M. Agier Epistemological Decentering

Article
Epistemological
decentring: At the root
of a contemporary and
situational anthropology
Anthropological Theory
2016, Vol. 16(1) 22–47
! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499616629270
ant.sagepub.com
Michel Agier
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Institut de
Recherche pour le Développement, France
Abstract
To what extent can anthropology still help us to understand the world around us at a
time when this world is characterized by processes of political and economic multipolarity, and the decolonization of knowledge? The political questioning of cultural decentring is an opportunity for anthropology to build a new epistemological conception of
decentring. Against and beyond cultural relativism, ethnicism or ontological perspectivism, the issue is knowing how to decentre in any situation, ‘here and now’, from oneself
as much as from each ‘we’, searching for tangible and intangible limits, and making those
borders places of observation and understanding of increasingly more cosmopolitan
social and cultural lives. I develop and propose this new conception in three stages. The
first contextual stage highlights the importance of border situations and the necessity to
account for them in order to tackle globalization as an observable social fact, beyond
and against frozen representations of Others’ cultures and identities. The second stage
explores the possibility of a post-culturalist decentring. In this reflection I turn to
philosophy, from Rousseau to Foucault and Agamben, to find cues for an epistemological conception of decentring. In the last part I emphasize the understanding of
situations, and rehabilitate reflexive ethnography and the situational inductive approach
as the foundations of contemporary anthropology.
Keywords
alterity, borderlands, decentring, global, post-culturalism, situations
Corresponding author:
Michel Agier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 105 boulevard Raspail, Paris, 75006, France.
Email: [email protected]
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The political importance the issue of world borders has gained, and the periods of
uncertainty this has caused, have been characterized in the social sciences by various ‘crises’, numerous debates and a general period of conceptual, methodological and thematic overhaul. The strength of individualism, the imposition of the
global above all other scales of action, the unrest and conﬂicts associated with
questions of identity and borders, are now obvious societal themes calling for
the critical attention of anthropologists. My reﬂection is to be viewed against
this backdrop. Essentially, its purpose is to turn anthropological reason on its
head, to rethink the concept of decentring – its founding principle – starting
from an imaginary or epistemological outside, which I equate with the contemporary redeﬁnition of anthropological decentring defended here.
This is necessary in light of the political and epistemic eﬀects of globalization.
Characterized by recent and increasingly global contexts of action and thought, the
increasing mobility of people crossing each other in everyday lives, these eﬀects call
into question the local and identitarian inscriptions of every individual and group
of people. Today’s environment thus calls for a new epistemological conception of
decentring, instead of the old culturalist one. However, this epistemological decentring has historical antecedents. The relative and malleable character of the border
that separates oneself from the ‘Other’ was already tangible in Rousseau’s understanding of the foundations of inequalities among men. Unlike the usual reading of
Rousseau’s work – for example by Lévi-Strauss, as we shall see further as a
culturalist foundation of anthropology, I would like to show that the epistemological understanding of decentring defended here can be found already in the ﬁrst of
Rousseau’s philosophical reﬂections on the diversity of the human condition. Yet,
almost two centuries later, the relativity of a world without beginning or end
became ‘hardened’ by cultural relativism. New inventions of the ‘Great Divide’
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, inventions of new essentialisms and ontologies in the
global context now call for a clearly radical position criticizing and deconstructing
the old culturalist conception of decentring, and edifying a new meaning and
practice for it, namely an epistemological decentring.
In terms of current anthropological debates, my objective is to propose tools for
observing margins while de-essentializing them at the same time. Thus, I distance
myself from a current trend in subaltern or cultural studies, and also from a socalled ontological trend in anthropology. This last reactivates and perpetuates the
agenda of cultural relativism founded on the principle of a table of cultural identities, drawn up in order to interpret and compare them. In both cases, my critique
of identitarian essentialisms aims to re-establish another founding principle of
anthropology – the ethnography of relationships – and, thus, to highlight border
situations considered as radical stages of relations.
With this reﬂection I hope to re-open both a research ﬁeld and a research
programme. The ﬁeld consists of all observable border situations, which can be
simultaneously understood as places of recognition and exchange between individuals, and as places where the globalized world is staged and set in motion. The
programme is both anthropological and political. It consists of observing,
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describing and understanding every place that has a border at centre stage: fortuitous encounters, conﬂicts, misunderstandings, experiences of otherness, conﬂicts
about universality, hybridizations, etc. In order to advance this programme, one
must take stock of the methodological eﬀects of an anthropology that is attentive
to the dynamics and processes of change. This I endeavour to do, after analysing
the beneﬁts of this situational approach. But as a prologue, let me present two
short stories about forests and Indians that address the question of borders.
Where has the border gone?
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville rode on horseback across 100-odd miles of forest
between Detroit on Michigan’s upper peninsula to the village of Saginaw, which
Americans then called the ‘frontier’. He was looking for a genuine Indian, but was
soon told that genuine Indians were getting farther and farther away each day; in
short, he would never meet one. Instead, he came across a variety of ‘forest people’
on his path: other Indians, European migrants and pioneers, a whole hybrid world
of men and women who didn’t really know, wrote de Tocqueville, what nation,
what God or what values they adhered to. ‘We had before us the spectacle we had
so long run after: the interior of a virgin forest’, he wrote in a short account of his
trip (cited in Pierson, 1938: 262). Like that forest, the spirit of its inhabitants was a
‘tangled chaos’. De Tocqueville elaborates: ‘Not knowing how to guide himself by
the doubtful light which illumines him, his soul struggles painfully in the web of
universal doubt: he adopts contrary usages, he prays at two altars, he believes in
the Redeemer of the world and the amulettes of the charlatan, and he reaches the
end of his career without having been able to untangle the obscure problem of his
existence’ (cited in Pierson, 1938: 274). At that time, the deep Michigan forest was a
border of territorial conquest – a frontier but also a complex borderland scene
in which processes of dis-identiﬁcation and cultural transformations took place
(language, dwelling, marriage, beliefs).
Nearly two centuries later, in 2011, I found myself in Asunción, the capital of
Paraguay, invited to give a talk by the French embassy. During my stay I was introduced to an ethnologist working for the Ministry of Culture. He oﬀered to take me the
following day to a remote forest, which was home to several indigenous villages,
remnants of the old ‘reductions’ created by the Jesuit missions. These villages, he
added, were inhabited by Guaranis who were keen to preserve their traditions and
unwilling to collaborate with the state. So oﬀ we went in search of Indians, heading for
the edge of the forest in a chauﬀeured 4 by 4 car from the ministry. We arrived in a socalled ‘Mestizo’ village – or more accurately, a village whose inhabitants, like many
Paraguayans, are of Indian origin but also migrants and farmers. The villager who
greeted us had not managed to contact the Guaranis to inform them of our impending
arrival. We ate a delicious tortilla his wife had prepared and, after visiting his maize
and manioc ﬁelds, set oﬀ again and arrived back in Asunción several hours later.
As we approached the big central square of the city, we saw about 40 tents, shacks and
shelters of diﬀerent descriptions made of cardboard, planks of wood and plastic tarp.
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Toddlers were playing on the ground, young people were talking on benches, other
adults – men and women – wandered from one shack to another, oblivious to the
pedestrians and cars constantly going round the square and their settlement. A little
disheartened, my colleague explained to me that these were Guaranis who had been
displaced after Brazilian agro-industrial conglomerates took over their land. So the
forest Indians were here in the centre of the city. Other Guaranis had settled in even
greater numbers on Asunción’s huge basura (rubbish dump) just outside the city.
