Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Roy Wagner’s work deals with two fundamental issues in anthropology: how to
describe difference, and where to place it in anthropological discourse. His discus-
sion and displacement of anthropological concepts such as ‘group’ and ‘culture’ in
the 1970s and 1980s have arguably encouraged a deconstructive undertaking in the
discipline. Yet Wagner’s work, although part of the radicalizing move of the 1970s
and 1980s in anthropology, was until some years ago not a central reference for
anthropological theory.
The question Dulley asks throughout her engagement with Wagner’s main essays
is whether it is possible for the emic gesture to account for difference within diffe-
rence without falling into the closure of totalization. Wagner’s work contains this
potentiality but is hindered by its very foundation: the emic gesture, in which diffe-
rence is circumscribed through a name that others. If this gesture is one of the pillars
of anthropology, and one that allows for the inscription of difference, the reflection
proposed in this book concerns anthropology as a whole: How can one inscribe
difference within difference? Dulley argues that this can only be accomplished
through an erasure of the emic.
Offering a comprehensive discussion of Wagner’s concepts and a detailed reading
of his most important work, this book will be of interest to anyone who wishes
to reflect on the relationship between ethnography and difference, and especially
those who in various ways engage with the ‘ontological turn.’ As the book reflects
on how Derridean différance can be appropriated by anthropology in its search for
subtler and more critical ethnographic accounts, anthropologists interested in post-
structuralist theory and methodology will also find it useful.
Theorizing Ethnography
Series Editors: Paul Boyce, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen,
EJ Gonzales-Polledo, and Silvia Posocco
www.routledge.com/Theorizing-Ethnography/book-series/THEOETH
Iracema Dulley
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
List of abbreviations xv
3 Inventing culture 45
The paradox of unit and relation 45
Negotiating paradoxes 49
Ethnography, dialogue, and dialectic 55
Dialectics and obviation 61
Image and power 69
viii Contents
5 The names of others 100
Fractality and totalization 100
Poai and leges 103
Currency 109
Ethnography and utopia 111
6 On metaphor 118
Trope versus referentiality 118
Analogy, culture, value 122
Representation and mysticism 125
Obviation and the temporality of image 130
Metaphor beyond closure 136
Index 153
Preface
x Preface
difference can never be fully subsumed to systematicity despite the attempt
at fixation that the emic gesture implies. Thus, this book is also about how
closure is never total and can therefore be frayed and displaced to the extent
that one reveals how it is also governed by dissemination. Its argument
draws on Wagner’s work both to indicate how this gesture is foundational
for his (and anthropology’s) discursive practice and to challenge the total-
ization it entails through a flexibilization of oppositions. Wagner embraces
the emic gesture as a way out of what he sees as the epistemological closure
of ‘Western’ culture. In his work, the totalization of ‘others’ functions as
a route to the displacement of the conventions and presumptuousness of
‘the West’ through the inventiveness of ‘others.’ Such displacement is only
possible at the expense of the institution of another kind of closure: that of
otherness. Yet, it is possible to argue that his theorization contains a decon-
structive potential that might lead to an erasure of the emic.
Even though anthropology and ethnography have frequently been
employed to deconstruct and displace the naturalized views of taken
for granted orders of things, ‘deconstruction’ has not affected anthropo-
logical discourse as much as it could. One aim of this work is to make
the Derridean approach to difference—différance—bear on anthropological
analysis through a discussion of how it might contribute to liberate anthro-
pology from the totalizing circumscription of difference that inheres in its
language, which is the language anthropological discourse necessarily shares
with common sense. Through a ‘deconstructive’ reading of Wagner’s work,
this work argues against the totalization of those who the emic gesture
designates and places as ‘others.’ While remaining interested in addressing
difference within difference, it intends to show how the equation of empirical
difference with otherness through naming halts the othering potential that
is contained in alterity if one understands it as non-totalizable. This seems
especially relevant now that anthropological works, mainly those related to
the ‘ontological turn,’ have been explicit in debating the possibility of a (re)
turn to metaphysics—one of the possible, and historical, names for the kind
of closure this book interrogates and intends to displace. As the following
pages argue, Wagner’s work is particularly suitable for this discussion to the
extent that it both questions and reinstates closure. ‘Deconstruction,’ whose
work displaces from within, can thus draw on Wagner to expose some of
the unrealized potentialities of his work as far as the erasure of the emic is
concerned.
When I started the research based on which this book was written, Roy
Wagner was in the process of becoming a figure of the anthropological canon
in Brazil. Interestingly, he was then not as widely read and/or mentioned
within the circles of mainstream anthropology in most other contexts as he
is now. I became acquainted with his work while conducting research on
missionary translations in Angola. As I read his The Invention of Culture
for the first time in 2006, the philosophical nature of his writing struck
Preface xi
me. Wagner addresses issues that have been central to both philosophy and
anthropology: The relationship between language and the world; represen-
tation; repetition; permanence and change; communication; interpretation;
generalization and particularization; metaphor; an immanent critique
of structuralism. These subjects, which are also matters of concern for
Derrida, were some of the key themes that sparked my interest in delving
into Wagner’s work. Whereas I had been in contact with these issues while
studying philosophy, the ethnographic element in Wagner’s work, in the
form of named, circumscribed, and described difference, added a whole new
dimension to the treatment given to these subjects in philosophy, for which
empirical instances were usually of exemplary status.
My training in philosophy was marked by a deeply structuralist
approach. Structuralism, especially in its Lévi-Straussian variation, is also
a central paradigm of anthropology in Brazil, where I was trained. Wagner
and Derrida, ‘post-structuralists’ if one considers how structuralism is both
fundamental to and uprooted by their work, challenge the structural per-
spective from different angles. The experience of reading them simultan-
eously led me to develop an interest in reading Wagner through Derridean
‘deconstruction.’ This book is the result of the past years of engagement with
the work of both Wagner and Derrida. As it attempts to help anthropology
assimilate some of the contributions of Derridean différance, it also poses
to ‘deconstruction’ the question of how to narrate and describe the world
once one recognizes that language sets boundaries that tend to transform
being into substance. What follows is a revised and expanded version of the
book published in Portuguese by Humanitas in 2015.1 Although the thread
of my argument remains roughly the same, an effort has been made to make
it converse with the current widespread interest in ontology—a concept that
Wagner does not frequently use, and Derrida deconstructs, but has been
central to the recovery of Wagner’s work, especially as a precursor to the so-
called ontological turn. Besides revisions to the chapters, a new chapter on
metaphor (chapter 6) has been added to this English edition.
Dialogue with Roy Wagner himself was key to the development of the
ideas that are presented in the following pages. So was the interlocution
I established with scholars at several institutions in Brazil, the United States,
and England, key centers for the reception of Wagner’s work. The next pages
are intended as a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the relationship
between anthropology and philosophy (especially in the ‘deconstructive’
mode); ontology; metaphysics; permanence and change; difference; alterity
and ipseity; the permeability between anthropological discourse and common
sense; representation. In engaging with these issues through an analysis of
the work of the emic in Wagner’s anthropological practice, I hope to bring
‘deconstruction’ to bear on what seems to have remained anthropology’s
unspoken foundation—the emic gesture—despite the successive waves of
criticism to which the last decades bear witness.
xii Preface
The manuscript of this book, which Wagner fortunately had a chance to
read, was already in press when he passed away. I remain thankful for his
comments.
Iracema Dulley
Campinas, May 29, 2018.
Note
1 DULLEY, Iracema. 2015. Os nomes dos outros: etnografia e diferença em Roy
Wagner [The Names of Others: Ethnography and Difference in Roy Wagner]. São
Paulo: Humanitas. Parts of chapter 3 appeared in a collection of essays organized
by Kofes and Manica in 2015: DULLEY, Iracema. 2015. “Imbricamentos
entre etnografia e biografia: um estudo sobre Roy Wagner.” In: KOFES, Suely
& MANICA, Daniela (eds.), Vidas e grafias: narrativas antropológicas, entre
etnografia e biografia. Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina. A version of chapter 5 was
published in the journal Campos in 2014: DULLEY, Iracema. 2014. Roy
Wagner e a fractalidade: considerações sobre o gesto êmico [Roy Wagner and
Fractality: Considerations on the Emic Gesture]. Revista Campos, 15(1): 11–
35. And a section of chapter 3 came out in the journal Revista de Antropologia
in 2011: DULLEY, Iracema. 2011. Coyote Anthropology, dialética e obviação
[Coyote Anthropology, Dialectic, and Obviation]. Revista de Antropologia,
54: 1079–1090. I thank the editors for allowing me to draw on previously
published materials.
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of over ten years of research at many institutions and
dialogue with many people. It is impossible to cite everyone who provided
me with input of some sort for it to be completed. Thus, the enumeration
that follows is inevitably a shortened list of names that cannot fully signify
my debt to all those who are mentioned. Many others remain unnamed. This
notwithstanding, I would like to acknowledge the central figures of this tra-
jectory as an indication of my esteem for their contribution.
Meeting Roy Wagner was a joy in itself. I thank him, in memoriam, for
our humorous conversations and for his personal and intellectual generosity.
He will be dearly missed.
The São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp) generously funded all the
years during which I conducted research and transformed it into writing.
Its anonymous reviewers provided me with helpful assessment of my work.
I am very grateful for that.
My work has benefited from interlocution and support at the University
of São Paulo, Columbia University, the Brazilian Center for Analysis
and Planning, the State University of Campinas, the London School of
Economics, and the Federal University of São Carlos. I am thankful to the
professors, students, and staff who helped me on so many occasions at these
institutions.
I remain forever indebted to Paula Montero and Rosalind Morris for the
combination of rigor, incitement, and delight that their mentorship brought
about during my formative years.
Many people contributed to the development of what follows by reading
and discussing versions of the chapters of this book, sharing their ideas
in extended conversations, and providing me with valuable references.
I would like to thank Fabiola Corbucci, Ariel Oliveira, Marcelo Mello,
Massimiliano Lacertosa, Viola Castellano, Chloe Faux, Aarti Sethi, Eva
Scheliga, Bruna Bumachar, Rodrigo Bulamah, Cheryl Schmitz, Rodrigo
Caravita, Lorena Muniagurria, Magda Ribeiro, Adriano Godoy, Lis Blanco,
Bruno Sotto Mayor, Ellen Hunt, Augusto Postigo, Marta Jardim, Martin
Holbraad, Suely Kofes, Marco Antonio Gonçalves, Renato Sztutman,
Leopoldo Waizbort, Aramis Silva, Raquel Gomes, Heloísa Pontes, Ronaldo
xiv Acknowledgments
Almeida, John Monteiro (in memoriam), Fernanda Peixoto, Rita Chaves,
Christiano Tambascia, Isabela Oliveira, Florência Ferrari, Luísa Valentini,
Stelio Marras, Jamille Pinheiro, Derek Newberry, Justin Shaffner, Matthew
Engelke, Michael Scott, Catarina Vianna, Jorge Villela, Marcos Lanna, and
Geraldo Andrello.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the team of editors at Routledge.
Series editors Elena Gonzalez, Paul Boyce, Silvia Posocco, and Elisabeth
Engebretsen embraced this project with admirable commitment. Louisa
Vahtrick and Katherine Ong, anthropology editors at Routledge, were
helpful and professional throughout the entire process. Marc Stratton was
extremely supportive. So were the three anonymous reviewers of the manu-
script, who presented me with helpful comments, criticism, and suggestions.
Project manager Ramesh Karunakaran and copy editor David Johnstone
have my appreciation for their precious suggestions and corrections. I thank
Elena Gonzalez for her trust and interest in my work at an earlier stage of
this endeavor.
This book would never have been finished without the friends who
offered me incentive wherever I was, at times from a distance. I am especially
grateful to Anna Panagiotou, César Álvarez González, Dimitris Kardaras,
Elena Petkova, Ludmila Maia, Marianna Lemus, Milena Kipfmüller, Klaus
Janek, Anna Maria Kipfmüller, Günter Kipfmüller, Lilian Dluhosch, Isabel
Graciano, Manuh Graciano, Moisés Nery, Luciana Utsonomiya, Cecília
Galdino, Cleide Vieira, Jeanine da Silveira, Guilherme Pereira, Sandro Vieira,
Isadora Brandão, Érika Melek, Edmilson Zambon (in memoriam), Ana
Paula Brant, Renata Machado, Sarah Van Simpsen, Eric Schambach, Joana
Lins, Clarice Freitas (in memoriam), Evanthia Patsiaoura, and Jacqueline
Teixeira.
Finally, I am very grateful for the support of my family: Frederico Dulley,
Paul Dulley, Larissa Dulley, Verônica Hilário, Rosaura Saboya, Rita Hilário,
Natasha Martins, Elizabeth Dulley, Rien van Genuchten, and Eunice Dulley
(in memoriam). Ariel Oliveira and Barbara Dulley shared life with me while
I worked on this project. I thank them for their patience and friendship.
List of abbreviations
1 Introduction
Difference and ethnography in
Roy Wagner
2 Introduction
and through the emic, why should one draw precisely on it? The answer
to this question is both analytical and contextual. Wagner deals with two
fundamental issues in anthropology: How to describe difference, and where
to place it in anthropological discourse. He has argued for incorporating
the creativity of the people whom one studies into the inventive rendering
of their lifeways (or, to stick to his vocabulary in The Invention of Culture,
their modes of symbolization). As far as the contextual aspect is concerned,
his critique and displacement of anthropological concepts such as ‘group’
and ‘culture’ in the 1970s and 1980s has arguably encouraged a decon-
structive undertaking in the discipline, the (re)turn to ontology possibly
being one of its effects.
Although part of the radicalizing move of the 1970s and 1980s, Wagner’s
work remained out of the spotlight of anthropological theory until recently.
While the Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986) movement focused pri-
marily on ethnography as textually represented, Wagner, albeit sharing some
of the movement’s tenets—such as the place of dialogue in ethnographic
writing and the questioning of anthropological assumptions grounded in the
projection of ‘Western’ ideas and practices onto ‘others’—took a consider-
ably different path. His response to the ‘crisis of representation’ in anthro-
pology was not to embrace the claim that representational modes should be
examined as text; rather, he espoused one of the alternatives mentioned, but
not fully investigated, in the Writing Culture project: Rethinking anthro-
pology through “non-Western experience” (Clifford 1986a: 19). And in
doing so, he questioned the very concept of representation as a means of
access, or interrogation, of ‘other’ modes of symbolization based on the
claim that ‘Melanesian’ symbolization is analogical and therefore does not
draw on a (homological) distinction between the word and what it names
(cf. chapter 3). The ethnographic theorization of the differentiating mode
of symbolization Wagner attributes to the ‘Daribi’/‘Melanesians’ is further
extended in TIC to account for the symbolization of ‘tribal’ societies. It
is based on the distinction between differentiating and conventionalizing
modes of symbolization that the opposition between ‘us’ (conventionalizing)
and ‘them’ (differentiating) is reinstated in his work.
According to Wagner, his ethnographic and theoretical work has been
dialectically affected by ‘Melanesian’ modes of symbolization, to which he
attributes potentialities lost to ‘the West’ (and, by extension, anthropology).
He remained somewhat marginal in a disciplinary context in which divisions
between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘modern’ and ‘traditional,’ ‘Western’ and its vari-
ously named opposites were widely debated and criticized. Wagner, not unlike
Strathern (e.g., 1988), invested in the methodological choice of exaggerating
difference in order to challenge (‘Western’) anthropological assumptions.
And he did so despite the fact that the totalization of those perceived as
‘others’ in this mode had become a dispreferred mode of engagement with
difference in the wake of ‘post-colonialism.’4 Wagner makes perhaps one of
the most poignant defenses of the emic in the discipline. Moreover, the fact
Introduction 3
that his approach resonates with some of the current proposals to rethink
anthropology from the perspective of the different worlds of ‘others’ is one
of the reasons why his work has been reclaimed. As Thomas once put it,
“the most persuasive and theoretically consequential ethnographic rhetoric
represents the other essentially as an inversion of whatever Western insti-
tution, practice, or set of notions is the real object of interest” (1991: 309).
Yet, one would be mistaken to assume that every iteration of this “rhetorical
form” bears the same ethnographic effects (cf. Strathern 1999a, 1999b).
In The Invention of Culture (Wagner 1981), ‘culture’ is construed as the
dialectical interplay of convention and invention. According to Wagner,
this makes it possible for anthropology to deal with the possibility of
transformation. ‘Traditional,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘religious,’ or ‘peasant’ others are
said to operate through a ‘differentiating’ mode of symbolization, whereas
‘Western’ people (and therefore also anthropologists) symbolize in the
‘collectivizing’ or ‘conventional’ mode. Along this divide, there is no diffe-
rence, in the ‘differentiating’ or ‘inventive’ mode, between symbols and
what they stand for—differentiation is said to operate through symbols
that ‘encompass what they symbolize’ (Wagner 1981: 8)—whereas the
‘collectivizing’ mode produces meaning through partition. This unfolds, in
Wagner, into a defense of ‘holistic’ anthropology, in which the differenti-
ating mode of symbolization should be appropriated to overcome not only
the discipline’s crisis of representation, but also the limitations of ‘our’
reading of the world. If, from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, he embraced
the dialectic of invention and convention, differentiation and collectiviza-
tion, culture and communication (to cite a few of his favorite opposing
poles) (Wagner 1977, 1981), from the 1980s onward his work has increas-
ingly claimed to speak from a ‘Melanesian’ perspective. In this vein, it is
invested in concepts such as holography, fractality, and self-modeling, the
‘holistic’ character of which should enable one to bridge the gap between
particularization and generalization by employing a model that keeps its
scale (Wagner 1986a, 1991, 2001, 2012). Yet, as I argue throughout this
book, the emic gesture grounds both moves. And the fact that it does so
explicitly is important.
What follows intends to both describe and transform Wagner’s work by
dwelling on the points at which the emic emerges, and totalization takes
the form of alterity as the poles of dialectic are named. In ripping apart the
foundations of the emic, my purpose is to open the closure of an anthropology
that circumscribes difference through the names of ‘others.’ As Wagner expli-
citly resorts to the emic in his attempt to overcome the ‘Western’ perspec-
tive but does not radically question the methodological and epistemological
foundations of alterity, it is possible to build deconstructively on his work
in order to displace totalization. If a text is an inevitably ruptured attempt
to produce meaning, in anthropological analysis, brisure frequently occurs
when empirical description is articulated with theoretical stance (Derrida
1976). In order to investigate how these aspects of analysis are imbricated
4 Introduction
in Wagner’s ethnographic writing, his accounts of naming, ritual, mythology,
kinship, currency, and metaphor are examined. I relate his text to the (con)
text of anthropology, which is here considered as a set of converging and
diverging lines of force frequently organized around the rendering of diffe-
rence. Drawing on Derridean différance to interrogate the emic gesture as
iterated in Wagner, I reflect on the limits of an ethnographic theory that is
attentive to difference as named—and nameable—alterity.
By questioning the status of difference in Wagner’s work, which is related to
his displacement of concepts such as ‘group’ (Wagner 1974), ‘culture’ (Wagner
1981), and ‘metaphor’ (Wagner 1986a) via an investment in the emic, I defend
that difference within difference can only be accounted for through an erasure
of alterity. Thus, the closure that separates the poles of his dialectic, variously
termed but ultimately reducible to ‘us’ and ‘them,’ is to be opened through
dissemination. The question I ask throughout my engagement with Wagner’s
main essays is how to account for difference within difference without falling
into the closure of totalization. It seems that Wagner’s work contains this
potentiality but is hindered by its very foundation, which it shares with much
ethnographic writing: The emic gesture, in which difference is circumscribed
through the names of ‘others.’ For if named alterity makes it possible to
question generalizations, it does so at the expense of instituting another sort
of totalization. Thus, by fraying the closure of totalization performed by the
naming of ‘others’ in Wagner, my engagement with the work of the emic in his
writings seeks to contaminate other iterations of anthropological analysis in
the emic mode through contagion and dissemination.
In “Différance,” the closure instituted by naming is argued to be a “closure
of ontology.” Indeed, the question Derrida poses in this text is relevant to
our discussion to the extent that naming, as it appears in the emic gesture,
does seem to halt the work of differentiation that Wagner’s advocacy of
invention defends:
[C]an we, and to what extent, think this trace and the dis of différance
as Wesen des Seins? Does not the dis of différance refer us beyond the
history of Being, and also beyond our language, and everything that can
be named in it? In the language of Being, does it not call for a necessarily
violent transformation of this language by an entirely other language?
(Derrida 1982: 25)
Alterity seems to be possible only in “the language of Being.” Yet, such
a language, the one we imperfectly inhabit, might be displaced. In what
language can ethnography be written if alterity, as expressed through the
names of ‘others,’ is to be erased? As Spivak puts it in her preface to Of
Grammatology, a “strategy of using the only available language while not
subscribing to its premises” (1997: xviii) is needed. If displacement operates
through traces, an “entirely other language” is possible only in the form of
utopia. Since “we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which
Introduction 5
has not already had to slip into the form, logic, and the implicit postulations
of precisely what it seeks to contest” (Derrida 1978a: 280–281), no decon-
structive reading of the emic could possibly annihilate it. My aim here is,
rather, to destabilize the (metaphysical) foundations on which the emic ges-
ture rests in order to engage with difference within difference in the form of
a language to come.
Wagner does not engage with ontology explicitly, not even in his little-
known discussion of Heidegger and Derrida (Wagner 1991b).5 Yet, he has
been acclaimed as a foundational figure by proponents of the ‘ontological
turn’ in anthropology (e.g.,Scott 2007; Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007;
Pedersen 2001, 2011, 2012; Holbraad 2007, 2009, 2012; Viveiros de Castro
2004, 2013, 2015; Holbraad & Pedersen 2017). While the ‘ontological
turn’ has gained ground as a movement, it has also met with strong and
diverse criticism (cf. Alberti et al. 2011; Candea 2011, 2014; Geismar 2011;
Heywood 2012; Laidlaw 2012; Scott 2013; Bessire & Bond 2014; Kelly
2014; Fischer 2014; Salmond 2014; Vigh & Sausdal 2014; Graeber 2015;
Argyrou 2017). It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the various
strands of the ‘ontological turn’ and their implications for the rendering of
difference within difference.6 This notwithstanding, to the extent that I agree
with Holbraad’s and Pedersen’s (2017, cap. 2) reading of Wagner, one might
ask whether a turn that takes as ‘foundational’ works that it recognizes are
grounded in the rendering of difference as the alterity of named others might
be able to do without totalizations of this sort while claiming to access the
‘ontological.’ The question that remains to be asked is whether the ‘otherwise’
(Povinelli 2011) to which anthropologists concerned with difference within
difference seem to aspire should be sought in ontological terms. What does
it mean to speak of difference within difference as metaphysics, even if of a
comparative sort (Charbonnier, Salmon & Skafish 2016)? Is there any possi-
bility that a reinstatement of metaphysics might escape the “metaphysics of
presence” (Derrida 1976, 2001) that grounds—albeit imperfectly—the canon
of ‘Western’ philosophy? Current claims to engage with ‘the ontological’
purport to have overcome both construction and deconstruction. Yet, the
closure of totalization might not have been iterated in the way one currently
observes if anthropology had taken in the critique of ‘deconstruction’ before
dismissing it as mere demolition (cf. Morris 2007). The interrogation of the
effects of the emic gesture that follows is concerned with this question.
Meeting Wagner
Although this book is not intended as an ethnographic account of my inter-
action with Roy Wagner, the brief pages in which I describe our encounter
may function as an epigraph—a kind of hors d’oeuvre inside the text
(Derrida 1981)—to what follows in that they hint at ways in which our
interlocution influenced my reading of his work.
