An ethnographic encounter with death

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The mode of expression I have chosen for this sensory ethnography is quite unconventional. It attempts to open a window on the world of the reverie so that the good-willed observer will be able to dissolve into it. “The map of the imaginable world is traced solely in the daydreams. The sensible universe is an infinitely small.” (Charles Nodier. 1832. Rêveries. Ed. Renduel. P162). This photography work is a sincere attempt to forge an immersive experience for the imagination of the observer. To evoke and suggest what is beyond the reachable known. I justify this method with various ideas I researched and developed parallelly to my photography practice for some years.

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More precisely, the constellation of ideas onto which I will attempt to shed light in order to grant them a coherence, and eventually convince the reader, will be directed towards the rehabilitation of confusion into scientific activities (anthropology for the least), hence rehabilitating the subtilities lost in the destructive enterprise to reduce reality to something understandable. I am arguing for a mystification of the texts we write so that they reflect better the unreachable depths of the real that we study instead of presenting its surface as the sole source of knowledge.

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“A scientistic scholar, one who adopts the rhetoric of exact science without subjecting it to critical analysis, claims that the only reality is one that can be measured, using the instruments – all of them, be it noted, human inventions – that are available to us; all else is froth, irrelevant detail that should not be allowed to interfere with the hard facts that make for scientific certainty.” (Herzfeld. 2018. Anthropological realism in a scientistic age. Anthropological theory, p. 130)

It is against this sanitized scientific certainty that distort our translations of reality to ‘the point of unrecognizability’ (Herzfeld. 2018. P130) that I am arguing. If someone thinks he has understood reality, it is a clear indication that he hasn’t understood anything. Socrates’s mystifying quote : “all I know is that I know nothing” is the founding paradox of science because it underlines an antagonistic necessity to return to a primordial state of ignorance before to enter the delirium from which science is born, the same way we would enter an imaginary vortex that takes us into a deferred real. “…an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.” (Nietzsche, 1873. P6) With disputable terms, Gandhi describes the dreamlike vortex that magnetically attracts the facts and arguments that will shape the feeling of being right about the world within a paradigm that is close to what Herzfeld refers to as ‘popular positivism’ (Herzfeld. 2018. P135):

“There rarely are people to support an argumentation that accuses them. Inebriated by modern civilisation, they will not start writing against her. They will, to the contrary, research facts and arguments to defend her, and they will do it unconsciously, believing that they are right. The man that dreams believes he is in the reality, and he sees his mistake only when he wakes up. The one that works in the poisoned atmosphere of modern civilisation is alike to the man that dreams. The books that we read in general are written by defenders of modern civilisation, in which we also find, of course, brilliant beings and even men of value. We are hypnotised by these writings, and it is so that one after the other, we are dragged into the whirlpool.” (M.K. Gandhi. 1957. p.67-68.)

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Arguing that scientific disciplines relies on cultural structures of conventions (Talalasad, 1973; Abu Lughod, 1991) or that writings are fictions (Clifford Geertz, 1975) is now trivial. The missing step lied in the undertaking of the remarkable breach these ideas have opened in the wall of positivism whose bricks are made from feverish desires for the expression of positive facts acting as occulting shadows. The love for wisdom, which was the initial heart of philosophy, was first transformed into a quest of utile knowledge which in turn was changed to a stacking of information and it is lately being muted into an amorphous mass of data whose army of fanatic disciples have accepted as a norm to melt together quantitative constructions with the principle of reality which allows the erection of a very particular kind of social order which Deleuze described as societies of control (in his 1987’s lecture given to the FEMIS). These blinded devotees are not sailing on the old ocean of wisdom but wading in a pond of political power.

