positivist

leanings of the British anthropological tradition of thinking about – rather it is

philosophical – as in the French anthropological attempts to think with (see

Holbraad above). He is telling us that there are multiple modes of participation

available to all of us, no matter who we are. If mental activity is both logical and

mystical at the same time, then new solutions open up to old dilemmas regarding

not only philosophy but within comparative religion and culture in general. The

reaction against Lévy-Bruhl’s terminology (i.e. prelogical, primitive, native) was

swift and far reaching, while the appreciation of his work is only more recently

felt within academia.

307
 It is certainly true that he could, at times, overstate his evidence to prove a

point. Jonathan Z. Smith offers one very important example of Lévy-Bruhl’s

578
overstating a point in his essay, “I Am a Parrot (Red).” In this essay Smith

points to a passage in Lévy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think, where he quotes at some

length a passage from Karl von den Steinen’s (1887-1888) Unter den

Naturvilkern Zentral-Brasiliens; an ethnographical report on the Bororo people of

Brazil. Von den Steinen writes that the Bororo people think of themselves as red

parrots, but relays this understanding as beholden to a kind of metaphorical

ambiguity. Lévy-Bruhl removes all ambiguity when quoting Von den Steinen,

asserting that the Bororo think of themselves as red parrots in the literal present

tense. Smith points out that scholars from Frazer to Cassirer took Lévy-Bruhl’s

account to heart, each in their own way downplaying the ambiguity of the Bororo

story as relayed by Von den Steinen. While Smith offers an important reminder of

how easily ethnographical materials can be bent to a scholar’s purpose, it should

not be lost on the reader that Viveiros de Castro’s structural perspectivism

(animism) makes exactly this same point almost one hundred years later. A

contribution that Wagner and many others have understood to be a radical new
579
beginning for the field of anthropology.

It is also true that Lévy-Bruhl did not deserve all of the criticism that came

his way. Following in the footsteps of Franz Boas, Paul Radin wrote a book

entitled Primitive Man as Philosopher in 1927. Adhering to the cognitive

relativism put forward by his mentor, Radin takes aim at Lévy-Bruhl’s

“unfortunate” and “erroneous” claims that so-called primitive persons lacked any

308
form of logic. He paints Lévy-Bruhl’s work as an heir to an outmoded way of

thinking, one that has total disregard for the ways in which other non-European
580
people have developed their own working logics. In the foreword to Radin’s

text, John Dewey asserts that in this text Radin has opened up radically new

horizons of thought regarding cross-cultural conceptions of what it means to be an

intellectual. Radin’s work, on Dewey’s account, will inevitably become the

“storm-center” of heated debate, as it formulates the thesis that in many if not all

earlier cultures there was among them a small intellectual class no different in
581
kind from those found in “civilized” European culture. To this end, we can see

Radin’s work as an early precursor of the Sage Philosophy of Henry Odera

582
Oruka, and the conversation regarding ethnophilosophy set off by the
583
publication of Paulin J. Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality.

But if we follow Radin’s critique too closely we lose sight of Lévy-

Bruhl’s contributions to our contemporary academy. Radin was student of Boas,

as I mentioned above, and heir to the cognitive relativism that would mark

modern anthropology throughout the twentieth century. Littleton qualifies his

introduction to How Natives Think when he titles it “Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the

Concept of Cognitive Relativity.” In this essay Littleton makes a case for Lévy-

Bruhl’s important contributions to the very trend (cognitive relativity) in

anthropology (and academia in general) that he is starkly contrasted against.

Where Radin and several others read Lévy-Bruhl as defending an indefensible

triumphalism of the European intellect, Lévy-Bruhl understands himself to be

doing quite the opposite.

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 Leenhardt points out that to a large extent the choice of terminology was

intentional, and meant to highlight differences; not among people, but rather

modes of participation. Littleton adds to the conversation by tracing Lévy-Bruhl’s

struggle through his written work to overcome some of these objections. It is

helpful to continue to consider the important dialogue that emerged between

Evans-Pritchard and Lévy-Bruhl on these topics. In an early essay Evans-

Pritchard recognizes Lévy-Bruhl’s tendency to over universalize the category of

“primitive,” while pointing to a host of other serious criticisms leveled at Lévy-

Bruhl’s work. Almost in the same breath Evans-Pritchard writes:

The criticisms of Lévy-Bruhl's theories which I have already mentioned,

and I have by no means exhausted the objections to his views, are so
obvious and so forcible that only books of exceptional brilliance and
originality could have survived them. Yet each year fresh polemics appear
to contest his writings and pay tribute to their validity. I suggest that the
[powerful influence of] his writings, in spite of their methodological
deficiencies . . . is due to the facts that he perceived a scientific problem of
cardinal importance and that he approached this problem along
sociological lines instead of contenting himself with the usual
psychological platitudes . . . We must not, therefore, dismiss his writings
with contempt, as many anthropologists do, but must try to discover what
in them will stand the test of criticism and may at the same time be
584
considered an original contribution to science.

Evans-Pritchard offers a plan whereby future scholars might approach Lévy-

Bruhl’s work in a useful way by detailing a series of relevant questions with

which to approach his writings. He wonders what Lévy-Bruhl means when he

writes that there is some clear distinction between “primitive modes of thought”

and “educated European” modes of thought. He wants to know what Lévy-Bruhl

really intends with his categories of “pre-logical,” “mystical,” and “participation.”

In defense of his own work, Lévy-Bruhl writes:

310
 My intention was to introduce the idea (which seemed to me to be new),
that there is a real difference between primitive mentality and that of more
developed civilizations . . . I do not at all deny mystical elements exist in
the mentality of the English and French peoples, etc.: but I thought I ought
to insist on the rational character of this mentality in order that its
differences from the primitive might emerge clearly. I admit that in my
work (and it is here that ' I plead guilty ') the savage is presented as more
mystical and the civilized man as more rational than they in fact are. But I
have done this ' on purpose': I intended to bring fully to light the mystical
aspect of primitive mentality in contrast with the rational aspect of the
mentality of our societies . . . Perhaps I have been wrong in insisting so
strongly on these differences. I thought that the anthropological school had
done enough to make the similarities evident. On this point, I think those
585
who will follow us will know how to keep the right balance.

Evans-Pritchard was convinced by this exchange with Lévy-Bruhl, and continued

586
to understand his work in a very favorable light. Littleton picks up this thread

when he writes, “What his critics failed to realize, of course, was that Lévy-Bruhl
587
was as much, if not more of a [cognitive] relativist as they were.”

By asserting his “law of participation,” Lévy-Bruhl had already set the

stage for the upheaval Dewey imagined Radin’s work might stir up. Contrary to

so many of his peers, Lévy-Bruhl’s theorizing posited multiple modes of

participation that were different in kind, rather than degree. On his account,

European logic is not a more advanced version of primitive ways of knowing.

Rather, European logic is a notable expression of one form of participation, while

what he termed “primitive mentality” is a pronounced expression of another kind

of participation all together, participation mystique. Lévy-Bruhl’s point was not to

assert a progress-oriented linear development from primitive to modern, but rather

to point out that there are multiple ecologies of participation available to human
588 589
beings. Logic is not lost on the Nuer, the Crow, or the Trobrianders of Papua
590
New Guinea. Nor is Nyāya logic equivalent to ancient Greek, or ancient Greek
311
equivalent to contemporary logics available to us today. Considering this point

from the comparative lens I am developing here, these can all be see as

expressions of animist and/or naturalist expressions of logic, but this is beyond

Lévy-Bruhl’s basic point that there are different logics available to human beings.

He writes,

The essential difference between these ‘savages’ [here he is referencing

the terminology of the Jesuit missionaries] and [Chinese and Western
people] . . . is not the result of an intellectual inferiority peculiar to
them . . . it is an actual state which, according to the Jesuit fathers, is
591
explained by their social conditions and their customs.

By making use of certain anthropological data and Jesuit memoirs, Lévy-Bruhl

notices that some of the non-Western people met in these written accounts walk in

the world in a way that emphasizes a different form of participation than most

Europeans and civilized persons. This is not to say that the Crow or the Europeans

are not capable of one or the other forms of participation, but that they place value

on different ecologies and ontological starting points.

What is important for Lévy-Bruhl is the possibility that such ecologies

might exist. He sees in this a great explanatory power that could solve many

philosophical and religious problems faced by not only Western authors, but by

any person who seeks to move into a comparative stance with regard to the

incredible diversity of people and ecologies of participation available to

humankind. In passage after passage, Lévy-Bruhl references authors’ accounts

that note a difference in cultivation rather than physiology or mental capacity. He

continues, “In them, therefore, as in the Iroquois, the distaste for the discursive

processes of thought did not proceed from constitutional inability, but from the

312
 592
general customs which governed the form and object of their mental activity.”

One set of circumstances (hunting in a forest) requires a totally different mode of

participation than another (writing in an office).

Lévy-Bruhl quickly dismisses all judgments offered by the Jesuits and

travelers that he reads. These non-Western people are not incapable, lazy, or naïve.

They are in fact quite proficient, wise, and competent; capable of scientific and

discursive thought. But this is not what interests Lévy-Bruhl most. He writes that

we should not assume that everyone should reason like us, but rather that we

should be interested in the different ways that people engage their worlds. So-

called “primitive mentality” is not interesting as a pre-cursor to logic, but as a

highly refined and subtle form of participation that is markedly different from

discursive participation. Lévy-Bruhl writes:

Then we shall no longer define the mental activity of primitives

beforehand as a rudimentary form of our own, and consider it childish and
almost pathological. On the contrary, it will appear to be normal under the
conditions in which it is employed, to be both complex and developed in
its own way. By ceasing to connect it with a type which is not its own, and
trying to determine its functioning solely according to the manifestations
peculiar to it, we may hope that our description and analysis of it will not
593
misrepresent its nature.

What is offered in these pages is the cognitive relativity that Lévy-Bruhl’s critics

are so quick to point out that he lacks. There is even the hint of a stronger stance

like the ecological perspectivism defended here. Though open to many criticisms,

his concern seeks to be comparative in the best sense of the word. He does not

seek to incorporate the Iroquois, the Bantu, or the Barotse into his own Western-

European framework, rather he is struck by their particular ways of participation.

He does not dismiss an emphasis on memory and story, nor a particular use of

313
sense awareness that locates what seem to the Western person to be “invisible

spirits and intangible forces” as sensate and integral to the formation of the world.

It is this intuition into radically different ecologies of participation that marks

Lévy-Bruhl’s contribution to the academy.

Following the outline of Lévy-Bruhl’s basic intuitions regarding multiple

ecologies of participation, contemporary authors such as Tambiah, Saler, and

Hanegraaff have all sought to discern at minimum two distinct forms of

participation. Tambiah turns to Lévy-Bruhl because he sees in his work the

beginnings of a truly pluralistic understanding of humanity. Tambiah admires

Lévy-Bruhl for his turning away from the linear developmental models of his

contemporaries (Tylor, Frazer, Mauss, and Durkheim in particular), and for

seeking to honor so-called primitive ways of knowing on their own terms. Rather

than see the thought of various indigenous people as lacking or irrational,

Tambiah understands Lévy-Bruhl approaching these different ways of living and

knowing as containing their own coherence and “rationality.”

Tambiah takes from this project a distinction between participation and

causality. These are the terms used to underline the assertion that there are indeed

diverse ways of knowing available to human beings, and that modern notions of

logic and rationality are not to be heralded as the only forms available to us.

Tambiah writes,

In short we are asked to face the possibility of other cultures, civilizations,

or epochs presenting us with alternative categories and systems of thought,
which would exercise to the utmost our powers of empathy and
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translation.

He underlines this point by looking the French School of History (the Annales

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School), especially to the work of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Both of these

authors acknowledged the importance of Lévy-Bruhl’s work on their own writing

and thought. Febvre documents the all pervasive role of Christianity in sixteenth

century European thought. He asserts that it would be absolutely impossible for

someone writing during this time to want to escape Christianity. To rebel or chafe

against Christian orthodoxy would require that someone question this same

orthodoxy, and Febvre writes that this is well nigh impossible during the sixteenth
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century. Though his point may be overstated, it still requires a certain pause.

Tambiah looks to the example of the witchcraze of the seventeenth

century to underline this point. The differences in what constitutes rational and

logical cannot be divorced from the context wherein these modes of thought and

action are established. The witchcraze might seem completely irrational from the

perspective of post-Enlightenment thought, but within the early seventeenth-

century this is simply not the case. The existence of both witches and magic

makes complete rational sense within a pre-Enlightenment context of a Christian

cosmology and worldview. A somewhat similar point can be found in comparing

neo-Darwinian and radically constructivist assertions in the natural and social

sciences. This kind of (post)modern atomism would seem very much a “craze” to

the sixteenth century philosopher. We can find here the first lesson Tambiah

draws from Lévy-Bruhl. Considerations about rationality need not jeopardize our

ability to understand very different societies, premises, and categories as

internally coherent. If we are going to make comparisons across cultures, contexts,

and epochs, then we cannot do so via the category of rationality as understood

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from within our own culture or epoch. We cannot divorce our comparisons from

our cultural milieu.

It is not generous to attribute pre-modern Africans with theoretical thought,

as Robin Horton has done, only to eventually relegate that same theoretical idiom
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to an inferior position when compared to Western theoretical systems. Lévy-

Bruhl lays the way for a different kind of comparison all together, one that honors

different modes of enaction on their own terms, in their own contexts. This is

done without reference to the more evolved, developed, or rational ways of

knowing and living some particular theorist identifies herself with. For those that

would sound the alarm of vulgar relativism (which usually denotes a thinking

with style of relativism as opposed to thinking through style, see chapter 5), this

path does not lead toward such a thing. Within any given context a coherent

definition can be given regarding what can be considered rational or logical.

Rationality is not relative within a context, but between contexts. This is not the

self-understanding of early modern to contemporary scientific and analytic

triumphalism, but as Tambiah points out, it is certainly in keeping with post-

Kuhnian philosophy of science. It is also in keeping with most postcolonial and

post-feminist comparative philosophy and religion currently underway within the

academy.

By way of tying the current discussion into my own comparative project,

we can begin to see the usefulness of articulating distinct ontological starting

points, and allowing for the incredible multiplicity of ecologies that can arise out

of the interactions and different degrees of emphasis that are placed on such

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ontological assumptions in any given context. We can begin to Lévy-Bruhl as an

important and early forerunner of the work of authors like Viveiros de Castro,

Descola, and Holbraad all considered here.

By way of further clarifying this similarity, we can look to Tambiah who

brings us back to the distinction between participation and causality. Tambiah

writes that

the second major legacy of Lévy-Bruhl’s later thought was the postulation
of two coexisting mentalities in mankind everywhere – the mystical
mentality and the rational-logical mentality, though their relative weight
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and salience may differ from primitive to modern times.

This is a subtle point that must be considered carefully, while always keeping in

mind the important role of cognitive relativity in Lévy-Bruhl’s thought.

Tambiah follows the work of Sigmund Freud, Bergson, James, C.S.

Pearce, Langer, Gregory Bateson, Alfred Shutz, Carol Gilligan, Sudhir Kakar,

Goodman, Ludwig, and Michel Foucault to make his point, though always with a

critical eye. He sees each of these authors emphasizing different poles of this

continuum, and notes how each in their own turn can place too much emphasis on

one expression or the other (e.g. Freud and Langer each assimilate moist mystical

participation under the auspices of dry rational or discursive thought). There are

numerous important details regarding each of these authors, as well as in relation

to the proposition that mentality is somehow constituted by some kind of play

between two poles continuum. This is not, however, the place to go into great

detail regarding these issues. What is important to consider is the explanatory

power such a theory can offer in an increasingly in relation to our participatory-

comparative predicament. Differences between cultures, peoples, and epochs can

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be explained by reference to tensions existing between different poles on a

continuum, but we have to be careful exactly how such a continuum is defined.

The self-understanding of any one group cannot be held as a standard for all

others, but rather seen as one expression one among many. In affect, I find Lévy-

Bruhl’s important distinction between two distinct modes of participation, which

is drawn out in more detail by Tambiah and Hanegraaff, to be a similar and early

precursor to the distinction I make between animist and naturalist ecologies.

