Aggiornamento of anthropology: Bridging the border between nature and culture

Abstract

The article analyzes modern western projects to update anthropology. The projects are united by the idea of the end of human exclusiveness, which is a modern form of the concept of human death. According to idea of the end of human exclusiveness, a person has no ontological privileges in the world, and he must be thought of as a part in the totality of other parts of the whole — nature, space, objects, etc. It is possible to allocate four forms of the realization of this idea: overcoming the oppositions “nature-culture”, “man-animal”, “man-technician”, and “man-objects”. In the article the first form of this idea, projects of anthropology beyond nature and culture, is analyzed. Within the framework of these projects, two tendencies are observed — naturalization of man and anthropomorphization of the world. Both directions are investigated on the example of works, on the one hand, of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, on the other, Philippe Descola and Ernesto B. Viveiros de Castro. Schaeffer’s anthropology becomes anti-anthropology the moment he starts speaking of man in the language of evolutionary biology. Man fits them into an evolutionary process, within which the cause of a person’s actions appears beyond him. The anthropomorphization of the world is based on ethnographic data on the so-called “primitive peoples”. If naturalism concerns the reduction of the anthropological to the biological, then here it is possible to speak of an intellectual forgery. Descola and de Castro identify the ideas of weak philosophy on the bases where the life of the mystery community is constructed. In this case, the mystery is described in social categories, and the exotic content of representations of the studied peoples serves as an argument for the chaotization of our own ideas. The author of the article believes that modern anti-anthropologists are trying to interpret the truly human, contained in mysteries, in terms of the inhuman.