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XXXIV, 2, 2024: Philosophy and Anthropology: The Unending Encounter. Edited by Roberto Brigati and Maririta Guerbo
That a dialogue between anthropology and philosophy is desirable seems to be beyond doubt. If anything, the threat to this encounter lies in the apparent intangibility of the disciplinary boundary that separates them. First and foremost, there is a historical contiguity between the two: anthropology became an autonomous discipline by emancipating itself from philosophy, and many major anthropologists were trained in philosophy. But there has also been a continuous exchange of methods and content. On the one hand, anthropology seems to be a repository of empirical material which is particularly appreciated by philosophers. On the other, philosophy produces concepts anthropology cannot avoid engaging with, if only to deny, twist, or simply borrow them. Hence a history of encounters and clashes in the recent past: a distinctly Western history, intertwined with the artificial but usable opposition between two different trajectories of philosophy, namely continental and analytic. Many of the contributions gathered here explore this complex history, revisiting and recovering, re-evaluating, and opening new paths.
Versions of continental philosophy that are more attentive to processes and structures, rather than to subjectivity and history, frame the encounter with anthropology in highly specific forms, linked to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1908-2009) structuralist legacy. It is on this legacy that Philippe Descola comes back in the essay that opens this volume, exploring the various strategies of symmetrization attempted by anthropology throughout its brief history, aimed at creating concepts capable of capturing ethnographic circumstances that are always particular, and of generalizing them within a scientific debate whose background may be comparatively different. Indebtedness to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism is then coupled with a theoretical formalism that has Goethean roots. The same roots, in a different cultural context, were claimed by Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and, starting from him, a fruitful dialogue between cultural anthropologists and philosophers has also long been underway: philosophy of language, social philosophy, and pragmatism have brought the two disciplines closer together. It is on this further legacy that Luigi Quarta draws, initially engaging in the debate about the concept of Lebensform. Quarta observes that the anthropological interest in this concept has undergone at least two waves, the last of which, at the beginning of this century, delved with Wittgensteinian tools into the dimensions of violence, the ethics of microinteractions, and the ordinary. However, the recovery of Wittgenstein has not yet fully identified a concept that carries the cultural element; Quarta’s proposal, based on another Wittgensteinian notion, that of Weltbild, pushes for an ambitious transcendental reading of the human form of life.
A similar necessity drives Carlo Severi’s reflection, who, by engaging in a confrontation with the “ontological turn” on one side and anthropological cognitivism on the other, aims to carve out a properly anthropological space for the study of culture. Starting from Kant’s 1786 essay “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?”, Severi highlights how the space in which thought propagates and becomes shared cannot be separated from the ways different cultures cultivate memory and imagination. Through a pragmatic analysis based on the conditions of knowledge transmission, Severi’s research hypothesis is to incorporate into this space not only linguistic games but also interactions with images.
The desire to reconsider certain postulates (representationalism and cultural relativism) characterizes a new phase of anthropology today, one particularly interested in the very philosophy that had previously discarded the question of anthropos. Proximity then involves new forms of compromise, with the reclamation of certain concepts isolated from their authors’ theoretical production (such as subjectivation and techniques of the self, from Michel Foucault (1926-1984), or Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908-1961) chair, which become keywords in the theoretical elaboration of ethnographic material. Alternatively, the encounter takes on more tumultuous and totalizing forms, as in the disciplinary re-foundation project by anthropologist-philosopher Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1951).
Many of the essays in this volume critically engage with the proposal of ontological pluralism, thus showing its centrality now nearly twenty years after the publication of Descola’s magnum opus, Par-delà nature et culture (2005). Felice Cimatti thus rediscovers that Italy – besides having an “internal Amazon” of sorts in the depths of Calabria – also has a philosophical tradition that represents a prefigurative alternative to the Cartesian one: a tradition rooted in the South, which since the Renaissance has continuously questioned the separation between interiority and exteriority. Just as Severi delved into the relationship with imagination, Cimatti believes that it is through matter and the sensitivity of bodies, not (only) through mind and language, that an “animist turn” can be built capable of questioning both the Anthropocene and anthropocentrism together.