It is important at this juncture to point out that Tambiah speaks of

participation and causality (instrumental causality for Hanegraaff) as two poles of

a continuum. I use the term participation somewhat differently. In essence, I have

decided to term the variety of attempts at dialectic (Desmond), identification

(Descola), or enaction (Ferrer and Sherman) in relation to the term participation.

Following from this change in terminology, causal mentality can be seen in light

of an ecology of naturalism (and in its more abstract expressions, atomism). What

Tambiah and Hanegraaff refer to as participation, I clarify by reference to an

ecology of animism. I understand an emphasis on Polarity (a double-identification

with interiority and physicality of the other) in light of totemism, and assert the

possibility of a more primary or agapeic participation as well. Having clarified my

change of terminology in this way, it is necessary at this point to turn back to the

distinction Ferrer and Sherman make between archaic and enactive modes of

participation.

They draw a line between pre-reflective and self-reflective, pre-critical

and post-critical modes of participation. We have to be very careful on this point.

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Lévy-Bruhl led in his early writing with a distinction between prelogical and

logical thought, yet he quickly understood how easily this distinction could be

misunderstood. Ferrer and Sherman draw attention to Lévy-Bruhl’s later work,

when they write, “both cognitive styles coexisted to some extent in all human
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beings.” The point is subtle, but must be made explicit. Lévy-Bruhl has

distinguished multiple ecologies of participation that can and do co-exist in

different groups of people.

This means that non-Cartesian people were self-reflective in some way.

They enjoyed some form of naturalist participation. The point can be easily drawn

out by comparing the dual tendencies in the Western tradition toward naturalism

and atomism, where atomism (e.g., Cartesian dualism) is understood as an

abstract attempt at univocity/comprehension stemming directly out of a naturalist

ecology. By way of further elaborating the point that naturalist tendencies exist in

a great diversity of linguistic groups all around the world, we can look to the wide

distribution of relative frames of reference noted by Levinson and his peers (e.g.,
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Southern India, Central America, West Africa, Papua New Guinea, Amazonia).

The opposite point, again following Levinson, also holds; namely that we find

intrinsic frames of reference (which I associate with animist ecologies) distributed

almost universally through human languages around the world. This is not to say

that all linguistic groups engage these intrinsic frames of reference in the same

way, but rather that on close examination a wide diversity of uses can be found.

What follows is that what we see when we look at different peoples is

more a matter of cultivation, than of differences in capability or competence.

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Some languages cultivate certain frames of reference or forms of identification,

whether animist, naturalist, or totemic, than others. This may seem a simple point,

but it must be discerned from two common expressions of (post)modern atomism,

thinking about and thinking with (see chapter 5). I am defending a version of

thinking through, from which it follows that different ecologies cultivate and

enact different and equally real interiorities, physicalities, and polarities. It

follows that as a practical application of this assertion regarding ecologies of

participation we can encourage what I have termed ecological perspectivism, the

commuting between ecologies. From such a transspecific/ participatory standpoint

one could argue those people who overemphasized any one ecology of

participation at the expense of others might need to reimagine the balance struck

between these different forms of participation.

By way of example, it is not that (post)moderns need to be more self-

reflective. Nurturing naturalist and atomist tendencies when strongly identified

with naturalist and atomist ecologies is not terribly helpful if you want to shift

perspective (in Viveiros de Castro’s strong sense of the word). If you find

yourself having a problem with positivist tendencies to “think about,” the cure for

what ails you is not thinking with (leading to critiques of critiques ad

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infinitum). Rather, atomist ecologies of the kind we all suffer (see chapter 2),

might try to relax their reliance on naturalist causality and look to animist,

totemic, or even agapeic forms of participation. To put it rather bluntly, modern

and postmodern authors are simply thinking too hard, isolated, and stuck in their

heads. We do not need more of the same. Rather we need to see the game

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(Latour’s (post)modern constitution) for what it is, and give it a rest.

When Ferrer and Sherman make a distinction between archaic and

enactive forms of participation they are balancing somewhat precariously on a

questionable historical and/or developmental edge. I do not think this point is lost

on Ferrer and Sherman, yet it needs to be stated more clearly. By writing of

archaic, romantic, and enactive participation they are allowing for a linear-

historical reading that is tenuous at best. They do not defend such a reading, yet

their work is not clear enough on this point. As I have said, I do not think that this

is their intention, and yet it is made possible by the way that they have framed

their modes of participation.

What I hope to have shown is that moving from consideration of

epistemology and linguistic relativity toward a more robust reading of multiple

ecologies is more aligned with Lévy-Bruhl’s own work. This is exactly the

direction Ferrer and Sherman take when they assert, against W. E. Hocking’s

“scandal of plurality” and fear of the loss of meaning, a plurality of ontologically

real worlds. They write,

Both the underlying anxiety and the persuasive force of this intuition fade
away if we consider the possibility of a plurality of culturally mediated but
existing religious worlds capable of anchoring the various religious
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languages.

Notice how the use of the comparative categories in these pages allows the

alleviation of these anxieties and fears.

Linearity is not wrong, history is not the obsolete, truth is not either Truth

or nothing. Linearity and physical continuity are hallmarks of naturalist ecologies,

while circularity and interior continuity are hallmarks of animist ecologies. As

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varieties of ecologies are allowed into our awareness, we do not lose the ground

of Truth; rather Truth is understood as that which undergirds naturalist ecologies,

especially in the context of naturalism’s more abstract (atomist) assumptions.

Such a “Truth” cannot be conflated with an animist emphasis on multiple

bodies/worlds and the absolute Polarity and theories of correlations that totemic

ecologies assert. Rather, naturalism and its emphasis on the logic of the

one/ultimate/truth can be understood as one dialectic between univocity and

equivocity among many. In the end the solution I offer is to nurture diverse

ecologies of participation. In this way Ferrer and Sherman’s enactive approach

can be seen as nurturing multiple ecologies of participation, as opposed to what

they term Romantic participation that was entirely too enamored with naturalist

abstractions and hierarchies of causality.

From this same perspective, archaic participation can be seen to point

toward a greater emphasis on totemic and/or animist ecologies, as opposed to the

cross-ecological stance of the participatory approach (enactive participation). Is

there anything wrong with such totemic and animist ecologies? Not inherently,

but there may be problems, for example in cross-ecological dialogue. An Achuar

hunter (living largely within an animist ecology), for example, may need to leave

the parameters of his/her local forest by way of defending that same forest from

outside forces that wish to cut down and sell the trees that live there. An ability to

engage the written word or manage a bank account (highly naturalist forms of

participation) may become vital to this endeavor. This leads to a crucial issue

regarding the unavoidable tendency to bump into other ecologies in our

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increasingly participatory predicament (also known as globalization). The point

argued here is not that we all must communicate with one another, but rather that

a certain majority of us must do so. “For the liberal state,” writes Habermas,

has an interest in the free expression of religious voices in the public arena
and in the political participation of religious organization. It must not
discourage religious persons and communities from also expressing
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themselves as such.

Such interactions, says Habermas, might act as the recursive methodology

defended here. An invitation extended to radical alterity might just help us to

unpack our naturalist and atomist (e.g., Habermas’ radical naturalism/scientism)

assumptions. He continues to underline this point when he writes,

One route by which a multidimensional reason that is not exclusively

fixated on its reference to the objective world can achieve a self-critical
awareness of its boundaries is through a reconstruction of its own
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genesis.

Habermas is defending a naturalist perspectivism that frees itself from the bonds

of particular univocal statements of Being. I have described this as the idiocy of

metaphysicians who risk relativity and conversion. If we add to this the roles of

divinatory and shamanic perspectivism – if we also risk the givenness of Nature –

then we are on our way toward a comparative path like the ecologies of

participation defended here. This, I have argued throughout these pages, is for the

good.

There will invariably be pockets of intense focus and elaboration of

narrowly defined ecologies beholden to one ontological starting point or another.

These ecologies should be encouraged, to the extent that they somehow encourage

the good, defined by recourse to the multiple ecologies available to us. A

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corporation or agri-business cannot be allowed to wholly ignore animist ecologies
604
of participation as they seek to procure more “natural resources,” especially

when they do so in parts of the world where animists make their homes. If their

business practices endanger the bodies of these the People (Wari, Achuar, Jaguar,

and/or Tree) through clear-cutting and policies that contribute to global warming,

they should at least be reconsidered in this cross-ecological light. Particular

naturalist ecologies (e.g., Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, communist, Western

scientific, and democratic) should be allowed to develop their own horizons of

being or not-being, to the extent that they do not lose sight of the natural limits

placed on comprehensive univocities in any given ecology, especially those

beholden to naturalism and atomism. To assert particular curiosities

(comprehensive univocities) to the point of distancing one self all together from

intimacy (eros and agape) and equivocity (diversity) is to risk fundamentalism

and literalism. Such lists could go on and on, but it is now time to turn to a

particular point that lies at the heart of this project.

In these pages, I find it necessary to defend an evolutionary theory, while

being careful not to fall into naturalist and (especially) atomist ecologies that can

be found both within the contemporary sciences as well as in popular culture.

Such an evolutionary theory is foundational to the participatory approach, and by

way of honoring this piece of the participatory puzzle I now turn to a

consideration of participatory knowing, and a further examination of Ferrer and

Sherman’s enactive participation in light of the enactive approach, especially as

defended by Evan Thompson.

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 The Enactive Approach and Participatory Evolution

Moving away from atomistic ecologies, Ferrer’s participatory knowing is

modeled on the enactive approach of Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela,

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Eleanor Rosch, and Thompson. This is not the place to go into a long and

detailed analysis of the enactive approach, or much less contemporary theories of

evolution, and yet a brief consideration of enaction is necessary for my overall

project. In essence, the issue that is addressed in these pages is an ontological

rather than an epistemological question. We can see in the enactive approach a

calling into question of the narrow epistemological focus of scientific positivism

that is still so prevalent today. Subsequently, we see the enactive approach

moving from a strict adherence to efficient causation in the sciences

(contemporary atomism), to a more robust consideration of the possibility of

teleology or purpose in those same sciences. Here we see the potential for a more

robust naturalism, but also the more radical potential for a consideration of

animist and totemic ecologies in our contemporary sciences. Writing out of a

purely naturalist set of assumptions, Nagel has written,

Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any

resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically
incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how
we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the
606
standard version of how the evolutionary process works.

Nagel finds himself looking for some neutral monism that can both accommodate

his need for teleology, without shaking too deeply his modernist (atomistic)

ecological commitments. I mention Nagel not because I mean to defend his

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neutral monism, but rather because he is a perfect example of someone so deeply

embedded in this ecology. He is also a person who is willing to consider the

logical limitations of its most extreme adherents.

It must be clarified at this point that conversations regarding causality are

largely naturalist in character, while conversations that attribute interiority to non-

humans tend to be animistic, and conversations who theories of correlations based

on polarities tend to be totemic. We will see that although the enactive approach

seeks to attribute some kind of autonomy to the non-human world, it generally

falls short of attributing personhood or interiority to physicality. The use of

enactive participation by Ferrer and Sherman, as opposed to the enactive approach,

tends to remain silent on this issue, while the particular expression of the

participatory approach I defend hear adopts a stronger cross-ecological reading

that defends such interiority (as well as totemic polarities). I begin by considering

the enactive approach in some detail below, before returning to the enactive

participation (alternatively, participatory enaction) of the participatory approach

at the end of this section.

Evan Thompson spells out five basic ideas that he says are unified in

Varela, Rosch, and Thompson (The Embodied Mind):

1) Living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and

maintain themselves, and thereby also enact or bring forth their own

cognitive domains.

2) The nervous system is an autonomous dynamic system: It actively

generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of

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 activity . . . The nervous system does not process information in the

computationalist sense, but creates meaning.

3) Cognition is the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and

embodied action. Cognitive structures and process emerge from

recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action.

4) A cognitive being’s world is not a prespecified, external realm,

represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or

brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of

coupling with the environment.

5) Experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any

understanding of the mind, and needs to investigated in a careful

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phenomenological manner.

Following Thompson’s first point, cognition cannot be reduced to positivist

causation and epiphenomena, nor can it be isolated from interactions and

communion (seen as some objective neutral awareness). On Thompson’s third

point (and also related to his first), cognition is participatory in the sense that

Ferrer has termed presential. In contrast to a naturalist ecology like the Cartesian

model wherein someone (Being) knows some particular objective something

(Nature), participatory knowing is understood as an “embodied presence pregnant

608
with meaning that transforms both self and world.” Cognition is not abstract or

distant, but subject to the constant interplay of “perception and action.” The fourth

idea articulated by Thompson suggests that – following a similar line of thought

as Ferrer when he asserts the existence of participatory events – actuality is not

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 609
simply subjective or objective. Actuality is not some prespecified “out there,”

no more than it is something that can be isolated “in here.” Cognition is some

kind of “relational domain” or participatory event.

In an edited volume on the subject of enaction, John Stewart writes that an

enactive approach offers a viable paradigm for the field of cognitive science. He

affirms that by signifying cognition as a fundamental feature of living organisms,

enaction creates a clear path beyond “Cartesian dualism, idealistic monism, and
610
materialistic monism.” Stewart goes on to write that within the enactive

approach an organism begins to look less like a thing, and more like a “process
611
with the particular property of engendering itself indefinitely.” Following

Thompson’s fifth point above, Stewart places cognition as a fundamental locus of

critical inquiry; but what is cognition? To answer this question, Thompson offers

a brief account of the enactive approach and its “theory of autopoiesis” in relation

to Kant’s consideration of “organic nature” as found in the Critique of Judgment.

Thompson writes that Kant offered a far-reaching account of organism

bearing important similarities to the autopoeitic theory proffered by the enactive

approach. In his theory of organic nature, writes Thompson, Kant gave a

teleological rather than a mechanistic account of organism. He longed for a future

Newton, one that could account for the production of a simple blade of grass

without recourse to the mechanism of a Cartesian world and Newtonian physics.

“So certain [are the limits of mechanical explanation],” writes Kant, “that we may

boldly state that it is absurd for human beings even to attempt [mechanistic
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explanations of organized beings].” Following an essay written by John F.

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 613
Cornell (“A Newton of the Grassblade?”), Thompson outlines three major

Kantian assertions that he sees undergirding Kant’s teleological theory.

First, to be organic is to be self-organizing. Organisms have purpose, and

therefore are teleological. Second, mechanism cannot account for organism.

Mechanistic thought is fundamentally tied to efficient causation, while a

teleological understanding requires final causality of some kind. Finally, no

matter the extent to which efficient causation is explanatory within the context of

biology, such causation will invariably have to be understood within a teleological

614
understanding of organism. Cornell writes,

The very recognition of a thing as a living organism, according to Kant's

analysis, entails thinking of the end of a sequence of causes as itself a
cause; this is quite the opposite of the mechanistic causal notion. A tree, to
take Kant's simple example, displays characteristic properties suggesting
615
that it is both cause and effect of itself.

For Thompson and Cornell, Kant lays a path for our contemporary conversations

regarding teleology. For both of these authors, Kant’s Critique of Judgment calls

into question a strict neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.

In contrast, for biologist cum philosopher Michael T. Ghiselin, authors

like Thompson and Cornell have it all wrong. Darwin is the Newton of the blade

of grass, and “treating teleology as a Kantian regulative principle” is a thing of the

616 617
past. “Teleology,” writes Ghiselin, “is metaphysical delusion.” Thompson

considers critiques like the one offered by Ghiselin. He writes that given certain

advances in our contemporary sciences, one might be moved to consider Darwin’s

theory in keeping with Kant’s criteria. He clarifies that contemporary

conversations revolving around the relations between mechanism and teleology

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are not as straightforward today as they were when all that was available to

theorists was Newtonian physics. Classical mechanistic views in physics have

been superseded by contemporary physics wherein causality is not understood in

strictly Newtonian mechanistic terms, or explicitly teleological ones. Biologists

and philosophers alike have come to understand causality in “teleonomic” or

“functionalist” terms that are not beholden to classic Greek understandings of

teleology that required final (backward causation for Thompson), formal

618
(anthropomorphic, Thompson), or material causality (vitalism, Thompson).

There is some kind of middle road between classic Greek teleology and modern

mechanism being struck in contemporary science. But Thompson asserts,

following Cornell, that Darwinian evolution as it was first advanced was

thoroughly Newtonian and so fails the Kantian parameters set above.

