i

On the Emic Gesture

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.

Iracema Dulley is Research Affiliate and Affiliate Professor of Anthropology at

the Department of Social Sciences of the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil.
Prior to this, she held a post-doctoral visiting fellow position at the London School
of Economics, UK, a researcher position at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and
Planning, and a visiting professor position at the State University of Campinas, Brazil.

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ii

Theorizing Ethnography
Series Editors: Paul Boyce, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen,
EJ Gonzales-Polledo, and Silvia Posocco

The ‘Theorizing Ethnography’ book series seeks to reorient ethnographic

engagements across disciplines, methods, and ways of knowing. By focusing
on ethnography as a point of tension between abstract thinking and situated
life-worlds, the series promotes ethnographic method and writing as an
analytical form that is always partial, open-ended, and epistemologically
querying.
Against this background, ‘Theorizing Ethnography’ employs ‘con-
cept,’ ‘context,’ and ‘critique’ as devices to stimulate creative ethnographic
thinking that transects lines of analysis and location. It publishes work that
reaches beyond academic, political, and life-world divisions, and as such
the series seeks to foster contributions from across socially and critically
engaged fields of practice.

Recent titles in this series:

Sensing the Everyday
Dialogues from austerity Greece
C. Nadia Seremetakis

On the Emic Gesture

Difference and ethnography in Roy Wagner
Iracema Dulley

www.routledge.com/Theorizing-Ethnography/book-series/THEOETH

9781138314153_pi-152.indd ii 17-Jan-19 8:23:52 PM

iii

On the Emic Gesture

Difference and Ethnography in
Roy Wagner

Iracema Dulley

9781138314153_pi-152.indd iii 17-Jan-19 8:23:52 PM

iv

First published 2019

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Iracema Dulley
The right of Iracema Dulley to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-31415-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-45721-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK

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v

To Verônica Regina Hilário, my aunt, and Eunice Braga Dulley,

my grandmother
(in memoriam)

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vi

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vii

Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
List of abbreviations xv

1 Introduction: Difference and ethnography in Roy Wagner 1

Difference and the emic gesture 1
Meeting Wagner 5
(Dis)placements of Wagner 9
The book 11

2 Deconstruction, alterity, différance 22

Points of rupture 22
On ‘deconstruction’ 24
The pharmakon and its chain of substitutions 28
Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Wagner 31
Wagner and the emic gesture 36

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

4 Groups and others 79

Roy Wagner and the history of anthropology 79
‘Native’ conceptualization and “naiveté” 84
Names and ‘others’ 87
“Contact” 90

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viii

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

7 Final remarks: Beyond the emic gesture 143

8 A short note: Under the guise of postscript 152

Index 153

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ix

Preface

The closure implied by the naming of ‘others’ is not restricted to anthropo-

logical discourse. It can be found in discursive practices as different as com-
monsensical statements about social and cultural difference, accusatory
practices directed against those perceived as ‘others,’ identity politics, state
policies, and local forms of designating ‘oneself’ and ‘others.’ The process
through which emic designation names and places ‘others’ is based on the
unstable fixation of an equivalence between a name and its supposed ref-
erent. And if it is true that the emic gesture is not only found in anthropo-
logical discourse, it is certainly the case that anthropology is the discipline
that specializes in the circumscription, designation, and description of socio-
cultural difference. Examples of the emic gesture in anthropology (and
beyond) famously include ‘the Nuer,’ ‘the Kachin,’ ‘the Bororo,’ ‘Amerindian,’
‘Bantu,’ ‘African,’ ‘Asian,’ and ‘Oriental.’ Emic naming comes in both sub-
stantive and adjectival forms: Noun forms such as ‘the native,’ ‘the Oriental,’
‘the African,’ or ‘the Nuer’ are not rarely accompanied by their adjectival
variants (‘native,’ ‘Oriental,’ ‘African,’ ‘Nuer’) and adjectives such as ‘indi-
genous,’ ‘autochthonous,’ and ‘tribal.’ As the following pages argue, such
forms of designation cannot be taken for mere descriptors of instantiations
of alterity in the world. Rather, they are part of a rhetoric in which such
names are often accompanied by reverse designations of ipseity. In (not
only) anthropological discourse, ipseity has been historically associated with
positions named as ‘Western,’ ‘European,’ or ‘Euro-American,’ often paired
with adjectives such as ‘modern,’ ‘rational,’ and ‘non-religious.’ Where ipseity
ends and otherness starts is determined not by the supposed referents of the
above-mentioned names, but by the hierarchization of the positionalities
from which discourse is possible.
This book is about the emic gesture and its relation with the institution
of closure in anthropology. And to the extent that there is no strict distinc-
tion between anthropological discourse and the discourse of common sense
as far as the naming of ‘others’ is concerned, it is also about the porous
relationship between the language of anthropology and that of everyday
forms of designation of ‘oneself’ and ‘others.’ Yet, if closure lies at the core
of anthropological descriptive practice, it is also true that the iteration of

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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

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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.

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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.

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xii

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

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xiv

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.

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xv

List of abbreviations

AS An Anthropology of the Subject

ATSG “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?”
CA Coyote Anthropology
COI “Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualizations of the
Innate: a Semiotic Critique of the Ecological Perspective”
ESK The Elementary Structures of Kinship
FGR “Figure-Ground Reversal Among the Barok”
FP “The Fractal Person”
LS Lethal Speech
STSFT Symbols That Stand for Themselves
TCS The Curse of Souw
TIC The Invention of Culture

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xvi

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1

1 Introduction
Difference and ethnography in
Roy Wagner

Difference and the emic gesture

How is one to account for difference within difference in anthropology? This
is the overarching question that frames this work. This book is a reading of
Roy Wagner’s work that interrogates the status of the emic gesture as that
which designates, constitutes, emplaces, and describes difference as alterity.
A  foundational procedure of anthropological rhetoric, the emic gesture is
not synonymous with the “metaphysical gesture” (Derrida 1988: 93), whose
closure ‘deconstruction’ seeks to open1. However, my reading of Wagner’s
iterations of this gesture2 draws on deconstructive performativity in its
attempt to contaminate the closure of named difference with dissemination.
If anthropological theory is to be ethnographic, what are the implications
of grounding ethnographic theorization in the assumption of the emic?
As a concept, the ‘emic gesture’ does the work of naming a foundational
anthropological procedure with the purpose of articulating the Wagnerian
instantiation of a gesture that points to the emic to the possibilities and
entanglements that its iteration in anthropological discursive practice have
implicated. The connections between Wagner’s actualizations of the emic
and the various iterations of this gesture in anthropology and beyond must
remain partial (Strathern 1991), as is the case with any attempt at descrip-
tion that also aims to be transformative. Yet, it is the connection between
Wagner and other endeavors grounded in the emic that is to foster dissem-
ination through the extension of the erasure of this gesture in his work to
anthropological work that is proposed under different signatures via the
contagion of ‘deconstruction.’
The emic gesture is frequently made visible in ethnographic writing
through the names assigned to others, which might be taken for an index
of alterity. Thus, alterity (and ipseity) emerges in Wagner’s text through
names such as ‘Daribi,’ ‘Barok,’ ‘Melanesian,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘peasant,’ ‘Western,’
‘American.’ Yet, the emic gesture is clearly not a prerogative of Wagner, as
it has grounded the anthropological endeavor in more or less explicit ways
even before anthropology emerged as a discipline.3 Thus, if Wagner’s work
is only one of the possible iterations of anthropological engagement with

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2

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

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3

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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)

After our first interaction, I  started to revisit Wagner’s texts in my hotel

room during the conference. As it turned out, my hat had apparently been
taken for a successful form of differentiation from the non-circumscribable
universe of the possibilities of being. Based on our conversations, many of
the passages that I  had found difficult to understand—such as the place
ascribed to Castañeda in TIC, formulations like “the whole cloth of uni-
versal congruence” in TFP (Wagner 1991a: 166) and the way in which the
notion of “seeing” is used in Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Wagner
1986a: 10, 13, hence STSFT)10—became clearer as I realized in what kind
of holism he was interested (cf. chapter 5). This was the subject to which
he invariably returned. Wagner does mention holism explicitly in texts
such as TIC, FP, and An Anthropology of the Subject (2001, hence AS). But
until I had a chance to talk to him, I had been inclined to understand it as
closer to Dumont’s concept in Homo Hierarchicus (1980), which he cites
frequently, especially as the concept of ideology is also present in Wagner
(e.g.,1972, cap. 2; 1978b, 1986a). Yet, I gradually realized that holism, for
him, is much closer to Castañeda’s, whom he presents as the inspiring force
for TIC and subsequent writings.11 Wagner sees in Castañeda’s work the
possibility of transmitting to one’s audience the potentialities found in ‘indi-
genous’ worlds.12
To Wagner, ‘the West,’ with its collectivizing perspective, does not pay
enough attention to ‘other’ forms of creativity that might liberate it through
their inventiveness. Thus, anthropology, as ‘counterculture,’ should make
the worlds of ‘others’ known so that the collectivizing, and therefore con-
ventional (cf. chapters 2 and 3), inclination of ‘Western’ culture and society
might be affected by more inventive modes of symbolization. In this for-
mulation, implied or made explicit in many passages of Wagner’s writing,

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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

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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.

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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).

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Introduction 17
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Introduction 21
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2 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

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.

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 23

Although dealing with description and naming, my concern here is not of
a purely linguistic nature; rather, the discussion concerns the conditions of
possibility for ethnographic writing to account for difference within diffe-
rence without resorting to the totalization of ‘others.’ If the world is not
transparent to language, it ensues that one cannot write as if names were
equivalent to things (or people). Thus, it will not suffice to negotiate the
paradox of description by pointing to the fact that there is a relation of
displacement between one’s rendering of difference and the world and then
proceed to describe it as if this were not the case. To the extent that ‘decon-
struction’ is committed not to the negotiation of paradoxes (cf. Wagner
1977a and chapter  3), but to opening the closure of totalization, I  draw
on it in an attempt to systematically introduce rupture into the naming
practices that designate, constitute, and emplace ‘others.’ Yet, one needs to
acknowledge, with Morris (2007), that if Derrida does not need to engage
with the issue of how to adequately narrate ‘the story of the Nambikwara’
that is told to us by Lévi-Strauss, this is a major concern for anthropology.
How can one describe the world from a perspective that considers difference
and simultaneously erases the name, and therefore the proper (le propre,
with all its connotations of proper, property, propriety)? It is necessary to
challenge the metaphysics of presence that creeps into ethnographic writing
without relinquishing the attentiveness to difference that is a historical mark
of anthropology and is so central to the work of Wagner and many others.
In the chapters that follow, Wagner’s work is read through ‘deconstruc-
tion.’ Special attention is paid to the naming practices attributed to others
as well as to those embraced by the author, at times in the name of others.
My reading is not ethnographic in the sense that it does not engage with
difference that has not yet been ethnographically reduced. But it might
be considered ethnographic to the extent that it engages with difference
as reduced through Wagner’s writing to follow as closely as possible the
movement of his conceptualization and capture the work of naming in his
rendering of ‘others.’ It is through an attentive reading of the naming of
difference that I wish to effect an erasure of the emic as that which totalizes
the displacement of difference and sameness as alterity and ipseity. For
“[n]omination is important, but it is constantly caught up in a process that
it does not control” (Derrida 1979: 67).
A relevant difference between my engagement with différance and that
of Derrida lies in the focus of observation. If philosophy can do without
empiricism, anthropology’s greatest challenge is probably how to deal with
the passage between the empirical world and anthropological analysis. It is
therefore not a coincidence that the moment of such passage is usually the
point of rupture of many anthropological texts. An example thereof can be
found in Derrida’s reading of Tristes tropiques (1997), where his erasure of
the prevalence of speech builds upon the moments in which Lévi-Strauss’s
theory departs from his description of lived experience. As far as Wagner
is concerned, one instance in which rupture is made visible is when the

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24 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

relationship between ethnography and theorization is related to the coup-
ling of dialogue at the empirical level with the concept of dialectic in TIC.
My analysis dwells on such moments and explores them with the purpose of
flexibilizing the oppositional categories based on which empiricism attempts
to conflate the empirical with the analytical.
Lest too strong an opposition between Wagner and Derrida be
presupposed, it is worth remembering that Wagner’s procedure in TIC is
akin to ‘deconstruction’ in many ways, as it portrays culture as invention
and proposes to engage with anthropology by posing questions of the order
of the ‘why’ and not only of the ‘how’ (Wagner 1981: 6). It is the fact that
Wagner’s work has already started this kind of move that makes it so suit-
able for a reading of the sort proposed here. In this chapter, I  dwell on
Derrida’s engagement with difference (as différance) and naming in order to
illuminate how I employ it in my reading of Wagner. What follows makes
explicit how ‘deconstruction’ might contribute toward a critical engagement
with a constant point of rupture in anthropological narrative: The emic ges-
ture. After dwelling on Derrida’s reading of anthropology and critique of
the metaphysics of presence, this chapter proceeds to outline some of the
iterations of the emic gesture in Wagner’s work as a basis for the discussion
undertaken in subsequent chapters.

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

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 25

couple of paragraphs later4—whose main objective is the destabilization of
‘ontology’ or ‘Western metaphysics,’ here posed as synonyms. Such desta-
bilization requires the questioning of statements in the third-person pre-
sent indicative, i.e., statements that purport to an objective description of
something. Thus, affirmations such as “Deconstruction is (not) a method”
or “Deconstruction is (not) an operation” cannot possibly serve as a foun-
dation for ‘deconstruction’ if what is at stake in its endeavor is the destabil-
ization of metaphysics and/as ontology. According to Derrida, it is precisely
(‘Western’) metaphysics that poses the conditions of possibility for such
sentences to be uttered. Deconstruction is said to be both a “structuralist
gesture” and an “antistructuralist gesture” to the extent that it “assumed
a certain need for the structuralist problematic” (Derrida 1985:  3) while
proceeding to unsettle its premises.
In affirming that my reading of Wagner’s work draws on Derridean
deconstruction, I do not, therefore, imply that it is a kind of tool for textual
analysis. For deconstruction, in its démarche, cannot be separated from
Derridean ‘theorization’ of naming, exchange, violence, translation, law, and
language.5 And from all its possible iterations and disseminations. Neither
can my reading be detached from the movement of Wagner’s work. This
chapter is therefore not about synthesizing Derrida and ‘deconstruction’ so
as to shed light on a supposed method; rather, what I  wish to offer here
are some initial elements—certainly also deconstructible—for the reader
to step into the moving ground from which I speak. What follows focuses
on the movement of some of the ‘concepts’ I  appropriate although the
supposed ‘property’ of language is diluted and lost in dissemination: In the
disseminations of the name Derrida, of the name ‘deconstruction,’ and of all
other names. For ‘deconstruction’ only makes sense in the (con)text of its
chain of substitutions:  Writing, trace, supplement, pharmakon, différance,
margin, gramma. And this is one reason why my provisional fixing does not
dispense with the reading of Derrida’s and Wagner’s text. If ‘deconstruction’
hinges on the impossible, I can only wish that this necessarily incomplete
iteration of it—“the book’s repetitions are always other than the book”
(Spivak 1997: xii)—might be illuminating to some extent. But “I,” here, is a
provisional place in language.
Grammatology, Derrida’s (1997) ‘science of writing,’ radically questions
the notion of subject that grounds the philosophy of consciousness. In so
doing, it challenges the supposition of the author’s intentionality, a founda-
tional element for the structural method of philosophical reading that one
finds, for instance, in Goldschmidt’s (1947) reading of Plato and Guéroult’s
(1953) reading of Descartes. In its abandonment of the idea of the author
as a conscious subject, grammatology considers the text as a composition
of lines of force in constant negotiation and dispute—a series, or chain, of
choices that are necessary when systematicity is sought, and which therefore
lead the author to venture into some paths and discard others, the discarded
ones being at the same time indicated and repressed by the text. This is

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26 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

to say that the control an author exercises over her text is limited, as the
text, whose ordering is unstable par excellence, ends up not only stating
what the author foresees, but also pointing to other underlying but not fully
realized possibilities. If authors are not subjects imbued with intentionality,
but names of problems, “neither identities nor causes” (Derrida 1997: 99),
and if every name is an attempt to engage with a problem in a certain way,
this can only be possible in relation to the ‘episteme’—or, rather, the “closure
of the episteme” (Derrida 1997: 93)—within and without which names (of
authors-problems) are located.
In writing, one is subject to the closure of a matrix of thought (‘Western
metaphysics,’ ‘ontology,’ the ‘metaphysics of presence’) to which one refers
despite one’s possible contrary intention. The sous rature, the erasure of
metaphysical concepts, is therefore necessarily coupled with the closure of
the epistemological (con)text in relation to which one writes. It creeps into
the author’s vouloir dire (what one wishes to say, coupled with what one
means) and makes itself felt at the points where the text ‘breaks.’ The author
is thus compelled to trace a path within an entanglement of contradictory
possibilities. Conceived within such entanglement, concepts remain attached
to some of the threads of this fabric, and these threads insistently point to
new directions for the text. The suggestions of other possible developments
for the text being imperfectly repressed in favor of its systematicity, the
author’s intention, if one could ever speak of such a thing, is necessarily
betrayed. Thus, grammatology dwells on the moments in which the text
thinks against itself—or, to paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, the moments in which
the problem thinks itself in the text. Intentionality can only exist as desire.
Two consequences ensue from this: The first is that one cannot simply do
without the concepts of metaphysics; they must, therefore, be summoned
‘under erasure,’ which means to “write a word, cross it out, and then print
both word and deletion. (Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since
it is necessary, it remains legible.)” (Spivak 1997: xiv). Derrida’s proposal
that semiology be replaced by grammatology does not, therefore, entail a
simple denial of semiology, but the erasure of the concept of the sign. The
second consequence of the impossibility of pure intentionality is that the
author’s affects emerge in the text precisely at the points where there is desire
to make it coherent: As one attempts to stitch the text together and keep it
from taking an unwanted route, the gate to other possible roads is left ajar.
In Wagner’s text, as discussed below, such an attempt at cohesion—and the
necessary rupture that comes with it—seem to occur whenever the emic ges-
ture, the gesture through which difference is circumscribed as alterity, seeks
to provide argumentative unity to the text. As moments like this are marked
by an escalation of affect, they are given special attention in my analysis.
My reading compares the realizations of Wagner’s text with some of the
other possibilities it points to: In following the movements of his text, other
routes that are latent, but not fully developed, are indicated through sim-
ultaneous description and transformation. By paying attention to points of

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 27

tension and fissure in his text, I seek to open the closure of metaphysics that
is expressed in the naming of ‘others.’ This transformation of Wagner’s text
is not, however, the result of an outside force; rather, it works on the pos-
sibilities that are posed within its very economy. Grammatological reading,
simultaneously descriptive and transformative, produces a text that ceases
to be a system and has its points of rupture transformed into erasures by
means of the flexibilization and displacement of oppositions (Derrida 1981).
In the effort of destabilization, the text’s presuppositions are made explicit,
and some of the possibilities it implies are radicalized. As the cracks of a text
are frayed, other possibilities can become the object of investment.
Derrida’s idea that “there is nothing outside of the text [there is no
outside-text, il n’y a pas de hors-texte]” (1997: 158) is to be understood as
the impossibility of drawing a strict distinction between text and context,
as the context, “a chain of possible substitutions” (Derrida 1985), indelibly
imprints itself on the text. Thus, the borders between what lies within and
without it are blurred, for the author cannot control the conceptual appar-
atus that writing sets in motion. From the perspective of grammatology, the
borders of a text overrun it, in a débordement, as the text is “a differen-
tial network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than
itself, to other differential traces” (Derrida 1979: 84). A text has no identity
that might be circumscribed to what are commonly understood to be its
borders. Derridean reading, as writing, acts on the text through différance,
i.e., through the endless displacement of its lines of force. Such trans-
formative description follows the logic of supplementation and iterability,
repetition that is never equal to itself because it contains within itself the
unfixing displacement of signification. The text needs to be able to iterate
itself in different (con)texts, and in so doing necessarily iterates the diffe-
rence from itself that is contained within itself. In its differential network of
traces, iterability contains both repetition and alterity. It is of the order of
the supplement, simultaneously void and excessive, adding and substituting
(Derrida 1997: 167).
The supplement is an attempt at substitution doomed to incompleteness,
for in the place of the origin that might fill emptiness lies the void (Derrida
1978; cf. also Morris 2000). The supplement destabilizes borders, the dis-
tinction between inside and outside; its logic is not oriented by an organizing
center. Neither presence nor absence, it is one thing and something else; it can
escape essentialism through the endless movement of différance, which does
not surrender to the principle of non-contradiction. The supplement applies
to any text, as a text begins to differ from itself at the moment in which it
starts to be written. It is in this sense that one can say that the supplement
and différance are governed by a logic of spectrality, of the phantasmagoric,
the uncanny. Movement without origin, the text yields to displacement and
escapes itself at every attempt of definition. It also escapes the world, as
pure presence in the form of perfect juxtaposition between signifier and
signified, the name and the thing, description and the world, cannot be.

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28 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

One is left with the ghostly differential marks of attempted equivalences.
Thus, différance differs, defers, detours. It is an endless process that points
to the impossibility of attaining the totality in which full meaning can be
established. For as Morris (2007: 359) reminds us, this can only be done if
one imagines that one can transcend time and history.

