I do not have the competence to speak about the history
of the notion of species in Western philosophy. In the case of
anthropology, the notion comes into play in two distinct conceptual contexts.
In the first place, and most importantly—as it involves
the very definition of the object of the discipline—anthropology has, from its
outset, clung to the postulate of the “psychic unity of the species,” which is
equivalent to the defining of the human species by its “psychic” capacities,
meaning, in this case, cognitive capacities. This, in turn, presupposes a
foundational discontinuity between our species and all others, given that the
“psychic unity” suggests that our species counter-unifies all others into a
single sub-psychic (or a-psychic) realm, which is exhaustively determined by an
extra-psychic corporeality. The idea of species, in this case, works in a
somewhat paradoxical fashion, given that for anthropology there is, strictly
speaking, only one species—the human—which cloaks itself in the nature
of a genus or domain, as the “ontic” or “empiric” differences among myriad
living species are neutralized by the greater “ontological” or “transcendental”
difference between this special species and the other mundane species.
Humanity works here as a collective angel, in the sense that, for some medieval
thinkers, angels were thought of as being individuals who were each a species
in their own regard. The analogy with angels is not accidental, since humanity
was frequently thought of as an entity “halfway between ape and angel.” It is
unnecessary to emphasize that here the aspect of the “ape” pertains to the body
while the “angel” signifies the soul or the “psychic unity.” Anthropology is
congenitally dualist, and because of that the idea of species is less a way of
situating man among a natural multiplicity than of radically setting him apart
as unically dual and dually unique.
On the other hand, any attempt at introducing anthropologically
(i.e. “psychically”) relevant discontinuities to the animal realm, understood
as the residual domain of the non-human, threatens the homogeneity, and thus
the integrity of the human species as one of coherent unity. It is as if there
existed a zero-sum game between internal unity and external counter-unity:
every meaningful internal differentiation of the external domain of the
non-human threatens to differentiate internally the domain of the human,
externalizing part of this domain as something quasi- or sub-human. In other
words, everything takes place as if the only mode of exorcising racism
(internal speciesism) were through the strengthening of external speciesism
(the theory of human exceptionality). However, Lévi-Strauss, in his famous
homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1962), already warned that the relationship
between racism and speciesism is not one of discontinuity, but rather one of
continuity. Speciesism anticipates and prepares for racism:
Never in the course of the past four centuries has
western man been in a better position to realize that by arrogating to himself
the right to raise a wall dividing mankind from the beast in nature, and
appropriating to himself all the qualities he denied the latter, he was setting
in motion an infernal cycle. For this same wall was to be pulled steadily
tighter, serving to set some men apart from other men and to justify in the
minds of an ever-shrinking minority their claim to being the only civilization
of men. Such a civilization, based as it was on the principle and notion of
self-conceit, was corrupt from the very start.
Secondly, the concept of species was mobilized in anthropology
to account for a phenomenon whose intellectual history is indissociable from
that very discipline, namely, the so called “totemism” or, more generally, the
innumerable devices for internal differentiation of a society that resorts to
the perceptible differences between living species (or, more generally, the
so-called “natural kinds”) to think the segmentation of the socius in
categories that are articulated horizontally or vertically. The classical
interpretation of totemic phenomena saw them as manifestations of an originary
identity between humans, animals, and other forms of life. If not the first,
once more Lévi-Strauss was the anthropologist who inverted the terms of the
problem and called attention to the fact that the identity between two
different genera (the human and the generic non-human) was subordinated to the
contrast between two systems of difference; the differences between “natural”
species; and the differences between “social” species or segments that are
internal to human society. It is worth noting that the explanation, although it
emphasizes the internal differences of the non-human domain, continues to think
through the “natural chain” (série natural) of totems as globally
discontinuous in relation to the “cultural chain” (série cultural) of
social segments. The father of structuralism, in the end, would cast the notion
of species into an absolutely central role within his image of the “savage
mind”: species appears as the central operator of an essentially classificatory
reason, located halfway between the individual and the category. Moreover, for
Lévi-Strauss, species is the empirical equivalent of the complete sign (signo
pleno), halfway between the sheer concrete ostentation (the individual) and
the abstract category (the concept). As a unit of a multiplicity, species
appears as the very form of the Object to the savage mind. In this sense, the
savage mind is Aristotelian (and vice-versa), as pointed by Scott Atran.