Kant, writes Thompson, was concerned with organization at the level of

organic nature. Thompson continues by telling us that the

Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection does not provide any

account of organization at the level of biologically organized individuals
that reproduce. Moreover, Darwin’s Newtonian framework, in which
design arises from natural selection conceived of as an external force, does
619
not address the endogenous self-organization of the organism.

Darwin’s original theory was not complete, by this account, and so we must look

to new theories of “biological self-organization” to fully address Kant’s concerns

(e.g., the enactive approach).

Returning to the three-fold Kantian stance above, there are organic

organizations that cannot be accounted for simply by reference to efficient cause.

Kant writes that we cannot hope to find a priori the slightest basis for that

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[purposive] unity unless we seek it beyond the concept of nature rather than in
620
it.” Thompson contrasts the views of nineteenth-century British natural

theologian William Paley and Kant in relation to Paley’s understanding of the role
621
of divinity (Christian God) in organism. Thompson sees Kant distinguishing

between divine purpose and natural purposes. His teleological view sees

organisms caused not by external rational agency of some kind, but rather by the

organisms own formative (autopoeitic) powers. This point brings us directly back

to Ghiselin’s critique.

Ghiselin writes,

To allow for change to be indefinite, and sufficient to permit the origin of

new species, implies that we may need to rethink some of our fundamental
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metaphysical assumptions. Maybe species do not have essences.

He juxtaposes this Darwinian insight over and against a “pre-Darwinian”

understanding of change. For pre-Darwinians, according to Ghiselin, change is

understood as something superficial. Reality is something that pre-existed in the

mind of God. There is an essential absolute quality to the world. Having been

brought into existence by an act of God, change is subsequently seen as the

realization of something that already existed. There is a kind of continuity in this

“pre-Darwinian” system that assumes all movement is the unfolding of a pre-

determined pattern. Ghiselin offers us a very good account of a particular

expression of a naturalist ecology of participation.

He understands Darwinian evolutionary theory as a pointed critique of old

ways of thinking. Darwin’s theory requires that something ontologically novel

can come into being. It moves the philosophical conversation out of the abstract,

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and into the concrete. “Epistemologically, therefore, the Darwinian ontology

called for a radical empiricism,” writes Paley,

albeit a sophisticated one. One way or another, claims about the natural
world had to be justified on a strictly experiential basis. That includes the
metaphysics, and on that basis we are justified in considering metaphysics
623
itself a natural science.

Ghiselin is defending novelty, while being critical of determinism. He is calling

for a turn from abstract to concrete, while making a case for what he calls radical

empiricism. He is clarifying the line between what Michel Weber terms trans-
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formative and creative process thought. Here trans-formative thought is

naturalism in its purest form. There is one world, one creator, one direction, and

change is a superficial bubbling along the surface of this one unitive Nature.

Creative process thought points to the possibility of multiple ontological realities,

a chaosmos similar to the one defended by James and Whitehead.

This is a crucial distinction for my project in particular, and for a

participatory approach in general. In order for contemporary thought to transcend

the bounds of naturalism and/or atomism in Western thought, it must account for

novelty in some way. Process thought and Whitehead’s work in particular manage

to do just this, by following the lead of nineteenth-century geology and biology

and twentieth-century physics. Writing out of this same scientific tradition,

Ghiselin is defending the need to account for novelty, while dismissing teleology

and metaphysics.

This is an interesting point. Ghiselin, in particular, has conflated all

teleology with the kind of divine telos championed by Paley above. As I show

throughout this section, this is not the teleology Kant was after. Nor is it the

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purposiveness defended by the various process thinkers like Whitehead, or that of

Ferrer and Sherman and the participatory approach. In the context of naturalist

ecologies (with the exception of the radical discontinuities of atomism), some

form of teleology (in keeping with Kant) is necessary in order to account for

novelty, motion, causality, atomicity, and a working theory of relations. It is

important to note for now that the participatory approach as outlined by Ferrer

aligns itself with this conversation by adopting the enactive approach of Maturana,

Varela, Rosch, and Thompson.

It is clear that Thompson offers a complex consideration of teleology in

his text Mind in Life. In the end he appears to follow Hans Jonas in locating some
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form of freedom in biological processes. This freedom is most obvious for

Jonas in the process of metabolism. Following Varela and Maturana he clarifies

this freedom by reference to “sense-making.” He writes that Varela distinguishes

the autopoeitic sense making as a “surplus of significance,” which is contrasted

with the physicochemical world that lacks this overabundance. Sucrose does not

have a “food significance” unless bacteria interact with the sucrose. Thompson

goes on to write, “Varela states that the structural coupling of organism and

environment always involves a ‘surplus of significance’ provided by the

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organism.” At first blush this may seem like an attempt from within an animist

ecology to personify life in the Other, but that is not what Thompson (and Varela)

are after.

Thompson tells us, again following Jonas, that only life can recognize life.

Bacteria does not personify sucrose, it organizes it somehow. We, humans,

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personify bacteria, making it more like us. Organism (biology) stands between

matter (physics) and mind (psychology). Enaction is the process of sense-making,

whereby “significance and valence . . . [are] brought forth, and constituted by

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living beings.” Intentionality is limited to the realm of the living, the organism.

The concern that Thompson seems most wary of is that he will be accused of

conflating adaptation with cognition. He does not want to get caught in the trap of

anthropocentrism. He writes,

We have seen that sense-making requires more than minimal autopoiesis;

it requires autopoiesis enhanced with a capacity for adaptivity . . .
autopoiesis plus adaptivity entails sense-making, which is cognition in it
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minimal biological form.

Directly after this quotation, Thompson admits that this is a very broad definition

of cognition. Yes it is, from within a naturalist ecology, but not nearly broad

enough from an animist one. Thompson cannot really bring himself to offer

personification to sucrose. In effect, he is left with a not so subtle gap between

matter and life. He has not managed to locate telos outside of an autopoeitic

system.

Where animist ecologies assume anthropomorphism, the enactive

approach struggles with anthropocentrism. Western evolutionary theories tend to

favor an idea of sociality (sense-making), and then debate at what point in the

evolutionary schema this adaptive response can first be found. For Thompson and

company, sense-making is only found in complex forms of autopoiesis, while for

many social anthropologists, sociality is something that is available only in the

629
human realm. Humans have animality, but animals do not have humanity. My

point is not to argue that some special form of consciousness or telos should be

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located among sucrose and others of the physicochemical world, for that would be

anthropocentric.

Viveiros de Castro underlines the point that naturalist evolutionary models

try to account for evolution by reference to anthropocentric assumptions.

Clarifying in turn that “For Amazonian peoples, the original common condition of
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both humans and animals is not animality but, rather, humanity.” He goes on to

write that not only are animals ex-humans, but so is everything down to whatever

one wishes to declare the “primordial plenum.” To the extent that Thompson and

the enactive approach are still struggling with anthropocentrism, we can be certain

that they are still working well within the confines of a naturalist ecology of

participation. Though I may have misunderstood Thompson’s stance, it seems to

me that to the extent that the enactive approach cannot abide by ontological

claims regarding teleology and personhood of rocks it fails to involve primary,

totemic, and animist ecologies of participation within its ecology of naturalism.

Thompson might ask at this point, so what? The easy answer following

from my consideration of cross-ecological perspectivism throughout this project

is that we should invite the other in because it is good for us, at least to the extent

that we fancy ourselves philosophers. This answer may or may not have traction

with Thompson, and so I add an addendum. The question that we must ask is with

regard to how serious Thompson is about solving his teleological conundrum. An

easy answer lies outside of his naturalist assumptions, but is he willing to consider

it? Is he willing to take a step cross-ecologically and risk not only his sanity

(interiority), but the stability of his body?

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 Following philosophers like Whitehead and Desmond, as well as

anthropologists like Viveiros de Castro and Descola, I cannot imagine a way to

solve this particular teleological puzzle without engaging with what another

participatory author, Jürgen Kremer, has called participatory/shamanic concourse.

On Kremer’s account, a participatory approach requires the “recovery of

indigenous mind,” and the practice the kind of transspecific ecological border
631
crossing that I defend here. But again, Thompson will have to risk his body, the

univocity that is Nature, the solid ground assumed by the vast majority of the

Western tradition. Many of our metaphysicians have risked conversion and

relativism, but how many have risked metamorphosis and cannibalism? My guess

is not very many. My hope is that many more will find the eros in such animist

perspectivism. Not just for the adventure however, but rather because the limits of

their particular curiosities (naturalism, animism) have proved too narrow. Because

the answers that are sought require renewed eros and agapeic participation; an

impulse to be shocked and overcome as well as to be overcome by something all

together alter. My assertion is that the answer Thompson (and other naturalist)

seeks regarding the gap between mind and matter can be his for the taking to the

extent that he can put down his anthropocentric perspectivism (naturalism), and

find an anthropomorphic solution to his riddle of the bacteria, the sucrose, and the

possibility of sense-making in our biological sciences. If we take the great

diversity of others (e.g., Achuar, Dagara, Guugu Yimithirr, Chinese, Mopan, and

Pirahã) seriously, this might not be so radical of an invitation after all.

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 Chapter 7: Conclusion

In the end it is always good to reflect on what has come to pass. Good

questions are important, like: what have I done? Why have I done this? And to

what end? It is also wise to ponder what has gone unsaid, or where more could

have been. By way of concluding this project I attend to each of these questions.

The first question is as significant as it is vague. What have I done, accomplished,

or set in motion? I began this work by considering the importance of idiocy and

intimacy, and so that is a good place to start. I have certainly engaged a level of

idiocy, or as Desmond would have it, a singular privatization of intimacy and

excess of being. I have wandered beyond the boundaries of much that passes for

polite scholarly company. In taking these steps I feared that I would find no one to

accompany me along my way. This fear was unfounded. When I looked at the

academy from afar I saw a distinct lack of eros and agape. I saw countless

individuals busying themselves with some corner of the (post)modern curiosity

that passes for acceptable scholarly work, and very little else. The closer I got,

however, the more I found eros and life.

Looking back it was an amazing adventure, full of unexpected

companions, so many of them that the dissertation ballooned in excess of 500

pages, only to be cut down and balloon again. These newfound compatriots snuck

in through the edges, and down from the sides. They came from everywhere. It is

hard to say who was chief among them. Descola, Desmond, Viveiros de Castro?

Ferrer and Sherman? What of Bado-Fralick, Holbraad, Price, Latour, Levinson,

and Lloyd? And what of Whitehead? Or Barad, Stengers, Taussig, Waters, and so

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many others that I thought would be there instead? What have I done? I have

found a scholarly community. I began on an edge, seemingly far away from the

stuff of storied academic presses, and yet I found my way directly between

several important conversations in academia. If I had to locate the primary focus

of my work I suppose it would be in the field of ethnographic theory (e.g.,

Descola, Viveiros de Castro, and Holbraad), but I have also drawn upon

Desmond’s (some might say continental) metaphysics, various trends in religious

studies, cognitive science, neo-Whorfian linguistics, and analytic philosophy to

make my argument.

I am left with the somewhat difficult task of locating myself in the

academy. Latour wrote some years ago on the problems of answering such

questions,

For lack of better terms, we call ourselves sociologists, historians,

economists, political scientists, philosophers and anthropologists . . .
Whatever label we use, we are always attempting to retie the Gordian knot
by crisscrossing, as often as we have to, the divide that separates exact
632
knowledge and the exercise of power.

I find this question no less difficult to answer myself. Where Latour speaks of

hybrids traveling and translating between seemingly disparate realms, I identify

myself as a transspecific scholar alternatively enacting forms of naturalist

(metaphysics), animist (shamanic), and totemic (divinatory) perspectivism.

Interestingly enough, there are clear avenues of publication. I plan to adapt parts

of chapters 3, 4, and 5 of my dissertation for publication in the Journal of

Ethnographic Theory or Common Knowledge. There are also avenues toward

publication in Comparative Philosophy, Cosmos and History, and Culture

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Unbound, and I am sure there are other journals that I have yet to find. The vast

majority of the conversations that I reference in these pages – especially with

regard to contemporary religious studies and the work of Descola, Holbraad, and

Viveiros de Castro – are published by the University of Chicago Press. This is

another clear avenue of publication to pursue. Though the conversation that I have

engaged throughout these pages is not limited to these publications, the most vital

aspects of it can be found here.

In my headlong adventure toward my own singular academic idiocy, the

thing that worries me most is in regard to intimacy. Has what I have written

opened avenues toward communication between disparate people and what I have

termed ecologies of participation, or has it shut them down. There is a wide swath

between agape and curiosity, and yet it sometimes looks like a very fine line. Is it

possible that I have simply offered yet another theory of everything, just like

those that so attracted me and repulsed me from the start? One of my first drafts

of this dissertation became a chapter in an upcoming book on the philosophy of

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Integral Theory. I pushed too far in that essay, blurring the lines between

ecological perspectivism and vulgar relativism, and eventually, potentially, falling

on the latter side. I kept pushing this line until Sherman finally asked me, is that

what you really mean? Ontological relativism? This gave me pause, and it as this

point I picked up Desmond. It is possible that Desmond’s work saved me from

myself, and my overindulgence in the process aspect of Whitehead’s supposedly

634
process-oriented philosophy. I brought Desmond to Descola and Viveiros de

Castro, which helped me answer important criticisms of their work (see below).

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This process cemented for me the adoption of the term ecology as opposed to

ontology. It helped to clarify questions Descola had not seemed to have asked

himself, namely in regard to some shared agapeic participation that held his whole

ontological relativity together without falling into vulgar relativism. The adoption

of Desmond also gave me a breath of fresh air whereby I could attend to

Descola’s work once again.

In reading an earlier essay of Descola’s I thought I had found all that I

needed, but upon readings his book (Beyond Nature and Culture) I realized that

something was missing. Or rather that something was missing (Desmond’s

agapeic participation and metaxological ground), and something had gotten

confused. Descola’s conflation of analogy with extreme abstraction proved

problematic, and forced a narrow definition of totemism and naturalism that made

it difficult to place various traditions, especially Vedic, Western, Chinese, West

African, and Central American. I traced a conversation between Viveiros de

Castro and Descola to see just how this narrow definition had come about. They

had both offered broad definitions of naturalism and animism, and yet had really

only given this generous reading to animist ecologies.

It is pertinent at this point to clarify in some finer detail exactly what I

have offered to these academic conversations. By reading Desmond and Descola

in parallel I offered answers to critical readings of their respective works offered

by other scholars. Caputo wonders in the introduction to The William Desmond

Reader what differentiates Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics from the

analogical metaphysics of Aquinas, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, or a

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post-Hegelian postmetaphysics like that of Habermas. Caputo writes, “Perhaps we

are being asked by Desmond to think that the ‘between’ is precisely between

classical metaphysical analogy, phenomenological ontology and postmetaphysical

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difference.” By taking Desmond’s emphasis on multiple dialectics seriously

(metaxology), and looking to Descola’s theory regarding multiple forms of

relationship and identification discernable in the ethnographic literature

(Descola’s fourfold way), we can locate a diversity of dialectics that are radically

different than those offered by Aquinas, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, or Habermas. For

example, we can see Aquinas’ analogical thought as a particularly erotic

expression of a dialectic beholden to naturalism, and find all of the authors

mentioned above as working within the general confines of naturalist thought. We

can then begin to consider erotic dialectics within animism and totemism, and

thereby break Desmond’s intuition free from its naturalist roots. By looking to the

multinaturalist shamanism of Amazonian animists, we find the assumptions of

naturalist ecologies radically subverted. Nature and Being, both capitalized, are

not exactly deconstructed; rather they are complexified by a wholly other erotic

impulse toward self-determination. Desmond’s metaxological assertion becomes

far more robust when read in the context of Descola’s ethnographic theory.

As I clarified in some detail in chapter 3, both Lloyd and Keane are

critical of Descola’s use of the term ontology. If there are really ontological

differences separating his multiple ecologies of participation, how then are we

able to translate and move between ecologies? By reading Descola next to

Desmond, I was able to assert the likelihood of a primary or agapeic form of

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participation. This answers Descola’s critics by distinguishing between a shared

univocal ground of sameness (which Descola is critical of), and a shared agapeic

ground of overabundance. By grounding Descola ontological relativity in

Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics, Descola is able to continue his important

contributions.