6 Introduction
I first met Roy Wagner at the annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in New Orleans in 2010. As I listened to his
talk, titled “The Chess of Kinship and the Kinship of Chess” (later published
as Wagner 2011a), it became clear that the Wagner usually read in Brazil
(basically The Invention of Culture (1981, hence TIC), “The Fractal Person”
(1991a, hence TFP), and “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea
Highlands?” (1974, hence ATSG)) was, for him, somehow past—despite the
familiar way in which his arguments were developed. From his stance during
the session and the audience’s reaction, I suspected that the place he occu-
pied in North American anthropology was also very different from the place
his work now has in Brazil.7 During his talk, he established complex analo-
gies between kinship and chess in the peculiarly cryptic language I already
knew from his writings—and he claims to have learned from Melanesians
(Wagner 2010a). He seemed to be amused at the reactions sparked by
his talk, and so were some of the people in the room. Other faces, to me
unknown, seemed startled. His presentation was part of a session on the
status of current kinship studies. Most of the presenters referred to David
Schneider,8 who supervised Wagner’s PhD dissertation on ‘Daribi kinship,’
published as The Curse of Souw (1967, hence TCS). Wagner spoke for the
customary 20 minutes allotted to every participant, during which chess and
kinship strategies were compared through a series of conceptual oppositions
and twists.
After the end of the session, I introduced myself. I told him I was writing
a dissertation on his work and had been working on the translation of some
of his core texts into Portuguese.9 He said he was happy about his work
becoming available to Portuguese readers, for he noticed among Brazilian
anthropologists a sort of opening to his ideas that he did not usually find in
North America. After I said I was reading TIC and trying to make sense of it,
he smiled and invited me to have a seat. He talked about how TIC had tried
to account for things which pertain simultaneously to the realm of the innate
and to that of human action. One example he employed was that of the sym-
pathetic nervous system (curiously the same mentioned by Lévi-Strauss in
“The Sorcerer and His Magic” (1967)). He took the opportunity to intro-
duce me to Edith Turner, his colleague from the University of Virginia, as “a
colleague from Brazil.” He told me she was over 90 but still gave courses
in anthropology and initiated her students in the rituals she had learned in
her field site. He also said she was a shaman. A fleeting observation amid
his recollection of the argument of the book he had first published in 1975
assured me of his empathy: “I love your hat!” We scheduled a meeting at the
Sheraton hall for the next morning. I would later on learn that my hat had
been taken for an index of a good tonal.
I did not notice it then, but this was the first of his many hints at Carlos
Castañeda’s work during our interaction. The opposition between tonal
and nahual is structuring of Wagner’s reading of Castañeda (e.g., 1975), in
which the tonal is a possible actualization of the nahual. For Wagner, the
Introduction 7
nahual is the realm of possibilities, “the exact opposite of all phenomenal
being, or what we might call ‘the absurdly innate’ ” (Wagner 2010b: xii),
i.e., that which is totally immanent to existence. As the nahual is the totality
of being, it remains inaccessible to the human habit of dividing things into
parts. The difference between tonal and nahual, as Wagner understands it,
was explained in an interview he gave to some colleagues and me in Brazil
in August 2011:
I think that every time a poet does anything or an artist does something,
it’s nahual. That is the only thing it could be. It’s not tonal. It’s differ-
entiation. … There’s a very intricate relation between knowing some-
thing and saying it. These two have to approximate each other, and it is
really, really important. It is the thing that everybody who writes things
or thinks about things needs to be aware of. You have to say it exactly
right, otherwise it will not work … Anthropology is all about explaining
correctly. It is the art of explaining things correctly. And so is poetry.
(Wagner et al. 2011: 973)
8 Introduction
anthropology is understood as something that is done for and by ‘Western’
people. ‘Others,’ by definition not anthropologists, might, in their alterity,
reveal to ‘the West’ possibilities that remain foreclosed to it in view of its own
biases (described as conventional and collectivizing as opposed to inventive
and differentiating). At first sight, this seems to be at odds with Wagner’s
idea of “reverse anthropology” in TIC (Wagner 1981: 30), i.e., the kind of
interrogation of otherness that is performed by those who are frequently
understood to be the subjects of anthropology. Yet, as this book foregrounds,
both possibilities are enmeshed in the economy of designation—as ‘us’ and
‘them’—that structures his ethnographic writing.
Like Castañeda, Wagner assigns humor a central place in his work. It
is explicit in Coyote Anthropology (2010a) but also to be found in many
of his earlier writings, though less conspicuously. Humor seems to bear
a curious relation with anthropology as carried out in the obviational
mode. Where one might have expected to find a defense of the cultural
(or at least particular) character of humor, one finds an incorporation
of the inventions of ‘others’ as a medium to deal with one’s disciplinary
entanglement. As Wagner puts it in TIC: “The tendency to sidestep, to
obviate, to ‘not deal with’ many or most of the chestnuts of theoretical
hassling in anthropology, maddening as it may be to those who have their
terrain scouted and their land mines set, is an artifact of the position I have
taken” (Wagner 1981: 6). The obviating procedure,13 described as to “not
deal with” and “sidestep” (Wagner 1981: 6), to “anticipate and dispose
of” (Wagner 2016: xviii), “the art of underdetermination itself” (Wagner
2016: xviii), operates by simultaneously hiding and revealing. Thus, it
allows for the displacement of the (‘Western’) conventional perspective
of the world, which it twists and moves into an unexpected direction.
For Wagner, humor stands, in a collectivizing culture, for the inventive-
ness that characterizes differentiating cultures. Thus, it is through humor
that North American anthropology, normally averse to anthropology as
espoused by Castañeda (and Wagner), is presented with another way of
doing anthropology: obviation.
In our first extended conversation, Wagner explained to me the relation of
figure-ground reversal that connects life when people are awake to the state
of dreaming: As he put it, while awake, people tend to fix their attention on
figures that are perceived as detached from their background. At the hotel
hall, for instance, the tendency is for one to pay attention to the people
walking around, and to forget about their environment (first attention,
i.e., figures detached from the ground). While dreaming, the opposite is the
case: Attention focuses on the ground, which is loaded with intention and
energy, rather than on the figures (second attention). According to Wagner,
there is a relationship between the body awake and the dreaming body that
is of the order of the Castañedan double. Thus, it became clear that the
figure-ground reversal Wagner attributes to ‘Melanesian’ symbolization
bears a strong relation with Castañeda’s descriptions.14 Reflections of this
Introduction 9
kind instantly illuminated aspects of Wagner’s theorization that seemed her-
metic to me at the time.
With this, I do not intend to affirm that commentaries of this sort,
made spontaneously, are to be taken as a guide to Wagner’s sophisticated
writings. Yet, it is undeniable that such moments occasionally oriented
and/or confirmed my understanding of aspects of his work. I was able to
deal with various passages of his texts that escaped or bewildered me as
we interacted in casual conversation. Most importantly, it confirmed my
reading that anthropology is, for Wagner, a way of accessing, through
experience, knowledge not only about humans but also about the relation-
ship between humans, the universe that surrounds them, and the power it
harbors, understood as the revelation of knowledge in the form of image (cf.
Wagner 1983, 1984, 1986a). Thus, Wagnerian power, as the capacity to con-
trol image, seems to unite two of the authors celebrated in TIC to the extent
that it operates as a kind of compromise between Nietzsche’s will to power
and the ‘holistic’ power of Castañeda.
I came from elsewhere. And as far as the anthropology done in Brazil
was concerned, Wagner was clearly interested in Viveiros de Castro’s
writings on perspectivism. The association of my interest in his work with
that of Viveiros de Castro was not entirely mistaken, as my first contact
with TIC and “reverse anthropology” was mediated by the writings of this
author (Viveiros de Castro 2002), who is a central figure of anthropology
in Brazil. It was not long before I could tell Wagner that I was interested in
establishing a dialogue between his work and post-structuralism, especially
in its Derridean iteration. Yet, Wagner is not a post-structuralist; nor is he
particularly interested in post-structuralism.
(Dis)placements of Wagner
It seems that Wagner parted ways with mainstream North American anthro-
pology in the mid-1980s, a period he associates with post-modernism. Yet,
one of its exponents, Clifford (1986b), engaged in dialogue with Wagner’s
work in the 1980s, after a (hardly) revised edition of TIC (Wagner 1975) was
published by the University of Chicago Press in 1981. Clifford incorporated
into his introduction to Writing Culture the idea that ethnography invents,
rather than represents, cultures (1986a: 2). Yet, he did not espouse the
“too sharp” opposition between ‘Melanesian’ and ‘Western’ that pervades
Wagner’s work (Clifford 1986b: 125). Wagner, who affirms in TIC that
“culture is a kind of illusion, a foil (and a kind of false objective) to aid the
anthropologist in arranging his experiences” (1981: 6), externalized his dis-
comfort with the centrality of the discussion on ethnographic authority and
rhetoric in “The Theater of Fact and Its Critics” (Wagner 1986b), his review
of Writing Culture. In it, he portrays post-modernism as “an art in which
‘how to paint’ has become more important than what is painted” (Wagner
1986b: 98)—a stance shared by Strathern (1987) in “Out of Context.” In
10 Introduction
his critique of “post-modernism,” Wagner insists on the experiential dimen-
sion of fieldwork: “a realm of condensed imagery and interaction whose
possibilities are always larger than those of inscription itself” (Wagner
1986b: 98).15
Wagner argues against “constructivist” anthropology on the basis that it
considers social phenomena merely as “social constructions,” and in doing
so disregards the interplay of the innate and the artificial in human sym-
bolization (e.g., Wagner 2001: 157). He associates “deconstruction” (not
necessarily Derrida’s)16 with “post-modernism” and a tendency to consider
meaning partible (cf. chapter 5).17 In response to the “post-modern” frag-
mentation of meaning, Wagner proposes to substitute interpretation, con-
struction, and deconstruction with holography, fractality, and self-modeling.
Yet, in An Anthropology of the Subject (hence AS) he associates revers-
ibility (“the cut made self-emphatic by turning its effect back upon itself”)
with Heidegger’s “Ver/schei/dung” and Derrida’s “difference” [sic] (Wagner
2001: 60). Both in AS and in “Dif/ference and Its Disguises” (Wagner 1991b),
he seems to posit a relation of identity between Heidegger and Derrida,
something that is not unusual (cf. e.g., Ricoeur 1975; Habermas 199318), but
which Derrida’s erasure of the concept of the sign that grounds both phe-
nomenology and structuralism disavows (cf. e.g., Derrida 1976, 2011). This
notwithstanding, when directly asked, Wagner conceded19 that texts such as
ATSG and TIC take a deconstructive stance on concepts that anthropology
used to take for granted, such as “group” and “culture.”
Wagner affirmed that “Brazilian anthropology” is interesting because it
is invested in the possibility of entering into dialogue with ‘non-Western’
forms of knowledge20 (Wagner et al. 2011). In this sense, he considers the
concept of perspective, attributed to Viveiros de Castro, an advance in rela-
tion to the culture concept. If Viveiros de Castro (2002) acknowledges TIC
as a kind of precursor of the argument he developed years later, Wagner sees
in perspectivism a sophisticated continuation of his displacement of the cul-
ture concept as well as a kind of ethnographic parallel with his research on
Melanesia. I refer particularly to the idea that when a pig sees a pig, he sees
a human being, but when he sees a human being, he sees a pig. These ideas,
which, as Wagner (1984) points out, are also found in the ethnographies of
Feld and Schieffelin in New Guinea, bear for him a curious similarity with
the perspectivism “Viveiros de Castro and his colleagues have found ‘all
over the Amazon’ ” (Wagner 2010b: ix). During his visit to Brazil,21 Wagner
proposed that the culture concept should be replaced by that of perspective.22
Thus, Wagner and Viveiros de Castro see conceptual continuity between the
kind of anthropology they practice.23 But whereas this seems to have the
effect of picturing Wagner’s work as revolutionary in Brazil (e.g., Goldman
2011), in other disciplinary contexts the concept of ontology, as proposed by
the ‘ontological turn’ (of which Viveiros de Castro is an exponent), has been
understood by some as “just another word for culture” (Carrithers et al.
2010) or “just another way of saying ‘reality’ ” (Graeber 2015).
Introduction 11
The whole debate on ontology, and the place Wagner’s work has in one
of its currents,24 gained international prominence after I had submitted my
book (Dulley 2015) for publication in Brazil. As Wagner does not dwell on
ontology himself, this was originally not a primary concern of my reading
of his work. Yet, there are certainly similarities between his anthropology
and the kind of anthropology proposed by the advocates of difference as
ontological. Wagner does affirm that “[s]ince thought is inseparable from
action and motivation, we are not so much dealing with different ‘logics’
or rationalities as with total modes of being, of inventing self and society”
(1981: 84, my emphases). An ontological reading of this is certainly pos-
sible, although the “human” in his interest for “human motivation” (Wagner
1981: 6) might as well be read as the possibility of generalizing ontology as
human. This seems to be an issue that Wagner’s work obviates. With this,
I do not mean that Wagner is or is not to be taken for a precursor of the
current advocacy of ontology and renewed attention to alternative modes of
being or multiple realities (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2004; Kirsch 2006; Henare,
Holbraad & Wastell 2007). My point is that if Wagner appears as a source
of inspiration for such works, it is worth investigating the effects of the emic
gesture in his work, as ontological claims seem to depend on his explicit
defense of the emic—what Holbraad and Pedersen rightly perceive as a “ter-
ritorializing distinction between ‘the West’ and ‘Melanesia’ ” (2017: 84).
This is not to say that this one possible iteration of ethnographic the-
orization is to overdetermine future ones. But releasing the closure of its
boundaries might contribute to the task of unveiling difference within diffe-
rence that seems to move the renewed interest for difference as alterity in
anthropology. And to the extent that displacement and dissemination can
only operate from within, my reading of Wagner can be understood as an
immanent critique whose purpose is to liberate difference of the restrictive
boundaries instituted by its totalized naming. Yet, as Spivak reminds us,
“deconstruction must also take into account the lack of sovereignty of the
critic himself” (1997: lxxiv); which is to say that the language to which
I resort in my reading of Wagner is not, and could not possibly be, fully
under control. Thus, like any deconstructive attempt, it remains open to fur-
ther deconstruction.
This book
My appropriation of Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ to interrogate Wagner’s
work is discussed in chapter 2, “Deconstruction, alterity, différance.” My
reading focuses on moments when an attempt is made to defend the ethical
and theoretical grounding of anthropology in the emic, for it is usually in
such instances that Wagner’s text is ruptured. The first part of the chapter
explains how Derrida’s (1976) reading of Lévi-Strauss and Plato inspired my
reading of Wagner. It then outlines iterations of the emic gesture throughout
Wagner’s work, from his proposal to understand ‘Daribi kinship’ via ‘Daribi
12 Introduction
symbolization’ in The Curse of Souw (1967), through his reflections on how
motivations are culturally determined in The Invention of Culture (1975,
1981, 2016)25 to his reconsideration of anthropology from the perspec-
tive of ‘Melanesian’ “holographic worldview” in An Anthropology of the
Subject (2001). Wagner’s work is especially suited for displacing the emic
through a flexibilization of oppositions (Derrida 1981) because its criticism
of concepts such as ‘group’ and ‘culture’ might be construed as an ante-
cedent step in this undertaking. In ripping apart the apparently placid sur-
face of his text, I confront the development of Wagner’s texts and arguments
with other, unfulfilled possibilities they indicate.
The next chapter, “Inventing Culture,” undertakes a close reading of
key texts by Wagner, such as “Scientific and Papuan Conceptualizations of
the Innate” (1977, hence COI) and “Figure-Ground Reversal among the
Barok” (1987, hence FGR), followed by a discussion of TIC and Coyote
Anthropology (2010a, hence CA). Its purpose is to present the main concepts
and ideas structuring Wagner’s work at different points in time, such as dia-
logue and dialectic; convention and invention; unit and relation; culture and
communication; collectivization and differentiation; control; masking; obvi-
ation; elicitation; analogy and homology; holography and fractality; image
and power; figure-ground reversal; self-modeling. The thread that guides
this exposition of Wagner’s conceptual framework is his understanding
and designation of the emic. This discussion interrogates the place of the
emic gesture in his writings and lays the ground for subsequent chapters,
in which his framework is compared with the ethnographic negotiation of
the paradoxes he exposes. This conceptual introduction to Wagner starts to
pin down how, in spite of Wagner’s critique of anthropology and ‘American’
convention, the emic gesture prevents him from opening the chain of dis-
semination that is contained in the attempt to control both unit and relation
through dialectic, fractality/holography, and obviation.
Wagner’s questioning of the ‘group’ concept in structural-functionalist
and structuralist anthropology is discussed in detail in chapter 4, “Groups
and others.” It describes how the totalization the group concept promotes
is deconstructed by Wagner on the grounds that there are no groups in
‘Melanesian’ conceptualization. In a clear statement of the emic as foun-
dational for anthropology, he affirms that anthropological constructs
are meant to “implement native ideology.” Wagner attempts to show
that groups are not ubiquitous, but rather the way ‘Western’ conceptual-
ization has found to deal with alterity. In order to sustain this claim, he
examines ‘Daribi sociality’—which, according to him, does not need the
‘group’ concept—and concludes that paying attention to the creativity of
the “other people” we study in order not to project our conceptualizations
of society upon them is both a theoretical and an ethical imperative (a pos-
ition he also defends in TIC). This chapter argues that Wagner eventually
substitutes the totalization of ‘group’ with that of ‘culture.’ The destabiliza-
tion of totality is therefore followed by its reinstatement at another level.
Introduction 13
In order to deconstruct the idea that groups are to be found everywhere, he
reiterates the (allegedly ‘Western’) idea that groups really exist by resorting
to a kind of naming that seeks to establish an equivalence between the
name and the thing it names.
Chapter 5, “The Names of Others,” undertakes a reading of “The
Fractal Person” (1991a, hence FP) and Asiwinarong (1986c) in order to
reflect on Wagner’s analysis of naming and currency, which he claims are
instantiations of ‘Melanesian’ fractality and holography. An interrogation
of the status of naming in this sort of ethnographic description reveals how
a certain approach to names is frequently related to the conception of diffe-
rence as alterity. This chapter shows how the emic gesture guarantees fractal
replication and argues that fractality and holography leave no room for
difference within difference. Rites and names are said to be able to keep
their scale as fractal “permutations”; however, the idea that lies behind the
theory of fractality and holography seems to contradict former stances in
Wagner’s work, such as invention as agency (as proposed in TIC) and the
idea that metaphorization occurs in a dialectical relation in which inven-
tion draws on convention and vice-versa (cf. Wagner 1972). How can one
think of invention as dialectically related to convention if any and all event
is conceived as a replication of the fractal of “universal congruence”? This
chapter concludes that the anthropology of fractality and holography, in its
radical defense of the conceptualization of others, ultimately establishes the
prevalence of (named) alterity at the expense of difference within difference.
Thus, the broader conclusion to which this thread of arguments leads is that
alterity should be thought of as that which lies beyond otherness: Difference
unnamed because unnameable.
In “On Metaphor,” a reading of Wagner’s theory of metaphorization in
Symbols that Stand for Themselves and Habu, the distinction between the
literal and the metaphorical that lies at the core of Wagner’s theorization is
explored with the purpose of flexibilizing it through an interrogation of the
chain of oppositions into which it disseminates. Through an engagement
with the issues of referentiality; the temporality of obviation; meaning and
value; and representation, it shows that a similar closure as that which
is instituted by the emic gesture organizes obviation in its more universal
aspirations in STSFT. Yet, chapter 6 also explores the moments in which
Habu and STSFT manifest possibilities of dissemination that remain latent
due to choices in the economy of the text that favor totalization under
different names, such as culture, nature, obviation, and the cosmos. As it
invests in the possibilities contained in, but not fully developed by, Wagner’s
theory of meaning and interrogates the determination of alterity by ipseity,
this chapter seeks to liberate closure through an erasure of the emic gesture
and of the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical. The conclu-
sion to this book aims to contribute to this liberation through a reading of
Wagner’s engagement with Heidegger and Derrida in “Dif/ference and Its
Disguises.”
14 Introduction
Notes
1 In Limited Inc, Derrida writes of a “metaphysical gesture” that pervades phil-
osophy at least since Plato. His subject of analysis in this particular text is the
legacy of Austin, but the metaphysical gesture clearly precedes and exceeds
Austin’s work: “The enterprise of returning ‘strategically,’ ideally, to an origin or
to a ‘priority’ held to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, or
in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, acci-
dent, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have
proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the
negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essen-
tial before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not
just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that
which has been the most constant, most profound and potent” (1988: 93).
2 The expression “emic gesture” is neither Derrida’s nor Wagner’s, though it draws
on Derrida’s (1985) theory of naming and on the centrality Wagner assigns to
the emic throughout his work. Conversations with Rosalind Morris were key to
the insight based on which this concept was coined. I thank her for that.
3 For a discussion of some of the ways in which ‘Western’ philosophy has projected
‘others’ as its inverted image, cf. e.g., Said (1978), Spivak (1999), Mbembe
(2017), and Leonard and Morris (2017).
4 Though it might be worth asking whether the emic gesture, and totalization in
the form of identity, did not continue to haunt anthropological analysis through
analogous names.
5 Wagner does mention “ontological differentiation” (Wagner 1991b: 45) in his
essay but does not elaborate on difference in explicitly ontological terms. Yet,
he does sometimes refer to an idea of “being,” either in quotation marks (as
in Wagner 1981: 50) or without them (as in the idea of a “ground of being”
presented in Wagner 1986a: 114).
6 Cf. Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, especially chapter 1, for a review of the turn to
ontology in anthropology, philosophy, and science and technology studies.
7 After attending the AAA conference, I spent six months as a visiting scholar
at Columbia University and had the opportunity to visit other institutions
in the United States. I was surprised to find out that most anthropologists of
my generation were not aware of the existence of Wagner’s work. Some older
anthropologists were acquainted with his work, especially TIC, but very few
taught it. I was rather impressed to find out that the author who had become
central to anthropology as practiced in Brazil was rather unknown in the country
where he had always worked, especially as the Portuguese translation of TIC,
published in Brazil in 2010, was said to provide belated access to a theoretical
alternative posed in the United States since the 1970s (e.g., Goldman 2011).
The eagerness of my colleagues in Brazil to understand Wagner’s work—which
I encountered every time I mentioned the subject of my dissertation—seems to
have been related to his association with Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism,
Strathern’s defense of the methodological exaggeration of differences, and
Latour’s symmetric anthropology. Presented side by side with these authors,
Wagner was received as an author to be read, understood, and incorporated to
the canon of anthropological literature in Brazil.
8 “Some Muddles in the Models” (Schneider 1965) is acknowledged as a source
of inspiration for Wagner in TCS and TIC. The exercise initiated by Schneider
Introduction 15
with the purpose of understanding American kinship (Schneider 1968) also had
a strong influence on Wagner’s theorization of difference (though cf. Holbraad
& Pedersen 2017, cap. 2). It seems that Schneider’s influence subdued as Wagner
turned to fractality and holography and away from culturalism, although it is
not possible to posit such a fixed division in his work.
9 At the time, I had revised the translation of TIC (Wagner 2010c) and published
a review of the then recently published Coyote Anthropology (Dulley 2011).
10 Here is another instance: “Someday it will be discovered that real ethnography
was the only thing anthropology had to offer, but by that time, all our books will
be dust. … Sometimes even staid academics go into possession trances, and this is
an example of what Don Juan calls ‘stopping the world’ ” (Wagner 2010b: xiv).
