Paper short abstract:

Symbolic thought is a trickster as it imposes categorical thought on the anthropologist and may blind her to the reality of the social world under scrutiny. Deleuzian alternative semiotics offer a way to disentangle the work of this trickster.

Paper long abstract:

A trickster is a "symbolic type," as conceptualized by Don Handelman; she unwaveringly sticks to her own behavior, while disregarding changing conditions, and thus forces the social scene to abide by her own logic; she determines the social unfolding and molds it. Moreover, the trickster is a fantastically successful fraud, since she makes everyone believe that reality conforms to her ways. The symbol and other representations in anthropology do the same, they impose categorical thought on the fuzzy, living, ever transforming social world under scrutiny, and thus too they determine the anthropologist's analysis and interpretation. This deceptive logic instills an illusory ontological gap between the world-we-live-in, and our cultural construction and understanding of that world. While the world itself is made of one sort of material, the trickster tells us, its representations are made of radically different stuff. With the help of Deleuzian semiotics I would like to unmask the trickster and propose an alternative way of looking at cultural constructs, one that does not impose its logic on anthropological observation, and that does not assume a gap between doing and making sense, because no unequivocal distinction exists between the two, but rather a smooth passage.