The assertion of a primary form of participation also helps to clarify some

of the other difficulties that I found inherent to Descola’s fourfold way. By

beginning with this primary/agapeic form of participation, I was able to read

Descola’s animist, naturalist, and totemic ecologies as diverse expressions of an

erotic impulse toward identification, self-determination, and/or dialectic.

Following Desmond (as well as Levinson and other linguistic theorists), I also

defended the importance of analogy to human thought. This allowed me to tease

apart the totemic and naturalist uses of analogy in general, and the conflation of

analogy with extreme abstraction posited by Descola in particular. As such I was

able to assert that each of these erotic impulses (animism, totemism, naturalism)

can potentially lend themselves to certain abstractions away from agape in the

form of curiosities, and critiques.

This allowed me to offer a broad reading of each ecology, and to underline

the potential inherent to each, the possibility of an abstract ecology arising out its

dialectical assumptions. Rather than one abstract ecology, analogism, I was able

to posit abstractions and curiosities emerging out of each erotic dialectic. The

most obvious of these abstract ecologies being that of atomism. Atomism’s

abstract curiosities are articulated out of a naturalist ecology, and have led to what

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I termed (post)modernity in these pages. This broad reading allows for a more

coherent reading of the history of Western thought, whereby Hellenic, Greek,

Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment thought is understood as more-or-less

erotic expressions of naturalism. This allows us to connect these traditions by

reference to a naturalist ecology, rather than trying to assert the sudden and

discontinuous emergence of a radically new ecology during the Enlightenment as

both Descola and Viveiros de Castro have done. This ensures that we do not

conflate the naturalism of the Western tradition with the totemism of China, West

Africa, and Central America. In the end, this broad reading also allow for the

positing of a (post)modern atomism that can be seen as a particularly abstract set

of curiosities that arises from the originary erotic impulses toward self-

determination inherent to naturalist ecologies.

I took some pains to detail the importance of Viveiros de Castro’s work

with regard to animist perspectivism in chapter 3, especially with regard to its

influence on Descola’s thought. The broad reading of totemism, naturalism, and

animism offered in these pages allows me to adopt Viveiros de Castro’s emphasis

on perspectivism, and utilize it in a more encompassing way. In effect, I assert the

possibility of totemic (divinatory) and naturalist (metaphysical) perspectivism,

alongside the shamanic perspectivism of animist ecologies. This allows me to

answer Descola and Viveiros de Castro’s concern that naturalist ecologies are

overly abstract. By discerning between erotic and curious (comprehensive/

critical) expressions of each ecology, I am able to offer Viveiros de Castro and

Descola’s generous reading of animism to both totemic and naturalist ecologies.

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Rather than reducing naturalism to its most recent and arguably one of its most

curious-comprehensive expressions, (post)modernity, naturalism is found

throughout the Western tradition.

By looking to animist perspectivism clarified by Viveiros de Castro, and

asserting the possibility of totemic and naturalist perspectivism, I am also able to

clarify Ferrer’s assertions regarding the co-creative and enactive nature of

participatory knowing. We can locate the assertions of Aristotle, Euclid, Plotinus,

Augustine, Proclus, Jon the Scot, al-Farábi, Ibn Gabirol, Anselm, Ibn Arabí,

Maimonides, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Copernicus, Luther, Teresa

of Avila, Bruno, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Vico,

Hume, D’Alembert, Kant, and Paley as the enactions of naturalist metaphysicians

(though I have not fully defended the thesis in the pages, it may also be possible

to locate much of the ancient Vedic and later Indian traditions here as well). At

first this might seem a blatantly egregious list not like the use of Descola’s work

by Emmanuel Lézy and Gérard Chouquer to assert rather static categories,

something that Juliet J. Fall calls a “scary Samuel Huntington-style portrait of

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civilisations.” By placing all of these disparate people into such a list I do not

mean to only locate them as naturalists. I mean instead to point to the subtly and

the usefulness of Descola’s work to understand differences between traditions.

Fall writes:

It quickly becomes apparent that [Descola’s work] is not one more Grand
Récit that surveys human knowledge, whatever Serres might choose to
label it. Instead, it is a spatially complex, creatively relational way of
looking at links and echoes, at difference and similarity, ahistoric but not
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acritical, finding links and neighbours in the most unlikely places.

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Fall goes on to consider the importance of Serres use of Descola’s work, whereby

Aristotle, Flaubert, and Linne are understood as totemists, while Proust is

understood as an animist alongside Plato, Bergson, and the practice of

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mathematics. My point is that both the long list of naturalists above, and the

practice of deconstructing such lists are both available to those utilizing Descola’s

work. Naturalists entertain a shared assumption: a continuity of physicality.

Notice that they do not share a structure. Descola’s are not Aristotelian categories.

There is a kind of relationality naturalists begin with, but this does not mean that

they must and always are only naturalists. These theorists risked the equivocity of

interiority, and enacted a great diversity of Being(s), and they could and have also

risked bodies (animisim/shamanism) and polar-tensions (totemism/divination). By

way of further elucidating Descola’s important work, as well as my critical

(fivefold) reimagining, both of these styles (long lists and the

deconstruction/complexification of the same lists) must be taken up at some

length. These important revisions will be taken up as this dissertation is rewritten

for publication.

Returning to what I have attempted to do in these pages, the introduction

of Levinson’s neo-Whorfian linguistic relativity in chapters 2 and 3 helps to

buttress my broad definitions, as he finds evidence for absolute (totemic), intrinsic

(animist), and relative (naturalist) frames of reference distributed throughout a

wide diversity of linguistic traditions. By connecting certain West African and

Central American (e.g., Ewe and Tzeltal) linguistic traditions to the absolute

frame of references found in Australian Aboriginal contexts, I am able to broaden

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Descola’s use of totemism to include all of these traditions. I am also able to

further defend the use of analogy, and distinguish this practice from the radically

discontinuous abstractions Descola equates analogy with. I think an important key

to this broad definition of totemism might be found in ancient Chinese, Central

American, and West African thought, as these seem to offer particularly good

example of abstract theories of correlations. If my broad definition were to be

maintained, these traditions would have to be compared to the absolute frames of

reference found in Australia that make little or no use of intrinsic or relative

frames of reference (e.g., Guugu Yimithirr and Warrwa). The relationship

between animist and totemic ecologies, intrinsic and absolute frames of reference,

needs to be understood in greater detail. This is a line of research that I plan to

pursue further, especially as it relates to the totemic and animist aspects of West

African ecologies of participation.

In chapters 4 and 5 I defended the practice of what I have termed

ecological perspectivism (following Viveiros de Castro), and set up certain guest

protocols to contextualize comparative studies. I drew the reader’s attention to a

distinction made by Descola between predation, sharing, and obligation, and

showed that in our contemporary context it is crucial that we acknowledge our

predatory tendencies before engaging in comparative work. I do not conflate all

comparative work with predation, but rather mean to bring awareness to a

tendency that is often neglected and/or maligned. In chapter 6 identified myself

with and defended certain aspects of the participatory approach. I clarified the

importance of Ferrer’s participatory knowing, Lévy-Bruhl’s work as an early

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precursor to the participatory approach and my own thought, as well as the use of

the enactive approach in biology and cognitive science in the context of Ferrer

and Sherman’s participatory approach. I also defended my own coming out of the

closet as a scholar-practitioner and the importance of this for contemporary

scholarship. This last piece is especially important for my project, as I locate

myself to greater or lesser extent throughout the three main ecologies (totemism,

animism, naturalism) presented in these pages. This is a very different approach

than the one taken by Descola, for example, whereby totemism and animism is

approached primarily through ethnographic materials. This stance brings me to a

consideration of important critiques that could be brought against my project.

I may have followed too close in the footsteps of my scholarly

predecessors. Like Whitehead I have chosen the path of the metaphysician and

speculative philosophy, but also like him, my grasp of the history of philosophy

may be suspect. Again like Whitehead, I have chosen to look to my own lived

experience, and yet where he began as a mathematician I began as more of a

diviner and a shaman. Like Lévy-Bruhl, I have looked to ethnographic materials

to call into question the assumptions of that same tradition which I have inherited.

But unlike Lévy-Bruhl, whose work I defend here, I looked to my own lived

experience just as Whitehead did before me (as well as Bergson, Husserl, James,

Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze to name but a few others). The strength of my

project, and its potential weakness, revolve around this fact. I draw on

ethnographic materials, but I also draw on my own experience. It is for this reason

that I continue to identify myself as a metaphysician, rather than as an

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anthropologist or a religious studies scholar. But unlike Whitehead, Lévy-Bruhl,

or Descola for that matter, I also identify as a shaman (animism) and as a diviner

(totemism). In the eyes of many scholars this will make my work suspect. I am

left wondering if I have defended my position as a scholar-practitioner well

enough. This is a question that I may have to ponder for some time.

It also leads me to wonder what else I may have left out. I think that it

would have been helpful to consider the important conversations around

structuralism and poststructuralism, especially with regard to French thought and

the work of Lévi-Strauss in particular. On this point I simply followed Descola,

who offers a nuanced stance that both defends a certain amount of structural

regularity (certain shared univocities) alongside a critique of those who would

dismiss such regularities by conflating those who assert them with those who

assert timeless static structures. A stance, Descola writes, which few if any ever
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held. The lack of engagement of this conversation in these pages is somewhat

mitigated by my consideration of linguistic relativity (and the neo-Whorfian work

of Levinson in particular), as well as my use of Desmond. Regarding the latter,

we can see Descola’s emphasis on relationality and identification, rather than on

static structures, as an emphasis on erotic self-determination rather than curiosity

and univocity. Having said all of this, I still find that my greatest concern for this

project is that I have simply formalized my own particular theory of everything;

in effect, that I have simply become what I set out to distinguish myself from. I

am sure there will be those who find this to be the case.

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 Paralleling this concern is my tendency toward scholarly overreach. My

inclination is clearly to think in large patterns and to make imaginative leaps. This

is one of my gifts, but it also can work to weaken my argument. I have had to

remove entire sections of this dissertation because I did not engage original

materials, deciding instead to rely on secondary sources. I have shown myself

capable of engaging deeply with original sources, and yet I have included a vast

diversity of texts and authors in this project. I have included far too many sources

for anyone to grasp in their entirety, especially at this early stage in my scholarly

career. Would a philosophy department sign off on this dissertation? I have

engaged Desmond and analytic philosophy, but only superficially. I have

promised future work on Whitehead, but it is not included here. I possess a clear

interest in the history of philosophy, yet cannot lay claim to any specialization

within the field. My work offers a variety of interesting directions for religious

studies scholars, including but not limited to what I have termed guest protocols

for comparative studies in these pages. Yet, again, I have not shown myself expert

in any one area of specialization. My most obvious contribution is in the field of

anthropology in general, and in ethnographic theory in particular, yet I have not

engaged in fieldwork or ethnography. I have relied instead on other authors work,

and on my own diversity of experiences; experiences that I have argued fall

outside the (post)modern and naturalist assumptions that undergird so much

academic thought. Returning to the question of what has been left out, one could

look at this work as a superficial gleaning of too many fields of study, and so

discount it on these grounds.

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 Yet I follow Apffel-Marglin who sees her work as an important

contribution to symmetrical anthropology. She writes,

The field of European history is a well-trodden and highly specialized one.

Encroaching on this terrain by a nonspecialist can immediately signal a
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lack of depth and precision and raise the specter of amateurism.

I have risked the specter of amateurism by engaging such a broad project, and yet

I have grounded this project as much in my own experience as I have in the work

of others. To this end, it seems to me that a project of this nature requires a certain

amount of feedback from the academic world. If I had offered an ethnography of

Dagara divination, a comparison of Dagara and Yoruba cosmologies, or a

comparison of Desmond’s metaxology and Whitehead’s pancreativism I would be

on more obvious ground. But I have offered something else, a comparative lens

(ecologies of participation), and a critical reading of Descola and Viveiros de

Castro (ecological perspectivism) in the context of ethnographic theory. The

contribution to the academy may be as important as it is unique. This is not for me

to decide, but rather for the passing of time to tell.

Far more important than its reception, it is of vital importance that this

project has transformed me. I now know what a diviner, a shaman, and a

metaphysician is. I find myself walking through my days and moving more

overtly toward one or the other than I have done in the past. I am freed to pursue

these practices in ecological perspectivism with great abandon, and can see clear

avenues toward teaching, writing, and mentoring others with regard to these

practices. It has been a long and difficult journey, and yet I know far more about

who I am. I have been offered a whole new level of freedom and flexibility in my

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cross-ecological travels, and as these vistas open up before me, I am quite sure

that I have enacted something meaningful, and even quite profound. I mean to

plant these pages in the rich soil of a changing academy and to watch them grow.

There are moments when I am attached, and moments when I relax, and it is in

the latter that I feel the incredible possibility that is the fruit of this labor. I end

with gratitude. To my wife who stood by my side throughout this project, to my

family for their maintenance of the magic, to my committee for their dedication

and support, to the Dagara for their acceptance of my idiocy, and to the countless

others, the rocks, the tree, the ancestors, the friends and mentors, the water and

earth – may we all enjoy the fruits of our agapeic and erotic participation.

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Alexander, W. M. 1966. "Johann Georg Hamann: Metacritic of Kant." Journal of
the History of Ideas no. 27:137-44.
Andrade, Oswald de, and Leslie Bary. 1991. "Cannibalist Manifesto." Latin
American Literary Review no. 19 (38):38-47.
Apffel-Marglin, Frédérique. 2011. Subversive spiritualities: how rituals enact the
world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Århem, Kaj. 1993. "Ecosofía Makuna." In La selva humanizada: ecología
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1
See William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after
Dialectic, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 8-13.
2
See Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1969), 210. See also Joris Geldhof, "The between and the Liturgy:
On Rendering W. Desmond's Philosophy Fruitful for Theology," in Between
Philosophy and Theology: Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity, ed.
Lieven Boeve and Christophe Brabant (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 92.
Geldhof writes, “At the background of what Desmond says, a prevailing – though
nowhere in Desmond’s work explicated – influence of Anders Nygren’s ideas is
observable.” For a comparison of the similarities between Nygren and Aquinas on
agape and eros see William C. Mattison, "Movements of Love: A Thomistic
Perspective on Agape and Eros," Journal of Moral Theology 1, no. 2 (2012): 43-
48.
3
William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2012), 47.

369
4
For a critique of Nygren’s strong opposition between eros and agape see
Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Oxford
University Press / Clarendon Press, 1994); D. C. Schindler, "Plato and the
Problem of Love: On the Nature of Eros in the "Symposium"," Apeiron: A
Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 40, no. 3 (2007).
5
See Mattison, "Movements of Love: A Thomistic Perspective on Agape and
Eros," 47. Mattison argues, against Nygren, and following Aquinas, for a deep
interrelation between eros and agape. He goes on to quote Pople Benedict XVI at
some length on this point, who assures us that if Christianity maintains a strong
opposition here, it risks cutting itself off from “vital relations fundamental to
human existence, and would become a world apart…. Yet eros and agape –
ascending love and descending love – can never be completely separated.”
6
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 9.
7
Ibid., 14.
8
See for example George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing
Significance of Race (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2008); Look, a
White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2012).
9
See for example John Levi Martin and Sylvia Fuller, "Gendered Power
Dynamics in Intentional Communities," Social Psychology Quarterly 67, no. 4
(2004); Jonatha W. Vare, "Gendered Ideology: Voices of Parent and Practice in
Teacher Education," Anthropology & Education Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1995); Julia
T. Wood, Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture (Boston:
Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011); Jiping Zuo and Yanjie Bian, "Gendered
Resources, Division of Housework, and Perceived Fairness. A Case in Urban
China," Journal of Marriage and Family 63, no. 4 (2001).
10
See for example James N. Brown and Patricia M. Sant, Indigeneity:
Construction and Re/Presentation (Commack, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers,
1999); Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking, Que(E)Rying Religion: A
Critical Anthology (New York: Continuum, 1996); Sandra G. Harding, The
Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011); Smitha Radhakrishnan, ""Time to Show Our True
Colors": The Gendered Politics of "Indianness" in Post-Apartheid South Africa,"
Gender and Society 19, no. 2 (2005); Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift:
Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Studies in
Melanesian Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Susan
Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2006); Jane Ward, ""Not All Differences Are Created Equal":
Multiple Jeopardy in a Gendered Organization," Gender and Society 18, no. 1
(2004).
11
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 172.
12
Ibid.

