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AFTERWORD
Transcendental Perspectivism: Anonymous Viewpoints
from Inner Asia
MARTIN HOLBRAAD and RANE WILLERSLEV1
m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk
University College London
rane@mail.dk
Aarhus University
INTRODUCTION
After Spinoza, and apropos Buddhist cosmology in Tibet, Da Col asks: What can
a body do? In perspectivism this is always the question. Viveiros de Castro
proposes it by analogy to the more familiar concern, intuitive to us Western intellectuals: ‘What can a mind do?’ We are accustomed to worrying about our minds
because we assume that even if our mental powers are ultimately generated by
our brains (bodily parts we have in common with others), it is what we can do
with our minds – the ideas we come up with, our way of thinking about things –
that makes us different from others (other people, other cultures, or even other
species or spirits). Perspectivism inverts this assumption, as Viveiros de Castro
writes for Amerindians:
The ability to adopt a point of view is undoubtedly a power of the soul, and nonhumans are subjects in so far as they have (or are) spirit; but the differences between
viewpoints (and a viewpoint is nothing if not a difference) lie not in the soul. Since
the soul is formally identical in all species, it can only see the same things everywhere – the difference is given in the specificities of bodies. (Viveiros de Castro
1998: 478)
Of course comparisons between Amerindian perspectivism and Western intellectualism are not at all alien to Viveiros de Castro’s theoretical aspirations (e.g. see
Viveiros de Castro 2003). While establishing an ethnographic argument about
the ontological premises of Amerindian cosmology, the theory of perspectivism
is also meant to suggest that such premises can substitute ordinary assumptions
about what theory itself might be, what it might do, and how. A theory of
Amerindian perspectivism, then, is meant also to suggest a perspectivist theory.
But if Viveiros de Castro’s theory is itself perspectivist, we argue, it must be
so just because it is ‘Amerindian’. For one ordinary assumption regarding anthropological ‘theory’ (from Greek theoria, the perspective of ‘contemplation’ –
Inner Asia 9 (2007): 329–345
© 2007 Global Oriental Ltd
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Taylor 1982: 89) is that it is an essentially intellectual artefact: theory is born of
the anthropologists’ mental effort, albeit one that is constrained by the ethnographic material with reference to which the theory is conceived. In this view, the
possibility that a theory might transcend the ethnographic particulars to which it
may have originally referred testifies to its robustness as an intellectual artefact.
So ‘cross-cultural comparison’ becomes a matter of testing the possible applications of a theory on different ethnographic materials – ‘What can a theory do?’
On a perspectivist premise, however, the possibility of theory transcending
ethnographies to which it might refer, and therefore compare, is not open. Just as
in Amazonia, a single cross-species perspective is rendered impossible by the
differences between species’ bodies – ‘bundle[s] of affects and capacities
…which [are] the origin of perspectives’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478) – so in
anthropology comparisons oriented towards establishing a transcendent crosscultural theoretical perspective are barred by the unique specificities of
ethnographic cases. In other words, in perspectivist anthropology, ethnography is
to theory what in Amerindian perspectivism bodies are to perspectives. This is a
‘hyper-empiricist’ anthropology, if you like, in that ethnographic materials do not
provide just ‘evidence’ that may constrain its theorems, but rather constitute the
very ground from which such theorems originate as intellectual extrapolations
(Holbraad forthcoming, cf. Jackson 1989). In such a view, the virtue of crosscultural comparison lies not in testing the robustness of a theory, but rather in
showing how it can be, precisely, ‘stretched’ – rendering a theory vulnerable to
ethnographic differences with a view to transforming it.
What, then, can ethnography do? More specifically, in the case of this
volume, what can Inner Asian ethnographies do to Amerindian perspectivism?
Drawing on the preceding articles, our aim in this Afterword is to show that Inner
Asian materials suggest a theoretical elaboration of perspectivism that remained
unanticipated in Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian theorisation. In particular, we
argue that if one may talk of ‘Inner Asian perspectivism’ – and we consider that
the present collection amply demonstrates that one can – then one must talk of a
perspectivism that incorporates a notion of ‘transcendence’. We suggest, in other
words, that Inner Asian ethnographies of perspectivist phenomena must qualify
the ‘immanentist’ premise of Viveiros de Castro’s model. For him, exchanges of
perspectives between different kinds of beings are conceived in thoroughly ‘horizontal’, or symmetrical, terms. Each being has the potential to transform into
every other because all beings (or at least all the cosmologically significant
species that enter into this perspectivist game) contain each other’s perspectives
immanently. Beings can ‘become-other’, in Viveiros de Castro’s Deleuzian
terminology, because in a crucial sense they already ‘are other’: they are constituted as beings by their very potential to become something else.