Their clothes, physical appearance and settlement more closely resembled those of
the Afghan migrants and refugees I had seen in Greece and in France, or the
‘encamped’ people in Africa, than the image we have of forest Indians. My colleague,
I noticed, had dropped the doctoral tone he had adopted in the forest for one of
judgement and indignation. He spoke of their miserable and shameful existence, and
talked of ‘ethnic resistance’: they’ve been here for years, he said, because ‘they can no
longer live in the forest’, they’ve been ‘abandoned by the nation’.
Yet, no one has conducted research on Asunción’s Guarani settlements. Neither
had my guide reﬂected upon this phenomenon apart from voicing outrage.
Whether Guaranis are ﬁgures of compassion or harbour dreams of ethnic resistance, what their displacement and location mean from the standpoint of world
restructuring has escaped investigation.
It seems to me that these two stories of expeditions, forests and frontiers can help
us shake up anthropology and better understand the contemporary world. They
indicate two ﬁndings and a point for reﬂection. The ﬁrst ﬁnding is that the border
has shifted: the border that used to keep ethnic ‘Others’ very far away has come
close to us, to the centre of our cities and national governance. Thus, the shacks of
displaced Indians now covering Asunción’s central square create a new kind of
border for all actors involved. The second ﬁnding is that people on the border (in
the forest as in the city) have the features of a hybrid entity, even an urbanized,
cosmopolitan entity. This stands in contrast to the ‘pure’ identities, searched for, but
never documented in Saginaw or in the Paraguayan forest. Finally, these border
stories raise the issue of decentring the anthropologist and call for a redeﬁnition of
this concept – no longer as a question of cultural or geographical distance, but as a
model of behaviour for research, an epistemological posture. The border is ‘here and
now’ as long as we’re able to see it. It is located at the margins, or at the limit, of
what an anthropology of power, or an anthropology of identity describe as central.
To observe the border, we need to re-think decentring as an epistemology, rather
than as a culturalist partitioning of the world, and therefore bring contemporary
anthropology and anthropologists into the 21st century.
Critiques and aggiornamento of anthropology
Here, my critique is based on a reﬂexive moment during which several aspects of
anthropology were questioned – its problematic (ethnic or civilizational), its
approaches (monographic or structuro-functionalist), its descriptions (totalizing
or monological) and its ﬁelds, which became the ‘territories’ of ethnologists
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Anthropological Theory 16(1)
(villages, tribes, communities). During the pivotal period of the 1970s–90s, a series
of appraisals and converging theories were developed in Europe and the United
States. Among these were: new explorations of coevalness between enquiry, information and writing (Fabian, 1983), critiques of monographs as writing and as
ﬁction (Geertz, 1973; Cliﬀord, 1988; Cliﬀord and Marcus, 1986), theoretical and
methodological considerations on the delocalization of lived and observed situations, and therefore the need for a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995;
Appadurai, 1996; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997).
At the same time in France, Marc Augé and his ‘anthropology of contemporary
worlds’ provided the most advanced critique and re-actualization of the discipline,1
which paved the way for a wider movement amongst anthropologists. This was
marked by the abandonment of ethnological (ethnic and monographic) objects, a
primary focus until then, in favour of a wide, but indeterminate a priori apprehending of contemporary worlds in the making, in situ and sometimes changing unpredictably in context and scale.
Here, it is important to succinctly note that this research trend takes us farther
back in the history of anthropology to a split between two major branches in the
1950s. On one side, ‘structural’ anthropology, an orientation designed and largely
developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, focused on exposing ‘other’ peoples’ social and
cultural systems, as well as ‘structural invariants’ on which history does not seem to
have had any inﬂuence. These analyses only perceived change (especially in the
development of cities and urban life) as the disappearance of their research subject.
On the other side, a ‘dynamic’ anthropology, essentially promoted in France by
Georges Balandier, focused on the historicity of subjects, on processes of social and
cultural change, and therefore on the inﬂuence of social and cultural contexts.
In particular, Balandier and his adherents examined decolonization movements
in Africa within a colonial context. It is with this perspective, in light of the
Manchester School’s contemporary investigations, and on African ﬁelds that
other changes in French anthropology took place, particularly development of
the anthropology of contemporary worlds.
The study of these worlds in the making opened new research themes better
adapted to evolving postcolonial and global contexts. The eﬀects of this approach
could not be ignored if one wanted to understand contemporary issues of development, health, migration, work, urbanization, poverty, or politico-religious
movements.2 Such research topics have motivated ethnologists to address global
societal questions and encouraged them to break away from the North–South
cultural divide. Empirically at least, they moved step-by-step towards globalization
(Burawoy, 2000) through multi-sited enquiries (Marcus, 1995). Reciprocally,
researchers in other disciplines integrated ethnological tools and concepts to help
them comprehend and reﬂect upon the changing worlds. At this time, the place
of anthropologists – their personal engagement and involvement in the ‘situation
of communication’ restricting their ﬁeld – was reconsidered (Althabe, 1990).
Also reconsidered were the theoretical eﬀects of this involvement on description
and interpretation (Bazin, 1996). At the same time, North American anthropology
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experienced a ‘philological turn’,3 to borrow Tobias Rees’s expression, taking literally Geertz’s famous phrase that anthropologists must ‘read’ cultures ‘like texts’,
over the shoulders of informants.
Thus, a broad, radical reversal took place during that period on both sides of the
Atlantic. Traditional ethnic and monographic ethnology was criticized as ﬁctitious
because it stemmed from an ‘author’ and a relation of dominance, which negated the
‘dialogism’ inherent in the enquiry. But what should it be replaced with? If all was
ﬁction, literature, idiosyncrasy, genius or authors’ whims, in colonial or postcolonial
ethnographic situations, would anthropological knowledge become impossible
nowadays? Such criticism targeted analyses of textualist anthropology. Stretched
to its limit, it signalled the end of ﬁeldwork and possibly the end of anthropology
– a common omen in times of malaise.4 Today, main actors interpret this critical
moment as the time ‘of opening up or of demolition, depending on how you look at it,
without putting anything else in place’ (in Rabinow and Marcus, 2008: 30).
That question is still relevant today: ‘What do we put in its place?’ How is
anthropology conducted in the context of the decentring world and decolonized
knowledge? To answer these questions, I believe it is important to re-use and
deepen the critique of the ‘Great Divide’, a critique not totally acceptable during
that critical time in France and the United States to the authors I have just mentioned. It is also important to reconsider anthropological decentring from a postculturalist and epistemological perspective. Finally, it is necessary to adapt methods
of observation and analysis to an anthropological perspective of contemporary
worlds. These are the three issues I want to tackle in this article.
The end of the ‘Great Divide’. . . and after
During the period just broadly described, the idea emerged that the ‘anthropology
of the contemporary’ was an alternative to an anthropology that had remained
‘traditional’ and referential to some (who embraced it as a ‘Golden Age’5) or
immutable and out-dated to others (who criticize it). The problem with diﬀerentiating between an ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ and ‘traditional ethnology’ (or,
for example, in national contexts such as Brazil, between ‘anthropology’ and ‘ethnology’) is that change and mobility are present everywhere and are no longer
dividing features from the perspective of ﬁeldwork. What is left to justify this
segregation of knowledge? Some believe that anthropology should be conﬁned to
old types of human groups (called ‘ethnic groups’ when ﬁrst formalized) and
excluded from contemporary groupings, whether constructed, emergent, or transforming themselves. Others opine that anthropology should face realities and imagine new ﬁelds as the world transforms.
