Carlo Severi

Transmutating beings: A proposal for an anthropology of thought

Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,” to the causal theories studied by Evans-Pritchard in witchcraft, have generally been interpreted as an expression of a specific language or “culture.” In this paper, I discuss this way of defining thought. Three classic objections are examined: (1) societies sharing the same “system of thought” may speak different languages, and vice versa; (2) if a relation between language and thought exists, it is an indirect and controversial one, and we should never take it for granted (or infer qualities of thought from language structures) without further investigation; (3) the languages that we use to qualify different kinds of thought are constantly translated. Through a discussion of the context of translation, I argue that instead of seeing the possibility of translation as a theoretical difficulty for defining thought, we could, on the contrary, consider the ethnography of translation as a chance to observe the dynamics and structure of thought processes, and to study how they operate in different cultural contexts. Using three Amazonian examples, I will try to describe the kind of cognition involved by the form of translation that Jakobson calls transmutation. I will argue that from this ethnographic analysis, we can not only derive a better (both wider and more precise) idea of some, rarely studied, cultural translation processes, but also draw from it a new way to define the concept of “cultural ontology,” both for Amazonian cultures and in more general terms.

The arts of memory

For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign. This myth of a figurative language composed by icons—that form the opposite figure of writing—has deeply influenced Western tradition. In this article, I show that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics (pictographs, khipus) cannot be understood from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with writing, but requires a truly comparative anthropology. Rather than trying to know if Native American techniques of memory are true scripts or mere mnemonics, we can explore the formal aspect both have in common, compare the mental processes they call for. We can ask if both systems belong to the same conceptual universe, to a mental language—to use Giambattista Vico’s phrase—that would characterize the Native American arts of memory. In this perspective, techniques of memory stop being hybrids or imprecise, and we will better understand their nature and functions as mental artifacts.

The arts of memory Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact

For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign. This myth of a figurative language composed by icons—that form the opposite figure of writing—has deeply influenced Western tradition. In this article, I show that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics (pictographs, khipus) cannot be understood from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with writing, but requires a truly comparative anthropology. Rather than trying to know if Native American techniques of memory are true scripts or mere mnemonics, we can explore the formal aspect both have in common, compare the mental processes they call for. We can ask if both systems belong to the same conceptual universe, to a mental language—to use Giambattista Vico’s phrase—that would characterize the Native American arts of memory. In this perspective, techniques of memory stop being hybrids or imprecise, and we will better understand their nature and functions as mental artifacts.

Authorless authority: A proposal on agency and ritual artefacts

In this article, the author proposes a re-examination of the first example of agency given by Alfred Gell in his famous Art and Agency (1998), namely the Zinganga ’nkisi (nail fetish) of Western Africa. This article essentially argues two points. First, the relation between the artefact and the person it incarnates is not, as Gell has defined it, bi-univocal (one-to-one), but can be better described as one-to-many. In the author’s view, the ritual artefact does not work as a mirror reflection, but as a crystal. Secondly, the kind of ‘distributed I’ that the artefact enacts is not composed of a single identity distributed in several material occurrences, as Gell has described it in Art and Agency. In the author’s view, another concept of plurality, defined as a set of different identities condensed in a single object, describes more appropriately the kind of agency that characterizes the ’nkisi.

A palavra emprestada ou como falam as imagens

It is a general human fact that we tend to attribute, in many social contexts, a status of living beings to inanimate objects. As Alfred Gell has shown, the analysis of this fact can provide radically new perspectives in the field of the anthropology of art. This article deals with this attribution of subjectivity as it appears within a ritual context. Exploring the role played by the utterance of words, as it was virtually attributed to kouroi and korai in ancient Greek funerary rituals, this paper raises two questions: How aesthetic values relate to the ritual uses of an image? How the virtual attribution of the faculty of speaking to an inanimate object can acquire an influence on the form and effects of a verbal act? Finally, the article suggests that the answers offered to these questions could lead to a new way, inspired by pragmatics, to understand both ritual action and artifacts.