The pharmakon and its chain of substitutions

In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida (1981) develops the concept of the pharmakon,
one of the possible substitutes in the chain of supplementation that includes
différance, deconstruction, hymen, gramma, entame. The pharmakon is
related to an understanding of writing as poison that was disseminated by
the commonsensical readings and translations of the Platonic text Phaedrus
(Plato 2005), in which writing is judged to be incapable of sustaining dia-
logue. Derrida questions the translation of the term pharmakon, for which
an equivalence with “remedy” was frequently established though it might
have been translated as “drug,” i.e., both remedy and poison. For in the
Greek text, writing is considered as pharmakon, a drug effecting a fascin-
ation that is as beneficial as it is harmful. Had the translation of pharmakon
been “drug,” argues Derrida, writing might have been more easily under-
stood as trace, iteration, différance, supplementation, violent displacement.
For it contains “the detours of a signifier that is foreign” (Derrida 1981: 71)
to itself. Thus, it is argued that metaphysics is a matter not only of history
but also of translation, of the fixing of a certain possibility where another
route might have been taken. In its “nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance,”
the pharmakon overruns its borders. Moreover, it operates by seduction: The
text, as writing and therefore pharmakon, can possess whoever reads it. The
Derridean text offers the idea that both drugs and writing are governed by
magic. To this, the living knowledge of dialectics is opposed.
According to Derrida, the “original truth” that writing is a pharmakon
results from the Egyptian myth of Thoth, which bears a structural similarity
to the Greek myth evoked in Phaedrus. In it, Theuth, the one who discovered
calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing, presents his discoveries to the
king, Thamus, who proceeds to examine and criticize them. Theuth presents
writing as a potion for “memory and wisdom,” and therefore a gift. Thus, the
value of writing remains uncertain, as it is to be recognized by the king, who
is also the father. The king experiences the pharmakon as something that
does not belong to him but comes from below and demands his approval.
For Theuth, who offers it, is a lesser god: A son. Yet, king Thamus takes it as
poison (a Gift, in the sense the term has in German—the allusion here is to
Mauss (1969) on the ambiguity of the gift). Writing is presented to the king-
sun-father as a gift, but he rejects it on the grounds that it is a pharmakon
for memory—it is said that it improves memory, but it actually harms it.
Thus, in his defense of the logos (reason undissociated from speech),
Plato resorts to the myth of Theuth as a foundation, despite the opposition

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 29

of mythos and logos on which philosophy rests. Derrida’s argument is that
writing puts forth “a question of morality” (Derrida 1981: 74): For Socrates,
a character in Plato’s dialogue, writing is unacceptable because it lures and
does without the authority of “living knowledge.” It is not adequate to write
because writing is severed from the source of discourse. But one needs to
resort to the authority of myth, i.e., to what one hears others say, in order
to affirm it. The myth (logos) is a truth that is repeated; but it is the very
fact that this truth is iterated that provides for the possibility that it might
be altered. Writing is accused of “repeating without knowing” (Derrida
1981: 74) what it says, which estranges it from its origins; and it is based
on this accusation that its status is to be decided. Yet, as Socrates resorts
to myth, he is obliged to repeat the nature of writing without knowing it,
while the very nature of writing is to repeat without knowing. Thoth’s myth
strikes the first blow, but it is Socrates’s logos that will present the accus-
ation: One that is supposed to be grounded in reason (logos), but needs the
support of myth (mythos), which it wishes to oppose, for reason (logos, in
Greek, is also related to speech) cannot access the nature of writing.
The god who looks down on writing cannot write, but his speech is
enough to judge it. As father, the king belittles the homage in a gesture that
points to what Derrida calls “phallogocentrism”: The Platonic residual per-
manence that attributes origin and the power of speech to the position of
the father (the law). However, the logos is not the father—it is the origin
of the father. Thus, one might say that the one who speaks is “the father of
speech,” and therefore immediately responsible for it. Without the authority
of the father, speech is mere writing. According to the father, what is spe-
cific to writing is the absence of the father. Writing, an orphan, is accused of
parricide because it evades the authority of the law personified by the father.
Writing, as pharmakon, is taken for a poisonous gift because it contains
the desire to kill the father. Writing no longer recognizes any origin; it
only points to its absence:  It is not a commoner, but a bastard (Derrida
1981:148). Logos, on the other hand, is sustained by the father. It recognizes
its debt to the father and “thinks it can forbid itself parricide” (Derrida
1981:  77). But there is an intrinsic relationship between prohibition and
parricide, for subversion is necessarily contained within the structure of the
law (Derrida 1991). The logos is capable of responding when interrogated
because the father is there—in dialectics, response presupposes recourse to
authority—while writingl is incapable of responding because its father is
no longer there, i.e., nobody stands for its origin. When questioned, writing
offers the open-ended chain of its significations, whereas logos can respond.
But in its capacity for adaptation, logos can also feign.
From Derrida’s reading of Phaedrus arises the following question: How
can one affirm that logos is indebted to a father if the father himself is very
much in debt with logos? This father needs to be supplemented, and when
the place of the father is supplied, there arises the possibility of deception,
equivocation, falsification (sophistry as opposed to the supposed truth of

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30 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

philosophy). Thoth is the “signifier-god” (Derrida 1981: 88) who interprets
messages as he carries them. He is never at the origin of the language he
transmits, but introduces difference into whatever he conveys. And diffe-
rence is introduced through substitution, displacement, subversion. At
this point of the text (Derrida 1981:89), Derrida poses the fundamental
question: Is differentiation “really a second step” in language? If not, this
means the absence of any origin, forever supplemented by difference and
displacement—différance as a process of signification. Writing appears as
“the supplement of speech” (Derrida 1981:89), and this is a violent process.
This process of substitutions is

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

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 31

soul” (Derrida 1981: 149, author’s emphasis). For, according to Phaedrus,
dialectics depends on this inscription, which makes it available for memory.
Dialectics, committed to the form of dialogue in Plato, is the immediate
transposition of the soul (as truth) into voice. And writing, in that it makes
memory feeble, gets in the way. It is a “dangerous supplement” (Derrida
1997):  A present absence, “the sign of a sign[, t]he signifier of a phonic
signifier” (Derrida 1991: 110) that lacks the authority of the father. Thus,
although repetition might wish to reiterate the same, it can only iterate
différance. Iteration, the result of writing as trace, displacement, différance,
can never be equal to itself. It “repeats the repeater, the imitator, the sig-
nifier, the representative, in the absence, as it happens, of the thing itself
[Heidegger’s Ding an Sich], … without the living tension of dialectics”
(Derrida 1981: 111).
Now, if presence is necessarily absent, and full equivalence is therefore
impossible, no description can ever correspond to the world. If presence “is
doubled as soon as it appears” (Derrida 1981: 168), its identity cannot be
present to itself because it is constantly displaced, supplemented, substituted.
Identity is not possible because what is can only remain what is if it can add
to itself the possibility of being repeated as such. And difference depends on
the trace, which, “if it makes way for a differential gap, … is neither fully
originary and autonomous, nor, as a path-breaking, is it purely derivative.”
If “such a trait makes way for the possibility of naming in language, … it is
not itself nameable, as spacing, either literally, properly, or metaphorically”
(Derrida 2007: 73–74). The trace defines in re-tracing and withdrawing. The
names that it iterates are therefore devoid of any essence, as originary presence.
And the borders instituted through naming withdraw while differentiating.
The trace, inscribed, “succeeds only in/by being effaced” (Derrida 2007: 75).
What follows dwells on the consequences of this inscription as effacement
for the emic gesture, the anthropological designation par excellence.

Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Wagner

If structuralism is known to ground its developments in (usually binary)
opposition, its engagement with difference—albeit of circumscribed, named,
and oppositional character—has in many instances contributed to the
decentering of metaphysics attempted by deconstruction. In The Elementary
Structures of Kinship, by Lévi-Strauss (1969), the incest taboo is presented
as both what divides nature from culture and what makes it possible to go
from one pole to the other, for it is simultaneously of the order of the natural
(the innate), and the cultural (the law)—a subject that will be the object of
Wagner’s (1972a, 1977b, 1981) reflections as well. This first investigation
of the nature-culture divide is “[led] to its point of effacement” (Derrida
1997:  103) in The Savage Mind, where it “[seems] to be of primarily
methodological importance” (Lévi-Strauss 1966:  247, quoted in Derrida
1997: 103). In Of Grammatology, Derrida (1997) draws on Lévi-Strauss’s

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32 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

reflections on the nature-culture divide to further displace it. Thus, he points
to the way in which Lévi-Strauss differentiates between “ ‘real analysis,’
which will never reveal any difference between nature and culture” (Derrida
1997: 104), and “ideal analysis,” based on which such a division might be
posited methodologically. Derrida affirms on Lévi-Strauss:

At once conserving and annulling inherited conceptual oppositions, this

thought, like Saussure’s, stands on a borderline:  Sometimes within an
un-criticized conceptuality, sometimes putting a strain on the bound-
aries, and working toward deconstruction.
(Derrida 1997: 105)

What Derrida says of Lévi-Strauss above might be said of Wagner to a great

extent. For Derrida, Lévi-Strauss’s thought is productive to the extent that
it is contradictory: Now deconstructive, now admitting the same totalizing
closure it questions. It overcomes boundaries only to set them anew; it creates
oppositions only to relativize them through successive displacements. This
is what makes it possible for Lévi-Strauss to simultaneously contribute to
the deconstruction of the nature-culture divide and claim that one should
“[reintegrate] culture in nature” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 247, quoted in Derrida
1997: 105). Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss is important not only because
it provides an illustration of how deconstruction operates, but also because
a similar instability in the tracing of borders and their débordement can
be attributed to Wagner’s deconstruction of the concepts of group and cul-
ture in ATSG and TIC. Although this will be the subject of inquiry of the
following chapters, I wish to draw attention to it here because it seems that
the procedure in which an opposition is simultaneously questioned and
maintained—what Wagner calls the “negotiation of paradoxes” in COI—is
one of the (unstable) foundations on which anthropological analysis seems
to rest.
The main criticism Derrida addresses to Lévi-Strauss concerns his
treatment of the question of writing and the nostalgia/denial of play it
implies. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss (1997) depicts a scene in which
the Nambikwara learn—or rather, mime—the anthropologist’s writing, the
consequence of which is said to be the introduction of violence among them.
When Lévi-Strauss sees himself as responsible for this due to his introduction
of violence through writing, the underlying supposition is that violence was
previously absent from Nambikwara society. Yet, as Derrida shows, there
are two other moments in Lévi-Strauss’s text on the Nambikwara in which
he describes violence as part of local relations before the introduction of
writing: Violent relations between men and women and the scene in which
local girls reveal to the anthropologist the names of the village’s inhabitants,
which should have remained unuttered. Thus, for Lévi-Strauss, evil comes
from without, with writing and the stranger. But for Derrida, the empirical
violence that Lévi-Strauss finds among the Nambikwara is dependent upon

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 33

the arche-violence of naming that results in the arche-violence of the prohib-
ition to reveal one’s name, without which the war of names described by the
anthropologist would never have occurred (Derrida 1997: 112).
Derrida asks: “[H]ow can we deny the practice of writing in general to a
society capable of obliterating the proper, that is to say a violent society?”
(Derrida 1997: 110). From Derrida’s stance on naming arises that original
purity is impossible, for “the violence of arche-writing is the violence of
difference, of classification, and of the system of appellations” (Derrida
1997: 110). Every production of difference is violent, no matter whether it
comes from within or from without. (There is no within and no without.)
This is not to say that writing is not violent. On the contrary, there is no vio-
lence without writing, and no writing without violence. Therefore, Derrida
claims that the Lévi-Straussian idea of a “society without writing” results
either from “ethnocentric oneirism” (Derrida 1997: 109) or from a lack of
rigor on the part of the anthropologist, who deducts the theory of original
purity (a Lévi-Straussian iteration of Rousseau) from an “empirical contin-
gency” he has not adequately explored (the Nambikwara). As Derrida puts
it, “[t]he point of the incident in effect supports an enormous theoretical
edifice” (Derrida 1997: 126). Thus, structuralism shuns the question of how
to transpose something from the realm of the ideas to its manifestation in
the world. No methodology is offered for that. As shall become clear in the
course of the argument presented in this book, the same might be said of the
claim to access ‘the other’s’ perspective.
In Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (2011), foundational for Lévi-
Strauss’s theory of language, writing is presented as a secondary development
of speech, and therefore estranged from the original, spontaneous, and imme-
diate communication that occurs in Rousseau’s “community immediately
present to itself, without difference” (Derrida 1997: 136). Yet, for Saussure,
this loss of originality and spontaneity of immediate communication—the
counterpart of which is the accusation of inauthenticity that is directed to
writing in Lévi-Strauss—is compensated by writing’s capacity of abstrac-
tion: If writing is a development, language does not depend on it. The same
is true in Lévi-Strauss (1969), for whom there is no humanity without lan-
guage. Yet, in reading the Saussurean text, Derrida notes that Saussure’s
analytical model is based on writing, not on speech. Thus, despite explicit
statements to the contrary, the Saussurean text contains the foundational
idea that speech implies writing. Of Grammatology elaborates and further
develops this possibly unintended idea on which Saussure’s theory of lan-
guage is built.
As every structuralist knows, there are two dimensions to the Saussurean
sign: Sensible sound-image (signifier) and intelligible concept (signified). The
relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary and acquires meaning
only in its relation with other signs (Saussure 2011). Yet, as Derrida (1997)
notes, this does not occur because there is a substantial difference between
signs as far as their structure is concerned; rather, all signs are composed

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34 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

of the same two elements (signifier and signified) and produced through
differential relations. In his grammatological reading of Saussure, Derrida
introduces the idea that language is permeated by alterity and absence.
It does not reproduce presence but is formed by traces containing both
sameness and difference—différance. Therefore, one cannot suppose an ori-
ginal presence, a foundation that vouches for the differentiation of signs
from one another, without a metaphysical move, for all the names of presence
point to metaphysics. Derrida inverts the Saussurean emphasis on speech by
recognizing that all signs, even in speech, suppose the perception of spaces
and intervals, i.e., a word is understood to the extent that it is perceived as
distinct from the next one, in both speech and writing. This perception takes
into account the spacing that marks the distinction between one element and
the next. Thus, almost anything can be understood as writing:  The paths
and signals that mark the landscape, naming, the patterns the Nambikwara
draw on ceramics.
In “A Writing Lesson” (Lévi-Strauss 1997), a narrative that does not
claim to be theoretical in nature and is therefore a less controlled expression
of the anthropologist’s thinking from the perspective of the economy of his
text, the author’s affects are more explicitly revealed. Thus, the Rousseauan
premise of original innocence is more bluntly exposed in Tristes Tropiques,
whereas they remain implicit in texts such as The Elementary Structures
of Kinship and The Savage Mind. This does not mean that the violence of
the law is absent from Lévi-Strauss’s work. Its presence is very much felt
when he considers the institution of society through the incest taboo (Lévi-
Strauss 1969), in what is admittedly a critical engagement with Freud’s
(1950) Totem and Taboo, of which the law, and thus violence, are explicit
components. Yet, the absence of explicit theorization of the violence that is
contained within classification (and naming), seen by structuralism as neces-
sary for social reproduction, substantiates Derrida’s argument that struc-
turalism denies ‘others’ the violence it is willing to concede to ‘Western’
societies.6 Lévi-Strauss’s text is stitched together by such affect. Derrida’s
reading unstitches his text to reveal its ruptures and, by dwelling on them,
destabilize the oppositions on which metaphysical reason is based.
There are certainly aspects of Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss that
resound with the deconstructive reading of Wagner that follows. Yet, despite
Wagner’s claim that Lévi-Strauss, along with Louis Dumont and Marshall
Sahlins, is one of his “silent mentors” (Wagner 2001:  xii), he explicitly
formulates a critique of structuralism (e.g., Wagner 1974, 1981, 1986a7).
The next chapter goes into the conceptual framework of Wagner’s work
in more detail. For now, let us dwell on the affect that seems to move his
writing:  Investment in the dialogical engagement with ‘others’ and the
broadening of the anthropologist’s horizons of possibility that might result
from what he calls an “open-ended experience of mutual creativity” in TIC
(Wagner 1981: 21; cf. also Wagner 1972b: 3–8). For Wagner, field experi-
ence enables the establishment of a profound relation with potentialities

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 35

of invention other than those available in his (‘Western’) culture, in which
conformity with convention is foregrounded. This affect often appears in
conjunction with the emic gesture and the exhortation for the creativity of
‘others’ to be considered. But if Lévi-Strauss, in his critique of ethnocentrism,
presents “the other” as “a model of original goodness” while “exhibiting
[his own] being-unacceptable in an anti-ethnocentric mirror” (Derrida
1997: 114), the same does not seem to occur in Wagner. He seems to have a
different conception of the relation between the “subjects” of anthropology
and the anthropologist, one that emphasizes dialogue (and at times conflict)
rather than nostalgic regret.
Wagner’s ethnographies portray him actively taking part in the lives of
‘Melanesians,’ whose occasional aggressiveness is not a taboo; for instance,
colonialism is blamed for preventing Melanesians from exercising their fun-
damental right of autonomously waging war against neighboring peoples.
Wagner portrays his presence in the field as one of intense surrender to
interaction. As narrated in Habu, he once tore down the house of a neighbor,
which is, according to him, what ‘the Daribi’ do when outraged:

Daribi often express acute hostility toward the inhabitants of a house

by slashing at the front with axes or chopping down the ladder. In 1964
I slashed at the house of a particularly annoying neighbor in a fit of rage,
after which the owner asked “Why do you want to kill me?”
(Wagner 1972b: 125)

Wagner does not aspire to be a neutral observer like the Lévi-Strauss of

Tristes Tropiques; nor does his ethnographic text manifest an explicit invest-
ment in morality as far as behavior (his and others’) is concerned. In his
narrative, the leveling of oneself and others is so thorough that he allows
himself to mime the aggressiveness he attributes to ‘the Daribi.’ Yet, one
still must ask whether tearing down one’s neighbor’s house really means to
interact on an equal basis, especially as Papua New Guinea was not an inde-
pendent country in 1964, and the conditions under which Wagner’s field-
work took place are not made explicit in his ethnography. What is one to
make of his interlocutor’s question? What are the conditions of possibility
for anthropology to aspire to symmetry?
Wagner’s political neutrality8 seems to compete with his ethical appeal for
anthropologists to pay attention to the creativity of the peoples they study
(cf. ATSG; Habu (esp. introduction); LS; TIC). An interest in transform-
ation, manifest in the importance he assigns to improvisation, creativity, and
invention seems to coexist with the negation of change at a deeper level that
his stances on ‘contact’ (cf. chapter  5) and ‘history’ (cf. chapter  6) reveal.
The same movement seems to mark the projection in time of ‘Daribi kinship’
in the last chapter of TCS and AK, which might be taken for an example
of the development of a synchronic model into a diachronic one as argued
by Comaroff and Comaroff (1992). Change seems to both attract and

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36 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

repel Wagner. It is based on the opposition between differentiating (‘non-
Western,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘peasant,’ ‘religious’) and collectivizing (‘Western’) people
that Wagner exhorts anthropologists to engage with the creativity of ‘others.’
The question remains whether this could be read as a less conventional iter-
ation of the Lévi-Straussian divide in which ‘hot’ societies (‘Western’ and ‘lit-
erate’ ones) are opposed to ‘cold’ ones (those ‘without writing,’ the ‘others’),
notwithstanding Wagner’s claim that the differentiating mode of symboliza-
tion is “the only ideological regime capable of managing change” (Wagner
1981: 7).9 In Wagner, the emic gesture points to the ingenuity of ‘others.’

Wagner and the emic gesture

Wagner’s PhD dissertation was published in the form of a book titled The
Curse of Souw (1967). It was the outcome of his first period of fieldwork in
Papua New Guinea in the 1960s10 and focused on “principles of Daribi clan
definition and alliance.” His next book, Habu (1972b), considers “Daribi
religion” from the perspective of metaphorization and is the first work of the
“unintended trilogy” (Wagner 1981: 9) that includes Lethal Speech (1978),
on “Daribi myth,” where the concept of obviation is more systematically
proposed, and The Invention of Culture, Wagner’s (1981) most well-known
piece, which he affirms to be the “epistemology” of the previous two. TIC
first came out in 1975, had a revised edition published in 1981, and was
reprinted in 2016 in the wake of renewed interest in Wagner’s work. It is
based on the ethnographic material of the two previous works of the trilogy
and presents the author’s theoretical stance in a more generalized way
than is the case in his more ethnographic writing—though the distinction
between theory and ethnography in Wagner is always a complicated one.
Asiwinarong (1986b) is based on fieldwork ‘among the Usen Barok’ in the
early 1980s11 and was published in the same year as Symbols That Stand for
Themselves (1986a). Both further develop Wagner’s ethnographic theory of
symbolization. Whereas Asiwinarong is more ethnographic in character, in
STSFT the theory of metaphor developed in Habu is extended through the
concept of obviation and generalized to encompass ‘human symbolization’
and ‘the cosmos.’
In the works published in the 1980s, i.e., after TIC, ‘culture’ is displaced
by concepts such as holography and fractality, which Wagner claims to have
learned from ‘the Barok.’ An Anthropology of the Subject (2001) might
be considered a further displacement of the ‘culture’ concept that begins
with STSFT as well as a renewed investment in the emic, to the extent that
it proposes to consider some of anthropology’s suppositions through the
“holographic worldview” of the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea. Wagner’s
most recent book, Coyote Anthropology (2010), is a very peculiar experi-
ment that radicalizes two aspects of his work: The centrality of dialogue,
presented in TIC as the basis for fieldwork and therefore a core element of
the ethnography that results from it, and the challenging of the nature-culture

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 37

divide initiated in TIC and AK. CA has a singular narrative form: structured
as a dialogue between Roy, the author’s homonym, and Coyote, it further
explores through other means issues previously approached in Wagner’s
more orthodox anthropological narrative, especially as far as his engage-
ment with the work of Carlos Castañeda is concerned.12
In the 1967 monograph on ‘Daribi kinship,’ the place of the emic in
ethnographic and theoretical discourse is already a matter of concern for
Wagner. Thus, in the conclusion to TCS, Wagner’s first published iteration of
the emic gesture appears in the form of a model whose purpose is to make
the “native view” compatible with the “anthropologist’s view” (Wagner
1967: 227). From the partial juxtaposition of its two main parts, “the native
point of view (Wagner 1967: 233) or “native symbolic categories” (Wagner
1967:  239) and “the anthropologist’s model of the Daribi social system”
(Wagner 1967:  229), results a third and central one, in which “scientific”
knowledge is to be made compatible with the knowledge of the people
studied by anthropology. TCS, which according to Wagner was influenced
by Schneider’s “Some Muddles in the Models” (1965), claims that ethno-
graphic narrative should be able to simultaneously present the ‘Daribi’ sym-
bolic system and build an anthropological model of it. If “science,” as the
possibility of generalization, has a prominent role in the argument, it is also
the case that one of the stated purposes of ethnography is, in Wagner’s terms,
to account for ‘Daribi kinship’ from the point of view of ‘the Daribi’—what
Crook and Shaffner call “a nascent symmetrical anthropology” (2011: 161).
For a kinship system is, as Wagner argues in the mode of the emic ges-
ture, the result of a certain way of thinking about it, and not the other way
around. Thus, a synecdoche in which kinship is juxtaposed with culture is
established: Kinship, a metonymy of culture, is in turn determined by what it
stands for. This formula, proposed by Wagner to bridge the gap between the
“Daribi model” and anthropological concepts in TCS, is further developed
in his work to the point of blurring the border between theorization and
empirical observation as his ethnography becomes increasingly invested in
fractality, holography, and obviation. As this book argues, the emic gesture
is what these different analytical moves have in common.
In its attempt to “analyze human motivation at a radical level”13 (Wagner
1981: 6), TIC intends to discard (or, to use one of Wagner’s terms, obviate)
analyses within the utilitarian matrix in order to grasp how phenomena and
aspirations are determined by culture, rather than culture being determined
by interests. Here, the emic gesture is iterated in the ‘cultural’ mode, as
interests are, for Wagner, of cultural character.14 The two contrasting “modes
of thought, perception, and action” (Wagner 1981:  44) outlined in TIC,
differentiation and collectivization, purport to overcome the dichotomy
between thought and action. As cultures are presented as inventive, symbol-
ization takes on an intellective as well as pragmatic character. The argument
of TIC is that the conventional mode of symbolization—which operates
through collectivization, ‘Western’ par excellence—and the differentiating,

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38 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

inventive or non-conventional mode of symbolization—attributed to
‘Melanesians’ and “tribal or acephalous societies” (Wagner 1981:  8) in a
more generalizing iteration of the emic gesture—operate differently. Thus,
it is based on the emic gesture, which enables the opposition between ‘us’
and ‘them,’ that it is affirmed that conventional symbolization operates by
drawing a distinction between the symbol and what is symbolized while dif-
ferentiating symbolization assimilates or encompasses what is symbolized
(cf. chapter 3). Yet, if convention is necessary for any act of invention, both
differentiation and generalization simultaneously take part in symbolization.
Cultures that are considered collectivizing consciously place their emphasis
on conventional symbolization and mask differentiation, whereas cultures
that are considered differentiating emphasize differentiating symbolization
and mask collectivization. The masked procedure is attributed to the realm
of the ‘innate’ whereas its counterpart is assimilated to the sphere of human
action (cf. TIC, esp. cap. 3).
TIC carries out a double movement. In chapters 1 and 2, it makes explicit
that culture, as a concept, is an analytical tool that helps the anthropologist
make sense of the difference encountered during field experience (culture as
meaningful reification). In chapters 3 through 6, it contrasts the ‘Western’
mode of symbolization with the mode of symbolization of ‘tribal societies’
to outline how they operate. Thus, to some extent, the four last chapters of
the book reinstate the concept of culture that the two first chapters pains-
takingly deconstruct (a procedure that COI describes as the negotiation
of paradoxes). It is possible to say that TIC both questions and reiterates
the emic gesture in that the description of the collectivizing and differen-
tiating modes of symbolization, in which culture (and the otherness or
sameness that is associated with it) remains presupposed, interrupts the
work of erasure initiated in the two first chapters, where culture is described
as the analogy that results from field interaction. The deconstructive move
initiated by Wagner in his engagement with the culture concept makes his
work especially interesting for a ‘deconstructive’ approach, as the displace-
ment of totalization and otherness, and of totalized otherness, is ultimately
not radicalized in TIC, but compromised by the differentiating/collectivizing
divide. It is naming, the naming of oneself and others, grounded in the emic
gesture, that stitches together the text of TIC and thus halts the work of dis-
placement initiated in its first two chapters.
In the first two chapters of TIC, “The Invention of Culture” and “Culture
as Creativity,” ‘culture’ is said to be invented in the relation between the
anthropologist and those he perceives as different from himself, who in turn
perceive him as different from themselves (reverse anthropology). Their
interaction is informed by their respective cultures, i.e., the context from
which signification is derived. Thus, for Wagner, ‘culture’ results from the
interaction between subjects that represent different modes of symboliza-
tion. Culture is, therefore, not a pre-given entity but the result of the object-
ification that ensues from interaction. Culture is not a closed system but

