Marilyn Strathern

Este libro clásico recién incorporado al conjunto de Academia.edu da cuenta de los prolegómenos y los primeros años de la antropología posmoderna. Con el correr de un par de décadas pudo verificarse que mi sombrío pronóstico, asentado en un prólogo que se come la mitad del libro, no era del todo descaminado: la antropología posmoderna no pudo formular en todo ese tiempo una sola heurística positiva. La postura crítica que adoptó el posmodernismo, y que rara vez toca resortes epistemológicos esenciales, permaneció asimismo ajena a todo conato de genuina reflexividad: la crítica posmoderna es siempre crítica de otras estrategias, jamás de la propia.

En cuanto a la presunta radicalidad política del posmodernismo antropológico, mejor ni hablar; no es necesario ser Noam Chomsky (o Alan Sokal) para percibir el carácter inherentemente inocuo y retrógrado de su posicionamiento, que con el tiempo ha resultado funcional al del neoliberalismo cuya trayectoria acompañó.

Ya en su sexta o séptima edición, esta obra ha sido clave en el conocimiento del posmodernismo en general y del posmodernismo antropológico en particular en los países de habla castellana. Si usted no está al tanto de los detalles personales, conviene que le aclare que nunca he sido posmoderno. Más bien todo lo contrario.

Sumado a otro caso bien conocido (La interpretación de las culturas), el libro en cuestión es sólo un indicador de la irreprimible propensión que tenemos ciertos autores a estudiar y difundir ideas con las que nadie en su sano juicio debería estar de acuerdo. Ideas que se promovieron, además, como las últimas (literalmente) que valía la pena tener en antropología. Y que algunos siguen sosteniendo, como si el posmodernismo no fuera ya, desde hace unos cuantos años, una agenda agotada. De hecho, los libros, artículos, ponencias y páginas de Web que se titulan algo así como “Qué fue el posmodernismo” ya son legión. Cuando en la década de los noventa los vientos cambiaron, buena parte de los antropólogos posmodernos propuso mudarse a los estudios culturales, un tema álgido al cual he dedicado otro libro.

Este texto, mientras tanto, sigue siendo lectura obligada sobre una teoría antropológica que, lejos de ser heterodoxa, es sustentada por muchos de los que todavía hoy dominan la academia: una generación en vías de jubilarse pero que no acaba de morir.

Contenidos:

Clifford Geertz – "Géneros confusos. La refiguración del pensamiento social".
Richard Shweder – "La rebelión romántica de la antropología contra el Iluminismo, o el pensamiento es más que razón y evidencia".
Michael Agar – "Hacia un lenguaje etnográfico".
James Clifford – "Sobre la autoridad etnográfica".
George Marcus y Dick Cushman – "Las etnografías como textos".
Marilyn Strathern – "Fuera de contexto. Las ficciones persuasivas de la antropología".
Dennis Tedlock – "Preguntas concernientes a la antropología dialógica".
Stephen Tyler – "Acerca de la “descripción/desescritura” como un “hablar por”".
Dennis Tedlock – "Sobre la representación del discurso en el discurso".
Stephen Tyler – "La etnografía posmoderna: De documento de lo oculto a documento oculto".

This is the original English version of the essay published in L'Homme 218, 2016, translated to French by Ariane Dorval (see below item for French). A longer version serves as the introduction to "Redescribing Relations," see above.


This version has been updated from the version some have already downloaded because it came to my attention that there were more footnotes in the French version. So I have added footnotes 5 and 14, which bumps up (as in the French version) the long footnote on the ontological turn, from number 15 to 17. It remains 15 in the longer version that appears as the introduction to the volume I edited, Redescribing Relations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics. This footnote (but more so one of Strathern's dreams) has also inspired a short intervention and debate in the journal Social Anthropology (see 'Interpreting Strathern's 'Unconscious' Critique of Ontology').

Este libro da cuenta de los prolegómenos y los primeros años de la antropología posmoderna. Con el correr de un par de décadas pudo verificarse que mi sombrío pronóstico, asentado en un prólogo que se come la mitad del libro, no era del todo descaminado: la antropología posmoderna no pudo formular en todo ese tiempo una sola heurística positiva. La postura crítica que adoptó el posmodernismo, y que rara vez toca resortes epistemológicos esenciales, permaneció asimismo ajena a todo conato de genuina reflexividad: la crítica posmoderna es siempre crítica de otras estrategias, jamás de la propia.

