CHANCEShiff, Richard;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322816
Academics generate circles of thought. Their preferred modes of conceptualization—the intellectual constructions in circulation within academic discourse at a given moment—readily pass across disciplinary boundaries. During the past two centuries, philosophical critique and the criticism of art have a history of informing each other (Robert Pippin's After the Beautiful is a current example of the syndrome). Although the concepts of societal “modernism” and “modernist” art exhibit variation, both are hybrids of philosophical (linguistic) and aesthetic (sensory) indeterminacies. Rather than fretting over interpretive instability, we are inured to conceptual change and indeterminacy in every domain. But our world becomes circular—ironically, quite stable—when we direct logical reasoning to illuminate its aesthetic double (as Hegel did) or direct art to illuminate its philosophical double (as Heidegger did). Inattentive to anything outside the circle, we imagine our intellectual progress, for circularity is self-confirming. Our illusory progress accompanies a spotty record of predicting actual change. With respect to where our philosophical concepts of change have led us, chance is a better guide to our immediate intellectual and aesthetic preferences, even though it presumes no explanation of our comprehensive cultural formation. Although never right, chance has the advantage of never being wrong. chance contradiction modernism Hegelianism Pippin
UTOPIARichmond, Colin;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322828
This guest column consists of a tongue-in-cheek counterfactual history of England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its highlight is the fifty-year reign of the saintly King Richard III, who dies a martyr in New York at the hands of the Iroquois in 1536 and is promptly canonized. In this version of events, England evades the Reformation and the wars of religion and enters modernity as a prosperous nation of small farmers who have no interest in enclosures and engrossing, let alone in capitalism and industrialization. Richard III Thomas More Elizabeth Woodville
INTRODUCTION: INDIGENOUS INSIGHTSFry, Douglas P.;Souillac, Geneviève;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322846
This essay, which introduces the fifth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” explores four ethnographically observed areas in which indigenous knowledge and practice hold insights for the prevention and reduction of enmity in the modern world. The four, very broadly, are values and norms (such as recoil from competition) that nurture peace, exceptional capacity for and recognition of the necessity of cooperation, exceptionally flexible and multilayered definitions of identity, and rituals that effect and strengthen peace. Neither this essay nor the symposium in which it appears advocates a simple application of conflict-prevention or -resolution mechanisms from particular cultures to other emic contexts. The point, rather, is to seek more general theoretical principles wherever they are to be found, given repeated failures of the modern peacemaking apparatus. enmity indigenous knowledge cooperation identity transborder ethics peace conflict resolution
PEACE AND KNOWLEDGE POLITICS IN THE UPPER XINGUVanzolini, Marina;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322858
With special reference to the Tupi-speaking Aweti people, this article reconsiders the nature of Xinguan pacifism in an analysis of sorcery and its relation to war in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil. It is argued that the mechanism that keeps violence there under control is probably less the result of an applied pacifist ideology—that is, rejection of war as the socius 's generative matrix—than the effect of a specific conception of knowledge. It is through the Xinguans' refusal of the idea of singular truth, rather than through their rejection of war, that their logic is “good to think” through the question of peace. This article divides roughly into two parts, the first concentrating on Xinguan sorcery, and the second on their knowledge politics. Xingu pacifism sorcery knowledge politics
CONFLICT, PEACE, AND SOCIAL REFORM IN INDIGENOUS AMAZONIA A Deflationary AccountFausto, Carlos;Xavier, Caco;Welper, Elena;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322870
Sociocultural transformations brought about by indigenous leaders in Amazonia have been described as prophetic, millenaristic, or messianic and contrasted with modern reformism. This article addresses new ways of describing processes of change negotiated among indigenous actors. Although these processes are mostly absent from colonial or later sources, they should not remain foreign to ethnology, as the three empirical cases analyzed in this essay show. Methodologically, the essay asks why the regulatory image of Rousseau's small community, meeting face to face to express the general will, has never had the same impact in the anthropological imagination as that of the “noble savage.” Thematically, these case studies raise the question of how peace is made and suggest that, while peacemaking demands “magic,” the invocation of extrahuman powers, the social forms and values on which peace is based are contained as objective possibilities in the present. Making peace actual requires creative choices. social reform Parakanã Marubo Koripako João Tuxaua
HORROR SANGUINISSmith, David Livingstone;Panaitiu, Ioana;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322882
We are a supremely social species whose ecological success rests largely on our capacity for large-scale cooperation. This high degree of sociality is only possible against a background of immensely powerful inhibitions against performing acts of lethal violence against conspecifics. There are circumstances, however, in which acts of lethal violence are individually or collectively advantageous and attractive. To perform such acts, we must override our inhibitions. This essay argues that this tension causes us to be ambivalent about killing other human beings and that our being so is manifested in the widespread belief, found across cultures and historical epochs, that taking human life contaminates the killer and may pose a threat to the entire community, unless rituals of purification are performed to counteract it. Examples from the Hebrew Bible, the Greco-Roman world, medieval Europe, Africa, and Native America are examined to substantiate this claim. Premodern beliefs, moreover, about the consequences of killing are echoed in the symptoms of “moral injury” described by contemporary psychiatrists treating combat veterans, which suggests that, in defying or disabling our inhibitions against performing acts of lethal violence, we ultimately do violence to ourselves. horror sanguinis purification rituals lustration combat neurosis
HOW OLD IS HUMAN BRUTALITY? On the Structural Origins of ViolenceMalešević, Siniša;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322894
Given the paucity of evidence available, scholarship in archaeology and the social sciences is deeply divided over the question, how old is human violence? Some scholars have concluded that humans are intrinsically violent, and others that they are basically nonviolent, but in both interpretive schools there is a pronounced tendency to rely on simple naturalist epistemology. In contrast, this article offers an interpretation focusing on the structural foundations of violent action. Instead of tracing violent or nonviolent behavior to “human nature,” the origins of violence are linked to the rise and proliferation of complex social organizations. violence war enmity brutality social organizations
DISCOURSES OF CONFLICT An EthnographyHazlehurst, Leighton;
2016 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3322906
This essay explores ways in which cultures at different levels and in different historical circumstances employ different modes of discourse to deal with conflict and with ways to resolve it. The study is based on ethnographic observations of the Tsimshian myth of Asdiwal, collected by Boas and made famous by Lévi-Strauss; the story of Sakuntala, from a Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata ; and Remarque's war novel of 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front . In the first case, no resolution of the conflicts comprising the narrative is required, because in mythical thinking adversaries are united in the strife that divides them. In the second example, the conflict is between the contested realities, colliding ideologies, and divergent social practices of the priestly and warrior castes; the discourse of the epic illuminates the differences in explicit detail in order to permit negotiation. The final instance is of a modern European narrative in which the specific causes and consequences of the Great War are obscure to the soldiers fighting in it. It is random chance, rather than the negotiation or transcendence of difference, that is thought, in this mode, to determine who lives and dies. The essay concludes with speculation about why this third and present mode has been less successful than the other two in dealing with conflict and its resolution. Asdiwal Mahabharata Lévi-Strauss Remarque Lukács