By contrast, as the articles in this collection suggest, in Inner Asia changes of
perspective frequently take place in ways that are best described as ‘vertical’
(sensu Hugh-Jones 1996; cf. Holbraad 2007). Here, beings’ capacity to transform
themselves is conceived in irreducibly restrictive terms inasmuch as their relation-
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ships to others are deemed to be inherently asymmetrical. For example, as
Pedersen showed in his pioneering attempt to transposeAmerindian perspectivism
to the North Asian region (2001), in Mongolia, perspectivist transformations are
typically restricted to shamans (e.g. hunters’ perspectival exchange with prey is
deemed to be a ‘contamination’and is to be avoided at all cost). Furthermore, such
transformations are often conceived in terms of the shaman’s ability to embody the
perspective of an ancestral spirit and, given the patrilinial kinship ideology prevalent in the region, this implies a vertical ‘ascent’ that approximates the
hierarchically superior position of an ‘elder’ (cf. Humphrey 1996). In such cases,
we argue, changes of perspective cannot only be a matter of actualising a potential
that already exists immanently within all beings, since beings are asymmetrically
circumscribed in terms of their relative lack of precisely such a potential. Rather,
beings’ perspectivist transformations must also involve the capacity to occupy
perspectives that are transcendent to them. So, subverting Viveiros de Castro’s
Amerindian formula, we might say that in Inner Asia beings can ‘become-other’
not because they are themselves already ‘other’, but rather because the perspectives that they can occupy in a crucial sense remain other to them, i.e. they are
constituted as what we call ‘transcendent perspectives’.
Now, we are aware that such an inversion of Amerindian perspectivism may
appear untenable or even contradictory. If, as we want to argue, hierarchical or
otherwise asymmetrical relationships between beings render their respective
perspectives ‘transcendent’ to one another, then is this not a way of saying by fiat
that perspectival transformations – shifts from one ‘transcendent’ perspective to
another – are in fact impossible? How can any being occupy a transcendent
perspective if what is meant by ‘transcendent’ is precisely a perspective that
cannot be occupied by that being? How, in other words, can perspectivism and
transcendence be rendered compatible if, as it would seem, one is defined in
terms of the absence of the other? In such a view, the attempt to ‘stretch’ perspectivism with reference to Inner Asian emphases on verticality (hierarchy,
asymmetry and so on) seems a stretch too far.
Indeed, we would argue that precisely this assumption, that the dilemma
between perspectivist transformation and transcendence is insoluble, is present in
a number of the contributions to this volume. For example, both Kristensen and
Swancutt, in ethnographic analyses that are otherwise highly suggestive as we
shall see, articulate Mongolian incarnations of perspectivist transformation in
opposition to ‘the somewhat more rigid hierarchical order and social values of …
everyday life’ (Kristensen this volume), so that perspectival changes become a
matter of ‘levelling out of “differences” between subjects’ (Swancutt this
volume). In doing so, they both follow Pedersen’s tendency in the aforementioned article to predicate perspectivism and transcendence upon two contrasting
‘social ontologies’, namely what he calls ‘animism’, articulated as a continuous
universe in which different beings relate to one another on a principle of ‘analogous identification’, and ‘totemism’, presented as a discontinuous ‘grid’ that
places beings in relationships of ‘homologous differentiation’ (Pedersen 2001).
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In fact, while Pedersen’s contribution to the present volume can be seen as a
consummate attempt to overcome the dualism of his earlier account, his analysis
tends to uphold the idea that perspectivist transformations and transcendence are
ultimately irreconcilable. Expressing reservations about the ‘virtualist’ premise
of Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivist model (see also below), Pedersen seeks to
formulate a Mongolian version of perspectivism that springs from a cosmology
in which different beings exist in splendid isolation from one another, separated
by intervals of unmarked ‘void’ – an image that recalls the grid-metaphor of his
earlier article. In such a universe perspectivism ought not to be construed as a
matter of‘becoming’ at all, he argues, but rather as one of ‘abrupt’ or ‘intervalic’
perspectival exchanges involving ‘leaps from one discrete form of being to
another, equally discrete form of being’ (this volume).
Compelling as it may be as a highly original position in the anthropological
debate about perspectivism, this suggestion arguably amounts to an assertion of a
particularly strong version of what we are calling ‘transcendence’, and does so
unapologetically at the expense of the very idea of transformation. On Pedersen’s
view, different beings’ perspectives are not just ‘beyond’ each other, but rather
exist in ‘parallel universes’ – a stance that seems confluent with Højer’s analysis
in this volume of how in their economic transactions contemporary Mongols
often seek to avoid exchanging perspectives with others altogether. While it is
beyond our ethnographic expertise to determine the extent of such ‘isolationist’
tendencies in Inner Asian cosmologies (islands of being existing ‘indifferently’to
each other, to use Højer’s expression), we would point out that other contributions to this volume, including Mongolist ones, suggest that perspectivist
transformations in the Inner Asian region often do take place within a framework
of perspectives that, while transcendent to each other, are nevertheless deemed to
be related in determinate ways – e.g. in terms of social and cosmological hierarchies (Kristensen, Swancutt), kinship positions (Empson & Delaplace), concepts
of ownership (Broz), degrees of pollution (Da Col) and so forth. In fact we would
suggest that by excluding such relationships, Pedersen’s model falls short of
presenting a complete theorisation not only of perspectivist transformation as
such, which it denies, but also, paradoxically, of the ‘isolationist’ image of transcendence (or ‘parallelism’) it affirms. The central idea that on the isolationist
equivalent of transformation beings’ perspectival ‘jumps’ involve ‘piecing
together (as opposed to merging into one hybrid mixture) two radically different
points of view’ (Pedersen this volume) is ambiguous. If different viewpoints can
be ‘pieced together’ then how exactly are they ‘different’? In other words, if the
radical transcendence of each perspective can be overcome in a ‘jump’, then in
what sense are perspectives transcendent at all? We are left, it seems, with the
antinomy of perspectivism versus transcendence.
