Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the possible contribution of perspectival anthropology in challenging Gell’s (1998) agency paradigm, flawed by a reiteration of the primacy of humans. Amazonian ontologies, in fact, consider humans and materials as things, without a hierarchical subdivision subject/object.

Paper long abstract:

The paper reflects on Gell's notion of distributed person, as theorised in Art and Agency (1998). By adopting Husserl's overlap between the real and the phantasised, Gell claims that social relationships are the externalization of a cognitive process, so that personhood is diffused temporally and spatially via the indexes or physical things (Gell, 1998, 222-223), and, therefore, objectified in the 'outside' (Gell, 1998, 231). In this theory of a 'material mind' (Kückler, 2015, 3), Gell reiterates a Jewish-Christian model of culture as the result of 'the imposition of mental design over formless matter' (Viveiros de Castro, 2012, 58). Gell's paradigm, then, does not challenge the primacy of humans in anthropology. However, a critique of Gell's paradigm cannot prescind from acknowledging its merits, the most relevant of which is the rejection of the idea that objects are merely symbols of social relationships.

The paper, therefore, explores whether Gell's material agency can be re-evaluated in the light of perspectival anthropology. As Viveiros de Castro (2012) and Santos-Granero (2009) have pointed out, Amazonian ontologies are based on the idea that culture is the result of a transformation from a primordial artefact-humanity, or, in other words: 'people and objects share the same "symbolic frame of fabrication". They are simultaneously things and embodied relations' (Santos-Granero, 2009, 6).

By reviewing the case studies analysed by the perspectival ethnography, the paper proposes to consider this Amazonian paradigm of distributed object as a possible non-ethnocentric approach to materiality, thereby completing Gell's agency paradigm.