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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 39

arises from the creative acts through which meaning is produced. Context,
as culture, is informed by and builds upon the convention of meaning which
precedes it; but context is also updated—and transformed—by each specific,
ad hoc act of symbolization, i.e., by every inventive act. Therefore, inven-
tion supposes convention and vice versa. This understanding of signification
allows Wagner to do without a culture concept that supposes the closure
or reproduction of a self-sufficient symbolic universe; it also allows him to
find a compromise between permanence and change that is not deterministic
regarding significations to come but allows one to refer meaning to previous
instances of signification ex post facto. Culture is based on the primacy of
what he theorizes in TIC as the “dialectic of invention and convention”
(Wagner 1981: 46). But in TIC, the dialectic of invention and convention
supposes the opposition between collectivization (‘Western’ and its chain of
substitutions) and differentiation (‘tribal’ and its chain of substitutions). As
this book argues, this is because difference, as it appears in Wagner’s work,
depends on the emic gesture.
In description, the poles of dialectic must be named if ethnography is to
produce oppositional difference. It is through naming that alterity can be
converted—and contained—into (cultural) otherness. In TIC, the term ‘other’
is employed mostly as an adjective.15 The expressions designating otherness
vary:  “tribal societies,” “acephalous societies,” “peasant societies,” “tribal
cultures,” “tribal peoples,” “religious peoples,” “nonstratified, decentralized
peoples,” “lower-class urban peoples,” “tribal, peasant, and ethnic ‘differen-
tiating’ traditions,” “tribal, peasant, and other nonrationalistic traditions.”
The adjectives related to the opposite pole ascribed to the anthropologist
include “Western,” “rationalistic,” “urban,” “bourgeois”; and one should
not forget the first-person-plural-possessive pronoun “our,” often followed
by the noun “culture.” Yet, one wonders why after such an effort of displace-
ment of the culture concept alterity and ipseity are still named along dichoto-
mies such as urban/rural, acephalous/centralized, nonstratified/stratified, or
religious/rationalistic. It seems that this necessity arises from Wagner’s take
on dialectics (cf. chapter 3), itself dependent on the type of nomination that
is instituted by the emic gesture.
Although Wagner’s advocacy of culture as relation might lead one to expect
the relation between the anthropologist and his interlocutors in the field to be
a subject of exploration and problematization, especially in his more explicitly
ethnographic work (such as TCS, Habu, LS, and Asiwinarong), this is surpris-
ingly not often the case. After dwelling on the way in which culture (as cul-
tural difference) is produced through dialogue in the two first chapters of TIC,
Wagner puts communication aside to focus on culture. This might be the case
because TIC proposes a model that is based not on induction, but on deduc-
tion (Wagner 1981: 7). Generalization is not developed based on inferences
resulting from the analysis of empirical instances; rather, conclusions arise
from the stances taken—what Bateson (1958) might have called “premises.”
Wagner cites the fact that Newton “wrote his equations and deduced the world

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40 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

from them” (Wagner 1981: 7) to illustrate his procedure in a book that “was
not written to prove, by evidence, argument, or example, any set of precepts
or generalizations about human thought and action” (Wagner 1981: 7); or, as
he puts it in STSFT, “evidence is largely a concern with illustrating, or exem-
plifying (rather than ‘proving’) the model suggested” (Wagner 1986a: xii). It is
thus based on deduction that Wagner wishes to account for what he presents
as two distinct modes of symbolization: Collectivization and differentiation.
Two consequences arise from this: The empirical world might not conform to
the collectivizing/differentiating dichotomy; and labels, including those one
attaches to others, precede and exceed ethnographic inquiry—as is always
the case when the world is deduced from an equation. Thus, the emic gesture
is not a consequence but a premise of Wagner’s work. Elicitation is not to be
confounded with demonstration.
If Wagner’s deductive argumentation bears resemblances with mathemat-
ical thought—one of the underpinnings of his work (cf. Wagner 2012)—this
has a curious effect as far as the status of the ethnographic is concerned.
Either the world is conflated with the model, and therefore ethnography
fully reflects it, or the world is to mime the model, for the former is to be
deducted from the latter:  “arguments and evidence belong to a different
level of investigation” (Wagner 1981: 6–7). Yet, what TIC proposes is to pre-
sent “a different viewpoint for anthropologists,” with the recognized possi-
bility that “some of these implications might fail to accord with some area of
‘observed fact’ ” (Wagner 1981: 7). It is this kind of reasoning that underpins
Wagner’s a priori statement that there is a difference in motivation between
‘Western’/collectivizing and ‘non-Western’/differentiating modes of symbol-
ization. And this difference is based, at the level of symbolization, on the
absence of distinction between the symbol and what it symbolizes in the
differentiating or inventive mode, whereas the conventional or collectivizing
mode generalizes by differentiating symbols from what they symbolize (cf.
chapter 3). With this move, Wagner wishes to attain the generalization that
for him characterizes ‘Western’ symbolization and propose a kind of pro-
cedure in which the world and its expression become the same—as in ‘dif-
ferentiation’ and mathematics.
Some questions arise from Wagner’s deductive procedure: Can ethnography
be considered a description of the world if the author draws on extended field
research, but postulates an a priori principle of symbolization from which
description shall be deducted? Does the adoption of such a procedure imply
that the empirical world is to be considered an illustration, a demonstration,
or a metaphor of the argument one develops? Is this the case with fractality,
holography, and obviation? We shall come back to these questions.

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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Deconstruction, alterity, différance 41

2 Examples thereof are Derrida’s (1997) approach to writing, discussed in his
reading of Lévi-Strauss’s (1997) “The Writing Lesson”; Derrida’s destabilization
of the (non-)opposition between nature and culture in Lévi-Strauss’s work (Lévi-
Strauss 1969; Derrida 1997), on which his reflection on animality is based (e.g.,
Derrida 2008); and Derrida’s (1992, 1994) engagement with Mauss’s (1969)
theory of the gift.
3 For a critique of what Rorty (1986:463) calls Derrida’s “swooshy generalizations
about the history of philosophy,” cf. Rorty (1984).
4 Bennington’s experiment in the book Jacques Derrida (Bennington & Derrida
1999), in which his account of Derrida’s work is followed by Derrida’s
interventions, points to the difficulty of systematization that ‘deconstruction’
implies.
5 ‘Theorization’ is not the right word either, for ‘theory’ is as clumsy a word as
‘method’ as far as the effects of ‘deconstruction’ are concerned.
6 Echoes of this refusal to extend violence to ‘others’ can be found in Wagner’s
claim that, in Melanesia, power, as image, is holistic (cf. chapters 3 and 5).
7 On the concreteness of obviation, which Wagner opposes to structuralist
abstraction, cf. Wagner (1986a: 131); structuralism is also criticized by him for
its investment in system (Wagner 1986a, esp. caps. 1 and 2).
8 Cf. Wagner’s interview by Alan Macfarlane (Wagner 2008), in which Wagner
affirms that he lost his interest in politics after Kennedy, for whom he had voted,
was shot.
9 On Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies, cf. Wagner
(1972b: 4). Cf. also the discussion on epoch in STSFT (Wagner 1986a, chapter 5)
and chapter 6 for a discussion of Wagner’s take on history and change.
10 His first fieldwork ‘among the Daribi’ took place from November 1963 to
February 1965. He went back to the field from July 1968 to May 1969 after
having published TCS.
11 The ethnography ‘among the Barok’ was conducted between July 1979 and
March 1980. Wagner returned to the field in June and July of 1983. He lived in
one of the five villages in which the Usen dialect is spoken. According to Clay
(1989), Wagner’s ethnography was part of a joint comparative effort in New
Ireland, in which Marianne George and herself also took part. Her review is very
laudatory of the book; yet, the same cannot be said of Gell’s appraisal, for whom
Asiwinarong accomplishes less than previous books by Wagner. He considers
that Wagner’s core ethnography is not very rich, and the work focuses on “cul-
tural meaning” to the exclusion of other relevant aspects, such as intercultural
trade and local ethnohistory (Gell 1987: 590).
12 On Coyote Anthropology, cf. chapter 3.
13 On this stated purpose, cf. also Wagner 1994, 1995.
14 Wagner’s argument has interesting parallels with Sahlins’s (1976) discussion of
how choices are culturally determined in Culture and Practical Reason. Other
authors to whom Wagner acknowledges his debt in TIC are Geertz, Lévi-Strauss,
Schneider, Dumont, and Bateson. And last, but certainly not least, Castañeda is
mentioned as an important source of inspiration, especially as his distinction
between tonal and nahual is concerned. If Castañeda is not always explicitly
mentioned in Wagner’s early work, his influence becomes increasingly evident.
This appears to be related to the way in which the emic is summoned to legit-
imize the differentiating perspective.

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42 Deconstruction, alterity, différance

15 Though there are instances in which the noun “others” is employed, such as
in Wagner (1986a:  90, 91). The same is true of the term “native,” frequently
employed in adjectival form but rarely used as a noun (though cf. Wagner
1972b: 4, 1986a: 1).

References
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CLAY, Brenda. 1989. Review of Asiwinarong. Pacific Studies, 12(2) 146–149.
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Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
CROOK, Tony & SHAFFNER, Justin. 2011. Preface:  Roy Wagner’s ‘Chess
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DERRIDA, Jacques. 1978 [1967]. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.
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———. 1994 [1993]. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
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———. 1997 [1967]. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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———. 2008 [2006]. The Animal That Therefore I  Am. New  York:  Fordham
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FREUD, Sigmund. 1950 [1913]. Totem and Taboo. New York: Norton.
GELL, Alfred. 1987. Review of Asiwinarong. Man, 22(3): 589–591.
GOLDSCHMIDT, Victor. 1947. Paradigme dans la dialectique platonicienne.
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———. 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA:  Beacon
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———. 1997 [1955]. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Modern Library.
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MORRIS, Rosalind. 2000. In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in
Northern Thailand. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2007. Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology,
36: 355–389.
PLATO. 2005. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
RORTY, Richard. 1984. Deconstruction and Circumvention. Critical Inquiry, 11(1):
1–23.
———. 1986. The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell:  A Reply to Henry Staten.
Critical Inquiry, 12(2): 462–466.
SAHLINS, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago:  University of
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SAUSSURE, Ferdinand. 2011 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics. New  York:
Columbia University Press.
SCHNEIDER, David. 1965. “Some Muddles in the Models:  Or, ‘How the System
Really Works.’ ” In: BANTON, Michael (ed.), The Relevance of Models for Social
Anthropology. New York: Frederick Praeger.
SIEGEL, James. 1997. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton
University Press.
———. 2006. Naming the Witch. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
SPIVAK, Gayatri. 1997. “Translator’s Preface.” In:  DERRIDA, Jacques & SPIVAK,
Gayatri, Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
STRATHERN, Marilyn. 2001. What Is a Parent? HAU Journal of Ethnographic
Theory, 1(1): 245–278.
———. 2011. Binary License. Common Knowledge, 17(1): 87–103.
TYLER, Stephen. 1998.Them Others: Voices Without Mirrors. Paideuma: Mitteilungen
zur Kulturkunde, 44: 31–50.
WAGNER, Roy. 1967. The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi Clan Definition and
Alliance in New Guinea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1972a. Incest and Identity: A Critique and Theory on the Subject of Exogamy
and Incest Prohibition. Man, 7(4): 601–613.
———. 1972b. Habu:  The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. 1974. “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?” In: LEAF,
Murray (ed.), Frontiers of Anthropology. New York: D. Van Nostrand: 95–122.
———. 1977a. “Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualizations of the
Innate: A Semiotic Critique of the Ecological Perspective.” In: BAYLISS-SMITH,
Timothy & FEACHERN, Richard (eds.), Subsistence and Survival: Rural Ecology
in the Pacific. London: Academic Press.
———. 1977b. Analogic Kinship:  A Daribi Example. American Ethnologist, 4(4):
623–642.
———. 1978. Lethal Speech. Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
———. 1981 [1975]. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1986a. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago
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———. 1986b. Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image and Social Power among the Usen Barok
of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1994. “If You Have the Advertisement You Don’t Need the Product.”
In: BATTAGLIA, Debora (ed.), Rhetorics of Self-Making. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
———. 1995. “Hazarding Intent: Why Sogo Left Hweabi.” In:  ROSEN, Lawrence
(ed.), Other Intentions:  Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States.
Santa Fé: SAR Press.
———. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject:  Holographic Worldview in New
Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2008. Interview on the Life and Work of Roy Wagner [video file]. Available
at: http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/198373.
———. 2010. Coyote Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
———. 2012. Automodelagem:  o lugar da invenção [Self-Modeling:  The Place of
Invention]. Revista de Antropologia, 54(2): 921–953.

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3 Inventing culture

The paradox of unit and relation

The 1977 article “Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualizations
of the Innate: A Semiotic Critique of the Ecological Perspective” (Wagner
1977b), published two years after the first edition of TIC (Wagner 1975),
discusses how the dialectic of invention and convention presented in TIC
unfolds into the dialectic of culture and communication. The dialectic of
culture and communication, the way in which the dialectic of unit and
relation is manifested in the practice of anthropology, is already present
in TCS (1967), though in a different formulation. In TCS, the opposition
on which ‘Daribi kinship’ is based (sharing meat versus exchanging wives)
serves as the conceptual mainstay of Wagner’s analysis. It was through the
ideas of unit definition and inter-relation that Wagner sought to escape the
structural-functionalist tendency to fit a particular kinship system into a
model that precedes ethnography (cf. also Wagner 1980). Thus, in TCS “the
native point of view” is to determine the way in which analytical criteria are
articulated, i.e., how units and relations are constituted in that ethnographic
context, and not the other way around. This idea also seems to orient the
“dialectic between society and individual strategy and ability” (Wagner
1972b:  218), possibly a formulation that precedes that of the dialectic of
invention and convention in TIC.
COI systematically explores the relation (and opposition) between “sci-
entific”—‘science’ is understood to be ‘Western’—and “indigenous Papuan”
conceptualization. In reading it, one is reminded of Lévi-Strauss’s (1966)
“The Science of the Concrete,” in which distinctions are drawn between
the “savage mind” (la pensée sauvage) and scientific thought, the bricoleur
mediating between these two positions. Yet, despite the residually struc-
turalist move of classification that underlies his effort, Wagner claims, as
he does in TIC, that one should pay attention not only to unit definition
but also to relation—his main critique of “systemic” approaches being
that they fail to consider human inventiveness (cf. TIC; STSFT). Wagner’s
discussion of the dialectic of invention and convention indexes a classical
subject of anthropological (and philosophical) debate: How to account for

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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:

Nontautologous meaning can only be produced through the innovative

extension of signifiers into metaphors, that is, the formation of symbols
whose contrast with the element signified is supplemented by a rela-
tion of similarity, or analogy, with that element. Thus although lexical
signification is characterized by an arbitrary relationship between sig-
nifier and signified, metaphorical signification involves a nonarbitrary
and determinate relationship between signifier and signified. … [A]
metaphor brings the element signified into relation with the system of
meanings in a culture, whereas lexical signification merely registers its
conventions of labeling. A lexical ‘coding’ signifies an isolated element,
but a metaphor signifies a relation.
(Wagner 1972a: 5)

Only convention is considered by Wagner to be of arbitrary nature; metaphors,

as invention, are non-arbitrary to the extent that metaphorization bears a
relation with the cultural context in which it occurs (the “system of meanings
in a culture”). Habu does question such a clear-cut distinction between the
literal and the figurative, as metaphors forcefully become conventional
(sometimes to the point of being understood as literal) and every convention
can potentially become an invention through metaphor. But if Habu blurs
the borders of invention and convention (cf. chapter  6), COI demarcates
them anew in its attempt to draw a distinction between the modes of sym-
bolization operating in “Western science” and “indigenous Papuan concep-
tualization.” This is the case because in creating this new paradox, COI is
able to defend the analogy that results from metaphorization (and is related
to the differentiating mode of symbolization described in TIC) as an alterna-
tive to structuralist homology. Yet, in order to do so, it must have recourse
to the emic gesture.
Lévi-Strauss is criticized by Wagner due to the distance homology creates
between the model and reality (e.g., Wagner 1986c:  110) as it establishes
a relation of representation with the object. According to Wagner, the
objectification that homology undertakes causes it to distance itself from
reality to better represent it; thus, in representation, the relations of diffe-
rence between representational elements are homologous to the relations of
difference between elements in the world, which leads to a divide between
language and reality, the symbol and what it symbolizes.8 In his review of
Habu, Ludvigson (1974) agrees with Lévi-Strauss (1964) when he affirms
that in totemism there is only homology, for analogy would require simi-
larity between humans and totems. Wagner’s response to Ludvigson is that
although Lévi-Straussian homology makes sense, the structuralist stance

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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

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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

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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)

Yet, the methodological and epistemological questions addressed to the emic

gesture above remain unanswered. Rather, one comes back to the tautology
that COI attributes to literal symbolization.
If the kinship of ‘others’ is based on analogy, at the semiotic level, differ-
entiation and invention are related to the figurative, iconic, or metaphorical.

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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

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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)

This is to say that the literal or conventional aspect of symbolization,

associated with (‘Western’) collectivization in TIC, remains overdetermining
for Wagner despite his insistence that anthropology should pay attention
to the (figurative and analogic) inventiveness of ‘others.’ In Wagnerian dia-
lectic, invention is encompassed by convention in a move that is not unlike
Dumont’s (1980) “encompassment of the contrary13.” Thus, it is the very
distinction between literal and figurative, conventionally established, that
keeps them separate. But once the distinction is assumed, is there not
always the risk that the reiteration of this convention might fail? Wagner’s
response to this predicament is that modes of symbolization are culturally
determined: “the conventional separation entailed by a culture provides the
essence of its semiotic orientation, or world view” (Wagner 1977b:  393).
Through this narrative slippage, a mode of symbolization is made equiva-
lent with a “world view.” And differentiation is ascribed to Melanesians and
other ‘others’ while collectivization is associated with ‘the West.’

Ethnography, dialogue, and dialectic

As discussed above, Wagner wishes to simultaneously make ‘others’ under-
standable and consider the dialogical interaction between the anthropologist
and the anthropologist’s culture, on the one hand, and the anthropologist’s
interlocutors and their culture, on the other hand, as a fundamental part
of the process through which cultures are invented. Thus, culture is not
simply the result of anthropological objectification; it is invented in the
interaction between subjects coming from different symbolic universes. In
TIC, Wagner mentions the possibility of a “reverse anthropology” in which
“the metaphors of modern industrial civilization [are literalized] from the
standpoint of tribal society” (Wagner 1981: 30). Reverse anthropology is a
curious reversal of the emic gesture in which symmetry is fantasized as one
attributes to ‘others’ the possibility of othering what is construed as the pole
of dialectic that stands for ‘us.’ As Abu-Lughod argued, the production of
otherness through ‘culture’ is not merely a matter of intellectual capacity, as
it “operates in anthropological discourse to enforce separations that inev-
itably carry a sense of hierarchy” (Abu-Lughod 1991:  466). Yet, the lure
of reverse anthropology resides in the possibility of destabilizing anthropo-
logical categories and concepts taken for granted because fundamental to
the anthropologist’s ‘world view’ (cf. the discussion on the equivalence of
cargo and culture in TIC (Wagner 1981: 30–33) and “Culture as Creativity”
(Wagner 1977a)).

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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:

The most insidious task confronting the possibility of a real anthro-

pology, a positive and definitive study of the human knowledge of
the human, would be one in which the very means of knowing were
already appropriate by the peoples being studied. An anthropology of
the subject.
(Wagner 2001a: xvii)

Thus, an “anthropology of the subject” proposes to be the anthropology

one does about the subject, the anthropology the subject does about one-
self, and the overcoming of the subject/object dichotomy. The subject of
Wagnerian anthropology is, therefore, a subject capable of ‘reverse anthro-
pology.’ As a result, ethnographic description cannot be separated from the
anthropologist’s experience in the field. This is especially true of Wagner’s
work, in which ethnography is considered as the description of a “world
view” through the lenses of the anthropologist’s “world view.” If one takes
his proposal further on its own terms, it is possible to affirm that in his work
there is a dialectical relation between dialogue at the level of interaction/
experience and his idea of dialectic at the theoretical level.
Wagner is not explicitly concerned with the relation between dialogue and
dialectic.14 Yet, Wagnerian dialectic seems to depend not only on actual dia-
logue (between the anthropologist and interlocutors from another culture)
but also on the naming of the differential poles that stand for the different
“world views” based on which dialectic, as anthropology, is to operate. Thus
ethnography, no matter how abstract it might become, depends on the ori-
ginal co-presence of subjects whose difference is based on their different
modes of symbolization—the collectivizing one being ascribed to ‘the West’
and the differentiating one to ‘others.’ It ensues that anthropology is, in prin-
ciple, knowledge produced by one pole of the dialectic about the other. This
is what one learns in the first two chapters of TIC. And yet, one also learns
in the introduction to the same work that the distinction between the dif-
ferentiating and collectivizing modes of symbolization does not need to be
proved. Thus, difference—named as differentiating, collectivizing, ‘Daribi,’
‘Barok,’ ‘Melanesian,’ ‘Western’—is both a presupposition and a foundation
of ethnographic work. It is the emic gesture and the act of naming through
which it is instituted that make it possible for dialectic to operate between
the poles of differentiation and collectivization. This seems to be Wagner’s
own negotiation of COI’s paradox:  An attempt to look at both unit and
relation. But both unit and relation depend on how units are defined.
It is with this in mind that I wish to analyze the relation between the field
experience Wagner (not so often) describes in his writings and his theory

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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:

End of serious discourse. Beginning of Daribi-style dialectic on the

importance of talk for political and ostensibly spiritual purposes, or, in
Daribi, po begerama pusabo po, ‘the talk that turns back on itself as it
is spoken.’ Sound familiar? It should; it is highly contagious, and your
author seems to have caught a good dose of it. It is distantly related to
asthma.
(Wagner 2008: 77)

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

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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’

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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

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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)

This is what “reverse anthropology” might look like if one applies it to

the analysis of the ethnographic process:  Wagner sought to confirm his
working hypotheses, but ‘the Barok’ were interested in his rhetoric. There
is an implicit reinstatement of the dichotomy of differentiating and conven-
tional symbolization here. While Wagner operated within the latter, trying
to ground his generalizations in the ‘Barok world view,’ so to say—by taking
the elderly ‘Barok’ for a metonymy of his “culture”— ‘the Barok,’ whose dif-
ferentiating conceptualization is said not to distinguish between words and
things, were more interested in Wagner’s performance of his understanding
of “their culture” than in the generalizations (and collectivizations) he had
to offer. The emic gesture both supposes and grounds this explanation of
difference.
From Habu on, the interpretations of local interlocutors become increas-
ingly visible in Wagner’s ethnographies, to the point that in “The Talk of
Koriki: a Daribi Contact Cult” Wagner affirms that concepts such as kinship,
role, and society become

negotiable epiphenomena of constructive or inventive dialogues.

Factuality and objectivity inhere in the creative acts of expression, com-
munication, and perception, rather than in the objects of belief or in
brittle cultural charters or taxonomies.
(Wagner 1979: 140)

If concepts are considered epiphenomena of dialogue, ethnography depends

not on the world view of ‘others,’ understood as something of the order of
representation, but on dialogic invention. However, as it is also the case that

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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.