In STSFT, Wagner also speaks of “some kind of mystical prescience” (Wagner
1986a: 56) in his explanation of retroactive motivation in obviation.
11 Wagner taught a course on Castañeda at the University of Virginia for over thirty
years. Castañeda, whose recognition as an anthropologist by his pairs is at least
ambiguous, published various books with millions of copies sold in which he
narrates his experiences of shamanic initiation by Don Juan and Don Genaro,
“Yaqui brujos.” Accused of writing fictional, non-ethnographic work as well as
of having an obscure identity and creating a religion whose members, most of
whom were women, disappeared enigmatically after his death, Castañeda is a
polemical figure. Wagner, although critical of his personality, affirms that the
power of his works results not from their author’s perspective, but from their
capacity to transmit to readers the knowledge of Don Juan and Don Genaro in
a clear and transformative way. In AS, he explains the reason for such admir-
ation: “His was a case study in depth of the anthropologist ‘taken in’ or ‘taken
over’ by the world perspectives he set out to study, and whose pragmatic of
teaching and learning consisted in creating and flourishing the doubts that
motivated the lessons” (Wagner 2001: xviii).
12 Castañeda also makes an appearance in the work of Deleuze and Guatarri, who
draw on his ethnography in more than one passage, especially for their concepts
of territory and body without organs (cf. “How do you make yourself a body
without organs?” and “Nomadology: The War Machine” in Deleuze & Guatarri
1987). Thus, the connections between the ‘ontological turn’ and Castañeda are
not restricted to the latter’s influence on Wagner’s work, for the work of Deleuze
and Guatarri is also foundational for the ‘ontological turn’ as advocated by
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (e.g., 2007).
13 On obviation, cf. chapters 3 and 4.
14 Apart from sharing Castañeda’s approach to anthropology, Wagner points to
similarities between Castañeda’s ethnographic writing and his own ethnography
‘among the Daribi,’ such as the “luminous body” described by Castañeda and
the “soul” of ‘the Daribi’ (Wagner 2010b: xii).
15 His aversion to “post-modern” reflexivity is depicted in the brightest colors in
AS, where “postmodernism” is defined thus: “The real killer in death is rigor
mortis, the frozen immobility of the body that all too quickly convinces itself it
has lost the ability to act, so that its chemical constituency begins a process of
autodissection. Death is the body’s postmodernism” (Wagner 2001: 254).
16 In fact, Wagner does not associate ‘deconstruction’ with Derrida in his writings. In
his interview by MacFarlane (Wagner 2008), he associates it with Piaget and the
reception of the latter’s work by North American academia. Whenever Derrida
is mentioned by Wagner (which is not often), it is in association with Heidegger.
16 Introduction
On the one hand, this is probably due to the very little influence Derrida has
had on anthropology in the United States; on the other hand, Wagner’s lack
of interest in ethnography as representation probably distanced him from the
effects that Derrida’s work had on literary criticism and other disciplines of the
humanities in North America.
17 Though cf. his discussion of Piaget’s concept of reversibility in Wagner
(1986a: 88).
18 Though Derrida’s work builds (deconstructively) on Heidegger’s work, Derrida
does not claim to be a Heideggerian (cf. e.g., Derrida 1987). If Heidegger’s
Destruktion claims to have metaphysics as its focus, from a Derridean perspective
it is not possible to efface metaphysics through ontology (cf. e.g., Derrida 1978b).
For a discussion on the subject of continuities and ruptures between Heidegger
and Derrida, cf. Gasché (1986), Hofstadter (1988), and Rapaport (1991).
19 Personal communication.
20 Anthropology in Brazil is, of course, not restricted to the subfield of “Amerindian
ethnology,” although this area does have significant impact on the configuration
of what counts as the anthropological canon. Viveiros de Castro is certainly the
most prominent ethnologist in Brazil, but he does have internal critics, Ramos
(2012) being the most vehement.
21 In July and August of 2011, Wagner spent a couple of weeks touring various uni-
versities in Brazil, where he gave conferences with fairly above-usual attendance
rates. He visited the Federal University of Amazonas, the Federal University of
Minas Gerais, the Federal University of Santa Catarina, the National Museum/
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the National University of Brasília, and
the University of São Paulo. His trip was jointly sponsored by the Federal
University of Santa Catarina and Cosac & Naify, the press that published the
first translation of TIC into Portuguese. I attended most of his conferences and
had the opportunity to further develop our conversations as one of his hosts in
São Paulo.
22 In “Anthropology is the Ethnography of Philosophy: Philosophy is the
Ethnography of Itself,” Wagner (2011b) draws on the concept of perspective in
order to discuss the relation between philosophy and anthropology. In his con-
ference at the Federal University of Amazonas, he affirmed that what he calls
the invention of culture Viveiros de Castro calls perspectivism. He also said that
the reason why he went to Brazil is that he thinks Viveiros de Castro’s concept
is “better.” Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzAtVuXX1Cw, consulted
on October 9th, 2017. The idea also appears in passing in Wagner (1986a: 68).
23 Yet, the recognition of similarities by both authors does not annul their differences.
The place of French structuralism, foundational for Viveiros de Castro, is rather
ambiguous in Wagner, whereas the holistic character of Wagner’s anthropology
is rarely discussed in Brazil.
24 Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) present their version of the ‘ontological turn,’
self-designated a “methodological” one focused on the “ontological” rather than
on “ontology,” as having Wagner, Strathern, and Viveiros de Castro as part of its
“intellectual genealogy.” The second chapter of their book reviews other turns to
ontology with which theirs bears similarities and differences.
25 A new edition of the book by the University of Chicago Press came out in
November 2016 and includes a foreword by Ingold (2016).
Introduction 17
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18 Introduction
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20 Introduction
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Introduction 21
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Points of rupture
With very few exceptions, anthropology has not engaged with Derrida as far
as the deconstruction of its tenets are concerned.1 Morris (2007) attributes
this to the fact that anthropology was not able to absorb the disturbing
criticism that ‘deconstruction’ addressed to its foundations as it questioned
phenomenology and structuralism, the concept of the sign, the possibility
of reproduction, and humanism. Having fieldwork (and thus experience) as
its classical methodology and empiricism and phenomenology as its “epis-
temological commitment” even in the absence of explicit theorization are
indicated by Morris as other possible reasons for anthropology’s impervi-
ousness to the “legacies of Derrida.” But as she reminds us, if Derrida has
been absorbed by anthropology in a rather parsimonious way, anthropology
exerted great influence on Derrida.2 This book builds on this dialogue to
question the status and the limits of the emic in anthropology as well as the
reproductive presupposition that is implied by the emic gesture to the extent
that it implies continuity.
If my interrogation of the emic gesture draws on Derrida’s displacement
of the metaphysics of presence, it is also true that the emic gesture is not
entirely absent from Derrida’s work—even if in the form of what Spivak calls
“reverse ethnocentrism,” i.e., the fact that “Derrida insists that logocentrism
is a property of the West” and therefore does not engage in deconstructing
“the East” (Spivak 1997: lxxxii). Dehiscing the emic gesture was not an
explicit part of the project of différance, as anthropology, along with its
named differences, served to open the closure of ‘Western’ metaphysics in
Derrida’s work.3 Yet, to the extent that nomination points to a metaphysics
as well as to the cracks that run through it, erasing the name is part of the
project of deconstruction. Wagner’s ethnographic theorization is focused on
how to come up with a satisfactory description of the ways in which (named
and circumscribed) ‘others’ live and conceptualize existence. Thus, the com-
bination of Derrida and Wagner appears to be especially appealing to dis-
cuss naming and the description of difference in anthropology to the extent
that each of these authors is invested in one of the poles of the ‘us’ versus
‘them’ divide while simultaneously interrogating this boundary.
On ‘deconstruction’
Derrida affirmed that ‘deconstruction’ is not a method on various occasions.
In “Letter to a Japanese Friend” (Derrida 1985), a brief text that names
difference in its very title on the grounds of linguistic difference and the
necessity of translation, Derrida discusses the English word ‘deconstruc-
tion’ in relation to its French counterpart, déconstruction, to help his friend
translate the concept into Japanese. He begins by stating that ‘deconstruc-
tion’ does not perfectly correspond to the French word déconstruction in
view of all the displacements that the process of translation entails: “The
question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of
translation, and of the language of concepts, of the conceptual corpus of
so-called ‘western’ metaphysics” (Derrida 1985: 1)—one notes that named
difference is displaced here through the quotation marks that make totaliza-
tion through naming evident. In this text, Derrida affirms that deconstruc-
tion, itself deconstructible and lacking foundations because foundations are
its very object, is neither a form of analysis nor a critique, procedure, or
method—“and it cannot be transformed into one” (Derrida 1985: 1).
Yet, in its ‘genealogical’ relation to Heideggerian Destruktion or Abbau,
déconstruction is also said to be “an operation bearing on the structure
or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of
Western metaphysics” (Derrida 1985: 1). Although not liable to organiza-
tion in the form of method, deconstruction is provisionally said to be an
operation—notwithstanding Derrida’s denial of its operative character a
a pure play of traces or supplements or, again, operates within the order
of the pure signifier which no reality, no absolutely external reference, no
transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound, or control; this sub-
stitution, … this unleashed chain is nevertheless not lacking in violence.
(Derrida 1981: 89)
Thoth, the proposer of writing, “participates in plots” and “helps the sons
[texts] do away with the father” [logos]. The pharmakon substitutes the
breathing voice for the lifeless sign. Thoth substitutes, replaces, does not
fear contradiction. He “extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. He is
thus the father’s other, the father, and the subversive movement of replace-
ment. … He cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences”
(Derrida 1981: 93). There is no strict separation between life and death here.
Everything can be substituted, for no absolute singularity exists.
The pharmakon is a floating signifier, “the floating indetermination that
allows for substitution and play” (Derrida 1981: 93), and as such, it can
never compose a closed figure with clear-cut borders. The attempt to block
the assignment of opposing values for a same word is of the nature of the
Platonic text and, as Derrida claims, of the metaphysics of presence, which
seeks to expel contradiction from its definitions. But because textuality is
constituted through difference within difference, it is always “composing
with the forces that tend to annihilate it” (Derrida 1981: 98). It is of the
nature of the pharmakon to carry within it both remedy and poison. And
it is harmful because it “produces a play of appearances which enable it to
pass for truth” (Derrida 1981: 103) when this might not be the case. One
is left with the pharmakon’s spectrality as it goes on in its endless chain of
substitution, deferral, and differentiation.
In its play with the simulacrum, writing, as pharmakon, mimes memory,
knowledge, and truth (Derrida 1981: 105). Thus, in his condemnation
of writing, Plato compares it to the sophist in that both mime truth. In
subtracting itself from the authority that is the source of speech, writing
imitates memory just as the sophist is said to imitate truth. But what is
curious, as Derrida reminds us, is that writing is condemned in the name of
a better and more original writing, which is the “inscription of truth in the
Notes
1 For exceptions to this rule, cf. e.g., Morris (2000), Siegel (1997, 2006), Ivy (1995),
Tyler (1998), Inoue (2006), and Strathern (2011).
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3 Inventing culture
46 Inventing culture
permanence and change. Were one to compare Wagner’s take on the subject
with the structuralist opposition between langue and parole, one might be
tempted to say that convention stands to language as invention stands to
speech; yet, this will not do.
COI affirms that a paradox permeates “Western science,” but each of
its disciplines (biology and anthropology are mentioned) negotiates it in a
different way. Wagner presents the problem as “the old one of unity and
diversity, the general or the universal against the particular, the collective
versus the individual, … boundaries and their permeability, or that of cultural
relativity” (Wagner 1977b: 385). Because the tension between these poles of
opposition—and, one might add, the possibility of crossing boundaries—is
found in all disciplines, a semiotic or epistemological paradox results: The
more one defines units, the more difficult it is to account for the relation-
ship between them; and the more one focuses on the relationships between
units, the harder it is to define them (Wagner 1977b: 386). In relation to
the conceptual universe of TIC, one could say that the negotiation of the
paradox of unit and relation is an example of masking in ‘Western’ science,
as relation is as much a product of the drawing of borders as borders result
from relations. And dialectic, as operated by Wagner, needs these two poles
to subsist because its mediating character depends on them. It mediates “its
own polarity” (Wagner 1986a: 51).1
On the concept of masking, Wagner claims in TIC that human symbol-
ization operates through the dialectic of collectivization and differentiation.
Within it, the masking of one of these poles is necessary for human action: “It
is impossible to objectify, to invent something, without ‘counterinventing’ its
opposite. Of course, a realization of this fact by the symbolizer would be
deadly to his intention” (Wagner 1981: 39). Thus, when one collectivizes
one necessarily differentiates and vice-versa, but for pragmatic reasons it is
necessary for the symbolizer not to realize this while thinking and acting.
Wagner’s own text in TIC might be read as an instance of this dialectic:2 The
first two chapters of the book focus explicitly on the relation between the
anthropologist and those studied by him (communication), and in so doing
produce the idea of ‘culture;’ as the idea of culture is further developed in
the subsequent chapters, the relation from which it ensues is masked so that
Wagner can describe the specificities of, as well as the differences between,
the differentiating and the collectivizing modes of symbolization. Thus, the
tension between generalization and particularization that structures COI
iterates a kind of movement that is similar to the one developed in TIC.
In COI, Wagner affirms that his anthropological approach, differently
from functionalism and structuralism, emphasizes the relations the anthro-
pologist establishes in the field and describes ‘culture’ based on them; yet, in
so doing, culture ‘itself’ ceases to be the exclusive focus of analysis. There is
a curious move here, which again iterates a move in TIC: ‘Culture’ is both
deconstructed as a unit—to the extent that it is not understood as some-
thing in itself, but as the result of the encounter between the anthropologist
Inventing culture 47
and people of ‘another culture’—and reconstructed as a ‘mode of symbol-
ization’ that not only orients the anthropologist’s and his interlocutors’
perspectives on the world but precedes and exceeds their interaction. COI
makes visible an anxiety that lies at the core of TIC: How can one blur
borders and at the same time describe difference? Wagner poses a core
question for anthropology, and one that remains relevant. Yet, his answer
reinstates closure in that it halts the work of displacement. Moreover, it
implicitly reiterates the ‘Western’ character of anthropology: “The sacrifice
appears to be less serious than it might be only because our civilization has
developed an extraordinary tolerance for the generalities and ambiguities
of ‘system’ and ‘process’ ” (Wagner 1977b: 386). After indexing the “nego-
tiation of paradoxes” to ‘our’ (‘Western’) civilization—and its inescapable
collectivizing mode of symbolization—the move between displacement and
reinstatement is left unproblematized.
According to Wagner, at first anthropology tended to describe units (des-
cent groups, segments, families, cultures), which were then classified and
analyzed, including in their inter-relations. In Wagner’s account of the history
of anthropology (cf. chapter 4), the focus on units gave way to an interest
in inter-relations: Descent groups were replaced with filiation (with Fortes)
and Lévi-Strauss consolidated the emphasis on exchange and reciprocity.
Since TCS, Wagner defends the Lévi-Straussian approach in his opposition
to structural functionalism and defends the idea that inter-relation matters
more than units because the latter are created through exchange and reci-
procity. A next step in this process was, as stated in ATSG (Wagner 1974,
cf. chapter 4), attentiveness to the betwixt and between, i.e., what lies in-
between categories: The creative liminality whose fundamental references
are Mary Douglas and Victor Turner.3 It might be the case that the queering
potential of liminality is restrained by the idea of culture as communication
to the extent that units are ultimately reinstated in both Turner’s analysis of
ritual and Wagner’s description of the invention of culture.
For Wagner, one of the consequences of Turner’s liminality was the
questioning of the notion of culture, for cultures, “the most obdurate of
the social species (…), do not, in the classic sense of their definition, inter-
breed.” The biological parallel reaches its apex in the question that follows
this statement: “But what does the fieldworker’s much celebrated ‘commu-
nication’ with his subjects amount to, then, if not some sort of miscegen-
ation?” (Wagner 1977b: 387). Communication with ‘others,’ those who do
not belong to “our civilization,” appears as a miscegenation of sorts. Despite
the parallel between biology and anthropology with which he initiates the
discussion of unit definition and relation, Wagner does not dwell on the pos-
sible parallels between cultures and species (or breeds and races, as the term
‘miscegenation’ seems to suggest). Yet, he affirms that anthropologists of
phenomenological orientation—among whom he includes himself—have
questioned the culture concept “on communicational (hence interrelational)
grounds” (Wagner 1977b: 387).4 As we know, Wagner celebrates relation
48 Inventing culture
as communication; yet, the unresolved biological parallel with which he
opens a text that otherwise focuses on the semiotics of ‘Western’ science and
Melanesians makes one wonder why he chooses to metaphorize culture in
biological terms. Even if against the author’s intentions, this might be one
instance in which the distinction between the text and its context is blurred
by what the text says, or conveys, despite itself: A certain anxiety of dis-
solution seems to accompany the author’s desire to make sense of how the
borders that demarcate cultures vanish in communication.
The problem with the relational approach is, for Wagner, that symbol-
ization, if understood as transcultural or universal, loses the capacity to
describe difference in a precise way. It is interesting to observe how his very
formulation supposes an anteriority of culture over communication: “[T]o
speak of a universal, transcultural flow of symbolization is to say very
little of the specific contents and orientations of particular cultures, for it
is the boundaries and specificity of these cultures that the communication
dissolves” (Wagner 1977b: 387). Communication (like miscegenation?) has
the power to dissolve something that is perceived as having already been
there: Cultures. Thus, the units of analytical discourse are here juxtaposed
with those of common sense.5 This seems to be the case, especially as the
culture concept is not very central in Wagner’s later works, such as AS
(2001a) and CA (2010). Rather, the concepts he employs in these works
(fractality, holography, obviation, self-modeling) further dissolve the
totalizing borders of culture—although one might argue (cf. chapter 5)
that they rest on the boundaries created by the emic gesture. If culture is
displaced, the units within which fractality and holography operate are still
constituted through a sort of naming that might be understood as residu-
ally cultural: ‘Melanesian,’ ‘Daribi,’ ‘Barok,’ ‘Western’ (cf. chapter 5). Such
names might be the way in which (not only his) ethnography copes with
what he calls the paradox of unit and relation. It seems that concepts, as
metaphors, can never completely do without some sort of relation with
common sense (Derrida 1974).
For Wagner, any relation in which the part maintains a dyadic relation
with the whole that encompasses it is paradoxical (fractality, holography,
and self-modeling seem to be an attempt to deal with this in a more satisfac-
tory way in his later work). Yet, in COI he affirms that the activity of science
is not very much affected by such paradoxes because it consists precisely
in negotiating them, i.e., dealing with paradoxes in an empirical way. The
paradox of science is, for Wagner, the paradox of any mode of conceptu-
alization: For it to operate, its dialectically complementary principle must
be masked, as discussed in TIC. Science is related to a particular mode of
conceptualization (a ‘Western’ one), but paradoxes are said to be “a deeply
and universally human phenomenon” (Wagner 1977b: 389). And it is on the
basis of their universality—every worldview “has its bounding paradoxes”
(Wagner 1977b: 389)—that Wagner (1981, esp. introduction) claims to pre-
serve paradoxes in anthropology. Thus, as far as paradoxes are concerned,
Inventing culture 49
human effort is to be directed at negotiation. For if the attempt to deal with
paradoxes is a semiotic activity, the creation of new paradoxes is inevitable.
And if science denies its paradoxical character, it is because in order to nego-
tiate a paradox it is necessary to mask it, i.e., to downplay it.
Negotiating paradoxes
Wagner ends the first section of his paper, on the paradox of science, with
the affirmation that his “critique of world views” not only makes paradoxes
visible, but also creates new paradoxes. This is so because his critique
“manifests a ‘world view’ of its own” (Wagner 1977b: 390), the difference
of his approach being that it “negotiates paradoxes by exposing them—
even by creating them” (Wagner 1977b: 390). In considering the negotiation
of paradoxes, COI deals with the dialectic of invention and convention
discussed in TIC in the light of semiotics. In another (brief) text of 1977,
Wagner affirms that in semiotics, as in symbolic anthropology,6 symbols are
used “in the broad, phenomenological sense of a semiotic operator through
which the totality of perception and ideation can be realized, rather than the
narrow sense of a ‘merely symbolic’ conceptual world opposed to ‘reality’ ”
(Wagner 1977c; cf. also 1981: 101). Thus, “indigenous conceptualization”
is not to be understood as “merely symbolic” in relation to the ‘reality’
investigated by scientists; rather, it manifests a worldview of its own. Yet,
given Wagner’s supposition of (human) universality, every symbolization is
analyzed by him as an articulation between two semiotic modalities: The
literal and the figurative.
Literal (or indexical) symbolization is defined as “denot[ing] the combin-
ation of symbolic elements (as we combine words to make a sentence) into
a total relational pattern, a ‘representation,’ that stands in a homologous
and literally representational relationship to some ‘represented’ context”
(Wagner 1977b: 390). This pattern of relation includes the establishment of
equivalence between a model and reality as well as between statements and
the world. For Wagner, whose semiotic reflection draws on the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus’s (Wittgenstein 1961) interrogations of the conditions
of possibility for language to express reality, literality refers to the realm of
convention, i.e., representation. And whenever there is representation, there
is homology with the context represented (words, laws, diagrams, models).
The problem with the literal is that it privileges homology over analogy.
And Wagner exhorts anthropology to consider not only convention, literal
and indexical (or, in the terms of Habu, lexical), but also invention, in which
the lexical might become metaphorical through a process of analogy. To the
figurative belongs the singularity of events, persons, accidents, and objects.7
This process is said to be a dialectical one, as innovative metaphors, after
being repeatedly employed, become part of the conventional lexicon; a new
process of invention via metaphorization then becomes necessary for differ-
entiation to occur.
50 Inventing culture
At the level of signification, invention occurs through metaphors, without
which new relations beyond conventional meaning cannot be established.
This is how the relationship between metaphorization and invention is
theorized in Habu:
Inventing culture 51
privileges homology at the expense of analogy, and as a result ignores some-
thing only analogy is capable of. According to him, analogy allows one to
understand that when a Bororo says he is an eagle, this does not merely
produce differentiations between men because the identification of different
people with different names causes them to be distinguished. Wagner’s
point is that if for ‘the Bororo’ he is actually an eagle, this must be taken
into account. Here, too, analogy is sustained by the emic gesture, which
grounds the supposition that men are eagles for ‘the Bororo’ without further
discussion.
Analogy is, for Wagner, what allows anthropology to incorporate the dif-
ferentiating procedure and thus establish a relation between anthropological
analysis and things in the world, the differentiating mode of symbolization
being characterized precisely by an immediate relation between the symbol
and what it symbolizes. As argued in the previous chapter, the difference
between differentiating and collectivizing is a premise of Wagner’s thought
and in this sense does not pose any methodological issue, such as what are
the conditions of possibility for symbolization to state something about the
world. If one follows Wagner’s argumentation closely, this would be an issue
only for the collectivizing mode of symbolization, in which the world is
conceived as separate from language (cf. TIC, cap. 3). Supposing that there
is a mode of symbolization (differentiation) in which this is not the case,
one could do without this problem if one were capable of symbolizing in
this mode. Yet, there remains the problem of universal symbolization, to
the extent that all human symbolization is said to be simultaneously differ-
entiating and collectivizing. And if one accepts the premise of the masking
of convention by a differentiating perspective in which analogy supersedes
homology, the methodological question of how a collectivizing perspective
could possibly gain access to a differentiating one remains unanswered.