“Old ocean, there would be nothing impossible in you hiding in your breast future utilities for mankind. You already gave him the whale. You do not readily allow to be guessed by the greedy eyes of natural sciences the thousands of secrets of your intimate organisation: you are modest. Man vaunts ceaselessly, and for minutiae. I greet you, old ocean!” (Lautréamont. 1890. Les chants de Maldoror. Librairie générale française)

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The ideal of rationality that is used as a legitimation for the objectivists is itself a lever of intolerance towards any other ways to be, it is a tool for discrediting the richness of alterity, or for the perpetuation of this old colonial tradition which consists in humiliating the other as a ‘chimpanzee’ or worst, like in Kipling’s or Rosling’s book. “Only the one that is satisfying the established order takes pleasure in humiliating the dream.” (Jean-Claude Guillebaud. 2012.) This ideal in turn consolidates the existing episteme (Foucault. 1966), it gave a spirit to the colonial project of civilizing the savages by bringing them the light of value-free rationality.

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“Words?

Ah yes, words !

Reason, I sacred you to the evening wind.

Mouth of the order your name?

It is to me corolla of the whip.

Beauty I call you petition of the stone.

But ah ! the raucous smuggling of my laugh

Ah ! my treasure of saltpetre !

Because we hate you and your reason, we claim ourselves from the precocious dementia of the blazing folly of tenacious cannibalism.” (Aimé Césaire. 1983.Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Editions présence africaine.)

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This is taking us precisely to what Viveiros de Castro described as “The epistemological break of Bachelardian fame” which “became, if not mendable, at least bridgeable; transitions multiplied, continuities were observed, compromises noticed, symmetries proclaimed. This new state of things made all frontiers, internal as well as external, much more permeable. Alterity became delocalized. The ‘Other’ (within or without the west) ceased to be the simple carrier of a mistaken ‘culture’ that represented  distortedly ‘our’ external nature, or conversely, a wild true representative of the internal nature of the human species, whose sociopsychobiological evolutionary makeup is always more easily accessible, as we know, through the examination of the ways of illiterate, ignorant people.” (Viveiros de Castro. 2015. p.5)

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This Bachelardian turn of the wheel relegates the desire for a strictly positive reality of universal conformity at the same rank as the numerous chimeras that ornate the jewels of human imagination. “We cultivate the complexes of culture while believing that we are cultivating ourselves objectively. The realist hence chooses his reality in reality. The historian chooses his history in history. The poet ordinates his impressions by associating them to a tradition.” (Gaston Bachelard. 1942. L’eau et les rêves. Librairie José Corti. P26)

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The passage of imaging prior to any human knowledge is not a ridiculous custom for primitive minds. It is the very process of knowing. “He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves. Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creative subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.” (Nietzsche. 1873. P.5)

The imaginary components lying in the fundaments of scientific activities, themselves entailed in complexes of cultures, are a limiting curse only for those that are still chasing the objectivist dream. “Bachelard shows that the spatial experience is before all mediated by imagination, whose activity precedes not only knowledge but also perception” (Gilles Hieronimus. 2020. P.13)

 

Consciously undertaken, this imaginary turn can lead us to take an active role in the creation of history: “For Nietzsche, the task of ‘the genuine historian’ is nothing less than the transformation of history into poetry in the effort to defend wisdom, to distinguish nobility from baseness, and to establish the love of truth as a resplendent vice and noble faith.” (Peter Berkowitz 1994 : p5). It is not anymore about inquisitively eradicating all myths and dreams in order to purify reality, it now has to become the poetical act of experimenting them. I support the theoretical task to “emancipate, in our effort of knowing the world, from the idea of a linear progress that would go from “the indigenous myth” towards the “the scientific truth” – to decolonise the construction of truth, to learn to read the true histories in the world.” (Baptiste Lanaspeze, Martin Schaffner. 2019. Vers des humanités écologiques – Avant-propos des éditeurs. Éditions wildproject. p.7). Indeed, if on the one hand, the epistemological mind has successfully conquered the world, it has failed to be conquered by the world in return.