The aim of this Afterword is to offer a solution to this general problem. If
perspectivism and transcendence appear contradictory, then what is required, we
suggest, is an analytical frame that modifies the premises of both in such a way as
to remove the contradiction. The key idea here is that there is a coherent analyt-
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ical story to be told – one which accommodates perspectivism and transcendence
within a single analytical frame – if one bites the bullet of the apparent contradiction between perspectivism and transcendence, by redefining each in terms of the
other or, in other words, by rendering them mutually constitutive.
In this view, perspectivism turns not on the ability of each being to contain
all others’ perspectives within it as immanent possibilities (as in Viveiros de
Castro’s model), but rather on its ability to contain them all as what we call a
‘transcendental’ impossibility. Each perspective, in other words, is indeed
constituted by its relations to all other perspectives, and in this sense ‘contains’
them, as the Amerindian model has it. However, as we propose to show, what
makes these relations transcendent rather than immanent is precisely the fact
that they are contained by each perspective as a totality. If each perspective is
constituted in relation to ‘all possible perspectives’, as perspectivism requires,
then, we argue, it is constituted in relation to an impossibility, since the view
from all possible perspectives – the transcendental ‘view from everywhere’, as
we call it – is not one that can possibly be occupied. So we define perspectivism
in essentially ‘negative’ terms: each perspective is constituted in relation to (and
thus contains) an impossible ‘view from everywhere’. Conversely, we define
transcendence ‘positively’. The irreducibly ‘impossible’ element that renders
each perspective transcendent is not to be understood in terms of some ‘lack’,
as habitual ways of thinking about transcendence might have it, but rather in
terms of an ‘excessive presence’, if you like. What makes perspectives transcendent is that they contain within themselves too many, rather than too few,
viewpoints – the ‘view from everywhere’ rather than the perhaps more familiar
‘view from nowhere’.
In what follows, we begin by exploring the implications of this ‘having-thecake-and-eating-it’ logic (negative immanence, positive transcendence) with
reference to Merleau-Ponty’s late writings on perception – thoughts published
posthumously (1968), and reconstructed by the philosophical commentator Sean
Dorrance Kelly (2005). As we hope to show, the analytical frame we elaborate is
able to illuminate three related ethnographic conundrums posed by the contributions to this volume. First, the fact that spirits are never deemed to be seen as
such, but rather invariably appear as distorted or otherwise anomalous bodies.
Second, that in Inner Asia perspectivist transformations typically take on an
asymmetrical character, as already mentioned. Finally, that perspectival transformations in this region often occur in an explicitly ‘temporal’ dimension.
Spirits and the view from everywhere
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception proposes a radical break with our intuitive,
commonsense understanding of vision as located where our eyes are. In a literal
sense, our commonsense assumption is egocentric: the world is centred upon the
perceiver. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, such subject-centred notion of
vision is actually misleading:
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When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible
from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can ‘see’;
the back of my lamp is nothing other than the face which it ‘shows’ to the
chimney. I can therefore see an object insofar as objects form a system or a world
and insofar as each of them treats the objects around it like spectators of its hidden
aspects and a guarantee of its permanence (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945]: 79)
Let us explain this somewhat cryptic passage, which pushes vision into the odd
realm where every object grows eyes and stares back. Given that our perception
of an object always takes place from one perspectival point of view or another,
we can never see the object in its totality but only partly. There will always be a
‘hidden side’, which remains absent from our direct view. Nevertheless, we
immediately presume that there is more to the object than what is exhibited to our
‘naked eye’. If this were not so, we would experience the object as a two-dimensional façade and not as a fully-fledged three-dimensional reality. So there is a
sense in which we see the object as having sides that are hidden from view.
Merleau-Ponty explains this by arguing that it is because our own perspective is
entangled in a vast sprawling web of viewpoints, which surrounds the focal thing
and provides the supporting context for that side of the object which is in view at
any one time, that we experience it to be deep or solid rather than just flat.
Without this matrix of other viewpoints, weaving the object through to its core,
the directly given aspect of the thing would simply lose its sense of depth and
volume – that is, it would lose its three-dimensionality.
Accordingly, it is, so to speak, ‘because vision is everywhere that we as
perspectival beings are able to see things from somewhere – that is, from one
particular perspectival viewpoint or another’ (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2007:
92, our emphasis). Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘view from everywhere’ the ‘normative ideal’ (Kelly 2005: 91). It might be imagined as a kind of cubist presentation
in which every side of the object is presented simultaneously to us in a single –
though ‘general’ – perspective. Crucially, however, such a perspective is impossible to adopt. While we can understand the ‘view from everywhere’
intellectually, we can never actually see things in their totality, simply because
seeing in its nature is embodied and therefore perspectival. Even so, ‘the view
from everywhere’ is a viewpoint that we cannot do without. It underlies every
perspective as the ‘invisible’ background that allows things to stand out in their
visibility. As Merleau-Ponty expresses it: ‘the proper essence of the visible [the
view from somewhere] is to have a lining of invisibility [the “view from everywhere”]… which it makes present as a certain absence’ (1964: 187, our
emphasis). In other words, while the ‘view from everywhere’ implies the world
seen in totally clear and unambiguous visibility – that is, the world as laid bare in
absolute transparency – it is a view that must ‘hide itself’ in order for the visible
world to appear before our eyes. As such, the ‘view from everywhere’ is a view
that cannot be an object of our perspectival seeing except ‘negatively’, that is by
its absence.