One should note that the first context of the use of the
notion of species is anthropocentric—the human species is not a species like
the others, for it expresses determinations that are inexistent in the other
species, where taken as a whole. Indeed, it expresses a certain essential indetermination,
an irreducibility towards those natural determinations that differentiate
species among themselves. As we have seen, the human species is dual, being at
the same time a species and a domain, an empirical entity and a transcendental
subject who knows its own condition and, in this sense, frees him- or herself
from it. The second context of use—totemic systems—remains anthropocentric to some
extent, in that living species are thought of as being enmeshed in biunivocal
relations with human sub-species (the totemic segments). Each totemic
species corresponds to a “type” of human, it is a partial humanity; as if the
universe, represented in miniature by the finite multiplicity of the totemic
species, were in a projective homologic relationship with society. The
relationship between society as microcosmos and cosmos as macro-society
establishes a formal identity between internal and external relations.
The discovery of “multinatural perspectivism” as the
presuppositional ground for the Amerindian cosmologies—and in many cases as a
doctrine explicitly elaborated in shamanism and native mythologies—led to the
conceptual position of a non-anthropocentric virtuality of the idea of species.
Perspectivism is the name we have given to a formulation culturally
characteristic of the so-called “animism,” a cosmological attitude that
consists of refusing the psychic discontinuity between the different types of
beings that populate the cosmos, imagining all the inter-species differences as
a horizontal extension, analogic or metonymic, of intra-species differences
(and not, as in the case of totemism, as their “vertical” repetition, homologic
or metaphoric). The human species then ceases to be a separate domain and
starts to define the “universe of discourse”: all the species-specific differences
appear as modalities of the human. This causes the human condition to cease
being “special” and to become, instead, the default mode or generic condition
of any species. The domain of nature characterized as a province that is
counter-unified by the eminent unity of the human domain, in essence,
disappears. Animism is “anthropomorphic” to the exact extent that it is
anti-anthropocentric. The human form is, literally, the form from which
all species emerge: each of the species is a finite mode of a humanity as
universal substance. This includes the human species (as we understand it),
which effectively becomes just another species: the differences between human
sub-species (the social segments of a particular people or of different
peoples) are of the same nature as the human “super-species,” i.e., those which
we call natural species.
Perspectivism is the presupposition that each living
species is human in its own department, human for itself (humano para
si), or better, that everything is human for itself (todo para si
é humano) or anthropogenic. This idea originates in indigenous cosmogonies,
where the primordial form of the being is human: “in the beginning there was
nothing,” say some Amazonian myths, “there were only people.” Thus, the
different types of beings and phenomena that populate and wander the world are
transformations of this primordial humanity.
Such an originary condition persists as a kind of
“background anthropomorphic radiation,” making it so that all current species
apprehend themselves more or less as intensely as humans. Insofar as they are
not apprehended by the other species as humans, the distinction between
reflexive or internal perspective and “third person” or external perspective is
crucial. The difference between species ceases to be merely an external
distinction, as it comes to constitutively incorporate a change in any being’s
point of view. What defines a species is the difference between the
internal and the external point of view of the species on itself of all the other
species on that species in particular. Thus, on the one hand, all species
becomes “dual,” consisting of a spiritual dimension (the interior human
“person” of each species) and a corporal dimension (the “clothing” or corporeal
equipment that is distinctive of the capacities of each species). Upon
universalizing itself, the invisible/visible, first-person/third-person duality
stops singularizing one single species and begins to define every species as
such. There is no longer a “definition” of species that can be made from a
species-independent point of view. Every species is thus a point of view about
(and in relation to) other species, and everything that exists is a species of
species (uma espécie de espécie), in other words, a “subject.”
To the extent that every species is formally composed of
a similar inside/outside, soul/body, human/non-human perspective
oscillation—since every species apprehended from another species’ point of view
is not apprehended as human, which includes our own species when considered,
for example, from the point of view of jaguars, or of peccaries (to whom we
are, respectively, peccaries and jaguars, or cannibal spirits)—the passing
between species is much more fluid than in the case of our exceptionalist and
anthropocentric cosmological vulgate. The species are fixed for
Amazonian cosmologies in the sense that pertinent global transformations
generally took place in one go in the pre-cosmological world of myth (myths
are, in essence, narratives of the process of speciation)—there is not a
continuist transformism (transformismo continuísta), as our modern
evolutionary biology would have it. But, at the same time the individuals
of each species are able to “leap” from one species to another with relative
ease, a process that is schematized principally in the imagery (imaginário)
of alimentary predation: the incorporation by another species is frequently
conceived as the integral transformation of the prey into a member of the
predator’s own species. All of which seems to give meaning to Samuel Butler’s
assertion that “there is no such persecutor of grain, as another grain when it
has once fairly identified itself with a hen" (Life and Habit,
137). Another form of inter-species transformation is shamanism, which is the
manifest capacity by certain individuals (of different species) to oscillate
between the points of view of two (or more) species—being capable of seeing the
members of both species as they see themselves, i.e., as humans, and thus being
capable of communicating multiple points of view and rendering intelligible
that which is noticeable only to them (the shamans), namely, the fact that each
species appears to the other in a radically different way than it appears to
itself.
