SAVAGE OBJECTS

edited by
Godofredo Pereira

Martin Holbraad
Graham Harman
Joo Maria Gusmo
Bjrnar Olsen
Eyal Weizman
Reza Negarestani
Susan Schuppli
Jonathan Saldanha
Regina de Miguel
Michael Taussig
Marcello Maggi
Ayesha Hameed
Paulo Tavares
Godofredo Pereira

CONTENT

11

preface
i.

17

Things as Concepts:
Anthropology and Pragmatology
Martin Holbraad

33

On the Supposed Societies of Chemicals,

Atoms, and Stars in Gabriel Tarde
Graham Harman

45

Soliloquy, A Dwarf in the Stratosphere

Joo Maria Gusmo

71

The Return of Things and the Savagery

of the Archaeological Object
Bjrnar Olsen

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ii.
87

In Excess of Calculation
A conversation with Eyal Weizman

101

A Vertiginous Enlightenment
(JWST and telescopic view of the object)
Reza Negarestani

119

Impure Matter:
A Forensics of WTC Dust
Susan Schuppli

141

Vibrational Mediations
Jonathan Saldanha

157

An Eect of Verosimilitude
Regina de Miguel

CONTENT

iii.
169

Bodily Unconscious
A conversation with Michael Taussig

183

The Tower and Its Ghost

A Cosmopolitical Narrative from Botswana
Marcello Maggi

199

The Petrication of the Image

Ayesha Hameed

215

On the Earth-Object
Paulo Tavares

233

Underground
Venezuelas Territorial Fetishism
Godofredo Pereira

251

image credits

255

biographies

261

acknowledgments

Things as Concepts:
Anthropology and Pragmatology
Martin Holbraad

Within anthropology, much has been written about the possibility of a posthumanist critical social science that is able to
emancipate things (objects, artefacts, materiality, etc.) from the
ensnaring epistemological and ontological bonds of humanism,
logicentrism and other modernist imaginaries.1 The aim of this
essay is to take this project further by exploring the possibilities
for an anthropological analytics that is able to allow things by
which I mean something akin to things themselves, though
only in the strict heuristic sense that I shall specify presently
to generate their own terms of analytical engagement. Might
the feted posthumanist emancipation of the thing be shown to
consist in its peculiar capacity to unsettle whatever ontological
assumptions we, as analysts, might make about it (including,
perhaps, the ontological premises of a posthumanist turn itself)?
Might things decide for themselves what they are, and in so
doing emancipate themselves from us who would presume to tell
1

E.g. Marilyn Strathern, "Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of

images", in Culture and History in the Pacic, ed. J. Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions
of the Finish Anthropological Society, 1990), 2544; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency:
An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel Miller, "Materiality: an introduction", in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2005), 150.

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them? Might they, if you like, become their own thingtheorists,

acting as the originators (rather than the objects) of our analytical conceptualisations?2
Such questions, I take it, would consummate the promise
of a properly savage thought: objects acting not merely as conduits for the thinking of the people anthropologist study (those
they used to call savages), but rather as a conduit for anthropological thinking itself. Objects, then, become the basis not only
for savages science of the concrete, as LviStrauss himself
would have it,3 but also for thoughts that are savage enough to
unsettle the conceptual economy of analysis itself, including
anthropological analysis (which I shall take here as my point
of departure). Let me illustrate what such a savage concretion
of anthropology might look like with reference to ach one of
the most basic notions involved in the prestigious AfroCuban
tradition of divination of If, which I have been studying ethnographically in Cuba since 1998.
The power of powder
Much like the notorious notion of mana in Oceania, ach is a
term that babalawos, which is what men who are initiated into
the cult of If are called, use in a wide variety of contexts. Most
salienty, they use it to refer both in the abstract to their power
(poder) or capacity (facultad) to divine, for which they are most
renown (to divine you must have ach , as they say); and, much
2

Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, And (Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social

Anthropology, 2002).

Claude LviStrauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

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T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y

more concretely, to certain powders that they consider to be a

prime ritual ingredient for making divinities appear and speak
during divination. Among the many ways in which specially prepared powders are deemed necessary to If ritual, perhaps the
most striking is its role as a register (registro) for the divinatory
congurations through which Orula, the god of divination, is said
to be able to speak during the ritual. Spread on the surface of
the consecrated divining tray that babalawos use for the most
ceremonious divinations they conduct for their clients (particularly during the initiation of neophytes), this powder becomes the
medium through which Orulas words appear. This they do in the
form of a series of signs (signos, also referred to in the original
Yoruba as oddu) that are marked (marcar) by the babalawo on the
surface of the powder, following a complex divinatory procedure
in which consecrated palmnuts are used to generate distinct
divinatory congurations, each corresponding to its own sign.
Sometimes considered as guises of Orula himself (or his paths or
representatives), these gures, comprising eight single or double
lines drawn by the babalawo with his middle and ring nger in
the powder, are considered as potent divinities in their own right
that come out (salen) in the divination: crouching around the
divining board as they mark the sign, the babalawos and their
consultants are in the presence of a divine being, a symbol that
stands for itself if ever there was one.4
Crucially, babalawos emphasise that the powder itself is an
indispensable ingredient for eecting these elicitations of the
divine. Properly prepared according to secret recipes that only
4

Sensu Roy Wagner, Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986).