370
13
See Sandra G. Harding, Sciences from Below Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and
Modernities, Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008).
14
Jorge N. Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to
the Question of Religious Pluralism," in The Participatory Turn: Spirituality,
Mysticism, Religious Studies, ed. Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2008), 142.
15
Ibid., 137.
16
Ibid.
17
See for example Richard Tarnas, "A New Birth in Freedom: A (P)Review of
Jorge Ferrer's Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of
Human Spirituality," Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 33, no. 1 (2001); John
Heron, Sacred Science: Person-Centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle
(Llangarron, UK: PCCS Books, 1998); "Participatory Fruits of Spiritual Inquiry,"
ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation 29, no. 3 (2007);
Participatory Spirituality: A Farewell to Authoritarian Religion (Morrisville,
NC: Lulu Press, 2006); Jürgen Kremer, "Ethnoautobiography as Practice of
Radical Presence: Storying the Self in Participatory Visions," ReVision: A Journal
of Consciousness and Transformation 26, no. 2 (2003); "Radical Presence:
Beyond Pernicious Identity Politics and Racialism," ReVision: A Journal of
Consciousness and Transformation 24, no. 2 (2002); Jorge N. Ferrer, Marina T.
Romero, and Ramon V. Albareda, "Embodied Participation in the Mystery:
Implications for the Individual, Interpersonal Relationships, and Society,"
ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation 27, no. 1 (2004);
Marina T. Romero and Ramon V. Albareda, "Born on Earth: Sexuality,
Spirituality, and Human Evolution," ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and
Transformation 24, no. 2 (2001); Samuel A. Malkemus, "Toward a General
Theory of Enaction: Biological, Transpersonal, and Phenomenological
Dimensions," The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 44, no. 2 (2012); Marina
T. Romero and Samuel A. Malkemus, "Sexuality as a Transformational Path:
Exploring the Holistic Dimensions of Human Vitality," International Journal of
Transpersonal Studies 31, no. 2 (2012); Peter Reason, Participation in Human
Inquiry (London: Sage Publications, 1994); "Toward a Participatory Worldview,"
Resurgence 168(1998); Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, "Inquiry and
Participation in Search of a World Worthy of Human Aspiration," in Handbook of
Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, ed. Peter Reason and Hilary
Bradbury (London: Sage, 2001); Luan Fauteck Makes Marks, "Great Mysteries:
Native North American Religions and Participatory Visions," ReVision: A
Journal of Consciousness and Transformation 29, no. 3 (2007).
18
Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in
Spirituality, Mysticism, and Religious Studies," in The Participatory Turn:
Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, ed. Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H.
Sherman (Albany: State of New York University Press, 2008), 1.
19
See ibid.

371
20
See Fran Grace et al., "Contemplative Studies from a Participatory Perspective:
Embodiment, Relatedness, and Creativity in Contemplative Inquiry" (paper
presented at the 2011 American Academy of Religion Annual Metting, San
Francisco, CA, 2011). Sherman has added to the seven themes mentioned in The
participatory turn several important trends in philosophy of science (e.g. Isabelle
Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans.
Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Bruno Latour,
On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010).) and contemplative studies (e.g. H. D. Roth, "Against Cognitive
Imperialism: A Call for a Non Ethnocentric Approach to Studying Human
Cognition and Contemplative Experience," Religion East and West 8, no. 1-26
(2008); Fran Grace and Judith Simmer-Brown, "Introduction," in Meditation and
the Classroom: Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies, ed. Fran Grace
and Judith Simmer-Brown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).)
21
See Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism," 137. Ferrer writes, “Human beings are-whether
they know it or not-always participating in the self-disclosure of the mystery out
of which everything arises. This participatory predicament is not only the
ontological foundation of the other forms of participation, but also the epistemic
anchor of spiritual knowledge claims.”
22
For a consideration of Stengers use of the term ecology with reference to
Whitehead see Vikki Bell, "Declining Performativity: Butler, Whitehead and
Ecologies of Concern," Theory, Culture, Society 29(2012).
23
For Descola’s use of “ecologies of relationships” see Philipe Descola, The
Ecology of Others, trans. Geneviéve Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley (Chicago:
Chicago University Press / Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013).
24
See especially Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1985); The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality,
Explorations in Interpretative Sociology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); C.
Scott Littleton, "Introduction: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the Concept of Cognitive
Relativity," in How Native Think (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
Benson Saler, "Lévy-Bruhl, Participation, and Rationality," in Rationality and the
Study of Religion, ed. Jeppe S. Jensen and Luther H. Martin (Aahars C., Denmark:
AARHUS University Press, 1997); Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion,
and the Scope of Rationality, The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); Walter J. Hanegraaff, "How Magic Survived
the Disenchantment of the World?," Religion 33(2003).
25
Philippe Descola, "Beyond Nature and Culture" (paper presented at the
Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, 2005, Proceedings of the
British Academy, 2006); Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson, eds., Nature and
Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996).
26
Martín Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to
the Heart of the Indigenous Soul (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1998), 128.
27
Ibid., 133.

372
28
Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism," 136
29
Ibid., 148-49.
30
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Macmillan
company, 1933), 279.
31
See George Yancy, Philosophy in Multiple Voices (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2007).
32
Steve Schwartz, A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls
(Malden, M.A.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 9.
33
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 177.
34
W. V. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1981), 21.
35
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 175.
36
W. V. Quine, "The Scope and Language of Science," The British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science 8, no. 29 (1957): 232.
37
Ibid., 17.
38
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 175.
39
Ibid., 235.
40
Ibid., 277.
41
See Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray
Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Corrected ed., Gifford Lectures (New York:
Free Press, 1978), 7.
42
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 277.
43
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 49.
44
Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989), 129.
45
See Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, Prentice-Hall Anthropology Series
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 145-51.
46
See Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of
Religion, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993); The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was
Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005).
47
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 19.
48
Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought?: Between Religion and Philosophy,
1st ed., Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005), 108.
49
Ibid., 263.
50
Ibid., 108.
51
Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism," 137.

373
52
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 11.
53
Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism," 149.
54
See Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought?: Between Religion and
Philosophy, 72.
55
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 280.
56
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 60.
57
See Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion;
The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was
Preserved in the Language of Pluralism.
58
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 12.
59
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the
World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13.
60
Martin Hollis, "The Social Deconstruction of Reality," in Rationality and
Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press,
1982), 67.
61
See Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1982); Michael Krausz, Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
62
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, xvi.
63
See John D. Caputo, "Foreword," in The William Desmond Reader, ed.
Christopher Ben Simpson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), ix.
Caputo’s choice of the term realist is his own. This project seeks to problematize
the distinction between realist and relativist all together.
64
See also David John Chalmers, "Ontological Anti-Realism," in
Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. David John
Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press / Clarendon Press, 2009).
65
See Matt Eklund, "Carnap and Ontological Pluralism," ibid.
66
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 21.
67
Ibid.
68
See section entitled “Latour’s (Post)Modern Constitution” in chapter 2.
69
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 105.
70
Ibid., 15.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid., 16.
73
Ibid., 16-17.
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid., 18.
76
Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism," 137.

374
77
Ibid., 142.
78
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 18.
79
Ibid., 19.
80
Ibid., 18.
81
Ibid., 9.
82
Ibid., 18.
83
Ibid., 241.
84
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 177.
85
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 242.
86
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 141.
87
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 180.
88
Ibid., 181.
89
Ibid., 182.
90
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 142.
91
Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic, 251.
92
Ibid., 255.
93
Ibid., 257.
94
Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), 33.
95
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. Lowell Lectures,
1925 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), 22.
96
Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 23.
97
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 34.
98
Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 6.
99
Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to the
Heart of the Indigenous Soul, 170.
100
George R. Lucas, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytic and Historical
Assessment of Process Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989), 2.
101
Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to the
Heart of the Indigenous Soul, 232.
102
See for example Anthony D. Barnosky et al., "Has the Earth's Sixth Mass
Extinction Already Arrived?," Nature 471, no. 7336 (2011); Ilya M. D. Maclean
and Robert J. Wilson, "Recent Ecological Responses to Climate Change Support
Predictions of High Extinction Risk," Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America 108, no. 30 (2011); J. E. N. Veron,
"Mass Extinctions and Ocean Acidification: Biological Constraints on Geological
Dilemmas," Springer-Verlag 27(2008).

375
103
See Akeel Bilgrami, "The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical
Essay," in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
104
See Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and
Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 168-74.
105
See David Manely, "Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics," in
Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. David John
Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press / Clarendon Press, 2009).
106
See Bilgrami, "The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical Essay."
107
See Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Nature.
108
See Bilgrami, "The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical Essay."
109
See ibid., 41-45.
110
Ibid., 42.
111
Ibid., 49.
112
For a book length consideration of this point see Lynne Rudder Baker,
Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
113
Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 173.
114
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian
Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 7.
115
See Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(New York: Viking, 2006), 120.
116
Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of
Nature is Almost Certainly False, 7.
117
Ibid., 27.
118
Ibid.
119
Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Nature, ix.
120
For a thorough elaboration of this point see Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics
to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press /
Clarendon Press, 1998).
121
Theodore Sider, "Ontological Realism," in Metametaphysics: New Essays on
the Foundations of Ontology, ed. David John Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan
Wasserman (Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, 2009), 384.
122
Ibid., 397.
123
Ibid.
124
Ibid., 398.
125
See discussion of Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism in chapter 3.
126
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Harvester Studies in Philosophy
(Hassocks, England: Harvester Press, 1978), 19.

376
127
Ibid.
128
Sider, "Ontological Realism," 398.
129
Ibid., 399.
130
See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 20.
131
Ibid., 21.
132
W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of
View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1953), 27-32.
133
Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 24-25.
134
Ibid., 26.
135
Ibid.
136
Ibid.
137
Thomas M. Norton-Smith, The Dance of Person and Place: One
Interpretation of American Indian Philosophy, Suny Series in Living Indigenous
Philosophies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 7.
138
Ibid., 14.
139
See ibid., 16.
140
Kris McDaniel, "Ways of Being," in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the
Foundations of Ontology, ed. David John Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan
Wasserman (New York: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, 2009), 309.
141
Peter Van Inwagen, "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," ibid.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press ), 472.
142
Ibid., 476.
143
Ibid., 477.
144
See Daniel L. Everett, "Periphrastic Pronouns in Wari’," International Journal
of American Linguistics 71, no. 3 (2005): 628. Everett writes that Pirahã speakers
utilize the simplest pronouns imaginable, and that these pronouns appear to be
borrowed from their linguist neighbors. They do not, then, need them, and in fact
intensionally choose to limit there use.
145
See ibid.
146
See Zdenek Salzmann, James Stanlaw, and Nobuko Adachi, Language,
Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, 5th ed.
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), 249-50.
147
For a defense of universalism against Everett as well as Everett’s response see
Daniel L. Everett, "Response to Nevins Et Al," Language 85, no. 4 (2009);
Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues, "Pirahã Exceptionality: A
Reassessment," ibid., no. 2.
148
For a consideration of the differences between Everett and Levinson see
Daniel L. Everett, "Pirahã Culture and Grammar: A Response to Some
Criticisms," ibid; "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã:
Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language," Current
Anthropology 46, no. 4 (2005).
377
149
Stephen C. Levinson and Nicholas Evans, "The Myth of Language Universals:
Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science," Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 32(2009): 429. See also Stephen C. Levinson, "The Original Sin
of Cognitive Science," Topics in Cognitive Science 4(2012).
150
For a critical reply to Chomskian universalist critiques regarding Levinson’s
neo-Whorfian linguistic relativity see Stephen C. Levinson and Nicholas Evans,
"Time for a Sea-Change in Linguistics: Response to Comments on 'the Myth of
Language Universals'," Lingua 120, no. 12 (2010).
151
See Salzmann, Stanlaw, and Adachi, Language, Culture, and Society: An
Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, 249. Salzman, Stanlaw, and Adachi
write, “Linguistic anthropologist Daniel Everett (2005, 2008) has offered some
serious formal challenges to Chomskian universalist grammar.”
152
McDaniel, "Ways of Being," 309.
153
For a thoroughgoing consideration of the state of analytic philosophy with
regard to theism see Richard M. Gale, God and Metaphysics, Studies in Analytic
Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010); On the Nature and
Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
154
See Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal
Logic, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 206-08.
155
See ibid., 221.
156
Willard V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays (New York:
Random, 1966), 134.
157
Quine, Ontological Relativity, and Other Essays, The John Dewey Essays in
Philosophy, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 22.
158
Ibid., 22-23.
159
Ibid., 24.
160
Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of
Nature is Almost Certainly False 8.
161
See Huw Price, "Naturalism and the Fate of M-Worlds," in Naturalism without
Mirrors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Originally published as Huw
Price and Frank Jackson, "Naturalism and the Fate of the M-Worlds,"
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 71(1997).
162
Price, "Naturalism and the Fate of M-Worlds," 136.
163
Ibid.
164
Ibid.
165
Ibid., 137-40.
166
See Everett, "Pirahã Culture and Grammar: A Response to Some Criticisms;
"Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the
Design Features of Human Language; Language: The Cultural Tool, 1st ed. (New
York: Pantheon Books, 2012).
167
Price, "Naturalism and the Fate of M-Worlds," 141.
168
Bilgrami, "The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical Essay," 49.

378
169
Price and Jackson, "Naturalism and the Fate of the M-Worlds."
170
For Jackson’s use of these examples see ibid., 278-79.
171
Ibid., 279.
172
See Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Discourse About
Values in Yoruba Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 65-73.
The truth of a statement in Yoruba is clarified by distinguishing between
knowledge and belief. Knowledge (and thereby truth) can only be attributed to the
first person account of a person who is considered cool (e.g., a person who is
patient, a good speaker, and a good listener).
173
In reference to a personal communication between Dagara elder Malidoma
Somé and myself to the effect that Dagara diviners develop a philosophy of the
cool, while European philosophers are obsessed with the real.
174
See Scott L. Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American
Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 133-62.
175
See G. E. R. Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient
and Modern Societies, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 56-57.
See also Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the
Human Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, 2007), 166-70.
The truth of a statement for a Chinese philosopher (as well as for Aristotle) is
relevant in part to whether or not the person is recognizable as sincere, honorable,
and well intentioned.
176
See Yoshihiko Ikegami, "'Do-Language' and 'Become-Language': Two
Contrasting Types of Linguistic Representation," in The Empire of Signs:
Semiotic Essays on Japanese Culture, ed. Yoshihiko Ikegami (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991); Sotaro Kita, "A Grammar of Space in
Japanese," in Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity, ed.
Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
177
Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking
through Things," in Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts
Ethnographically (New York: Routledge, 2007), 14.
178
See Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology,
Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Amiria J. M.
Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, Thinking through Things: Theorising
Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge, 2007). Throughout such texts
there is an invitation to encounter “things” in new ways. To this end Henare,
Holbraad, and Wastell make a distinction between “things-as-analytic” and
“things-as-heuristic.” On the latter case, things are approached in the context
where they are found, and the ethnographer or philosopher resolves to be
challenged by the thing itself, even when the thing turns out to be animate.
179
See Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American
Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