En cuanto a la presunta radicalidad política del posmodernismo antropológico, mejor ni hablar; no es necesario ser Noam Chomsky (o Alan Sokal) para percibir el carácter inherentemente inocuo de su posicionamiento, que con el tiempo ha resultado funcional al del neoliberalismo cuya trayectoria acompañó.

Ya en su sexta o séptima edición, esta obra ha sido clave en el conocimiento del posmodernismo en general y del posmodernismo antropológico en particular en los países de habla castellana. Si usted no está al tanto de los detalles personales, conviene que le aclare que nunca he sido posmoderno. Más bien todo lo contrario.

Sumado a otro caso bien conocido (La interpretación de las culturas), el libro en cuestión es sólo un indicador de la irreprimible propensión que tenemos ciertos autores a estudiar y difundir ideas con las que nadie en su sano juicio debería estar de acuerdo. Ideas que se promovieron, además, como las últimas (literalmente) que valía la pena tener en antropología. Y que algunos siguen sosteniendo, como si el posmodernismo no fuera ya, desde hace unos cuantos años, una agenda agotada. De hecho, los libros, artículos, ponencias y páginas de Web que se titulan algo así como “Qué fue el posmodernismo” ya son legión. Cuando en la década de los noventa los vientos cambiaron, buena parte de los antropólogos posmodernos propuso mudarse a los estudios culturales, un tema álgido al cual he dedicado otro libro.

Este texto, mientras tanto, sigue siendo lectura obligada sobre una teoría antropológica que, lejos de ser heterodoxa, es sustentada por muchos de los antropólogos crepusculares que todavía hoy dominan la academia.

A shorter version of this review (by half) has been published in American Ethnologist (Early View, November 2020, see above).

Some of the discussions have been expanded upon in "After the Medium: Rereading Stories on a String and the War at Canudos" and "Truth and Relations" (you will find both on my profile here on academia.edu).

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Dec 2021

Corrected!

I am leaving the bibliography out--please check out JAAR website to download the full article--also have a look at the whole issue, it is great! https://academic.oup.com/jaar/issue/89/4

El perspectivismo amerindio sobrevino y evolucionó tan rápido que muchos de mis colegas sienten que apenas se distrajeron un instante y que al volver a mirar en torno percibieron que toda la antro­pología latinoamericana había cambiado y que todo el mundo estaba en guerra por variancias interpretativas tan grotescas, por tópicos de relevancia tan discutible y por relec­tu­ras enésimas de autores tan gastados por los años que toda la circunstancia se tor­naba has­ta difícil de creer. Al­gunos colaboradores míos en la investigación y en la do­cen­­cia, a quienes qui­zá im­pulsé demasiado a que concentraran el foco en cuestiones meto­do­lógicas muy demandantes, encuentran casi inconcebible que en tan poco tiem­po (en me­nos de veinte años) haya llegado a coagular un máquina discursiva de seme­jante facundia, de fun­da­mentación tan pre­caria y de tan exorbitante poder de per­suación.

En este libro de próxima publicación se examinan críticamente las etapas de la antropología perspectivista Amazónica, desde el animismo de Philippe Descola hasta la antropología pos-estructuralista de Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, pasando por la Teoría del Actor-Red de Bruno Latour.