From the critical and programmatic text by Mohamed Amer Meziane to the historical and theoretical examination by Paolo Pecere, the validity as well as the meaning and political consequences of the multiplication of ontologies are questioned. As Ernesto De Martino taught, the opportunity for a theoretical encounter inevitably depends on its historical relevance, that is, on the ethical-political needs of the societies to which the theorists belong. In this regard, both Pecere and Amer Meziane ask themselves about the meaning of the renewed interest in animism in Europe, providing two different but subtly dialoguing answers. For Amer Meziane, the necessity for a new theory of secularization is now urgent to account for the history of anthropology and its effects on Western societies. Why are we more ready to relativize nature rather than religion? Drawing all the consequences of anthropology’s missionary vocation, Amer Meziane proposes replacing metaphysics with ontology to definitively end our claims to truth regarding what is real and what is not. Following Ernesto De Martino’s diagnosis, Pecere interprets the return of animism as a sign of a profound crisis. Based on this diagnosis, Pecere proposes a new configuration of animism, capable of constituting an alternative to rigid ontological separations, in dialogue with the history of philosophy, ethnography, and the hard sciences. Taking a somewhat parallel path to Pecere’s, philosopher Filippo Batisti and anthropologist Roberta Raffaetà present the current debate on plant cognition, in anthropology and philosophy, giving new meaning to pragmatic investigations and, in a sense, opening a new space to reinvent animism once again.
Despite criticisms that seem to disqualify it from many quarters, the ontological turn in anthropology has brought attention to a question we consider both essential and often overlooked: that of conceptual invention, at the frontier between philosophy and anthropology. The very act of posing the question allows to move beyond a rather caricatured image of the confrontation – a strongly inductive knowledge on the one side, deeply anchored in experience, and a practice entirely deductive on the other, whose rigor seems to depend on its ability to withdraw from experience. One might propose, almost trivially, that it is precisely their supposed isolation from the concrete that allows philosophers to grasp the theoretical process in all its concreteness. This is what the more historical contributions in the volume show, particularly the essays by Claude Imbert and Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos.
Presenting a true archaeology of the encounter between philosophy and the human sciences in France, Imbert and Fruteau invite us to reconsider it today. Just as Pecere engages with De Martino, Imbert brings us back to the heart of a Europe on the brink of collapse. Far from representing the science of foundations, French philosophy between the two world wars appears hesitant, bloodless. The unexpected encounter with ethnography would bring a wind of novelty, that “bit of possible” longed for by Gilles Deleuze. What Imbert tells us about early 20th-century philosophy still seems as relevant today. For Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, too, the historicization of a partly forgotten moment in the encounter between anthropology and philosophy, that of the 1930s, allows for a reformulation of the project of a “philosophy in the field” in a way that is different from the way it is emerging in the United States. By giving space to the less audible voices of the French intellectual field, Fruteau de Laclos disrupts and renews disciplinary partitions that have become canonical. The philosopher’s encounter with anthropology then makes it possible to redefine what philosophizing means, taking on all its concrete and existential depth.