379
180
For Schelling see chapter on creative-totemic participation below. For
Empedocles see C. G. von Brandenstein, "Identical Principles Behind Australian
Totemism and Empedoclean 'Philosophy'," in Australian Aboriginal Concepts, ed.
L. R. Hiatt (New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1978).
181
See Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and
Modern Societies; Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of
the Human Mind.
182
See Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in
Cognitive Diversity, Language, Culture, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins, Grammars of
Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity ibid. (2006).
183
See for example C. G. von Brandenstein, "Aboriginal Ecological Order in the
South-West of Australia — Meaning and Examples," Oceania 47, no. 3 (1977):
185. Brandenstein recounts a conversation with one of his informants, “ eagle ‘is
the first of all, the head man, the mammangurrat, he father of all’ (14/107);
though being a maametj-maath e is above the moieties.’” He continues, “[Eagle]
is above the kinship rules of the moieties.”
184
Bell, "Declining Performativity: Butler, Whitehead and Ecologies of
Concern," 112.
185
See Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking through Things."
186
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 49.
187
Bell, "Declining Performativity: Butler, Whitehead and Ecologies of
Concern," 110.
188
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 49.
189
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 176.
190
Descola, "Beyond Nature and Culture," 3.
191
See ibid., 2-3.
192
See Paul Bloom, Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development
Explains What Makes Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
193
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 3.
194
Desmond does not use the term comprehension, yet it is a useful clarification
regarding the extremities of abstraction pursued by way of curiosities.
195
See Eduardo Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian
Perspectivism," The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3
(1998): 476-77. Viveiros de Castro writes, “Whilst our constructionist [naturalist]
epistemology can be summed up in the Saussurean formula: the point of view
creates the object - the subject being the original, fixed condition whence the
point of view emanates - Amerindian ontological perspectivism proceeds along
the lines that the point of view creates the subject; whatever is activated or
'agented' by the point of view will be a subject. This is why terms such as warí
(Vilaça 1992), dene (McDonnell 1984) or masa (Århem 1993) mean 'people', but
they can be used for - and therefore used by - very different classes of beings:
used by humans they denote human beings; but used by peccaries, howler
380
monkeys or beavers they self-refer to peccaries, howler monkeys or beavers.”
196
See "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere" (paper
presented at the Four lectures delivered at the Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Cambridge, February 17 - March 10 1998), 481.
197
See for example Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and
Diversity of the Human Mind, 127. Lloyd tells us that based on the balanced
interdependence of yin and yang, “The interconnectedness of everything is a
recurrent motif in Chinese cosmology.” This point seems to contradict Descola’s
claim that ancient Chinese thought is predicated on analogism and discontinuity.
See also Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of
Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 114. Holbraad
writes, “This sort of image of paradox and ontological discontinuity is quite alien
to Ifá cosmology.
198
See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 202. Descola writes, “Analogy [the
ecology of analogism] is a hermeneutic dream of plenitude that arises out of sense
of dissatisfaction.”
199
See consideration of Desmond’s use of “monstrosity” in “Desmond’s
Metaphysics: A Fourfold Way” in chapter 1.
200
See Levinson, "The Original Sin of Cognitive Science;" Levinson and Evans,
"Time for a Sea-Change in Linguistics: Response to Comments on 'the Myth of
Language Universals';" "The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity
and Its Importance for Cognitive Science."
201
Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 541.
202
See Eve Danziger, "Parts and Their Counterparts: Spatial and Social
Relationships in Mopan Maya," The Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 2, no. 1 (1996); Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought, and Kinship
among the Mopan Maya, Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001); "Language, Space and Sociolect: Cognitive
Correlates of Gendered Speech in Mopan Maya," in Language Diversity and
Cognitive Representations, ed. C. Fuchs and S. Robert (Amsterdam: Benjamins,
1999).
203
See "Parts and Their Counterparts: Spatial and Social Relationships in Mopan
Maya," 72.
204
Ibid., 73.
205
See William B. McGregor, "Prolegomenon to a Warrwa Grammar of Space,"
in Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity, ed. Stephen C.
Levinson and David Wilkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
126.
206
See ibid., 124. McGregor writes, “Like many other Australian Aboriginal
languages, Warrwa uses its locative marker to encode general static spatial-
locational relations of contiguity, containment, adjacency and so on; that is, it
covers relations expressed in English by prepositions such as at, in, on, by, over,
near and so forth.”
381
207
See Danziger, "Parts and Their Counterparts: Spatial and Social Relationships
in Mopan Maya," 73.
208
Ibid., 71.
209
See McGregor, "Prolegomenon to a Warrwa Grammar of Space," 148.
McGregor writes, “Warrwa… speakers do not use an egocentric system
distinguishing left and right in terms of the speaker's body as center, to specify a
search domain for a figure with respect to a ground.”
210
See Danziger, "Parts and Their Counterparts: Spatial and Social Relationships
in Mopan Maya," 76.
211
See Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the
Human Mind, 26-28. See also Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, "Frames
of Spatial Reference and Their Acquisition in Tenejapan Tzeltal," in Culture,
Thought, and Development, ed. L. P. Nucci, G. B. Saxe, and E. Turiel (Mahwah,
NJ: Psychology Press, 2000).
212
Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the
Human Mind, 29.
213
See ibid., 113, 47. Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient
and Modern Societies, 26, 107-12.
214
See Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern
Societies, 36. See also Isabelle Delpla, Quine, Davidson: Le Principe De Charité
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001). Lloyd follows Delpla by way of
referencing the important but distinct contributions by Davidson and Quine to
what Lloyd terms the principle of charity in interpretation.
215
Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern
Societies, 109.
216
See Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 543. See also Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition:
Explorations in Cognitive Diversity, 94.
217
Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity ibid. (2006), 621. See also Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition:
Explorations in Cognitive Diversity, 94.
218
Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 551.
219
See for example Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 233-34. Descola tells
us that modern persons beholden to a naturalist ecology might occasionally slip
into animist, totemic, or analogical reveries, but that rarely do these “slippages”
become ontologically primary.
220
Ibid., 121.
221
Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, 197.
222
Ibid.
223
Ibid., 195.

382
224
Webb Keane, "Ontologies, Anthropologists, and Ethical Life," Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 1 (2013): 187.
225
Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern
Societies, 21.
226
Keane, "Ontologies, Anthropologists, and Ethical Life," 187.
227
See Steven Engler, "Constructionism Versus What?," Religion 34(2004).
228
See Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism."
229
See Everett, "Pirahã Culture and Grammar: A Response to Some Criticisms;
"Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the
Design Features of Human Language; Language: The Cultural Tool.
230
See "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look
at the Design Features of Human Language."
231
Ibid., 622.
232
See ibid., 631.
233
Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the
Human Mind, 130.
234
See ibid., 131-40.
235
See ibid., 137-38.
236
See Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and
Modern Societies, 56-58.
237
See Bruno Latour, "Will Non-Humans Be Saved? An Argument in
Ecotheology," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(2010).
238
See Descola, "Beyond Nature and Culture."
239
See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). For a more
detailed consideration of Lévi-Strauss’ algebraic reduction of totemism see my
chapter “Recursive anthropology, relativism, and truth” below.
240
C. G. von Brandenstein, "The Phoenix "Totemism"," Anthropos 67, no. 3/4
(1972): 586. Brandenstein writes, “The fate of old-time totemism was sealed
when Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962: Chapter I) dealt totemism the coup de grâce by
declaring it an illusion, though L. R. Hiatt (1969: 93) rose in Australia to ‘stand
squarely opposed to the forces of annihilation’ and tried to prove Lévi-Strauss’
verdict a mistake.”
241
Brandenstein, "Identical Principles Behind Australian Totemism and
Empedoclean 'Philosophy'," 135.
242
See C. G. von Brandenstein, Names and Substance of the Australian
Subsection System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 12-13.
243
See "Aboriginal Ecological Order in the South-West of Australia — Meaning
and Examples."
244
See Philippe Descola, "Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society," in
Conceptualizing Society, ed. Adam Kuper (London: Routledge, 1992), 113-15.
245
"Beyond Nature and Culture," 6.
383
246
Ibid.
247
C. G. von Brandenstein, "The Meaning of Section and Section Names,"
Oceania 41, no. 1 (1970): 49.
248
See ibid., 46. This is not to say that totemic ecologies are concrete. They are
simply more concrete. This is seen in the differences between disparate
Aboriginal groups in Australia that articulate the moon, as one example, as either
warm or cold, and sometimes both. To this end, these ecologies are not offering
an exact picture of the concrete, but rather a particularly moist expression.
249
Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of
Nature is Almost Certainly False, 9.
250
C. G. von Brandenstein, "The Meaning of Section and Section Names," 47-48.
251
C. G. von Brandenstein, "Aboriginal Ecological Order in the South-West of
Australia — Meaning and Examples," Oceania 47, no. 3 (1977): 171.
252
Stephen C. Levinson, "Language and Cognition: The Cognitive Consequences
of Spatial Description in Guugu Ymithirr," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7,
no. 1 (1997): 100.
253
John B. Haviland, "Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions," Ethos 26, no. 1
(1998): 43.
254
See Stephen C. Levinson and Penelope Brown, "Immanuel Kant among the
Tenejapans: Anthropology as Empirical Philosophy," Ethos 22(1994).
255
Stephen C. Levinson, "Language and Space," Annual Review of Anthropology
25(1996): 356.
256
John B. Haviland, "Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr
Pointing Gestures," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1993): 5.
257
Ibid., 10.
258
Ibid., 12.
259
Ibid., 14-17.
260
See ibid., 36-37.
261
See Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 543. Levinson and Wilkins write, “There is nothing universal about
`top', `bottom' and `sides'. Instead, for inanimate objects, the whole system is
driven by the internal axial structure of the object. Thus a stone lying down with a
flat surface on the ground will have its `face' upside down, with its `head' and
`butt' determined by the shapes at the end of its longest axis (see Levinson 1994).
Neither vertical orientation nor function play a role in part assignment, which can
be shown to be almost entirely a matter of internal geometry.”
262
See ibid., 549-50. Levinson and Wilkins write, “What the observations in this
section show is that in this fundamental area of spatial language and cognition,
which psychologists have imagined to be conceptually uniform across the species,
we find once again significant variation at almost every level.”
263
See ibid., 542. Levinson and Wilkins write, “[Intrinsic frames of reference are]
closely linked to topology, where the geometry of the ground object is also

384
relevant – knowing the parts of an object is a precondition to using intrinsic
systems.”
264
See ibid., 543. Though Levinson and Wilkins do not make use of the
categories (animism and naturalism), the linguistic traditions referenced as
relative frames of reference listed here can be easily correlated with the ecologies.
265
See Haviland, "Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions."
266
Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 221.
267
Ibid., 218.
268
See A. P. Elkin, "Studies in Australian Totemism: The Nature of Australian
Totemism," Oceania 4, no. 2 (1933).
269
Ibid., 121.
270
Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 154.
271
See ibid., 151-52.
272
Elkin, "Studies in Australian Totemism: The Nature of Australian Totemism,"
130.
273
See Brandenstein, Names and Substance of the Australian Subsection System,
11-12, 19-20, 61-63, 93, 97-98, 148-49.
274
See "Identical Principles Behind Australian Totemism and Empedoclean
'Philosophy'."
275
Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 156.
276
Ibid., 160.
277
Brandenstein, Names and Substance of the Australian Subsection System, 85-
86.
278
See Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 513.
279
See ibid., 542. Levinson writes, “This frame of reference [intrinsic] is the only
one that may be - at least in rudimentary form, with topological antecedents -
universal.”
280
See Alison Wylie, Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of
Archaeology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); "The Reaction
against Analogy," Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8(1985);
""Simple" Analogy and the Role of Relevance Assumptions: Implications of
Archaelogical Practice," International Studies in Philosophy of Science 2(1988).
281
Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Epilogue: Analogy as the Core of Cognition," in The
Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, ed. Dedre Gentner, Keith
James Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 499.
282
See Esa Itkonen, Analogy as Structure and Process: Approaches in Linguistic,
Cognitive Psychology, and Philosophy of Science, Human Cognitive Processing
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2005), 6.
283
See ibid., 202.
284
Ibid., 166-76.
285
See ibid., 177-86.
385
286
See Brandenstein, "Identical Principles Behind Australian Totemism and
Empedoclean 'Philosophy'."
287
Ibid., 137.
288
Ibid., 138-43.
289
See Itkonen, Analogy as Structure and Process: Approaches in Linguistic,
Cognitive Psychology, and Philosophy of Science, 182-83.
290
See Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 621 n. 7.
291
Descola, "Beyond Nature and Culture," 7.
292
Ibid., 12.
293
Ibid.
294
See Brandenstein, Names and Substance of the Australian Subsection System,
11.
295
Ibid., 10.
296
See Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 21.
297
Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 235.
298
Ibid., 202.
299
See ibid., 202-07.
300
See "Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society;" "Constructing Natures:
Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice," in Nature and Society: Anthropological
Perspectives, ed. Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson (London: Routledge, 1996).
301
"Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society," 109.
302
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,"
469-70.
303
See Kaj Århem, "Ecosofía Makuna," in La Selva Humanizada: Ecología
Alternativa En El Trópica Húmedo Colombiano, ed. Francois Correa (Bogota:
Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, 1993); "The Cosmic Food Web: Human-
Nature Relatedness in the North-West Amazon," in Nature and Society:
Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson (London:
Routledge, 1996); Andrew Gray, The Arakmbut--Mythology, Spirituality, and
History, The Arakmbut of Amazonian Peru (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books,
1996). See also Eduardo Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in
Amazonia and Elsewhere," HAU: Masterclass Series 1(2012): 7. Viveiros de
Castro is at pains to distinguish his ontologically robust point from Århem’s more
representationalist/constructivist reading of perspectivism here.
304
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and
Elsewhere," 45.
305
See Brian Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals," in
Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, ed.
Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Simon
Blackburn, "Perspectives, Fictions, Errors, Play," in Nietzsche and Morality, ed.

386
Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon
Press, 2007).
306
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and
Elsewhere," 45.
307
Ibid., 88.
308
Ibid.
309
See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 173.
310
Descola, "Beyond Nature and Culture," 8.
311
Ibid.
312
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and
Elsewhere," 474.
313
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and
Elsewhere," 126.
314
See Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia,
Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); "Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society;"
"Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice."
315
Roy Wagner, "Facts for You to Believe in Them; Perspectives Encourage You
to Believe out of Them. An Introduction to Viveiros De Castro's Magisterial
Essay," HAU: Masterclass Series 1(2012): 12.
316
Wagner, "Figure-Ground Reversal among the Barok," HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012): 542. Wagner writes, “The Tolai say that
man is a tabapot, a figure-ground reversal, forever desiring that which is outside
of his form (body), only to hunger again for the human form once the external has
been obtained.”
317
See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 172-73.
318
Ibid., 172.
319
Ibid.
320
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and
Elsewhere," 131.
321
See ibid., 126.
322
See ibid., 112.
323
See ibid., 114.
324
Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism," 136-37.
325
See ibid., 136. Ferrer writes, “Participatory also refers to the fundamental
ontological predicament of human beings in relation to spiritual energies and
realities. Human beings are-whether they know it or not-always participating in
the self-disclosure of the Spirit by virtue of their very existence. The participatory
predicament is not only the ontological foundation of the other forms of
participation, but also the epistemic anchor of spiritual knowledge claims and the
moral source of responsible action.”

387
326
See Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and
Elsewhere," 123.
327
For the difference between Greek and Chinese things see G. E. R. Lloyd, The
Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China,
Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 49. “But the
fundamental difference between yin/yang and much Greek thinking with
polarities, is that yin and yang themselves are not stable, fixed entities, but
dynamic, interrelational, aspectual.” And with regard to divergences in elemental
theories of Greek and Chinese thought, “This is not an element theory, in the
sense that we understand in Greece, where the elements are the basic constituents
of things and in themselves unchanging. The five phases, wood, fire, earth, metal,
water, are the stages of transformations that occur, processes rather than
substances, related to one another in cycles of production and conquest.”
328
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and
Elsewhere," 88.
329
Holbraad, Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination,
90.
330
Ibid., 94.
331
See ibid., 127. Holbraad writes, “[A divinatory cosmology] present the
contrast between what I have been calling transcendence and immanence as a
problem of sorts – a twin predicament, if you like. Too much transcendence [leads
to] the absolute separation of Orula from the world of humans…. Too much
immanence [leads to] absolute identification between divinities and humans…
can be equally disastrous.”
332
See Filip de Boeck and René Devisch, "Ndembu, Luunda and Yaka Divination
Compared: From Representation and Social Engineering to Embodiment and
Worldmaking," Journal of Religion in Africa 24, no. 2 (1994): 129.
333
For reference to shamans as “transspecific beings” see Eduardo Viveirós de
Castro, "Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in
Amerindian Ontologies," Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 465.
334
Regarding the “logic of the One” see Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond
Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2008). I was
introduced to Schneider’s work at too late a date to include a consideration of it in
these pages, though I imagine her logic of the One to be largely in keeping with
what I am here calling naturalism.
335
Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of
Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 10.
336
See the section “The Enactive Approach and Participatory Evolution” in
chapter 6 below.
337
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 2.
338
Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World, 15.