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babalawos know, ach de Orula, as the powder is referred to in

this context, has the power to render divinities present. Ach
powder does this not only by providing the surface on which they
can appear on the divining tray, but also because it constitutes
a necessary ingredient in the consecration of each of the various objects used in the divination, including the divining tray,
the palmnuts and various other items babalawos must have
consecrated for divinatory use during their own initiation. As
they explain, none of these items work unless they are properly
consecrated, and this must involve charging them with acheses,
i.e. with achpowders, according to secret procedures.
Concepts versus things
Elsewhere I have explained ways in which the notion of ach
so blatantly exemplies some of the central preoccupations
that inform LviStrausss theorization of savage thought, such
as the antinomies he associated with oating signiers that
can signify anything e.g. both power and powder because, in
themselves, they mean nothing.5 Here we may draw attention
only to the fact that, viewed from within the prism of the kinds of
anthropological preoccupations Lvi-Strausss argument on oat5

Claude Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. F. Barker

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). See Martin Holbraad, " The power of powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban If (or mana
again)", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed.
A. Henare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 189-225. See also Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y

ing signiers itself exemplies, the case of ach raises classical

anthropological conundrums about the rationality credentials of
what he playfully called savage thought (pense sauvage). Much
as with classic anthropological controversies about so-called
apparently irrational beliefs (Nuer twins being birds, Bororo
men being red macaws, and so on), we seem here to be confronted
with a series of notions that are counter-intuitive to say the least.
Certainly, it would appear that the terminological coincidence of
ach as both power and powder corresponds to an ontological one,
since, as babalawos arm, a diviners power to elicit divinities
into presence is irreducibly a function of his capacity to use the
consecrated powders at his disposal as an initiate. Powder, in
this sense, is power. And this would seem to raise the classical
anthropological question: why might Cuban diviners and their
clients believe such a notion? How do we explain this apparently
irrational belief anthropologically?
It should be noted, however, that this classical way of posing the question draws its power from what one might call its
own inherent perversity. In order even to ask why certain people
might believe that a certain form of powder has the power to
elicit certain divinities into presence, one has rst to take for
granted that this could not (or should not) be the case in the rst
place. In particular, assuming that the pertinent anthropological
question is why people might believe in this way that powder
is power turns on the corollary assumption that such a belief
can be parsed as the particular way in which the people in question represent the objects in their midst, namely, in this case,
representing (signifying, imagining, socially constructing etc.)
powder as power. And this in turn relies on that foundational
ontological axiom of straight-thinking modernism, namely the

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distinction between things as they are in the world and the various and variable concepts that people may attach to them. Indeed,
as long as the analysis of ach remains within the terms of an
axiomatic distinction between things and concepts, it cannot
but ask the question in terms of representations, beliefs, social
constructions and so on. Since we know that powder is just
that dusty thing there on the diviners tray, the question cannot
but be why Cubans might think that it is also a form of power.
The move to posthumanist analyses of things in anthropology has been motivated partly by a desire to avoid precisely this
way of raising questions, and in particular to overcome the blatant
perversity of seeking to parse alternatives to our own metaphysic
of concepts versus things in terms of just that metaphysic (for
Cuban diviners powder is power; we, on the other hand, ask why
they might believe it to be so, since, from rst metaphysical
principles, it cant be so). Hence the penchant in recent writings
on material culture (and note the telling ontological oxymoron)
for so-called relational ontological premises which seek, in one
way or other, to erase or otherwise compromise the concept versus
thing divide.6 Still, rather than placating the conceptual imperialism of modernist metaphysics by binding things to an alternative
6

E.g. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice
Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling and Skill (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Tim Ingold, " Materials against materiality", Archaeological Dialogues 14, no.1 (2007): 1-16; Bjrnar
Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Langham:
AltaMira Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010).