In “Analogic Kinship” (Wagner 1977d, hence AK), the replacement of
homology by analogy leads to the idea that kinship relations should be
thought of in analogical terms. Wagner’s analysis begins with the premise
that all human relations are analogous, i.e., no a priori innateness of
kinship relations (such as mother or fathers) is to be presupposed (cf. also
Wagner 1986a: 34). Rather, he affirms that the differentiation of kin into,
e.g., mother, father, sister, and son arises from the sharing of “a certain
solicitude” that is “quintessential to all ideal kin relationships” (Wagner
1977d: 623). It is this “solicitude” that lays the ground for both analogy
and differentiation in that it represents “one essential kin relationship” that
“flows” (Wagner 1977d: 623) among all differentiated kin relations. From
this perspective, incest is seen as an improperly drawn distinction that will
therefore “appear as a kind of contagion, a moral degeneracy spreading
from one kinsman to another”, i.e., “a morally undesirable flow of simi-
larity” (Wagner 1977d: 624). In “Western middle-class society,” differen-
tiation is said to be perceived as natural and innate, and therefore kinship
relations require “conscious and deliberate performance” in relation to this
52 Inventing culture
natural given (Wagner 1977d: 624), whereas “others perceive the flow of
relationship as a ‘given’ that prompts appropriate differentiation” (Wagner
1977d: 624). Here, the emic gesture appears in its most abstract and gen-
eral form: As unnamed otherness, of which ‘the Daribi’ are nonetheless an
example.
Wagner points to the difference between the differentiating and collect-
ivizing modes of symbolization (AK puts it in terms of ideologies) based on
the way in which each of them perceives what is innate, given, or natural as
opposed to what is artificial and made. His appeal that one should not inves-
tigate kinship relations based on a priori conceptions imbued with genea-
logical assumptions is a salutary one. Yet, the same methodological and
epistemological question one might ask of COI can be asked of AK: How
does one access others’ perspectives on kinship? And what is the status of
the name ‘other,’ as a name of the difference that differentiates rather than
conventionalizes? Also, if an analogical approach to kinship obviates the dis-
tinction between natural and cultural kinship (Wagner 1977d: 626) (which
in Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of incest is quite a fuzzy one), and thus displaces
the role of incest in the constitution of culture, where is the violence of dif-
ferentiation to be located?
In AK, differentiation, the part played by invention in the dialectic of
invention and convention, is synonymous with “creativity elsewhere”
(Wagner 1977d: 624). AK proposes that kinspeople are, in differentiating
contexts, “a (‘metonymic’) part of a potential whole” (Wagner 1977d: 624),
an idea to be iterated in “The Fractal Person” (Wagner 1991a) under the
rubric of fractality. As in FP, Dumont’s (1980) holism is also an explicit ref-
erence for AK, which, as stated above, poses the very unlikely possibility that
all kinship relations arise from an originally undifferentiated background of
solicitude. Original non-violence is thus attributed to ‘others.’ And if the pri-
macy of genealogical thinking is rightly questioned, there is a silent refusal
to extend skepticism to the idea of non-violent gender distinction—which
becomes, through the emic gesture, the “Daribi conception of sexual dif-
ferentiation” (Wagner 1977d: 627), “the germinal social differentiation of
male and female” (Wagner 1977d: 629), or “gender opposition” (Wagner
1986a: 79; cf. also Wagner 1986a, chapter 4).9 Although the supposition of
solicitude denies the violence inherent in any process of differentiation and
attempts to replace it with neutrality,10 maleness, understood as contingent
and supplementary in relation to femaleness, is related to the “exercise [of]
social force and constraint in such a way as to contain and incorporate male
lineality” (Wagner 1977d: 628). A further attempt to contain the violence
of displacement arises when the term designating a mode of relationship is
fixed to the relation it designates: “Here the kin term or terms (as well as the
‘relatives’ it identifies) is part and parcel of the mode of relationship …, and
term and relationship together form a conceptual entity that is differentiated
from other such entities” (Wagner 1977d: 626).
It seems that the transformation of homology into analogy cannot do
without the taxonomic demarcation of difference; rather, it inverts the
Inventing culture 53
vector in which generalization is achieved from presupposed difference
to one in which presupposed homogeneity results in differentiation by
positing a perspective in which “constructions are intended as simultan-
eously conceptual and phenomenal” (Wagner 1977d: 626). And this is
only possible because of the precedence this sort of analysis concedes to
the emic:
We begin, not with a grid, but with a conceptual world, and the sig-
nificance of kin relationships within this world is a function of their
meaningful development in terms of its symbols. The beginnings of our
analysis should involve an entry into this conceptual world and a cre-
ative apprehension of its meanings, rather than the demarcation of a
particular ‘domain’ or department of the totality that we might want to
designate as ‘kinship.’
(Wagner 1977d: 627)
With this gesture, the totality of kinship, based on the ideology of “Western
middle-class society,” is displaced. Yet, this does not do without totalization
per se, as the apprehension of kinship as a total unit instantiated differ-
ently in different contexts is substituted for the totality of conceptualiza-
tion. This might not have been the case if Wagner had not rushed to name,
and thus demarcate, conceptual worlds through the names of ‘others:’ It is
‘kinship among the Daribi,’ a hybrid of two totalities (kinship and culture)
that comes to stand for the possibility of analogical analysis. The closure
of kinship is, through the emic gesture, substituted with the closure of cul-
ture, as in the statement that “a strong argument can be made, supported by
their own notions of priority and responsibility, that the kin relationships
of the Daribi constitute a self-generative means of analogical construction”
(Wagner 1977d: 638). Thus, it is “their own” analogies that ground Wagner’s
analogic approach. It is the emic gesture that connects Wagner’s analysis to
his subjects’ conceptualization of kinship, i.e., it is through the assumption
that a certain mode of symbolization subsists under the name ‘Daribi’ that
his analysis comes to mime what it is to account for:
Since … I have argued that the Daribi themselves understand the dif-
ferentiation of relatives and relationships to be a province of human
responsibility, the analogical equivalence of all kin relationships to one
another can be said to ground their own approach to kin differentiation
and relationship.
(Wagner 1977d: 640)
54 Inventing culture
Wagner proposes that anthropology should experiment with the figurative
mode, associated with self-containment and the assimilation of context,
for if literal or indexical constructions also establish relations, such as in
representation, they depend on context to do so. Figurative symbolization,
in turn, contrasts symbolic elements that are connected to their respective
contexts, but apprehended as singular units in analogic relation. Speciation
provides the example to illustrate this: While Homo erectus and Homo
sapiens are two distinct species, both belong to the genus Homo and are,
therefore, analogous (1977b: 390).11 Wagner opposes literal constructions
to figurative ones on the grounds that analogic, figurative constructions are
self-contained and depend on the assimilation of context for establishing
relations whereas ‘orders’ and ‘paradigms’ are representational and there-
fore articulated in the homological, literal mode that denotes things in a
conventional way. Figurative symbolization is said to be non-conventional
despite Habu’s insistence on the continuous transformation of innovation
into convention through metaphor. What seems to concern Wagner here
is not the fixity of the separation between conventional and figurative
but rather that the creativity of non-conventional symbolization allows
it to leave the realm of representation to become self-representative. This
is opposed to literal denotation, whose relation to the world is one of
representation and hence of exteriority. This leads one back to the dia-
lectic of invention and convention, or differentiation and collectivization,
proposed in TIC.
The interplay of masking and control that is said to characterize human
symbolization in TIC is iterated in the idea that “in order for any con-
struction to be meaningful and coherent, the context of a literal expres-
sion must always be perceived as figurative, and the context of a figurative
construction must always be perceived as literal” (Wagner 1977b: 391). If
the literal contrasts between itself and the world (homology), the figurative
assimilates context (analogy). But what determines the way in which sym-
bolization operates, i.e., which of the poles is masked, and which operates
as control (cf. Wagner 1981)? Wagner’s answer supposes the emic: “this
depends on the actor’s conventional orientation to his world—his ‘world
view’ ” (Wagner 1977b: 391). This means that if the actor perceives her
activity as one in which things are to be related, their differences are
perceived as inherent; and if the actor’s motivation is differentiating, rela-
tion is taken for granted, i.e., understood as innate. Therefore, as discussed
in TIC, scientists perceive nature as external, something that resists their
efforts to control it, whereas among people who perceive their activity as
one of differentiation, relations are perceived as inherent and independent
from one’s intentions.12 Yet, figurative constructions are constantly
transformed into literal ones and vice-versa—“they ‘ground’ each other”
(Wagner 1977b: 392).
Distinction between the figurative and the literal is indispensable for
human symbolization. But it is worth noting that the
Inventing culture 55
separation [of these two modes of symbolization] is always the effect of
the literal component of action, whether in fact the literal mode corres-
ponds to the deliberate intention of the actor or to the reflexive trans-
formation that is precipitated as its context.
(Wagner 1977b: 392)
56 Inventing culture
In AS, in which Wagner claims that anthropology should be done from
the perspective of the “holographic worldview” of the inhabitants of New
Guinea, one finds the most explicit definition of what this reversibility
should be like:
Inventing culture 57
of culture as the result of subsequent elaboration on one’s interaction and
interlocution with subjects perceived, named, and described not only as
different, but also as ‘others.’ The hypothesis that there is a dialectical rela-
tion (on Wagner’s terms) between these two levels of his work is mine; but
it is based on the author’s claim that his style of writing was affected by
‘Daribi’ dialectic:
This is how Wagner elaborates on the way in which his writing was
affected by ‘Daribi’ narrative. But it seems that something not unlike it
can be observed since his first published work. TCS describes a particu-
larity: ‘Daribi’ kinship, understood as “principles of Daribi clan definition
and alliance,” but it does not contain the amount of information on the
anthropologist’s field interactions that is usual in much ethnographic work.
TCS might be the work in which Wagner’s interactions in the field appear
less explicitly—to this effect, one of its reviewers affirms that “[t]he book
does not supply the empirical background material to judge independ-
ently the effect of Daribi cosmology on group recruitment and intergroup
relations” (Lepervanche 1969: 520). Wagner seems to invest more effort in
the narrative of his ethnographic encounters in later work, in which his pre-
vious silence is almost replaced by loquacity—CA is a case in point.
As far as works that predate AS (2001a) are concerned, field experience
is described in the guise of examples in Wagner’s more theoretical writing,
such as the first chapter of TIC. But if field interaction is not frequently
mentioned in TCS, the book already contains the mark of “reverse anthro-
pology” to the extent that it draws on the “world view” or “cosmology” of
“others” to make sense of a given “social system15.” TCS presents itself as
the description of ‘Daribi kinship’ from the perspective of how “the natives
themselves conceptualize and deal with their social system,” as “the native
symbolizations furnish the ultimate points of reference by which the details,
or rules of the system, are determined” (Wagner 1967: xxvi). If the dia-
logue on which TCS is based cannot be accessed by the reader, it makes
itself absently present since the first pages of the work, for considering
“native symbolizations” means, for Wagner, to enter into dialogue with ‘the
Daribi.’ TIC goes one step further in this quest, as it interrogates culture as
the product of such interaction. It is in this sense that it is understood as
an “epistemology” of Wagner’s more ethnographic work (Habu and Lethal
Speech), in which the “world views,” “conceptualizations,” or “modes of
58 Inventing culture
symbolization” of ‘others’ are presented, as it were, in themselves (though in
abstract, and abstracted, form). It is as if the acknowledgment that one does
not access difference in itself, but construes it through one’s background,
could guarantee the condition of possibility for the description of ‘other
symbolizations.’ Let us consider some of the few moments in which inter-
action emerges in Wagner’s early ethnography.
Concerning the process of writing TCS, Wagner affirms that
the ideas presented have emerged gradually during the course of the
field work and subsequent analysis of the data. The specific form that
they assume here was conceived in October, 1965, and during an attack
of malaria in December, 1965, and was subsequently revised during the
spring and summer of 1966.
(Wagner 1967: x)
Thus, the classical distinction between fieldwork as a time of experience, in
which the anthropologist is immersed in ‘another culture’ to learn its ways,
and ethnographic writing as the period in which this experience is organized
by the anthropologist is not to be strictly found in TCS. Differently, Wagner
affirms that his ideas started to develop during fieldwork, between November
1963 and February 1965. In October 1965, as he was writing his disserta-
tion for seven months, ideas are said to have taken the form they have in the
book. An attack of malaria in December 1965 seems to have contributed to
that—malaria also being something he brought from the field. The attack
of malaria as a creative fit suits Wagner’s eulogy of creativity and non-
rationalization, despite the classical form in which his ethnographic argu-
ment is worked out. His presentation of intellectual conception as having
started during fieldwork has a parallel in the fact that the author does not
conceive of the process of inventing cultures as separate from the relation
the anthropologist has with ‘others’ and ‘their culture.’
In TCS, ‘the Daribi’ are frequently called “natives.” This is certainly an
ambiguous term, as it points simultaneously to autochthony and the status
of people in a colonial situation.16 The way in which ‘others’ are named in
ethnographic writing is important, as it incorporates into the account of
‘their culture’ the place they are assigned in the world—the hierarchies of
which Abu-Lughod speaks. Thus, despite the attempt at symmetrization that
is contained in the idea of “reverse anthropology,” with its focus on leveling
‘Western’ conceptualization with the conceptualization of ‘others,’ the names
assigned to ‘others’ surreptitiously introduce the social places they index
into the ethnographic text. To call one’s interlocutors “natives” was surely
not a prerogative of Wagner’s work, as this was part of (not only) anthropo-
logical commonsense in the 1960s. The way in which ‘others’ are named
actually points to the permeability of anthropological analysis to what is
contextually perceived as sameness and difference and the hierarchies this
entails: Both the hierarchies based on which one can study ‘others’ and the
ways in which it is politically acceptable to draw distinctions between ‘us’
Inventing culture 59
and ‘them’ at a given point in time. In this sense, the iteration of the ways in
which ‘others’ are named throughout Wagner’s work reflects the continuities
and changes as to what names have been considered appropriate to address
alterity from a disciplinary perspective.
As is the case with many anthropologists, Wagner had a few privileged
“informants.” In his acknowledgments, the most effusive thanks are for
David Schneider, his supervisor, and Kagoiano, whose picture is displayed in
the frontispiece of the book: “Kagoiano of Kurube’ has helped as informant,
analyst, companion, and confidant to an extent for which any acknowledg-
ment would be insufficient” (Wagner 1967: x). The cook is also presented as
a “friend.” In TCS, collaboration with Kagoiano is restricted to the preface,
where he is said to be a friend, informant, and analyst. Yapenugiai, a relative
of Kagoiano, is also mentioned as a privileged informant and friend. But if
in TCS this collaboration is mentioned only in the preface, Habu mentions
Kagoiano’s and Yapenugiai’s interpretations of ‘Daribi’ myths and rituals
(e.g., Wagner 1972a: 47, 69–73). Both were considered especially interesting
as interlocutors because they were recognized as experienced dreamers and,
according to Wagner (Wagner 1972a: 68–79), interpretation is related to
dreaming among ‘the Daribi.’ In a footnote, Wagner (1972a: 62) affirms
that the interpretations of metaphors he provides are frequently those of his
“informants,” his “supplementary statements” having the purpose of pro-
viding the relevant context for the reader. Thus, differently from what is
affirmed by Schneider in his foreword to TCS, Wagner’s ethnography does
not ascribe to a strict “distinction between the symbols of the [Daribi] culture
and the anthropologist’s model” (1967: viii); rather, it attempts to mediate
between them. Since TCS, Wagner portrays one of those he perceives as
‘others’ as an analyst, like the anthropologist. It is therefore dialogue during
fieldwork that is supposed to ground the dialectic of differentiation and col-
lectivization theorized in TIC.
Wagner seems to have incorporated his interlocutors’ interpretation of
myth and ritual into analysis since the beginning of fieldwork. In STSFT,
one is told that after participating in the habu ritual in 1968 as a habubidi,
i.e., as part of the group of men who take the menacing ghost to the bush,
he asked the organizer of the ritual about its meaning. Whereas the organ-
izer and those of his clan are said to have offered “penetrating insights” into
the habu ritual (Wagner 1986a: 80), they attributed the partiality of their
knowledge to the fact that the previous generation died without revealing
everything there is to it. In Wagner’s interpretation, no total analysis of
myths and rituals could be obtained from ‘the Daribi’ because they treat
this realm of life as “secret knowledge,” not to be revealed to ‘outsiders.’
Partiality is thus viewed as the result of suspicion towards ‘outsiders,’ and
not as something constitutive of social life. As far as his ethnography on
‘the Barok’ is concerned, Wagner affirms that he had the opportunity to
test his understanding of some of the issues with which he was concerned
in Asiwinarong through the “point-for-point confirmation, in the most
60 Inventing culture
enthusiastic terms, for the iconographic analysis of Barok feasting … from
an orong of Bakan Village, Mr. Tadi Gar,” especially as far as “the mode
of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ feasts, and of the negation of social meanings in the
kaba” (Wagner 1986c: xxii) are concerned. Confirmation by ‘Melanesian’
interlocutors is, therefore, a crucial element in the constitution of Wagner’s
analysis, especially if from elderly men. He counts among his interlocutors
“an old man, quite disdainful of what little others could remember of the
subject” (Wagner 1986c: 38). Also, “Mr. Bubulo of Giligin, Lulubo Village,”
is said to have confirmed that the a lua ritual was related to the transit of the
Pleiades (Wagner 1986c: 42).
A few years later, Wagner criticizes his seeking for validation in the con-
firmation of his ideas by his interlocutors:
[I]n looking for some sort of approbation for my ideas I had entirely
missed the point. They were not interested in my thoughts but … in
what I was able to put into words—a remarkable gratuitous body skill,
rather like riding a monocycle.
(Wagner 1991b: 44)
Inventing culture 61
anthropologists do not undertake fieldwork without any previous biases,
one needs to explain how previous experience inflects dialogue and, as a
result, dialectic. In TIC, Wagner affirms that biases result both from the
anthropologist’s ‘culture’ and from anthropology as a discipline. Thus, com-
munication, as relation, is inflected with the particularity of ‘culture.’ If one
considers the permeability between anthropological discourse and the lan-
guage of common sense, it might be possible to affirm that what Wagner
describes as the dialectic of invention and convention and the distinction
between differentiation and collectivization related to it were conceived as
a result of his communication in the field. Yet, to the extent that the poles
of this dialectic are assigned the names attributed to ‘us’ and ‘others’ in the
language of common sense (which is part of the anthropologist’s ‘culture’),
the interplay of convention and invention is halted by the closure of naming.
62 Inventing culture
‘the Barok,’ the possibility of getting to know the ‘Melanesian’ world view
is theorized by Wagner in terms of its “coming into appearance,” i.e., its
presentification or apparition in the form of images (Wagner 2001b). Among
the concepts coined to account for the difference of those he presents as
‘others,’ at least two are attributed to his field interactions: Obviation, which
he claims to have learned from ‘the Daribi,’ and holography, a result of his
engagement with ‘the Barok.’ Wagner relates his conception of dialectic to
his Melanesian encounters (cf. Wagner 2008), although not exclusively (as
is shown by his brief discussions of Greek, Hegelian, and Marxist dialectic).
As Wagner’s dialectic does not suppose the possibility of synthesis, obviation
operates through the opposition of reversible poles. Reversion is an essential
element of obviation, and it is based on it that Wagner distinguishes his dia-
lectic from Hegel’s sublation (Aufhebung).
Dialectic, as defined and operated by Wagner, is conceived as a struc-
turing element of anthropology. He presents it as non-Hegelian, closer to
‘Greek’ dialectic, because it does not aim at synthesis (though cf. Wagner
1986a: 39). In the place of synthesis, one finds obviation. A parallel with
one of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus (Plato 2005),18 discussed in the previous
chapter via Derrida’s reading, might help us engage with Wagner’s latest
book, Coyote Anthropology (2010), in which dialectic and obviation are
key concepts. It is frequently said of Phaedrus that its goal was possibly
not the subject of its reflection, rhetoric, but the concise demonstration of
dialectical thought in operation. Wagner’s opposition to anthropology as
rhetoric notwithstanding, something similar might be affirmed of CA, an
experimental literalization of the foundational concepts on which his work
is based: Dialogue at the level of interaction, theoretically coupled with
dialectic; the analytical procedure of obviation; symmetry; mimesis that
fractally keeps its scale; figure-ground reversal, through which anthropo-
logical analysis, when successful, attains reverse anthropology by means of
obviation.
In both Phaedrus and CA, dialogical form embodies dialectics. Dialogue
occurs between two characters: In Plato, between Socrates and Phaedrus; in
Wagner, between Roy and Coyote—who is indeed a coyote. However, if dia-
logue, in Plato, is clearly led by Socrates, Roy does not seem to be able to pre-
determine its outcome. In the first chapter, “The Coyote of Anthropology,”
Roy takes the lead of dialectic, and thus comes closer to Platonic form; but
in the second chapter, “The Anthropology of Coyote,” it is Coyote who leads
the dialogue, and Roy sees himself as the apprentice of the anthropology
that is taught to him by Coyote. In the subsequent chapters, “Obviation”
and “The Book of Symmetries,” the interaction between the two characters
becomes more balanced, with both contributing to the dialectic that leads
to obviation. Humor and irony pervade the dialogue between Roy and
Coyote and contribute to make the method visible.19 If one thinks of “coyote
Inventing culture 63
anthropology” not merely as a title but also as a way of doing anthropology,
one could draw a parallel between the structure of CA and the way in which
Wagner’s conception of anthropology develops throughout his work. If he
starts by describing the lifeways of ‘others’ in a more abstract and objectifying
way in TCS, he increasingly yields to what TIC calls “reverse anthropology”
and attempts to describe the worldviews of ‘others’ by considering their own
perspective on it (though cf. the discussion above and chapters 2 and 6
on the methodological issues that arise from this aspiration). Subsequent
works, such as AS and CA, claim to have amalgamated the perspective of
‘others’ into anthropological conceptualization.
Wagner’s discussion of dialogue and dialectic in TIC allows one to relate
the form of CA to his theoretical and methodological premises. In the first
chapters of TIC, the anthropologist’s cultural and scholarly background is
crucial to the invention of another ‘culture,’ and it is in relation to his back-
ground that relations in the field are established—this moment corresponds
to the “anthropology of coyote.” Yet, as the anthropologist is engulfed by
the ‘other’ culture and by the way in which he is seen and dealt with from
its perspective, he perceives that there is also the “coyote of anthropology,”
its double, which poses the true challenges to anthropological thought and
practice.20 “Reverse anthropology” ensues from the dialogue established
between the anthropologist and the coyote, or, in TIC, between the anthro-
pologist and ‘others.’ Although the emic gesture supposes otherness, Wagner
never questions the possibility of dialogue (which does not necessarily mean
understanding) despite differences. His aspiration to symmetry reaches
exponential levels in “The Book of Symmetries,” where fractality and holog-
raphy appear as mechanisms for keeping scale at a cosmic level, thus over-
coming relations commonly seen as belonging to the order of nature and
culture. Wagner affirms that
64 Inventing culture
in the relation with ‘others.’ Hence, the coincidence of form and content in
Plato and Wagner: If Plato attempts to approach truth dialectically, Wagner
develops in CA something like a phenomenology of dialectic without syn-
thesis with scale retention, the final but, as one might argue, potentially non-
totalizing product of which is obviation (cf. chapter 6 on the possibility of
dissemination that is contained in Wagner’s theory of metaphor).