388
339
See Marcel Détienne, The Creation of Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
340
See the introductory chapter of Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How
Rituals Enact the World, 154.
341
Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 2.
342
Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
343
Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World, 155.
344
See Goody, The Theft of History, 13-14.
345
Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 3.
346
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,"
481.
347
See my consideration of Holbraad’s recursive anthropology above.
348
See also Jr. Hester, Thurman Lee, "On Philosophical Discourse: Some
Intercultural Missings," in American Indian Thought, ed. Anne Waters (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 264. A Creek elder that Hester invites to speak to
his students makes a similar point when asked what makes a Creek a Creek. Mr.
Proctor, the Creek elder, says, “If you come to the stomp ground for four years,
take the medicines and dance the dances, then you are Creek.”
349
Compare for example with Rane Willerslev, "Animal, Not Not-Animal:
Hunting, Imitation and Emphathetic Knowledge among the Siberian
Yukaghirs," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(2004): 632; Jane
Monnig Atkinson, The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 283. Willerslev writes, “Thus, I cannot
claim to represent all the Yukaghirs, or even all the Yukaghirs of Nelemnoye.
Therefore, when I use the terms ‘Yukaghir’, or ‘the Yukaghir people’, I am
resorting to ethnographic shorthand for those individuals among the Yukaghir
population ‘whom I know the best’ (cf.Atkinson 1989: 5).”
350
Goody utilizes the term Lodaaga rather than Dagara to point to this tradition.
For a detailed consideration of various terminological choices used by Goody and
other anthropologists considering the Dagara see Sean Hawkins, Writing and
Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the Lodagaa and "the
World on Paper" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 5-9. Hawkins
writes that while LoDagaa is an ethnonym used within the anthropological
literature, it is an invention of this same literature, and not used by the people
themselves. Goody and Hawkins choose to stay within the accepted literature by
using LoDagaa, I follow Somé and the tradition I work within, and use the term
Dagara. Pointing specifically to the “LoDagaa” speaking people who live within
close proximity to the town of Dano, in French speaking Burkina Faso.
351
See Jack Goody, Myth, Ritual and the Oral (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 62. “Our recordings showed considerable variations,
whether they were made by the same person in different situations or by different
persons in the same situation, proof that the [LoDagaa] Bagre is not remembered

389
by heart, word for word…. The variations are not secretly introduced but are
encouraged (it remains ‘one’), even if they mean the disappearance of another
theme. These versions show the presence of creative talents which the idea of a
fixed text of a myth overlooks.” See also The Domestication of the Savage Mind,
28-29.
352
It is helpful to clarify that I am a philosopher who is relatively youthful in
context. Somé is fond of laughing at my naturalist questions regarding the real
and being, and often comments on the necessity of continued divinatory practice
if I am ever to understand the depths of what a philosopher is from a Dagara point
of view.
353
I am not sure to what extent it occurred to us that we had already been taking
life by eating a vegetarian diet up until this point.
354
This is a common sentiment of the Dagara community often quoted by Somé.
355
Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking through Things," 7.
356
Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, trans. Alistair Ian
Blyth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 262.
357
See for example Tiffiny A. Tung, "Dismembering Bodies for Display: A
Bioarchaeological Study of Trophy Heads from the Wari Site of Conchopata,
Peru," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 136(2008); "Trauma and
Violence in the Wari Empire of the Peruvian Andes: Warfare, Raids, and Ritual
Fights," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 133(2007); Violence, Ritual,
and the Wari Empire: A Social Bioarchaeology of Imperialism in the Ancient
Andes (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).
358
For a anthology on Neolithic violence see Rick J. Schulting and Linda Fibiger,
Sticks, Stones, and Broken Bones: Neolithic Violence in a European Perspective
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
359
Eduardo Viveirós de Castro, The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The
Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th-Century Brazil, trans. Gregory
Duff Morton (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2011), 102.
360
See Oswald de Andrade and Leslie Bary, "Cannibalist Manifesto," Latin
American Literary Review 19, no. 38 (1991): 38.
361
Ibid., 39.
362
For divergent considerations of the Goddess see Kristy S. Coleman, Re-Riting
Woman: Dianic Wicca and the Feminine Divine, The Pagan Studies Series
(Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009); Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess:
Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1997); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A
Western Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
363
Viveirós de Castro, The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of
Catholics and Cannibals in 16th-Century Brazil.
364
See ibid., 94. Viveiros de Castro writes, “Cannibalism seems to have been,
among many other things, the specifically female method for obtaining long life
[among the Tupinambá].”

390
365
Bernard Williams, "The Truth in Relativism," Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 75(1974).
366
This is only a first step toward the important contributions the cross-ecological
work defended in these pages might offer the important conversations regarding
relativism in the academic literature. By pointing toward the overemphasis on
naturalist ecologies in Western thought regarding the conversation surrounding
issues of relativism, this cross-ecological project is able to invite both animist and
totemic ecologies into this important conversation. Where naturalism is haunted
by relativism, animist and totemic ecologies are not. As this dissertation is revised
and updated for publication as a book, a chapter on relativism in light of these
important differences is planned.
367
Williams, "The Truth in Relativism," 226.
368
See ibid., 224.
369
Ibid., 226.
370
Ibid., 227.
371
See David Perusek, "Grounding Cultural Relativism," Anthropological
Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2007): 821. Perusek writes, “After having long been regarded
icon of been traditionalists as Western gateway to long by universal in clergy-
most truth ethics, and evil notably as denounced by Joseph Ratzinger, who’s
pontifications on the subject now carry the weight of his ascendancy to the papacy
- cultural relativism is increasingly under fire from human rights activists,
socialists, communists, and left leaning thinkers the world over. In fact the
situation is so bad that Maryam Namazie, the intellectual and Director of the
Worker Communist Party of Iran has, for instance, taken to calling cultural
relativism ‘this era’s fascism.’”
372
Ibid., 835.
373
See Michael F. Brown, "Cultural Relativism 2.0," Current Anthropology 49,
no. 3 (2008): 372. Brown writes, “Despite its flaws, and revised along the lines
proposed here, cultural relativism is a set of ideas worth keeping—not as a
comprehensive philosophy or doctrine, a status it cannot sustain, but as a rule of
thumb or an intellectual tool.”
374
Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?: From Matter of Fact to
Matters of Concern," Critical Enquiry 30, no. 2 (2004).
375
Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 33.
376
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,"
480-81.
377
Harry G. West, Ethnographic Sorcery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007), 85.
378
Ibid., 84.
379
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,"
481.
380
West, Ethnographic Sorcery, 85.

391
381
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples (London: Zed Books / University of Otago Press, 1999), 187.
382
See Aparecide Vilaça, Stange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of
Encounters in Amazonia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 312. Vilaça
writes, “Carneiro da Cunha's observation (1998, 12) on the importance of
journeys for the shaman's training in western Amazonia provides an interesting
example of this idea. According to Carneiro da Cunha, today's Western-style
journeys, involving distant travel and stays in different cities, are seen to be
equivalent to the soul's journeys [in animist traditions].”
383
Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 25.
384
Ibid.
385
Nikki Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation
Ritual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13. For a more in depth
consideration regarding the metaphor of commuting with regard to comparative
studies see Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
386
Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 347.
387
Graham Harvey, "Guesthood as Ethical Decolonising Research Method,"
Numen 50, no. 2 (2003): 134. Harvey goes on to write, “That the ancestor/house
also eats/receives visitors either by consuming or embracing them is also made
clear in door carvings that more-than- represent mouths and/or vaginas.”
388
Ibid.
389
Ibid.
390
Ibid.
391
Ibid., 135.
392
Ibid., 136.
393
Ibid., 140-41.
394
See for example Giorgio Agamben and William McCuaig, Democracy in
What State? , New Directions in Critical Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011); Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London:
Verso, 2000). With regard to the predatory tendencies aimed at conversion
engaged by neo-Darwinists see Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science,
Religion, and Nature.
395
Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 337-38.
396
Ibid., 338-39.
397
R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation
Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 133.
398
Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 115.
399
Ibid., 250.
400
Ibid., 251.
401
Ibid., 252-53.
402
Ibid., 253.
392
403
Avramescu references John T. Scott, ed. Jean-Jacques Rousseu: Critical
Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 2006), 388.
404
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 102-03.
405
Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 262.
406
Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy, 112.
407
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis: Library of the
Liberal Arts, 1955), 19.
408
Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy, 120.
409
Ibid., 90.
410
See Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking through Things,"
5.
411
Ibid., 13.
412
See Clifford Geertz, "The Way We Think Now: Toward an Ethnography of
Modern Thought," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 35, no.
5 (1982): 19-23.
413
An inside created first by assuming a very particular version of “outside” and
then by proceeding to create theories by virtue of the problematic “inside” that
this outside made up of simply located things requires.
414
See Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?: From Matter of Fact to
Matters of Concern."
415
Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking through Things," 6.
416
See Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied
Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1991). The enactive approach of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch is considered in
greater detail in a chapter 6.
417
Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies," 35.
418
See Holbraad, Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban
Divination; "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory
Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)," in Thinking through Things:
Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and
Sari Wastell (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
419
Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking through Things," 10.
420
See Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of
Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
421
Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in
Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
422
See Daniel Cottom, Cannibals & Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
423
See Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion.
424
See Eduardo Viveirós de Castro, "O Nativo Relativo," Mana 8, no. 1 (2002).
393
425
See Viola F. Cordova, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F.
Cordova, ed. Kathleen Dean Moore (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007),
145-50. Cordova defends the complexity of the Native American thought against
Western tendenancies to denigrate these traditions. Yet in defending her tradition,
she tends to denigrate the other (Western) tradition. If we read these traditions as
naturalist (Western) and animist (Native American) we can see the important
complexities in both, as opposed to arguing for either or.
426
Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking through Things," 15.
427
Here I must give a nod to the work of the philosopher Jean Gebser. See Jean
Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas
(Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 1985).
428
Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, "Introduction: Thinking through Things," 16.
429
Ferrer, "Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the
Question of Religious Pluralism," 137.
430
See James Leach, "Differentiation and Encompassment: A Critique of Alfred
Gell's Theory of the Abduction of Creativity," in Thinking through Things:
Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and
Sari Wastell (London: Routledge, 2007).
431
Morten A. Pedersen, "Talismans of Thought: Shamanist Ontologies and
Extended Cognition in Northern Mongolia," in Thinking through Things:
Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and
Sari Wastell (London: Routledge, 2007), 144.
432
See ibid., 162.
433
See Terrence M. S. Evens, "Mind, Logic, and the Efficacy of the Nuer Incest
Prohibition," Man 18, no. 1 (1983); Anthropology and Ethics: Nondualism and
the Conduct of Sacrifice (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008).
434
See especially Roy Wagner, "The Fractal Person," in Big Men and Great Men:
Personifications of Power in Melanesia, ed. Maurice Godelier and Marilyn
Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Symbols That Stand
for Themselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
435
See especially Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and
Problems with Society in Melanesia; After Nature: English Kinship in the Late
Twentieth Century, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale, Prickly
Pear Pamphlet (Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press, 1995); Partial Connections,
Updated ed. (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004); "Artefacts of History: Events
and the Interpretation of Images," in Culture and History in the Pacific, ed. Jukka
Siikala (Helsinki: Finnish Anthropological Society, 1990).
436
See especially Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences
into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); We Have
Never Been Modern; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The
Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

394
437
See especially Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia
and Elsewhere;: "O Nativo Relativo;" "The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-
Essays on Kinship and Magic," in Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model
Reconsidered, ed. Sandra Bamford and James Leach (Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2005); "The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits," Inner
Asia 9, no. 2 (2007); "Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects
into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies;" "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian
Perspectivism."
438
See Holbraad, Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban
Divination, 260. Holbraad shares a personal communication with Viveiros de
Castro who suggests Holbraad writes with a “strong Kantian accent” further
remarking that he “was led to imagine [the manuscript] as a kind of latter day
Critique of Anthropological Reason. [Chapter 2], for instance, reads as a version
of the ‘antinomies of reason’; and the job done in [the conclusion] looks
amazingly like a ‘transcendental deduction’ sort of argument. The whole project
of the author, as a matter of fact, made me think of a Kantian-like effort to
establish the conditions of possibility of all anthropological knowledge.”
439
See ibid., 261-62. Holbraad underlines this point by clarifying that if we
“replace ‘world’ with ‘other,’ ‘experience of the world’ with ‘ethnography,’ and
‘categories of thought’ with ‘analytical concepts,’ and the above account of
Kantian critique becomes a fair description of recursive anthropology… hence the
Kantian accent.”
440
Ibid., 262. See also W. M. Alexander, "Johann Georg Hamann: Metacritic of
Kant," Journal of the History of Ideas 27(1966).
441
See for example Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists
and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987); We Have Never Been Modern; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The
Construction of Scientific Facts.
442
Holbraad, Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination,
263.
443
See Hollis, "The Social Deconstruction of Reality; Martin Hollis and Steven
Lukes, "Introduction," ibid; Steven Lukes, "Relativism in Its Place," ibid., ed.
Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes.
444
See for example the various essays in Krausz, Relativism: Interpretation and
Confrontation.
445
See Richard A. Shweder, "Post-Nietzschian Anthropology: The Idea of
Multiple Objective Worlds," in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed.
Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). For
another post-Nietzschian critical stance that is more in keeping with my overall
project see also Christopher Bracken, Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
446
See Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies." Ferrer and Sherman acknowledge the
important feminist emphasis on transformation (as opposed to
395
representationalism), and reference the work of Mike Sandbothe who also notes
the change of emphasis from representation to transformation that has occurred
for those shifting allegiances from analytic and linguistic philosophy to more
pragmatic expressions. See Mike Sandbothe, "The Pragmatic Twist of the
Linguistic Turn," in The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary
Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought, ed. William Egginton
and Mike Sandbothe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
447
See Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, The Norton Library (New
York: Norton, 1975).
448
See previous section, “Thinking Through Things.”
449
Holbraad, "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory
Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)," 190.
450
See Donald R. Hill, "Magic: Magic in Primitive Societies," in The
Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company, 1987).
451
See Kevin Schilbrack, "Introduction: On the Use of Philosophy in the Study of
Myths," in Thinking through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kevin
Schilbrack (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5-10; Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the
Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 23-26.
452
See Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies
of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 26.
453
Lincoln, "Theses and Method," in Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars:
Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012).
454
Arvind Sharma, Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case
for Reciprocal Illumination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005),
48.
455
See Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion;
The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was
Preserved in the Language of Pluralism.
456
See Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths,
Knowledge, and Ideology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003).
457
Bruce Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations
in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1.
458
See for example Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and
Indigenous Peoples.
459
See Shweder, "Post-Nietzschian Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple
Objective Worlds."
460
Ibid., 101.
461
See Kripal, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion,
10.

396
462
Shweder, "Post-Nietzschian Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple Objective
Worlds," 101.
463
Ibid.
464
A naturalist myth in the best sense of the word, following Descola’s multiple
ontologies fleshed out in the following chapter.
465
Shweder points us toward his own work on the subject of distinct rationalities.
See Richard A. Shweder, "Divergent Rationalities," in Metatheory in Social
Sciences: Pluralisms and Subjectivities, ed. Donald W. Fiske and Richard A.
Shweder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
466
Swheder, "Post-Nietzschian Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple Objective
Worlds," 126.
467
See for example Yancy, Philosophy in Multiple Voices.
468
Shweder notes that this postpositivist stance is not all together new. Following
Michael Friedman, for example, he remarks that the same postpositivist argument
recounted here can be found in the Marburg School and the doctrine of “logical
idealism.” Shweder references Michael Friedman, " Scientific Objectivity in
Historical Perspective.," (Unpublished manuscriptn.d.). For a further
consideration of the relativistic leanings of the Marburg School see also Friedman,
A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court,
2000).
469
See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
470
See Robin Horton, "African Traditional Thought and Western Science," Africa
37(1967).
471
Shweder, "Post-Nietzschian Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple Objective
Worlds."
472
Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 2.
473
Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies," 32.
474
Shweder, "Post-Nietzschian Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple Objective
Worlds," 131.
475
Ibid., 111.
476
Ibid., 134.
477
I mention this point in more detail in a following chapter (on scholar-
practitioners), but it seems to me that this may stem to some extent from
Shweder’s engagement with Hindu alterity, with its naturalist leanings, than say
the alterity of Achuar animism, Guugu Yimithirr totemism or the analogism of
West African divination practices like those engaged by Holbraad in his own
recursive studies (naturalism, animism, totemism, and analogism are all fleshed
out in some detail in the following chapter).
478
Holbraad, "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory
Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)," 190.