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It seems to us that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, in which vision
transcends immediate perspectival seeing, offers an appropriate framework for
exploring what ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ might mean in perspectivism. Let us begin by
drawing attention to the important similarity between Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
the ‘normative ideal’ and what Viveiros de Castro describes as the grounding or
origin of perspectivism in mythical past (this volume) – later we also point to
their differences. In the ‘absolute past’of myth, Viveiros de Castro tells us, bodily
differences along with their distinctions of perspectives were not yet actualised.
Instead, what prevailed was a ‘condition endowed with perfect transparency – a
“chaosmos” where the bodily and spiritual dimensions of being did not yet reciprocally eclipse each other’ (original emphasis). Moreover, this mythical
condition, rather than being an actual point in time was never present, and therefore never passes and thus underlies the present-day somatic matrix of bodies as
invisible spirits or souls, with their infinite capacity for transformation (see also
below).
Were we to express it in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, the
condition that Viveiros de Castro describes is none other than the ‘normative
ideal’ – the ‘view from everywhere’ – in which the world is laid bare in absolute
transparency. It is this pre-perspectival world – this prototype of being – marked,
as it were, by an ‘anonymous’ or ‘general seeing’, that underlies every bodily
perspective as its vital or animating principle (Willerslev 2006: 34). In the terminology of perspectivist theory, this can only be the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, which, as
Viveiros de Castro points out, provides all beings with ‘the ability to adopt a point
of view’, but which is ‘formally identical in all species’ and, therefore, marks no
divisions or differences (1998: 478).
This, we argue, explains why no one (not even beings that hunt for souls2)
ever sees souls or spirits as such, since no achievable perspective allows for
seeing this ‘anonymous’ or ‘general seeing’ that is nothing but a transcendental
abstraction, defined as the totality of all viewpoints. All that is ever seen are
bodies, which is how beings are assigned their particular perspective within this
vast, tangled network of an otherwise ‘invisible’ anonymously given vision. So
‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, on this interpretation, is the body seen in its totality or absolute
visibility, leaving nothing hidden – that is, the body seen from all sides, in all
relationships all at once. However, no one (including shamans, about whom
more below) can take up such a viewpoint. Indeed, this is why ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is
a ‘normative ideal’ and not an actual thing to be seen.
SEEING LIKE A SPIRIT AND SEEING INTO THE WORLD OF SPIRITS
With these observations in mind, let us turn to Humphrey’s (this volume) illuminating description of the shamanic séance among the Horchin Mongols. The
Horchin woman shaman has encircled her body with mirrors, which hang all
around her hips facing outwards. The participants sit in a circle around the shaman,
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looking into the mirrors. The mirrors, Humphrey proposes, produce two different
kinds of perspectives, from ‘outside the mirrors’ (looking into them) and from
‘inside the mirrors’(looking outwards). The first type of perspective is taken up by
the participants, who rather than seeing their own reflections in the mirrors’cloudy,
often mottled surface, see what is on the mirror’s ‘other side’ – the world of the
spirits. The second type of perspective, from within the mirrors facing outwards, is
that of the spirits themselves – a perspective the shaman embodies.
What is to be understood by spirit here? The ethnographic image that
Humphrey presents suggests an answer. The woman shaman, we are told, is a
spirit during the séance because one or more of them possesses her. Yet, we might
add that what constitutes the shaman as a spirit is also her placement within the
circle of viewpoints. The shaman is in a very literal sense looked at from all
possible viewpoints by the surrounding participants, and a spirit is, as we have
just argued, nothing but the body seen from everywhere all at once. Thus, the
shaman is constituted as a spirit by the viewpoints of the participants whose
collective view approximates the ‘view from everywhere’.
However, the shaman herself could also be said to embody this ‘spirit’ viewpoint that sees everything. By encircling her body with mirrors facing outwards,
the shaman provides herself with what in principle is an indefinite number of
additional eyes. In this way, she extends or even replaces her own embodied
perspectival vision with an ‘anonymous’ or ‘general seeing’ that reveals the
world transparently. Indeed, were it not for the fact that we are told that the
Mongols do not have an idea of a primordial mythical time (see Humphrey and
Pedersen this volume) as described by Viveiros de Castro for Amazonia, we
could say that the shaman sees right into the world of mythical existence, seen as
the totality of all possible perspectives.
The fact that the Mongols do not have a conception of such mythical pasts of
endless becoming is suggestive of how they conceive the shaman during the
séance. This becomes apparent when we turn to the perspective of the audience.
Humphrey tells us that what the audience see when looking into the cloudy
surface of the mirrors is not a perfect reflection, but a slightly distorted image,
which ‘opens up their vision to what is on the mirror’s other side’ – the world of
the spirits. In this sense, people rather than looking into the mirrors ‘see through
[them]’ (original emphasis). Indeed, we would argue that the fact that the figures
seen in the mirrors are distorted is just as significant. It reminds us that the present
volume is abundant with ethnographic examples of how the peoples of Inner Asia
conceive spiritual beings in an essentially non-realist and sometimes monstrous
fashion. Empson & Delaplace (this volume), for example, describe the so-called
‘little humans’, who are said to be a kind of miniaturised version of humans, and
Pedersen gives a vivid and rather terrifying account of the ‘half people’, who, as
the name suggests, appear to the human eye as half bodies, the other half being
absent.
