This is the 5th in a series where I provide a brief explanation of an influential concept
We are so used to speaking of things like the economy, politics, society, culture etc that we have now come to take these terms for granted - we assume they are as real as the laptop I am now writing this post on or the breakfast I ate earlier this morning.
We forget that all of these words are scarcely 200-300 years old and yet once these words were coined, we started speaking as if they were a fact of the world - that no matter where one went, one would encounter people with a politics, with an economy, with a culture etc.
Their politics, economy or culture might be different but the fact that they have this thing called a politics, or a culture or an economy is rarely called into question.
There has been a debate brewing in anthropology since the mid to late 90s that has called these assumptions into question.
Anthropology is a discipline devoted to the study of culture and making note of cultural differences. An anthropologist will do fieldwork - spend a prolonged period of time (anywhere between 2 to 20 years) - in a place typically foreign to the anthropologist. So most often the output of anthropological work becomes a comparitive study - we in the West do things this way but in the Fiji islands.....
But there is an assumption - unspoken, often unnoticed assumption - that allows the anthropologist to carry out this work. There is an assumption that while culture varies; nature remains the same.
In India we venerate and worship Tulsi (basil) but in Italy they put Basil in their pasta and make a sauce out of it. In India some people worship cows, in America they make hamburgers out of cows.
The thing called cow or basil remains the same - what varies is the culture surrounding it.
When we talk in this way, it appears we are implicitly narrating a very old myth.
In the beginning was the world. And the world was there and it was beautiful. Then along came Man. Man grew up, evolved and split up and wherever Man went - he ellaborated and built upon the thing that was given to Man - the world. In some places Man fell to his knees and worshipped the Basil plant - in others he ground them up and used it for food. These fabrications that Man built upon the world that was given to Man came to be called culture while the world itself as it was prior to Mans entry became nature.
Or in other words - nature is the raw material while culture is that which cooks nature into something else - decides whether a cow should be worshipped or eaten for instance. The raw materials are the same while the cooking process and the ingredients used vary.
In one of those stunning reversals and jolts to the system that anthropology is so good at delivering, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro flipped this relationship on its head: he claimed that many, many Amazonian societies were multinatural rather than multicultural.
Since I am unable to recall what were the specific groups Castro spoke about, I will just call it Amazonia for the sake of this article. In Castro's Amazonia "people" as a category refers not just to humans but also animals, birds etc. (what we typically consider "nature").
In Amazonia, when a jaguar is licking what looks like blood to us - to the jaguar it would actually be licking and tasting manioc beer. When a jaguar retreats into what looks like a den to us - to the jaguar it will look like the jaguar is just coming back into a home like ours. When an animal feasts on what looks like the entrails and remains of another animal - to the animal doing the feasting it would seem like it is eating rice.
We typically speak of the world being the same and different nations, peoples, cultures or customs having different viewpoints on the world. One world; many views.
In Amazonia this relationship is flipped: Many worlds; one view i.e. regardless of whether your world is made up of animal entrails and blood - the viewpoint remains the same: one of manioc beer, rice and houses. The variation here is at the level of nature: what things exist in your world. Not at the level of culture - which remains the same for everybody.
Here the word every body is quite literal - not in the colloquial sense where we use it to speak about only humans. In Amazonia literally everything in possession of a body shares in the same world view. And just as we speak of being able to exchange view points or even discarding and picking up viewpoints, in Amazonia they speak of exchanging skins and bodies - becoming a jaguar or an anteater.
The world is made up of not just different interpretations, worldviews or schemas - it is made up of different things. An anthropologist writing outside of the demands made by the ontological turn might say - the people of this village worship this tree as if it were an ancestral spirit i.e. the people of this village believe this tree to be a spirit.
An anthropologist committed to the ontological turn might discard this word belief and simply say the people of this village worship an ancestral spirit.
^This is one advantage of the ontological turn - it allows one to not only ask how is X different from Y (say how is the Maldives different from Taiwan), it allows us to wonder or ask where to even locate this difference? The ontological turn allows us to imagine difference at the level of not just culture but also nature or imagine difference not just at the level of what we think about the world but begin wondering that perhaps the world itself is different in different places. Maybe in some parts of the world they believe in ghosts not because that is their worldview or culture but simply because they have ghosts there while we here don't.
The second major advantage is it opens up the space for anthropologists to talk about something other than culture. After all this word culture is so new: it was Herder - a student of Kant who gave us this word in the sense that we use it today. It is only slightly older than 200 years. People have been talking about other people without the need to resort to this word "culture" before Herder came along.
This is an interesting and exciting question to contemplate now: what comes after culture?
PS: For a robust, entertaining and concise contemplation of anthropology's future, Tobias Rees' After Ethnos is a great read.
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