Dialectics and obviation

In the light of Wagner’s argument in COI, his ethnography on ‘the Daribi’
and ‘the Barok’ might be understood as the dialectical negotiation of the
paradox of unit and relation, culture and communication. And if dia-
lectic, as proposed and operated by Wagner, alternates between opposing
poles, in the ethnography that has ‘the Daribi’ as referent the pole of cul-
ture encompasses that of communication, whereas the ethnography on
‘the Barok’ reveals more of the communication between Wagner and his
interlocutors. The pattern of TIC, which dwells on communication in the
first two chapters and on culture in the subsequent ones, is to a certain
extent repeated in Asiwinarong (Wagner 1986c).17 Yet, it is striking that in
Wagner’s ethnographies on ‘the Barok’ communication appears even when
the explicit focus of discussion is culture. Here and there, the results of ’con-
tact’ make themselves felt: A Christian prayer is inserted into the kaba ritual;
‘Western’ and ‘Barok’ currencies become amalgamated. Wagner’s experience
with ‘the Barok’ possibly transformed the dialectic of invention and con-
vention developed in TIC. According to Wagner, ‘the Barok’ aim at eliciting
an ethos conceived as ideal behavior. What might be understood as their
differentiating practice is thus carried out in explicit reference to a “fairly
self-conscious ideal or standard of comportment and interpersonal relation-
ship” (Wagner 1986c: 45). In this case, it seems that convention, rather than
invention, is consciously foregrounded.
Although Wagner does not elaborate extensively on the difference between
his ethnographic experience with ‘the Daribi’ and ‘the Barok’ (though cf.
Wagner 1983a), the transformations in his approach after fieldwork among
‘the Barok’ seem to indicate that they did not entirely fit the differentiating
mode of symbolization as theorized in TIC. In AS, the divide between dif-
ferentiating “tribal societies” and collectivizing “Western” ones gives way
to a play of perspectives that is not so much governed by opposing poles in
interaction, but by perspectives in elicitation. After the ethnography among

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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

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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

as part of the universe, the brain would necessarily incorporate or imper-

sonate the totality of its workings, its implicate structure, according to
Bohm. Whereas the universe itself would expersonate the brain’s activity
in so doing.
(Wagner 2010: 28, author’s emphases)

In CA, Wagner posits that the human brain is a holographic replication of

the universe, something already announced in STSFT (Wagner 1986a, con-
clusion). His interest in holography lies in the absence of distinction between
part and whole, which he attributes both to the ‘worldviews’ of Melanesia
and to the constitution and form of operation of the cosmos. If Plato seeks
to attain truth through dialectic, which is only perfectly realized in the form
of dialogue, Wagner presents to his readers a dialogical invention premised
on experience as well as on modes of description that can only be produced

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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

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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:

[O]bviation as a method [is] like a consummation of Hegel’s notion of

the dialectic that ends in a synthesis. The difference is that with obvi-
ation you get a synthesis and then an antisynthesis, which mirrors the
original setup of the dialectic, which opposed the antithesis to a thesis.
That is the innovation that Hegel made upon the traditional, classic
Greek dialectic, which was only thesis, antithesis, thesis, antithesis. Then
he added the synthesis, which was the third point. And the third point is
the point of definition and consummation where the duality ends. What
obviation does is that it adds a fourth, that turns upside down the first

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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

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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

SUBLATION, the Buck that Never Stops, the sublime motivation,

or HOLOGRAPHIC movement, of the whole creation. It is the
AUTOMIMETIC AGE, ROY that imitates you, models you, if you will,
far better than you could ever imitate or model it.
(Wagner 2010c: 118, author’s emphases)

It is as if because holography is “sublime,” it could make the division between

language and the world disappear. Here, the investigation of human motiv-
ation in TIC seems to give way to an interrogation of the motives of the
cosmos, which one can perceive as “transparent” because one is modeled
after it. From this perspective, substitution is transformation in a weak sense.
Sublation, conceived as the motivation of “the whole creation,” cannot

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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:

If a myth, tale, or legend, or an explanation (which is the same thing)

is a verbal picture of itself, or an image told in many episodes—each
substituted for the previous—then it must have a point of OBVIATION.
A vanishing point where all its episodes and pictographic details merge
together to form a single holographic entity, the tiniest part of which is
equal to the whole.
(Wagner 2010c: 114)

In this version of dialectic, mimesis occurs in the replication of the one in

the whole and vice-versa, as in fractals that mime themselves and thus retain
scale. In Wagner, iteration is holographic, and holography is his response
to anthropology’s crisis of representation (cf. Wagner 1986a:  xi).21 In the
dialectical play of substitutions, fractality and holography aspire to scale
retention between the model and its empirical referent. And scale retention
means identity without displacement. As repeatedly affirmed in CA, what-
ever is beyond dialectic can only be accessed through death. If obviation

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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.

Image and power

In “Figure-Ground Reversal among the Barok” (Wagner 1987) it is affirmed
that “thinking and feeling in images,” as a principle, organizes “Barok cul-
ture.” As in TIC, creativity is associated with the artistic in ‘our’ culture but
considered a core feature of the differentiating mode of symbolization. In
FGR, image encompasses from pictorial image to music, architecture, and
language. The text presents a Turnerian idea (Turner 1967) that is also cen-
tral to STSFT: The idea that “image has the power of synthesis: It condenses
whole realms of possible ideas and interpretations and allows complex
relationships to be perceived and grasped in an instant” (Wagner 1987: 56).
Consequently, image cannot be exhausted by any gloss. The ethnographic
example provided is that of the ‘Barok’ expression a bung marapung, glossed
as “the gathering in the bird’s eye,” although the different ‘Barok’ interpret-
ations of it show that there is no consensus as to its meaning. Wagner’s
argument is that if image allows for the co-existence of ambiguous and com-
plementary meanings, only image itself is precise; any interpretation must
remain partial.
According to Wagner, image has the power of elicitation. If it contains
the whole meaning, and no meaning can account for it entirely, the extent to
which meaning can be considered complete depends on how close it comes
to the whole represented by the image, for image, in its power of synthesis,
proliferates interpretations. In its containment of all possible instantiations
of meaning, the image is the origin with which every particular meaning
seeks to equate itself; but such equation is impossible. It seems that this
theorization of image as “perfect continence” attempts to partially con-
tain dissemination by resorting to closure. While it is acknowledged that
the interpretations of a given image may vary, by referring interpretations
to the image as a stable, non-divisible referent one manages to establish a
point of origin for its (necessarily imperfect) instantiations in language. Yet,
Wagner recognizes that there is an inescapable distance between the image
(that is juxtaposed to the thing) and the name (the description of the image
through language) (cf. chapters 5 and 6). Consequently, to the extent that
ethnography is an attempt to descriptively account for a universe imagined
as ‘other,’ it can only fall short of what seems to be the utmost aspiration
of Wagner’s ethnographic theorization of alterity: To do without displace-
ment between language and ‘culture’ (or any of its possible iterations as
worldview, conceptualization, mode of symbolization, perspective) by pro-
ducing a depiction of the lifeways of ‘others’ in the imagetic mode. For one
cannot do this without language. And in language, displacement is inevitable.

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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:

[A]nthropology, or much of ‘traditional’ anthropology at least, is a

pernicious enterprise on the part of a literate civilization to reduce
the imagistic meanings of cultures (especially of those cultures whose
expression is largely imagistic) to verbal or mathematical formulae …
[T]he names that things have … are cultural representations, and the
adjustments we make among them … are the logics of particular cultures,
or of what we might call ‘civilization.’ These logics are dependent, for
their purchase and effectiveness, upon the credibility that people invest
in them. … For the symbol, the word or integer, the unit of consensual
representation, is the ultimate guarantor of the logics that become, in
the process, organizational or economic power.
(Wagner 1983b: 2)

It is thus symbolization, as cultural image, that ultimately guarantees “organ-

izational or economic power” in Wagner. This is probably the reason why
any explicit theorization of inequality as related to power relations is absent
from his theory of the social. If power is governed exclusively by cultural
images as symbols, power relations among ‘others’ cannot be determined
by ‘our’ criteria of what power is, for such criteria are understood to be
determined by ‘our’ symbols, whose collectivizing mode of operation is
very different from differentiating conceptualization. (This is why ‘interest’
is construed in cultural terms in TIC.) Wagner’s take on power intends to

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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

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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

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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’:

Ultimately unknowable and unpredictable, tadak as power, as origin, or

as the basis of identity, is analogical, an unglossed and unglossable meta-
phor. Like kin relationship, it is elicited rather than stated. And while
the unglossable essence of either relationship or tadak is hardly proof
against attempts to delimit, circumscribe, or control them, everyone
knows what happens to the person who reveals his relationship and
communication with his tadak. He loses them.
(Wagner 1986c: 120)

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

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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).

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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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TURNER, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca,
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78 Inventing culture
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4 Groups and others

Roy Wagner and the history of anthropology

In “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?” Wagner (1974)
undertakes a critical appraisal of the history of anthropology as part of his
response to the question posed in the title of the article. In his narrative of
the developments of social anthropology, Durkheim appears as the founding
figure to whom many of the pillars of anthropology are attributed. Durkheim
is located at the origin not only of the French tradition—from Mauss to
Lévi-Strauss—but also of the “science of social integration” developed
by the British structural-functionalist school. The structural-functionalist
supposition of “social integration” is associated with Durkheim’s focus
on “man’s moral and collective life,” which Wagner equates with human
“groupiness” (Wagner 1974:  96). Wagner, who considers that the sup-
position of “social integration” by Radcliffe-Brown and other exponents
of structural-functionalism leads to the reification of society, criticizes the
“ ‘politico-jural’ assumption” (Wagner 1974: 96) that lies at the core of their
analyses:

Social anthropology gradually evolved into a kind of game of heur-

istic pretending:  Concepts with a very broad base of acceptance and
understanding in Western society, like “politics,” “law,” “rights,” and
“property,” were applied to the collective usages of tribal peoples, with
a sort of implicit “as if” attached to them … even though it cast the
native subjects in the unseemly roles of barristers and bewigged judges
and made their collective existence into a droll parody of the Bank of
England.
(Wagner 1974: 97)

It is the projection of “Western concepts” on “native customs” that Wagner

finds problematic in functionalism.1 As ATSG wishes to account for the
way in which ‘other’ socialities operate, the main question the article asks is
how not to project one’s concepts onto ‘others.’ It is with this in mind that
the intellectual legacy of Durkheim, especially in its structural-functionalist

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80 Groups and others

variation, is questioned. Affect, in the form of irony, emerges in Wagner’s
text2 at the moment when it asserts that structural-functionalism translated
“native customs” based on ‘Western’ assumptions. It is the projection of
‘Western’ concepts on peoples who are said not to “have politics in our
sense, nor … laws, though many of them held courts and engaged in litiga-
tion” (Wagner 1974: 97) that is considered problematic. And if engaging
in litigation appears as extensible to many ‘others’ in ATSG, the same is
not true of politics, laws, rights, and property. Wagner’s reaction concerns
what he calls the anthropology of “as if,” in whose translational effort
equivalences are established between the universe of the “native” and that
of the (supposedly ‘Western’) anthropologist, but differences between the
contexts from which the elements are extracted are ignored (cf. also Wagner
1981: 30).
When Wagner affirms that projecting ‘Western concepts’ onto ‘non-
Western’ people is a “game of heuristic pretending,” a cognitive operation
receives a moral qualification: As one projects, one pretends. Wagner’s exas-
peration grows as pretending gives way to the image of bewigged “native
subjects” parodying the Bank of England. The problem seems to be that
structural-functionalist ethnographic description cannot portray “native
subjects” as they are—with their litigations and courts, rather than pol-
itics and laws—but reduces ‘them’ to ‘our’ preconceptions for comparative
reasons.3 The ‘us’ versus ‘them’ divide is not questioned in ATSG because
the problem the article addresses depends on it. Yet, Wagner points out that
despite projections, the task of describing “native” life posed difficulties to
functionalist anthropology to the extent that it had to “come to terms with
the customs of the people it described” (Wagner 1974: 97). In the absence of
institutions that one might call laws, politics, property, or rights, analogies
were established—which is, if one considers Wagner’s criticism of homology
and defense of analogy, the right thing to do (cf. chapter 3). But analogies
were established in the wrong way, as they transformed social anthropology
into a “science of descent groups.”
The problem with such groups is not so much that they became “sub-
stantial and strictly bounded” but that they were “much more like the
consciously organized, planned, and structured groups of Western society
in spite of a lack of any kind of evidence that natives actually thought of
them in that way” (Wagner 1974: 97). It is thus based on the criterion of
whether the descriptions of anthropologists have a greater or lesser prox-
imity with ‘native’ conceptualization that the history of anthropology is told
by Wagner. In ATSG, he analyzes the way in which anthropology dealt with
the conceptualization of ‘others’ in order to assert his own approach to how
‘others’ conceptualize the world: Ideally, ‘native’ conceptualization should
set the terms for its ethnographic rendering, i.e., it should be considered
on its own terms. If functionalism is said to have projected “Western
concepts” on “native subjects,” ATSG acknowledges that “native customs”
challenged descent theory to the extent that they never conformed entirely

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Groups and others 81

to the anthropologist’s projections. Radcliffe-Brown’s joking and avoidance
relationships and Fortes’s filiation, for instance, are considered attempts to
cope with ethnographic exceptions on the basis that society is “a bigger and
better descent group” (Wagner 1974: 98). Thus, even when anthropological
theorization tried to subsume the world view of ‘others’ to its own, theory
was affected by difference.
ATSG shows how, in order to deal with the fragile character of
‘groups,’ British structural-functionalism had to resort to a broader—
and presupposed—totalization:  Society as a descent group. In Wagner’s
narrative, Max Gluckman’s answer to the problem of social integration
looked at contradiction as a basis for explanation:  Through rituals of
rebellion, African societies increased their cohesion as they avoided dis-
integration. By paying attention to contradiction, Gluckman is said to
have paved the way for Mary Douglas’s and Victor Turner’s anthropology
of interstitiality, in which paradox and ambiguity are valued. The sym-
bolic anthropology of Douglas and Turner are considered by Wagner to
be closer to “native” conceptualization than the functionalist analogies
by means of which “Western concepts” are simply projected onto “native
customs.” At this point of the argument, Wagner opposes structuralism
and structural-functionalism based on the distinction between what he
considers to be the conceptualist focus of Lévi-Strauss’s work and the
legalist approach of the functionalist school of anthropology in the wake
of Durkheim and Mauss.
In his review of the English translation of The Elementary Structures of
Kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1969), Wagner opposes functionalism and structur-
alism by means of a gastronomic metaphor: Whereas functionalism serves
an endogenous main course with exotic elements, as in “British culture,”
structuralism, like “French culture,” serves “exotic” main dishes (Wagner
1970:  246).4 In Wagner’s argument, functionalism inherited the legalist
approach of Durkheim whereas structuralism focused on conceptualization.
Yet, if Lévi-Strauss’s (2001) reading of Mauss on the gift emphasizes reci-
procity at the expense of legal issues, the French sociological school which
included Durkheim and Mauss was concerned with both conceptualization
and law (cf. Sigaud 1999). Issues of conceptualization were also addressed
by scholars who followed Mauss and preceded Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism,
as is the case with Lévy-Bruhl (2010) and Leenhardt (1979), both absent
from Wagner’s and Lévi-Strauss’s narrative of disciplinary origins.5 And if
one may argue that Lévi-Strauss’s works on “the savage mind” and myth
indeed focus on conceptualization, law was also a concern for Lévi-Strauss,
for instance, in his discussion of the incest taboo and the distinct types of
exchange in ESK.
This notwithstanding, for Wagner, the focus on reciprocity represents a
shift from the problem of social integration to that of conceptualization.
Thus, concepts such as “wife-givers” and “wife-takers,” which structure the
description of ‘Daribi kinship’ in TCS, are considered a step further in the

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82 Groups and others

description of ‘native’ conceptualization to the extent that they are “social
constructs of the analyst devised to implement native ideology” (Wagner
1974: 101). If Wagner shares with Lévi-Strauss an interest in “native con-
ceptualization,” he criticizes the functionalist residue in structuralism on
the grounds that the universalization of the incest taboo loses sight of the
diverse ways in which exogamy can be conceptualized. In his 1972 article on
exogamy and incest, his point that anthropology should be made from the
perspective of its subjects is replicated:

The notion of incest presupposes a conception of kin role, and where

no conception of this sort is found to be present, the term is inapplic-
able, except perhaps as a ‘projection’ on the part of the observer. The
notion of exogamy depends in a similar way on the conceptualisation
of social units. It is important here to distinguish between the descrip-
tive use of these terms to ‘gloss’ behavioural acts, as one might do in
speaking of ‘incest’ among dogs, or of ‘exogamous’ troops of primates,
and the recognition of incestuous or exogamic behavior as meaningful
to the actors themselves. In the former instance the ‘kinship’ and ‘social
units’ involved are constructs of the observer, and ‘incest’ and ‘exogamy’
derive their relevance solely from his use of such social comparisons.
In the second case incest and exogamy can be treated as operative cat-
egories, provided of course that we are precisely clear as to what we
mean by them, and what the subjects of our study mean by them.
(Wagner 1972b: 602)

Thus, by pointing to the functionalist residue in structuralism, Wagner

seeks to liberate what he sees as its potential for giving access to the
conceptualizations of “the subjects of our study.” Although the place of
Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in TIC is not foregrounded by Wagner, a
close reading of “The Sorcerer and His Magic” reveals unexpected simi-
larities between the idea of invention as espoused in TIC and what is done
by the shaman in Lévi-Strauss’s 1958 article. In addressing the way in
which the shaman’s ritual leads to cure as it establishes a balanced relation
between the absence of signification in disease and the excess of significa-
tion in magic (personified by the shaman), Lévi-Strauss puts the transform-
ation (invention) the shaman introduces into “group tradition” in terms
that are very similar to Wagner’s formulation of the dialectic of invention
and convention:

[A] structure must be elaborated and continually modified through the

interaction of group tradition and individual invention. This structure
is a system of oppositions and correlations, integrating all the elements
of a total situation.
(Lévi-Strauss 1967: 176)

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Here “group tradition” and “individual invention” are opposed in order
to account for structural transformation, whereas in TIC the opposition is
between invention and convention,6 invention being confined to the realm
of individuality only in the collectivizing, i.e. ‘Western,’ mode of symbol-
ization. Yet, if both Wagner and Lévi-Strauss are concerned with concep-
tualization, it seems that the emic gesture does not have the same place in
their works. The Lévi-Strauss of “The Sorcerer and His Magic” vehemently
insists on the distinction between magic and science in his discussion of the
oppositions and correlations of shamanism and psychoanalysis; he points to
the dangers inherent in the transformation of psychoanalysis into magic as
its body of theories risks becoming a mythology of ‘Western society.’ And
as far as ‘native ideology’ is concerned, it seems that the Lévi-Strauss of
“Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss” (2001) would hardly agree
with Wagner:

[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

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84 Groups and others

relation between anthropology and “native conceptualization” to the extent
that for Lévi-Strauss “reduc[ing] social reality to the conception that man—
savage man, even—has of it” would lead to “a path of destruction” (Lévi-
Strauss 1987: 57). With this, my intention is neither to defend Lévi-Strauss’s
objectivism and fixed demarcation of boundaries nor to suggest that Wagner
was mystified by ‘natives,7’ but to show how the work of Lévi-Strauss can be
read in the way Wagner proposes only by way of a torsion. In Lévi-Strauss,
the unconscious gives access to the “human mind” (l’esprit humain), not to
“native conceptualization” totalized as culture.
In Wagner’s reading of the history of anthropology, the valoriza-
tion of “native conceptualization” is an almost natural development of
anthropological theory. But if structuralism is seen as a step further in the
attempt to account for “native ideology”—which the quotes above seem
to question—it does not enable one to deconstruct the idea of group. After
acknowledging this, Wagner proposes to investigate whether ‘natives’
create groups and, in case they do, how this is done. What is ironic about
this analytical movement is that in its attempt to deal with the existence
or absence of groups for ‘others,’ recourse is made to another form of
totalization: Culture.

‘Native’ conceptualization and “naiveté”

Once “native system” is established as anthropology’s point of arrival,
Wagner proceeds to the investigation of whether social groups exist in
‘native’ conceptualization despite the anthropologist’s tendency to explain
society in terms of groups. Thus, the systematicity of functionalist or struc-
turalist order is replaced by that of “native system” or “native standpoint”
(Wagner 1972a: 170). Yet, Wagner does not dwell on how to access “native
conceptualization.” It is the lack of engagement with the question of whether
it is possible to say what is and what is not for ‘others’ based on empirical
observation that makes it possible for ATSG to affirm that for groups to
exist they must exist in the conceptualization of ‘others.’ The (unquestioned)
assumption that it is possible to describe not only the reality of the world but
what “native imagination” makes of it is only possible if one supposes not
only the transparency of language but also the transparency of those whose
conceptual worlds one names and totalizes as ‘natives.’ This is what allows
one to ask questions such as these: “Is there something about tribal society
that demands resolution into groups? Or is the notion of ‘groups’ a vague
and inadequate description of something that could better be represented in
another way?” (Wagner 1974: 102).
As the supposition that something lies there to be represented remains
unquestioned, the problem of representation as the accurate description
of the world is restated (though cf. Wagner 1986b). Yet, this is not always
the case in Wagner, who also affirms that “[o]ur symbols do not relate
to an external ‘reality’ at all; at most they refer to other symbolizations,

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Groups and others 85

which we perceive as reality” (Wagner 1981:  38). Wagner oscillates
between the affirmation that description should replicate the world
(of ‘others’) and the idea that symbols refer not to reality but to other
symbols. It seems that the difficulty in doing without totalizations of
‘oneself’ and ‘others’ (not only) in his work is related to the attempt to
replace epistemological interrogation with the reiteration of difference
as alterity. In order to suppose that the description of the ‘world view’
of ‘others’ is possible, one needs to engage with classical philosophical
(and methodological) questions such as the following: What is the rela-
tionship between one’s language and the world? What is the relationship
between one’s language and the language of ‘others’ (who, in any case,
do not need to be totalized as ‘natives’)? And what are the conditions
of possibility for one to access the relationship between the language of
‘others’ and the world?
This is, however, not what ATSG does; rather, it reiterates the binary
divide between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It proposes to challenge the “as if” of former
anthropological approaches, whose need to think in terms of groups is
explained by the anthropologist’s culture, “in which founding, joining, par-
ticipating in, and integrating groups is a deliberate and important matter”
(Wagner 1974:  103). Thus, anthropologists—implicitly ‘Western’—seek
groups in “other cultures” because groups are a central aspect of “their cul-
ture.” It is the anthropologist’s culture, with its conscious emphasis on social
participation and collectivization (cf. also TIC), that is responsible for the
projection of groups onto ‘others.’ At this point, Wagner exhorts his readers
to consider the creativity of ‘others;’ as he poses the need to do it as a matter
of ethical commitment, affect emerges in his narrative:

[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

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86 Groups and others

that of someone coming from a “tribal society” despite his article having
been published in a scientific journal is an index thereof.
If a good representation8 is one that reflects (or reproduces) the Melanesian
mode of creating people, it is the response to the question of how “people
create themselves socially” (Wagner 1974: 104) that is to determine the rele-
vance of previous anthropological accounts of Melanesian sociality. The
author’s understanding that anthropology is ‘Western’ leads him to state that
if groups are a ‘Western’ construct, it is up to the anthropologist (and not to
“natives”) to decide whether the concept should be used in the description
of a given sociality. Here is the criterion according to which this should be
decided: “A people have groups to the extent that, and in the way that, they
conceive of such things” (Wagner 1974: 104). And the imposition to “other
cultures” of anything they do not “have” is all the anthropologist should
not do. The substitution of “groups” with “cultures” occurs surreptitiously.
It goes unquestioned. So does, of course, the fixation of borders they entail.
This leads to another set of questions: “How, then, do the peoples of the
New Guinea Highlands create their sociality? … Do they have a ‘problem of
society’ and a systemic solution, or are their problems conceived in a totally
different way?” (Wagner 1974: 104).
This form of posing the problem implies the supposition that difference is
of the order of totality. Thus, Wagner responds to the interrogations above
by considering them in relation to specific people: ‘the Daribi.’ And he adds
to this the need to approach ‘them’ “naively,” i.e., to abandon previous theor-
etical suppositions in order not to project one’s concepts onto ‘them.’ Thus,
“naiveté” replaces epistemological engagement with the conditions of pos-
sibility for the apprehension of ‘others.’ Does this imply that the more one
is familiar with anthropology, the less one is capable of accounting for the
conceptualizations of ‘others’? Or is it the case that in order not to question
the assumption that totalized ‘others’ actually exist, and their modes of
existence can therefore be objectively described, one needs to get rid of one’s
disciplinary formation and look at the world naively, i.e., through the lenses
of common sense? Wagner’s proposition is followed by another apparent
naiveté:  After submitting functionalism to a deconstructive procedure as
he points to the fact that it considered society as a great descent group,
his questioning of the ‘group’ concept does not dispense with situating his
question within the borders of a specific group: “the Daribi, a people of the
Eastern New Guinean Highlands” (Wagner 1974: 105).
An exposition of “Daribi sociality” follows. It begins with a narrative of
origins, as it seeks to transport the reader to a “pre-colonial” scene, around
1950, about ten years before “pacification,” when the region consisted of
“gardens and a small settlement” (Wagner 1974: 105). Although Wagner did
his fieldwork from 1963 to 1965 in a “pacified” territory, he refers to a situ-
ation in which groups could be observed before ‘Western contact’—a “heur-
istic pretending” of another sort, as he could not possibly have observed this
himself: The people he studied had been forced by the colonial administration