The dialogue between Roy and Coyote can be taken for a manifestation,
or instantiation, of dialectic. As instantiation replaces demonstration, a sig-
nificant difference with Plato arises: In Wagner, examples are summoned
as illustrative manifestations rather than irrefutable proofs. The dialogue
that elicits dialectic takes place between Roy, the author’s homonym, and
Coyote. The figure of Coyote refers to the animal of the North American
fauna, the well-known trickster of Amerindian mythology, and the character
of Castañeda’s (1991) Journey to Ixtlan, with whom Carlos speaks at the
revealing moment when, helped by Don Juan and Don Genaro, he can “stop
the world” and “see.” ‘Coyote’ might also mean a person who surrepti-
tiously transports people illegally across the borders of the nation state. And
although this meaning is not explicitly hinted at by the author, one might
resort to his theory of metaphorization to explore its possible extensions
of meaning: Reverse anthropology, as it operates dialectically between the
differentiating and collectivizing poles (Wagner 1981), transports into the
theory it invents, via obviation, what it understands to be the ‘world views’
of the ‘others’ with whom it enters into dialogue. In doing so, it attempts to
describe ‘others’ through ‘their own’ rhetoric so that, through analogy, no
gap between the thing and the world might disrupt such depiction. This is to
say that Wagner’s portrayals of ‘others’ are not intended as representations
but as metaphors that operate based on ‘their’ premises (cf. the discussion
on the literal and the metaphorical in chapter 6).
Wagner’s work is marked by a concern to avoid non-correspondence
of scale between the model and the world since TCS, but it is in FP that
this becomes more explicit. Thus, the concept of fractality attributed to
‘Melanesians,’ in which there is no opposition between individual and
society, is summoned to account for the figure of the ‘great man,’ conceived
as an instantiation of Melanesian personhood. In it, there is no distinc-
tion between the whole and the one, and the whole is actualized in all
empirically observable ones (cf. Wagner 1991a and chapter 5). It is pos-
sible to draw an analogy between the dialectic elicited by dialogue and
Melanesian fractality: In CA, the dialectic of opposing poles keeps its scale
as it is instantiated in the dialogue between the Roy/Coyote double. Now,
this scale retention is said to occur because dialectic “has its own continuity
built into it” (Wagner 1981: 45). After this mechanism is unleashed, it is as
if the anthropologist were capable of textually reproducing the transform-
ations that ultimately happen at a cosmological—and cosmic—level. Now,
according to Coyote, “a ‘holographic model’ or ‘holographic worldview’ is
Inventing culture 65
one that imitates you back with far greater precision and accuracy than you
could ever imitate it” (Wagner 2010: 28). Thus, holography is presented
as the adequate way to realize the passage between theory and the empir-
ical world because it can do without an epistemic rupture between the
model and its subject. It is as if holography and fractality, sustained by the
emic gesture, could guarantee the transparency of language in relation to
the world.
In STSFT, Wagner affirms that image condenses different possibilities
of meaning, understood as the mediation between image and perception.
He compares image to a black hole in that it is capable of simultaneously
representing itself and generating meaning from the excess of power it
contains. This is done through metaphorization (cf. Habu), a symbolic pro-
cedure in which the creative extension of meaning does not bear an arbitrary
relation with the symbols in relation to which it occurs. For in Wagner’s
metaphorization, “metaphor places the signified element in relation to the
system of meaning whereas lexical signification merely registers its conven-
tional meaning” (Gonçalves 2010: 79). This “system of meaning” in Wagner
is cultural. It is thus the totalization of culture that makes it possible to affirm
that in image there is both an immediate relation between the thing and its
symbol and an excess of signification. It is based on the holographic relation
between the referent and the symbol that arises the possibility of obviation,
whose subtlety is related to “ ‘anticipating’ and ‘disposing of’ conventional
effect” (Wagner 1978: 31), simultaneously revealing and concealing, indi-
cating without making it too explicit. Through this mechanism, Wagner’s
anthropology claims to distance itself from explanation, construction, and
deconstruction in order to transform through metaphor.
In LS, Wagner affirms that obviation’s etymological reference is to the
Latin term obvius “(from obviam, in the way),” which shares the root of
obvious. Thus, “[o]bviation is the effect of supplanting a conventional semi-
otic relation with an innovative and self-contained relation; it is the defini-
tive paradigm of semiotic transformation” (Wagner 1978: 31). Obviation
is therefore of the order of differentiation, and it makes the arbitrariness of
convention visible. In the interview Wagner gave in São Paulo, he described
obviation as follows:
66 Inventing culture
one; a fifth, that turns upside down the second one; and a sixth that
turns upside down the third one.… In other words, I think that Hegel
didn’t go far enough with the dialectic. He did not compound the dia-
lectic upon its own rationale, which is what obviation does. That is how
I would defend obviation in Hegelian terms. I am not a Hegelian. I think
that Hegel got it wrong because he thought that what he discovered
was the end of history. No. Karl Marx got into it then and it became the
beginning of another history, because what Karl Marx did with the dia-
lectic was to turn it on his head. I am not a Marxist and I am not really
a Hegelian. Obviation is the natural state of symbols. It is the condition
of symbolism. … [Symbols] lose characteristics, they simplify over time.
I think that’s the generic thing of all symbols, including myth. That it
obviates. It turns into some sort of negation of itself, and then a tran-
scendence of itself, which is what Hegel called Aufhebung or lifting up.
So, for Hegel the ultimate result of obviation would be some sort of sub-
limation turned into a different range of experience, a different dimen-
sion if you will. I don’t like to use the word dimension, but dimension
of experience. Obviation is the sequential version of metaphor. What
is metaphor extended? If you make a metaphor of metaphor, and you
make a metaphor of that metaphor and keep going, what do you get to?
You get to an obviation of the beginning.
(Wagner et al. 2011: 974–975)
One might question the idea that Aufhebung stands for the end in Hegel (cf.
e.g., Safatle 2016). This notwithstanding, to obviate is to transform through
metaphor, endlessly. Symbolization, which in structuralism is of the order
of culture, is thus attributed a natural component so that obviation can be
said to be “the natural state of symbols.” And the simplification of symbols
acquires transcendental status with obviation’s metaphorical sequence, in
which a trope is formed out of symbolic points of reference (Wagner 1986a).
If Wagner’s rereading of Hegel replaces sublation with reversibility, what
seems to remain of the Hegelian concept is the supposition that symmetry
is a condition for dialectical operation. In Wagner, symmetry is extended to
encompass a double, reversible triangulation. And to the extent that obvi-
ation functions through the self-encompassment of the frame, it is viewed as
the opposite of structuralism (Wagner 1986a: 131).
Wagner’s obviating reading of Hamlet in CA (Wagner 2010c: 110–112)
begins with the scene in which the main character, moved by the cer-
tainty that his uncle Claudius had killed his father, king of Elsinore, to
take his throne, decides to feign madness to make his father’s assassin-
ation public and question his uncle’s claim to the throne. This first course
of action should allow Hamlet to say the truth and obviate Claudius’s
intention. But on his way, Hamlet meets Polonius, father of his friend
Laertes and his beloved Ophelia, who tells him to be true to himself. In
Inventing culture 67
Wagner’s analysis, the contradiction between these two courses of action
(pretending to be mad and being true to himself) leads Hamlet to com-
promise or synthesize: He hires players to perform the assassination of
the king by his uncle, who is also the successor to the throne. The play,
to be performed to the court, should obviate Claudius’s intention to the
audience. Yet, it portrays a nephew who kills his uncle and thus obviates
Hamlet’s intentions. Hamlet enters his mother’s room and thinks he has
seen his uncle behind the curtains, stalking on him. He stabs him, only
to learn that Polonius was there. For Wagner, Hamlet’s assassination of
Polonius cancels out the substitution of sane Hamlet for insane Hamlet
as well as Polonius’s advice. Claudius takes the opportunity to organize
a duel between Laertes, now vengeful, and Hamlet. As a result, almost
everyone dies. Yet, at the end of the play Laertes realizes that his friend’s
actions were driven by the circumstances. He tells Hamlet to kill Claudius,
the king, which he does. In Wagner’s analysis, Laertes, “The Obvious,” is
considered the play’s hero for having understood that “the cause of the
effect is the effect of the cause.”
After such unorthodox reading of Hamlet, one is startled to read about
transparency in mythology: “a myth is always transparent to itself. Just
like real life, as it were” (Wagner 2010c: 113)—despite Wagner’s acknow-
ledgment that substitution is essential to obviation. In CA, Roy affirms that
“SUBSTITUTION was the first thing the human race ever knew” (Wagner
2010c: 106, author’s emphasis). Original substitution is said to have been
followed first by narrative sequence and then by synthesis: “the point of
closure in a myth—the punch line of a joke” (Wagner 2010c: 106, author’s
emphases). It is curious to note that even if substitution is assigned ori-
ginal character in this narrative—though this is an unstable and replaceable
origin—it is driven toward closure to the extent that narrative sequence is
followed by synthesis. Yet, this kind of closure does nothing to stop substitu-
tion; rather, it domesticates it through the fantasy of recurrence. This closure
is holographic in nature. Thence the statement that
68 Inventing culture
be transformed. Such reproduction is structured by fantasies of closure,
recurrence, perfect mimesis, transparency—a fantasy of symmetry against
displacement.
This is why Wagner is concerned with “symbols that stand for them-
selves”: In this idea, one finds perfect repetition, transparency, identity
despite substitution. Were one to posit a relation between the symbol and
an outward referent, no perfect substitution could ensue, as the relation
between language and referent, signifier and signified is always a conven-
tional and therefore unstable one. It summons the danger that it might
be transformed into iteration as imperfect repetition (Butler 1997). If
the Wagner of TIC and Habu recognizes that convention (and its inter-
play with invention) is necessary for symbolization, his later writings
seem to seek refuge in the emic as the place where substitution as per-
fect identity is possible. Obviation, a form of dialectic based on holog-
raphy, recursion, and reversal, halts the potential of displacement related
to substitution. According to Wagner, Hegel’s mistake was not to notice
that figure-ground reversal inverts synthesis upon itself, this being the
reason why he could not understand the reversible temporality of obvi-
ation, what he calls “past-in-its-own-future” and “future-in-its-own-past”
in CA. If, in Hegelian dialectic, synthesis is the moment at which closure
interrupts substitution—though Wagner’s reading is not shared by many
Hegelians—this would not be the case for Wagner, for whom “obviation
is a fractal, or scale-retentive feature, that is evident (made obvious) at
every point” (Wagner 2010c: 109). Obviation enables its actors to antici-
pate events because it is a kind of “future memory” in which “the cause
of the effect is the effect of the cause.” Holographic obviation is said to
cancel out the difference between past and future:
Inventing culture 69
operates through image, one needs to understand the role that image plays
in Wagner’s text. The next section argues that it is deeply related to his con-
ception of power.
70 Inventing culture
Although Wagner is compelled to recognize that the absence of such dis-
placement is impossible in anthropology (cf. e.g., TIC, COI, FP), an attempt
is made to overcome this by attributing the possibility of non-displacement
to ‘others.’ The emic gesture enables him to affirm that “[b]y holding images
in common, rather than the interpretation of images, Barok culture makes
the synthesizing power of its collective images into the power of culture
itself” (Wagner 1987: 57). The “collective images” of “Barok culture” are
thus opposed to the anthropologist’s necessarily partial interpretations. What
seems luring about these images is that they can do without the need for lan-
guage as rhetoric that is involved in interpretation and explanation. They
exert a totalizing power over description in that they cannot be challenged.
Image is “certain,” and this certainty arises from the identity it bears with all
its possible meanings. The continuity of “Barok culture” is said to depend on
such images, which synthesize its power. Yet, once again, no methodological
discussion as to how to access the indivisibility of meaning in image that is
guaranteed by the name ‘Barok’ is offered. In Wagner, power is related to the
search for absolute similarity with image, but image is not universalized—it
remains cultural.22
Wagner’s conception of power can be best understood through a consid-
eration of his opposition to the Marxist concept of ideology based on the
idea that ideologies, like images, are cultural:
Inventing culture 71
challenge the ‘Western’ discourse on power as related to the inequality of
forces or possibilities based on the idea that this seeming inequality is, in
‘holistic’ modes of symbolization, complementary. Gender relations and
the social position of the ‘big man’ in Melanesia are thus understood in
these terms (cf. AK, FP, Habu). Relativism, a consequence of the emic ges-
ture, leads to a ‘holistic’ conception of power as image in its Wagnerian
instantiation. It is therefore not a coincidence that Wagner’s theorization of
power has Castañeda as its main reference. With this in mind, let us see how
Wagner relates image and power ethnographically.
The transformation of power through image among ‘the Barok’ (a lolos)
has its most spontaneous form identified with the a tadak, described as
places and spirits whose form changes according to the circumstances. The
“essence” of the a tadak is said to lie not in a specific form but in the cap-
acity to change forms and names (Wagner 1986c: 99–100). Thus, utmost
power is the power of transformation, and it operates through images. Yet,
if its most conventionalized manifestations have a fixed named, Wagner
affirms that there is a difference between the tadak and its manifestations,
which is the difference between power and its actualization (and, one might
like to add, language and the world). Thus, the manifested tadak contains
the power of the tadak as potentiality but does not exhaust it. There seems
to be something of the order of the phantasmagoric in the tadak’s appar-
ition (pire wuo) to the extent that it refers to an overwhelming power that
it cannot contain but determines it. The tadak are described as jealous and
whimsical, devouring their victims (the members of the clan to which they
belong or, rather, which belongs to them) and compelling them to follow
their orders. They are also considered to lie at the origin of various anom-
alies. The supreme power of transformation of the image is, therefore, not
merely positive: The power of the a lolos is a force whose transformations
account for events such as artistic creativity and the anomalies of the “nat-
ural world.” They seem to operate according to the logic of the scape-
goat: By devouring their victims, they provisionally appease, through the
pire wuo, the impossibility of the a lolos to halt displacement.
In “Western civilization,” Wagner reserves the place from which it is pos-
sible to oppose convention to “great artists.” In their unpredictability and
creativity, they are said to come close to the transformations that image
operates among ‘the Barok.’ If in ‘the West,’ creativity is the masked pole
of dialectic (cf. TIC), among ‘the Barok’ it is most conscious. The emic ges-
ture, through which creativity at the level of culture (the ‘Barok’ tadak) is
opposed to creativity as exceptional (individual artists), reinforces, though
probably unwillingly, the dichotomy between individual and society
through its distinction of creative collectivities (‘non-Western’ par excel-
lence), among which one might find the tadak, and the genius, a sort of
possession that seems to take hold of extraordinary individual (‘Western’)
people. ‘The Barok’ are, in Wagner’s text, compared with artists such as
72 Inventing culture
Rilke, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo. An ethnonym is thus juxtaposed
with individual names even though individual ‘Barok’ also have names,
and individual ‘Westerners’ could have been generalized in an analo-
gous way. But they are not, as this is a frequent effect of the emic ges-
ture: It reduces ‘others’ to general names whereas those one understands
to occupy the place reserved to ‘us’ are particularized. Both kinds of names
are proper, but what is proper to them is of a different order. If innov-
ation through image is proper to ‘the Barok,’ then Shakespeare, Rilke, or
Michelangelo stand for innovations in relation to their ‘culture.’23 This is
the case although the ‘Western’ name that points to their singularity is a
family name, not the name of an individual. It seems that analogy is not as
symmetrical as texts such as TIC or COI propose.
As previously noted, Wagner criticizes Lévi-Strauss for approaching
totemism in terms of homology rather than analogy24 (cf. Wagner
1986c: 109–10). The establishment of homologies between the order of
names and the order of things is what Wagner calls ‘nominalism.’ He sees
it as problematic because it does not rest on the bond between names and
things; rather, the model built on homological relations opposes the order of
names to the order of things. From this perspective, the name is considered
to take part in the distancing of the model from the things it represents. It is
as if designation were not the effect of the relation between language and the
world but an obstacle to the immediate apprehension of “the world of phe-
nomena.” Or, rather, the question of the relationship between naming and
the world can be said to be irrelevant because in the symbolization of ‘others’
names and things are the same. Through the emic gesture, the possibility of
doing without language as mediation is posed—if ‘others’ can summon the
world without displacement as they speak, ‘we’ could learn from ‘them.’
The analogical mode of symbolization, after having been opposed to the
homological one, is thus ascribed to ‘others.’
In Wagner, the identity between two names (‘man’ and ‘cockatoo’) that
stand in a homological relation of representation with two things (a man and
a cockatoo) in Lévi-Strauss is to be substituted for the relationship between
two things via the similarities to which their names point in Wagner. What
remains unclear is why this “possibility coincides rather uniquely with the
name,” and one is therefore to conclude that the name “ ‘stands for’ the
possibility that it elicits” (Wagner 1986b: 14). Why does metaphor, i.e.,
the relation established between two signs through the similarity of their
referents, become self-reference in Wagner’s theory of analogy? This seems
to be related to his attempt to collapse possibility and actuality: “power
may be seen as identical with its own application” (Wagner 1986c: 121).
The only way in which a symbol can stand for itself is through the denial of
displacement in signification. If Lévi-Strauss (1987) grounds the possibility
of structure in the excess of signification that is contained in the floating sig-
nifier, Wagner wishes to halt displacement by attributing to ‘others’ a mode
Inventing culture 73
of symbolization in which names are the same as their referents (hence his
defense of the non-partibility of meaning). His “structuralism without struc-
ture25” (Wagner 1986b: 9) seeks to confine substitution, supplementation,
and débordement to ‘Western’ signification by attributing to ‘others’ a mode
of symbolization in which the power of image makes it possible for there
not to be any distinction between language and the world. Thus, names
come to be ‘symbols that stand for themselves’ and in so doing stand for the
world—a world of things that are “too definite for words” (Wagner 1986b).
For Wagner, homology is not completely inadequate but reductive.
And if one reads him carefully, one notices that this is not only because he
understands the relation between homology and the world to be insufficient.
It is also the case that analogy is related to power among ‘the Barok’:
Thus, analogy bears an intimate relation with power both ‘in the world view
of the Barok’ described by Wagner (1986c: 121) and in his theorization of
language and metaphor. One of the most important ways in which power, as
a lolos (potentiality) and iri lolos (manifested power), can be incorporated is
said to be through the ‘Barok’ kastam, the pidgin word that derives from the
English ‘custom.’ Kastam is, according to Wagner, the broader category that
elicits important relations ‘among the Barok’: Kin relations; the centrality
of non-verbal image; the rituals carried out in the men’s house. Yet, kastam
is not only related to ‘Barok’ “cultural reproduction” (Wagner 1991c); it
is a loan word from English, just like meaning, another word said to be
pervaded with power. Wagner affirms that these two English loan words
have the power of fixing ‘Barok culture,’ for their referents have “the ability
to elicit the essential cultural meanings in people” (Wagner 1987: 57). How
is this related to the place of convention attributed by Wagner to ‘the Barok’?
What is the language in which one can speak of kastam and meaning? Is it
even possible to assign fixity to transliteration?
In the excerpt quoted above, power is juxtaposed with origin and said
to be “the basis of identity.” But identity cannot be clearly stated, for its
“essence” is “unglossable.” The tadak is the source of power and as such
cannot be named, for whoever names it, loses it. The search for power
as essence implies that one should focus on self-contained image, not in
the displacement of language. This is why Wagner’s theory of language is
74 Inventing culture
ultimately non-linguistic: His is an attempt to evade language and reach the
power that inheres in images. And yet, he cannot do so without the emic
gesture, which allows him to ascribe to ‘others’ the possibility of articu-
lating a critique of the ‘Western’ perspective on the relationship between
language and the world. The emic gesture allows him to dodge the meth-
odological question of how to access the perspective of ‘others’ (Vigh &
Sausdal 2014). If Kant and others see in ‘others’ the impossibility of reason
(cf. Spivak 1999; Morris 2017), Wagner attributes to ‘them’ the possibility
of overcoming one’s perspective of the world. It is not a coincidence that the
analogical mode, through which one could presumably attain a perspective
in which language and things coincide, is said to be self-referential and self-
contained: It is achieved by oneself and for oneself (or one’s ‘culture’), albeit
in the name of ‘others.’
Notes
1 Though cf. Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: 88–90).
2 Cf. chapter 2 for an overview of the argument developed in TIC.
3 Victor Turner (1967) is presented as a source of inspiration for Habu and
Asiwinarong, especially as far as Wagner’s understanding of ritual and theoriza-
tion of image are concerned. Turner’s theory of image resonates with Wagner’s
fieldwork among ‘the Barok’ to the extent that the latter told him that the
meaning of their public feasts is contained in images and cannot be satisfactorily
put into words (Wagner 1989), which leads to the idea that images must be
experienced to be understood.
4 Wagner’s humorous remark that “exponents of the culture concept” and
“radical phenomenologists” can intermarry despite their conceptual divergences
(1977b: 389) further resonates with the interbreeding/miscegenation metaphor.
5 On the entanglement of anthropological (and philosophical) discourse with
commonsense through metaphor, cf. chapter 6.
6 On Wagner’s relation with symbolic anthropology, cf. Gonçalves (2010).
7 One is reminded of Sahlins’s (1985) discussion of the relation between structure
and event here.
8 In STSFT, one consequence thereof is said to be that structuralism does not take
the dimension of the body, and of embodiment, into account, and as a result
produces an explication of culture that is abstract rather than concrete (Wagner
1986a: 129, 131).
9 For a discussion of gender in Melanesia from a perspective grounded in the emic
gesture that nonetheless engages with feminist theory, cf. Strathern (1988).
10 For a reflection on the conditions of possibility of the neuter, cf. Barthes (2002).
11 Wagner’s conception of analogy and homology does not seem to correspond to
the definition these concepts have in biology, where analogous structures have
a common function but different origins (e.g., bird wings and insect wings) and
homologous structures have a common origin and similar development, but pos-
sibly distinct functions (e.g., bat wings and bird wings; bat wings and human
arms). I thank Fabiola Corbucci for this information. Wagner’s view of hom-
ology seems to draw on Spengler’s (1926: 111–112).
Inventing culture 75
12 Spengler’s influence is also to be felt in Wagner’s take on the nature-culture
divide to the extent that Wagner’s ideas of masking and control seem to repli-
cate Spengler’s affirmation that “Nature is a function of the particular Culture”
(Spengler 1926: 169).
13 For an account of the dialectic of invention and convention based on an ethnog-
raphy of ‘Daribi’ mediumship, cf. Wagner (1977e).
14 The closer he comes to this is when he compares the work of metaphorization
to that of dialogue in Habu (Wagner 1972a: 8). Wagner attended my presenta-
tion of a paper on the relation between dialogue and dialectic in his work at the
conference of the American Anthropological Association held in New Orleans in
2010. He made no objections to what I presented on the subject.
15 Crook and Shaffner (2011) seem to share this reading.
16 On this subject, cf. Mamdani (1996) and Stocking (1991).
17 Asiwinarong was published in 1986 and is based on Wagner’s field research
‘among the Usen Barok’ from July 1979 to March 1980 as well as from June to
July 1983.
18 My purpose here is to illuminate Wagner’s dialectic through a brief comparison
with Plato, which seems especially interesting as his concept of dialectic also
supposes the dialogical form. In Aristotle, also cited by Wagner, dialectic can
do without actual dialogue because it operates through syllogism. For a philo-
sophical discussion of the relation between dialectic and dialogue, cf. Maranhao
(1990).
19 As far as humor is concerned, one central reference is the work of Castañeda,
itself structured on Carlos’s dialogues with Don Juan and his comic double, Don
Genaro.
