M. Agier Epistemological Decentering

Anthropological Theory
2016, Vol. 16(1) 22–47
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499616629270
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Article
Epistemological
decentring: At the root
of a contemporary and
situational anthropology
Michel Agier
E
´cole des Hautes E ´tudes en Sciences Sociales and Institut de
Recherche pour le De
´veloppement, 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 multipo-
larity, and the decolonization of knowledge? The political questioning of cultural decen-
tring is an opportunity for anthropology to build a new epistemological conception of
decentring. Against and beyond cultural relativism, ethnicism or ontological perspectiv-
ism, 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 epistemo-
logical 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]

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 va-
rious ‘crises’, numerous debates and a general period of conceptual, methodologi-
cal 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 contempor-
ary 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 decen-
tring has historical antecedents. The relative and malleable character of the border
that separates oneself from the ‘Other’ was already tangible in Rousseau’s under-
standing of the foundations of inequalities among men. Unlike the usual reading of
Rousseau’s work – for example by Le
´vi-Strauss, as we shall see further as a
culturalist foundation of anthropology, I would like to show that the epistemolo-
gical 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 so-
called ontological trend in anthropology. This last reactivates and perpetuates the
agenda of cultural relativism founded on the principle of a table of cultural iden-
tities, 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 indivi-
duals, and as places where the globalized world is staged and set in motion. The
programme is both anthropological and political. It consists of observing,
Agier 23

describing and understanding every place that has a border at centre stage: for-
tuitous 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 Asuncio
´n, the capital of
Paraguay, invited to give a talk by the French embassy. During my stay I was intro-
duced 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 so-
called ‘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 Asuncio
´n 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.
24 Anthropological Theory 16(1)

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 Asuncio
´n’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 Asuncio
´n’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 resis-
tance, 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 Asuncio
´n’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
Agier 25

(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, infor-
mation 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 situa-
tions, and therefore the need for a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995;
Appadurai, 1996; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997).
At the same time in France, Marc Auge
´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 apprehend-
ing of contemporary worlds in the making, in situ and sometimes changing unpre-
dictably 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 Le
´vi-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 deve-
lopment, 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
26 Anthropological Theory 16(1)