Professional Documents
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Anthropological Theory
2016, Vol. 16(1) 22–47
Epistemological ! The Author(s) 2016
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situational anthropology
Michel Agier
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Institut de
Recherche pour le Développement, France
Abstract
To what extent can anthropology still help us to understand the world around us at a
time when this world is characterized by processes of political and economic multipo-
larity, and the decolonization of knowledge? The political questioning of cultural decen-
tring is an opportunity for anthropology to build a new epistemological conception of
decentring. Against and beyond cultural relativism, ethnicism or ontological perspectiv-
ism, the issue is knowing how to decentre in any situation, ‘here and now’, from oneself
as much as from each ‘we’, searching for tangible and intangible limits, and making those
borders places of observation and understanding of increasingly more cosmopolitan
social and cultural lives. I develop and propose this new conception in three stages. The
first contextual stage highlights the importance of border situations and the necessity to
account for them in order to tackle globalization as an observable social fact, beyond
and against frozen representations of Others’ cultures and identities. The second stage
explores the possibility of a post-culturalist decentring. In this reflection I turn to
philosophy, from Rousseau to Foucault and Agamben, to find cues for an epistemo-
logical conception of decentring. In the last part I emphasize the understanding of
situations, and rehabilitate reflexive ethnography and the situational inductive approach
as the foundations of contemporary anthropology.
Keywords
alterity, borderlands, decentring, global, post-culturalism, situations
Corresponding author:
Michel Agier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 105 boulevard Raspail, Paris, 75006, France.
Email: agier@ehess.fr
The political importance the issue of world borders has gained, and the periods of
uncertainty this has caused, have been characterized in the social sciences by va-
rious ‘crises’, numerous debates and a general period of conceptual, methodologi-
cal and thematic overhaul. The strength of individualism, the imposition of the
global above all other scales of action, the unrest and conflicts associated with
questions of identity and borders, are now obvious societal themes calling for
the critical attention of anthropologists. My reflection is to be viewed against
this backdrop. Essentially, its purpose is to turn anthropological reason on its
head, to rethink the concept of decentring – its founding principle – starting
from an imaginary or epistemological outside, which I equate with the contempor-
ary redefinition of anthropological decentring defended here.
This is necessary in light of the political and epistemic effects of globalization.
Characterized by recent and increasingly global contexts of action and thought, the
increasing mobility of people crossing each other in everyday lives, these effects call
into question the local and identitarian inscriptions of every individual and group
of people. Today’s environment thus calls for a new epistemological conception of
decentring, instead of the old culturalist one. However, this epistemological decen-
tring has historical antecedents. The relative and malleable character of the border
that separates oneself from the ‘Other’ was already tangible in Rousseau’s under-
standing of the foundations of inequalities among men. Unlike the usual reading of
Rousseau’s work – for example by Lévi-Strauss, as we shall see further as a
culturalist foundation of anthropology, I would like to show that the epistemolo-
gical understanding of decentring defended here can be found already in the first of
Rousseau’s philosophical reflections on the diversity of the human condition. Yet,
almost two centuries later, the relativity of a world without beginning or end
became ‘hardened’ by cultural relativism. New inventions of the ‘Great Divide’
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, inventions of new essentialisms and ontologies in the
global context now call for a clearly radical position criticizing and deconstructing
the old culturalist conception of decentring, and edifying a new meaning and
practice for it, namely an epistemological decentring.
In terms of current anthropological debates, my objective is to propose tools for
observing margins while de-essentializing them at the same time. Thus, I distance
myself from a current trend in subaltern or cultural studies, and also from a so-
called ontological trend in anthropology. This last reactivates and perpetuates the
agenda of cultural relativism founded on the principle of a table of cultural iden-
tities, drawn up in order to interpret and compare them. In both cases, my critique
of identitarian essentialisms aims to re-establish another founding principle of
anthropology – the ethnography of relationships – and, thus, to highlight border
situations considered as radical stages of relations.
With this reflection I hope to re-open both a research field and a research
programme. The field consists of all observable border situations, which can be
simultaneously understood as places of recognition and exchange between indivi-
duals, and as places where the globalized world is staged and set in motion. The
programme is both anthropological and political. It consists of observing,
describing and understanding every place that has a border at centre stage: for-
tuitous encounters, conflicts, misunderstandings, experiences of otherness, conflicts
about universality, hybridizations, etc. In order to advance this programme, one
must take stock of the methodological effects of an anthropology that is attentive
to the dynamics and processes of change. This I endeavour to do, after analysing
the benefits of this situational approach. But as a prologue, let me present two
short stories about forests and Indians that address the question of borders.
Toddlers were playing on the ground, young people were talking on benches, other
adults – men and women – wandered from one shack to another, oblivious to the
pedestrians and cars constantly going round the square and their settlement. A little
disheartened, my colleague explained to me that these were Guaranis who had been
displaced after Brazilian agro-industrial conglomerates took over their land. So the
forest Indians were here in the centre of the city. Other Guaranis had settled in even
greater numbers on Asunción’s huge basura (rubbish dump) just outside the city.