Why this crude, monstrous and essentially non-realist depiction of spiritual
beings? We would argue that if the ‘invisible’ world of spirits is defined as the
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‘view from everywhere’, then it follows that such a viewpoint cannot be
embodied in any conventional realist form. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘Since the
total invisible [the “view from everywhere”] is always behind, or after, or
between the aspects we see of it, there is access to it only through an experience
which like it, is wholly outside of itself’ (1968: 136, our emphasis). What he is
pointing to here is that it is only through a disruption or defamiliarisation of
realist perspectival seeing that the invisible ground of vision can be revealed. So
the spirit way of seeing the world from everywhere all at once, can never be
perceptually grasped as it really is, but only sensed through ‘absence’. This is
exactly what Empson & Delaplace point to when they state that encounters with
spiritual beings in Mongolia tend always to be:
described as sensations at the same time incomplete and intermitted … e.g. frying
smells with no one seen frying or bell rings with no bell in sight… These particular sensations are rendered with verbs which convey a doubtful experience,
something the narrator is unable to identify clearly… (original emphases).
Similarly, in Humphrey’s ethnography, what the audience see when looking into
the distorted images in the mirrors is not the spirit world per se. Rather, they get a
glimpse of it at work, in much the same as we, when looking at a Cubist painting,
do not see the nature of the object as it really is – that is, the ‘normative ideal’ –
which cannot be represented. Instead, we perceive its workings through the
sensed presence of that which is always absent, ‘the view from everywhere’.
But what about the shaman, who by surrounding her body with mirrors facing
outward, extends her ‘normal’ perspectival vision with additional eyes? Does she
see the world from everywhere as it really is? Certainly, by adopting a multiplicity of viewpoints all at once, the shaman must see much more and much
better than ordinary perspectival seeing. The fact that the Mongols often see the
shaman’s mirrors as ‘miniature copies of the universe … that reflect everything,
inside and outside’ (Loubo-Lesnitchenko and Heissig in Humphrey this volume)
would support this general idea. Still, we venture to claim that the shaman does
not fully occupy the ‘view from everywhere’, since no embodied subject can
fully occupy this view. As Humphrey also points out:
The ontological difference at issue here is that between a ‘being of the physicallylimited living human kind’ [that is, an embodied being] as against that of a ‘being
of the former-human, dispersed, and universalised spirit kind’ [that is, a disembodied spirit].
So while shamans may artificially extend their number of eyes and thereby
assume the spirit perspective, they cannot take up the ‘view from everywhere’ in
an absolute sense (we return to this point below). Perhaps this is the reason why
not even shamans are clear about what spirits actually see. As Humphrey points
out, ‘evidence of what the world of the Living looks like from the perspective of
Beyond Death is more scanty and uncertain’.
This leads us to a further point. Humphrey argues that the shaman’s mirrors
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are both armour and weapon, they are ‘both container for incoming helper spirits
of the shaman and provide protection against curses and attacks from external
evil-intentioned people and spirits’. Building on this, we would argue that there is
also a sense in which the mirrors protect the audience, who by looking into them
not only get a glimpse of the spirit world at work, but are also reminded of the
limitation of their own perspectival seeing. Why is this important? Well, had they
been Amerindians and had they been able to see the spirit world as it really is –
that is, from a ‘view from everywhere’ – it would imply transforming into mythical existence, from which people have estranged themselves with such great
effort. In the Mongolian context in which no such origin myth of becoming exists
and where the world, with all its divisions and dichotomies, along with its
emphasis on hierarchical ordered differences (see Kristensen and Swancutt this
volume), is taken to be the natural order of things (see Humphrey and Pedersen
this volume), any such condition of absolute indistinction of perspectives would
simply mean the ‘end of the world’ – a condition that recalls Empson’s
Mongolian informants’ description of the ‘Time of Great Calamities’ (Empson
2006).
A HIERARCHY OF PERSPECTIVES
Having provided the above analysis of spirits, understood as ‘views from everywhere’, we may now turn to the key question of the role of transcendence in Inner
Asian perspectivism. That such a move is viable is suggested by the fact that, as
so many of the contributions to this volume reiterate, the perspectives of the
spirits that shamans are able to embody (albeit always incompletely as we have
argued) are so often conceived in irreducibly asymmetrical and often ‘vertical’
terms. For example, Broz argues that in the Altai, the relationship between people
and eeler (the animal master spirit) is asymmetrical in terms of power. It is ‘eeler
who have the power to punish people for improper behaviour, not the other way
around’ (this volume). Likewise, in her contribution, Kristensen describes how
among Duha herders, the distinction between beings relies on a difference in rank.
In fact, as many of the contributors also suggest, the hierarchical character of
Inner Asian spirits marks a key difference from the Amerindian cosmologies that
Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivist model articulates (see Swancutt, Humphrey
and Pedersen this volume). As Viveiros de Castro describes in this volume, in
Amazonia all cosmologically significant beings are spirits. To Amerindians
under ordinary conditions (i.e. when they are not shamanising, hallucinating,
dreaming, hunting and so on), beings appear in the form of their ‘speciated’
bodies (humans, jaguars, Whites, thunder, etc.) but this takes nothing away from
their irreducibly spiritual character. As ‘laminated’ or ‘crystallised’ forms of
spirits, all beings are indexes of the pre-cosmological ‘chaosmos’ of origin myths
which, as we have already touched upon, constitutes the condition of the ‘bifurcat
[ion] … of a relative invisibility (human souls and animal spirits) and a relative
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opacity (the human body and the somatic animal ‘clothing’) which determines
the make-up of all present-day beings’ (original emphases). Viveiros de Castro
continues:
The heterogenic continuum of the pre-cosmological world gives way, therefore,
to a homogenic ‘discretum’, where each being is only what it is, and is only what it
is by not being what it is not. But spirits are testimony to the fact that not all virtualities were actualised, and that the mythical river run of fluent metamorphosis
continues its turbulent course not too far below the surface discontinuities separating the types and species.