“The science, the logic, as our universities practice it, have received their patent of nobility with the mission to discover or to invent a proliferation of forms from the elements of the world of the real, to give to these forms the name of knowledge and to transmit them to the future generations. There is the birth of the ‘system’.” (Robert M. Pirsig. 1974. p.412)

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However, the performative destructivity of the ‘system’ (as described by Pirsig) operating on the ‘world of the real’ it pretends to originate from leads us to propose a turn towards an experimental anthropology that lies in the battlefield of the “three historical stimuli” mentioned by Viveiros de Castro (2015. p.4) which consists in the breakdown of conceptual divides contained in our word categories. “As in the famous Wagnerian one-liner: ‘Every understanding of another culture is an experiment of one’s own.’ Or, As Maniglier himself put it in another occasion (2009), ‘anthropology is the formal ontology of ourselves as variants.’ (Viveiros de Castro. 2015. p.7). Anthropology has always had its roots in the experience of alterity. An action that carries the strange ‘Wagnerian one-liner’ paradox of taking us inside of ourselves though a narcissi mirror-like impression. However, the way this multidirectional experience is being translated is subject to choices, unconsciously or consciously posed by the ethnographer, which will conform his translated result to a certain ideal that has a performative effect on both side of the mirror. “The paradox of translation can be constituted to be analogous to the paradox of decision-making.” (Rottenburg. 2003. p.33) It is precisely this ‘paradox of decision-making’ that we want to question and regenerate. “It is this binarity formed from the social and cultural construction of oppositional couples – the sensible and the intelligible, the emotion and the reason, the images and the ideas – but that has absolutely nothing universal, that a non-hegemonic anthropology must question.” (F. Laplantine. 2014. P.7)

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“And our academic division between arts and sciences comes to worsen the already existing problems caused by this binary sharing (between nature and culture), inhibiting the work that we have to realise. It is the same for the ranking of knowledge systems that situate western science at the summit of an epistemological scale; this harms our capacity to share knowledge within fields composed by plural and diverse knowledge” (Deborah Bird Rose. 2004. Vers des humanités écologiques. Editions wildproject p.12).

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The two issues thereby tackled by Deborah Bird Rose are crucial to our movement of thought. Not so much the use of art in science or the use of science in art but rather the flooding dissolution of both resulting from a destruction of the dam that keeps them separate, is a key to bridge our intellectual cosmogonies to “fields composed by plural and diverse knowledge”. We have inherited this strict division from the so-called enlightenment that gave shape to the division of labour as we know it: “By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented. By the partition of employments, our ability increases. And by mutual succour we are less expos’d to fortune accidents. ‘Tis by this additional force, ability and security, that society becomes advantageous.” (Hume, 1739).

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This ‘partition of employments’ had a clear concern for productivity in an epoch preluding the industrial revolution. This gives us an insight to the dynamics that led to our current episteme (Foucault. 1966). The fractalization of functions in society has become a generalized organizational mode so omnipresent and familiarized that it is globally unquestioned.

There are intrinsic issues to this scheme. First, its incredibly powerful application on society leads to the seemingly logic equation that a person equals his function. In common language, we tend to say ‘he is an artist’ or ‘she is an anthropologist’ as we present someone. We do not say he is a man making art or she is a woman doing anthropology. The function takes over the being as the being takes over his function in society and this process enforces him into pre-compartmentalized categories defined by our conceptual dispositive, themselves embedded in an interplay of images and words. How, I ask you, should we label Leonardo Da Vinci? What function do we give him? A painter, a physician, an engineer, an architect, a poet etc? Or a man doing physics, engineering, architecture, poetry and painting that does not limit himself to boundaries between various activities?

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In my opinion, it leads to regrettable amputations of our intellectual activity even though it might increase productivity as a whole. The division that we operate between modes of expressing the world incarcerates our knowing into categories. Someone is a poet or an artist only because people grant them this title for the recognition of the activities that they execute in a social field. But anyone able to talk is then capable of distorting language, hence creating images, metaphors or allegorical spatiality that repositions our symbolic networks and knowledge system. Art or poetry is not contained in the minds of those denominated poets or artists. It is spread in the general movement of relations between life and the cosmos and its concealing by scholarly customs into unbridgeable fragments is an impoverishment of the activities of the mind.