From ethnic groups to ethnic identities
This territorial divide between ‘traditional’ anthropology or ethnology and contemporary anthropology reproduces, within its conﬁnes, the schismatic principle of
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the ‘Great Divide’: a dualist and culturalist, even civilizational form of segregation
between tradition and modernity, between ethnicity and class, between ‘them’ and
‘us’, between particularisms (‘among the. . .’) and universalism (‘among us’), and so
forth. This dualism was the conceptual framework that gave birth to ethnology
when it was the project of explorers, who founded the exotic representation of
‘Others’ considered literally outside the (Western) world.
Forgetting historical background while discovering the remote ‘Other’ (i.e. contexts of colonization and colonial administration, people who were to be controlled,
separated and classiﬁed) anchored the ethnic group in the essence of anthropology
for a long time. At ﬁrst, the idea of the ethnic group was a framework for global
external identiﬁcation of peoples (ethnos) seemingly characterized by a certain unity
of social and economic organization, language, agrarian and cult-based practices.
Explorers and colonizers gave all-encompassing names to the remote and alien
organizations they discovered, conquered and administered. Ethnonyms made the
task of governing indigenous populations easier. This long historical episode made
the ethnic group the model of alterity – the ‘ethnic’ one is always the ‘Other’ – and an
essential component of anthropological knowledge. The notion of ethnicity was
later criticized in many studies not only from an historical perspective, but also as
a political or imaginary ‘construction’ where colonial power had been central in
freezing or dividing societies.6
At the same time, and in diﬀerent contexts of enquiry, a new research question
emerged. ‘Ethnic identity’, in contexts of social contacts and social changes linked
to urbanization and industrialization, also appeared in ‘marginal’ contexts (poverty, social exclusion, etc.) on all continents. Ethnonyms, whether old, new or
transformed, were used as labels in frameworks of contact, competition or conﬂict,
usually in urban settings. Therefore, it was clearly in relation to ‘Others’ that the
question of ‘ethnic groups’ arose. And it was on the border between groups, in the
context of social, political and cultural confrontation with others, that diﬀerences
emerged and manifested themselves (Barth, 1969). Finally, diverse patterns and
strategies of recognition in heterogeneous societies have led to broader enquiries
and reﬂections on contemporary identities, thus diluting ‘ethnic identity’ across a
wide range of identity options in the framework of changing situational engagements.7 Other questions then arose, including questions concerning the new identitarian ‘essentialisms’, which I address next.
Essentialisms and ontologies
In a brilliant, caustic essay,8 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper highlighted
the distinction between identity as a ‘category of practice’ (i.e. its now-common
usage in diﬀerent aspects of social and political life, in commentaries about private
life, politics or the media) and identity as a ‘category of analysis’ (a concept
used in causal explanations). As a category of analysis, they question every use
of the concept (which, depending on the case, means too much, not enough or
not at all) and ask: what are we talking about when we talk about identity?
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They disparage analytical uses of identity and its possible substitutes: ‘identiﬁcation’, ‘categorization’, ‘self-understanding’, ‘social statuses’, ‘group’, etc. However,
they ignore a second question that cannot be dissociated from the ﬁrst because it
lies at the root of this conceptual malaise: what are we referring to when we invoke
identity?
On this subject, Brubaker and Cooper simply underline the possible coexistence
in research or discourse of two types of positioning, respectively labelled ‘constructivist’ (considering identity as a social and historical ‘construction’ which analysis
must ‘deconstruct’) and ‘essentialist’ (based on the primacy of identity over all its
relational and contextual ‘alterations’, a primacy resting on the idea of original
purity or homogeneity). But Brubaker and Cooper explain this ambiguity, too
simply and quickly I think, using the dual antinomic concept of knowledge and
engagement: knowledge allegedly leans on the side of deconstruction (and of the
‘object’), whereas engagement induces essentialism and implies a belief in ‘identity’
itself. One could respond that engagement is not in principle incompatible with
criticism and freedom of thought (this does not apply only to researchers, of
course). Moreover, freedom of thought and freedom to produce knowledge without any kind of compromise must not in any way preclude the researcher’s necessary involvement in ﬁeldwork, which is the condition of anthropological knowledge
based on ethnographic relations. The two positions must stand side by side.
Furthermore, I believe that the main question needs to be shifted: theoretical
essentialism in anthropology does not result from ethnographic involvement, but
is a remnant of the discipline’s old ethnic specialization and culturalism. This calls
for a self-critique of founding principles and not merely a strategical
rearrangement.
Faced with the multiplication of border situations, with ‘conﬂicts of universality
without preliminary solutions’, to borrow Etienne Balibar’s phrase, or with ‘conﬂicts between universalisms’, according to Judith Butler, some anthropologists
have recently endeavoured to explain the new cultural state of the world by adopting a so-called ‘ontological’ approach. By resorting to the paradigm of a world
divided in broad cultural systems, they want to bring answers to the misunderstandings and disagreements that proliferate today. This is certainly their greatest
merit. Yet, these approaches reiterate – deliberately or not – the earlier culturalist
credo. Frozen and de-contextualized cultural representations are compared and
confront one another.
This operation of contextual reduction and a-temporality is particularly evident
in the ‘Amerindian ontology’ thesis defended by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, for
whom ontological posture is directly marked by an ethnic referent. Although the
author defends himself against accusations of ethnicism and contemporary ethnopolitics, and claims a universalizing structuralist heritage, he describes the cultural
system he presents as an identitarian form (like ‘Amerindian’).9 Authors such as
Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour and others have defended analyses relating to this
so-called ‘ontological’ posture.10 There are big diﬀerences between these
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Anthropological Theory 16(1)
approaches, which share the same name borrowed from philosophy. However, this
is what uniﬁes them: a project linking metaphysical research of an (ontological)
being in itself to places, cultures and anthropological identities, even if this means
questioning the ethnographic truth of being in the world.
In the end, philosophers do not identify with these endeavours, which for them
are part of sociological ‘veriﬁcation’ or ‘veridiction’ (questions in which they are
not interested). Neither do anthropologists adhere to decontextualized abstractions
from which societies, and even humans, end up disappearing. To their authors,
anthropological ontologies are virtual constructions of diﬀerent scales, from the
most micro-level, local and ethnological (Viveiros de Castro) to the most global,
terrestrial and eco-sociological (Latour). Endowed with a laudable universalist
vocation, these constructions provide tools to understand their own intellectual
abstraction, but not tools to use in situ and in context. This deﬁciency would be
understandable from the perspective of philosophical reasoning. It is less so from
the perspective of anthropological reasoning, for which truth is always relative to
ﬁeldwork, place, context and relationships. It is precisely relativity of knowledge
that keeps at bay any form of ‘cultural relativism’, a division of the world into
frozen cultures intrinsically linked to identities and places (Agier, 2015). Without
unfairly judging endeavours that laudably aim to think on a global scale and
generalize knowledge, I argue that they convey a radical, frozen opposition
between structure and context, between meaning and function, and between
holism and individualism. This opposition, which in French social sciences of the
1950s heralded the bifurcation between structuralism and process analysis, is represented, respectively, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was inspired by the models of
structural linguistics, and Georges Balandier, who was closer to the Manchester
School’s situational anthropology.
Therefore, ontologies are abstract globalizations of local enquiry, structural
constructions with the ‘whole’ as a horizon. This wholeness is two-fold. On the
one hand, the ‘indigenous intellectual structure’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2008: 19)
presupposed, in the most classic and elementary holist tradition, an identiﬁcation
of the part with the whole – an identiﬁcation embodied in practice by the
‘privileged informant’ and in theory by the notion of ‘person’. Identiﬁcation of
the subject considered as ‘person’ with the ‘structure’ leaves no remaining categorical signiﬁers. In this reiﬁcation, the concept of ‘person’ considered as ‘prior
and logically superior’ to that of ‘human’ stretches without limits to other species,
an intellectual operation rooted in the idea of (multi-)naturalism, which encompasses humans and non-humans, objects and subjects, etc. (Viveiros de Castro,
2008: 23). This approach refers to the philosophical ﬁgures of ‘subject-object’ or
‘subjected subject’ and leaves little room for apprehending disorder, resistance or
dissidence.