The key consequence of the immanence, albeit ordinarily invisible, of spirits as
the virtual residue of all actualised beings is, of course, perspectivism. If all
beings are spirits, and spirits are defined by their capacity to undergo mythic
transformations, then all beings are constituted by their potential for transformation, i.e. the adoption of another being’s point of view. Indeed, it follows, as
Viveiros de Castro describes, that since all humans are spirits too (they have
‘souls’), they also have the capacity to transform themselves, a capacity shamans,
dreamers, hunters and so on display. Hence, for example, for the Yanomami ‘“to
become a shaman” is a synonym of “to become a spirit” (xapiripru [from
xapiripë, the Yanomami word for “spirit”])’, and is conceived as a capacity that
all humans possess, albeit to different degrees of expertise (see also Swancutt this
volume).
The ethnographic premise, then, of perspectivism is spirit. Now, our argument about the transmutation of perspectivism to the ‘vertical’ setting of Inner
Asia turns precisely on this premise. As we have just seen, Viveiros de Castro’s
‘horizontal’ model lays supreme emphasis on the immanence of spirits as the
virtual counterparts of all beings. It is, if you like, by virtue of always being more
(virtually) than they are (actually) that all beings have the potential to become
something else. From an Inner Asian point of view, however, the problem with
this image is that it tends to preclude the kinds of distinctions between perspectives that are necessary to articulate perspectivist transformations in vertical
terms. As Viveiros de Castro himself points out, the virtual domain in which
beings qua spirits transform themselves is one of ‘indistinction’ and ‘transductivity’ – an anarchic ‘chaosmos’. So it follows that an Inner Asian model of
perspectivism requires an analysis of spirits that does not entail a ‘chaosmotic’
potential for indiscriminate transformation.
It is here, we argue, that the ‘transcendental’ analysis of spirits that we have
provided above – spirits as the unattainable ‘view from everywhere’ – becomes
pivotal. Indeed, such an analysis performs the same work for our model as
Viveiros de Castro’s ‘virtual’ analysis does for his. In Inner Asia all beings are
spirits (or have souls), much like in Amazonia. Furthermore, as in Amazonia
again, Inner Asian spirits are defined in terms of the ‘excess’ of perspectives that
they can occupy – indeed, the totality of all possible perspectives. The crucial
difference of a ‘transcendental’ analysis, however, is that precisely this excess
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renders the perspective of spirits unattainable as such. So, on this view, the fact
that all beings have spirits suggest that each being entails (viz. is constituted by) a
relationship to the unattainable ‘limit’ of all possible perspectives. Inverting
Viveiros de Castro’s ‘virtualist’formula, we might say that each being is what it is
(actually) by virtue of being ‘less’ than it is (transcendentally) or, in other words,
beings are always present by being partly absent. And, as we now propose to
show, it is precisely in terms of their relationship to their own inherent absence
that beings’ perspectives can be differentiated hierarchically, as Inner Asian
ethnography would require.
We explained how the ‘view from everywhere’ is not a view that can be held.
Nevertheless it is implicit in each particular perspective as the background to
what is seen. As such, the view from everywhere is constituted as an ideal from
which all perspectives are felt to be deviating to some degree. As Merleau-Ponty
remarks, the ‘normative ideal’ tends to be experienced as a motivational invitation to change one’s position, so as to get a better, fuller, or more optimal view of
the perceived object. Thus, not all perspectives are of equal value. While they all
deviate from the same ‘normative ideal’ some are closer to it than others. The
philosophical commentator Holenstein is particularly clear in his discussion of
the ‘optimal’ viewpoint:
We soon realise that, in the case of viewing a building, we have to go to a specific
side in order to bring out more clearly the function of the building, and yet to a
third in order to realise in an optimal way how the architecture takes up and
continues the main lines of the landscape … These series [of perspectives] characterise themselves as ascending, culminating in an optimal perspective … The
optimal perspective … tends to establish itself as absolute, making the rest of the
perspectives appear to be orientated towards it. (1999: 82)
In other words, the idea of a ‘normative ideal’ allows particular perspectives to be
differentiated in terms of the degree to which they approximate the ‘optimal
perspective’. Such an analysis, we argue, allows us to makes sense of the ‘vertical’ character of Inner Asian perspectivism. Swancutt’s penetrating analysis of
Mongolian games in this volume illustrates this particularly clearly. As social
activities, Swancutt shows, games mirror the abidingly hierarchical character of
wider social and cosmological orders in Mongolia. The experience of learning to
play games typically revolves around the asymmetrical relationship between a
novice and a master. Indeed, as Swancutt argues, the ‘virtuosity’ that masters
exemplify can be conceived as a ‘bodily affect’ that players hold to varying
degrees. Novices become virtuosos by learning to emulate their masters in the
context of pedagogical contests with them or, occasionally, by being favoured
with ‘fortune’ by the spirits – a state of being that also has strong corporeal
connotations (see Swancutt this volume). Crucially, however, the attainment of
virtuosity consists in the ability to gain an increasingly complete purview on
possible ‘moves’ within the game at any particular juncture. Thus virtuosity, for
Swancutt, is a thoroughly ‘perspectival’ phenomenon and involves transforma-
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tions on the part of players that are strictly comparable with more familiar
perspectivist scenarios, such as human–animal transformations and so on.