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Within the fields of conceivable, there exists alternatives to these dichotomic structures that are not only viable and graspable to our intellectual capacities but also, in some cases, desirable. The experiential substance of anthropology that we mentioned above can find its way through translational practices that fully undertake their creative aims instead of hiding the decision-making processes that underly such an enterprise. “In this perspective, reality as represented reality is not the beginning but the result of these practices (Latour 1995 (1991);Pinch 1985)”. (Rottenburg. 2003. p.33) I suggest that poetry can provide the experiential substance of the deeply subjective objects of anthropology, sometimes even better than a traditional ethnographic account. “In its good shape, the complex of culture relives and rejuvenates a tradition. On its bad shape, the complex of culture is a scholar habit of a writer without imagination.” (G. Bachelard. 1942. p.26-27)

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For example, the poem of Aimé Césaire cited earlier in this essay fathoms the feeling of negritude and the resentment towards what he describes as ‘the mouth of order’. Doesn’t it unveil to us in a fistful of words the ‘anthropological challenge of intercultural understanding’? Doesn’t it provide us a remarkable mirror to experience our own culture? This confusing layout of words achieves more than a long essay on the topic. Which ethnographic accounts could reach such depth? The painful lacerations of words that lies at the heart of his poetry is what makes it so sharp. When the scientific forces reality to fit his data, his models and concepts, the poet makes it sing. “If we must desubjectivise as much as possible, the logic and the science, it is nonetheless necessary, as a counter part, to deobjectivise the vocabulary and the syntax.” (Claude Louis Estève. 1939. Etudes philosophiques sur l’expression littéraire. P.192).

I carry the somewhat subversive conviction that a deobjectivised language parallely to a desubjectivised science is a map for writing the unknown. Not creating with language but creating the language, is the gate to open for reaching the unreached.

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“Imagination is not, as suggests its etymology, the faculty of forming images of reality; she is the faculty of forming images that exceed reality, that sing reality. It is a faculty of superhumanity. A man is a man in the proportion that he is a superman. We must define a man by the ensemble of tendencies that pushes him to exceed the human condition. A psychology of the mind in action is automatically the psychology of an exceptional mind, the psychology of a mind that tries the exception: the new image grafted on an ancient image. Imagination invents more than things and dramas, she invents the new life, she invents the new mind; she opens eyes that have new types of vision.” (G. Bachelard. 1942. p.25)

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One could say that a scientific stick to images of reality and leaves the task of exceeding it for other souls. But who could argue that anthropology’s quest doesn’t lie precisely in the experimentation of what exceeds reality as it is known? The exploration of strange cosmogonies hidden behind in the horizon of our real? “Anthropology is always about sticking one’s neck out through the looking-glass of ontological difference.” (Viveiros de Castro. 2015. p.15) And this has everything to do with imagination and poetry. It is from the conviction shared with Bruce Chatwin that “the real is more extraordinary than the fantastic” (as cited in Laurent Maréchaux. 2017. P.199) that we draw our assertion that the real can be expressed more accurately by poetry than with neutralised and objectivised language.

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“The expression ‘paradox of creativity’ reminded me of the work of Donald Winnicott (e.g., 1964) and his crucial concept of the ‘transitional space’, that area in between pure subjective-internal and pure objective-external experiences of the infant, from which, says Winnicott, all art, all creativity and all culture spring. This area contains a paradox, is built on a paradox, says Winnicott – a sort of Möbius-band situation where one can’t tell the inside from the outside, because there is no such distinction – but a paradox that we should refuse to explain. (…) I like to think of a good ethnographic description as a ‘good enough description’. Don’t reduce the paradoxes. The hateful expression ‘breaking a butterfly on a wheel’, which a colleague was patronizing enough to evoke in order to hedge somewhat his harsh criticism of my work, should be applied to what we do with, or rather, to the existential and intellectual work of the peoples we study. Anthropologists are butterfly collectors after all, pace Leach. We are always dealing with, we are only dealing with butterflies. Delicacy (and elegance) is required; too much historicizing will crush the butterfly.” (Viveiros de Castro. 2015. p.13-14).