On the other hand, the ideal of wholeness is already present in the deﬁnition of
‘perspectivism’. Some may consider this notion as conﬁrming the decentring of the
anthropologist – who endlessly moves across multiple viewpoints and goes well
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beyond cultural relativism, as I show later. But this is absolutely not the case: on
the contrary, it represents an identitarian version of decentring, as in ‘Amerindian
perspectivism’. In other words, while the new form of decentring I defend here is an
epistemology of anthropology in general, perspectivism is, as Oscar Calavia Saez
notes (2012: 15), ‘an epistemology with ontology’.
On the basis of ‘ontological perspectivism’, the idea of wholeness (and its incarnation in the reactivated, oversized ethnological notion of ‘person’) abolishes the
separation between human and non-human, nature and culture, ecology and
sociology. Here, Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian ontology converges with the
totalizing constructions defended by Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour. More
speciﬁcally, Latour extends the ontological viewpoint to the incarnation of thought
in the wholeness of the Earth conceived as matter, being, soul and divinity, called
Gaia by the author who speaks in its name (Latour, 2015).
In the Amerindian case, when the ethnologist speaks on behalf of the jaguar,
I assert that ontological perspectivism has lost its sense of decentring and has
instead reiﬁed a self-produced abstraction by an ethnologist trapped in personal
narcissism of thought even while claiming the opposite. This is because the reality
thus reconstructed becomes a caricature of the constructivist approach: the symbolic role the jaguar has for shamans (who, in their own social role, create a myth,
a mask and a meaning for the animal) switches to a belief in the jaguar’s self-being,
in which the shaman becomes its ambassador amongst humans (Viveiros de
Castro, 2008: 121). Logically, this leads to the oxymoron of an anthropology
that is both post-human and non-human. With the anthropos discarded, shared
humanity as the founding principle of anthropology is thrown into question and
authors of these ontologies introduce themselves, without any theoretical or methodological precautions, in the world of post- and non-humans (Vigh and Sausdal,
2014: 54). Hence comes the necessity to re-apprehend, through ethnographic
enquiry, the stakes and movements of human cultural dynamics (the objects of
anthropo-logy), to go back to situational and contextual ethnography using contemporary analysis.
The framework of ‘Amerindian ontology’ consists of an artiﬁcially closed
world. Despite being associated with this cosmology, no Yanomani, Arawete or
Tupi take part in it because none of them live in a structural ‘isolate’. Similarly,
no person corresponds to an Amerindian, Amazonian or Yanomami ‘sociocultural system’. Furthermore, the globalized world receives no more anthropological
attention than a few lines conveying negative moral and aesthetic judgement.11
In an ontological perspective: the concrete inﬂuence of the globalized world has
no place in ethnography nor, logically, any place in the analysis of locally
observed cultural facts.
In response to this critique, the author accepts and defends the ‘ﬁction’ produced: a necessary abstraction, perspectivism pretends to take indigenous thought
‘seriously’ to the point of extending it beyond itself. According to the Brazilian
anthropologist Alcida Ramos (2012), this is a ‘ventriloquist[‘s]’ magical pretence on
the part of the ethnologist, to which she opposes, rightly I believe, political issues of
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the voice of Indians, of access to higher education and beyond, to the issue of an
‘auto-ethnography’.12 Moreover, there is a problem with this ‘ventriloquist’ pretence. The ethnographic reports from the ﬁeld (especially in America) say that
persons who are the identity references of this ontological construction move
around, become individualized, and ideas, knowledge, relations, ways of doing,
etc., move with them. They are not outside the world. Nor are Indians outside
the reach of Brazilian or international ﬁnancial and agro-industrial capitalism,
which has been particularly destructive in Amazonia. They are not outside globalization in general; they are not far from UN organizations or international NGOs.
All these actors call on them and solicit from them individual and collective
responses, identitarian or even ‘essentialist’ constructions as forms of revolt, dialogue or strategy.13 From this point of view the ontological approach is close to socalled ‘essentialist’ strategies, which anthropologists of the contemporary confront
in the ﬁeld today.
This brings us back to the critique of Brubaker and Cooper regarding identity as a category of practice or analysis. To this critique I add the following
question: should we believe there is any truth to essentialism? Essentialist language is largely a direct eﬀect of the politicization of identity assignations. In
this context, essentialism starts to exist, to express itself, and to become more
interesting to the anthropologist as a contemporary form and an object of
reﬂection, the strategic reason for which refers to political contemporaneity. If
identity is a question whose reality keeps escaping, always directing its response
to facts other than itself (places, links, assets, memories, etc.), if it is an endless
quest, if essential identity is not a ‘thing’ one can isolate and apprehend, then
essentialism is nothing. It is merely a language, useless analytically, but one that
deserves to be questioned ‘in situation’. In other words, going beyond identity
clariﬁes its uses simply by acknowledging what lies beyond. It reveals ‘why’ and
‘how’ processes lead some individuals or groups, at a given time, to use this or
that identitarian language, to turn this language into a withdrawal of oneself
and a rejection of the other or, on the contrary, a ritual, aesthetic or political
form of subjectiﬁcation. In this way, it reveals how other (geographically or
temporarily remote) languages can be transformed and give life to other subjects
in situations of conﬂict.14
Finally, if the world’s ‘Great Divide’ (and its culturalist, ethnic or ontological
variants) can no longer be the founding principle of anthropology, it is primarily
because the existence of the world as constituent of local social practices and
situations can now be observed everywhere: this has become as much an empirical
fact as a theoretical one.15 If ﬁelds of anthropology are no longer determined by
their location on the globe, or by geographic proximity to the observer’s society,
then anthropologists can no longer rely on geographical distance for more or less
enlightening the knowledge of societies studied, and on their own societies in
return. It is therefore essential to entirely reconsider what makes the work of
anthropologists theoretically possible and original nowadays: we return to the
question of decentring.
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Rethinking decentring
Foucault and the Nambikwara
In the late 1960s, Michel Foucault explained the project behind the book he had
just published, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences:
I wish we were able to consider our own culture as something as alien to us as, for
example, the cultures of the Arapesh or the Nambikwara, or the Chinese culture.. . . I
think that until now we have never apprehended our own knowledge as a phenomenon that is alien to ourselves. And what I tried to do here is to apprehend Western
knowledge, which has been taking shape since the very beginnings of the Greek era, as
if it were as alien and distant to us as the cultures of the Arapesh or the Nambikwara,
and it’s this ethnological situation of our knowledge which I have wanted to
reconstitute. . . as if we were aliens to ourselves.
Doing this is of course hugely diﬃcult because, after all, with what can we apprehend
ourselves if not with our own knowledge? In other words, it is our own mental frameworks, our categories of knowledge that will enable us to know ourselves, and if we
want to know precisely those categories of knowledge we ﬁnd ourselves in a very
tricky situation. We need to twist our reason on itself to enable it to see itself as an
alien phenomenon. Our reason must go beyond itself, it should be pulled inside out
like a glove, as it were, and it is this endeavour which I have undertaken or begun to
undertake.16
As foundational to the ethnological approach, going from oneself towards the
Other, decentring must be entirely re-thought in the light of the ‘twisting’ of
reason on itself, described by Michel Foucault. The old notion of decentring
is radically called into question by the crisis of alterity taking place in today’s
world – a world globalized, mobile, connected and permanently altered by our
desire for ubiquity. Who is the Other? How and where can s/he be recognized?