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T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y

(e.g. relational, symmetrical, vital, vibrant) ontological order,

my interest here is in the possibility of freeing things from any a
priori ontological determination whatsoever, so as to allow them
to dictate, as it were, their own terms of analytical engagement.
As I propose to show, this most crucially involves eliding the
concept/thing divide, not as a matter of substantive ontological revision, but rather as point only of analytical methodology.
Given space constraints, I present such a prospect as a series of
three methodological moves.7
Step I: thing-as-heuristic
If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered,
somehow, also as non-things (e.g. a putatively material powder
that is also a putatively immaterial power, as in our example),8
then, anthropologically speaking, the notion of a thing can at
most have a heuristic, rather than an analytical, role. The initial
7

For more detailed discussion see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari
Wastell, "Introduction", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically, ed. Wenare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-31; Martin
Holbraad, "Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography
of things", Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no3 (2009): 431-441; Martin Holbraad, Can the Thing Speak?, OAP Press, Working Paper Series #7 (2011), available
at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/
uploads/2011/01/Holbraad-Can-the-Thing-Speak2.pdf

For classic arguments to this eect with reference to the things anthropologists
call gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Cf. Amiria Henare et al.,
Introduction, 16-23.

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analytical task, in other words, cannot be to add to the theoretical purchase of the term thing by proposing new ways to think
of it e.g. as a site of human beings objectication,9 an index
of agency,10 an on-going event of assemblage,11 or what have you.
Rather it must be eectively to de-theorise it, by emptying it out
of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a pure ethnographic form ready to be lled out contingently according only
to its own ethnographic exigencies. To return to our example: if
calling the powder babalawos use a thing implies that it could
not, properly speaking, also be a form of metaphysical power,
then let us not call it a thing in any sense other than merely as
an ontologically and analytically vacuous heuristic identier
merely a tag for identifying it as an object of study, with no
metaphysical prejudice, and particularly with no prejudice as to
what it might be, including questions of what it being a thing
might even mean.
Step II: concept = thing
If the rst step towards letting things set their own terms of analytical engagement involves emptying them out of any a priori
9

Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987); Daniel Miller, Materiality: an introduction, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50.

10

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998).

11

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice
Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005).

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T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y

metaphysical contents, the second is geared towards allowing

them to be lled by (potentially) alternative ones in each ethnographic instance. We may brand this methodological injunction
by way of a further heuristic formula, namely concepts = things.
According to this methodological edict, instead of treating all the
things that people say of, do to, and do with things as modes of
representing them (i.e. as manners of attaching various concepts
to the things in question by way of social construction, as per the
standard anthropological way of thinking), we may treat them as
modes of dening what these things are. This renders wide open
precisely questions about what kinds of things things might be:
what materiality might be, objectication, agency all that is
now up for grabs, as a matter of ethnographic contingency and
the analytical work it forces upon us.
So, to return again to the Cuban example, the idea here is
to treat all the things babalawos and their clients supposedly
believe about their ach-powders as elements of a conceptual
denition of what such a thing might actually be: Cuban diviners
do not believe that powder is a form of power, but rather dene
it as such. To the extent that our own default assumption is that
powder is not to be dened as power (its just a dusty thing, we
assume), the challenge then must be to reconceptualise those
very notions and their many empirical and analytical corollaries
(powder, power, deity etc. but also thing, concept, divinity etc.) in
a way that would render the ethnographically-given denition
of powder as power reasonable, rather than an absurd belief.
I have sought at length elsewhere to specify the full gamut
of ways in which dierent kinds of data may enter into the eorts
of analytical conceptualization that problems of the powder-

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is-power necessitate for anthropologists.12 Crucially, a sound

ethnographic understanding is necessary in order even to formulate such problems in the rst place, let alone solve them. For
example, since what powder might be in If divination depends
on the notion of power that is at stake in this ritual activity, part
of an attempt to articulate the question involves developing
the cosmological conundrum that lies at its core: if power, in
this ethnographic context, refers to babalawos ability to render
divinities present as signs during divination, then are we not in
some pertinent sense dealing here with a version of the age-old
theo-ontological conundrum, so familiar in the anthropology
of religion,13 of how entities that are imagined as transcendent
might under certain conditions in this case by ritual means
that involve the use of powder as an indispensable component
be rendered immanent? Conceptualising powder as power, then,
requires us to understand how Afro-Cuban divination eectively
solves something akin to the so-called problem of transcendence
in Judeo-Christian theology although immediately one wants
to add that this may well be a misnomer, at least insofar as the
very notions of transcendence and immanence may themselves
have to be reconceptualised in this context.
12

Martin Holbraad, "Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion",
Debate & Discussion at the GDAT 2008, Critique of Anthropology 30, 2 (2010): 179185, 185-200 passim; Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

13

E.g. Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African

Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Webb Keane, Christian
Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).