397
479
Ibid.
480
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays (New
York: Doubleday, 1954), 78.
481
Ibid., 76.
482
It should be noted that for his part, Malinowski did not conflate magic and
mana, as Holbraad seems to suggest that he did. See for example ibid., 85.
Malinowski writes, “all theories which lay mana and similar conceptions at the
basis of magic are pointing all together in the wrong direction.” Malinowski
understands magic as a ritual act, an emotional overflowing, while he reserves
terms like mana for primitive metaphysical categories.
483
See Bradd Shore, "Mana and Tapu," in Developments in Polynesian Ethnology,
ed. Alan Howard and Robert Borofsky (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1989).
484
Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
485
Holbraad, Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination,
241-42. Holbraad continues, “In effect ‘oracular’ points to an absence of
argument in the text: it presumes truth, failing to display a sufficient concern with
it; in other words, it states truth rather than establishing it.”
486
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (London:
Routlege, 1987), 63.
487
Ibid., 63-64.
488
See Lévi-Strauss, Totemism.
489
Holbraad, "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory
Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)," 195.
490
Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 52-53.
491
Holbraad, "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory
Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)," 195.
492
See William S. Sax, "Ritual and the Problem of Efficacy," in The Problem of
Ritual Efficacy, ed. William Sturman Sax, Johannes Quack, and Jan Weinhold
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
493
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E.
Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 201.
494
Holbraad, "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory
Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)," 198.
495
See ibid., 193.
496
Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1998), 94. “By placing actual Indian people as well as imagined Indians into a
disjunctive past, Morgan pointed toward a sea change in the ways Americans
imagined their identities using Indianness. In the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth centuries, Americans’ fascination with playing Indian would shift from
the tradition founded during the Revolution – to a new, modernist tradition

398
characterized by an obsessive desire for authentic Indians outside the temporal
bounds of modern society. Ethnography could point toward one toward such
authenticity, and early twentieth-century Americans swirled that together with
tourism and a new primitivism in order to address deep-seated social and cultural
anxieties. The result was yet another reinvention and dramatic appropriation of
Indianness.”
497
Holbraad, "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory
Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)," 200.
498
Ibid., 199.
499
See Plato, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1997),
Phaedrus 229-30.
500
See Ramon V. Albareda and Marina T. Romero, Nacidos De La Tierra:
Sexualidad, Origen, Del Ser Humano (Barcelona: Hogar del Libro, 1991); Jorge
N. Ferrer, "Embodied Spirituality, Now and Then," Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish
Critique of Politics, Culture, & Society, no. May/June (2006); Ferrer, Romero,
and Albareda, "Embodied Participation in the Mystery: Implications for the
Individual, Interpersonal Relationships, and Society; Marina T. Romero and
Ramon V. Albareda, "Born on Earth: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Human
Evolution," ibid.24, no. 2 (2001); Romero and Malkemus, "Sexuality as a
Transformational Path: Exploring the Holistic Dimensions of Human Vitality."
This body of work is based on a set of basic polarities: procleaver (instigates
contact) – receiver (receives contact), light-dark, masculine-feminine.
501
See Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of
Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 51.
502
For works by Harner see Michael J. Harner, Hallucinogens and Shamanism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); The Way of the Shaman, 10th
anniversary ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990); Cave and Cosmos:
Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books,
2013); The JíVaro, People of the Sacred Waterfalls (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984). For Somé see Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power,
Healing and Community, Echoes of the Ancestors (Portland, OR: Swan/Raven &
Co., 1993); Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life
Purpose through Nature, Ritual, and Community (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher /
Putnam, 1998); Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life
of an African Shaman (New York: Putnam, 1994).
503
See Jefferey J. Kripal, "Comparative Mystics," in The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic
Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
504
"Restoring the Adam of Light," in The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on
the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
505
Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies," 22.
506
See Kripal, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion,
108.
399
507
Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea
Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999).
508
See Kripal, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion,
88. In Kripal’s own words, “such “mystical humanism” reduces “all religious
language to the human being, but to human being now conceived as an
unfathomable biological, chemical, and quantum depth, an immeasurable,
unquantifiable potential, an anciently evolved cosmic body literally composed of
exploded stars, an instinctually undetermined, ever-receding horizon, and a
radical, irreducible plurality expressed and explored in countless cultural forms
and practices.”
509
Ibid.
510
See ibid., 82-89.
511
Ibid., 94.
512
Ibid.
513
Tobie Nathan, "The Phasmid and the Twig," Common Knowledge 10, no. 3
(2004): 530. See also Eduardo Viveirós de Castro, "Exchanging Perspectives: The
Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies," ibid.: 466.
514
Plato, Plato: Complete Works, Phaedrus 230d.
515
For an interesting account of the Greek struggle with “belief” see Paul Veyne,
Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive
Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
516
Kripal, "Comparative Mystics," 488.
517
See Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian
Perspectivism."
518
See Descola, "Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society; "Constructing
Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice."
519
See for example Nurit Bird-David and Danny Naveh, "Relational
Epistemology, Immediacy, and Conservation: Or, What Do the Nayaka Try to
Conserve?," Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 2, no. 1 (2008).
520
See Viveirós de Castro, "Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of
Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies," 468.
521
See Ferrer, Romero, and Albareda, "Embodied Participation in the Mystery:
Implications for the Individual, Interpersonal Relationships, and Society; Marina
T. Romero and Ramon V. Albareda, "Born on Earth: Sexuality, Spirituality, and
Human Evolution," ibid.24, no. 2 (2001).
522
See José Ignacio Cabezón, "The Discipline and Its Other: The Dialectic of
Alterity in the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion
74, no. 1 (2006).
523
See Zayin Cabot, "Toward a Critical Evolutionary Cosmology: A Process-
Oriented Critique of Integral Theory," in Dancing with Sophia: Intetegral
Philosophy on the Verge, ed. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Michael Schwartz
(Albany: State University of New York Press, Forthcoming).
400
524
Cordova, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova, 69-75.
Cordova is a very generous author, and yet she portrays Native American thought
as containing more depth and complexity than Euro-American thought. This
could be read as we are similar, but Native Americans are more complex than
Euro-Americans.
525
Kripal, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, 104.
526
Cabezón, "The Discipline and Its Other: The Dialectic of Alterity in the Study
of Religion," 32-33.
527
Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual, 14.
528
Jacob Sherman, personal communication with author.
529
See ibid.
530
See consideration of Lopez, Kripal, Cabezón, and King in this section.
531
See section entitled “Adventures in Interdisciplinary Method and Intimate
Metaphysics” in chapter 1.
532
See Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation
Ritual, 6.
533
Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies," 103. Ferrer and Sherman write, “[The
participatory approach] results in the most genuine of pluralisms, a soteriology
capable of multiple religious ends without collapsing these ends into each other or
subordinating them to one single goal.”
534
Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual, 16.
535
Ibid., 17.
536
David Hufford, "The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: Reflexivity in
Belief Studies," Western Folklore 54, no. 1 (1995): 69.
537
Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, 5.
538
Cabezón, "The Discipline and Its Other: The Dialectic of Alterity in the Study
of Religion," 29.
539
G. William Barnard, "Transormations and Transformers: Spirituality and the
Academic Study of Mysticism," Journal of Consciousness Studies 1, no. 2 (1994).
540
Donald D. Evans, Spirituality and Human Nature, Suny Series in Religious
Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
541
Jess Byron Hollenback, Mysticism: Experience, Response, and Empowerment,
Hermeneutics, Studies in the History of Religions (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
542
Frits Staal, Exploring Mysticism: A Methodological Essay (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975).
543
Evans, Spirituality and Human Nature, 101.
544
B. Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of
Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 187.
545
Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 6-7.

401
546
See Descola, "Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society; "Constructing
Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice."
547
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,"
476.
548
Ibid., 481-82.
549
Jorge N. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of
Human Spirituality, Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 123.
550
Stoller and Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among
the Songhay of Niger, 227.
551
Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande.
552
Stoller and Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among
the Songhay of Niger, 51.
553
Paul Stoller, The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 178.
554
West, Ethnographic Sorcery, 48.
555
Ibid., 49.
556
See Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian
Perspectivism," 481. See also Viveirós de Castro, "Exchanging Perspectives: The
Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies." Viveiros de
Castro points to a “Supernature” which he uses to denote a “trans-specific unity of
spirit” or interiority found in Amazonian animism; this in sharp contrast to the
naturalist assertion of “supernatural” whereby super denotes transcendent.
557
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,"
481.
558
See Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods.
559
Descola, "Beyond Nature and Culture," 3-5.
560
Viveirós de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,"
483.
561
See Saler, "Lévy-Bruhl, Participation, and Rationality."
562
See Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality.
563
See Hanegraaff, "How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World?."
564
See Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales Dans Les Sociétés Inféieures,
Travaux De L'année Sociologique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1910).
565
Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies," 38.
566
Ibid.
567
See ibid., 36. Ferrer and Sherman write, “Lévy-Bruhl relaxed the contrast
between logical and participatory mentalities indicating that, instead of being
exclusively associated with modern and primitive modes of thinking respectively,
both cognitive styles coexisted to some extent in all human beings.”
568
Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 386.
402
569
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science, trans. Elizabeth Lee (London:
A. Constable & Company, 1905).
570
Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 37.
571
Ibid., 37-38.
572
See H. R. Hays, From Ape to Angel: An Informal History of Social
Anthropology (New York: Knopf, 1958), 303-4. Hays writes, “It is probable that
Lévy-Bruhl would not have exaggerated his picture of native confusion to such an
extent if he had engaged in field work.”
573
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "Lévy-Bruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality," Bulletin
of the Faculty of Arts [Egyptian University, Cairo] 2(1934).
574
Littleton, "Introduction: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the Concept of Cognitive
Relativity."
575
See Holbraad, "The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the
Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)."
576
See for example Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 38.
577
Maurice Leenhardt, "Preface," in Les Carnets De Lévy-Bruhl (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1949).
578
Jonathan Z. Smith, "I Am a Parrot (Red)," History of Religions 11, no. 4
(1972). Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, "A Letter to E. E. Evans-Pritchard," The British
Journal of Sociology 3, no. 2 (1952): 119.
579
See Wagner, "Facts for You to Believe in Them; Perspectives Encourage You
to Believe out of Them. An Introduction to Viveiros De Castro's Magisterial
Essay."
580
Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1927).
581
John Dewey, "Foreword," in Primitive Man as Philosopher, ed. Paul Radin
(New York: Dover Publications, 1927).
582
H. Odera Oruka, Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate
on African Philosophy, Philosophy of History and Culture (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1990).
583
Paulin J. Hountondji, African Philosophy : Myth and Reality, Hutchinson
University Library for Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
584
See Evans-Pritchard, "Lévy-Bruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality," 44-45.
585
Lévy-Bruhl, "A Letter to E. E. Evans-Pritchard," 118-19.
586
See Evans-Pritchard, "Lévy-Bruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality."
587
Littleton, "Introduction: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the Concept of Cognitive
Relativity," xx.
588
See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, Sir D Owen Evans
Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, 1965). In this essay,
Evans-Pritchard is critical of Lévy-Bruhl’s use of particular “biased”
ethnographies, clarifies that in his own work he has found non-Western people to
be capable of some form of logic, and that he understands Lévy-Bruhl’s category

403
of “prelogical” to be used to make a similar point; though one that needs
clarification. For a recent consideration of this issue see Littleton, "Introduction:
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the Concept of Cognitive Relativity."
589
See Robert Harry Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (New York:
Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 220-21. Lowie was one of the early anthropologists
who contrasted his view against the unilinear model he understood Lévy-Bruhl to
be defending. Through years of working with the Crow Indians, Lowie could
easily push back against speculations that non-Western persons were not capable
of logic.
590
See Andreas Heinz, "Savage Thought and Thoughtful Savages. On the
Context of the Evaluation of Logical Thought by Lévy-Bruhl and Evans-
Pritchard," Anthropos 92, no. 1-3 (1997). Malinowski, who worked with the
Trobrianders was a strong defender of the view that all cultures are capable of
some form of scientific inquiry and logic.
591
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (New York: AMS Press, 1978), 22.
592
Ibid.
593
Ibid., 24.
594
Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality, 89.
595
See for example Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic,
1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Eugenio Canone and Ingrid
D. Rowland, The Alchemy of Extremes: The Laboratory of the Eroici Furori of
Giordano Bruno, Bruniana & Campanelliana Supplementi (Pisa: Istituti Editoriali
e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2007).
596
See Horton, "African Traditional Thought and Western Science;" Robin
Horton and Ruth H. Finnegan, Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western
and Non-Western Societies (London: Faber, 1973).
597
Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality, 87.
598
Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies," 36.
599
See Levinson and Wilkins, Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity, 543.
600
See Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?: From Matter of Fact to
Matters of Concern."
601
Ferrer and Sherman, "Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Religious Studies," 31.
602
Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 130.
603
Ibid., 141.
604
See section entitled “(Post)modern Naturalism” in chapter 2.
605
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The
Biological Roots of Human Understanding, 1st ed. (Boston: New Science Library,
1987); Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science
and Human Experience.
404
606
Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of
Nature is Almost Certainly False 4.
607
Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of
Mind (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 13.
608
Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human
Spirituality, 121.
609
See ibid., 118.
610
John Stewart, "Foundational Issues in Enaction as a Paradigm for Cognitive
Science: From the Origin of Life to Consciousness and Writing," in Enaction:
Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, ed. John Stewart, Olivier
Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1.
611
Ibid., 2.
612
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN:
Hacket Publishing Company, 1987), 283.
613
John F. Cornell, "Newton of the Grassblade? Darwin and the Problem of
Organic Teleology," Isis 77, no. 3 (1986).
614
Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind,
130.
615
Cornell, "Newton of the Grassblade? Darwin and the Problem of Organic
Teleology," 407.
616
Michael T. Ghiselin, "The Darwinian Revolution as Viewed by a
Philosophical Biologist," Journal of the History of Biology 38, no. 1 (2005): 128.
617
Ibid., 127.
618
Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.
619
Ibid., 133.
620
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 236.
621
William Paley, "Natural Theology," in But Is It Science? The Philosophical
Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy, ed. M. Ruse (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1996).
622
Ghiselin, "The Darwinian Revolution as Viewed by a Philosophical
Biologist," 126.
623
Ibid., 128.
624
Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism: Jamesian Applications, Process
Thought (Frankfurt: Ontos-Verlag, 2011), 79. Webber writes: “Process is a very
old concept that can take two main guises: weak (trans-formative) and strong
(creative)…. The weak concept—that already speaks in terms of event, flux,
instability and the like—puts becoming before being; “being” is understood as the
surface effect of ever-changing underlying relationships…. Whitehead's “London
epoch” is a good example of such an attitude. It is a continuist concept that sees
Nature’s unrest as a “perpetual transition into novelty.” Change is morphological:
new patterns are made of old ones…. With the strong concept, not only is the
question raised at the ontological level, but it is now bolder: there cannot be a

405
continuous stream of events progressively disclosing new cosmic features. So
Process and Reality’s (1929) “creative advance” claims that genuine novelty can
only enter the World in a disruptive, bud-like manner. Its point is to secure true
becoming, to make the emergence of the unexpected possible within the fabric of
the universe. Change is creation.”
625
See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology,
1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 80.
626
Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind,
154.
627
Ibid., 158.
628
Ibid., 159.
629
See Tim Ingold, "Becoming Persons: Consciousness and Sociality in Human
Evolution," Cultural Dynamics 4, no. 3 (1991).
630
Viveirós de Castro, "Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects
into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies," 465.
631
See Kremer, "Radical Presence: Beyond Pernicious Identity Politics and
Racialism."
632
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 3.
633
See Cabot, "Toward a Critical Evolutionary Cosmology: A Process-Oriented
Critique of Integral Theory."
634
I think that by reading Whitehead’s work through the lens of ecologies of
participation, a better description than “process” could be articulated for his work.
635
Caputo, "Foreword," vii.
636
Juliet J. Fall, "Toolboxes for Thinking Worlds: Philippe Descola and Michel
Serres," Society and Space(2012),
http://societyandspace.com/2012/11/05/toolboxes-for-thinking-worlds-philippe-
descola-and-michel-serres/. See also Emmanuel Lézy and Gérard Chouquer,
"Autour Du Livre De Philippe Descola: Par-Delá Nature Et Culture," Études
rurales 178(2006).
637
Fall, "Toolboxes for Thinking Worlds: Philippe Descola and Michel Serres".
638
See ibid. See also Michel Serres, Écrivains, Savants Et Philosophes Font Le
Tour Du Monde, Les Essais Du Pommier (Paris: Pommier, 2009).
639
See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 91-111.
640
Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World, 13.

406