The encounter between the two disciplines involves re-engaging reflections that were at the origin of modernity, and at the same time were discarded by it. If this is the case for Telesio and Bruno revitalized by Cimatti, it is also, almost exemplarily, the case of Montaigne, whose controversial “relativism” in the essay on cannibals is subjected by Marco Piazza to a careful study, attempting to test its relevance for the current anthropological debate. If it is not a “relativist revolution,” in fact precisely because of this, Montaigne’s move retains its critical potential against European rationality, finding in the “ingenious mixture” of natural equilibrium a way to reinvent the relationship with the other. An alternative naturalism, or a sui generis animism, is also the deep legacy left to us by the philosophical-biological vitalism of Canguilhem, to which Giulia Gandolfi dedicates an examination carefully grounded in the study of unpublished Canguilhemian materials. The result of Gandolfi’s research should be considered definitive in showing not only Canguilhem’s irreducibility to the paradigm of the so-called German philosophical anthropology (from Scheler to Plessner) but especially its absolute relevance today, in view of a vitalistic turn right at the heart of modernity’s anthropocentric/anthropocenic project. The contributions by Piero Carreras and Martino Simonetti draw on a different corpus, but are driven by the same need for rigor in redefining the relationships between philosophical and anthropological viewpoints. Both tackle without prejudice one of the latest, most often evoked and at the same time least understood encounters/clashes between the two disciplines: that between anthropology and phenomenology. While Simonetti transports Merleau-Ponty to Melanesia, testing him against the vast repertoire of ethnographic research conducted there, from Leenhardt to Strathern, Carreras starts from Husserl and his controversial relationship with the anthropological “other,” caught between the condemnation of “anthropologism” and the need to embody consciousness, to prevent phenomenology from being reduced to egology. Both works contribute, in different ways, to establishing some vantage points – and those who work at the intersection of the two disciplines know how much this is needed – in appraising the recurrent appeals to phenomenology in recent decades of anthropological reflection.
The encounter with anthropology stimulates philosophy to develop new methodological tools, to be added to those more typical of its disciplinary toolkit. The study of a work and a corpus thus becomes an opportunity to revisit and overturn fundamental questions about the degree of ethnocentrism we are willing to acknowledge in order to continue doing philosophy. This is precisely what Maririta Guerbo attempts in her essay on De Martino. In light of the current debate, Guerbo examines and distinguishes the different ontological and metaphysical options adopted by one of the foundational texts of anthropology in Italy, Il mondo magico (1948), in order to test its coherence and innovative potential. Through contact with ethnographic material, philosophy does not rediscover a naïve realism but rather theoretical options otherwise confined to the most timeworn debates in the history of philosophy: multinaturalism, historical naturalism, idealism. The discomfort with cultural relativism and its implicit exclusion of a unified theoretical perspective ultimately brings philosophy and anthropology closer together – an approach that many anthropologists view as a threat to the autonomy of their discipline, yet one that seems necessary today, at a time when separating humanity into different ethnoi appears increasingly artificial. Will anthropology, through philosophy, become post-cultural? And will philosophy be able to benefit from this art of description? What becomings lie ahead? This issue of Discipline Filosofiche aspires to present readers with the shifting cartography within which this debate unfolds and evolves.
Contents
(click on the titles to view the abstracts)
Roberto Brigati, Maririta Guerbo, Premessa
Philippe Descola, Antropologia e filosofia: come simmetrizzare le ontologie?
Mohamed Amer Meziane, Decolonizzare l’invisibile? Prolegomeni a un’antropologia metafisica
Carlo Severi, Lo spazio antropologico del pensiero. Alcune ipotesi sulla relazione tra antropologia e filosofia
Luigigiovanni Quarta, Il riccio e la volpe. Alcune riflessioni sui rapporti tra antropologia e filosofia
Filippo Batisti, Roberta Raffaetà, Scienza sradicata. Filosofia e antropologia alla prova dell’ampliamento della cognizione alle piante
Claude Imbert, Sur le désarroi des après-guerres. Les philosophes ont douté de leur parole, l’ethnographie y a trouvé la sienne
Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Extension du domaine de la théorie. Quand la philosophie se confronte au terrain
Paolo Pecere, L’animismo oggi: un’ipotesi tra filosofia e antropologia
Felice Cimatti, Ontologie sudiste. La vita delle cose da Telesio (via Campanella) a Bruno
Marco Piazza, Montaigne e la coutume: una rivoluzione relativistica?
Maririta Guerbo, Rivedere i termini dell’alleanza. La filosofia dopo la svolta ontologica in antropologia, a partire da De Martino
Piero Carreras, Exceedance and E-duction. Remarks on Phenomenology and Cultural Anthropology
Martino Simonetti, La fenomenologia culturale applicata al caso melanesiano
Giulia Gandolfi, The Living and Its Norm: Is There an Anthropological Claim in Georges Canguilhem’s Biological Philosophy?