How do borders between oneself and the Other move? Therefore what Other and
what place are we decentring from?
A critique of cultural decentring
Cultural decentring has been a core principle of anthropology. In the best
hypotheses, it meant detaching oneself from cultural assumptions inherited in
one’s own society, and suspending judgement in order to open oneself to the
relativity of other cultures and to the discovery of others. This did not happen
overnight. Explorations far aﬁeld, initiatory journeys and other ‘detours’17 have
successively symbolized anthropologists’ vocation to operate this cultural decentring until they come back enriched and better informed about the world’s
diversity.
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Anthropological Theory 16(1)
This notion ﬁred the exploratory zeal of the ﬁrst ethnographers, like Mungo
Park. Commenting on Park’s account of his explorations to the ‘centre of Africa’ at
the end of the 18th century, Adrian Adams described this Scottish medical doctor
going on his ﬁrst travels as a ‘traveller without history’. This meant that Park’s
availability to others was the result of self-forgetfulness and self-abandonment.18
According to Maurice Godelier, cultural decentring still allows a form of free
thought, which can turn into a scholarly positioning, but also into a political
and ethical positioning: ‘To understand the beliefs of others without having to
share them, to respect them without refraining from criticizing them, and to recognize that, with others and owing to others, one gets to know oneself better: such is
the scientiﬁc, ethical and political core of today’s and tomorrow’s anthropology’
(Godelier, 2007: 72). What was usually called decentring was, in other words, this
personal, authentic and even deliberately candid experience of the relativity of
everything – but that was before its theoretical setting transformed it into ‘cultural
relativism’ (Lévi-Strauss, 2014) as a result of the anti-racist movement after the
Second World War and the Holocaust.
What and where are we coming from today, and where are we going? It is
necessary to take this posture well beyond cultural relativism. The question
becomes how not only to decentre our view of the world, thanks to anthropology’s
relativist ethnological tradition, but to decentre anthropology (anthropological
knowledge) through the view of the world. The former interpretation is older
and ethnological, and persists in the name of diversity, or of aesthetical curiosity
toward everything diﬀerent. I don’t deny the qualities and appeal of the aesthetical
outlook and intervention onto and from the ‘Other’. But, as evidenced by cultural
tourism, or exhibits at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, or in many other cultural
creations in the world today, the aestheticization of the ‘Other’ is a mode of
appropriation-integration of images and objects that change meanings as they
are displaced and go from one social and semantical context to another. In this
process, objects (both in the material and epistemological sense) are circulated,
revived, and transform themselves elsewhere, whereas subjects have disappeared.
This disappearance does not preclude demonstrating the ‘diversity of cultures’, but
such compensatory and somewhat arrogant displays pale in comparison with the
dispossession of subjects.19
Thus, the idea of rooting the knowledge of anthropologists in the cultural
decentring of ethnological tradition is invalidated by the circulation of
knowledge. Polemical discussions that have taken place in the last few years
about so-called ‘postcolonial’ or ‘subalternist’ research trends have highlighted a
certain ‘re-evaluation’ and a general relativization of the theoretical, technical and
political models that exist today. What the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty
(2009) called the ‘provincialization of Europe’ is now a known fact when it comes
to economic, cultural and social realities. Cosmopolitical realism is an invitation to
inquire about the legitimacy, the epistemology and the method of a science of
alterity. Decentring anthropology is not about inverting the outlooks of formerly
colonizing and formerly colonized countries. In order to give sense to such an
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35
inversion one would have to believe that world context is still colonial, which is not
the case. The world is postcolonial. Its multi-polar order is the stake of permanent
conﬂict in all regional war environments. Two theoretical questions, then, arise
from the perspective of decolonization of knowledge. One concerns, as we’ve just
seen, the possibility of a cosmopolitical framework of knowledge, which implies
neither consensus nor homogeneity but merely recognizes a common scale of measurement and exchange. It becomes increasingly clear that the multipolarity of
knowledge and perspectives, how the world looks at and represents itself, will
generate the set of global anthropological knowledge as a cosmopolitical
mechanism.20
The second question asks how, beyond the cosmopolitics of anthropology, the
object and method of this decentred outlook must change. Today’s anthropology
can no longer maintain a diametric between ‘cultural relativism’ (the others, out
there) and absolute universalism (us, here). It must query universal aspects that
emerge from a social and political context no longer characteristic of a particular
nation, civilization or culture, but featuring the entirety of exchanges that exist at
a given time on the surface of our planet. One must now envisage the possibility
of a world-anthropology where local ethnographic observations will be carried
out with the world in mind, just as the people observed in diﬀerent social scenes
have the world in their minds and practices. Today one can observe a growing
number of border situations (whether spatial, administrative, social or symbolic)
and a cosmopolitan condition that is more commonplace and, in a way, more
banal.21 People on the move experience this kind of cosmopolitism on a daily
basis and borders themselves become a relational framework. They are border
people who have acquired a de facto perception of the world and experience a
decentring characteristic of exile cultures.22 Philosopher Seloua Luste Boulbina
(2013) also links the ‘decolonization of knowledge’ and the ‘de-territorialization
of oneself’. Building on Edward Saı̈d’s work, particularly his Reﬂections on Exile,
she places the most decolonized thought in ‘in-between worlds’, more precisely in
migrants’ travel experiences and their ‘science of concretism’. Borders are instable
in time and space; they are geographically wider than a simple line, socially
thicker and symbolically ambiguous, and they are the place of new and original
social worlds.23
By persisting solely in modes of cultural relativism, anthropology considerably
reduces its intellectual space and its chance to contribute to an understanding of
today’s world. To be more contemporary, anthropology must be less nostalgic
and less apologetic about what may have existed once upon a time, or about what
supposedly exists elsewhere. It must break culturalist conﬁnes inherent in the
ethnological agenda while rethinking cultural, globalized dimensions of decentring
in current situations. Today, decentring acknowledges globalization, particularly
the greater circulation of knowledge, imaginaries and patterns it has engendered.
This implies thinking about the world from a premise of equality among all
situations and conditions observed from the standpoint of their place in
knowledge.
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Anthropological Theory 16(1)
Constructing epistemological decentring
Whatever place or object it is based upon, anthropological outlook will have to
learn again how to decentre itself. Only then will it be contemporary. Indeed I do
not diﬀerentiate between observing the contemporary and decentring. These are
two ways of describing the same project. To clarify this viewpoint, and to create the
possibility of an anthropology and ethnography con-temporary with their objects,
based upon an epistemological redeﬁnition of decentring, I turn to an essay by
philosopher Giorgio Agamben entitled ‘What Is the Contemporary?’:
Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who
neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus
in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely
through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others
of perceiving and grasping their own time.
Naturally, this noncoincidence, this ‘dys-chrony’, does not mean that the contemporary is a person who lives in another time, a nostalgic who feels more at home in
the Athens of Pericles or in the Paris of Robespierre and the Marquis de Sade than
in the city and the time in which he lives. An intelligent man can despise his time,
while knowing that he nevertheless irrevocably belongs to it, that he cannot escape
his own time.
Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres
to it, and at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.
(Agamben, 2009: 40–41)
I took the liberty of citing at length an excerpt of this text, because it presents
the possibility of a visibility of the contemporary (and therefore, for the anthropologist, the possibility to make it a personal anthropology founded on ethnography) upon the relative detachment (neither too close nor too far) of the
observer towards what is observed. This approach I describe as decentring. It
gives the possibility of an in/out relationship understood, not as a relationship
between distinct spaces, but between two contiguous temporalities, both simultaneous and separated by the preposition with (com-). The con-temporary divides
and uniﬁes; it is a ‘relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction
and an anachronism’.