The essential difference between this “perspectivism”
and our own “multiculturalism” is that this variation of point of view does not
only affect our “way of seeing” a world that would otherwise be objectively
exterior to the point of view and larger than any possible point of view; it is
an ontologically and epistemologically infinite world. In the first place, the
perspectivist “world” is a world exhaustively composed of points of
view: all beings and things in the world are potential subjects, hence the
entities that “we see” are always seeing beings. That which we
experiment is always a subject of a possible experience: every “object” is a
type of “subject.” Secondly, the difference between species is not a difference
of “opinion” or “culture” but rather a difference of “nature”: it is a
difference in the way each species is experienced by others, i.e., as a
body, as a collection of affections that are vulnerable to the senses, of
capacities for modifying and being modified by agents of other species. The
world as seen by another species is not the same world merely seen differently,
rather, it is “another world” (“outro mundo”) that is seen in the same
manner. Each species, by seeing itself as human, see the other species (that
is, the world) as we—those who apprehend ourselves as human—see them. Every
species see the world in the same way. There is only one point of view,
the point of view of humanity. What changes is the point of view of this
point of view: which species is seeing the world upon seeing itself as
human? If it is the species of jaguars, then they will see (those we see as)
humans as if they were peccaries, because human beings eat peccaries (and not
other humans). All humans share the same culture—human culture. What changes is
the nature of that which they see, according to the body these referential
humans possess. The point of view is in the body. Perspectivism is not
merely a theory of representation (of nature by the spirit), but rather a
pragmatic of corporeal affection. It is the species-specific potency of each
body that determines the correlative objective of universal cultural categories
that are “applied” by all species in their human moment.
The living species, the difference between the species,
therefore, is a fundamental concept in perspectivist worlds. But there species
is not as much a principle of distinction as it is a principle of relation. To
begin with, the difference between species is not anatomical or physiological,
but behavioral or ethological (what distinguishes a species is much more its
ethogram—what they eat, where they live, whether they live in group or not,
etc.—than its morphology). In this sense, the differences between “species” do
not lend themselves to be projected onto a homogenous ontological plane, unless
we define corporeality as the constituent of such a plane; however, this
corporeality is a heterogeneous and relational totality of affections rather
than a substance endowed with attributes. Differences in the feeding habits of
jaguars, peccaries, and humans, differences in feeding habits among human
groups, the physical appearance of different animals and diverse peoples—all
these differences are equally taken as differences that express diverse
bodily affections. De jure, it is not more difficult for an Araweté to
transform into a Kayapó than into a jaguar. The transformation processes
implicate only qualitatively discrete affections. Furthermore,
inter-specific differences (diferenças inter-específicas) are blocs of
relational virtualities, of modes of relative positioning of species among
themselves. The difference between species is not a principle of segregation
but of alternation: for what defines the specific difference is that two
species (unlike two given individuals) cannot “be” both human at the same time,
which means that both species cannot perceive themselves as human one for
the other, or else they would cease to be two different species.
If we project perspectivism onto itself, and onto our own
multiculturalism, we will be compelled to conclude that it is not possible to
be at the same time perspectivist and multiculturalist. Nor is this even
desirable. We must conclude, therefore, that these two anthropologies are
inter-translatable (commensurable), but are incompatible (no dialectic
synthesis is possible). I have been speaking in terms of “anthropologies”
because I understand every cosmology to be an anthropology, not in the trivial
sense that human beings are only able to think through human categories—the
Indians would agree, but they would disagree that only our species is “human”—
but in the sense that even our anthropocentrism is inevitably an
anthropomorphism, and that every attempt to go beyond this “correlation” is
merely an anthropocentrism in the negative, which still does and always will
refer to the anthropos. Anthropomorphism, far from being a speciesism,
as is anthropocentrism, be it Christian, Kantian, or neo-constructivist,
expresses the originary “decision” to think the human as rooted within the
world, not above it (even if at only one side of its dual being). In a world
where every thing is human, humanity is an entirely different thing.
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