Their clothes, physical appearance and settlement more closely resembled those of
the Afghan migrants and refugees I had seen in Greece and in France, or the
‘encamped’ people in Africa, than the image we have of forest Indians. My colleague,
I noticed, had dropped the doctoral tone he had adopted in the forest for one of
judgement and indignation. He spoke of their miserable and shameful existence, and
talked of ‘ethnic resistance’: they’ve been here for years, he said, because ‘they can no
longer live in the forest’, they’ve been ‘abandoned by the nation’.
Yet, no one has conducted research on Asunción’s Guarani settlements. Neither
had my guide reflected upon this phenomenon apart from voicing outrage.
Whether Guaranis are figures of compassion or harbour dreams of ethnic resis-
tance, what their displacement and location mean from the standpoint of world
restructuring has escaped investigation.
It seems to me that these two stories of expeditions, forests and frontiers can help
us shake up anthropology and better understand the contemporary world. They
indicate two findings and a point for reflection. The first finding is that the border
has shifted: the border that used to keep ethnic ‘Others’ very far away has come
close to us, to the centre of our cities and national governance. Thus, the shacks of
displaced Indians now covering Asunción’s central square create a new kind of
border for all actors involved. The second finding is that people on the border (in
the forest as in the city) have the features of a hybrid entity, even an urbanized,
cosmopolitan entity. This stands in contrast to the ‘pure’ identities, searched for, but
never documented in Saginaw or in the Paraguayan forest. Finally, these border
stories raise the issue of decentring the anthropologist and call for a redefinition of
this concept – no longer as a question of cultural or geographical distance, but as a
model of behaviour for research, an epistemological posture. The border is ‘here and
now’ as long as we’re able to see it. It is located at the margins, or at the limit, of
what an anthropology of power, or an anthropology of identity describe as central.
To observe the border, we need to re-think decentring as an epistemology, rather
than as a culturalist partitioning of the world, and therefore bring contemporary
anthropology and anthropologists into the 21st century.
(villages, tribes, communities). During the pivotal period of the 1970s–90s, a series
of appraisals and converging theories were developed in Europe and the United
States. Among these were: new explorations of coevalness between enquiry, infor-
mation and writing (Fabian, 1983), critiques of monographs as writing and as
fiction (Geertz, 1973; Clifford, 1988; Clifford and Marcus, 1986), theoretical and
methodological considerations on the delocalization of lived and observed situa-
tions, and therefore the need for a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995;
Appadurai, 1996; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997).
At the same time in France, Marc Augé and his ‘anthropology of contemporary
worlds’ provided the most advanced critique and re-actualization of the discipline,1
which paved the way for a wider movement amongst anthropologists. This was
marked by the abandonment of ethnological (ethnic and monographic) objects, a
primary focus until then, in favour of a wide, but indeterminate a priori apprehend-
ing of contemporary worlds in the making, in situ and sometimes changing unpre-
dictably in context and scale.
Here, it is important to succinctly note that this research trend takes us farther
back in the history of anthropology to a split between two major branches in the
1950s. On one side, ‘structural’ anthropology, an orientation designed and largely
developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, focused on exposing ‘other’ peoples’ social and
cultural systems, as well as ‘structural invariants’ on which history does not seem to
have had any influence. These analyses only perceived change (especially in the
development of cities and urban life) as the disappearance of their research subject.
On the other side, a ‘dynamic’ anthropology, essentially promoted in France by
Georges Balandier, focused on the historicity of subjects, on processes of social and
cultural change, and therefore on the influence of social and cultural contexts.
In particular, Balandier and his adherents examined decolonization movements
in Africa within a colonial context. It is with this perspective, in light of the
Manchester School’s contemporary investigations, and on African fields that
other changes in French anthropology took place, particularly development of
the anthropology of contemporary worlds.
The study of these worlds in the making opened new research themes better
adapted to evolving postcolonial and global contexts. The effects of this approach
could not be ignored if one wanted to understand contemporary issues of deve-
lopment, health, migration, work, urbanization, poverty, or politico-religious
movements.2 Such research topics have motivated ethnologists to address global
societal questions and encouraged them to break away from the North–South
cultural divide. Empirically at least, they moved step-by-step towards globalization
(Burawoy, 2000) through multi-sited enquiries (Marcus, 1995). Reciprocally,
researchers in other disciplines integrated ethnological tools and concepts to help
them comprehend and reflect upon the changing worlds. At this time, the place
of anthropologists – their personal engagement and involvement in the ‘situation
of communication’ restricting their field – was reconsidered (Althabe, 1990).
Also reconsidered were the theoretical effects of this involvement on description
and interpretation (Bazin, 1996). At the same time, North American anthropology
the ‘Great Divide’: a dualist and culturalist, even civilizational form of segregation
between tradition and modernity, between ethnicity and class, between ‘them’ and
‘us’, between particularisms (‘among the. . .’) and universalism (‘among us’), and so
forth. This dualism was the conceptual framework that gave birth to ethnology
when it was the project of explorers, who founded the exotic representation of
‘Others’ considered literally outside the (Western) world.