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What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreducible contribution that, heuristically understood, things themselves can make to this work of conceptualization. Indeed, with
reference to the case of powder in If, one might say that while
ethnographic information derived from babalawos serves to set
up the anthropological conundrum that ach in its dual aspect,
so to speak, poses, it is what I shall call the pragmatographic
information culled from its peculiar qualities as a thing (viz. as
powder) that delivers the most crucial elements for its solution.
Step III: thing = concept
Consider what powder actually does in the diviners hands. As we
saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, it provides the
backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, come
out. So powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, where that
power is understood as the capacity to make divinities come out
and speak. Now, note that, considered prosaically as a thing,
powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collection of unstructured particles its pure multiplicity, one might
say. In marking the oddu on the board, the diviners ngers are
able to draw the conguration just to the extent that the intensive
capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean
bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the
oddu as it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive
mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is registered.
In this way powder renders the premise of the oddus revelation
explicit, as a matter of these signs inherent motility: by way of
gure/ground reversal, oddu gures are revealed as a temporary
displacement of their ground, the powder.

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But this suggests also a logical reversal that goes to the

heart of the problem that apparently transcendent oddu might
be imagined to pose. If we take seriously babalawos contention
that the oddu just are the marks they make on ach-powder (the
basic magic of divination), then the constitution of deities as
displacements of powder tells us something pretty important
about the ontological premises of If cosmology: that these divinities are to be thought of not, say, as entities that may or may
not exist in states of transcendence or immanence, but rather
as motions. And if the oddu are just motions, then the ontological discontinuity between transcendence and immanence (and
with it the onto-theological problem they may be imagined to
pose) is resolved. In a logical universe where motion is primitive, what looks like transcendence becomes distance and what
looks like immanence becomes proximity. Indeed: qua motions,
the divinities have inherent within themselves the capacity to
relate to humans immanently, through the potential of directed
movement that ach-powder guarantees, as a solution to the
genuine problem of the distance deities must traverse in order
to be rendered present in divination.
Now, what I wish to draw attention to here is the work powder
does for this analysis, by virtue specically of what heuristically
(once again!) one would identify as its prosaic, material characteristics. If ethnography carries the weight of the analytical
problem, in this argument, it is the material quality of powder that
provides the most crucial elements for its solution. If deities are
conceptualised as motions to dissolve the problem of transcendence, after all, that is only because their material manifestations
are just that, motions. And those motions, in turn, only emerge
as analytically signicant because of the material constitution

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of the powder upon which they are physically marked: its pervious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured particles,
amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of water,
in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviners ngers,
and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres in
powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that
they can engender conceptual eects, setting the parameters for
the anthropological analysis that they aord the argument. As
an irreducible element of the analysis of ach, it is powder that
brings the pivotal concepts of perviouness, multiplicity, motion,
direction, potential and so on into the fray of it own analysis,
providing its own answer to its own problem its savage power,
if you like, analytically (conceptually, ontologically) to unsettle.
So what is at stake in this mode of analysis is the capacity
that things have to engender conceptual transformations of
themselves, by virtue of the conceptual dierences their material
characteristics can make. Indeed, this irreducibly pragmatological
element, as we may call it,14 of anthropological analysis is nothing other than the corollary inversion of our earlier concepts =
things formula, namely things = concepts. If the formula concept
= thing designated the possibility of treating what people say
and do around things as ways of dening what those things are,
its symmetrical rendition thing = concept raises the prospect of
treating things as a way of dening what we as analysts are able
to say and do around them. At issue, to coin a term, are a things
14

Cf. Christopher Witmore, The realities of the past: Archaeology, Object-Orientations, Pragmatology, in Modern Materials: Proceedings from the Contemporary
and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference, eds. B. R. Fortenberry and L.
McAtackney (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 25-36.

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conceptual aordances: how things material characteristics

can give rise to particular forms for their conceptualization. One
might even imagine this kind of transformational movement
as a form of abstraction, provided that notion is disentangled
from habitually corollary distinctions between concrete things
and abstract concepts.15 Indeed, this is just what the thing =
concept clause of our analytical method would suggest. Where
the analytical ontology of things versus concepts would posit
abstraction as the ability of a given concept to comprehend a
particular thing, external to itself, in its extension, the heuristic
continuity of thing = concept casts this as a movement internal
to the thing itself: the thing dierentiates itself, no longer as
an instantiation of a concept, but a self-transformation as a
concept. Savage thought thinking itself.

15

See also Martin Holbraad and Morten A. Pedersen, "Planet M: the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern", Anthropological Theory 9, 4 (2009): 371-94.

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