For us to be ‘contemporary’ in that sense, we must extract from the ﬁrst
cultural decentring the epistemological and non-culturalist dimension, which
enables us to decentre ourselves in all ﬁelds of research. With this epistemological
posture, we can rebuild and share a universal dimension of anthropological
knowledge, to reﬂect simultaneously on observed interactions (thus allowing
genuine rehabilitation of reﬂexive ethnography as knowledge), on the world as
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context (gradually going from the local to the global, from the network to the
planetary), and on this world as a moment in history (thus rehabilitating the
historicity of observations and analyses, of observable situations and the processes they set in motion).
This is why this article goes back to the philosophical origins of the idea of
decentring, to the time of the Enlightenment and to what ethnologists made of it
later. Decentring was the central theme in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1984)
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. Its core argument
was that the non-natural character of human society necessitated conceptualizing
the Other in order to think and put in perspective all social and political conﬁgurations. This led Claude Lévi-Strauss to say that Rousseau, with this book, was
the founder of ethnology.24 But another reading of Rousseau’s essay is possible,
which is contrary to Lévi-Strauss’s and many others’ interpretation. It was not so
much the ‘savage’ or the Other that interested Rousseau. Then, the ‘pure state of
nature’ was not perceived to be a real part of the world (much of which was
unknown to Europeans when Rousseau wrote his essay). It was an audacious,
empirically shaky, but nonetheless necessary hypothesis, as Rousseau recognized
himself in his preface to the Discourse. While forcing himself to ‘form conjectures
based solely on the nature of man, and the beings around him, as to what the
human race might have become if it had been abandoned to itself’ (Rousseau, 1984:
78), this hypothesis enables him to describe, in contrast, the non-natural (i.e. social
and political) progression of societies towards ‘servitude’, ‘inequalities’, ‘conﬂicts’
and the production of ‘supernumeraries’ as an eﬀect of land appropriation which
Rousseau chose to take as the founding event: ‘The ﬁrst man who, having enclosed
a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘‘This is mine’’, and found people
simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society’ (Rousseau,
1984: 109). This declaration designates the ‘event’ whose theoretical scope is central
to the philosopher.
In other words, Rousseau, a self-designated ‘citizen of Geneva’, critiques and
describes the features of the ‘civil man’, his contemporary, in the face of whom the
state of nature hypothesis is an ‘operator of alterity’.25 On the one hand, he makes
it possible to demonstrate that it ‘could have been otherwise’ (a phrase that could
well be deconstructionist!).26 On the other hand, he demonstrates that it can be
otherwise, by creating or altering the social contract, in other words, by intervening
in law and politics.
Rousseau was an 18th-century revolutionary, or was he ‘the most ethnographic
of all the philosophes’ (Levi-Strauss, 1992: 390)? In Discourse on Inequality, LéviStrauss saw promoted a ‘primitive identiﬁcation’ that, according to him, made
Rousseau the ﬁrst ‘ethnographer’, ‘our master’, ‘our brother’.27 But apart from
the fact that Rousseau never conducted ethnographical research or travelled to
distant lands like some of his contemporaries, one may suggest that Rousseau
was more interested in method or ‘anthropological ascetism’ (Bachofen and
Bernardi, 2008: 23) than in the discovery of the world. In other words, his is an
epistemological posture, a counterpoint to reﬂect on how the author’s
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Anthropological Theory 16(1)
contemporary world was built. This epistemological dimension was highlighted in
Louis Althusser’s reading and explained in the three courses he gave on Rousseau
(recorded in 1972, edited and prefaced by Yves Vargas in 2012). In tracking down
concepts and non-realism in the Discourse, Althuser (2012) was bringing it back to
philosophy and, I should add, to the possibility of a general anthropology rather
than to the ethnology of the ‘savage’. Rousseau needed to create a ‘void’, or an
‘outside’ of reason, Althusser shows. Highlighting the ‘void, the ‘nothingness’ or
the forest, this reiﬁed vision of primary disorder and chaos enabled him to identify
‘denaturation’ as a founding process of the social. This chaotic and uncertain world
of limits can be found in Tocqueville’s description of Saginaw Forest mentioned
earlier. One can understand Tocqueville’s rush towards the border-forest as a limit
of his American trip, which was meant to study the modernity of American
democracy.
This epistemological reading of decentring can also be associated with Michel
Foucault’s interest in, or fascination for silences, absences, voids and all vacuums
that make up what he called the ‘thought from outside’: ‘because the outside never
yields its essence. The outside cannot oﬀer itself as a positive presence – as something inwardly illuminated by the certainty of its own existence – but only as an
absence that pulls as far away from itself as possible, receding into the sign it makes
to draw one toward it (as though it were possible to react to it)’ (Foucault, 1987:
28). It should be noted that these considerations about the void of the thought from
outside are contemporary with his comments about his own work in 1966 (cited
above). To me, these comments aptly describe the decentring of self which de facto
characterizes epistemological decentring in all situations and places on the planet: a
reason that ‘goes beyond itself’ as ‘if we could twist ourselves inside out and watch
a mirrored image of ourselves’.28
At this point in our reﬂection, decentring obtains a new meaning – a decentred
outlook on situations of contact, border or conﬂict. It is oppositional to a posture
that aims to describe the identity of others as another proper identity. The hypothesis of conﬂict between ontologies and ‘conﬂict between universalisms’ suggests a
purity preceding the encounter. But global encounters in border situations created
by human, economic and technological globalization (just like previous colonial
encounters) form the pre-existing context of representations and practices of everyone interacting.
One immediate eﬀect of epistemological decentring as a critical re-reading and
‘reversal’ of anthropological decentring is the realization that the operator of alterity is the limit itself, not the ‘elsewhere’; it is the border in all its aspects, not (or no
longer) the remote diﬀerence. The ‘Other’, the one who will embody alterity, can
then be named the subject of the border: he or she is there, visible, present, contemporary, and a relationship is established with him or her. This relationship is
uncertain, and can even be conﬂictual, as the history of borders has taught us, but
it can become less and less strange and gradually more and more familiar. The
place of the ‘Other’, the border, is diﬀerent from the traditional ‘elsewhere’ which is
exotic, abstract, ﬁctional, virtual, ideal or imagined.
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A contemporary and situational anthropology
Although cultural decentring was long considered to be the fundamental anthropological approach as part of an essentially ethno-logical agenda or ﬁliation, the
epistemological and in situ decentring, here and now, become central in making
sense of the anthropological outlook in and on the world.
Epistemological decentring is also situational, when implemented by the anthropologist’s enquiry. In the ﬁeld, implementation consists of constantly shifting time
and place of outlook from centre and order, to edges and disorder. It also consists
of taking, as a point of observation and starting point for reﬂection, border situations in the very generic and anthropological sense of spaces and situations of
‘in-betweenness’, thresholds and limits, but also of moments of uncertainty and
indecision. By moving the focus toward the in-between of borders – apprehended
from the perspective of space, time or relationships – anthropologists’ descriptions
and analyses provide the means of seeing processes and geneses, contacts
and transformations. Now I develop the question of anthropological modes of
observation and analyses.