Desentrañar el origen exacto del perspectivismo, sintetizar sus lineamientos y evaluar su aporte es un trabajo enredado por­que (como habrá de verse) los au­to­res se citan re­cí­pro­ca­mente, copian y pe­gan, se realimentan, descontextualizan y filtran todo tex­to que to­can, en­mascaran sus vo­ces propias tras de un canon de dis­cur­­­si­vi­dad im­per­sonal, reparten pre­mios y castigos discor­dantes, glorifican o domestican fuen­tes de inspiración que difie­ren cada vez que histo­ri­zan sus propias trayec­to­rias, cultivan las más hondas contradic­cio­nes, adoptan ni­ve­les de abs­tracción tan altos que todo lo que miran deviene parecido, atri­bu­yen etno­cen­tris­mo, modernismo o derechismo a quienes piensan distinto, invisibilizan todo lo que guarde relación con pro­cesos de cam­bio, re­su­­ci­tan autores y con­­ceptos en desuso que se han demostrado pro­ble­máticos (sha­ma­­nismo, a­ni­mis­­mo, parti­ci­pa­ción), vuel­ven a llamar o aceptan que se llame “primitivos”, “fósiles”, “bárbaros” o “sal­vajes” a los pue­­blos ori­gi­­na­rios, desa­tien­den todo as­pec­to de la vi­da y la so­­ciedad que no implique el men­­tís de dicotomías más presuntas que reales, agru­pan prác­­ti­cas di­ver­sas en ca­te­gorías uni­­for­­­mes, aguijonean a sus discípulos para que adopten repertorios concep­tua­­les rebuscados que no están aso­ciados a ninguna metodología, a­tri­buyen a la cien­cia, a occi­den­­te o a quien se ponga a tiro ideo­logías que na­die sus­ten­tó o que no han sido exac­ta­mente co­mo se las des­­­cribe, des­co­nocen o des­precian cam­­­pos en­teros del tra­­­­bajo cien­­­tífi­co en general y de la antropología en particular, redu­cen la con­ciencia, la cogni­ción y el pen­sa­miento a la invención mito­ló­gica, importan conceptos de la matemática cruda que no sirven para lo que se requiere, tri­via­li­zan, mi­ni­­mizan o sobre­va­loran los mé­ritos que encuentran en los po­cos an­tropólogos extra­par­ti­da­rios de cu­ya ima­ginación y de cuyo respaldo de­penden (Pie­­­­rre Clas­tres,  Roy Wag­ner, Mar­shall Sahlins, An­tho­ny See­­ger, Ma­­ri­lyn Stra­thern y por su­puesto Clau­de Lévi-Strauss) y les atri­bu­yen una y otra vez ideas que no es­tán ahí cuan­do se lo co­rrobora o que mu­tan de sen­tido o cam­bian de acen­to cuan­do se las con­tem­pla en su contexto real.

Lejos estamos de una teoría de excelencia. Atri­bu­yo al perspectivismo, como sus logros culmi­nan­tes, la más fea definición conocida del pensa­miento indígena, la concepción más bizarra e ingenua de la idea de objeto fractal, la visión de con­junto más insustancial del estado de la teoría y el método en la disciplina y la imple­men­tación más pobre, estúpida y torcida jamás llevada a cabo del con­cepto riemanniano-deleuziano de multi­pli­cidad.

En este libro se examinan críticamente las etapas de la antropología perspectivista Amazónica, desde el animismo de Philippe Descola hasta la antropología pos-estructuralista de Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, pasando por la Teoría del Actor-Red de Bruno Latour, pasando por las ideas de Pierre Clastres, Marilyn Strathern, Bruno Lator y el recientemente fallecido Roy Wagner.

If we keep on speaking the same language together, we're going to reproduce the same history. Begin the same old stories all over again. Don't you think so? [.. .] The same difficulties, the same impossibility of making connections. The same. .. Always the same.-Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One We know, knowledge there is, but the idiot demands that we slow down, that we don't consider ourselves authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know.

In a world that can appear to have been cosmologically unified by centuries of globalization, the claim that anthropology’s most urgent mission is to expose heterogeneous ontologies has a confounding ring. It has been heard as a call for anthropology to untether its mode of inquiry from the “ground” of the field and enter the atmosphere of pure speculation often favored by contemporary philosophy. The injunction, however, is to make another, unfamiliar intellectual move, which is at once entirely concrete and acutely metaphysical: to intensify the descriptive powers of anthropology to the point of provoking a crisis in the concepts fundamental to the European philosophi- cal tradition, both within and outside the social sciences. Several generations of anthropologists assumed that they could account for the indifference of certain indigenous peoples to modern distinctions—between nature and cul- ture, thing and person, and humans and animals—but without questioning the validity of using those very categories to make the explanation. When anthropologists instead accepted that these partitions form merely one means of distributing beings among others—began trying to do justice to those other ways of making worlds—it exited the reassuring framework of scientific inquiry for the unstable terrain of ontological comparison.