Forgetting historical background while discovering the remote ‘Other’ (i.e. con-
texts of colonization and colonial administration, people who were to be controlled,
separated and classified) anchored the ethnic group in the essence of anthropology
for a long time. At first, the idea of the ethnic group was a framework for global
external identification of peoples (ethnos) seemingly characterized by a certain unity
of social and economic organization, language, agrarian and cult-based practices.
Explorers and colonizers gave all-encompassing names to the remote and alien
organizations they discovered, conquered and administered. Ethnonyms made the
task of governing indigenous populations easier. This long historical episode made
the ethnic group the model of alterity – the ‘ethnic’ one is always the ‘Other’ – and an
essential component of anthropological knowledge. The notion of ethnicity was
later criticized in many studies not only from an historical perspective, but also as
a political or imaginary ‘construction’ where colonial power had been central in
freezing or dividing societies.6
At the same time, and in different contexts of enquiry, a new research question
emerged. ‘Ethnic identity’, in contexts of social contacts and social changes linked
to urbanization and industrialization, also appeared in ‘marginal’ contexts (pov-
erty, social exclusion, etc.) on all continents. Ethnonyms, whether old, new or
transformed, were used as labels in frameworks of contact, competition or conflict,
usually in urban settings. Therefore, it was clearly in relation to ‘Others’ that the
question of ‘ethnic groups’ arose. And it was on the border between groups, in the
context of social, political and cultural confrontation with others, that differences
emerged and manifested themselves (Barth, 1969). Finally, diverse patterns and
strategies of recognition in heterogeneous societies have led to broader enquiries
and reflections on contemporary identities, thus diluting ‘ethnic identity’ across a
wide range of identity options in the framework of changing situational engage-
ments.7 Other questions then arose, including questions concerning the new iden-
titarian ‘essentialisms’, which I address next.
They disparage analytical uses of identity and its possible substitutes: ‘identifica-
tion’, ‘categorization’, ‘self-understanding’, ‘social statuses’, ‘group’, etc. However,
they ignore a second question that cannot be dissociated from the first because it
lies at the root of this conceptual malaise: what are we referring to when we invoke
identity?
On this subject, Brubaker and Cooper simply underline the possible coexistence
in research or discourse of two types of positioning, respectively labelled ‘construc-
tivist’ (considering identity as a social and historical ‘construction’ which analysis
must ‘deconstruct’) and ‘essentialist’ (based on the primacy of identity over all its
relational and contextual ‘alterations’, a primacy resting on the idea of original
purity or homogeneity). But Brubaker and Cooper explain this ambiguity, too
simply and quickly I think, using the dual antinomic concept of knowledge and
engagement: knowledge allegedly leans on the side of deconstruction (and of the
‘object’), whereas engagement induces essentialism and implies a belief in ‘identity’
itself. One could respond that engagement is not in principle incompatible with
criticism and freedom of thought (this does not apply only to researchers, of
course). Moreover, freedom of thought and freedom to produce knowledge with-
out any kind of compromise must not in any way preclude the researcher’s neces-
sary involvement in fieldwork, which is the condition of anthropological knowledge
based on ethnographic relations. The two positions must stand side by side.
Furthermore, I believe that the main question needs to be shifted: theoretical
essentialism in anthropology does not result from ethnographic involvement, but
is a remnant of the discipline’s old ethnic specialization and culturalism. This calls
for a self-critique of founding principles and not merely a strategical
rearrangement.
Faced with the multiplication of border situations, with ‘conflicts of universality
without preliminary solutions’, to borrow Etienne Balibar’s phrase, or with ‘con-
flicts between universalisms’, according to Judith Butler, some anthropologists
have recently endeavoured to explain the new cultural state of the world by adopt-
ing a so-called ‘ontological’ approach. By resorting to the paradigm of a world
divided in broad cultural systems, they want to bring answers to the misunder-
standings and disagreements that proliferate today. This is certainly their greatest
merit. Yet, these approaches reiterate – deliberately or not – the earlier culturalist
credo. Frozen and de-contextualized cultural representations are compared and
confront one another.
This operation of contextual reduction and a-temporality is particularly evident
in the ‘Amerindian ontology’ thesis defended by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, for
whom ontological posture is directly marked by an ethnic referent. Although the
author defends himself against accusations of ethnicism and contemporary ethno-
politics, and claims a universalizing structuralist heritage, he describes the cultural
system he presents as an identitarian form (like ‘Amerindian’).9 Authors such as
Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour and others have defended analyses relating to this
so-called ‘ontological’ posture.10 There are big differences between these
approaches, which share the same name borrowed from philosophy. However, this
is what unifies them: a project linking metaphysical research of an (ontological)
being in itself to places, cultures and anthropological identities, even if this means
questioning the ethnographic truth of being in the world.