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Groups and others 87

to conform to a different type of spatial distribution before his arrival, as he
informs the reader.9 In Wagner’s account of fieldwork among ‘the Daribi,’
in which he seeks to determine whether ‘they’ conceived of ‘themselves’ in
terms of groups, the narrative develops “as if” it were possible to access ‘the
Daribi’ before ‘Western contact.’ Yet, what is the status of the name ‘Daribi’
in Wagner’s narrative? Is this a self-designation? Is this the name that mis-
sionaries and/or the administration conferred upon people inhabiting a cer-
tain geographic area? The criteria for someone to be considered ‘Daribi’ are
not discussed.10

Names and ‘others’

According to Wagner, in his field site there were about five adult men with
their families. In order to determine the existence or absence of groups, he
asked the eldest of them, Buruhwą, who his “house people” were. “House
people” is said to be the translation of a “local idiom,” the vernacular version
of which remains unknown to the reader. Buruhwą’s answer to the question
was “Weriai” (Wagner 1974:  105). This response, proffered by the eldest
(and implicitly most authoritative) person in Baianabo, is what gives access
to ‘Daribi’ conceptualization. Wagner’s narrative moves from the imagin-
ation of a pre-contact situation to the situation in which the anthropolo-
gist did his fieldwork, right after “contact.” It is thus the name “Weriai,”
the answer to the question one does not exactly learn, but which Wagner
associates with the existence or absence of groups, that is to determine how
people create themselves in Melanesia. One also learns that Buruhwą was
born in Waramaru and moved to Peria because of his sister. Although one
does not know what questions were asked, it is clear that they were related
to the supposition that if groups are formed among ‘the Daribi,’ this must
have to do with the realm of kinship.
Buruhwą’s response to Wagner’s question is a name. Yet, it remains unclear
what the status of this name is. ATSG does not pose this question. Rather, it
affirms that multiple displacements are common among ‘the Daribi,’ from
which ensues that “the Weriai”—it is noteworthy that Buruhwą’s “Weriai”
is transformed into Wagner’s “the Weriai”—have spread over the whole ter-
ritory. Those to whom “the Daribi” refer as “house people”—and which
would be designated as a group by functionalist theories—are scattered
around, differently from what one might expect of a group. According to
Wagner’s argument, if one wished to find groups, one could consider that
‘the Daribi’ have a “segmentary lineage system.” He establishes a relation
between the name “Weriai” and the origins of groups in order to affirm
that a functionalist analysis might have interpreted them as phratries, clans,
and subclans. But the criterion of the definition is, here, given by the eldest
man in the village. And if he does not think in terms of phratries, clans, and
subclans, these are not legitimate concepts to describe ‘the Daribi,’ a name
Buruhwą does not seem to mention. The fact that probably none of the

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88 Groups and others

interlocutors of functionalist anthropologists answered in terms of phrat-
ries, clans, and subclans is not considered. Although Wagner rejects what
functionalist analysis would have made of this ethnographic situation, he
does affirm that the “hierarchical order” that organizes the above-mentioned
names “is there” (Wagner 1974: 106).
Wagner’s critique of functionalist anthropology is followed by a powerful
argument:  “The terms are names, rather than the things named” (Wagner
1974: 107). According to the argument put forth in ATSG, terms differen-
tiate in that they imply that some people come from one place whereas other
people come from somewhere else. Thus, names are meaningful not because
they say something specific, but because in saying it they make what they
say contrast with something else (as in Lévi-Strauss’s Totemism (1964)—cf.
chapter 3). Here, the distinction between the thing and its (for the Wagner of
COI, homological) representation appears at the level of naming: The name
is a more or less adequate representation of the thing it names, but is not to be
mistaken for it. Thus, terms are names, not groups. From this ensues that they
can be used in a flexible manner so as to draw whatever distinction seems
appropriate at the moment. Yet, if Wagner’s critique is substantial, from the
perspective of his own theorization in COI and TIC, his analysis reproduces
the ‘Western’ mode of symbolization, for ‘differentiating’ people are said
not to distinguish between the name and the thing it names (Wagner 1977b,
1981, 1986a). Thus, if one applies Wagner’s own distinctions, his conclusions
in ATSG arise from ‘Western’ conceptualization rather than “native system.”
Were one to extend the argument of ATSG based on Wagner’s decon-
structive take on culture in TIC, his argument that there are no groups,
just names, could easily be extended to another anthropological con-
struct: Cultures.11 Why is it that this never happens? Or, rather, why does
one form of totalization (groups) give way to another such form (cultures)?
It seems that this is because the author needs to justify the inapplicability of
the notion of ‘group’ to his context of investigation based on the idea that
‘the Daribi’ have a ‘culture’ that is different from ‘his own.’ Were this not the
case, ‘Daribi’ might also be considered a name that one could circumstan-
tially oppose to ‘Tųdawe’ or some other name. Wagner’s own ethnography
actually brings this to the fore as it affirms that ‘the Daribi’ and ‘the Tųdawe’
inhabit “mount Karimui, in the valley of the Sena river to the east of the
Patrol Post” (Wagner 1967: 5). This is what he says on the relation between
‘Daribi’ and ‘Tųdawe’:

It is perhaps significant that, although a very high percentage of

[Tųdawe] are bilingual, speaking Daribi as well as their own language,
comparatively few Daribi speak Tųdawe. The two languages do not
seem to be related to any significant degree. Intermarriage between the
two linguistic groups is so common that they may be said to constitute
a single society.
(Wagner 1967: 5)

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Groups and others 89

What is it that prevents Wagner (and many others) from not establishing a
classificatory boundary between ‘the Daribi’ and ‘the Tųdawe,’ apart from
the conventional rhetoric of ethnographic writing? Or, given the association
of ‘the Daribi’ with ‘the Pawaia,’ what is it that makes it possible to affirm
that ‘they’ “have probably been a distinct people for some hundreds of years
at least” (Wagner 1972a: 12)? Is it the totalization of language, in which ‘the
Daribi’ are understood to be those who speak ‘Daribi’ and ‘the Tųdawe,’
those who speak ‘Tųdawe’? Or is it the convention of ethnic naming,
Strathern’s (2011) “forking pathway”? On the few occasions on which the
issue of ethnic classification arises, Wagner dispenses with any further con-
sideration of it because, as he once put it, it is “incidental to our interests”
(Wagner 1972a: 12). Yet, even if he does not dwell on the subject, he does
hint at the fact that the convention based on which people are named as
groups in the New Guinea Highlands might as well have been fixed in a
different way. He does not develop the issue; rather, after mentioning it in
passing, he relapses into ethnic naming in the substantive mode as if ‘the
Daribi’ were an entity.
For Wagner, the way in which ‘the Daribi’ employ names draws bound-
aries, and thus creates contrasts, that make it possible to elicit “groups as
a sort of general context of one’s expression, alluding to them indirectly
rather than consciously organizing or participating in them” (Wagner
1974: 108). Here, the argument put forth in TIC appears in another iter-
ation: Indirectly eliciting social collectivities, as opposed to (the ‘Western’
way of) doing it directly or consciously, is a ‘Melanesian,’ and thus dif-
ferentiating, “style or mode of creativity.” Thus, whatever is opposed to
‘Western’ symbolization is said to produce groups unconsciously, as a
response to an action of differentiating character, whereas ‘Westerners’
produce difference as a result of collectivization. One comes back to the
point of departure of Wagner’s theory:  ‘natives’ and ‘Westerners’ sym-
bolize in a different way. If one were to accept the tautology that sustains
such argumentation, one could still ask:  Is the distinction between col-
lectivizing and differentiating people not an effect of naming in the col-
lectivizing mode? What if differentiation were to affect the language in
which anthropology is enacted? Could ‘Western’ and ‘Melanesian,’ for
instance, no longer be taken for fixed names from which different modes
of symbolization ensue?
This is how Wagner responds to the question of whether there are groups
in the New Guinea Highlands:

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)

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90 Groups and others

One cannot start with groups, for they are not deliberately formed; but one
ends up with them because although they are not consciously produced, they
appear automatically “whenever the right distinctions are made.” Now, the
notion of group emerges from this argumentation with a particular status: It
acquires legitimacy after being related to the “native” style of differenti-
ation. Thus, a category that is in principle classed as ‘Western’ is reinstated.
After the initial deconstructive effort, it is recovered in a movement that
approximates the argumentation in ATSG to that of TIC, in which a similar
move is carried out in relation to the culture concept.

“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

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Groups and others 91

certainly bore many continuities with the activities of those pictured in the
sigibe’. It is symptomatic that there are no people in the pictures whenever
they portray something that is associated with the ‘Western’ world; when
people are visually represented in Wagner’s ethnographies, they invariably
index what his ethnographic accounts portray as ‘Melanesian.’
The next question asked in ATSG is whether the fact that ‘the Daribi’
were organized into groups in this way is enough to consider them as
groups. In order to answer this question, Wagner proposes that one
consider the evidences:  “the resettlement of Buruhwą’s Weriai people”
(Wagner 1974: 114). Evidences are, here, associated with the relationship
between a name and an origin. Surprisingly, Wagner affirms that moving
‘the Weriai’ to Baianabo was not too drastic, as they were already going
in that direction because migration was usual in the context of ‘Daribi’
social life. Thus, around 1960, several Weriai from Waramaru are said to
have joined “Buruhwą’s people.” As the groups created by administrators
are challenged, other distinctions are drawn: “the Weriai of Waramaru,”
“Buruhwą’s people.” In a colonial situation, distinctions are seldom “just
names,” for names index social positions that pose or foreclose differen-
tial possibilities of action and experience. As the focus of the analysis lies
exclusively on issues of symbolization, colonial violence is neutralized
by a possible coincidence between colonial purposes and those of these
people.13
The narrative leads one to expect ‘the Daribi’ to conform to the nucleated
village houses built by the administration after having left their former
houses; yet, this is not what happened, as the latter were abandoned in 1966.
And although people could have gone back to their longhouses, most never
did. Rather, they regrouped into concentrations distributed along the road
built by the administration. Wagner observes that the people living together
were “probably” the ones who previously shared a longhouse “under pre-
contact conditions” (Wagner 1974: 115). The “probably,” inserted into the
author’s narrative almost imperceptibly, is very revealing. His inference is not
backed by empirical evidence on the way in which the ‘pre-contact Daribi’
lived; it rests on the supposition that ‘Daribi’ sociality/creativity tends to be
reproduced in time and space, a supposition that is theoretically developed
in Habu and TIC. If ‘Daribi’ culture is supposed to remain the same even
in the face of visible transformation, this permanence is not demonstrated
ethnographically.
As far as the “effects of Western contact” are concerned, ‘Daribi soci-
ality’ is said to have remained the same. The possibilities of transformation
that “contact” poses are solved with adversatives as the elements related
to external influence are assigned secondary status in relation to those that
might be indexed to “pre-contact conditions.”14 Wagner situates his own
ethnography at a time when ‘the Daribi’ had not had much ‘contact’ with
‘the West’:

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92 Groups and others

Their first encounter with white people, we think, was with the Australian
prospectors Michael Leahy and Michael Dwyer, on June 17–19, 1930.
When I asked Leahy about this, I was stunned by his response: ‘So, Roy,
you were one of the first people into Karimui.’
(Wagner 2008: 80)

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:

My status as representative white man made my situation even more

intriguing to my Daribi friends. How did my peculiar interests relate
to the specialties of other Europeans they knew of, such as the govern-
ment, the missionaries, the doctors? Were these just names? Did they
only stand for different kinds of work, or were they in fact separate
and distinct families, or even different kinds of people? This was the
sense of the question some of my friends put to me one afternoon: “Can
you anthropologists intermarry with the government and the mission-
aries?” I  explained that we could if we wanted to, but that I  had no
particular aspirations in that direction. But I had not answered the real
question, so it was later rephrased and asked in a different way: “Are
there kanakas (i.e., “natives, people like us”) in America?” I said that
there were, thinking of the subsistence farmers in some parts of the
country, but I am afraid I conjured up an image of a subject population
living under the tutelage of patrol officers, missionaries, and others.
(Wagner 1981: 23)

In the excerpt above, the place of “natives” as “a subject population living

under the tutelage of patrol officers, missionaries, and others” in Papua New
Guinea is acknowledged despite Wagner’s attempt to compare his “Daribi
friends” to American subsistence farmers. The significance of patrol officers
and missionaries in his field site is not analyzed.15 Rather, Wagner affirms
(e.g., in TCS, Habu, ATSG) that the presence of Christian missions did
not affect his subjects of study very much. The affirmation, not backed up
by empirical evidence, that missions did not play a relevant role as far as
the conceptualization of sociality—and in Habu, religion—was concerned
sustains the possibility of access to the “pre-contact” Daribi.
The key to the sketch of the village in ATSG reads “native house, with
no. of inhabitants” and “mission building, etc.” (Wagner 1974: 116). When
the subject is “contact,” the “mission building” is followed by “etc.” This is
consistent with Wagner’s affirmation in Habu that although Lutheran and
Adventist missionaries were everywhere in Karimui, “it was difficult to dis-
cover any trace of Christian influence in the native religious conceptual-
ization and practice” (Wagner 1972a: 13). Wagner offers no ethnographic

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Groups and others 93

description of the relation between ‘the Daribi’ and Christian missions.
Rather, he elaborates on the suppositions on which his statement rests:

[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)

In the excerpt above, Wagner simultaneously affirms that Christian religion

“bears a unique innovative relation with Daribi culture”16 and sustains that
the symbolic distance between ‘the Daribi’ and the mission was too great for
metaphorization to occur in the same way as it would have in “native reli-
gion.” Yet, if analogy is not possible when contrasts are “too great,” how is
one to make sense of his defense of analogy in the invention of culture? These
are the possibilities envisaged in Habu: (i) “Mission ideology” might not be
understood at all and will therefore not be interpreted. This being the case,
‘Daribi religion’ is not affected. (ii) In case “mission ideology” is understood,
and therefore interpreted, this occurs through metaphorization, i.e., through
“native religion.” This being the case, ‘Daribi religion’ is also not affected.
Wagner acknowledges that the censorship of “religious practices” made it
difficult for him to talk about “religious usage,” but insists that “Daribi reli-
gious conceptualization” was not affected by missionary presence. Why is
Wagner so eager to assert the reproducibility of “native religion” and its
impermeability to “mission ideology” but does not bother to give this affirm-
ation any empirical content? It seems that this is because the supposition of
future reproduction can only be tautological. And relation poses the threat
of unit dissolution (cf. COI and chapter 3).
As in Habu, ATSG seeks to validate the supposition that contact did not
affect ‘Daribi’ symbolization. In order to affirm it, recourse is made to ety-
mology. The absence of a new word to designate ‘post-contact’ housing is
seen as an index of the fact that such places continue to be understood
as they were “before contact”:  The term used is be’, the same term for-
merly used in reference to two-story longhouses (sigibe’). Thus, a connection
between language and culture is established in which the former is seen as a
repository of the latter’s most ingrained elements at the conceptual level. As
far as language is concerned, one also learns that the inhabitants of the new
settlements have a name for their own settlement and “improvise a name

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94 Groups and others

for the other on the spot” (Wagner 1974:  115). Wagner affirms that the
term “Weriai” is sometimes used to designate the whole settlement, some-
thing unusual in the village. Thus, there are neither fixed names nor fixed
patterns of housing, as many people spend time in smaller houses in their
fields, and the settlements are flexible. Yet, the new settlements are said to be
“acculturated.” (He does use quotation marks.) After resorting to both ety-
mology (as proof of permanence) and fluidity (as evidence of differentiating
symbolization), Wagner affirms that ‘Melanesian’ creativity resists external
influences. This is said to be the case although some people appear to con-
form to “Western-style” clothing and houses—which they are said to wear
and live in because “foreigners” want them to do so. The units of analysis
(‘Melanesian’ and ‘Western’) determine the two possible outcomes of “con-
tact”: “Culture” can either be transformed (and become other than itself) or
remain the same (through ignorance or incorporation of alterity).
If ‘the Daribi’ are considered impervious to ‘contact’ in the 1970s, the
same is not affirmed of ‘the Barok’ in the 1980s. In Asiwinarong, Wagner
narrates how the local calendar incorporated the longer calendar brought
by “the evangelists.” Thus, what remained from the calendar of “the Barok
of the precontact period” is “only the name of the first lunation of the Barok
stellar year, Marana-kai” (Wagner 1986c:  38). Yet, Wagner affirms that
“[m]odern Barok would seem to retain the rhythms of this system, as well
as some of its ideology” (Wagner 1986c: 43). The process he calls “accul-
turation” is presented as a threat to be neutralized by arguments. Instead of
questioning the concept by deconstructing the bounded units on which it is
based, Wagner affirms that ‘the Daribi’ are not acculturated because they
managed to retain differentiation as their mode of symbolization, i.e., ‘their’
creativity continues to operate despite external influences.17
In his conclusions to ATSG, Wagner reiterates his ethical and theoretical
appeal for anthropologists to consider “how the natives conceptualize their
sociality” (Wagner 1974:  119). It concludes with the same reversibility—
the “reverse anthropology” of TIC (Wagner 1981: 30)—which grounds his
subsequent discussions. He goes on to affirm that “the assumption of cre-
ativity puts the anthropologist on a par with his subjects; the ‘native,’ too,
is an ‘anthropologist,’ with a ‘working hypothesis’ of his own regarding
his way of life” (Wagner 1974:  120). From this ensues that:  The anthro-
pologist and the “native” are equal in their enterprise of understanding the
world, for both have a “working hypothesis” as to how it works; there is
a fundamental difference between them, for which the anthropologist, and
not the “native,” must account; this difference is of cultural character and
refers to different modes of creativity/symbolization; the anthropologist’s
ethical duty is to account for the creativity of “natives” by replicating it in
anthropological analysis.
The quotation marks in Wagner’s text destabilize the apparent sym-
metry. What is one to expect from an “anthropologist,” in quotation marks?

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What is the epistemological status of a “working hypothesis” or a “theory,”
in quotation marks? This is a curious form of treating dialogical inter-
action: As a dialogue between essentially different positions whose objective
is to remain different and explain each other out from their condition of
(named and circumscribed) difference. Improvisation stumbles on the limit
of “culture,” for Wagner’s dialectic of opposite poles cannot ultimately dis-
pense with the boundaries that constitute it. As he puts it in TIC, “If each
pole can be collapsed into the other, then the polarity itself is meaningless”
(Wagner 1981: 108). A paradox—which one might be tempted to read as
an instantiation of Spengler’s (1926) influence on Wagner’s work18—results
from simultaneously attributing a different mode of symbolization to ‘other
cultures’ and claiming that it is possible to depict the world from the per-
spective of ‘others.’ How is one to negotiate this paradox?19
Wagner’s stance on the matter evokes Sahlins’s (1981) productive
misunderstanding:

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)

If reciprocity is “pure courtesy” because understanding is impossible between

different “cultures,” Wagner’s proposal in ATSG could not be accompanied
by a methodology to access the symbolization of ‘others.’ In asking how
“natives” conceptualize in order to determine how anthropology is to pro-
ceed, ATSG relapses into the same procedure it criticizes in functionalism:
The supposition of totality that makes ‘system’ cohesive. The displacement
of the concept of society by that of culture does not hinder the reinstatement
of the totalization that is interrogated as one questions the notion of group
through the (cultural) question of how “natives” conceptualize groups.
Posing the problem in this way supposes that difference is of the order of
totality, as it is ascribed to the “peoples of the New Guinea Highlands,”
conceived in opposition to ‘us,’ ‘Westerners.’ In this sense, Wagner’s dia-
lectic of opposite (and opposing) poles ultimately hinders their transform-
ation. Moreover, it prevents displacement and dissemination from operating
beyond the barrier of names such as ‘Western’ and ‘Melanesian.’

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96 Groups and others

Notes
1 For a critique of Wagner’s presentation of structural-functionalism and descent
theory in ATSG, cf. Kofes (2010).
2 Affect is considered here as the symptom of an attempt to stitch together a moment
of the text which argumentation alone is incapable of weaving. In Wagner, this is
frequently the moment in which (named) difference is presented as alterity.
3 The idea that one should not “impute to others” ideas that are ‘Western’ is also
to be found in Strathern (1980:  177), although not in the same way. Cf. also
Strathern (2011) for a more recent appraisal of the matter.
4 If Wagner sees structuralism in such positive light in the 1970s, in subsequent
decades he increasingly criticizes the “totalizing view of society” (Wagner &
Williamson 1990: 206) that the idea of structure entails.
5 Leenhardt is not cited by Wagner despite their common interests for person-
hood, myth, and the word in Melanesia. The only exception is Wagner’s review
of Do Kamo, in which Leenhardt’s place at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes is mentioned along with his interest for “Canaque ideation” (Wagner
1980: 690).
6 This approximation might explain Wagner’s statement in STSFT that his approach
could be understood as “structuralism without structure” (Wagner 1986a: 9) des-
pite his criticism of the place assigned to “system” in Lévi-Strauss (1986a: 9).
7 If Lévi-Strauss criticizes Mauss for letting himself be mystified by the “native”
hau, such criticism could not be addressed to Wagner (were one to accept Lévi-
Strauss’s terms) to the extent that the concepts Wagner attributes to ‘others’ might
as well be called ‘Western’: fractality, holography, obviation, self-modeling.
8 Though cf. Wagner (1986b).
9 Wagner’s fieldwork occurred in a “colonial situation” (cf. Stocking 1991), as he
seems to have arrived in the field just after the “pacification” of the highlands was
considered to have been effective. This is rarely a subject of discussion in his eth-
nographies, which more often than not focus on ‘the Daribi’ or ‘the Barok’ as if
outside unequal relations of power. ATSG predates the discussion of the relation-
ship between anthropology and the colonial enterprise that gained momentum in
the 1980s though. Although the discussion of the political entanglements between
anthropology and colonialism informs my reading of Wagner’s work, it is not my
main aim to denounce the fact that his ethnography ignores power relations in a
colonial setting (though this is often the case even in his later work). Rather, what
I wish to accomplish here is a fraying of the politics of naming that drives the des-
ignation of ‘oneself’ and ‘others’ in ethnographic writing.
10 For an account of the migrations of the various ‘groups’ in the region, cf. Wagner
(1988).
11 I agree with Murray’s (2002) reading of the dialectic of invention and convention
to a great extent. It might be a useful analytical tool to the extent that it dispenses
with constituting the poles of dialectic in the form of totalizations (names) that
are ultimately equated with groups (‘Daribi,’ ‘Melanesian,’ ‘Western’).
12 Gender-distinction structures ‘Daribi kinship’ in TCS. In Habu, religion and
metaphorization depend on the opposition between male and female. In LS, the
narrative forms po page (glossed as “myths”) and namu po (glossed as “fables”)
are said to roughly correspond to the male-female dichotomy that governs
‘Daribi’ symbolization (Wagner 1972a, 1977d).

