Andrew Brandel - Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality

Thinking from Elsewhere

Series Editors

Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University

Bhrigupati Singh, Ashoka University

International Advisory Board

Roma Chatterji, University of Delhi

Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University

Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College

Harri Englund, Cambridge University

Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Angela Garcia, Stanford University

Junko Kitanaka, Keio University

Eduardo Kohn, McGill University

Heonik Kwon, Cambridge University

Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

Deepak Mehta, Ashoka University, Sonepat

Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto

Sameena Mulla, Marquette University

Marjorie Murray, Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile

Young-Gyung Paik, Jeju National University

Sarah Pinto, Tufts University

Michael J. Puett, Harvard University

Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town

Lisa Stevenson, McGill University

ANDREW BRANDEL
AND MARCO MOTTA,
EDITORS

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2021

Copyright 2021 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brandel, Andrew, editor. | Motta, Marco, editor.

Title: Living with concepts : anthropology in the grip of reality / Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta, editors.

Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2021. | Series: Thinking from elsewhere | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021010945 | ISBN 9780823294268 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823294275 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823294275 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Ideals (Philosophy) | Concepts.

Classification: LCC B105.I3 L58 2021 | DDC 121/.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010945

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 215 4 3 2 1

First edition

Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta

Sandra Laugier

Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer

Veena Das

Andrew Brandel

Jocelyn Benoist

Marco Motta

Michael J. Puett

Michael D. Jackson

Michael Lambek

Michael Cordey

Lotte Buch Segal

ANDREW BRANDEL AND MARCO MOTTA

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Anthropology, one might say, has long relied on the power of concepts to represent reality. They are believed to help us unlock the meaning behind diverse and often disparate practices and experiences. Often these have been imported from the colonial archive, or from Christianity; this is the case, for example, with religion, reciprocity, and kinship. But they have also regularly emerged from encounters in the field, adopted from societies where anthropologists have carried out ethnographic research and been subsequently transformed, elevated, and moved. One thinks of cases like Durkheims use of the Melanesian concept mana, one he says is the exact equivalent of the Sioux notion of wakan and Iroquois orenda, and which he uses as an analytical lever he applies in the analysis of Australian totemism; or of Mausss popularization of the Maori term hau to explain common features of reciprocal exchange across societies reaching as far as the Pacific Northwest. These concepts have become anthropological icons unto themselves, and contemporary efforts are underway to mobilize them in still new contextsfor example, as William Mazzarella (2017) has done for mana in relation to the rise of mass mediatization. Recently, the field has also been witness to rallying calls against the over-cultivation of the concept in favor of relations (Lebner 2020), or at least to making them vulnerable to destabilization by bringing them nearer to experience (Mattingly 2019). But for all this debate, we have rarely paused to ask, in any systematic way, what our concepts are, how they are made, and what they do. What do we mean when we talk about concepts?

At the same time, philosophy has frequently been described as the discipline concerned with analysis and production of concepts. And in recent years, we have begun to see illuminating conversations emerge about the attraction or repulsion of particular anthropologists to particular philosophers, of even to particular philosophical concepts, which have encouraged us to attend to the new forms concepts take as they move into new contexts (Biehl and Locke 2017; Jackson 2009; Pedersen and Dalsgrd 2015; Stoler 2016). Such endeavors, rather than treating anthropology and philosophy as two fully constituted disciplines, begin from singular encounters that reflect pressures specific to a situation (Das, Jackson, Kleinman, and Singh 2014). This book carries these discussions forward through a related though different tack. It is an attempt to think through the resonances between certain strands of contemporary philosophy and anthropology, and how they might benefit from an engagement with each other, by responding to a fairly specific question: how different would concepts appear if we looked at the way concepts are embedded in our lives rather than thinking of them as mere analytical tools? What does it mean to live with our concepts?

The project took shape over two years of conferences, panels, and workshops designed to engage a critical and collaborative dialogue. We invited a group of scholars from each discipline whose work has led them to dialogue with thinkers in the other field. A first meeting took shape under the provisional heading of a discussion on concepts, experience, and the claim to the real. There we seized the opportunity to discuss whether there were ways of thinking about the intelligibility of the content of anthropological research beyond those that depend on our capacity to generalize and to place our concepts over and above those we encounter in the field. The first iteration of papers coalesced of their own accord around two fascinating and fruitful themes: one on diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutics, and the other on the borderlines of the imagination and reality. The interventions prompted us to ask first, in relation to clinical situations, if there were ways of smoothening the normative effects of concepts for anthropology, by allowing disruptive and troubling elements of ethnographies to be taken into account rather than simply be eclipsed in the escape to rarefied domains like metaphysics. In other words, we began asking ourselves how a case might disclose the norms through which physicians and patients apprehend its specificity and instruct us on how concepts work. But we also wanted to link these issues with those posed by the other set of papers centering on the relationship between reality and the imagined, their interdependences and their divergences, since it appeared to us that there was something we needed to clarify about the role imagination plays in the way we anthropologists and the people we meet in the field picture reality. If our notion of experience is opened up to the imagined as a necessary component of the real, then we felt compelled to ask how this might affect our understanding of concepts. Different configurations of the relationship between concept and experience complicated long-held assumptions about division of imagination and reality, and therefore demanded further exploration.