20 The double discussed in Coyote Anthropology and the relationship between Roy
and Coyote might be understood in terms of Kelly’s (2001) Self-Other composite
elements.
21 Though cf. Wagner (1972b, especially introduction) for a less critical take on
representation.
22 This remains largely the case even in STSFT’s attempt to generalize Wagner’s
theory of metaphor to encompass “human symbolization” and “the cosmos.”
23 Cf. also Wagner (1986a, chapter 2) for a discussion of symbolization in art and
ordinary perception.
24 Cf. Sztutman (2009) for a critical appreciation of Descola’s critique of totemism
in Lévi-Strauss.
25 I tend to agree with Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: 286) on “what Wagner’s
theory of obviation … boil[s] down to: a sort of hyperstructuralism, on which
everything is treated as if it belonged to a single yet endlessly self- differentiating
totality.”
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[I]n the Essai sur le don, Mauss strives to reconstruct a whole out of
parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mix-
ture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his
account. This quantity is hau.
Are we not dealing with mystification, an effect quite often produced
in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous people? Not, of course,
by ‘indigenous people’ in general, since no such beings exist, but by
a given indigenous group. … In the case in point, instead of applying
his principles consistently from start to finish, Mauss discards them in
favour of a New Zealand theory—one which is immensely valuable as
an ethnological document; yet it is nothing other than a theory. The
fact that Maori sages were the first people to pose certain problems
and to resolve them in an infinitely interesting but strikingly unsatis-
factory manner does not oblige us to bow to their interpretation. Hau
is not the ultimate explanation for exchange; it is the conscious form
whereby men of a given society, in which the problem had particular
importance, apprehended an unconscious necessity whose explanation
lies elsewhere.
(Lévi-Strauss 1987: 47–48)
Lévi-Strauss not only embraces the concept of ‘group’ which Wagner seeks
to deconstruct; he also calls the procedure through which Mauss attempts to
ground his theory in Maori conceptualization a “mystifying” one. In order for
anthropology to take place, “indigenous conception” must, for Lévi-Strauss,
be “isolated, it must be reduced by an objective critique so as to reach the
underlying reality” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 48–49), a reality that is to be found
“in unconscious mental structures to which institutions give us access, but a
better chance yet, in language” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 49). There is a distance
between Wagner’s appropriation of Lévi-Strauss and the latter’s take on the
[I]t is this “native” mode of making society … that compels our interest
here. The understanding of this creativity per se is the only ethical and
theoretical alternative to those patronizing efforts that would “civilize”
other peoples by making over the remains of their own creative efforts
into hypothetical groups, grammars, logics, and economies.
(Wagner 1974: 102–103, author’s emphases)
Understanding the creativity of ‘others’ is, thus, the only “ethical and the-
oretical” alternative for anthropology. And as the following passage of TIC
makes clear, this endeavor supposes a ‘Western’ anthropologist: “I hoped
to invent the Daribi people for my colleagues and countrymen, much as
we have invented our own culture through the very same kind of cre-
ativity” (Wagner 1981: 24). The vector of anthropological production is
clear: ‘Western’ anthropologists write about ‘other’ (“native”) people for
‘Western’ people. One effect of this is that the anthropological production
of those designated as ‘others’ is consistently framed as not quite anthro-
pology in the ‘Western’ sense—Wagner’s understanding of the contribution
of “Francis Bugotu, a native of the Solomon Islands” (Wagner 1981: 26) as
Even though one does not “start out” with groups, since these are never
deliberately organized but only elicited through the use of names, one
always ends up with specific bunches of people as be’ bidi and pagebidi.
It is an “automatic society,” one that suddenly appears in concrete form
wherever the right distinctions are made.
(Wagner 1974: 111)
“Contact”
ATSG’s last section narrates the astonishment of colonial administrators at
the dispersion of local villages upon their arrival in Karimui. Wagner affirms
that they reacted to this situation by creating groups, which included the
choice of local leaders to conduct the village census. As people designated
by the same name were clustered around these leaders, a fixed boundary was
created between groups based on an initial designation that was, according to
Wagner, supplied by local people themselves. Administrators are said to have
“let the boundaries of the group take care of themselves” (Wagner 1974: 112)
because otherwise they would have to deal with the contradictions of local
designations. As previously argued, these contradictions were related to the
fact that groups were circumstantially elicited from names, as no groups were
consciously formed in a fixed way. The practical effect of this was, according
to Wagner’s narrative, the substitution of the longhouses (be’bidi), in which
many people used to live, with “nucleated villages.” Wagner states that most
people never went back to their former longhouses, although “a few stragglers
were living in the traditional pattern as late as 1969” (Wagner 1974: 113).
Only one picture of a “nucleated village” is displayed by Wagner (1974: 114),
but pictures and sketches of the two-story sigibe’ are found in many of his
texts (Wagner 1967: 18, 1972a: 122, 1974: 113, 1978: frontispiece). They
are frequently followed by a key informing that men used to live upstairs and
women, downstairs. This is not a gratuitous observation, as the fluidity of
group formation seems to stumble on gender distinction, the leitmotif of at
least three of Wagner’s ethnographies on ‘the Daribi’: TCS, Habu, and LS.12
The picture of the sigibe’ is followed, in ATSG, by a picture of the village
of Kurube in 1964, with clustered houses “falling into disrepair.” This second
picture, if compared with the first one, evokes in the reader a lament for invol-
untary cultural transformation. In the picture of the sigibe’, the “traditional
pattern” is pictured from a short distance, and one can see people in daily
activity on the upper level of the house. The picture of the nucleated village
built by the administration displays a line of decadent houses seen from afar,
in nostalgic focus. People are absent from it, though it would have been pos-
sible to picture the inhabitants of these houses in their daily activities, which
This might have been the case from the perspective of the (‘white’) explorer,
though many people inhabited the region at the time. A description of the
way in which people in Karimui tried to make sense of the differences
between the ‘Europeans’ they knew appears in TIC:
[T]his situation results from the fact that mission ideology bears a
unique innovative relationship to Daribi culture (when it is understood,
or interpreted, at all); the contrasts presented are simply too great to
permit any consistent metaphorization in terms analogous to native reli-
gion, and the “message” of the missions is not perceived to be in conflict
with the latter.
In spite of this, at times religious usage has been a difficult matter to
discuss with the Daribi. Although Daribi religious conceptualization is
largely impervious to the influences of western ideology, their religious
practices have sometimes been the target of mission (or other outside)
condemnation.
(Wagner 1972a: 13)
What we have been looking at, and writing and thinking about as
though it were a symbology, something that goes on ‘inside the native’s
head’, is actually the Melanesians capacity to explain things. If this also
includes (because we ask them) explaining themselves as well, their
turn at this becomes inevitably confused with the rhetoric we use to
decipher it, and what we, in our turn, want to explain back to them.
Yet if explaining things is usually, and courteously, done for the benefit
of the other person, the likelihood of a ‘working misunderstanding’ is
nearly impossible to avoid. It becomes its own automatic ‘structuring’ of
the supposedly ‘mental’ encounter between different cultures, one that is
‘reciprocal’ by virtue of pure courtesy alone.
(Wagner 1998: 62)
References
CLAY, Brenda. 1977. Pinikindu: Maternal Nurture, Paternal Substance.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
GELL, Alfred. 1987. Review of Asiwinarong. Man, 22(3): 589–591.
KOFES, Suely. 2010. O segredo como fato, o fato como segredo [The Secret as Fact,
the Fact as Secret]. Cadernos de Campo, 19: 231–236.
LEENHARDT, Maurice. 1979. Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian
World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. 1964 [1962]. Totemism. London: Merlin Press.
Is the big man [the great man’s] equivalent in another kind of society,
a more open, competitive and loosely organised one? Or is this type-
casting of the big man itself the error of another way of approaching
society, and therefore not a typological contrast at all?
(Wagner 1991: 161)
No justification is given for considering the big man an error above. Based
on Wagner’s argumentation elsewhere, one might guess this is so because
such a description is of the order of the ‘how’ and not of the ‘why.’ The
description of other orders of how is never exposed as error; rather, it
serves as a counterpoint to ‘our’ (i.e., Wagner’s) order of ‘how’ in order
to achieve what is understood to be the ‘why.’2 The big man is said to be
characteristic of “more open, competitive and loosely organized” soci-
eties, i.e., ‘Western’ ones. The supposition underlying this idea, if one
applies to it Wagner’s dialectical thinking, is that ‘other’ societies are more
closed, egalitarian, and rigidly organized. As a consequence of this oppos-
ition, social borders in Melanesia are hardened—at least among some
‘Melanesians,’ the only ones with which Wagner’s reflection is concerned.
One falls into the trap that was set by the very question one asks: In
subscribing to the emic gesture with the purpose of reaching the ‘why,’
Wagner needs to posit comparison with “another kind of society.” In so
doing, he is forced to let go of the holistic view of the world and to
attribute it to a totalized segment of the whole. Interestingly, the justifica-
tion for his approach, itself dependent on the name ‘Melanesian,’ will be
sought in ‘Daribi’ naming.
Two persons, or a person and a thing, that share a name are tedeli
nogi poai, ‘one name congruent’. … Anything designatable by a word
stands in a poai relation through any conceivable point of resemblance.
Furthermore any two persons or objects that each share any conceivable
point of resemblance with a third, are related as poai through that third.
Currency
It is no coincidence that Wagner engages with the concept of currency in
his critique of representation.4 Currency, “money that demands accounting
in terms of singularity and plurality,” is said to be a “non-fractal impos-
ition upon a regime of exchange based on sectionings taken from human
productivity and reproductivity.” By this, he means that elements such as
pigs, axes, and shells are “already relational and implicated in the congru-
ence that underlies the remaking of human form, feeling and relationship”
(Wagner 1991: 165) and thus differ from capitalist production, in which
money is “mere plurality.” In continuity with Wagner’s critique of cap-
italism, in which he affirms that quantity should be replaced by meaning
(Wagner 1986a: 119), ‘Melanesian’ exchange is portrayed as congruent and
reciprocal, and the reciprocity of “integral relationship” is opposed to that
of currency. Here, the literalization attributed to currency seems to threaten
metaphorization. Money is said to be an imposition on ‘Melanesian’ con-
ceptualization, not because it is abstract but because it engages with singu-
larity and plurality while ‘Melanesian’ life is pictured as fractal.
But why could money not be conceptualized by ‘Melanesians’ from the
perspective of fractality if authors such as Sahlins (1985) claim that local
cosmologies do assimilate elements introduced by ‘contact’ with ‘the West’?
It seems that this is because Wagner’s approach at this point is more nos-
talgic than it is historical.5 After all, if the introduction of currency entails
various social, political, cultural, and subjective transformations, such
changes can only be described through historical analysis. Yet, Wagner
states that sectionings are related to human productivity and reproduct-
ivity in the ‘Melanesian’ regime of exchange, something money cannot
do. But does not money relate everything in that it enables all things to
have their exchange value abstracted from their use value (Marx 1976)?
The problem seems to be, rather, that money, understood as a non-fractal
abstraction, was not available before ‘contact.’ And its abstraction sections
the “essential” connection between the name and the thing it names because
money is of the order of representation, i.e., homology. FP wishes to keep
‘Melanesians’ away from such contagion, for it seems that, in their inclin-
ation to relate to everything, they could end up in relation with anything,
including ‘the West.’
In Asiwinarong, Wagner’s perspective on the co-existence of ‘traditional’
currency and money is not as critical:
Thus, for Wagner, meanings that arise from elicitation cannot have parts.
Meaning is total, and so are the different parts into which one can try
to divide it, for fractality and holography depend on the idea of infinite
self-replication. But why is the affirmation that meaning cannot be divided
so necessary? Wagner’s critique of Gell7 goes in the same direction, as for
him the problem seems to be that Gell dissociates “condensed images into
linear oppositions and categories” (Wagner 1992: 206). As an alterna-
tive to the partition of meaning, Wagner proposes to retain scale through
image. And what guarantees his advocacy of the non-division of the image
in smaller parts is “the indigenous experience of the ritual as a concrete,
imagistic power” (Wagner 1992: 207). As the emic gesture guarantees that
the origin of power is the whole, the relation of power with violence can
be interrupted.
If the whole is one, when divided, it can only be segmented into holograms
of itself. Totality precedes partition. However, in order to accept such a sup-
position, one would have to do without the poles of Wagnerian dialectic,
i.e., the various names for ‘oneself’ and ‘others,’ or else subsume them as
instantiations of the whole. Ultimately, it would be necessary to do without
difference—a difficult choice for anthropology. What remains to be asked
is how “Law” and the “Cosmos,” which are said to organize thought, have
come to allow dissemination. Derrida (1991) offers a provocative response
to this question: Every possibility of transgression is contained in the law;
for law simultaneously claims the prohibitions it inaugurates. This is to say
that every iteration brings with itself the possibility of subversion. It seems
that the anthropology of holography/fractality is an effort to iterate the
order of the cosmos in the modality of integral reproduction; but reproduc-
tion risks transformation at every iteration. Wagner insists on permanence:
Tautology, the moment in which one does without both justification and
displacement, is presented above as a possible substitute for analysis.
Wagnerian dialectic may do without synthesis because tautology does not
need it. The circularity of this way of thinking establishes boundaries in
exchange for the guarantee that is offered by the replication of the one.
Holography, in its conceptual totalization of the world, transforms the
problem of opposition into the reiteration of complementarity.8 The article’s
conclusion is emblematic: “the task of the great man, then, would not be one
of upscaling individuals to aggregate groupings but of keeping a scale that is
person and aggregate at once, solidifying a totality into happening” (Wagner
1991: 172). This keeping of scale is presented as immanent in the same way
as Louis Dumont’s holistic view of the Hindu caste system—Wagner speaks
of the “fractality of Brahmanic unity,” which makes one wonder whether he
would also construe caste as a non-violent instance of fractality.
Fractality and holography seem to fall short of the idea of invention put
forth in TIC. How is it possible for the dialectic of invention and conven-
tion to operate if any and all event is a fractal replication of the “cloth of
universal congruence”? In other words, what is the place of difference and
differentiation in holography and fractality? Paradoxically, the radical claim
that one should focus on the conceptualization of ‘others’ put forth by the
anthropology of fractality and holography ends up establishing the preva-
lence of alterity at the expense of an understanding of processes of differen-
tiation. This poses the following question: How is it possible to reconcile the
attempt to question the epistemological bases of anthropology through an
engagement with difference (in TIC, necessarily dialectical) and the defense
of fractality as a universal form that nonetheless depends on the name of
‘others’? The idea that the social is immanent, and therefore does not need to
be explained, points to the absence of transformation in the historical sense of
the term (cf. Comaroff & Comaroff 1992). If fractality depends on a gesture
that circumscribes difference through the names of ‘others,’ the emic gesture
vouches for replication in the mode of self-reproduction. In replicating the
same at the expense of opening the closure of totalization so that difference
within difference might be disseminated, it stops the flow of unimagined and
unnameable possibilities that might be contained in iteration.
References
ALTHUSSER, Louis. 2001. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
Towards an Investigation).” In: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
New York: Monthly Review Press.
BUTLER, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York:
Routledge.
CLIFFORD, James & MARCUS, George. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
COMAROFF, Jean & COMAROFF, John. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical
Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
DERRIDA, Jacques. 1976 [1967]. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
———. 1978 [1967]. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.
———. 1981 [1972]. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1982 [1972]. “Différance.” In: Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
6 On metaphor
On metaphor 119
of names as self-identical identities, Wagner’s theory of metaphor depends
on the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical.1 And, as has
been argued for fractality (cf. chapter 5), it prioritizes (self-)identity at the
expense of difference.
In Wagner, analogy is proposed as a substitute for the idea of homology
(partition between the symbol and the thing it symbolizes, signifier and
signified, the parallelism of the structuralist series of oppositions).2 And if
trope, analogical par excellence, is the element through which symboliza-
tion operates, it does have a paradoxical character due to the impossibility
of its ever being fully glossed. Since Habu, Wagner is concerned with the
expansion of tropes, a process he calls “metaphorization.” In STSFT, sym-
bolization is conceived in holographic terms, and obviation for the most
part replaces metaphorization. As this chapter argues, the potential for dis-
semination contained in Wagner’s theory of metaphor in Habu is undone
in STSFT by his insistence on holography as the closure of the trope upon
itself. Indeed, the idea of ‘symbols that stand for themselves’ implies that
symbolization can either produce its own ground or do without it. If struc-
turalism is concerned with the question of how to ground structure, Wagner
intends to elide it in his theory of symbolization by claiming that symbols
are grounded in the image that refers back to itself. It is in this sense that
Wagner departs from Saussure and Peirce, as representation, in Wagner’s
framework, does not necessitate a symbol that represents something other
than itself. Yet, in proposing an alternative theory of metaphor, Wagner
does not take into account that “[c]oncept is a metaphor, foundation is a
metaphor, theory is a metaphor; and there is no meta-metaphor for them”
(Derrida 1974: 23). How can theory claim to state what metaphor is while
ignoring the metaphorical character of its own positionality?
Obviation, a methodology for analyzing symbolization as transform-
ation, substitution, recurrence, and reversibility, purports to be the expres-
sion of holography in its processual recursiveness, as a series of metaphors
that replace each other ad infinitum. In Wagner, the expansion of tropes
occurs through a process of obviation, in which meaning is carried out in the
process of its exhaustion or condensation.3 Wagner (1986a; Wagner et al.
2011) writes of a process of simplification in which image is reduced to its
essential, originary dimensions. Given his interest in Spengler’s (1926) The
Decline of the West, with which he engages at least since TIC (e.g., Wagner
1981: 90), one might suppose a parallel between his notion of condensa-
tion or symbolic simplification—which he sometimes presents as an alter-
native to Hegel’s Aufhebung or sublation—and the notion of Untergang, or
decline, as articulated by Spengler in his claim that civilization is the state of
decay that awaits all cultures. Spengler resorts to the extension of symbols
as a mode of analysis, and so does Wagner.
Wagner’s idea of a ‘symbol that stands for itself’ echoes Spengler’s symbols
as “things actualized” (Spengler 1926: 165). Wagner’s analysis of the history
of ‘the West’ in terms of ‘epoch’ (Wagner 1986a, chapter 5) also reminds one
120 On metaphor
of Spengler’s, for whom ‘epoch’ is related to the rise and fall of empires. Yet,
if Wagner draws on Spengler in his theory of symbolization as extension,
the systematization of the procedure he calls obviation is Wagner’s own.
Although obviation is understood as dialectics without synthesis, it bears
certain similarities to Hegel’s sublation, especially as far as the understanding
of metaphorization as a “movement of idealization” is concerned. And it is
this ideational movement, based on “an opposition genealogically linked to
that between physis and its opposites,” that guarantees “the possibility of
metaphysics” (Derrida 1974: 25). It is thus not a coincidence that the core
metaphors in Wagner’s account of ‘Daribi’ metaphorization revolve around
life, reproduction, and the inevitability of death.
According to STSFT, human perception functions through the unified
and coherent apprehension of meaning, in its physical, mental, and cultural
dimensions. This understanding of meaning gives way to a positive view of
power as connected to perception and cognition. Excluded from this con-
ception of power are the forces of social and political inequality and his-
tory as constitutive elements. In STSFT, power is theorized as image framed
through the emic gesture. Undergirding Wagner’s understanding of image
and trope as holographic power is his supposition that meaning is at once
coherent and indivisible. Holography is what enables Wagner to affirm the
self-referentiality of metaphor. It is also by way of holography that Wagner
asserts that meaning is “not a free-floating intangible” because it is bounded
by culturally mediated parameters (Wagner 1986a: ix). Wagner resorts to
‘culture,’ in an instantiation of the emic gesture, as that which might be
able to halt the displacement and dissemination of the floating element
of signification. However, as Wagner argues in STSFT, meaning does not
simply reproduce cultural convention; a process of mediation takes place.
Furthermore, while meaning is related to contingent cultural forms, it is not
exhausted by them. This is because, in Wagner, meaning functions through
obviation. And obviation is marked by both closure and substitution.
The closure of the emic gesture and that of metaphor at a cosmic level
depend on the affirmation of a metaphysical foundation for oppositions
such as ‘Western’ versus ‘Melanesian,’ ‘literal’ versus ‘metaphorical,’ ‘micro-
cosm’ versus ‘macrocosm.’ Both of these closing gestures by Wagner are
conditioned by a denial that naming depends on differential tracing, in which
the trace marks difference as it withdraws. And the consequence of recog-
nizing the trace as withdrawal is that “one can no longer submit withdrawal/
redrawing to the instance of an ontological copula whose very possibility
it conditions” (Derrida 2007: 77). Which is to say that self-referentiality,
as closure, becomes impossible because any ontological statement must be
brought under erasure. Wagner shares a critique of the concept of sign with
Derrida.4 Yet, they arrive at different conclusions. The difference resides in
Wagner’s presentist concern and emphasis on closure and recursiveness at
the expense of the potential of dissemination that is contained in his earlier
theory of metaphor proposed in Habu. For the Wagner of STSFT, semiotics
On metaphor 121
is a science of the ordering of signs, for which “meaning is an effect of signs”
(1986a: ix–x). Wagner considers that semiotics, being totally grounded in
convention, ignores the work of invention he theorizes in TIC. Despite the
fact that both Wagner and Derrida criticize the sign, invention and dissem-
ination are clearly not the same, for invention supposes a dialectical relation
with (named) convention.
In his theorization of the elicitation of meaning through trope, Wagner
turns away from structural approaches because for him they merely stitch
together metaphors, absorb them into conventional cultural meaning, and
thus ignore invention. In STSFT, he proposes to start from trope, rather than
convention, as a means of grasping the work of invention (as obviation).
Trope, and not convention or structure, is positioned as the organizing prin-
ciple of meaning. Thus, invention is necessarily connected to the production
of meaning through trope.5 How can one show how meaning and inven-
tion are the effect of tropes if one cannot fully gloss the meaning of a spe-
cific trope because images cannot be fully exhausted by language? Wagner
attends to this paradox through the analysis of what he calls “core symbols”
in ‘Papua New Guinea’ and ‘Western history.’ Tropes, he insists, ultimately
produce their own conditions of possibility by collapsing into themselves
and thus organize the cultural frames with which they bear a dialectical
relation (Wagner 1986a: xi). The trope is equated with ‘the whole,’ ‘cultural
construction,’ the larger frame (Wagner 1986a: 30). And this equivalence
makes it a foundation of Wagner’s theory of meaning. Thus, the closure
that one finds in the emic gesture is replicated in the tropes that become
intelligible through it. And it seems that nowhere is the role of closure and
self-referentiality theorized by Wagner more robustly than in STSFT. Yet,
if the metaphorical is inevitable even as one speaks of metaphor, Wagner’s
elaborations on trope must be understood as a metaphor of metaphor, which
is the case with any metadiscourse on metaphor (Derrida 2007). One might
wish to give this metaphor of metaphor the name of ‘totalization.’
