Eduardo Viveiros de Castro E-Book

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 38

Beschreibung

 Der brasilianische Anthropologe Eduardo Viveiros de Castro beschäftigt sich mit den Vorurteilen gegenüber dem binären Denken, mit dem der strukturale Ethnologe Claude Lévi-Strauss assoziiert wird. Als Schlüssel zur Dekonstruktion dieses für ihn zu Unrecht verrufenen Schemas dient Viveiros de Castro zufolge die Mittellinie einer Gemeinschaft:  » Mit anderen Worten müssen wir die Natur der inneren, die beiden Moieties trennenden Mittellinie begrifflich definieren[…] «  In diesem Notizbuch wird die Mittellinie immer wieder neu verortet und dabei deutlich, dass das binäre System für Levi-Strauss keineswegs ein vereinfachender  » modus operandi «  gewesen ist. Schon zu Lebzeiten hat Lévi-Strauss den Dualismus problematisiert und dabei die Inkommensurabilität, den Chromatismus und die Dynamik dualer Strukturen mitgedacht.    Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (*1951) ist ein brasilianischer Anthropologe und Professor am National Museum der Federal University von Rio de Janeiro.      Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch 

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº056: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Radical Dualism: A Meta-Fantasy on the Square Root of Dual Organizations, or A Savage Homage to Lévi-Strauss /

Radikaler Dualismus. Eine Meta-Fantasie über die Quadratwurzel dualer Organisationen oder Eine wilde Hommage an Lévi-Strauss

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

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Translations / Übersetzungen: Claudio Brandt, Inka Marter

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© 2012 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Students on deck of Chalet III (Farrally Hall) / Studenten auf der Terrasse des Chalet III (Farrally Hall), The Banff Centre, 1956 (detail / Detail), courtesy Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives at The Banff Centre;all other images / alle anderen Abbildungen: © Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

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Eduardo Viveiros de CastroRadical Dualism: A Meta-Fantasy on the Square Root of Dual Organizations, or A Savage Homage to Lévi-Strauss / Radikaler Dualismus. Eine Meta-Fantasie über die Quadratwurzel dualer Organisationen oder Eine wilde Hommage an Lévi-Strauss

Eduardo Viveiros de CastroRadical Dualism: A Meta-Fantasy on the Square Root of Dual Organizations, or A Savage Homage to Lévi-Strauss

The name of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died exactly two years ago to the day on which I write these notes (October 30, 2011), has become emblematically associated with what some call, disdainfully, “binary thought.” Structural anthropology would evidence a reactionary partiality for dual, symmetrical, static, and reversible oppositions, and for the analogies of proportionality that one can build with them, such as totemic systems. The French anthropologist would thus be a kind of champion of the binary system (or of the binary machine, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have said), conceiving it at the same time as the elementary schematism of human semiosis and as the final reduction of every metaphysical system.

This image, however, belongs more to certain simplistic versions of structuralism, both inside and outside anthropology, than to the modus operandi of Lévi-Strauss himself. For him, much to the contrary, a binary opposition is anything but a simple, or simply dual, object, or even simply an object; perhaps it may not even be an opposition at all. It is worth noting that Lévi-Strauss ends the two phases of his monumental study of mythology1 at a time when structuralism had reached full theoretical maturity, with warnings about the limits of both the resources (and vocabulary) of extensional logic and the very notion of binary opposition for coping with the multidimensional relationships that perfuse and constitute mythic matter. But since his very early papers, he drew attention, on the one hand, to certain non-commutative, irreversible, and heterogeneous aspects of mythic transformations and, on the other hand, to the precarious and as often as not illusory nature of the comprehensiveness and equipollence often attributed to the symbolic dualities that recur in human societies.

These two axes of problematizing dualism are announced with clarity in two key articles, “La Structure des mythes” (1955), in which the enigmatic canonical formula of myth is presented, and “Les Organisations dualistes existent-t-elles?” (1956), which reconceptualizes the nature of a morphological configuration quite common in societies of the “tribal” kind, in which the human population (and, many times, the totality of the universe) is divided into two opposite and complementary, and often exogamous, classes or moieties,2