Este texto constituye un ejercicio de pensamiento sobre
la figuración y lo que se evoca por medio de ella. A
partir de la etnografía de dos pueblos indígenas del Chaco
argentino (toba-qom y guaraní) nos proponemos mostrar
las vinculaciones entre la forma que adoptan ciertas
relaciones y una ontología en la cual las personas humanas
y no-humanas están articuladas entre sí por compartir
capacidades de interioridad y por establecer relaciones
de comunicación e interdependencia mutua. Las formas
que en estas ontologías pueden asumir las relaciones
y los existentes demuestran una gran inestabilidad y
dinamismo y, al mismo tiempo, dicha fluidez responde
a una “estética apropiada”. Específicamente analizaremos
dibujos en papel realizados por un iniciado chamánico
qom y las máscaras elaboradas y experimentadas en el
ritual del arete guasu por un reconocido enmascarado
guaraní (chiriguano). Nos preguntaremos por el tipo de
relaciones y efectos que los qom y los guaraní objetifican
en su proceso de figuración en máscaras y dibujos y qué
aspectos de la ontología son puestos a la luz en aquello
que unas y otros no solo evocan sino también activan.

Context holds a significant place mediating the conceptual and the empirical in ethnography. This modality of knowledge has also become a significant part of science and technology studies since the rise of laboratory studies. However, conventional modes of contextualization that locate the object of study within a whole—such as within a society or culture—have become a target of suspicion and criticism since the 1980s. This led to the radical
alteration of the contextualizing strategies of actor–network theory (ANT) and multisited ethnography. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern is also responding to this crisis by renovating the practice of ethnography in a way significantly different from both strategies. Since contextualization occupies a significant place in the formation of ethnography as a representation of a larger ‘‘out there’’ reality, her alternative contextualization requires a new
characterization of ethnography other than representation. This article tries to expound the complicated, and often perplexing, ethnography of Strathern by making an analogy with objects familiar to most science, technology, and society scholars, namely, machines. By doing so, this article argues that Strathern is opening up a new way of dealing with context that is radically different both from ANT and from multisited ethnography.

"In the Vicinity of the State is about house construction in Mulwene, an emerging neighbourhood on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique. It is about how aspirations to secure a permanent location in an unstable urban environment become associated with building a cement house in a parcelled‐out plot. Above all, it is about how people struggle to secure land and build houses and in so doing reconfigure their social personhood. The thesis explores how, for people living in Mulwene, house construction in parcelled‐out plots has come to represent a path towards new possibilities in the vicinity of the state; the idea of the finished house being a measure of an imagined future which guides people towards these possibilities.
By focusing on the particular aesthetic ideals and physical practices which guide construction projects in Mulwene, it becomes possible to examine novel ways in which materiality, time and personhood are linked. Taking house construction to constitute particular temporal assemblages composed of heterogeneous physical and ideational elements, the thesis yields a fresh perspective on how individual and shared ontological perspectives
are (re)produced as people build houses."

A number of these arguments are also developed in published form in "After the Medium" @ JAAR. See above.

Discussant comments for the AAA Panel "Speaking Truth/Knowledge/Bodies: Old and New Directions in the Anthropology of Religion" November 2021. Panel organizer: Ingie Hovland

This paper explores “how ethnographic collaboration configures its data” via examination of three relations: between ethnography as method and writing, between leaky empirical and conceptual sets, and between ethnographic and rhetorical effects. I suggest that writing entails keeping the research imagination alive to two simultaneous processes of scaling—of the empirical within the text, and of diverse sets of literature in mutual relation—always with a specific focus and orientation. What emerges is an image of both ‘ethnographer’ and ‘data’ as hybrid and transformable companions.
I illustrate with reference to two quite different texts about emerging Mekong realities. Both are elicited as experimental additions to worlds. In that capacity, they are capable of generating reality effects but those effects cannot be preordained. I conclude that ethnographic collaborations find no other grounds than dic cur hic—why, here, now—or as Isabelle Stengers has formulated it “say why you say it.”

This paper presents three nested case studies. The first is an exposition of David Tudor’s experimentalism which was intertwined with the more well-known experimentalism centering around the discourse/practice of John Cage. Despite his extensive collaboration with Cage, Tudor’s focus was quite removed from his collaborator’s, concentrating on what he called the “nature of instruments,” which grounded his idiosyncratic practice as performer/composer of experimental music. The second case study problematizes the first by asking what the nature of a “case” is, and why, when scholars like myself investigate the history of experimental music, we end up focusing on “cases” to make our point, despite our well-meaning and well-funded efforts to indefinitely trace the potentially infinite network of actors. I connect the ontological status of “cases” to that of experiments in the natural sciences, depicting their necessarily biased and local nature as well as the form of closure which seems to block the otherwise endless flow of agencies in the network model. I argue that “cases” present a case of experimental objectivity that is not universal but situated, and thus related to the specific nature of objects assembled in the collective—the instruments involved. This experimental and instrumental nature of cases correlates to the biased and localized position of the particular observer of history who frames or fabricates cases as such. The third case study capitalizes on the implications of the above analyses to focus on a series of miniature expositions of more recent, relatively unknown endeavors in experimental music that I have been personally associated, including my own project, No Collective (http://nocollective.com). What arises through this meandering trajectory is the problem of who is tracing the network, with what interests, using what resources, and under what conditions, which also brings into question the seemingly neutral authority of our vista wishing to foresee what comes after experimental music.