Wagner insists on the holographic character of obviation, a “recursive
processual form,” “a series of substitutive metaphors” (Wagner 1986a: xi)
through which trope is said to retain its properties. Holography involves
condensation through the correspondence between point metaphor and
frame metaphor (Wagner 1986a: 51). Through holography, Wagner posits
the recursive character of transformation in order to theorize substitution
while gesturing toward the totalization that closure implies. As this chapter
argues, this is the result of his commitment to closure beyond the emic
gesture: The elicitation of verbal metaphors through trope that happens
in interpretation (Wagner 1986a: 51), be it at the level of the emic, of the
human, or of the cosmos. Obviation is usually applied to make sense of
myth and ritual in his analyses. Because trope is to be demonstrated at the
level of human symbolization, Wagner focuses on both ‘Daribi’ myths and
rituals (cf. Wagner 1986a, chapters 3 and 4) and symbolization in ‘Western
history’ (cf. Wagner 1986a, chapter 6). Closure is, thus, attributed to both
122 On metaphor
the pole of otherness that grounds his analytic invention and the pole that
is marked by ipseity. In obviation, no matter where or when, tropes are said
to expand until they reach “the paradox of self-encompassment” (Wagner
1986a: 54). By expanding, tropes are realized through closure and exhaus-
tion. But if “meaning is constituted in the limen between word and full,
perceptual image” (Wagner 1986a: xi), it is not possible to fully account
for it—Wagner speaks of a “parallax of meaning” (Wagner 1986a: xii), that
which happens in-between perception and realization. What kind of closure
is possible if one dwells on liminality?
On metaphor 123
the trope or metaphor, understood as a symbol that refers to, and therefore
stands for, itself (Wagner 1986a: 4). Metaphor is said to be relative to a cul-
ture, whereas cultures are relative to one another. And relativity, here, is to be
understood as self-referentiality. If metaphor is self-referential, and meaning
depends on trope, meaning depends on closure. The symbol that stands for
itself is opposed to the sign in its self-referentiality, self-motivation, and
self-assimilation. It mediates between the microcosm of convention and the
macrocosm of image (Wagner 1986a: 31) through what Wagner calls “mys-
tical prescience” (Wagner 1986a: 57). Thus, the habu ritual, understood
as figure-ground reversal, or the metaphor of a metaphor, is said to create
a metaphor of relationship as it mediates between convention and image
(cf. Wagner 1986a, chapter 4). The holographic character of this mediation
supposes a holistic understanding of the relationship between human sym-
bolization and the cosmos (cf. Wagner 1986a, conclusion). Thus, the total-
ization based on which self-referentiality can be attributed to symbols might
ultimately be called universal in the sense that it stems from the universe
as cosmos—here, too, Spengler (1926, chapter 5) seems to be an important
reference. And it is self-encompassment that attempts to halt the work of
displacement that is posed by the sign. In doing without referentiality, and
thus the possibility of literality, Wagner attempts to make meaning equiva-
lent with metaphor as non-glossable image. Yet, one is reminded by Derrida
(1974) that this depends on a strict differentiation between the literal and
the metaphorical which no text can uphold. For in order to theorize meta-
phor, the border between the literal and the metaphorical is blurred. The
conceptualization of metaphor, as a metaphor of metaphor, remains “quasi-
metaphorical” (Derrida 2007: 66).
Wagner’s theory of metaphor rejects the exchange of value but not com-
parison and substitution. A metaphor or trope is said to operate through
analogy in that it equates and replaces points of reference at the conven-
tional level (Wagner 1986a: 6). Invention is derived from the metaphor-
ical meaning that is created out of the superposition of two conventionally
distinct points of reference; yet, the meaning that results therefrom is not
previously given: It is up to the interpreter to make sense of the product of
this substitution qua equation, not exchange. For if meaning has no value,
comparison and substitution can happen between any symbols. And if, in
Wagner’s theorization of metaphor, content is coincident with intent, ana-
logy is not inseparable from perception.
According to TIC, intent is determined not by interest, but by culture. Yet,
as is the case when Wagner claims that one should resort to the emic in order
to make room for the creativity of ‘others’ in anthropological accounts, no
theorization and/or methodology is offered as to how one might access the
intent of analogy. Unless one supposes that all symbolization happens from
the same (human) perspective, which cannot be the case given that Wagner
does not do without cultural difference, it is necessary to ask oneself how
one might access the intention of both symbolizer and interpreter. Wagner
124 On metaphor
does not provide us with a method for that, neither could he. Instead, he
postulates a relation of mimetic holography between human symboliza-
tion, the human body, and the cosmos (cf. especially Wagner 1986a, con-
clusion). If, in TIC, motivation is of a cultural character, in STSFT culture
seems to instantiate cosmic intention. The question of how to access cosmic
intention, in case one concedes there might be one, remains, of course, also
unanswered.
For Wagner, metaphor, as figuration, does not point at things. Rather,
what it does is to set “pointers or reference points into a relation with one
another,” a relation which innovates upon convention as “the original order
of reference” (Wagner 1986a: 6). But because metaphor is not literal, that is,
it does not bear a relation of homology with any referent, it cannot refer to
anything except for the point of reference with which it is analogous. Thus,
it can do without referentiality. This kind of affirmation bears a relation of
continuity with Wagner’s theorization of homology versus analogy in COI
(cf. chapter 3). STSFT goes a step further to make the claim that lack of
referentiality is, in the analogical mode, the embodiment, or imaging, of the
object. Not only is the non-existent object embodied, but also image and
body coincide with one another in Wagner’s theorization of trope. Just as
one asks how this might be possible, Wagner offers up a response: “When
we speak of things that do not have conventional referents, then our manner
of speaking must itself become the referent” (Wagner 1986a: 6). This effects
the equivalence between being and reference, for as figurative constructions
impinge upon convention, assimilated to the realm of reference, they sub-
vert reference through “autistic” symbolization: As ‘symbols that stand for
themselves.’ Wagner warns us that self-containment can only be relative
(Wagner 1986a: 6). Yet, even though he concedes that the relation between
figuration and literality is necessarily porous, STSFT nonetheless carries out
an investigation of symbolization as if symbols could stand for themselves.6
This seems to be the case because his theorization of embodiment as image
attempts to do without language in the linguistic sense even though it dwells
on metaphor. Language as linguistic is replaced by language as indistin-
guishable from things.
Wagner’s main theoretical adversary in STSFT is structuralism and its
system of oppositions. Though he shares structuralism’s concern for univer-
sality, Wagner’s interest in invention, as opposed to convention, leads him to
affirm that “[c]ulture is but analogy based on (and subversive to) other ana-
logies, not in a tension of rigid oppositions or categories, but a mobile range
of transformations worked up a conventional core” (Wagner 1986a: 7),
a definition not unlike his take on metaphorization in Habu. Despite
doing away with the system of oppositions that grounds the structuralist
approach, Wagner nonetheless relies on its units of analysis: ‘cultures.’ If, in
STSFT, the “Western core symbol” is analyzed alongside the core symbol of
“New Guinea,” one cannot do without the border constituted by the emic
gesture, that separates ‘Westerners’ from ‘New Guineans.’ Why is Wagner’s
On metaphor 125
conception of symbolization, if considered at a human, or at times cosmic,
level, not capable of subverting the borders of conventional opposition
between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in empirical analysis? Why is the process of obvi-
ation demonstrated separately for ‘Westerners’ and ‘Melanesians’ if it is said
to lie at the core of human symbolization no matter where, who, and when?
This seems to be the case because although obviative invention is the focus
of Wagner’s analysis, a “conventional core,” of cultural character, is supposed
to be the matrix from which symbolization derives.7 Yet, if the core does not
lose the place of centrality that the very idea of core suggests, it is under-
stood as a residue. Literality is residual because the analogies associated
with the core have “been identified as the most literal, or common.” The
literal is “most common” because it depends on common usage, that is,
convention. The metaphorical is, here, explicitly dependent on the literal as
‘culture.’ And because the literal is usual, it facilitates the work of meaning
as metaphors refer to a “larger, framing metaphor” (Wagner 1986a: 7)—
and the broader framing of metaphor is, for Wagner, culture. Culture, as
center, appears as the matrix from which, and against which, metaphors
can innovate. It is as if Wagner’s theory of metaphor could not do without
a center, which remains despite the attempt to bring relativity to bear not
only on the relationship between cultures, but also within languages. For it
is the difference between centers that guarantees the borders instituted by
the emic. Even if one concedes that culture is “the ultimate subjunctive8”
(Wagner 1986a: 8). Culture, a residue, a remainder, that as such “inscribes in
itself something of the infinitely other” (Derrida 2005: 55), is thus elevated
to the status of core.
126 On metaphor
1986a: 24). This formulation is interesting to the extent that it clears a
conceptual space to consider the dialectic between invention and conven-
tion, metaphor and frame, from the perspective of plasticity, i.e., without
supposing beforehand what remains and what is transformed. Yet, my con-
tention is that the porousness and fluidity that inhere in the questioning of
the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical (metaphors might
become frames and vice versa) is done away with as soon as the cultural
aspect of the frame is given the name of the emic: e.g., ‘New Guinean’ or
‘Western.’ It is the very circumscription of otherness through naming that
elides the possibility of unsettling “the referentialism of the symbol, the ‘is’
of convention” (Wagner 1986a: 9). And this is probably the reason why, as
Wagner acknowledges, his theorization of meaning reminds one of struc-
turalism (even if without structure).
Wagner proposes to model “cultural construction” upon tropes, and not
the other way around. In so doing, he calls the reader’s attention to the fact
that conceptual work is based on metaphors. The examples he offers are
those of the double helix to make sense of DNA structure and of tectonic
plates to describe the crust of the earth. As the construction of paradigms is
said to be based on the metaphorical procedure of analogy rather than meta-
phor being derived from cultural convention, the relation between concep-
tual work and common sense is implicitly acknowledged. This reminds one
of Derrida’s (1974) interrogation of the role of common sense and/as the
metaphysics of presence in philosophy as it is transported into philosophical
writing by metaphor. Despite this similarity, Wagner’s text takes a different
path. Instead of interrogating the closure of metaphysics, he embraces it
as he affirms that knowledge derives its force from the “self-significative”
character of metaphor (Wagner 1986a: 10), something that is equated with
Castañeda’s “seeing” (cf. Wagner 2010 and chapter 3), in which the diffe-
rence between subject and object is done away with through the immediate
character of the experience of power as image. It is as if meaning could do
without the need for mediation if apprehended solely through image; that is,
if language, to the extent that it can be considered imagetic, could cease to
be linguistic. Thus, if metaphor and analogy allow one to do away with the
totalization of culture in that modeling is attributed to the action of innova-
tive tropes, and not of conventional ordering, in Wagner, this is achieved by
means of an understanding of language qua thing.
Wagner deconstructs the commonsensical take on metaphor in anthro-
pology, which is that it is dependent on sociocultural convention and/or
structure, only to replace it with a commonsensical understanding of lan-
guage, the consequence of which is the uneasy place of the emic in STSFT.
Whereas obviation and meaning, as theorized in this work, would not neces-
sarily require the emic gesture, the disjunction between the generality of the
human and the particularity of cultures that one finds in (not only) anthropo-
logical commonsense makes an appearance in totalizing form despite his
efforts to theorize metaphor as trope expansion. Thus, a kind of closure,
On metaphor 127
which one finds in his earlier writing, is reinstated at the expense of expan-
sion as dissemination. Wagner’s (1986a: 11) methodological proposition is
for ethnography to be modeled on metaphor as black hole and vice versa.
What exactly is meant by metaphor as black hole remains unclear, though it
is stated that in order for this to happen, one should look at kinship, myth,
and ritual, “favorite generalities” of anthropology, and suppose that they
work through the construction of metaphorical sequence, in which cultural
frames are built and expanded. Wagner sticks to meaning as what “makes
people do” (Wagner 1986a: 11) things, but attempts to subvert this with the
idea that, in that it stands for itself, metaphor is both “proposition and reso-
lution” (Wagner 1986a: 11).
Myth is said to be a “totality” that is a “part of a larger set of interlinked
tropes” (Wagner 1986a: 35), whereas “Daribi kin relationships” are said
to “derive their indigenous meaning from the expansion of … trope” into
what Wagner calls a “large-frame metaphor” (Wagner 1986a: 35). There
is, therefore, a kind of matrix for the expansion of meaning that depends
on totalization and inter-relationship. The sequence of ‘Daribi’ relationships
that are said to make up ‘Daribi kinship’ is based on a series of substitutions
(e.g., betrothal, in which affinal protocols are replaced by avoidance; the
exchange of meat and wealth; marriage; conception) that lead to closure.9
The idiom of totality and closure is, therefore, part and parcel of obvi-
ation.10 But the fact that there is closure does not mean that the sequence
ends; rather, the obviative sequence of kinship supposes endless repetition,
in which the meaning of the ‘symbol that stands for itself’ is exhausted in
condensation. Yet, Wagner himself speaks against closure when he affirms
that the diagrams he presents in STSFT are not obviation itself, but a model
of it, in which what is displayed is “a condensation of the Hegelian dialectic
and the ternary diagramming of mediation into a closed, recursive format”
(Wagner 1986a: 51). The model is said to serve the purpose of accounting
for a great number of complex relations in a “concise image,” in the same
way as words are said to elicit trope. The acknowledgment that the model
is not the same as obviation and that it depicts the obviative process at the
expense of making it come across as closed favors a deconstructive take on
Wagner’s theory of metaphor. What if, instead of obviation, one were to con-
sider metaphor as dissemination?
In order for this to happen, one would have to relinquish the distinc-
tion between the literal and the metaphorical, a distinction which in itself
supposes that one can speak about metaphor in a literal mode: To say what
it is, how it works, what kinds of trope there are, and what they do to
meaning. The very concept of metaphor is an attempt at literalization. And
yet, this attempt must remain incomplete because in order to speak about
metaphor, one cannot
treat it without dealing with it (traiter avec elle), without negotiating the
loan I take out from it in order to speak about it. I cannot produce a
128 On metaphor
treatise on metaphor that is not treated with metaphor, which suddenly
appears intractable.
(Derrida 2007: 49)
On metaphor 129
in language so that one might say they are the same in analogical thought, in
which, one is told, the symbolized is as cultural as the symbol.
In the example of the ‘Daribi’ poie relation,12 an analogical “as if” is
said to structure the relationship between denominator and denominated.
According to Wagner, this analogical superposition suspends convention to
the extent that a man who has the name of a cockatoo is actually taken
for a cockatoo, and a cockatoo is different from man from the perspective
of reference. Emic naming makes possible the conflation of possibility and
actuality as the violent dimension of language is excluded from Wagner’s
theory of metaphor, in which the differentiating mode of symbolization
comes to stand for the possibility of self-referentiality and non-violent sub-
stitution. As STSFT denies the violence of translation that permeates ethno-
graphic description, it attempts to halt the withdrawal of metaphor in favor
of a retracing of metaphor in the emic mode but necessarily fails. For the
substitution of any named circumscription (culture, perspective, the cosmos)
for another inevitably institutes the violence of tracing, which is simultan-
eously that of withdrawal and of retracing (Derrida 1978).
One is not given a description of the convention in which men and
cockatoos are said to be now different, now the same (Wagner 1986a: 15).
Analogical symbolization is conceived as opposition to the ipseity that is
attributed to homology, and thus convention. Wagner’s argument, despite its
claim to subvert convention through invention, cannot escape the entangle-
ments of language qua representation—and the violence of separation it
entails. For his resource to the emic as the (utopian) place in which symbols
and things might conflate does not offer him an alternative theory of sig-
nification; rather, the reiteration that language operates otherwise among
those he calls ‘differentiating’ in TIC is an a priori supposition—which is not
surprising given his affirmation that, like Newton, he intends to deduce the
world from equations (Wagner 1981: 7).
The reason he offers for making analogy, “this special case of naming[,]
a general case of symbolism” (Wagner 1986a: 16) is the fact that names are
said to be symbols and symbols, names. But so are they in what he calls
“homology.” This rejection of the sign to the benefit of the symbol is not
inaugurated by Wagner; rather, it is to be found in the previous history of
metaphysical theorization on metaphor, in which “the force of this distinc-
tion [between the symbol and the sign] is that what is symbolized retains a
bond of natural affinity with the symbol and thus warrants etymological
reconstitution” (Derrida 1974: 10). The symbol qua natural expression of
the symbolized attempts to guarantee the connection between meaning and
origin, something that is lost in the structuralist theorization of the arbitrari-
ness of the sign. In this critique of structuralist homology, the degradation of
metaphor is understood as its distancing from a supposed origin.
Metaphor, “the trope of resemblance” (Derrida 1974: 13), operates
through the similarity between signifier and signified as well as between two
signs, “the one designating the other” (Derrida 1974: 13), in a process in
130 On metaphor
which “one signified [is substituted] for another so that the one becomes the
signifier of the other” (Derrida 1974: 27). As Wagner takes on a “symbolist”
stance on metaphor, he ascribes to a “conception of language … [in which]
the link between signifier and signified ha[s] to be and to remain … one of
natural necessity, of analogical participation, and of resemblance” (Derrida
1974: 13). But if Wagner affirms the self-referentiality of the trope, he does
not explain how it is that metaphor, of which comparison and substitution
are ineluctable elements, can do without alterity as it privileges sameness. It
seems that his claim for self-referentiality mistakes resemblance for identity.
And if it is based on identity, one must again ask where the work of diffe-
rence is to be found. For metaphor, in searching for resemblance, ascribes to
a “return of the same” (Derrida 1974: 68). Through a conflation of language
and image, or rather, a subordination of language to image, symbolization is
assigned a “cosmic” dimension (Wagner 1986a: 16). One starts to ask one-
self whether the closure of obviation is not a closure of mystical character, as
in Castañeda’s “seeing.”13 An engagement with the temporality of obviation,
in which a similar closure is to be observed, might shed light on both the
work of closure and the relationship between alterity and ipseity in Wagner.
On metaphor 131
of a resolution with which they bear an “organic” relation. And these events,
perceived as inventive because not totally subsumed to the order of conven-
tion, are said to be differentiating.
Organic temporality is, according to Wagner, found in myths, literary
narratives, and dreams. In these processes of “figurative expansion,” the
resolution of meaning occurs by means of its articulation in frames. Wagner
opposes this temporality to the temporality of the clock, marked by emphasis
on the interval between elements based on which time is counted. He cites as
examples of what he considers approaches to time that view it as a cultural
construct Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) opposition between ‘structural time’
and ‘ecological time’ and the qualitative measurement of time described by
Geertz (1973) in “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali.” According to Wagner,
although these analyses show how time can be perceived differently in
different sociocultural contexts, they cannot establish a nexus between the
human dimension of the experience of time and cultural variation. STSFT
draws on the apprehension of time by the differentiating mode of symbol-
ization in order to gain perspective on organic time: The temporality within
which obviative processes are said to occur.
An argument that will be summoned again in FP (cf. chapter 5) is put
forth: The distance between description and what is described can only be
elided in the register of common sense. In Wagner’s words, “To say that our
means of registering or reckoning something, is the thing reckoned, that the
description is the thing described, is a familiar shorthand of everyday speech”
(Wagner 1986a: 83). This move has at least two relevant implications: There
is necessarily a distance (spacing, interval) between the thing and its descrip-
tion; and conflating the thing with its description is a preferred procedure
in the realm of common sense. It is based on this argument that Wagner
affirms that one cannot understand human temporality from the perspec-
tive of the time of the clock. Here, common sense is made equivalent with
‘Western’ time. It remains unclear why ‘organic’ time cannot be apprehended
by common sense. Is it because the common sense of ‘others’ is not that of
the author or because the embodied time of life is ascribed to the realm of
‘reality’?
If organic time is the time of analogy, and therefore of metaphor, the dis-
tinction between literal and organic time is based on the strengthening of
the opposition between metaphoricity and literality. If metaphor operates
through analogy, literality operates through interval or spacing (what
Wagner calls “homology”). The literal, associated with conventionalization,
and thus with the ‘West,’ is characterized in Wagner’s discussion of epoch as
the measurement of time based on its spatialization, i.e., ‘Western’ tempor-
ality depends on analogies with space (Wagner 1986a: 83). The synchroniza-
tion of time is understood by Wagner as the “extension and universalization
of a conventional idea” (Wagner 1986a: 84), and not as a proof that the
object one measures actually exists. In the realm of convention, Wagner
equates time with words and money: Things one can spend, waste, or count.
132 On metaphor
He then questions whether it is worth investing in a distinction between
figurative and conventional time—one should bear in mind that the border
between the literal and the metaphorical is repeatedly blurred in his work.
In response, he affirms that although the apprehension of time based on
spacing is conventional14 (he offers as examples a five-minute interval and a
thirty-year war), the idea that ‘time is money’ is based on an analogy (and
therefore on a figurative extension of literal meaning). But the only ‘real’
time, according to Wagner (1986a: 84), is the time of life, literal time being
a mere translation—a figurative one—of it. Organic time is, therefore, time
in the sense of organicity: The physical, and indivisible, time of life. For
Wagner, both the literalization of words in the form of dictionary and the
literalization of life time through spacing depend on the transformation of
meaning through convention. But what exactly is to be understood as con-
vention here? Does it stand for ‘Western’ common sense?
Convention is of the order of representation, that is, it supposes a distance
between the thing and the means through which it is represented. Yet, des-
pite the distinction between literal and figurative on which Wagner’s reflec-
tion is based, he does recognize that trope, as representation or perception,
is a fixation of meaning: “[A] tropic perception or representation is achieved
as the masquerading of meaning-flow as that thing” (Wagner 1986a: 85, his
emphasis). However (and this is important), the literal dimension of trope
is of the order of the subjunctive; it interrupts the flow of signification for
trope to be perceived as if it were a thing. The flux Wagner calls ‘real’ is ana-
logical flux. Thus, we have a distinction between two instances of the figura-
tive: Trope and analogy, the former being an instance in which a figurative
congealment or masking occurs by means of conventional fixation, and the
latter being an instance in which the flow of meaning is apprehended in its
‘organic’ dimension. If Wagner rehearses here a questioning of the border
between the literal and the figurative, a border Habu to a certain extent
undoes, this border is retraced by the distinction he draws between trope
and analogy, in which trope is roughly assigned to the pole of convention
and analogy, to the pole of invention. And the reenactment of an opposition
of this sort is accompanied by a presentist discourse or, on Derrida’s terms,
of a metaphysics of presence (cf. chapter 2). In Wagner’s text, this is made
explicit by the concept of ‘epoch.’
The concept of ‘epoch,’ whose etymology Wagner (1986a: 85) relates to
a Greek term meaning ‘stoppage’ or ‘cessation,’ is mobilized to oppose the
excess of “subordination of presence to movement” (Wagner 1986a: 85)
that Wagner attributes to the idea of event or incident. In opposition to time
as interval, measured as displacement in space, epoch is said to oppose this
movement to the extent that it is “a self-defined ‘piece’ of time, something
that is original and unmeasurable beyond all attempts at conventionalizing”
(Wagner 1986a: 85). Epoch is to resist conventionalization and mensuration
in view of its originality. The search for the self-presence of time in the con-
cept of epoch is thus followed by the affirmation of its originary character.
On metaphor 133
The next step in Wagner’s argumentation is, not coincidentally, the equation
of ‘organic’ time with the framing from which it is perceived: “Epoch, then,
is time considered as organic, happening as one and the same as the frame
within which it is perceived” (1986a: 85). Or, more explicitly, “epoch is the
presence of time” (Wagner 1986a: 86). Yet, if Wagner’s text is driven by
the desire not to subordinate presence to movement, it acknowledges that
the fixation of the present belongs to the order of convention. It is as if his
theory of meaning could do without the mediation he recognizes as neces-
sary for perception.
Wagner draws an analogy between epoch and obviation to the extent that
both resist movement and the subdivision of ‘literal time’; thus, they are “the
trope of literal time—the time that stands for itself” (Wagner 1986a: 86).
The trope appears as a figuration of literal time here. Moreover, this fig-
uration is capable of standing for or representing itself, that is, of eliding
the distance between language and the thing that representation supposes.