In the end, philosophers do not identify with these endeavours, which for them
are part of sociological ‘verification’ or ‘veridiction’ (questions in which they are
not interested). Neither do anthropologists adhere to decontextualized abstractions
from which societies, and even humans, end up disappearing. To their authors,
anthropological ontologies are virtual constructions of different scales, from the
most micro-level, local and ethnological (Viveiros de Castro) to the most global,
terrestrial and eco-sociological (Latour). Endowed with a laudable universalist
vocation, these constructions provide tools to understand their own intellectual
abstraction, but not tools to use in situ and in context. This deficiency would be
understandable from the perspective of philosophical reasoning. It is less so from
the perspective of anthropological reasoning, for which truth is always relative to
fieldwork, place, context and relationships. It is precisely relativity of knowledge
that keeps at bay any form of ‘cultural relativism’, a division of the world into
frozen cultures intrinsically linked to identities and places (Agier, 2015). Without
unfairly judging endeavours that laudably aim to think on a global scale and
generalize knowledge, I argue that they convey a radical, frozen opposition
between structure and context, between meaning and function, and between
holism and individualism. This opposition, which in French social sciences of the
1950s heralded the bifurcation between structuralism and process analysis, is repre-
sented, respectively, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was inspired by the models of
structural linguistics, and Georges Balandier, who was closer to the Manchester
School’s situational anthropology.
Therefore, ontologies are abstract globalizations of local enquiry, structural
constructions with the ‘whole’ as a horizon. This wholeness is two-fold. On the
one hand, the ‘indigenous intellectual structure’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2008: 19)
presupposed, in the most classic and elementary holist tradition, an identification
of the part with the whole – an identification embodied in practice by the
‘privileged informant’ and in theory by the notion of ‘person’. Identification of
the subject considered as ‘person’ with the ‘structure’ leaves no remaining catego-
rical signifiers. In this reification, the concept of ‘person’ considered as ‘prior
and logically superior’ to that of ‘human’ stretches without limits to other species,
an intellectual operation rooted in the idea of (multi-)naturalism, which encom-
passes humans and non-humans, objects and subjects, etc. (Viveiros de Castro,
2008: 23). This approach refers to the philosophical figures of ‘subject-object’ or
‘subjected subject’ and leaves little room for apprehending disorder, resistance or
dissidence.
On the other hand, the ideal of wholeness is already present in the definition of
‘perspectivism’. Some may consider this notion as confirming the decentring of the
anthropologist – who endlessly moves across multiple viewpoints and goes well
beyond cultural relativism, as I show later. But this is absolutely not the case: on
the contrary, it represents an identitarian version of decentring, as in ‘Amerindian
perspectivism’. In other words, while the new form of decentring I defend here is an
epistemology of anthropology in general, perspectivism is, as Oscar Calavia Saez
notes (2012: 15), ‘an epistemology with ontology’.
On the basis of ‘ontological perspectivism’, the idea of wholeness (and its incar-
nation in the reactivated, oversized ethnological notion of ‘person’) abolishes the
separation between human and non-human, nature and culture, ecology and
sociology. Here, Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian ontology converges with the
totalizing constructions defended by Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour. More
specifically, Latour extends the ontological viewpoint to the incarnation of thought
in the wholeness of the Earth conceived as matter, being, soul and divinity, called
Gaia by the author who speaks in its name (Latour, 2015).
In the Amerindian case, when the ethnologist speaks on behalf of the jaguar,
I assert that ontological perspectivism has lost its sense of decentring and has
instead reified a self-produced abstraction by an ethnologist trapped in personal
narcissism of thought even while claiming the opposite. This is because the reality
thus reconstructed becomes a caricature of the constructivist approach: the sym-
bolic role the jaguar has for shamans (who, in their own social role, create a myth,
a mask and a meaning for the animal) switches to a belief in the jaguar’s self-being,
in which the shaman becomes its ambassador amongst humans (Viveiros de
Castro, 2008: 121). Logically, this leads to the oxymoron of an anthropology
that is both post-human and non-human. With the anthropos discarded, shared
humanity as the founding principle of anthropology is thrown into question and
authors of these ontologies introduce themselves, without any theoretical or metho-
dological precautions, in the world of post- and non-humans (Vigh and Sausdal,
2014: 54). Hence comes the necessity to re-apprehend, through ethnographic
enquiry, the stakes and movements of human cultural dynamics (the objects of
anthropo-logy), to go back to situational and contextual ethnography using con-
temporary analysis.
The framework of ‘Amerindian ontology’ consists of an artificially closed
world. Despite being associated with this cosmology, no Yanomani, Arawete or
Tupi take part in it because none of them live in a structural ‘isolate’. Similarly,
no person corresponds to an Amerindian, Amazonian or Yanomami ‘sociocul-
tural system’. Furthermore, the globalized world receives no more anthropological
attention than a few lines conveying negative moral and aesthetic judgement.11
In an ontological perspective: the concrete influence of the globalized world has
no place in ethnography nor, logically, any place in the analysis of locally
observed cultural facts.
