Specular anthropologies (and possible others)

The insubordination of indigenous cosmologies before the idea that worlds are available to control has been a strong enough reason for anthropology to assume the task of critically rereworking its methods and postulates. Maybe, we could emulate the art of maroon escape and imagine a counter-anthropology; and maybe—we insist on the maybe—among all sciences, anthropology is the one which first assumed, inspired by the indigenous peoples, that thinking, knowing, and defining are world-altering practices. Being alterity both an object and method for anthropology, alteration is its more or less assumed strength. 

Stemming from a subtle perception on the couplings between the visible and the invisible, between the apparent and the unfathomable, this course wishes to replace the landscapes established by the great dividers—Nature/Culture; Subject/Object; Individual/Society; etc.—and run through the theories of cosmological operators: Predation, Mastery and Folding. We will experiment the reversibility of viewpoints and will be fictionalised by indigenous formulations, conceptually travestied by anthropology: fractal person, magnified person, compound, perspective and cosmopolitics. Research methodologies native to human and social sciences will give way to day-to-day transformation practices: cooking, weaving, singing, smoking, dreaming.  

Knowing indigenous cosmologies requires us to become strangers to our ways of delving into them. In the best of scenarios, Western ontologies are put on hold during the ethnographic encounter: they generate circumstances with which to ask each other questions, where to produce controlled misconceptions that can allow us to understand each other without encapsulating or annulling each other. Before indigenous worlds, we can allow ourselves to leave out the objectivity and unanimity conferred by data and pay sensitive attention to finely crafted, world-transiting techniques. 

This course is an invitation to delve into some of the devices with which indigenous cosmologies or epistemologies block the activations of a generalising humanity. Events and/or relationships based on perspectivist interconstitution allow us to consider possible differential positions in relation to the globalising operations produced by the Anthropocene. We will understand this era as a framework for future definition, for experience or for an area of thought. To carry out such an exercise, we need to become accessible to indigenous gazes, as well as the ways of becoming strangers within the space, ever hazier, between people and goods. Likewise, such a turn can require other specular images, leaving behind symmetry-producing devices in favour of magical operations of transformation and transit between worlds. Specifically, we will seek inspiration from the political-epistemological practices that Amerindian ethnology has been mapping and inhabiting since its primordial origins.

Strucutre:

This course will take place in six sessions, between 12 November and 17 December 2024, mobilizing a series of thematic attractors that will structure an open and dialogic study process. The thematic attractors act as collectors of confluences between authors, issues, moments, proposals: anthropological fictionalization and imaginable fugues from it; the composition of people between worlds, of counter-alienating territories and belongings; to-last-for circulation and the imagination alter(c)ations, transhuman policies, indigenous re-existences and anti-futurist activism.

Ana María Ramo Affonso holds a PhD in Anthropology and Geography and History. She is an associate researcher at einaidea and a regular collaborator in our projects, and has worked as a researcher and teacher in Brazil and Spain, as an associate professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and, recently, at the Faculty of Geography and History of the Complutense University of Madrid. She has worked and lived with Guarani communities since 2010, collaborating in the formulation and adaptation of public policies aimed at these populations, mainly in the field of Intercultural Education. During her time in the coastal villages of the south-southeast region of Brazil—Bioma Mata Atlântica—she received extensive training on indigenous forms and means of knowledge. As a corollary, she orients her research career to delve into the possibilities of dialogue between the Humanities and Amerindian cosmologies. The results of her research have appeared in national and international journals such as the Revista Española de Antropología Americana, Iberoforum: Revista de Ciencias Sociales (Mexico), Etnográfica (Portugal), Revista de Antropologia (Brazil), among other publications.