Transmutating beings: a proposal for an anthropology of thought

Abstract

Forms of thought, from what Lévi-
Strauss called the “systematization [of]
what is immediately presented to the
senses,” to the causal theories studied
by Evans-Pritchard in witchcraft,
have generally been interpreted as an
expression of a specific language or
“culture.” In this paper, I discuss this
way of defining thought. Three classic
objections are examined: (1) societies
sharing the same “system of thought”
may speak different languages, and vice
versa; (2) if a relation between language
and thought exists, it is an indirect and
controversial one, and we should never
take it for granted (or infer qualities
of thought from language structures)
without further investigation; (3)
the languages that we use to qualify
different kinds of thought are constantly
translated. Through a discussion of
the context of translation, I argue
that instead of seeing the possibility of
translation as a theoretical difficulty
for defining thought, we could, on the
contrary, consider the ethnography of
translation as a chance to observe the
dynamics and structure of thought
processes, and to study how they operate
in different cultural contexts. Using
three Amazonian examples, I will try
to describe the kind of cognition involved
by the form of translation that Jakobson
calls transmutation. I will argue that
from this ethnographic analysis, we
can not only derive a better (both wider
and more precise) idea of some, rarely
studied, cultural translation processes,
but also draw from it a new way to
define the concept of “cultural ontology,”
both for Amazonian cultures and in
more general terms.