An equivalence between the immediacy of perceptive consciousness and
the absence of alienation of that which is perceived is postulated. But if
the trope is what makes the self-presence of time possible, a similarity is
posited by Wagner between literal time and organic time since both depend
on the obviative process: The movement of literal time is interrupted as a
literal cycle is closed in the form of a unit. This interruption is, according
to the author, a simulation of epoch: “the closure of obviation” (Wagner
1986a: 86). Now, if a cycle is concluded by means of its closure, the cyc-
lical and recurring quality of literal time is similar to the epochal sequence
of obviation. Therefore, obviation depends on closure to be understood as
lying at the basis of both organic and literal temporality. Although Wagner’s
argument acknowledges the displacement that characterizes literal time, it
subsumes displacement to the closure of obviation. Thus, it is my contention
that the closure of obviation resembles that of the emic gesture in its accom-
modation of opposition.
At this point, it is worth asking oneself why Wagner decides for closure at
the expense of a more radical investment in the flexibilization of the opposition
between literal and figurative. The excerpt below hints at this possibility:
a trope can be elicited but not defined, and it can only approach the
extremes of referentiality or complete self-containment as boundary
conditions. Thus, for obviation, the collective and the individuative are
relative approximations.
(Wagner 1986a: 128, his emphases)
134 On metaphor
… uncount” (Wagner 1986a: 87). Thus, what the time of the clock does
is to “accumulat[e] closures as countable units” (Wagner 1986a: 87, his
emphases). Although his affirmation is the logical consequence of his
point of departure, it is translated in terms of a process of alienation, in
which epoch is alienated as the “unresolved closures” that one counts are
accumulated (Wagner 1986a: 87). That is, the accumulation of closures
based on counting is understood as that which hinders the realization of
epoch, present to itself because in it time and consciousness are one. As
Wagner (1986a: 87) affirms, time, if spatialized, lacks a center. And it is the
self-presence of epoch as equivalence between time and consciousness that
is believed to be lost as time takes on the dimension of representation, and
therefore mediation. Thus, what is lost in representation is the immediacy
of time as presence.
As per Wagner, the distinction between space and time is based on the
reversible quality of space as opposed to the irreversible character of time.
Thus, for time to be counted, it is necessary to make it reversible by means
of its spatialization. With this purpose, an analogy between time and space
is established in which time is congealed. The concept of epoch is proposed
to account for what Wagner calls “organic time”: “time as the act of
imagining” (Wagner 1986a: 88, his emphasis). This equivalence between
organic temporality, the act of imagining, and the consciousness of percep-
tion that he calls “epoch” is contrasted with the time of the clock, in which
time is alienated by representation. Wagner highlights that what literal time
calls past or future are actually apprehensions of time based on the pre-
sent. Memory, imagination, and creation are projections based on a moving
present. And yet, he acknowledges that the apprehension of the present is
not possible in itself to the extent that, like the future and the past, the pre-
sent is a “projective image,” as metaphorical as any other image (Wagner
1986a: 89). Here, the border that divides image from representation is
blurred.
To the extent that Wagner relativizes the distinction between literal and
figurative as he affirms that present, past, and future are projections in the
form of image, the presentism that affirms that both past and future are
projections based on the present is questioned. This is what he affirms in a
footnote:
Here, it is the literal that appears as immediate and simultaneous. And yet,
throughout STSFT, Wagner attempts to say that it is image that makes this
On metaphor 135
possible because in it the thing and its representation coincide. Consequently,
image, like simultaneity, is illusory. It is an illusion of perception. This
observation, discreetly proposed in a footnote, poses the possibility of
unsettling the oppositions on which Wagner’s argumentation rests. If the
simultaneity at which literalization aims is impossible—hence its alienating
character—it ensues that the present of epoch, the ‘now’ alluded to above,
is necessarily metaphorical. And if the simultaneity of the experience of the
present is an illusion, so is its image. To the extent that all projections are
“a piece of figurative time that belongs to the flow of analogy” (Wagner
1986a: 90), one has a succession of impressions, or perceptions, of the pre-
sent. Even though his argumentation points to the opening of the chain
of substitutions, Wagner insists on its closure. In affirming that analogic
flow is of the order of organic time, and not of the time of the clock, he
reaffirms “the self-sealing and nonnegotiable quality of epoch as organic
time” (Wagner 1986a: 90). The mainstay of his defense of closure is the
emic gesture: “What others would perceive as epoch is dissociated by an
unconscious disavowal of the link between time and human perception” in
“Western civilization” (Wagner 1986a: 90). But here one must ask: Which
‘others’ are those? Based on what is it possible to affirm that for ‘others’
time and perception bear a relation of unity? The affirmation lacks any
empirical demonstration or elaboration. And again, no methodology is
offered to access alterity.
Wagner (1986a: 91) affirms that time, in its literal, non-organic modality,
is not only mistaken for space, but also understood as spacing or distan-
cing between the anthropologist and his subjects, in a “topological dis-
tortion” associated with the “Western worldview.” Thus, trope cannot be
fully understood because semiotics has separated sign from its perceptual
image (Wagner 1986a: 92). In this move, one is made aware of an artifi-
cial distancing of semiotics from a supposed origin, where one might find
a non-divisible sign. In Wagner’s argumentation, the detachment between
representation and the world is attributed to ‘Western’ “rationalist civ-
ilization,” which, because it is incapable of simply living the present of
epoch, is doomed to simulate it. The alienation of ‘Western’ symbolization
is thus understood to consist of the simulacrum of organic time as literal
time. And if obviation lies at the root of both literal and organic time, in
the literal modality it is said to be mimetic, that is, to mime the closure
and resolution of the symbolization that stands for itself as it purports to
represent something else. It is as if the critique of fetishism were inverted
to the extent that it is claimed that alienation lies not in the act of trying
to make the name one with the thing, but in trying, through language, to
represent something that lies outside it. That is, alienation results from
spacing, and not from the attempt to equate language and the world. Now,
what allows for this argumentative inversion in relation to the work of
fetishism is the emic gesture: For Wagner, there are ‘others’ who symbolize
in this way, whereas ‘we,’ because alienated, mask real obviation. Hence
136 On metaphor
the title of the chapter, in which ‘real time’ is opposed to ‘unreal time.’
Wagner concludes that the culture of ‘others’ is invented by ‘us’ while ‘we’
invent culture for ‘ourselves’ (Wagner 1986a: 94), that is, the invention of
cultural ‘others’ is conditioned by the invention of the self-same, which is
as cultural as the ‘other’ despite its alienation. As it turns out, alterity is
conditioned by ipseity.
On metaphor 137
of ‘others’ as that of ‘system.’ Moreover, the distinction between societies
based on ritual (‘tribal’ ones) and societies based on events (the ‘Western’
one) also does not hold because, as Wagner claims in STSFT, the obviative
procedure that he learned from ‘Melanesian’ societies can also be applied
to the history of the “Western core symbol.”
In Habu, the symbols with which meaning is constituted are still under-
stood in terms of a distinction between the signifier and the signified
(denotation, designation). Symbols are said to ‘stand for’ something else,
and words in a dictionary, whose meaning is lexical (cf. Wagner 1977 and
chapter 3), to bear an arbitrary, or conventional, relation with what they
signify. Since conventional signification is said to merely repeat tautolo-
gous definition, metaphor appears as that through which meaning might be
transformed. Through metaphor, signifiers extend their meaning via analogy
with other signifiers, and this is said to produce non-tautologous meaning
(Wagner 1972: 168). Yet, Wagner’s theorization of analogy supposes not
only that the meaning of a signifier might be extended through metaphor,
but also that “metaphorical signification involves a nonarbitrary and deter-
minate relationship between signifier and signified” (Wagner 1972: 5). Two
consequences ensue from the choice of this path in Wagner’s theory of meta-
phor: the first one is the slippage through which the signified (for Saussure, a
concept) is equated with a thing in the world; the second one is the denial of
the status of relation to conventional signification, for only “metaphor signi-
fies a relation” (Wagner 1972: 5, 169). But why is only metaphor conceived
as relational? Why can the relationship between signifier and signified in
conventional signification not retain its relational status in Wagner’s theor-
ization of metaphor? It seems that only metaphor is conceived as relational
because, in the effort to draw a sharp distinction between metaphoricity and
literality, characteristics of signification must be assigned to one or the other
pole of Wagnerian dialectic. And yet, in the theory of metaphor proposed in
Habu, these borders are not yet fixed.
The proposition that only metaphor “signifies a relation” is followed in
Habu by the famous example of the ‘Bororo’ man who says he is a parakeet.
In Wagner’s reading, which he opposes to Lévi-Strauss’s (1964) homological
interpretation of totemism, this statement does not create two homological
series, in which different totems stand for distinct groups of people; rather,
it creates an analogical relation between the man and the parakeet, both as
symbols and as things in the world, to the extent that the characteristics of
a parakeet are attributed to a man. The virtue of metaphor is, for Wagner,
that it enables one to simultaneously oppose and approximate: The man
remains a man, and is therefore like other men, but as a man he can also be
seen as a parakeet, which means he is also different from other men. The
metaphorical superposition of man and parakeet is said to innovate upon
cultural meaning; yet, one should bear in mind that this very affirmation
supposes the primacy of convention—that is, if ‘culture’ were thought of as
mainly analogical, its very borders would be dissolved. Metaphor ultimately
138 On metaphor
points to its ‘own’ dissolution to the extent that analogies, if frequently used,
become conventional through wear and tear—what Derrida (2007: 53) calls
“usury,” and Wagner, perhaps following Spengler, calls “decay.” In this case,
the relation between signifier and signified is said to be taken for granted,
whereas in a relatively recent metaphor innovation remains visible.
Wagner’s dialectical take on culture leads him to affirm that “meaning is a
function of change as well as of form” (Wagner 1972: 6). Within it, ideology, a
sort of cultural subset, is understood as “a set of complementary metaphors”
(Wagner 1972: 7). In Habu, symbolization is conceived in relation to ‘social
relations’ and ‘institutions,’ which are connected to cultural ideology. The
innovation of meaning necessarily involves a displacement of ideology to the
extent that ideology, in which complementary metaphors are organized to
“express the central propositions or tenets of a culture” (Wagner 1972: 7), is
also transformed by every new metaphorical connection between signifiers.
This occurs through events, which innovate through a dialectical relation
with conventional context and referents. Events, to be “meaningful,” need to
be innovative, which means to enter into relation with the “tenets of culture”
(Wagner 1972: 168), in a process that is said to produce the embodiment of
signification (for instance, in style). Wagner’s discussion of impersonation
in Habu is intended as one such example of innovative embodiment. The
privileging of origins that the conception of metaphor as “wear and tear” or
“decay” supposes appears in the “presupposition of continuity” that lies at
the core of Wagner’s theory of symbolization in the metaphorical mode: In
Wagner’s theorization, metaphor degrades in a process that is described by
Derrida (2007: 13) as one of “progressive erosion, a regular semantic loss,
an uninterrupted draining of the primitive meaning” (Derrida 2007: 13).
It is this parti pris by Wagner that hinders the understanding of metaphor
as “displacement, with ruptures, reinscriptions in a heterogeneous system,
mutations, digressions without origin” (Derrida 2007: 57). Origin can be
given different names: nature, culture, instantiations of the emic, totalization
as the cosmos or otherwise.
In the habu ritual intended to appease the ghost of a recently deceased
member of a community, part of this community impersonates the ghost.
This impersonation is understood as an innovation upon the social role of
men to the extent that the meaning of man is extended to encompass that
of the ghost through this metaphorical connection. It is via this creative
link that the ghost, impersonated in and by man, can be dealt with. Yet,
one might ask whether this transformation, carried out in the same way
every time the ritual is enacted, might not as well be understood as conven-
tional. Although it is true that, as claimed by Wagner in Habu, the analogy
between man and ghost metaphorically extends the meaning of man (and
ghost), it does so in the same way every time the ritual is enacted. This is not
to say that the border that is usually drawn between the literal and the fig-
urative is to be maintained. Rather, the question to be posed is why Wagner
On metaphor 139
looks for transformative metaphor in kinship, ritual, and myth, in which
form tends to repetition. Instead of dwelling on the way in which specific
iterations of performance and/or narrative depart from expected formal
reiteration, he proceeds to describe them in a totalized way. If in Habu the
theorization of metaphor insists on the limits of systematicity and closure,
the fact that its ethnographic descriptions take the emic gesture as founda-
tional contributes to the enactment of closure as theory is instantiated in
analysis. Thus, the emic gesture comes to halt the potential for dissemin-
ation that Wagner’s questioning of the borders between metaphoricity and
literality contain.
No matter whether closure draws its force from the emic or from the
cosmos, the determination of alterity by ipseity has more than one iteration
in Wagner’s work. In the last lines of Habu, the emic gesture is given a curious
name: “exoticism.” Exoticism, far from being censored, is actually praised
for its capacity to convert the idioms of ‘others’ into innovative extensions
of the analyst’s and the reader’s “tired metaphors and collapsing idioms”
(Wagner 1972: 174). Thus, the innovations one theorizes for ‘exotic’ ‘others’
do not necessarily need to extend the meanings of ‘their culture.’ Indeed, the
main function of anthropological work is, as per Wagner, to borrow the force
of expression that one finds in the idiom of the ‘other’ as a catalyst for inven-
tion in the ‘decaying’ intellectual world of the anthropologist. Therefore,
it apparently does not matter, in the economy of Wagner’s text, whether
metaphorization is theorized as open-ended and ethnographic descrip-
tion depicts the ad infinitum repetition of myth and ritual in a formalized
and totalized way. For in Wagner, what the metaphors, or conventions, of
‘others’ seem to offer to the anthropologist and ‘the West’ is the possibility
of eventfulness. This is why both the distance between theoretical claims
and analytical actualization and closure in obviation are not considered a
problem: The more one is able to totalize ‘others’ in opposition to ‘oneself,’
the more anthropology can serve the purpose of enhancing the creativity of
the conventional ‘West.’
Ipseity conditions alterity under different names: Culture, nature, meta-
phor, creativity, the cosmos. Or, rather, that which is rhetorically assigned
the place of ipseity wishes to condition alterity but fails. For this is not
possible to the extent that the trace that both separates and unites ‘self’ and
‘other’ in the “unity of a contour (Umriss), a frame, a framework” (Derrida
2007: 78), and in so doing paves the way for discourse on metaphysics (as
mysticism or otherwise), metaphor, and (self-)referentiality, must necessarily
withdraw as it re-traces difference. And as the trace re-traces and withdraws,
the work of differential writing frays the ontological claims of metaphysics
despite any text’s aspiration to unity. It is my contention that for trace to be
thought beyond the emic gesture and (its) closure, eventfulness needs to be
understood beyond the opposition of convention and invention, the literal
and the metaphorical.
140 On metaphor
Notes
1 Despite Wagner’s attempts to relativize the distinction between the literal and the
metaphorical in Habu and, less frequently so, in STSFT, it is drawn in Wagner’s
writings with a certain obsession since COI. Derrida’s (1974) “White Mythology,”
which Rorty (1986) rightly describes as a text that explores the effects of such
an obsession, is therefore the background reference for my reading of Wagner’s
work on metaphor.
2 On Wagner’s critique of homology and defense of analogy, cf. Wagner (1977,
1986a, 1986c) and chapter 3.
3 As acknowledged by Wagner (1972: 170; 1986a: 29), the concept of conden-
sation is drawn from Freud’s (1953) The Interpretation of Dreams. Yet, if the
author of STSFT insists on the impossibility of a full gloss and on the equiva-
lence between the holographic expansion of tropes and condensation, Freud
emphasizes the fact that the meaning of the images that arise in dreams depends
on the interpretive work of the subject being analyzed.
4 Cf. chapter 2 for a discussion of Derrida’s critique of the sign.
5 Trope is understood by Wagner as interchangeable with metaphor and metonymy.
6 He seems to make fun of the impossibility (or inanity) of a symbol that stands
for itself as he asks the rhetorical question “who cares?” (Wagner 1986a: 6).
7 In Habu, metaphorization ‘among the Daribi’ is said to innovate upon the core
symbols of gender opposition (mostly understood as complementarity).
8 On Wagner’s criticism of the subjunctive mode of ethnography, cf. Wagner
(1974) and chapter 4.
9 For a full account of the obviative cycle of ‘Daribi kinship,’ cf. Wagner (1986a,
chapter 3).
10 Cf. also Wagner (1986a, chapter 4) for an obviative analysis of ‘Daribi mythology.’
11 These seem to be characteristics that Wagner’s core symbol shares with Spengler’s
(1926) Ursymbol, or originary symbol. Wagner does mention the Ursymbol in
TIC (Wagner 1981: 90–91) as he addresses the subject of human motivation,
cultural creativity being one of the concerns Wagner shares with Spengler. Yet,
Wagner does not usually indulge in the kind of pessimism associated with
Spengler’s view of the cyclic character of symbolization as decline.
12 On the poie relation, cf. Wagner (1972, 1986a, 1991; and chapter 5).
13 The same kind of mysticism seems to permeate Wagner’s choice of vocabulary
when referring to the dialectic between concreteness and abstraction in analogy,
in which the macrocosm of analogies is said to be cut into units by the micro-
cosm of social names (Wagner 1986a: 16). The ideas of microcosm and macro-
cosm (re)iterate the kind of closure that underlies the emic gesture.
14 Spengler (1926: 173) would probably agree.
15 Cf. Wagner (1981) for his questioning of the nature-culture divide, another point
of contact between Wagner’s and Spengler’s work.
16 The term is his. Though Wagner will increasingly position himself against
representation in the 1980s, claiming that ‘how to paint’ should not become
more important than ‘what is painted’ (cf. especially Wagner 1986b), in the
1970s he does resort to the concept of representation to address the status and
conditions of possibility of anthropological description. He even calls anthro-
pology the “representation of representation” to the extent that it depicts the cre-
ativity of others through that of the anthropologist (Wagner 1972: 4). It seems
On metaphor 141
that his opposition to representation as a concept is elaborated in the wake of
his distancing from the Writing Culture movement (Clifford & Marcus 1986)
at a time when the influence of Oswald Spengler and Carlos Castañeda become
more explicit in his work. Notions such as that of extension, already present in
Habu, might be understood in the light of Spengler’s discussion of “extension as
the prime symbol of a Culture” (Spengler 1926: 174). Yet, Spengler’s influence
is only made explicit in TIC and STSFT.
References
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CLIFFORD, James & MARCUS, George. (ed.). 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
DERRIDA, Jacques. 1974 [1971]. White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of
Philosophy. New Literary History, 6(1): 5–74.
———. 1978. The Retrait of Metaphor. Enclitic, 2(2): 5–34.
———. 2005. Paper Machine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Volume I. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
EVANS-PRITCHARD, Edward. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of
Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
FABIAN, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
FREUD, Sigmund. 1953 [1900]. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Hogarth Press.
GEERTZ, Clifford. 1973. “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali.” In: The Interpretation
of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. 1964 [1962]. Totemism. London: Merlin Press.
———. 1966 [1962]. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
PEIRCE, Charles. 1991. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders
Peirce. Hoopes J. (ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
RORTY, Richard. 1986. The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A Reply to Henry
Staten. Critical Inquiry, 12(2): 462–466.
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A. Knopf.
WAGNER, Roy. 1967. The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi Clan Definition and
Alliance in New Guinea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1972. Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion. Chicago:
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———. 1978. Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation. Ithaca, NY:
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142 On metaphor
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———. 1986a. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago
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———. 1986b. The Theater of Fact and Its Critics. Anthropological Quarterly,
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———. 1986c. Asiwinarong. Ethos, Image and Social Power among the Usen Barok
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7 Final remarks
Beyond the emic gesture
The analogical or relative mode, which is likely the only one in which
culture can be understood, delineated, or realized, is as incapable of
forming absolute identities as it is of generating complete differenti-
ation. What it produces are “bound” forms in which analogic (meta-
phoric or metonymic) similarities or linkages acquire their significance
solely by contrast with properly corresponding differences, and vice
versa. Difference and similarity, in other words, form a sort of contrast
that opposes a positive photographic print to its negative transparency.
(Wagner 1991: 43)
The analogic mode does not, in and of itself, engender absolute identity
or difference. Its products are forms that acquire significance only through
contrast with other forms. From this ensues that difference is not necessarily
totalized as alterity. However, in order to address the thing in itself—which
in the excerpt above is represented by a figure-ground reversal between a
photograph and its negative—in an attempt to come as close as possible to
“experiential concreteness,” it is necessary to undertake a totalizing effort
to be accomplished in different ways and through different but related
concepts: Group, culture, society, mode of symbolization, perspective. For
Wagner, without the fiction of culture—or, more recently, perspective—
one loses sight of the contours of differentiation and, thus, of the possi-
bility of determining meaning through contrast. This becomes clear in the
excerpt below:
“Older” than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language.
But we “already know” that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally
so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or
because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite
system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all,
not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,”
which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly
dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions.
(Derrida 1982: 26, author’s emphases)
Now, doing without the name means to dissolve the borders of difference
and think of everything as spacing and differentiation—not as bounded
alterity—for difference is also contained within the same to the extent that it
cannot be conceived as the same made present before itself because spacing
always entails iterability. Thus, the border between sameness and otherness
is frayed. It cannot be contained, for there is nothing that remains without
becoming other. And yet, difference, in anthropology, has existed between
units: Cultures and societies, groups and ethnicities, classes and segments,
subjects and individuals, alterities and identities. Wagner attributes this to
language:
If one can only do justice to the sense of a metaphor through the office
of another metaphor, and if the “performance” of what it may mean is
always another performance, as distinct from the original, then, the con-
tagion has no practical limits.
(Wagner 2001: 10)
References
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Routledge.
DERRIDA, Jacques. 1974 [1971]. White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of
Philosophy. New Literary History, 6(1): 5–74.
———. 1978 [1967]. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.
8 A short note
Under the guise of postscript
Should not a text that dwells on the affects that move a certain kind of
writing begin by examining ‘its own’ affects? From a certain perspective, it
might be the case that the text that precedes this hovering postscript, simul-
taneously within and without this book, does not sufficiently make explicit
the place from which its author speaks. Yet, my analysis was not concerned
with the affects of Wagner as a person; nor was it interested in his subjective
constitution. Rather, it was concerned with affect as related to the emergence
of fissures in the texture of the writing that bears his signature. Moreover,
and more importantly, the idea of anything ‘proper’ does not hold if one
attempts to erase the metaphysics that grounds names through différance.
The first-person singular is intended merely as a gesture of responsibility for
these lines. To embrace the task of understanding ‘my own’ affects would be
to ignore the impossibility of such a thing. If it is true that it is only possible
to oppose something in the very language in which it is uttered, such lan-
guage is by no means ‘proper.’ The obliteration of the ‘proper’ begins in lan-
guage. Thus, the attempt to stitch together this text which ‘I,’ as a position
in language (Benveniste 1971), sign, offers to the reader the possibility of
engaging in the same kind of fraying that is posed for any text. To the extent
that language obliterates the proper, there is no unified and/or coherent ‘I’
that might be the subject of analysis. ‘I’ can only exist in displacement. Like
any other name. Thus, the process of erasure this book proposes is not ‘my
own,’ but a possibility that is posed by the othering potential of language
and arises from the discursive position of this ‘I’ that signs it. And as lan-
guage has nothing one might call ‘proper,’ ‘my’ positionality, as well as the
analysis that is carried out from it, remains as liable to further erasure as is
the case with any writing, in which ‘I’ is a position of displaced authority.
Reference
BENVENISTE, Émile. 1971 [1966]. “The Nature of Pronouns.” In: Problems in
General Linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press.