In response to this critique, the author accepts and defends the ‘fiction’ pro-
duced: a necessary abstraction, perspectivism pretends to take indigenous thought
‘seriously’ to the point of extending it beyond itself. According to the Brazilian
anthropologist Alcida Ramos (2012), this is a ‘ventriloquist[‘s]’ magical pretence on
the part of the ethnologist, to which she opposes, rightly I believe, political issues of
the voice of Indians, of access to higher education and beyond, to the issue of an
‘auto-ethnography’.12 Moreover, there is a problem with this ‘ventriloquist’ pre-
tence. The ethnographic reports from the field (especially in America) say that
persons who are the identity references of this ontological construction move
around, become individualized, and ideas, knowledge, relations, ways of doing,
etc., move with them. They are not outside the world. Nor are Indians outside
the reach of Brazilian or international financial and agro-industrial capitalism,
which has been particularly destructive in Amazonia. They are not outside globa-
lization in general; they are not far from UN organizations or international NGOs.
All these actors call on them and solicit from them individual and collective
responses, identitarian or even ‘essentialist’ constructions as forms of revolt, dia-
logue or strategy.13 From this point of view the ontological approach is close to so-
called ‘essentialist’ strategies, which anthropologists of the contemporary confront
in the field today.
This brings us back to the critique of Brubaker and Cooper regarding iden-
tity as a category of practice or analysis. To this critique I add the following
question: should we believe there is any truth to essentialism? Essentialist lan-
guage is largely a direct effect of the politicization of identity assignations. In
this context, essentialism starts to exist, to express itself, and to become more
interesting to the anthropologist as a contemporary form and an object of
reflection, the strategic reason for which refers to political contemporaneity. If
identity is a question whose reality keeps escaping, always directing its response
to facts other than itself (places, links, assets, memories, etc.), if it is an endless
quest, if essential identity is not a ‘thing’ one can isolate and apprehend, then
essentialism is nothing. It is merely a language, useless analytically, but one that
deserves to be questioned ‘in situation’. In other words, going beyond identity
clarifies its uses simply by acknowledging what lies beyond. It reveals ‘why’ and
‘how’ processes lead some individuals or groups, at a given time, to use this or
that identitarian language, to turn this language into a withdrawal of oneself
and a rejection of the other or, on the contrary, a ritual, aesthetic or political
form of subjectification. In this way, it reveals how other (geographically or
temporarily remote) languages can be transformed and give life to other subjects
in situations of conflict.14
Finally, if the world’s ‘Great Divide’ (and its culturalist, ethnic or ontological
variants) can no longer be the founding principle of anthropology, it is primarily
because the existence of the world as constituent of local social practices and
situations can now be observed everywhere: this has become as much an empirical
fact as a theoretical one.15 If fields of anthropology are no longer determined by
their location on the globe, or by geographic proximity to the observer’s society,
then anthropologists can no longer rely on geographical distance for more or less
enlightening the knowledge of societies studied, and on their own societies in
return. It is therefore essential to entirely reconsider what makes the work of
anthropologists theoretically possible and original nowadays: we return to the
question of decentring.
Rethinking decentring
Foucault and the Nambikwara
In the late 1960s, Michel Foucault explained the project behind the book he had
just published, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences:
I wish we were able to consider our own culture as something as alien to us as, for
example, the cultures of the Arapesh or the Nambikwara, or the Chinese culture.. . . I
think that until now we have never apprehended our own knowledge as a phenome-
non that is alien to ourselves. And what I tried to do here is to apprehend Western
knowledge, which has been taking shape since the very beginnings of the Greek era, as
if it were as alien and distant to us as the cultures of the Arapesh or the Nambikwara,
and it’s this ethnological situation of our knowledge which I have wanted to
reconstitute. . . as if we were aliens to ourselves.
Doing this is of course hugely difficult because, after all, with what can we apprehend
ourselves if not with our own knowledge? In other words, it is our own mental frame-
works, our categories of knowledge that will enable us to know ourselves, and if we
want to know precisely those categories of knowledge we find ourselves in a very
tricky situation. We need to twist our reason on itself to enable it to see itself as an
alien phenomenon. Our reason must go beyond itself, it should be pulled inside out
like a glove, as it were, and it is this endeavour which I have undertaken or begun to
undertake.16
This notion fired the exploratory zeal of the first ethnographers, like Mungo
Park. Commenting on Park’s account of his explorations to the ‘centre of Africa’ at
the end of the 18th century, Adrian Adams described this Scottish medical doctor
going on his first travels as a ‘traveller without history’. This meant that Park’s
availability to others was the result of self-forgetfulness and self-abandonment.18
According to Maurice Godelier, cultural decentring still allows a form of free
thought, which can turn into a scholarly positioning, but also into a political
and ethical positioning: ‘To understand the beliefs of others without having to
share them, to respect them without refraining from criticizing them, and to recog-
nize that, with others and owing to others, one gets to know oneself better: such is
the scientific, ethical and political core of today’s and tomorrow’s anthropology’
(Godelier, 2007: 72). What was usually called decentring was, in other words, this
personal, authentic and even deliberately candid experience of the relativity of
everything – but that was before its theoretical setting transformed it into ‘cultural
relativism’ (Lévi-Strauss, 2014) as a result of the anti-racist movement after the
Second World War and the Holocaust.