WYSIWYG
Whatever their ﬁeld of study, the knowledge process for anthropologists takes
place between two poles. On one side is the dialogue in the ﬁeld – it is during
moments of exchange with their hosts that anthropologists learn things. The possibility of real dialogue highlights the contemporaneity between researchers and
their ‘objects’, and it determines the proprieties of the materials collected. On the
other side, there is the ﬁction of writing – here ‘ﬁction’ does not refer to a lie or an
invention, but to a selective, synthetic or analytic description that adheres to particular conventions of anthropological writing. In the shift from ﬁeldwork to writing, one risk highlighted by the ‘textualist’ critiques mentioned earlier is the
production of a monologue that totalizes representation at the expense of the
plurality of voices heard in the ﬁeld, and of the representation of conﬂicts or
deviant social forms. Furthermore, the ‘ethnographical present’ is transcribed as
an absolute, eternal and a-temporal present of data collected in a topical environment, although the strategic stakes of the time when they were collected may have
been signiﬁcant. Thus the contemporary determinants of data – actions, declarations and exchanges observed and collected in situation and in context – disappear
in this ‘ethnographical present’ (Fabian, 1983).
Diﬀerent contortions of time, of enquiry and of reporting led Johannes Fabian
to talk of a ‘schizogenic use of time’. How to escape this artiﬁcial separation? The
solution is to start from an observational principle that what is seen is not an
adulterated version of truths from another place or another time. Nor are there
proper, ontological identities supposedly more ‘genuine’ than those observed earlier that are now lost. Nor should anthropologists endeavour to eliminate contemporary elements because they spoil the image: power generators with strong smells
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Anthropological Theory 16(1)
of fuel, cans of coke, land spoliations, alcoholism, Indians committing suicide,
etc.29 What is seen, heard, noticed via this observational principle is the whole of
reality in actual context and temporality, which is shared with the people in the
study. ‘What you see is what you get’, or WYSIWYG, as computer advertisements
used to say in the 1990s to indicate that what appeared on your computer screen
was exactly the same image that would come out of your printer. We can use this
acronym concerning the anthropological ﬁeld: what you see is what is, there is no
hidden identitarian or cultural truth that the ethnologist is supposed to unveil
against the contemporary. On the contrary, any writing that breaks away from
this ‘schizogeny’ between observation and description must be more reﬂexive and
thus allow for a closer – more contemporary – description of the results of the
enquiry.
The contribution of situational anthropology
The link between situational anthropology and epistemological decentring today
can be comprehended in the history of dynamic anthropology, developed in the
1950s and 1960. This research trend was a turning point for contemporary
anthropology. Its anthropology of situations could be found among French
and British anthropologists engaged in the colonial and decolonization ﬁelds
of Black Africa, such as Georges Balandier (1955a, 1955b) or Gérard Althabe
(1969) in France, and Max Gluckman (1940), Clyde Mitchell (1956, 1987) or
Van Velsen (1967) in Britain. Balandier’s analyses of the ‘colonial situation’ in
central Africa, and Gluckman’s or Mitchell’s of staging relations between blacks
and whites in social or ritual situations in southern Africa have made decisive
contributions to deﬁning the situational approach. This major political conﬂict in
world history – decolonization – was echoed by an essential theoretical conﬂict,
which saw a situational, contextual and dynamic conception of anthropology
ﬁnding its way between the dominant and predominantly culturalist interpretations in the African realm, and predominantly structuralist interpretations in
Latin-American studies both trends taking ethnic framework as an evident,
all-encompassing whole deﬁning personhood and identity.
Situational anthropology made it possible to fully appreciate the complexity of
what was taking place in the colonial framework instead of retaining only the
cultural and ethnic part artiﬁcially separated from its context. The situational
approach enabled us to account for social or political situations marked by unpredictability or an extraordinary, even exceptional character, where changes could be
studied. The point here is not to deny the importance of social structures but to put
them in perspective, or to tackle them only from the perspective of the constraints
they place on observed situations. In this framework, ethnographic reﬂexivity
became a real theoretical tool, giving a central place to the relationship between
anthropologists and their contemporary subjects. Ethnography is the living matter
of the contemporary in anthropological knowledge. To apprehend it is to build
anthropology from a reﬂection on the situation, which itself relies on the
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relationship and communications established between observers and their subjects
of enquiry.30 The epistemology developed by Jean Bazin regarding observation and
description enables us to explain more fully this situational dimension of contemporary anthropology:
In reality, society is not something I can observe. However remote or small it may be,
the point of view from Sirius is not more accessible to me. I never observe only
situations. To observe a situation (as opposed to observing a planet), is to be in it.
If I observe, I am part of it but in the position of a stranger. Out of scholarly interest, I
manage to ﬁnd myself in situations (even if it means provoking them) that present a
degree of relative strangeness, one that is strong enough that, not knowing what they
do, I undertake to learn it. (Bazin, 1996: 409)
So we are talking about a pragmatist anthropological posture based on a ‘degree of
strangeness’, a posture not ethnic or culturalist, but relative and pragmatic (‘for the
time being, I don’t know what they’re doing’). With this posture the state of
ignorance I deliberately adopt will disappear when I can understand and describe
how they act or behave. This hypothesis is humanistic because it is anthropological
(‘humankind starts with my next-door neighbour’) and not culturalist (‘it’s their
custom and it is irremediably other’).
Rather than trying to take facts out of their contexts in order to draw universal
conclusions from them (losing everything they owe to these contexts, and therefore
to history and geography, and forgetting that it may have been otherwise at other
times and in other places), situational anthropology bases the universalist ambition
of anthropology not on a supposed structural or collective unconscious but on the
processes, conditions, forms and eﬀects of the dynamics observed.
Finally, one last aspect seems crucial to me today, particularly respecting the
importance of border situations. It is about getting closer to a level of description
and interpretation of facts that could be deﬁned as ‘all the remains’ of structural
analysis. It is an ‘unthought concept’ (impense´), an in-between or a counter-point
which, for example, corresponds to what Victor Turner (1969) called the ‘antistructure’ and, in a comparable epistemological stance, what Marc Augé (1992)
named ‘non-place’ (a concept whose success has made us forget that it was created
in relation, and in opposition to the ‘anthropological place’). Similarly, this level
corresponds to what Georges Balandier analysed as the necessity and dynamic of
‘disorder’ (1988). This very in-between still corresponds to situations of border
marked by social or ritual liminality (Agier, 2016). Generally one can see that all
these ‘levels’ are associated with practices of a transgressive, individual, informal or
unforeseen type, the description of which makes it possible to carry out analyses
that are oﬀset from the emergence of subjects. Through this decentred outlook, the
place of social order is ﬁnally put in perspective and no longer becomes the norm
but a moment and a part of a process where orders and disorders alternate and
confront each other. The whole world as anthropologists of the contemporary may
describe and interpret it can then be seen, in a dynamic and relational way, as an
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Anthropological Theory 16(1)
archipelago of situations. The situational approach is therefore an integral part of
the act of epistemological decentring: it consists of being in position to see the
emergence of everything that has the border as its place. Therefore it puts in doubt
the evidence of the powerful ‘‘center’’ as a norm and/or as a totality. By putting
myself in this place, I put myself where an encounter takes place with ‘an external
Real which brutally imposes itself on us, shattering our established ways of thinking’ (Žižek, 2000: 213). This brings us back to the need for an anthropology of
borderlands, whether it be in the Saginaw Forest, in the central square in Asunción
or along any other new border exchange that emerges. The simultaneous presence
and detachment of the anthropologist on the ﬁeld is the concrete form of this
epistemological decentring in relation to his/her object. In a world where economic,
communicational and even political globalism tends to impose itself on all other
scales of action and thought, thus moving closer peoples and diﬀerences, making
identities more uncertain, through acts of self-reversal anthropologists in the ﬁeld,
and anthropology in general, will manage to remain possible, contemporary and
reﬂexive everywhere. This rehabilitates reﬂexive ethnography as the permanent
substance of anthropological knowledge. Alterity thus becomes a question to be
re-interrogated in each new situation, not a given essential attribute; and epistemological decentring a way of reducing bias and restarting anthropology of the
state of the world at each new enquiry.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conﬂicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no ﬁnancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Notes
1. These relate more particularly to the transformation of local anchorings (Augé, 1992), the
transformations of alterity (Augé, 1994a) and the formation of new ‘social’ and ‘cultural’
worlds (Augé, 1994b).
