Subaltern Studies 2.0
With Essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Marisol de la Cadena, Thom Van Dooren, and Suraj Yengde
State and Capital reign over the Age of Sorrow. We face inequality, pandemics, ethnocide, climate crisis, and mass extinction. Our desire for security and power governs us as State. Our desire for possessions governs us as Capital. Our desires imprison and rule us beings as Unbeing. Yet, from Nagaland to New Zealand, Bhutan to Bolivia, a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions has begun. Arising from assemblies of humans and other-than-humans, these revolutions replace possessive individualism with non-exploitative interdependence. Naga elders, Bhutanese herders and other indigenous communities, feminists, poets, seers, yaks, cranes, vultures, and fungi haunt this pamphlet. The original Subaltern Studies narrated how Indian peasant communities destroyed the British empire. Subaltern Studies 2.0 prophesies the multi-being demos and liberates Being from Unbeing. Re-kin, Re-nomad, Re-animate, Re-wild! The Animist Revolution has come.
Kinds of Value | An Experiment in Modal Anthropology
In this slim volume, anthropologist Paul Kockelman showcases, reworks, and extends some of the core resources anthropologists and like-minded scholars have developed for thinking about value. Rather than theorize value head on, he offers a careful interpretation of a Mayan text about an offering to a god that lamentably goes awry. Kockelman analyzes the text, its telling, and the conditions of possibility for its original publication. Starting with a relatively simple definition of value—that which stands at the intersection of what signs stand for and what agents strive for—he unfolds, explicates, and experiments with its variations. Contrary to widespread claims in and around the discipline, Kockelman argues that it is not so-called relations, but rather relations between relations, that are at the heart of the interpretive endeavor.
The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul | The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16-century Brazil
In the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries working in what is now Brazil were struck by what they called the inconstancy of the people they met, the indigenous Tupi-speaking tribes of the Atlantic coast. Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the Gospel, they also had a tendency to forget the missionaries’ lessons and “revert” to their natural state of war, cannibalism, and polygamy. This peculiar mixture of acceptance and rejection, compulsion and forgetfulness was incorrectly understood by the priests as a sign of the natives’ incapacity to believe in anything durably.
In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro situates the Jesuit missionaries’ accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective, and in the process draws out some startling and insightful implications of their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates on culture and religion.