What and where are we coming from today, and where are we going? It is
necessary to take this posture well beyond cultural relativism. The question
becomes how not only to decentre our view of the world, thanks to anthropology’s
relativist ethnological tradition, but to decentre anthropology (anthropological
knowledge) through the view of the world. The former interpretation is older
and ethnological, and persists in the name of diversity, or of aesthetical curiosity
toward everything different. I don’t deny the qualities and appeal of the aesthetical
outlook and intervention onto and from the ‘Other’. But, as evidenced by cultural
tourism, or exhibits at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, or in many other cultural
creations in the world today, the aestheticization of the ‘Other’ is a mode of
appropriation-integration of images and objects that change meanings as they
are displaced and go from one social and semantical context to another. In this
process, objects (both in the material and epistemological sense) are circulated,
revived, and transform themselves elsewhere, whereas subjects have disappeared.
This disappearance does not preclude demonstrating the ‘diversity of cultures’, but
such compensatory and somewhat arrogant displays pale in comparison with the
dispossession of subjects.19
Thus, the idea of rooting the knowledge of anthropologists in the cultural
decentring of ethnological tradition is invalidated by the circulation of
knowledge. Polemical discussions that have taken place in the last few years
about so-called ‘postcolonial’ or ‘subalternist’ research trends have highlighted a
certain ‘re-evaluation’ and a general relativization of the theoretical, technical and
political models that exist today. What the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty
(2009) called the ‘provincialization of Europe’ is now a known fact when it comes
to economic, cultural and social realities. Cosmopolitical realism is an invitation to
inquire about the legitimacy, the epistemology and the method of a science of
alterity. Decentring anthropology is not about inverting the outlooks of formerly
colonizing and formerly colonized countries. In order to give sense to such an
inversion one would have to believe that world context is still colonial, which is not
the case. The world is postcolonial. Its multi-polar order is the stake of permanent
conflict in all regional war environments. Two theoretical questions, then, arise
from the perspective of decolonization of knowledge. One concerns, as we’ve just
seen, the possibility of a cosmopolitical framework of knowledge, which implies
neither consensus nor homogeneity but merely recognizes a common scale of mea-
surement and exchange. It becomes increasingly clear that the multipolarity of
knowledge and perspectives, how the world looks at and represents itself, will
generate the set of global anthropological knowledge as a cosmopolitical
mechanism.20
The second question asks how, beyond the cosmopolitics of anthropology, the
object and method of this decentred outlook must change. Today’s anthropology
can no longer maintain a diametric between ‘cultural relativism’ (the others, out
there) and absolute universalism (us, here). It must query universal aspects that
emerge from a social and political context no longer characteristic of a particular
nation, civilization or culture, but featuring the entirety of exchanges that exist at
a given time on the surface of our planet. One must now envisage the possibility
of a world-anthropology where local ethnographic observations will be carried
out with the world in mind, just as the people observed in different social scenes
have the world in their minds and practices. Today one can observe a growing
number of border situations (whether spatial, administrative, social or symbolic)
and a cosmopolitan condition that is more commonplace and, in a way, more
banal.21 People on the move experience this kind of cosmopolitism on a daily
basis and borders themselves become a relational framework. They are border
people who have acquired a de facto perception of the world and experience a
decentring characteristic of exile cultures.22 Philosopher Seloua Luste Boulbina
(2013) also links the ‘decolonization of knowledge’ and the ‘de-territorialization
of oneself’. Building on Edward Saı̈d’s work, particularly his Reflections on Exile,
she places the most decolonized thought in ‘in-between worlds’, more precisely in
migrants’ travel experiences and their ‘science of concretism’. Borders are instable
in time and space; they are geographically wider than a simple line, socially
thicker and symbolically ambiguous, and they are the place of new and original
social worlds.23
By persisting solely in modes of cultural relativism, anthropology considerably
reduces its intellectual space and its chance to contribute to an understanding of
today’s world. To be more contemporary, anthropology must be less nostalgic
and less apologetic about what may have existed once upon a time, or about what
supposedly exists elsewhere. It must break culturalist confines inherent in the
ethnological agenda while rethinking cultural, globalized dimensions of decentring
in current situations. Today, decentring acknowledges globalization, particularly
the greater circulation of knowledge, imaginaries and patterns it has engendered.
This implies thinking about the world from a premise of equality among all
situations and conditions observed from the standpoint of their place in
knowledge.
Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who
neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus
in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely
through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others
of perceiving and grasping their own time.