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13 This seems to be what makes it possible for Wagner to ask the following
question:  “Is colonialism the memory of affliction or only an affliction of the
memory?” (Wagner 1995b: 8).
14 Wagner’s (1977c) affirmation that Clay (1977) successfully describes the cre-
ativity of the Mandak despite their being in ‘contact’ with the “white” for more
than one century goes in the same direction.
15 ‘Both missions and a military occupation are said to have existed ‘among the
Barok’ (Wagner 1986c: 14, 118).
16 His interpretation of what he sees as a similarity (or figure-ground reversal)
between ‘Christian’ and ‘Papuan’ myths of flooding seems to confirm it. This
is how Wagner relates the flood motif in ‘Daribi’ mythology to the flood motif
in the Bible: “The story I have to tell is that of the origin of Genaa, the flood
motif in Papua that is the same flood, and the same story, as Noah’s flood in the
Bible, and the one that the makers of the Bible borrowed from the older Epic of
Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia. It is the story of the figure-ground reversal of land
and water, not likely a real deluge across earth but more probably a universaliza-
tion of the myth that took its place.
“In this version, for understandable reasons, it is a very localized phenom-
enon. In the region of Genaa, Lake Tebera, including the Mount Karimui area,
a lake is always quite literally a ‘body’ of water, the liquidity or effluvia of the
person who died to make it so. The local knowledge is that water runs, like the
course of life itself, and that when and where it stops, there is a body. Genaa
people identify themselves with the lake and its liquidity in a uterine sense. They
will not drink the lake water.…
“The origin story of Genaa is a tale of pairs, pairs of same- and opposite-
gendered people who reflect and refract each other, folding the space of human
interaction more or less as the surface of the water redoubles the landscape
around it. The lake is the people and the people are the lake” (Wagner 2001).
17 Cf. Gell’s (1987) critique of Asiwinarong for focusing on the perspective of a
single community.
18 In Spengler’s (1926:  165) words, “The degree of interrelation between one’s
world and another’s fixes the limit at which understanding becomes self-
deception. Certainly it is only very imperfectly that we can understand the Indian
or the Egyptian soul, as manifested in the men, customs, deities, root-words,
ideas, buildings and acts of it.”
19 On science in general, and anthropology in particular, as the negotiation of
paradoxes, cf. Wagner (1977b).

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.

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———. 1967 [1958]. “The Sorcerer and His Magic.” In:  Structural Anthropology.
New York: Basic Books.
———. 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
———. 1987 [1950]. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge.
———. 2001 [1950]. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge.
LÉVY-BRUHL, Lucien. 2010 [1922]. Primitive Mentality. New York: AMS Press.
MURRAY, David. 2002. Queering the Culture Cult. Social Analysis, 46(1): 80–89.
SAHLINS, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure
in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
SIGAUD, Lygia. 1999. As vicissitudes do ensaio sobre o dom. Mana, 5(2): 89–123.
SPENGLER, Oswald. 1926 [1923]. The Decline of the West. New  York:  Alfred
A. Knopf.
STOCKING, George (ed.). 1991. Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization
of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
STRATHERN, Marilyn. 1980. “No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case.” In: MAC
CORMACK, Carol & STRATHERN, Marilyn (eds.), Nature, Culture and
Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2011. Binary License. Common Knowledge, 17(1): 87–103.
WAGNER, Roy. 1967. The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi Clan Definition and
Alliance in New Guinea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1970. Review of The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Journal of the
Polynesian Society, 79(2): 245–252.
———. 1972a. Habu:  The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. 1972b. Incest and Identity: A Critique and Theory on the Subject of Exogamy
and Incest Prohibition. Man, 7(4): 601–613.
———. 1974. “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?” In: LEAF,
Murray (ed.), Frontiers of Anthropology. New York: D. Van Nostrand: 95–122.
———.1977b. “Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualizations of the
Innate: A Semiotic Critique of the Ecological Perspective.” In: BAYLISS-SMITH,
Timothy & FEACHERN, Richard (eds.), Subsistence and Survival: Rural Ecology
in the Pacific. London: Academic Press.
———. 1977c. “Foreword.” In:  CLAY, Brenda, Pinikindu:  Maternal Nurture,
Paternal Substance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1977d. Analogic Kinship:  A Daribi Example. American Ethnologist,
4(4): 623–642.
———. 1978. Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
———. 1980. Review of Do Kamo:  Person and Myth in the Melanesian World.
American Anthropologist, 82: 690–691.
———. 1981 [1975]. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1986a. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. 1986b. The Theater of Fact and Its Critics. Anthropological Quarterly,
59(2): 97–99.
———. 1986c. Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image and Social Power among the Usen Barok
of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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———. 1988. “Visible Sociality: The Daribi Community.” In: WEINER, James (ed.),
Mountain Papuans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 1995. Fight Over Pigshit: A New Ireland Pragmatic. Anthropology and
Humanism Quarterly, 20(1): 3–8.
———. 1998. “Environment and Reproduction of Human Focality.” Social Analysis,
42(3): 55–66.
———. 2001. “Condensed Mapping:  Myth and the Folding of Space, Space and
the Folding of Myth.” In: RUMSEY, Alan & WEINER, James F (eds.), Emplaced
Myth. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
———. 2008. “Lost Horizons at Karimui.” In: KAARTINEN, Timo and SATHER,
Clifford. (eds.) Beyond the Horizon: Essays on Myth, History, Travel, and Society.
Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2008.
WAGNER, Roy & WILLIAMSON, Margaret. 1990. Desperately Seeking Structures:
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5 The names of others

Fractality and totalization

As argued in the previous chapter, Wagner’s questioning of the idea that
groups are to be found everywhere in ATSG eventually substitutes ‘group’
for ‘culture.’ In affirming that among ‘the Daribi’ groups are elicited as a
result of their creativity, rather than consciously produced, Wagner resorts
to a kind of naming that seeks to establish an equivalence between the name
and that which it names: ‘the Daribi.’ This chapter focuses on the issue of
emic naming through an analysis of how Wagner describes naming and cur-
rency in Melanesia. In his 1991 essay “The Fractal Person,” on ‘Melanesian’
personhood, fractality is related to ‘Daribi’ naming practices. In this model,
proposed as an alternative to structural-functionalist and structuralist1
conceptions of individual and group, the relations the person establishes
with others are considered as a constitutive part of it.
FP establishes an opposition between the conceptions of big man and
great man in Melanesia. According to its argument, the big man operates
a change in scale from the dimension of the individual to that of the group
and is a “mobilizing social force,” whereas the great man is connected to
the sociality of the ‘fractal person.’ As the ‘fractal person’ reproduces only
versions of itself, scale is retained, there is continuity between inside and
outside, and no distinction is made between parts and wholes. FP seems to
be half-way between the differentiating mode of symbolization attributed
to ‘tribal’ peoples in TIC and the idea of self-modeling developed in later
texts (cf. Wagner 2001, 2012). Wagner’s theorization of fractal sociality
and symbolization builds on his notion of ‘dialectic.’ It is as if his attempt to
rethink anthropology from a ‘Melanesian’ perspective were to carry out a
differentiating collectivization: His recourse to ‘Melanesian’ symbolization
seeks to extend the effects of holography and fractality to anthropology.
Wagner rejects the concepts of individual and society because they are
considered to privilege one (‘Western’) perspective to the prejudice of
other possible ones. The concept of the social is considered to be “ideal
and practically unrealizable” (Wagner 1991: 159) because it is opposed to
the concept of the person as object (“necessarily substantive, physical, and

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material”). In FP, Wagner claims that the idea of group is related to the
incapacity of individuals to mingle into a single body, i.e., the failure of
the (structural-functionalist) corporate ideal. In his rejection of the notion
of ‘culture’ as a “totally integrated … collective representation” (Wagner
1991: 160), Wagner seeks a pragmatic idea of culture that is fully realizable
in ‘individuals.’ His refusal of ethnography as representation (cf. Wagner
1986b), a major difference between Wagner and the proponents of Writing
Culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986), goes hand in hand with his defense of an
anthropology in which language and things might be conflated.
Against the separation of thought from substance, Wagner’s effort is to
bridge the gap between language and the world. The emic perspective is thus
presented as one way of reaching the thing itself. For Wagner, ‘Melanesian’
conceptualization not only reveals the biases of ‘Western’ thought; as an
instantiation of the fractality of the cosmos, it also allows access to the
matrix of the unity that replicates itself in the whole. It is as if cultures were a
fractal of the human, in its turn a fractal of the cosmos. What matters is how
“subjects think of themselves” (Wagner 1991: 160), and Wagner argues that
Melanesians “think of themselves” in a fractal/holographic way. According to
him, the idea of a social mechanism “did not grow indigenously in Melanesia”
but was taken there by “self-conscious ‘individuals’ ” (Wagner 1991:  160).
The defense of the ‘native’ way of conceptualizing things needs therefore the
idea of a ‘before’ to be opposed to the present, undeniably ‘post-contact’ so
that a clear distinction might be traced between what is ‘Melanesian’ (or
‘Daribi,’ ‘Barok’) and what is ‘Western.’ The question of origins and their
greater substantiality necessarily remains a background issue whenever one
adheres to the metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1988). Here, it is manifested
in the attempt to overcome words in order to reach things.
Wagner suggests that “at least for some Melanesians” (Wagner 1991: 160),
holism, in its fractal/holographic instantiation, overcomes the general/par-
ticular and individual/society distinction. That is, the part/whole distinction
and its systematic implications might not be applied to the ‘Melanesian’ con-
text. He sees in ‘Melanesia’ a universal he considers to be ultimately ‘ours.’
Yet, the appositive, interesting as it is, goes almost unnoticed: “at least for
some Melanesians.” A similar construction is used when Wagner refers to
the ‘traditional’ gardening cycle of ‘the Barok,’ even though among them,
who as he says have been more affected by ‘contact,’ this is said to have
happened in a different way: “For some Usen Barok, at least, the heavens
still model the gardening cycle, however anecdotally” (Wagner 1986c: 43).
Wagner’s ethnographic theorization aims to surpass the disjunction between
the general and the particular but refuses to engage with the contradic-
tion that is posed when one affirms that ‘Melanesian’ conceptualization
operates in a certain way while excluding from ethnographic description the
‘Melanesians’ who do not fit it.
The reason why Wagner cannot generalize fractal replication for all
‘Melanesians’ is his verification that ‘the West’ had already made itself

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102 The names of others

present in the Pacific when he arrived. The affirmation that this is valid
“at least for some Melanesians” is at odds with his refusal to deal with
the relation between theorization and ethnographic description as gener-
alization/particularization in FP. It is as if his option for the totalization of
‘others’ under various names (‘Melanesian,’ ‘Daribi,’ ‘Barok’), together with
the affirmation that such totalization is valid even if it does not encompass
all these ‘others,’ were enough to put an end to the issue of generalization.
How is it possible to go from the ethnographic particularity of ‘the Barok’
or ‘Melanesians’ to the supposition of fractality as a mode of operation
that is not only human, but also arises from “the whole cloth of universal
congruence” (Wagner 1991: 166), i.e., from the cosmos? This is especially
noteworthy if one considers Wagner’s discussion of the dialectic of general-
ization and particularization, one instantiation of which is the dialectic of
culture and communication (cf. chapter 3).
Had the appositive gone unnoticed, this form of naming would lead one
to slip from the model Wagner presents as the outcome of his ethnography
to the reality of ‘the Barok’ or ‘Melanesians.’ Supposing that “at least some
Melanesians” symbolized in this way before ‘contact,’ and could therefore
be taken for an instantiation of fractality, the question remains (and it has
not been addressed by Wagner) as to where to fit the other, pre- or post-
‘contact,’ ‘Melanesians’ who might possibly conceptualize the world in a
different way. This would jeopardize the proposed fractality, as it cannot do
without the totalization of sameness within difference. To put it otherwise,
how can one accommodate difference within difference? It seems that one
can only do so if one relinquishes the desire for totalization in which the
description of ‘others’ through the emic gesture is grounded.
In his theorization of ‘Melanesian’ personhood, Wagner (1991:  161)
opposes the idea that social relations in Melanesia can be explained
through the notion of friction. Although the great man is considered by Gell
(1987: 591), in his review of Asiwinarong (Wagner 1986c), to be someone
who, in acquiring the status of adult and exercising power, opposes the
whole of the ‘Barok’ (translated as ‘children’) and therefore opposes his cul-
ture, for Wagner, the great man is a cultural being. He affirms that the great
man is not utilitarian and does not use social friction to achieve and main-
tain his position. He works for his culture because he is part of it and it is
part of himself—in a fractal way. The equivalence between the name and
the thing named is reiterated in spite of the appositive above. This makes
it possible to keep the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ with the purpose of
attributing to ‘them’ a solution to a problem ‘we’ verify among ‘ourselves.’
In Wagner’s words, “The larger challenge is that of a more holistic manner
of thought than that implied in structure, and the great man is its holistic
counterpart” (Wagner 1991: 161).
The fractality of the great man is therefore preferable because it is a
‘more holistic’ substitute for structure. In Wagner’s theorization, the place
of structure is occupied by ‘native’ conceptualization. But if one further

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develops the implications of his stance that ‘the Barok’ or ‘Melanesians’
are an instantiation of the human, or even of the cosmos, to what extent
is it possible to still speak of a ‘native’ perspective? Does not fractality
ultimately imply the abolition of frontiers between cultures and modes
of symbolization, if one considers that fractal replication is always self-
replication, i.e., replication of the same? Wagner’s ‘fractal’ gesture erases
not only cultural difference and its various forms of totalization, but also
difference within difference. In Wagner’s holistic fractality, any and all
event is merely a replication of “the whole cloth of universal congruence”
and, as such, the same in different clothing. If this is true, the ‘fractal
person’ not only contributes to subsume difference within sameness but
also does so with such self-reflexive purpose that any attempt to read
diverging traces is engulfed by self-referentiality. The passage below seems
to confirm it:

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.

Poai and leges

For Wagner, the big man produces society whereas in the case of the great
man it is already there. Thus, in Melanesia, society and solidarity are not

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104 The names of others

only presupposed; they do not need to be produced. Now, the possibility of
affirming this is guaranteed by the names of ‘others.’ Such names simultan-
eously ground the difference they imply and pose the need to rethink ethno-
graphic terms in order to make sure that they remain adequate vis-à-vis the
empirical universe described. If the great man does not produce society, a
new name that points to this difference has to be found in order to desig-
nate him. The name must, therefore, be replaced in order to fit the thing. In
such an effort, the underlying idea is that there should be the least possible
difference between the name and what it names. This is to say that things
are not conceived as depending on the names they are given; yet, names are
indispensable precisely because they point to things that are “too definite for
words” (Wagner 1986a: 14–33).
Thus, it might be said that Wagner’s anthropology is an attempt at a kind
of translation that can do without the violence of displacement. The indi-
vidual and the group are presented as false alternatives because they index
‘Western’ political ideology and do not reflect the practices and concepts of
‘others.’ In the moka ritual, great men are said to be equally valid among
themselves, no matter how successful they are, for they produce nothing
other than what is already there. If society and solidarity are immanent, it is
no longer necessary for someone to articulate them. This is, in Wagner’s the-
orization, the difference between the big man and the great man: While the
former produces society, the latter is a section of the great fractal of people,
the replication of which his sociality instantiates. On these terms, the great
man actualizes that which already lies there in potential; he does not create
society. Yet, the only way in which violence might be excluded from the
political is by affirming that political actions are merely the actualization of
what is meant to be. Thus, from the perspective that Wagner attributes to
‘others,’ society not only is already there but also reiterates itself in a fractal,
and therefore non-violent, way in all its instantiations.
Wagner’s fractal person, an appropriation of Strathern’s (1990) con-
ception of ‘Melanesian’ personhood, itself borrowed from Haraway’s
(1985) reflection on cyborgs and inspired by Marriott’s (1976) “dividual,”
is, according to Wagner, a “mathematical notion of a dimensionality that
cannot be expressed in whole numbers” (Wagner 1991: 162). It is defined in
contradistinction to singularity or plurality, for the great man’s aspirations
are simultaneously individual and corporate. Here, the classical issue of
individual and society is solved through the emic gesture. For the ‘other,’
so goes the argument, there is neither singular, nor plural; both singular
and plural are dissolved into the fractality of the one. People, clans, and
lineages are viewed as arbitrary, fractal sectionings within a reproductive
chain that is conceived as a unified whole (Wagner 1991: 163). Fractality
not only connects, it unifies and totalizes, for any part of it is understood
to replicate the whole it sections. Such a relation between parts and wholes
is called an “integral relationship.”3 And examples of it are to be found at
all levels of social life, from “bodily reproduction” to “the commonality

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of shared language” (Wagner 1991: 163). The smoothness of fractal lan-
guage is reaffirmed: In the fractal modality, communication is necessarily
understanding.
The implication of this is that the relationship between language and the
world is not understood to be one of displacement, of impossible equiva-
lence; rather, language is conceived as one of the manifestations of a mode
of being from which it is inseparable. The fractal does not entail differen-
tiability; it replicates the same. Wagner affirms that the best evidence that
fractality is the mode of personhood in Melanesia is to be found in language,
“the way in which Melanesians indigenously speak of, order and concep-
tualize existence as identity” (Wagner 1991: 163). Thus, according to him,
for the difference that is expressed under the name ‘Melanesians,’ existence
is equivalent with identity. Difference as identity is secured by the name
‘Melanesians.’ The affirmation of identity within difference finds support in
the naming of ‘others’ in a double way: It is the names of ‘others’ that allow
for the totalization of difference as identity, and it is through the naming
practices of these ‘others’ that Wagner seeks to prove the conceptualization
of existence as fractality. Yet, names are also said to be “but names” (Wagner
1991: 163), in a move that distances Wagner from the identity of language
and the world that he ascribes to the differentiating mode of symbolization
in TIC (cf. chapter 3).
Wagner’s theorization of language in Melanesia hesitates between the
complete equivalence of names and the world and the existence of a distinc-
tion between them (cf. chapters 2, 3, and 6). In FP, names are said to be “but
names,” i.e., not identical with what they point to. There is, therefore, some-
thing that can be named in various different ways, and one of these ways,
the ‘Melanesian’ one, is thought to be closer to the things it names than is
the case with ‘Western’ naming. Thus, it is the ‘Melanesian’ perspective that
vouches for Wagner’s attempt to suppress the difference between the name
and the thing named as well as for his understanding of names as “ref-
erence points,” or the figure-ground reversal of image, in STSFT (Wagner
1986a: 127). This is possible because for ‘them’ existence is said to be iden-
tity. After such displacement, one can legitimately address difference within
difference as identity—like ‘Melanesians.’ Wagner proceeds to his linguistic
proof: “A Daribi name, nogi, is always an instantiation, and also a simpli-
fication, of the relation designated by the participle, poai, of the verb poie,
‘to be congruent with’ ” (Wagner 1991: 163). The name is an example, an
instantiation, because for Wagner language is a manifestation of fractality.
Here is his description of the fractality of 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.

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106 The names of others

Poai is universally commutative … Poai eats the world, and it also eats
itself.
(Wagner 1991: 163–164)

What is described above is a procedure of analogy in which relations are

established between elements based on their similarities. Poai is observable
at the level of names, skin, kinship (cf. Wagner 1972, cap. 4), and anything
else. If anything that has a name is necessarily implied by this relation, every-
thing is inter-related. Poai stands for universal reciprocity and the possibility
of infinite exchange. The universally applicable poai relation occurs through
language, but what it connects are the characteristics of people and things.
And if poai “eats the world” and “also eats itself,” so do fractals. The name
“unnamed,” for instance, is said to place the child thus named in relation
not only with all other names that mean “unnamed” and all other beings
who bear such names, but also, because it is a name, with all other names
(Wagner 1991:  164). Thus, even the attempt not to name establishes an
inescapable universal relation of fractal poai.
Yet, one might pose the question of whether the poai relation might not
be read otherwise. Is it not possible that it might point to the impossibility of
total equivalence between all elements and, as such, to the tenuous analogy
that unites them, an analogy that simultaneously contains an inescapable
difference that the relation of naming seeks to contain? The establishment
of the poai relation seems to suggest two abysses:  The first, that of the
differences between the elements, analogy being necessary to fix a relation
between them; the second, that of the difference between the elements and
their names, which the attribution of the same name to distinct things makes
apparent. Naming obliterates the proper, and such obliteration of the proper
is related to the impossibility of retaining a definitive distinction between
proper and common names. From this ensues the non-singularity of names
conventionally considered to be proper, but which in their structure resemble
common names and thus have their property obliterated (Derrida 1985).
The “proper” name poziwai, ‘unnamed,’ is the perfect example thereof.
Wagner affirms that these examples “serve to direct our attention to the
social recognition of the name, the only real grip afforded the Daribi on an
otherwise frictionless surface” (Wagner 1991: 164, author’s emphasis). The
idea that the social is exempt from friction apart from the differences that
are inserted into it by naming seems to sustain his argument despite the fact
that he is not able to produce an empirical description in which there is no
friction at the level of sociality. Whenever smoothness is pictured in his eth-
nography, it is at the level of conceptualization. Thus, for Wagner, the name
is what makes it possible to fix one specific relation despite the potential
infinity of relations. Relation is established through designation. This is an
interesting stance that has been defended by others (e.g., Althusser 2001;
Butler 1997), albeit not on the same terms. It is rather curious that Wagner
insists on the absence of friction fractality implies despite his recognition

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that the name is “both less … and more … than the person designated.” For
Butler, this is precisely what accounts for the possibility of interpellation,
through which the bearer of a name is put in the position of the subject. And
although this is shared with all other bearers of names, people are by no
means levelled by this fact.
If the person, like the name, is simultaneously more and less than itself,
naming inevitably elicits the arche-violence in which the proper is obliterated
(Derrida 1976). How can one affirm that the name is a point of fixation on a
surface that is otherwise frictionless if the very act of naming institutes diffe-
rence not only among names themselves, and between names and things, but
also between the name and itself? A  brief digression through Asiwinarong
provides us with an empirical example of the obliteration of the proper
through interpellation: The humiliation of couples who break moiety exogamy
is, among ‘the Barok,’ marked by the assignment of a name to those guilty of
the breach. Instead of being called by the kin terms applicable to them, they
are called leges. This appellation is accompanied by the suspension of “the
ideal of forbearance” and the need to pay a fine to “buy the shame.” The chil-
dren of leges are “called by name alone, without recourse to kin terminology”
(Wagner 1986c: 55). The reduction in status to which leges and their children
are subjected is thus marked by the name attributed to them.
The obliteration of the proper associated with the interpellation of leges is
extremely violent: The person whose social place is obliterated by the breach
of convention receives, as a ‘proper’ name, the name of the transgressed
taboo (leges). Such naming, besides pointing to the violence of segrega-
tion that substitutes the ‘original’ violence of strangling, the punishment of
leges “in traditional times,” marks entrance into the opposite of reciprocity.
According to Wagner, reciprocity is traditionally elicited by the relation
between the moieties. In the moiety system, two moieties are differentiated
through the claim of absolute property over their matrilineal members and
the nurturance of the other moiety. Belonging to the moieties—and the
consequent differentiation between them—is elicited through malum (“the
ethic of … self-restraint”) and malili (“social serenity” and “conviviality”)
(cf. Wagner 1986c: 75–78). In his description of the moiety system as not
oriented by descent, but by the eliciting of difference, Wagner argues that
‘Barok’ kinship results from constant elicitation. Thus, it is through elicit-
ation that kinship relations might be reconfigured so that marriage with
people from the same moiety can be allowed after ritual transformation in
the patterns of interaction between those involved. Why is the mechanism
of elicitation not employed to deal with the transgression of the principle of
moiety exogamy (leges) if the social is frictionless?
The case of the children of leges seems to point to the residue of the
floating signifier, that is, to the impossibility of total equivalence between the
signifier (le signifiant, i.e., ‘the signifying’) and the signified. It breaks the law
that is presented as absolute in Asiwinarong (Wagner 1986c): In its inscrip-
tion of the breach of moiety exogamy, leges seeks to do away with the poai

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108 The names of others

relationship implied by naming. The obliteration of the proper is paradoxical
here: Leges are designated only by their proper name, whereas the clan rela-
tion that would not only be proper, but appropriate, to them is suppressed
from their naming. All those who break exogamy are given the same name,
leges, which designates the same social place for all its recipients. This sort
of naming seeks to break the analogy of the poai relation in its attempt
to unhinge this name from the names of everyone else. But if all leges are
similar in their exclusion from the relation of reciprocity between the moi-
eties, their children might be a sort of difference within difference, to the
extent that they are incorporated by the moiety to which they do not belong
but remain disconnected from it as far as their clan name is concerned. Now,
if one considers that the relationship between signifier and signified is one of
flotation, difference within difference is present in every name.
If the name, in its obliteration of the proper, exceeds and precedes the
person named to the extent that it assigns a social place to a person, one
should question the very distinction Wagner establishes between entitlement
and nomination in FP. After all, it is not possible to claim a total distinction
between the name and the position it designates. The act of naming entails
social placement, and therefore institutes difference. However, FP insists that
friction is absent from fractality. Wagner affirms that the differences among
“other Melanesian regimes of naming” are irrelevant due to the similarity
that characterizes them in opposition to ‘Western’ regimes. Or, rather, as his
argument seems to imply, ‘Melanesian’ naming might allow one to perceive
that reproduction and naming are fractal even in ‘Western’ naming, as “any
system of identities developed by sectioning and referencing in a relational
field is intrinsically fractal” (Wagner 1991: 64) because people relate to each
other through reproduction and words are polysemic. Here, the polysemy
of language leads to fractal unity. This is why Wagner claims that “denomin-
ation is our surest map or model for the apprehension of identity” (Wagner
1991: 65).
However, polysemy not necessarily leads to fractality. If one abandons
the supposition of replication and absence of friction, polysemy might be
understood no longer as the replication of the same that keeps its scale, but
as dissemination, i.e., the process of infinite differentiation that happens
when names are iterated. Iteration poses the possibility that permanence
and change might co-exist in the relationship between signifier and signified.
If the absence of distinction between part and whole has similarities with
Derridean différance, holography/fractality is considerably distinct from
the formation of traces through iteration, for the self-reproduction with
scale retention defended by Wagner is necessarily replication of the same. If
one abandons the supposition that the name sticks to the thing, naming can
be understood as both an attempt at essentialization (of saying that which
is in a fixed form) and the inevitability of displacement:  The unending
movement of differentiation and deferment that is not referenced by origin;
the detours of a signifier that is alien to itself (Derrida 1982)—thus, the

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impossibility of fixing borders. For in every equivalence there is a residue
of signification.