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Butterfly wings turn into powder as soon as the finger touches it. Likewise, the fragility of our material doesn’t support the knife of analytical thought as we capture it into our word systems. Aspects of lived experienced are unavoidably destroyed when this process is applied to it. And destroying the butterfly means the destruction of both the observation and the observed for the vain triumph of the observer. “When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare “look, a mammal !” I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value.” (Nietzsche. 1873. P.5)

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For this reason, suggesting the confusion that is inherent to any conceptualisation of alterity, tearing apart our own word structures and meaning systems, refusing to establish horizontal equations between objectified settings and avoid taking altitude in our relations with other ways to be is necessary to leave the other unspoiled. Otherwise it could be that “… there will always be victims of civilisation. Its effects are mortals: people let themselves be attracted by her and they get burn, like butterflies at the flame of a candle. (…) Civilisation flatters us by sucking our blood. When its effects will be fully known, we will realize that religious superstition is inoffensive in comparison to the superstition that surrounds modern civilisation.” (M.K. Gandhi. 1957. p.81).

What seems from within as an enlightened reason might seem from the outside as a criminal fire for marvellous butterflies. It is obvious that secularized societies are not exempt of superstitious credulity, of cults and rituals, holy wars and fanatic intolerance. This was put forward many times since Weberian study of the protestant ethic. However, these features are made invisible in the cultural context of the scientific subject because of the familiarized meanings that are attached to vocabulary and symbols used in the act of describing one’s own culture whereas the cultural context of the studied object is unfamiliar and appears as irrational. This is how a blind belief in the invisible hand of the free market ends up appearing as more logical and reasonable than a shamanic sacralization of the forest. This is how we forget that truths are lies: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. (Nietzsche. 1873. P.4)

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I argue that the mission of anthropology should not stop at the defamiliarization of a given cultural context. It should reach further to the defamiliarization with language, the ‘deobjectivation of words’. Not the creation of a new jargon as many have proposed but instead the word by word destruction of our language, of our categories, of our classifications for that is the only way to see something else than our already existing prison of words. For the absurd act of bringing sense to confusion is senseless. It always makes more sense to bring confusion to sense. The destruction of our arrogant ‘logos’ is necessary to recover the ‘mythos’. I am taking part for the sophists despite all the conjurations that were directed to them. “The latter (the intuitive), by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture can take shape and art's mastery over life can be established.”(Nietzsche. 1873. P.9). It is against the illusion of truth that I urge for a return of mythical realities, of burning desires for a poetical universe and unresolvable enigmatic mysteries.

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Florian De Schutter.

 

References

Abu Lughod. 1991. Writing against culture. School of American Research Press.

Aimé Césaire. 1983. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Editions présence africaine.

Berkowitz, P. (1994). Nietzsche's Ethics of History. The Review of Politics, 56(1), 5-27. Retrieved May 28, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/1407565

Charles Nodier. 1832. Rêveries. Ed. Renduel.

Claude Louis Estève. 1939. Etudes philosophiques sur l’expression littéraire. VRIN

Clifford Geertz, 1975. The interpretation of cultures. Hutchinson & co L.T.D.

Deborah Bird Rose. 2004. Vers des humanités écologiques. Editions wildproject

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2015. Who is afraid of the ontological wolf? The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

Foucault 1966. The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences. Gallimard

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873. On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense.

Herzfeld. 2018. Anthropological realism in a scientistic age. Anthropological theory

Hume. 1739. A Treatise of Human Nature. GENERAL PRESS

Jean-Claude Guillebaud. 2012. Une autre vie est possible, Éditions de l'Iconoclaste.

Laurent Maréchaux. 2017. Ecrivains voyageurs – ces vagabonds qui disent le monde. Arthaud poche

Lautréamont. 1890. Les chants de Maldoror. Librairie générale française.

M.K. Gandhi. 1957. Leur civilisation et notre délivrance. Denoël

Richard Rottenburg. 2003. Crossing Gaps of indeterminacy. The university of Arizona Press.

Robert M. Pirsig. 1974. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. William Morrow & C

Talal Asad. 1973. The colonial Encounter. Ithaca Press.