Naturally, this noncoincidence, this ‘dys-chrony’, does not mean that the contem-
porary is a person who lives in another time, a nostalgic who feels more at home in
the Athens of Pericles or in the Paris of Robespierre and the Marquis de Sade than
in the city and the time in which he lives. An intelligent man can despise his time,
while knowing that he nevertheless irrevocably belongs to it, that he cannot escape
his own time.
Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres
to it, and at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relation-
ship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.
(Agamben, 2009: 40–41)
I took the liberty of citing at length an excerpt of this text, because it presents
the possibility of a visibility of the contemporary (and therefore, for the anthro-
pologist, the possibility to make it a personal anthropology founded on ethno-
graphy) upon the relative detachment (neither too close nor too far) of the
observer towards what is observed. This approach I describe as decentring. It
gives the possibility of an in/out relationship understood, not as a relationship
between distinct spaces, but between two contiguous temporalities, both simulta-
neous and separated by the preposition with (com-). The con-temporary divides
and unifies; it is a ‘relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction
and an anachronism’.
For us to be ‘contemporary’ in that sense, we must extract from the first
cultural decentring the epistemological and non-culturalist dimension, which
enables us to decentre ourselves in all fields of research. With this epistemological
posture, we can rebuild and share a universal dimension of anthropological
knowledge, to reflect simultaneously on observed interactions (thus allowing
genuine rehabilitation of reflexive ethnography as knowledge), on the world as
context (gradually going from the local to the global, from the network to the
planetary), and on this world as a moment in history (thus rehabilitating the
historicity of observations and analyses, of observable situations and the pro-
cesses they set in motion).
This is why this article goes back to the philosophical origins of the idea of
decentring, to the time of the Enlightenment and to what ethnologists made of it
later. Decentring was the central theme in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1984)
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. Its core argument
was that the non-natural character of human society necessitated conceptualizing
the Other in order to think and put in perspective all social and political config-
urations. This led Claude Lévi-Strauss to say that Rousseau, with this book, was
the founder of ethnology.24 But another reading of Rousseau’s essay is possible,
which is contrary to Lévi-Strauss’s and many others’ interpretation. It was not so
much the ‘savage’ or the Other that interested Rousseau. Then, the ‘pure state of
nature’ was not perceived to be a real part of the world (much of which was
unknown to Europeans when Rousseau wrote his essay). It was an audacious,
empirically shaky, but nonetheless necessary hypothesis, as Rousseau recognized
himself in his preface to the Discourse. While forcing himself to ‘form conjectures
based solely on the nature of man, and the beings around him, as to what the
human race might have become if it had been abandoned to itself’ (Rousseau, 1984:
78), this hypothesis enables him to describe, in contrast, the non-natural (i.e. social
and political) progression of societies towards ‘servitude’, ‘inequalities’, ‘conflicts’
and the production of ‘supernumeraries’ as an effect of land appropriation which
Rousseau chose to take as the founding event: ‘The first man who, having enclosed
a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘‘This is mine’’, and found people
simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society’ (Rousseau,
1984: 109). This declaration designates the ‘event’ whose theoretical scope is central
to the philosopher.
In other words, Rousseau, a self-designated ‘citizen of Geneva’, critiques and
describes the features of the ‘civil man’, his contemporary, in the face of whom the
state of nature hypothesis is an ‘operator of alterity’.25 On the one hand, he makes
it possible to demonstrate that it ‘could have been otherwise’ (a phrase that could
well be deconstructionist!).26 On the other hand, he demonstrates that it can be
otherwise, by creating or altering the social contract, in other words, by intervening
in law and politics.
Rousseau was an 18th-century revolutionary, or was he ‘the most ethnographic
of all the philosophes’ (Levi-Strauss, 1992: 390)? In Discourse on Inequality, Lévi-
Strauss saw promoted a ‘primitive identification’ that, according to him, made
Rousseau the first ‘ethnographer’, ‘our master’, ‘our brother’.27 But apart from
the fact that Rousseau never conducted ethnographical research or travelled to
distant lands like some of his contemporaries, one may suggest that Rousseau
was more interested in method or ‘anthropological ascetism’ (Bachofen and
Bernardi, 2008: 23) than in the discovery of the world. In other words, his is an
epistemological posture, a counterpoint to reflect on how the author’s
WYSIWYG
Whatever their field of study, the knowledge process for anthropologists takes
place between two poles. On one side is the dialogue in the field – it is during
moments of exchange with their hosts that anthropologists learn things. The pos-
sibility of real dialogue highlights the contemporaneity between researchers and
their ‘objects’, and it determines the proprieties of the materials collected. On the
other side, there is the fiction of writing – here ‘fiction’ does not refer to a lie or an
invention, but to a selective, synthetic or analytic description that adheres to par-
ticular conventions of anthropological writing. In the shift from fieldwork to wri-
ting, one risk highlighted by the ‘textualist’ critiques mentioned earlier is the
production of a monologue that totalizes representation at the expense of the
plurality of voices heard in the field, and of the representation of conflicts or
deviant social forms. Furthermore, the ‘ethnographical present’ is transcribed as
an absolute, eternal and a-temporal present of data collected in a topical environ-
ment, although the strategic stakes of the time when they were collected may have
been significant. Thus the contemporary determinants of data – actions, declara-
tions and exchanges observed and collected in situation and in context – disappear
in this ‘ethnographical present’ (Fabian, 1983).