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:

In its use, Barok mangin approximates the functions of three kinds of

currency: The “vital wealth” … that circulates in the New Guinea high-
lands, … “money,” in the accepted Western sense as part of an economy

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110 The names of others

of goods or produced “things”; and “money” as a medium of moral
merit, or ascendancy. It is … interchangeable for Papua New Guinea
currency and for goods … that can also be converted into money; …
mangin may be redeemed by kina, and kina by dollars.
(Wagner 1986c: 83–84)

At this point in Wagner’s work, before privilege is assigned to holography

and fractality, the introduction of currency is not portrayed as something
that can make ‘Melanesian’ sociality collapse. It is actually as if the ‘Barok’
concept of currency already contained both kina and dollars. Yet, in FP the
question seems to be one of how to maintain relativism without postulating
the neutrality of ‘contact.’ In order to engage with ‘contact’ not only nos-
talgically, it is necessary to consider power relations as constitutive of ‘the
West’ as well as of ‘Melanesia.’ For any regime of naming and exchange
is pervaded by violence—a violence Wagner’s narrative wishes to suppress.
The echoes of Derrida’s “Writing Lesson” (1976) are not coincidental: They
point to the incongruity that frequently makes its way into anthropological
texts that search in ‘others’ the solution for problems attributed to ‘oneself.’
Representation distorts integral relation because in its abstraction it
causes the name to loosen itself from the thing named. Commodity is a
problem for Wagner because it cannot be understood as integral relation. As
it interrupts congruence between elements at the fractal level, the immediacy
of fractality is lost. It is as if before ‘contact,’ where origins are to be found,
the name and the thing were the same. In TIC, the differentiating mode of
symbolization attributed to non-‘Western’ people is precisely characterized
by the identity between language and the world. The nostalgia of FP is a
nostalgia of origins, origin being the moment in which language and the
thing are supposed to be one. However, differentiation might be thought of
as occurring not only between the name and the thing but also between the
name and the name in its various iterations. Difference within the same is so
infinite that one can no longer speak of sameness and otherness, for diffe-
rence is everywhere. If this is so, one can do without alterity. Alterity, as the
totalization of otherness, only makes sense if one accepts that sameness and
difference can be totalized, and thus opposed.
In FP, money is presented as the avant-garde of the world system: It counts
resources in an abstract way whereas ‘Daribi’ resources are intrinsically rela-
tional. This is presented as the reason why the prices of children and brides
“inflate prodigiously.” But how can one speak of inflation separately from
the world system? Is inflation not a concept that depends on the conception
of money as abstraction? It is claimed that inflation is a form of relation
in the ‘Melanesian’ mode, but one might ask under what circumstances. Is
it possible to conceive of it in a system set apart from ‘contact,’ or is there
an implicit recognition of the impossibility of radical separation between
pre- and post-contact currency? For Wagner, ‘we’ inflate the big man when
‘we’ ascribe to him his own inflation, whereas what distinguishes him for

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‘Melanesians’ is the fact that he is a rhetorician, i.e., a master of speech. The
big man is a rhetorician because it is talk, not representation, that is said to
be important for ‘Melanesians.’ Now, it is in talk that the name can be fixed
to the thing. Yet, if names and things are one, how can one make sense of the
necessity of rhetoric, i.e., of the dissent that haunts any attempt at commu-
nication? Talk is said to make it possible for language to equal all occasions
by transforming these occasions into talk, “like a poai relation intrinsic to
thought” (Wagner 1991: 165). However, no attempt is made to ground such
equivalence ethnographically.
“Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida 1981) discusses the place of orality in the
metaphysics of presence, in which an attempt is made to fix a signifier to a
signified in order to stanch dissemination (cf. chapter 2). A similar move is
made in FP as it tries to restrict money to one of the possibilities it entails.
In so doing, FP seems to be moved by the same desire for equivalence that
animated the translators of Plato when fixing the equivalence between
pharmakon and ‘poison’ and thus excluding the potentialities contained
in its translation as ‘drug’ (not only ‘poison’ but also ‘remedy’). Wagner’s
theorization of language seems to be moved by the desire to fix the thing
to its name that is frequently found in attempts to defend orality at the
expense of writing. If talk is the means of fractality, it might as well be its
pharmakon. In the attempt to establish speech as the place in which the
name and the thing are the same, one finds the iteration of a recurring
nostalgic gesture:  longing for real presence in discourse. But if talk is in
constant activity, it must also be iterative. And whatever is iterated can be
transformed.

Ethnography and utopia

What seems to disturb the Wagner of FP the most is that the names ‘we’
take for granted are “arbitrary sectionings” of the “cloth of universal congru-
ence” (Wagner 1991: 166), which he opposes to (‘Western’) representation.
His criticism, repeated at other moments, is that whenever anthropology
mistakes things for their names, it takes categories at face value; thus, names
lose their fractal quality and no longer retain scale. They cannot reflect “indi-
genous awareness and use” (Wagner 1991: 166) because they operate based
on representation. Yet, a couple of questions arise from this affirmation: Is
the choice of ‘Melanesian’ naming as a starting point not a mere substi-
tution of one arbitrary sectioning for another? Are the names with which
‘others’ are totalized not arbitrary sectionings of a similar sort? If this is the
case, how can one speak of ‘Daribi’ or ‘Melanesian’? In Wagner’s argument,
fractality needs two dialectically opposed sectionings to operate: ‘Western’
versus ‘Melanesian’ and the various instantiations of these names. Yet, it
is claimed that according to the ‘Melanesian’ form of naming, ‘Western’
names lack fractality, whereas ‘Daribi’ names are fractal because they are
instantiations of a fractal mode of being. The argument is tautological. The

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112 The names of others

paradoxical conclusion is that fractality cannot, therefore, be ‘Daribi’ any
more than it can be ‘Western.’ Why is it necessary, from this perspective, to
insist on denominations such as ‘Melanesian,’ ‘Daribi,’ and ‘Western’? And
how can one sustain that ‘their’ form of symbolization can enable ‘us’ to
understand things if such names are merely an “arbitrary, imposed, and artifi-
cial” (Wagner 1991: 166) sectioning? ‘Their,’ here, operates like such a name.
There seems to be a contradiction here. “And, as always, coherence in
contradiction expresses the force of a desire” (Derrida 1978:  279). Either
‘the Daribi’ are merely a name, and this robs them of their singularity, or they
are ‘really’ ‘Daribi,’ which contradicts the idea that the forms of the human
are fractal and keep their scale. In an oblique way, one comes to the question
of how to ground the claim that the “indigenous” mode of symbolization is
fractal. (If “indigenous” replaces the term “native” in later texts, the work
these two names do is very similar.) But still, another question precedes
it: How can one possibly ground the idea of anything “indigenous” if “indi-
genous” itself depends on being circumscribed by a name? If “indigenous”
modes of symbolization take the place of structure in Wagner’s work, they
are subject to the same classical objection to structuralism:  Just as there
is nothing that can serve as a foundation for the concept of structure, it
is impossible to guarantee the existence of a singular mode of conceptual-
ization pertaining to a specific sociocultural sectioning of reality. Yet, such
arbitrariness in the constitution of units of analysis is seldom questioned, for
admitting it would entail acknowledging that the notion of “whole” cannot
possibly be grounded.
It is the notion of “whole” that lies at the core of fractality: “Fractality
… relates to, converts to and reproduces the whole, something as different
from a sum as it is from an individual part” (Wagner 1991: 166). The “holo-
graphic or self-scaling form” is perceived to be different from “social organ-
ization” or “cultural ideology” because the organization, explanation, or
interpretation it promotes are said not to be imposed. Thus, as “an instan-
tiation of the elements themselves” (Wagner 1991:  166), it is inseparable
from them or, rather, their necessary outcome. Is this longing for immediacy
not a reinstatement of the metaphysics of presence?6 Social organization
or cultural ideology, in imposing scale, are said to distance elements from
‘themselves’ and submit ‘them’ to an alien logic. In so doing, social organiza-
tion or cultural ideology supposedly set elements apart from their origins as
well as from the possibility of instantiating themselves in a holographic and
fractal way. Wagner claims that this is possible in Melanesia, but his move
depends on attributing fractality to a name (‘Melanesian,’ ‘Daribi,’ ‘Barok’)
while attempting to remain outside language so that description can picture
what is presented as real. As such a thing is impossible, one tries to make
language reflect the world. It is not possible to affirm that one’s ‘own’ lan-
guage is one with the world because language always exceeds and precedes
one (Derrida 1998). Thus, such a language is sought elsewhere, in a place
populated by ‘others.’ Ethnography comes to ground utopia.

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The excerpt below, in which Wagner explicitly opposes “deconstructive
ploys and the like,” is especially interesting to reflect on his distancing from
dissemination and embracement of totalization:

The phenomenality of meaning provides an apt parallel; there is no such

thing as a ‘part’ of a meaning. Though we may well persuade ourselves,
through grammars, sign-systems, deconstructive ploys and the like, that
the means by which we elicit meaning can be eminently partible, the
meanings so elicited do not and cannot have parts. It is not simply a
matter of the cliché about wholes being greater than the sums of their
parts, for if a meaning has no parts, there is no sum to compare with
the totality. One might as well conclude that the whole is less than the
sum, for it is only one. When a whole is subdivided in this way it is split
into holographs of itself; though neither the splitting nor its opposite
amount to an ‘ordering’ function. What we call an ‘order’ belongs to the
world of partibility and construction.
(Wagner 1991: 166–167)

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:

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114 The names of others

But if holography has a significance in this discussion, it is not as an
ethnographic phenomenon but rather as a mode of understanding. …
Nothing is built up and nothing dissected in these examples; they are
neither construction nor deconstruction, but simply a further replica-
tion of fractality in the ethnographer’s understanding. One might say
that the indigenous holography is re-interpreting the anthropologist’s
ideas, and in the process re-interpreting interpretation itself.
(Wagner 1991: 170)

The “indigenous” understanding of things is to be replicated ad infin-

itum. Thus, “indigenous” holography/fractality might be able to replicate
itself in its interpretation of anthropology and anthropological interpret-
ation. The proposal clearly echoes the “reverse anthropology” of TIC.
And if “indigenous holography” is to reinterpret anthropology’s interpret-
ation, anthropology is to reproduce holography by replicating it. Thus,
the anthropologist is to be a medium:  A pharmakon. The anthropolo-
gist imagined by Wagner commits to a notion of power that seeks to do
without the violence of translation. Wagnerian anthropology seeks to be
a pharmakon that is only remedy, never poison. Yet, ambiguity is inherent
to the pharmakon.
In his attempt to overcome the individual-society dichotomy, Wagner
defends the “holographic conceptualization of the conceptual world”
and the need to acknowledge that personhood is fractal. He claims that
anthropological explanations should not operate based on scale change
or the introduction of elements that have not been posed by the object.
(This is what he calls “constructionism.”) For him, the anthropologist is
to achieve a better understanding of the world through engagement with
“indigenous” conceptualizations. Once more, Wagner does not elaborate on
how to access the “indigenous” perspective. Instead, he reiterates dialogue
as dependent on poles of opposition. For Wagnerian dialectic to operate,
opposition cannot be dissolved into dissemination or supplementation.
However, this making available of the perspective of ‘others,’ which allows
Wagner to argue against the theories of ‘his own’ culture/society, is only
possible because the anthropologist, in naming ‘others,’ places ‘them’ on
the opposite pole of the dialectic. Overcoming the perspective that is under-
stood to be one’s ‘own’ depends on the totalizing designation of ‘others,’
i.e., on the emic gesture.
Wagner opposes ‘deconstruction’ in his desire to replicate what he
presents as that which is. However, ‘deconstruction’ acknowledges that one
cannot simply do without opposition; rather, it is only possible to desta-
bilize it in making explicit that the foundation on which oppositions rest is
fragile and depends on the violence that institutes origins. Wagner resorts to
‘Melanesian’ conceptualization in his attempt to evade oppositional concep-
tualization. Yet, in order to do so, he falls back onto the classical ‘us’ and
‘them’ divide. In another attempt to make language replicate the world, he

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states that fractality is not generalization but the very means of its ‘own’
analysis:

[T]he evidence presented here indicates that for some Melanesian

peoples at least the forms of social and cultural conceptualisation keep
their scale through all ritual and pragmatic permutations. For in such
a fractal or scale-retaining conceptualisation the concept itself merges
with the space of its conceiving, and there is nothing to be gained by
remapping the data onto artificial and introduced scalings.
(Wagner 1991: 172)

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.

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116 The names of others

Notes
1 Cf. chapters  3 and 4 for more details on Wagner’s criticism of structural-
functionalism and structuralism.
2 Wagner’s stance here is unlike that of authors such as Fischer (1986), who
advocates a bifocal critical stance in anthropology. It is similar to that of authors
such as Strathern (1988), who refrains from criticizing those she calls her ‘hosts’
and addresses her criticism to ‘her own’ social context based on what she has
learned from ‘others.’
3 As far as the centrality of relations is concerned, Scott (2014) poses a methodo-
logical critique to what he calls “holographic ontology”:  “[I]n my view, there
are many potential problems with … holographic ontology, at least as methodo-
logical presupposition. For one thing, there is, at present, no evidence that the
universe is comprehensively fractal—let  alone fractal to the degree of invariant
self-similarity across all scales. I am concerned that we have simply been wonder-
struck by the apparent congruence between a few aesthetically powerful examples
of invariant fractality—as described by scientists and mathematicians—and the
familiar macrocosm–microcosm correlations found in many ancient, indigenous,
and alter-modern cosmologies.”
4 Cf. also Wagner (1977: 629).
5 Wagner oscillates between a Nietzschean affirmation of play and its nostalgic
lament in the mode of Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau (cf. Derrida 1978). His movement
seems to follow a pattern in which play is affirmed when he sides with ‘native’
perspective and lamented when he places himself (and anthropology) within the
‘Western’ mode of symbolization, especially as far as ‘contact’ is concerned.
6 For a critique of the metaphysics of presence, cf. Derrida (e.g., 1976, 1988, 1991).
7 For Gell’s critique of Asiwinarong, cf. Gell (1987).
8 I will not go into the complementarity of gender (understood as male and female)
that pervades Wagner’s work (e.g., Wagner 1972; 2001, caps. 4 and 7; 2002).
However, it is worth pointing out, even if en passant, that his holistic perspective
on gender disregards violence and fully ignores the debate on gender that has been
going on for decades.

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.

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———. 1985. “Des Tours de Babel.” In:  GRAHAM, Joseph (ed.), Difference in
Translation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
———. 1988 [1972]. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1991. Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority. Cardozo Law
Review, 11: 921–1045.
———. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
FISCHER, Michael. 1986. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.”
In: CLIFFORD, James & MARCUS, George (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
GELL, Alfred. 1987. Review of Asiwinarong. Man, 22(3): 589–591.
HARAWAY, Donna. 1985. A Manifesto for Cyborgs:  Science, Technology and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 80: 65–107.
MARRIOTT, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions:  Diversity Without Dualism.”
In:  KAPFERER, Bruce (ed.), Transaction and Meaning:  Directions in the
Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior. Philadelphia, PA:  Institute
for the Study of Human Issues.
MARX, Karl. 1976 [1867]. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Penguin.
SAHLINS, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
SCOTT, Michael. 2014. Equal Time for Entities. Cultural Anthropology. Available
at:  http://culanth.org/fieldsights/467equaltimeforentities. Accessed on November
26, 2017.
STRATHERN, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and
Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1990. Partial Connections. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
WAGNER, Roy. 1972. Habu:  The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1974. “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?” In: LEAF,
Murray (ed.), Frontiers of Anthropology. New York: D. Van Nostrand: 95–122.
———. 1977. Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example. American Ethnologist, 4(4):
623–642.
———. 1986a. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. 1986b. The Theater of Fact and Its Critics. Anthropological Quarterly,
59(2): 97–99.
———. 1986c. Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image and Social Power among the Usen Barok
of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1991. “The Fractal Person.” In:  STRATHERN, Marylin & GODELIER,
Maurice (eds.), Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1992. “The Imagery Keeps Its Scale:  An Obviation Model of the Yafar
Yangis.” In:  JUILLERAT, Bernard (ed.), Shooting the Sun:  Ritual and Meaning
in the West Sepik (New Guinea). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
———. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject:  Holographic Worldview in New
Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2002. Edith Turner: The Gender of Giftedness. Anthropology and Humanism,
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———. 2012. Automodelagem:  o lugar da invenção [Self-Modeling:  The Place of
Invention]. Revista de Antropologia, 54(2): 921–953.

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6 On metaphor

Trope versus referentiality

The process of human symbolization is the central object of Symbols that
Stand for Themselves (Wagner 1986a, hence STSFT). In it, Wagner attempts
to displace the structuralist interest in the sign (in Saussure, made up of the
signifier, or acoustic image, and the signified, or concept) through his discus-
sion of how one might think of symbolization in terms of ‘symbols that stand
for themselves,’ that is, symbols free of the structural bipartition. For Wagner,
the symbol, unlike the sign as understood by semiotics, is not a form whose
relation to meaning is arbitrary; rather, in its self-referentiality, the symbol
that both stands for itself and encompasses the thing it symbolizes aspires
to tautology. In his critique of the concept of the sign, Wagner attempts
to do away with referentiality, foundational to both Saussure’s (2011) and
Peirce’s (1991) understanding of it. Drawing from the organizing principles
of his theory of signification, Wagner affirms that because meaning relies on
trope, it does not require a referent. Through self-referentiality, tropes are
said to function as non-glossable images, in an iteration of what Derrida
views as the ascription of “a certain originating naturalness” to the “figure”
of meaning (Derrida 1974: 32), or a “teleology of the sense,” in which image
substitutes syntax so that language can be “regain[ed] in its fullness,” as a
“pure calling by name” (Derrida 1974: 73).
And as trope, a term Wagner uses almost interchangeably with metaphor,
is theorized as the core of meaning, the image connected to it cannot have
its meaning exhausted by interpretation—because symbols ‘stand for them-
selves.’ Any attempt to undertake an exhaustive interpretation would remain
incomplete despite the relation of meaning to cultural convention, with which
it is said to maintain a relation of mediation. Meaning—as mediation, sig-
nification, signification as mediation—is, thus, connected not to signs but to
symbols, the mainstay of Wagner’s theory of signification. Methodologically,
Wagner proposes obviation to analyze symbolization as image (cf. chapter 3
and below). This chapter contends that self-referentiality depends on self-
identity, which Derrida, in “White Mythology,” calls, not without irony, the
mythos of Western logos (Derrida 1974: 11). In privileging the substitution

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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

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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

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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

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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?

Analogy, culture, value

Wagner begins the introduction to STSFT with the following question: Why
should one be concerned with symbols if “the natives” (the quotation
marks are Wagner’s 1986a:  1) do not speak about them to the anthro-
pologist? One only has access to the symbols used by “natives” through
their “content” (these quotation marks are also Wagner’s), one is told. Yet,
he continues, that which emerges from fieldwork is usually made visible
in and through language. After granting that symbols might be “the aca-
demic currency” minted by the workers of “the postcolonial knowledge
industries” who semantically produce “all-too-aptly named research
‘subjects’ ” (Wagner 1986a: 1), he does not dwell on the political aspect of
the question. Rather, he affirms that it is now time for a new coinage: One
that does not depend on inflation. The theme of scale maintenance in lieu
of inflation, also thematized in FP (cf. chapter 5), makes an appearance in
relation to the question of obviation.
In his attempt to make metaphor overcome the arbitrariness of the sign,
Wagner proposes a theory of meaning that is not only independent, but
also radically different, from a theory of value. His rejection of Saussure’s
concept of sign is therefore a denial of the notion that semiotics, like eco-
nomics, is based on a system that makes it possible for things of different
orders to be made equivalent. For Saussure (2011), if value is not considered
along with signification—in which case metaphor is to be understood as
both idealization and appropriation (Derrida 1974:  55)—one loses track
of the possibility of exchanging and comparing things different and similar;
consequently, what is produced is mere naming. It is thus not a coincidence
that ‘Melanesian’ ‘great men’ and language are described as holographic,
i.e., scale-keeping, as opposed to inflationary and representational ‘Western’
language and money. If ‘they’ provide ‘us’ with concrete language, one in
which symbols do not need to be equated or compared, but only extended,
the anthropologist’s task is one of abstraction. One should not lose sight of
the fact that the theory of symbolization proposed in STSFT aspires to be
universal.
STSFT intends to make sense of meaning as something other than an
“economy of symbols.” In order to do so, it chooses as its point of departure

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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

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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

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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.

Representation and mysticism

Frames, if considered absolute, are said to be part of a ‘conventionalist’ or
‘literalist’ perspective characterized by arbitrariness, in which order is made
“absolute for the sake of order itself” (Wagner 1986a: 9). Wagner’s theor-
ization of metaphor as image attempts to escape the arbitrary character of
symbolization. This is why he is so interested in the idea of a symbol that
stands for itself, eliding both reference and the arbitrary relation between
the components of the sign. One can surely ask whether arbitrariness is an
obstacle to the production of meaning, as those Wagner calls “semioticians”
would certainly contend that it is not. But it seems that when Wagner writes
of “meaningful construction” (Wagner 1986a: 9), he does not only mean sig-
nification, but a kind of value (“meaningful” as relevant) that is of cultural
rather than economic character.
Wagner chooses the trope of metaphor as a unit (or frame) of significa-
tion and affirms that metaphor “expands the frame of its self-referentiality
by processual extension into a broader range of cultural relevance” (Wagner
1986a:  9). STSFT speaks of a dialectic between ‘referential symbolism’
and ‘self-significative symbolism,’ restriction and expansion (Wagner

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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,

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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

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128 On metaphor
treatise on metaphor that is not treated with metaphor, which suddenly
appears intractable.
(Derrida 2007: 49)

The closure that derives from self-definition and self-containment is

destabilized as concepts become metaphorical. Despite this, Wagner’s
attempt to theorize motivation in TIC is further developed in STSFT in
that the cultural frames that result from metaphorical expansion are said
to influence cultural motivation and the action that results from it (Wagner
1986a: 11). Thus, in STSFT, if one begins with metaphor, one ends with cul-
turally determined action, and a total, if expansive, unit:  Culture, defined
and particularized through emic naming. This goes hand in hand with the
idea that the form of meaning results from its content: The underlying idea
is that the unit of culture results from the empiricity of its content (mostly
meaning), and not that the apprehension of meaning results from the consti-
tution of culture as a total unit through emic naming.
Thus, ‘core symbols,’ self-closing and standing for themselves,11 are said to
constitute the content of culture, its frame metaphors and tropes. And obvi-
ation, both a methodology for making sense of metaphor and the way in
which meaning evolves in Wagner’s superposition of description and the
world, is considered the “deep structure” (Wagner 1986a:  12) of culture.
Wagner’s reference to Benedict’s (1935) patterns of culture and Spengler’s
(1926) cultural cycles reaffirms the overdetermination of culture, under-
stood as the overdetermination of meaning. This is probably the reason
why, in Wagner, politics is restricted to the dimension of cultural meaning.
The actor, as a “ ‘sensorium’ of meanings,” becomes a kind of support for
the obviative sequence of metaphor that results in cultural closure. If trope
elicits the perception of meaning, it is said to do so through Castañeda’s
“seeing” (Wagner 1986a:  13), a kind of mysticism that Wagner seems to
prefer over that which he attributes to Marxism, economics, and semi-
otics (Wagner 1986a:  3). And if “the metaphorical exists only within the
boundaries of metaphysics” (Heidegger, quoted in Derrida 1974: 26), one
should not be surprised if mysticism and its totalization are taken in with
lightheartedness.
In the chapter titled “Too Definite for Words” (Wagner 1986a), symbols
are said to be names. But as names, they can be understood both as coding—
in which case they bear a relation of homology with the things named, which
they, as points of reference, represent—and as analogy—in which case the
relationship between the symbol and that which it represents is said to be
foregrounded. As these two alternative understandings of the symbol are
presented, Wagner must resort to representation even in order to say that
this is not what the symbol, as analogy, does. The very language in which
Wagner speaks of analogy, of conflation between word and thing, is that of
representation, in which reference, and therefore separation between lan-
guage and the world, is supposed. Things have to be separated from names

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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

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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.

