“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”: Objects and Objections of Ethnography
September, 2008
This text thinks through the possibility of engagement with genuine alterity, a real other, in the light of the discipline of ethnography, for which this engagement is an insistent problem in the face of actuality. The present speaks to ethnography in examples of situations where reaching the other by way of the object raises questions on the latter’s status. For instance, a displacement of objects gathered and treated within this discipline is occurring nowadays in Paris, with the closing of the Musée de l’Homme to newly contextualize and display them in the Musée du Quai Branly. Although the gesture corresponds to ethnography’s shift from its colonial roots to a post-colonial present that strives to acknowledge the value of cultural otherness through its objects, failure to truly avoid re-appropriation manifests itself in political and aesthetic registers. The article contrasts ways of engagement with difference as proposed by aesthetic experience, by anthropology, and by living peoples themselves, as a means of detecting openings, in their limits and potentials, to the encounter with the undomesticated and unsettling other. The crowd is an important phenomenon in the practices around these objects. It may upset the sense of identity, and, under certain conditions, disrupt homogeneity, which obstruct visibility of the other as such. At the base of these limitations lies logocentricism. Thus, a true attempt at drawing away from it, in the direction of the real other, requires considering anew what Western culture has traditionally neglected as “nonsense.” The analysis in this text of Leiris’ troubles as anthropologist in assimilating magic practiced by a people he wishes to report on and of the issue of animality and self-identity raised by Derrida bring attention to magic and superstition: a non-logocentric treatment of objects –as fetishes— is proved to continue operating at an everyday level, in spite of its being hidden or denied by Western mentality, as a result of the impossibility to escape the unexpected.
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