(first presented at: "After Experimental Music" conference at Cornell University on February 8-11, 2018)

Corporate gifts – from philanthropic donations to individual reward schemes – attract considerable attention from scholars for the kinds of moral, economic and political logics that motivate them. This article considers the gifts that transnational corporations give to producers and draws from Marilyn Strathern’s writings on exchange and personhood in order to reverse dominant analyses. Focused on the gifting of gold coins to industrial workers at a global manufacturing unit in India, it brings together field-based observations with a diverse field of literature on the gift in anthropology. Against an analysis that sees the corporate gift harnessed directly to a corporate bottom line, this article proposes an alternative accounting that uses Strathern’s notions of ‘elicitation’, ‘revelation’ and ‘detachment’ to explore the contours of knowledge, personhood and relationality in the transaction. If corporate gifts have powerful effects, the article argues, it is because they establish difference between the person of the giver and the person of the recipient and because they materialize actions, desires and capacities that accrue to and transform the recipients rather than simply because they are vessels for the interests of global capital. As social theory confronts the political economy of corporate giving, Strathern’s writings prompt provocative questions about agency and power that challenge the hegemonic status of the modern corporation.

Redactado en 1987, apenas un año después de "Writing culture", este fue tal vez el primer artículo sobre la antropología posmoderna publicado en castellano. Los autores tomados en consideración son Stephen Tyler y Marilyn Strathern. Es un ensayo más descriptivo que crítico, pero aun así no se sitúa a favor del movimiento sino decididamente en contra, como lo testimonia esta frase:

“El posmodernismo no está, como alucina, fuera de la historia, y su moda habrá de ser devorada por el tiempo más tarde o más temprano. Su auge, empero, recién comienza, y podemos augurar mucho combate estéril, mucha inteligencia dilapidada y mucho esfuerzo digno de mejor causa. […] No esperamos refutarlo, decíamos. Quizá no presenciemos su agonía; con esta protesta, sin embargo, esperamos contribuir a que llegue su hora”.

Treinta y cuatro años más tarde queda claro que la resistencia fue en vano. Mis contemporáneos, los primeros que sucumbieron al encanto de la nueva teoría, estaban esperando que las modas se sucedieran rítmicamente cada diez o quince años para subirse a la última de ellas. El posmodernismo fue sólo una de ellas; ni siquiera fue la más prolongada, ni la más radical, ni la última.

Resumen: Los escenarios interculturales emergentes problematizan la utilidad de las categorías antropológicas relacionadas con el chamanismo, por lo que necesitamos evaluar críticamente su precisión y productividad analítica. Para esta tarea primero, realizaré una genealogía de las concepciones del chamanismo en la antropología, analizaré las lógicas de su reproducción social, y las disputas por establecer su legitimidad. Segundo, evidenciaré la dimensión política de la ritualidad chamanística. Tercero, objetivaré cómo existe una retroalimentación discursiva entre los investigadores y los chamanes. Y, por último, concluiré cómo las reflexiones anteriores nos permitirán ampliar nuestro conocimiento acerca de la interculturalidad.

Abstract: Emerging intercultural scenarios problematize the usefulness of anthropological categories related to shamanism, so we need to critically evaluate their accuracy and analytical productivity. For this task first, I will make a genealogy of the conceptions of shamanism in anthropology, I will analyze the logic of its social reproduction, and the disputes to establish its legitimacy. Second, I will highlight the political dimension of shamanistic ritualism. Third, I will objectify how there is discursive feedback between researchers and shamans. And, finally, I will conclude how the previous reflections will allow us to broaden our understanding about interculturality.

American Ethnologist (Early View)
In deciding how to review this rich and complex book--and with only 1000 words--I focused more on those aspects that would help readers devise a strategy for reading it. The longer version (uploaded separately, see my profile), which I had to edit down for publication, has a bit more discussion, and a picture! Thanks for reading.