Different contortions of time, of enquiry and of reporting led Johannes Fabian
to talk of a ‘schizogenic use of time’. How to escape this artificial separation? The
solution is to start from an observational principle that what is seen is not an
adulterated version of truths from another place or another time. Nor are there
proper, ontological identities supposedly more ‘genuine’ than those observed ear-
lier that are now lost. Nor should anthropologists endeavour to eliminate contem-
porary elements because they spoil the image: power generators with strong smells
In reality, society is not something I can observe. However remote or small it may be,
the point of view from Sirius is not more accessible to me. I never observe only
situations. To observe a situation (as opposed to observing a planet), is to be in it.
If I observe, I am part of it but in the position of a stranger. Out of scholarly interest, I
manage to find myself in situations (even if it means provoking them) that present a
degree of relative strangeness, one that is strong enough that, not knowing what they
do, I undertake to learn it. (Bazin, 1996: 409)
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Notes
1. These relate more particularly to the transformation of local anchorings (Augé, 1992), the
transformations of alterity (Augé, 1994a) and the formation of new ‘social’ and ‘cultural’
worlds (Augé, 1994b).
2. Studies on these topics have been plentiful and have given rise to a rich literature. For a
balanced account in French, see for example Berger (2005), Copans (2009), Leservoisier
and Vidal (2007), De l’Estoile and Naepels (2004), Colleyn and Dozon (2008).
3. See Tobias Rees, ‘Today, What Is Anthropology?’, in Rabinow and Marcus (2008: 4).
4. More recently, see the critique by Comaroff (2010).
5. ‘Anthropology is alive in its post-1980s engagements, but these are very different from in
its old haunts, in its still stereotypic reception, and in an institutional life that is still a
beneficiary of what some have called its Golden Age’ (George Marcus in Rabinow and
Marcus, 2008: 32).
6. Two edited books refer to this topic in France, Amselle and M’Bokolo (1985) and
Chrétien and Prunier (1989), as many case studies in the 1980s–90s fed into this critical
reflection.
23. On the ambiguity of the ‘borderline’ between Greece and Albany see Sarah Green
(2005), and for a general reflection about time, space and social borderlands see
Agier (2016: Ch. 1).
24. ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man’, in Lévi-Strauss (1976: 33–43).
25. Here I follow the commentary by Bachofen and Bernardi (2008 [1755]: 28).
26. I assume the fact that I am applying to Rousseau’s thought a reading equivalent to the
one Derrida has applied to Levi-Strauss’s cultural decentring (Derrida, 1967: 411).
Considering writing as a decentring or as an ‘excentricity’, Derrida put in doubt the
reference to the powerful ‘centre’ itself as an evidence.
27. One can easily perceive a continuity of interpretation between Rousseau’s vision as an
ethnologist and the representation of an anthropology confined to cultural decentring
and exotic societies, a representation of anthropology that can be found, for example, in
parts of today’s political philosophy. From a certain point of view, the culturalist read-
ing is always useful to philosophy in order to reflect on the Other who is ‘without a state’
or ‘against the state’ as a counterpoint or counter-ideal to the societies analysed by
Western philosophy. Thus, the association of the names of Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss
and Clastres now creates an acceptable ethno-political paradigm for some philosophers.
To these names we can now add the recent work by James Scott (2013), who idealizes
and groups under the name of ‘Zomia’ (a name given by the author, not the people
concerned) proto-anarchic mountain societies ‘‘recently disappeared’’.
28. Televised interview with Michel Foucault by Pierre Dumayer, 14 June 1966 (see Note 16).
29. For instance, there is no breakdown of temporalities or contexts between the Indian
reserves of the ‘pacified’ Amazonian forest and Rio’s favelas that are undergoing a ‘paci-
fication’ process with strong military and police presence and constant supervision, notes
João Pacheco de Oliveira (2014) in an article which not only sheds light on Brazil’s policies
towards the margins – whether urban or national – but also has the great merit of breaking
away with the idea of the ‘Great Divide’ which is still very present in the social thought of
the Brazilian nation. Similar ideas are developed in Bessire and Bond (2014: 446).
30. Gérard Althabe (1990) has thus highlighted the importance of a mutual engagement
between surveyor and subjects to define the situation as a framework of communication.
Besides, the theoretical developments of the situational approach can be found in arti-
cles and books by Mitchell (1987), Alisdair Rogers and Steven Vertovec (1995), and
Terry Evens and Don Handelman (2006). Finally, and it is of course not a coincidence,
the situational approach did not find its place in the aforementioned ‘philological turn’
of North American anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. On ethnographic reflexivity
and anthropological knowledge see Agier (2015).
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