2. Studies on these topics have been plentiful and have given rise to a rich literature. For a
balanced account in French, see for example Berger (2005), Copans (2009), Leservoisier
and Vidal (2007), De l’Estoile and Naepels (2004), Colleyn and Dozon (2008).
3. See Tobias Rees, ‘Today, What Is Anthropology?’, in Rabinow and Marcus (2008: 4).
4. More recently, see the critique by Comaroff (2010).
5. ‘Anthropology is alive in its post-1980s engagements, but these are very different from in
its old haunts, in its still stereotypic reception, and in an institutional life that is still a
beneficiary of what some have called its Golden Age’ (George Marcus in Rabinow and
Marcus, 2008: 32).
6. Two edited books refer to this topic in France, Amselle and M’Bokolo (1985) and
Chrétien and Prunier (1989), as many case studies in the 1980s–90s fed into this critical
reflection.
Agier
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
43
See for example Brubaker (2006) and Sansone (2003).
See Brubaker and Cooper (2000).
See Viveiros de Castro (2014).
See Descola (2006) and Latour (2012). Some analyses of the so-called ‘ontological turn’
were published recently (see for example Vigh and Sausdal, 2014). Vigh and Sausdal
highlight the difficulty of conceiving and enquiring on an alleged ‘radical alterity’, and
ask if, for example, in the ontological logic a ‘Western. . . Euro-American ontology’ may
not be the other facet of this essentialism.
By way of background, the reader will have to make do with a brief mention of ‘the
conservative revolution that has, in the last decades, showed itself particularly efficacious at transforming the world, both ecologically and politically, into something perfectly suffocating’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 47).
This latter point, that of ‘auto-ethnography’ or ‘ethnology of the self’, would of course
deserve a longer development for which this article is not the place. Though particularly
sensitive in today’s Brazilian research, it is nonetheless a question which confirms the
need for a shared reflection on decentring as epistemology, whatever the field. Only this
epistemological decentring will render possible the construction of the universality of
decentring, and therefore of anthropology. This is what this reflection is aiming for.
To this anthropological essentialism I oppose the description and analysis of a biographical and political construction of a subject of speech and a Yanomami discourse in
and against the world regional, national and global – as developed in the exceptional
book co-authored by the anthropologist Bruce Albert and the leader Davi Kopenawa,
La chute du ciel. Paroles d’un chaman yanomami (Kopenawa and Albert, 2010).
These developments can be found in the last part of my latest book, Borderlands (Agier,
2016).
For a discussion on the place of globalization in anthropology, see Abélès (2008),
Assayag (2010), Caillé and Dufoix (2013), Friedman (2013) and Friedman and
Ekholm Friedman (2013). Regarding the hypothesis of a ‘grounding globalization’
and local enquiries of global facts, networks and social movements, see Burawoy (2000).
Televised interview with Michel Foucault by Pierre Dumayer, ‘à propos du livre Les
mots et les choses’, 14 June 1966 (RTF/ina.fr; available at: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v¼XC7Ksv5tQso). I would like to thank Mathieu Potte-Bonneville for alerting
me to the existence of this archival document about Michel Foucault.
As the accounts by Michel Leiris (1996 [1934]) or Georges Balandier (1957) show.
See Adrian Adams, ‘Introduction’, in Park (1980: 11) and my comment in Agier (2004).
It is in this sense that I understand the reference made by Bhabha (2007: 73) to the
‘docile body of difference’. This expression refers both to a critique of the political uses
of the aesthetics of the ‘Other’, and to the plasticity of cultural objects which change
meaning and transform as they circulate (see also Warnier, 2008).
On this point I agree with Jackie Assayag’s reflection (2010: 219–25) on the necessary
and polemical links between the universal and democracy, and with Gustavo Lins
Ribeiro’s (2014) discussion on the cosmopolitical knowledge of anthropology. See
also the special issue organized in France by Élisabeth Cunin and Valeria Hernandez
(2007).
There are several contributions on the issues of ordinary cosmopoliticism, the anthropology of migrations and the multiplication of borders: see Tarrius (2000), Glick Schiller
and Irving (2014), Agier (2016).
See Achille Mbembe (2010) and Nicole Lapierre (2004).
44
Anthropological Theory 16(1)
23. On the ambiguity of the ‘borderline’ between Greece and Albany see Sarah Green
(2005), and for a general reflection about time, space and social borderlands see
Agier (2016: Ch. 1).
24. ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man’, in Lévi-Strauss (1976: 33–43).
25. Here I follow the commentary by Bachofen and Bernardi (2008 [1755]: 28).
26. I assume the fact that I am applying to Rousseau’s thought a reading equivalent to the
one Derrida has applied to Levi-Strauss’s cultural decentring (Derrida, 1967: 411).
Considering writing as a decentring or as an ‘excentricity’, Derrida put in doubt the
reference to the powerful ‘centre’ itself as an evidence.
27. One can easily perceive a continuity of interpretation between Rousseau’s vision as an
ethnologist and the representation of an anthropology confined to cultural decentring
and exotic societies, a representation of anthropology that can be found, for example, in
parts of today’s political philosophy. From a certain point of view, the culturalist reading is always useful to philosophy in order to reflect on the Other who is ‘without a state’
or ‘against the state’ as a counterpoint or counter-ideal to the societies analysed by
Western philosophy. Thus, the association of the names of Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss
and Clastres now creates an acceptable ethno-political paradigm for some philosophers.
To these names we can now add the recent work by James Scott (2013), who idealizes
and groups under the name of ‘Zomia’ (a name given by the author, not the people
concerned) proto-anarchic mountain societies ‘‘recently disappeared’’.
28. Televised interview with Michel Foucault by Pierre Dumayer, 14 June 1966 (see Note 16).
29. For instance, there is no breakdown of temporalities or contexts between the Indian
reserves of the ‘pacified’ Amazonian forest and Rio’s favelas that are undergoing a ‘pacification’ process with strong military and police presence and constant supervision, notes
João Pacheco de Oliveira (2014) in an article which not only sheds light on Brazil’s policies
towards the margins – whether urban or national – but also has the great merit of breaking
away with the idea of the ‘Great Divide’ which is still very present in the social thought of
the Brazilian nation. Similar ideas are developed in Bessire and Bond (2014: 446).
30. Gérard Althabe (1990) has thus highlighted the importance of a mutual engagement
between surveyor and subjects to define the situation as a framework of communication.
Besides, the theoretical developments of the situational approach can be found in articles and books by Mitchell (1987), Alisdair Rogers and Steven Vertovec (1995), and
Terry Evens and Don Handelman (2006). Finally, and it is of course not a coincidence,
the situational approach did not find its place in the aforementioned ‘philological turn’
of North American anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. On ethnographic reflexivity
and anthropological knowledge see Agier (2015).
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Michel Agier is an Anthropologist, Professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and Senior Researcher at Institut de
Recherches pour le Développement (IRD). His main interests are Human
Globalization, Exile and Urban Marginalities. He published in English at Politiy
Press, At the Margins of the World (2008), Managing the Undesirables. Refugees
Camps and Humanitarian Government (2011), and Borderlands. Towards an
Anthropology of Cosmopolitan Condition (forthcoming Spring 2016).

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