In this daring debut, Zayin Cabot challenges the wise homebodies of academia. A profoundly interdisciplinary approach to comparative scholarship, Ecologies of Participation offers a methodology whereby we can face our shared planetary predicament. It is grounded in process philosophy and asserts the importance of a new ontology of agency. It traces the importance of Lévy-Bruhl and Lévi-Strauss's early work while offering new insight into the ontological turn in anthropology. This book sets out to destabilize modern reductionist trends toward scientific materialism, without falling into postmodern cultural constructivism. It does not assume the giveness of nature or culture. By advancing a multi-ontology approach, this work offers robust interventions into decolonial and critical studies. Cabot takes contemporary scholarship in new and exciting directions—offering an unstable ground from which to examine our shared worlds, both human and other. Throughout the last chapters of the book, these threads are illuminated through a detailed ethics of comparison and participation.

It is impossible to capture in some neat established academic sound-bite, mostly because its multiple claims are all quite impossible—impossible, that is, within our present Western and colonized ways of speaking, thinking, and being. If we can imagine ourselves outside or after that framework, we might say that the book, like its author, is a shaman, and a diviner, and a traveler among worlds, including future worlds. The vision of the human (and nonhuman) that emerges through these words and worlds is unabashedly global, comparative, moral, and magical. Here is a weird and wonderful book in which everything is alive and even the stones tell stories. Really. " —Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University " A joyful, verve-driven contribution to the conversation about the role of ontological difference in getting a handle on what used to be called cultural diversity. Impressive in its scope and ambition, this book takes the whole debate about ontology in the humanities and social sciences to places it has never been before. " —Martin Holbraad, University College London ABOUT THE BOOK: In this daring debut, Zayin Cabot challenges the wise homebodies of academia. A profoundly interdisciplinary approach to comparative scholarship, Ecologies of Participation offers a methodology whereby we can face our shared planetary predicament. It is grounded in process philosophy, and asserts the importance of a new ontology of agency. It traces the importance of Lévy-Bruhl and Lévi-Strauss's early work, while offering new insight into the ontological turn in anthropology. This book sets out to destabilize modern reductionist trends toward scientific materialism, without falling into postmodern cultural constructivism. It does not assume the givenness of nature or culture. By advancing a multi-ontology approach, this work offers robust interventions into decolonial and critical studies. Cabot takes contemporary scholarship in new and exciting directions—offering an unstable ground from which to examine our shared worlds, both human and other. Throughout the last chapters of the book, these threads are illuminated through a detailed ethics of comparison and participation.

Yet again, the perennial question: What is ‘the social?’ if there is one commonplace that seems to traverse the multiplicity of practices we have come to associate with the so-called ‘social’ sciences, it is the implicit sense that the nature of ‘the social’ constitutes a problem. Indeed, far from serving as an agreed first principle capable of articulating a scientific commu- nity, the definition of the social has become a problem which persists in the many attempted solutions that have been proposed as a response to it over and beyond the history of the social sciences. In this sense, as intellectual historians have attested, struggles with the problematic nature of the social by far predate their emergence. Keith Baker (1994: 95), for example, notes that already in 1775 the Comte de Mirabeu characterised the social as ‘a dangerous word’ whose senses were multiple, while some early attempts at solving the problem – in the sense at least of providing an authoritative definition for the term – can already be found in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alambert (1779).

El género discursivo al que es afecto Bruno Latour (junto con filósofos pos-estructurales como Deleuze y Guattari y al lado de otros perspectivistas como Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern y Roy Wagner ) no constituye meramente una visión alternativa de narrativas y
realidades sino un marco de referencia que reclama jurisdicción y hace gala de solvencia en materia de teorías de alta complejidad, incluyendo, entre otros campos del conocimiento, el análisis de redes sociales, la geometría diferencial riemanniana y una peculiar concepción mereológica de la fractalidad. Todas y cada una de las incursiones en esos campos están saturadas de equivocaciones de grueso calibre, tal como lo he examinado con detenimiento en la segunda edición de mi libro (Re)lectura crítica de la Antropología Perspectivista y de los giros ontológicos de la ciencia pos-social (Reynoso 2017a, revisada en 2021), disponible para el lector en estas mismas páginas académicas.