With regard to our argument, what is most interesting about Swancutt’s
analysis is how she theorises novices’ attainment of virtuosity in terms of an
essentially hierarchical order of perspectives. In particular, she shows how such a
hierarchy is organised with reference to a notional limit – what she calls the ‘ideal
game’. This, as she explains, is the game seen from every player’s viewpoint all
at once, in which ‘Devoid of competition, the ideal game ceaselessly gives rise to
victories and lasts indefinitely’. In direct parallel to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
the ‘normative ideal’, then, the ‘ideal game’is not one that can actually be played.
It is ‘ideal’ just in the sense that each player’s viewpoint during an actual game is
experienced as deviating from it. Indeed, as Swancutt shows, these deviations
vary according to the skill and fortune of each player. The closer to the ideal game
– the transcendental ‘view from everywhere’ – one’s perspective is, the more
‘optimal’ it is, so that the process of learning the game involves players’ shifts
along a spiral of increasingly optimal positions.
Swancutt’s detailed discussion of how ‘fortune’, understood in terms of ‘fluctuating degrees’of ‘spiritual potency’, facilitates such shifts places her discussion
of games in the context of a wide ambit of perspectivist phenomena in Mongolia
and other Inner Asian regions. For example, if fortune in games consists of players’ ability to expand the range of perspectives that they are able to adopt, then
game playing can be compared directly to the experience of the shaman of
Humphrey’s example, who gets a clearer and more transparent view of the world
by artificially extending her ordinary human vision with a number of extra eyes.
In this sense, the notion of a hierarchy of perspectives, articulated on an axis of
relative proximity to the transcendental limit of all possible perspectives, can
arguably be transposed beyond the confines of Mongolian games to include a
wide variety of forms of ‘spiritual potency’ which, so often in Inner Asia as we
have seen, is conceived in irreducibly hierarchical terms. Inner Asian perspectivism then forces us to deal with degrees of perceptive power.
Indeed, the possibility of differentiating perspectives by pointing to the
degree to which they deviate from the ‘ideal’ allows us to supplement our earlier
comments about the nature of spirits. For while in our earlier discussion we identified spirits with the ideal ‘view from everywhere’, we also noted that, as a
matter of ethnographic fact, spirits are never seen as such, but are rather depicted
in a variety of quasi-corporeal forms. Particularly relevant here is the fact that, as
many of the articles in this volume suggest, the embodied spectres of spirits in
Inner Asian cosmologies are not seen as equal, but are often classified into taxonomic pyramids with respect to their varying degrees of authority and power (e.g.
see Swancutt, Kristensen and Broz). Following the logic of our argument on the
hierarchy of perspectives, such cosmological orderings of variously embodied
spirits come as no surprise. Just as the shaman becomes perceptually more
powerful and also more spirit-like by transcending her ordinary human vision
with an extra number of eyes, so a spirit become less powerful and perceptually
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more limited, the more embodied it becomes. In other words, insofar as spirits are
embodied in a variety of ways, they are subject to the same deviations from the
pure ideal of the ‘view from everywhere’ as non-spiritual beings, only in an
inverse sense. Indeed such an inversion, we would suggest, accords with the fact
that in Inner and North Asia in general the world of the spirits is so often depicted
as a mirror reversal of the world of the living, where everything is inside-out or
back-to-front: Light becomes dark, old becomes young, left becomes right, and
so on (e.g. see Humphrey and Broz this volume; Willerslev 2007: 11)
TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVISM
One way to summarise our contrast between Amerindian ‘immanentism’ and
Inner Asian ‘transcendentalism’ would be in terms of the semiotic distinction
between ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’ structures (cf. Holbraad 2007: 217). In
Viveiros de Castro’s model, different perspectives are immanent to each other
in the sense that each perspective can in principle substitute every other, much
like the members of a semiotic ‘paradigm’ can in principle act as each other’s
equivalents (e.g. each letter of the alphabet can in principle substitute every other
since their order (a, b, c, …, z) is merely a conventional aide-mémoire). By
contrast, on the model we have presented for Inner Asia, different perspectives
are transcendent to one another in the sense that switches from one to the other
typically take place asymmetrically, inasmuch as perspectives are related to each
other in ordinal sequences that are ranked ‘syntagmatically’. After all, ranking
perspectives with respect to the degree to which each approximates the transcendental norm of ‘the view from everywhere’, as we have suggested, yields
precisely such an ordinal distribution. So if the semiotic metaphor for the
perspectives that beings can occupy in the Amerindian case is something like the
letters of the alphabet, in the Inner Asian case it would be the words that letters
can make up or, by extension, the sentences and narratives that words themselves
can build in syntax. The Inner Asian shaman, for example, becomes a spirit less
like an ‘x’ could become a ‘y’ or ‘z’, and more like Cinderella could become a
princess.