Obviation and the temporality of image

A distinction between ‘organic’ or ‘mythic time’ (Wagner 1986a:  81) and
‘literal time’ (Wagner 1986a:  83) is drawn in STSFT’s fifth chapter, titled
“Epoch: Real Time and Unreal Time.” There, it is affirmed that the obviative
sequence does not depend on the time of the clock:  Whereas the cycle of
‘Daribi’ kinship relations takes more than two generations to be completed,
the narrative of the myth of Souw takes a few minutes, and the habu ritual
takes from one to two months. The time of obviation is said to be valid not
only for ‘the Daribi’ but also for ‘Western history,’ as shown by Wagner’s
obviative analysis of the “Western core symbol” (Wagner 1986a, chapter 6).
As affirmed by Wagner, “what matters is the working out of a sequence”
(Wagner 1986a:  81) based on the transformation of sequences into other
sequences—the process of ad infinitum substitution he explores in CA
(Wagner 2010). Wagner’s argumentation in his chapter on ‘epoch’ aims at
proving that the time of obviation is distinct from the time of the clock to
the extent that it is based on the relation between points (opposition, medi-
ation, cancellation), and not on “arbitrary interval” (Wagner 1986a:  81).
Thus, obviation—like structure—is said to have its own temporality, not
subsumed to historical time. And the temporality of ‘organic’ or ‘mythic’
time (the quotation marks are his) is characterized by neither accumulating
nor counting; in it, events establish relations of transformation with pre-
vious and subsequent events (Wagner 1986a: 81) so that relation becomes
a transformative connection between the elements of a sequence. In order
to define obviation, Wagner writes of a “qualitative mathematics,” in which
events are not counted to be subordinated to an external logic but are part

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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.

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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.

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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)

But this possibility, mentioned in a few passages in STSFT, is soon

abandoned—which might make of the excerpt above one of the instances
in which the text thinks against itself (cf. chapter  2). As far as time is
concerned, Wagner’s option for closure is related to his affirmation that
the literal time of the clock is not capable of obviating “because it cannot

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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:

‘Now’ is a trope because literal simultaneity is impossible; the experience

of now as the immediacy of thought corresponds to the formation of
a trope ‘between’ the immediate past of a just-now realized perception,
and the anticipation of intention. … ‘Now’ is an experience that welds
perception and intention into an image (and illusion) of simultaneity.
(Wagner 1986a: 89)

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

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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

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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.

Metaphor beyond closure

If one might say that STSFT evades the emic gesture to the extent that it
theorizes symbolization beyond named culture, it nonetheless fixes closure
to an unprecedented extent if compared with Wagner’s previous works.
In it, closure is given not only the names of the human and its cultural
variations, but also those of nature and the cosmos.15 It seems that Habu,
despite being more firmly grounded in the emic, does not depend on closure
in such a definitive way as is the case with STSFT. Habu contains a poten-
tial for dissemination that is halted in Wagner’s subsequent work, in which
totalization is embraced with less ambiguity. This might seem counter-
intuitive given that closure in Wagner’s work is largely associated with the
emic gesture. Yet, it is almost as if in Habu one could do without totaliza-
tion if one relinquished the emic gesture, whereas the totalizing gesture of
the emic seems to be foundational to a greater extent in STSFT. If in Habu
the emic might be understood as a residue of anthropological discourse that
structures Wagner’s narrative despite the potential for dissemination that
is contained in his theory of metaphor, in STSFT totalization is explicitly
defended and theorized as such. This is the reason why, after outlining the
work of closure in STSFT, it is relevant to show how Wagner’s text might
have taken a different path if the blurring of the distinction between the lit-
eral and the metaphorical proposed in Habu had been radicalized, that is,
if the danger of an “errant semantics” (Derrida 1974: 41) that arises when-
ever one ascribes to metaphor as endless detour had not led to an attempt
to halt dissemination through closure.
In Habu, as Wagner contends that the task of the anthropologist is
to represent16 the creativity of a “subject-culture” through anthropo-
logical analysis, which he equates with “the creativity of his own cul-
ture,” he warns the reader that there is a danger that such representation
might result in a “fixed, unchanging, ‘logical’ order or a ‘closed’ system
of timeless determinants” (Wagner 1972:  3). Thus, creativity, not only
that of ‘others,’ but also that of anthropology and anthropologists, is
associated with the possibility of transformation, whereas the anthropo-
logical fixation of culture as a model is understood as something that falls
short of portraying culture in its entire complexity. Habu openly criticizes
binarism—for instance, the structuralist divide between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’
societies (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1966)—on the grounds that this kind of oppos-
ition reifies the role of anthropology as that of ‘the analyst’ and the role

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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
BENEDICT, Ruth. 1935. Patterns of Culture. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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.
———. 2007 [1987]. “The Retrait of Metaphor.” In: Psyche: Inventions of the Other,
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.
SAUSSURE, Ferdinand. 2011 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics. New  York:
Columbia University Press.
SPENGLER, Oswald. 1926 [1923]. The Decline of the West. New  York:  Alfred
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:
University of Chicago Press.
———. 1974. “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?” In: LEAF,
Murray (ed.), Frontiers of Anthropology. New York: D. Van Nostrand.
———. 1977. “Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualizations of the Innate: A
Semiotic Critique of the Ecological Perspective.” In:  BAYLISS-SMITH, Timothy
& FEACHERN, Richard (eds.), Subsistence and Survival: Rural Ecology in the
Pacific. London: Academic Press.
———. 1978. Lethal Speech:  Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.

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142 On metaphor
———. 1981 [1975]. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1986a. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. 1986b. The Theater of Fact and Its Critics. Anthropological Quarterly,
59(2): 97–99.
———. 1986c. Asiwinarong. Ethos, Image and Social Power among the Usen Barok
of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1991. “The Fractal Person.” In:  STRATHERN, Marylin & GODELIER,
Maurice (eds.), Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2010. Coyote Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
WAGNER, Roy et  al. 2011. ‘O Apache era o meu reverso.’ Entrevista com Roy
Wagner [‘The Apache Was My Reverse.’ An Interview with Roy Wagner]. Revista
de Antropologia, 54(2): 955–978.

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7 Final remarks
Beyond the emic gesture

If it is possible to attribute a point of arrival to an author’s work, in the case

of Roy Wagner this seems to be the articulation, in anthropological analysis,
of the interpretation of human motivation to the ‘Melanesian,’ or differen-
tiating, mode of symbolization. The concepts he employs in his work—such
as obviation, fractality, holography, dialectic, and elicitation—are informed
on the one hand by his ethnography on ‘Melanesia’ and on the other hand
by his dialogue with anthropology and disciplines such as philosophy, math-
ematics, and physics. Thus, this invention of concepts could be read, in the
author’s terms, as a possible instantiation of the dialectic of culture and
communication (Wagner 1977), mobilized every time a ‘Western science’—
in this case, anthropology—must deal with the paradox of unit (culture)
and relation (dialogue or invention). It seems, therefore, that the encompass-
ment of the pole of invention (relation) by that of convention (unit), almost
inevitable from the point of view of symbolization, can also be observed in
his work despite his claim that anthropology should pay more heed to the
creativity of those it studies (Wagner 1981). This is because invention, to
be innovative, must necessarily refer to the convention that grounds it—
something he acknowledges since Habu (Wagner 1972).
The inevitability of the encompassment of invention by convention
becomes clear as one considers the concepts coined by Wagner. Obviation,
fractality, holography, and elicitation, for instance, were not usual concepts
in anthropology until their employment by him. Yet, although they might
arguably account for the ‘Melanesian’ mode of symbolization, such concepts
have long been employed by other disciplines. This makes one wonder what
lies behind the adoption of such concepts in anthropological theorization
while simultaneously attributing their origin to ‘Melanesian’ symbolization.
The idea that they have an (analogical) equivalent in ‘Melanesian’ sym-
bolization is what seems to ground the preference for them as a means of
access to this mode of thinking and acting that is presented as ‘other.’ It is
‘Melanesian’—or, at times, ‘Daribi,’ ‘Barok,’ or ‘tribal’—symbolization that
grounds Wagner’s ethnographic theorization. Although he acknowledges
that ‘Melanesian’ can only be approached through relation, there is a desire
to come close to something that lies there—something that he affirms is

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144 Final remarks

beyond reach for anthropology unless mediated by dialogue and analogy,
and inevitably informed, or encompassed, by the anthropologist’s mode of
symbolization (convention). But the otherness that is said to lie at the core
of Wagner’s conceptualization receives, at the conceptual level, the names of
concepts familiar to ‘the West.’
The preceding chapters have claimed that the emic gesture grounds
Wagner’s approach. Yet, in the excerpts below, from a text in which he
engages with ‘deconstruction,’ it seems that his understanding of the analogic
mode in which differences are outlined in anthropology might as well do
without the closure of the emic. I quote him:

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:

Cultural comparison and similarity, “knowing” another culture insofar

as an intimate acquaintance and participation are required for it, is like-
wise imprinted with the self-differentiation of the “knower” from his or
her own tradition. And this also means that estrangement from one’s
own tradition is entirely derivative of and relative to the analogic sense
one makes of the other. An ‘unbound’ difference, one with no analogic
shadow to point up the significance of its differentiation, may well be
possible in the anthropological context, but it would be very difficult to
determine what it might be.
(Wagner 1991: 44)

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Final remarks 145

Although unbound difference is hard to determine in anthropology, Wagner
acknowledges that it might be possible to deal with difference without total-
izing it. If one reads the excerpt above carefully, one finds out that were one
to relinquish anthropology in the analogic mode as conceived by Wagner,
one would lose the ability to estrange oneself from one’s culture. It seems,
therefore, that it is the potential of transformation that lies in the process
of othering that Wagner does not want to do without. Because once the for-
mation of borders (the ‘bounded’ entities of which the first excerpt speaks)
does not occur, one loses both the poles of opposition based on which the
dialectic of unit and relation is to occur and the possibility to clearly depict
difference. One ends up not being able to predetermine transformation in
the sense that the border between context, as convention, and iteration,
as invention, is blurred. Now, it is this very ontological determination of
things that is relinquished by différance, “neither a word nor a concept”
(Derrida 1982), in its attempt to escape closure through dissemination.
Wagner understands that this is what lies behind Heidegger’s Unter-schied
and Derrida’s différance, but affirms that “[t]he admission of a cultural diffe-
rence that could not be bridged by analogy, a cultural dif/ference, would
deny the possibility of a theoretical solution” (Wagner 1991: 48). This is so
because his theoretical solution necessarily supposes the inventive oppos-
ition between delimited (invented) conventions (the ‘cultures’ the anthro-
pologist constructs based on dialogue with ‘other’ world views). This is what
leads Wagner to affirm that “dif/ference,” the term he uses to refer both
to Derridean différance and Heideggerian Unter-schied, is holographic and
self-representative:

Dif/ference might … be defined for our purposes as differentiation that

“keeps its scale” in all of its instantiations, and therefore as a kind of
holography behind the scenes of thought. … [I]t could be thought of
as a crack or a flaw running down through all the scales of cultural
meaning, one that necessarily presents itself as the same fragmenta-
tion or fractability at every point. One might call it the “crack between
the worlds,” or, understood holographically, the “Indra-net” of Hindu
cosmology.
(Wagner 1991: 51)

For Wagner’s purposes, “dif/ference” (his invention to deal with Derrida

and Heidegger in the same vein) is considered from the perspective of
holographic and fractal scale retention, “in all of its instantiations.” Yet,
his attempt at instantiation pictures it as named totalization in the form
of alterity:  “Hindu cosmology.” The rhetoric to which he ascribes posits
that abstraction (in this case, “theorization” as to how “dif/ference” might
operate in the analogical mode) must be followed by empirical examples.
But there is another implicit rule that makes itself present: Alterity is to be
ascribed one of the names of otherness, in this case, “Hindu cosmology,”

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146 Final remarks

probably read through the lenses of Dumont (1980; cf. Wagner 2001: 60–
61). One should not forget that image, for Wagner (1986a, 1986b), is power.
And no bounded image could be so classical and disputed at the same time.
This might become clearer with the excerpt below, which evokes the meta-
phor of the game to make sense of “dif/ference”:

Dif/ference is then self-enacting or holographic difference, the widening

or chain-reactive crack that eventually faults the medium itself, as move
and countermove lead ultimately to the checkmate that breaks the
setting of the game. Insofar as the checkmate that ends it is the object
or intent of a game of chess, every move that is not checkmate “binds”
itself to the chain of previous and subsequent moves in a suspension of
“game” toward the anticipation of its closure.
(Wagner 1991: 46)

Thus, “dif/ference,” in its holography and fractality, is what makes the

anthropological checkmate possible. No defense of the game could be more
explicit. The inventions (moves or countermoves) made both in relation to
and against convention (the rules, or the setting, of the game) bind the player
and her subsequent moves to a previously known end: The checkmate. It
is unclear who the obviated adversary is here—a game of chess is always
a dispute—but one might wonder whether it is not one’s own culture and
its conventions. In any case, the analogy between anthropology and chess
points to the necessary relation between invention and convention: If moves
cannot be foreseen, they not only actualize one possibility among many
others but are also binding regarding moves to come. As every chess player
knows, the possibilities of moves in chess are not infinite. In chess, and in
Wagner’s argument, the preeminence of convention, which establishes what
the possible moves are for the game to come to an end, is highlighted despite
the variations foreseen by its structure. In the excerpt above, convention is
to the rules of the game what invention is to its moves. Yet, différance does
not presuppose the totality of convention. For différance is not a game; it
is play.
Extending the analogy would reveal that in play one can neither state
fixed rules nor foresee moves, for it does not depend on the totalization
of game, i.e., the closure to which Wagner refers above. Thus, one cannot
affirm that difference is holographic and fractal in différance, for events
(as iterations) do not follow a chain reaction, that is, they cannot be
transformed, as a unit, into an organized image that is to a certain extent
predictable in its form as is the case with holography and fractality (scale
maintenance). With différance, it is possible to look for the difference that
lies within difference instead of looking for creative acts within or against
convention. Différance is not a dialectical movement, nor does it depend
on opposing poles that have been fixed beforehand through naming;
rather, even if différance happens within language, and therefore depends

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Final remarks 147

on the naming of difference and ipseity to be expressed, it resists oppos-
ition through displacement. One might want to make a distinction, even if
somewhat blurred, between the game, as advocated by Wagner, and play as
“what keeps itself beyond this opposition [between empiricism and logical
discourse], announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of
chance and necessity in calculations without end” (Derrida 1982: 7). Play is
a fundamental metaphor for two authors who inspire Wagner: Lévi-Strauss,
who nostalgically laments it, and Nietzsche, who affirms it as will to power.
Here is what Derrida, who not coincidentally wrote on both Lévi-Strauss’s
and Nietzsche’s approach to play (Derrida 1978), affirms about différance:

“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:

How is language itself limiting? The limit of language is language’s

“being a limit”—it limits, demarcates, draws boundaries around that
which it references. Anything it accomplishes as language is done
through this fact. By the same token, language does not describe the
elements it demarcates save in demarcating them, nor does it make those
elements immediately meaningful as a result of demarcating or referen-
cing them. Language, in short, cannot access or convey the experiential
concreteness of its referents.
(Wagner 2001: 4)

Wagner wishes to attain that which lies beyond language: “the experiential

concreteness of its referents.” In this sense, language is not only a limit but
also an obstacle to the apprehension (and communication) of experience

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148 Final remarks

(hence the lure of shamanism and of “stopping the world”). Yet, the only
realm of language within which one can aspire to simply state the world is
common sense. This is not to say that anthropology, and philosophy, could
ever be impervious to its metaphors. Much to the contrary, and both Derrida
(1974) and Wagner (1972, 1981) recognize this. The names one assigns to
others are an example of that, as no matter how much one considers the
historicity and arbitrariness that mark the constitution of limits, the con-
ceptualization of difference appears to be circumscribed by a border that
is ultimately given by the names (and metaphors) available in the discourse
of common sense (Derrida 1974). One should therefore pose to anthro-
pology a classical philosophical question:  What is the relation between
anthropological discourse and common sense? The difficulty in accounting
for difference within difference seems to be related, on the one hand, to
the supposition of reproduction that feeds into totalizations, and on the
other hand, to the work of reification that inheres in language (metaphor
as synthetic image, as in Wagner (1986a)). Thus, tackling the relationship
between anthropological conceptualization and the metaphors of common
sense might enable one to understand the work of historical reification that
is contained in concepts such as group, culture, society, perspective, struc-
ture. Through an interrogation of this sort, one might open the closure of
totalization that inheres in language because, like writing, it unknowingly
carries the historicity of convention, commonsensical by definition. Names
are one instance in which the sedimentation of such history overdetermines
difference and ipseity.
Wagner, though attempting to flexibilize totalization, faces difficulties in
this endeavor because alterity is presupposed and named. And from such
naming, the designation that constitutes subjects (cf. Butler 1997), ensues
the conclusion that distinct subjects operate according to different modes of
symbolization. This is the case even if Wagner acknowledges that “there is
no difference to separate such people from their own conventions and thus
form a basis for totalizing them analogically” (Wagner 1991: 44). Yet, if he
offers no methodology for accessing alterity, this is due not only to a (neces-
sary) failure of method, as Vigh and Sausdal (2014) argue, but also to the
fact that the very project of describing a totalized ‘other’ collides with the
names one employs to designate difference as alterity.
Wagner’s stance seems to have a methodological and linguistic blind
spot: Though I agree that a methodological issue arises if one posits both
the existence of radical alterity and the possibility of accessing it, I am not
entirely convinced that Wagner would argue for the radicality of alterity
given his defense of generalization and science (with which Holbraad and
Pedersen (2017) seem to disagree) and his interest in the ‘human.’ Yet,
even if alterity is not radical, the question of how to access difference and
sameness remains. For if the subject is not transparent to itself (cf. Spivak
1997; Morris 2007), even accessing ipseity can be a problem. One can only
have access to the language in which sameness and difference are expressed.

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Final remarks 149

As far as language and description are concerned, ‘others’ are, in Wagner,
now reified (as ‘Melanesians,’ ‘tribal peoples,’ ‘the Daribi,’ ‘the Barok’), now
deconstructed. When anthropology makes the move of trying to approach
the lifeways of ‘others,’ it causes the repressed to surface: A name must be
fixed to a thing for the ‘other’ to remain ‘other.’ As a result, alterity, thus
named, seeks not only to encompass difference, but also to halt the work
of displacement, supplementation, and differentiation that threatens its sta-
bility. ‘Group’ and ‘culture’ come to exist because there is a “substance,”
something “out there” (e.g., Wagner 2001: 147, 176, 194) (‘ontology’?) to be
described: “the world’s substances and objectivities, its social relationships
in commonsense as well as anthropological terms” (Wagner 1991: 49). It is
Wagner who poses the question of the relationship between anthropology
and common sense here. And if literalization is impossible because concepts
are metaphors (Derrida 1974), and Wagner (1981, 1986a) knows this, it
seems, nonetheless, that an investment in the literal is suggested by the focus
on “substances and objectivities,” the “futility of form without content”
(Wagner & Williamson 1990) that grounds Wagner’s opposition to structur-
alism, and the reproducibility entailed by self-replication and self-modeling
(in spite of the critique addressed to literality on the grounds that it is
‘Western’). The (admittedly impossible) search for an equivalence between
description and the world has its parallel in the claim that the differentiating
mode of symbolization does not distinguish between the word and the thing.
Yet, the absence of distinction between language and the world is one of the
possible definitions of the fetish (cf. Morris & Leonard 2017).
In Wagner, the attempt to conflate description with the difference one
names has a parallel in the idea that fractality replicates the one in the
whole and vice versa:  Fractals are said to keep their scale by mimicking
themselves. Thus, in his argumentation on “dif/ference,” iteration becomes
holographic. And holography is Wagner’s response to the crisis of represen-
tation. In his dialectical play of substitutions, one instantiation of which is
the theory of metaphorization in Habu, holography and fractality allow for
the scale between description and its subject to be kept. After all, according
to the argument presented repeatedly in CA (2010), whatever lies beyond
dialectics can only be accessed through death. Holography, fractality, obvi-
ation, and self-modeling seem to do without the closure implicit in concepts
such as group, culture, society, and alterity to the extent that the former are
open-ended, prone to infinite replication in diverse scales. But there are at
least two problems with them. The first one is stated in the prefix to self-
modeling: They replicate themselves, and it is difficult to imagine how one
might account for difference within difference through self-replication (as if
replication were not always repetition of the same). The second problem is
that what grounds these concepts are precisely the names of others, which
must be capable of repeating the same at every enunciation for such foun-
dation to remain stable. Thus, one finds oneself in the strange position in
which the replication of the same attributed to others justifies one’s claim to

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150 Final remarks

access difference. This convention, totalizing par excellence, makes possible
inventions that are extensions of meaning whose purpose is to negotiate
the paradox of unit and relation, not to overcome it, as Wagner states in
COI. Yet, if one depends on the names of ‘others,’ this foundation is actually
grounded in (the convention of) language, itself subject to the possibility that
designation might fail to reproduce the same as it is enacted (Butler 1997).
The recognition that no foundation of this sort is possible seems to creep
into Wagner’s later engagement with language. In the excerpt below, for
instance, dialectic gives way to sheer contagion:

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)

If contagion cannot be contained, “substance” (or ontology) remains

inaccessible because it is impossible to reach the referents of names. As argued
throughout this book, the emic gesture, as iterated in the names of ‘others,’
is grounded in a totalization of alterity that institutes closure in represen-
tation. Such closure can only be released through an erasure of the emic. It
is as if Wagner’s ethnography opened up a liberating path of invention that
one of the conventions of anthropological commonsense—translating diffe-
rence as alterity—comes to repress. Acknowledging the absence of such a
foundation would mean to relinquish totalizing ‘others.’ To translate it into
terms familiar to the ‘ontological turn,’ one would have to recognize that
ontology remains inaccessible because difference differs from itself in every
iteration. The historical names assigned to difference (culture, perspective,
ontology, alterity, in their substantive as well as adjectival and adverbial
forms) iterate difference as reproduction whereas iterability actually resides
in the simultaneous possibility of permanence and change, i.e., in the unfore-
seeable character of future iterations. To circumscribe difference with the
names of ‘others’ is, therefore, to determine beforehand that there must be
presence and persistence, whereas one could, instead, pay heed to the non-
totalizable displacement of traces in a chain of significations. If alterity is
to be erased, difference has to be accepted as undecidable because its traces
have no origin.

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———. 1977. “Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualizations of the Innate: A
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———. 1981 [1975]. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1986a. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago
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———. 1986b. Asiwinarong. Ethos, Image and Social Power among the Usen Barok
of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1991. “Dif/ference and Its Disguises.” In:  SCHARLEMANN, Robert (ed.),
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———. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject. Holographic Worldview in New
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———. 2010. Coyote Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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152

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.

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