Resumen: El presente artículo busca comprender la sobredeterminación de relaciones que median en la reproducción, movilización y consolidación de las ceremonias de yagé en Colombia. Para ello se propondrá una matriz teórico-metodológica desde una lógica post-plural que invita a conceptualizar estas prácticas rituales con base en tres escalas entrelazadas pero autónomas: creencias, intereses y marcos de enunciación. A partir de este modelo multi-escalar se podrá comprender la interrelación en fricción entre las creencias animistas, los umbrales de la economía capitalista y las encrucijadas contemporáneas de la representación étnica que compone este fenómeno.

Abstract. This article seeks to understand the overdetermination of relationships between the reproduction, mobilization and consolidation of ayahuasca ceremonies in Colombia. To do this, atheoretical-methodological matrix will be proposed from a post-plural logic that invites to conceptualize these ritual practices based on three intertwined but autonomous dimensions: beliefs, interests and frames of enunciation. From this multi-scalar model, it will be possible to understand the interrelation in
friction between animistic beliefs, capitalist economy thresholds, and contemporary crossroads of the ethnic representation composing this phenomenon.

A different and shorter version of this text was published in Deringer and Lebner (2009). What follows are selections that were made and translated by Ashley Lebner from a longer text that was first edited from transcriptions of three lectures given in April 2006, at the National Museum (Museu Nacional) section of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Naturally, the oral quality of the lectures that we decided to ‘maintain’ was achieved through various rewritings of the original transcription; and the dated character of our statements (‘April 2006’) hide a number of surreptitious insertions made in January 2009. These lectures were part of the post-graduate course ‘Introduction to a post-social anthropology: networks, multiplicities and symmetrisations’. It experimented with new directions in anthropology created by the collision of certain concepts (‘invention/convention’, ‘reversibility’, ‘reflexivity’, ‘actor network’, ‘symmetry’, ‘partial connection’, and ‘multiplicity’, among others) proposed by authors like Roy Wagner, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Marilyn Strathern.

Este artículo explora la relación entre el trabajo etnográ-fico y la cultura de las sociedades de las que provienen los antropólogos. En concreto, el texto revisa la forma en que el pensamiento neoliberal, impulsado por Marga-ret Thatcher, impactó la forma de concebir y practicar la antropología en el contexto del Reino Unido. Se sostiene que el neoliberalismo resquebrajó los fundamentos del funcionalismo y otras formas clásicas de la teoría an-tropológica. Al mismo tiempo, se plantea que la obra de Marilyn Strathern constituye una respuesta a la crisis conceptual abierta por el neoliberalismo a través de una crítica etnográfica de las nociones occidentales de sociedad e individuo.Palabras clave: teoría, etnografía, antropología bri­tánica, Melanesia, neoliberalismo, individuo

In this paper I respond to Carl Knappett's key note address at a session held at the EAA in Maastricht 2017 (which I co-organised) titled "Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction".  The focus was on moving away from the dominance of spatial approaches in archaeological studies that use social network theory (SNA).  Following Knappett, I examine the potential that "Strathernograms" have in understanding the feasting practices of Iron Age Tyrrhenian Italy.

This essay explores the organisational character of Facebook's Libra currency by undertaking a critical reading of documents published by the Libra Association. Drawing on the conceptual work of Marilyn Strathern and Michel Serres, it illustrates how ownership cuts the network and encourages parasitism as a means of driving future profit. Central to this is the claim that Libra is not an exercise in democratising money, but rather, the opposite: Libra is run as a club, for the benefit of club members. The conceptual theme of 'cutting' is used to organise the argument. Rather than a cutting-edge technology, Libra's true innovation is organisational and consists in overturning the decentralised character of blockchain, such that distributed ledger technology is re-centralised by big tech firms. Outsiders are thus cutoff from Libra; only those inside the club have the right to participate in Libra and its governance. This position also affords members an exclusive capacity to take a cut of the profits generated through Libra. As a private organisation, members have sole rights to future profits generated from the Libra ecosystem and are in this way incentivised to create new product opportunities over time.

The article describes a bridewealth prestation among
the Chagga-speaking people of Tanzania. Departing
from approaches that rely on the notion of reciprocity,
the author explores how the prestation per se constitutes,
rather than represents, the relationship between
wife-givers and wife-receivers. By investigating the
materiality of the exchanged object, the relationships it
forms part of are laid bare, and it is argued that the
object forms part of a reproductive network where
persons, things and social relationships are mutually
constituted. Against this background, materiality and
sociality, things and meanings, reality and representation,
are interrelated and the problems raised by the
notion of reciprocity are transcended.