An advantage of thinking of the contrast between Amazonia and Inner Asia in
these terms is that it allows us to address the final ethnographic conundrum
presented by a number of the articles in this volume, which is that in Inner Asia
perspectivist transformations are frequently deemed to occur on an irreducibly
temporal axis. We have already seen, for example, that on Swancutt’s account the
perspectival shifts involved in Mongolian games are to be understood in sequential terms. Over time, novices can become experts by learning to adopt their
teacher’s perspective on the game, which is articulated at the moments in which a
multitude of possible ‘moves’ becomes transparent to the player – the moments
Swancutt, following Deleuze, calls ‘aleatory points’ (this volume). Particularly
suggestive in this context is that, as Swancutt explains, players’ ability to occupy
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such increasingly ‘better’ perspectives is not only a matter of emulating a teacher,
but depends also, as we have seen, on ‘boosts’ of fortune that shamanic spirits or
Buddhist deities may confer on players temporarily during a game. As a fluid
‘bodily affect’ (Swancutt this volume) that may at times be contained and at other
times lost (see also Empson 2007), fortune itself is an inherently temporal state of
being. It would follow, therefore, that if players’ ability to adopt others’ perspectives is deemed an event of fortune then those perspectives themselves must also
be seen as distributed on a temporal axis.
While the implications of a temporal view of perspectivism are explored by a
number of the contributors to this volume (e.g. see Broz), they are treated most
explicitly by Da Col in his remarkable discussion of the ways in which a variety
of Tibetan Buddhist concepts explicitly relate beings’ capacity to transform
themselves to their position on various temporal scales. For example, drawing a
direct analogy with Tibetan concepts of fortune and the body – they are both an
assemblage of forces, efficacious configurations of affectual dispositions – Da Col
(this volume) shows how various types of fortune serve to trigger beings’ ability
to temporarily transcend ontological and social hierarchies. Moreover, as Da Col
shows, in Tibet concepts of fortune exist alongside a host of further notions that
associate both the cosmological positions that particular beings occupy and their
ability to transcend those positions at particular junctures with a variety of
temporal conceptions, including cycles of karmic reincarnation. Da Col writes:
Everything is either ultimate or conventional truth, essence or appearance,
depending on one’s karma and body of fortune. Revelations will happen at the
appropriate moment. It will be a view from somewhen since a Being has to be
conceived in time, being not a singularity but a multiplicity, not one life but a
multiplicity of lives and perspectives: the sum of all the perspectives it will
traverse during the course of the virtually infinite extension of its possible lives.
Among Tibetans, karma and fortune generate an evenemental perspective, a view
from somewhen. A Being has to be conceived in time, being not a singularity but a
multiplicity, not one life but a multiplicity of lives and perspectives: the sum of all
the perspectives it will traverse during the course of the virtually infinite extension
of its possible lives … In the Tibetan world, events not things create points of
view. (Da Col, this volume, original emphases)
Such a temporalised notion of perspectivism, which as we have seen finds echoes
in other Inner Asian regions, is certainly confluent with our attempt to encompass
transcendence within a perspectivist scheme. To say, as we have done, that on a
‘transcendentalist’analysis perspectives are ordered syntagmatically is just to say
that they are ordered according to asymmetrical relations of ‘before’ and ‘after’.
Clearly such an image implies a temporal distribution just as it implies a hierarchical one. Indeed in such a view, time is a straight corollary of hierarchy, at least
in the sense that any ‘ascent’ or ‘descent’ from one hierarchical position to
another is a movement of some sort, and movement requires a time within which
to unfold, as Cinderella with her 12 o’clock deadline knew only too well. In this
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sense it is perhaps not so surprising that, in Inner Asia, perspectival shifts should
so often be thought of in hierarchical and temporal terms at once.
However, Da Col’s analysis also suggests an intriguing, if somewhat speculative, extension of the transcendentalist position. Throughout this Afterword, our
argument about transcendence has been elaborated in the language of space.
Following Viveiros de Castro, we have been thinking about perspectives as
‘points of view’, adding that the relative partiality of such viewpoints can be
differentiated normatively with reference to the total ‘view from everywhere’
which is contained within each perspective as a transcendental limit. However, it
would appear that the frequently temporal premise of Inner Asian perspectivism
allows us to add time as a further dimension of this analysis. To the extent that
particular perspectives can be construed as views from ‘somewhen’, to use Da
Col’s suggestive neologism, should the transcendental totality from which they
deviate not also be conceived as a ‘view from everywhen’? As unattainable, logically, as the Merleau-Pontyan ‘view from everywhere’ (cf. Merleau-Ponty 2002:
69–71), such a view could amount to nothing less than the view from eternity –
eternity, that is, not merely as a line of infinite time, but rather as the full plenitude
of all possible events. Perhaps it is just the unattainable ‘excess’ of such a view
that Da Col’s Buddhist friend had in mind when he explained that to conceive of
the co-existence (rather than the dualist separation, as we would add) of a
noumenal world alongside the sensible world of tulpa (illusion), you have to
think in terms of ‘emptiness’. ‘Everything is endless, infinite and circular. If you
really want to conceive an originating point, you need the concept of time but in
emptiness itself there is not even that, there is only eternity’ (Da Col, this
volume). In this sense, the Buddhist doctrine of ‘two worlds’ (illusion and eternity) can be viewed as a particularly explicit cosmological rendition of our
logical argument about co-existence of perspectivism and transcendence in Inner
Asia more generally – a permutation of ‘transcendental perspectivism’ that
makes its own logical premises cosmologically transparent.
NOTES
1The
authors have contributed equally to this article. The order of names was the result of
a coin toss.
2The Siberian Yukaghirs’ conception of the much-feared evil spirits, abasylar, illustrates
this point. These spirits are said to hunt for human souls, the ayibii. However, they never in
fact see souls as souls. Instead, they see the ayibii as bodies – that is, as elks of different
sizes and ages (Willerslev 2007: 82).
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