Els Lagrou é Professora do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia e Antropologia (PPGSA, UFRJ); bolsista do CNPq. Doutora em Antropologia Social pela University of St. Andrews e pela Universidade de São Paulo. Coordena o grupo de pesquisa NAIPE (Núcleo de Arte, Imagem e Pesquisa Etnológica) e os Seminários Ameríndios (UFRJ). Publicou os livros A fluidez da forma: arte, alteridade e agência em uma sociedade amazônica (Topbooks, 2007), Arte indígena no Brasil (ComArte, 2009, 2015), editou com Carlo Severi Quimeras em diálogo, grafismo e figuração nas artes ameríndias (7Letras, 2014) e editou o catálogo No caminho da miçanga (MI/UNESCO, 2017).
The Huni Kuin (Cashinahua) from the Northwestern Amazonian rainforest value design very much and ... more The Huni Kuin (Cashinahua) from the Northwestern Amazonian rainforest value design very much and call themselves, along with signi cant non- human others, keneya beings – beings ‘with design.’1 The presence of design points toward speci c cognitive, agentive and transformational capacities. The engendering of pattern in body painting and weaving is a female art and is understood by men and women alike to condense complex thought pro- cesses. In this chapter, I intend to show how patterns manifest connections across different topological levels of space-time and capture – in a visual formula – the logic of multiple relations and iterations that compose any single being. The art of patterning, thus, constitutes a relational topography, showing how proper distances should be kept and created, while showing, at the same time, how these distances collapse during the transformational processes of other-becoming that characterise all personal biographies of human beings in this Amerindian relational ontology.
This article explores how different formal techniques used by the Cashinahua and other “people wi... more This article explores how different formal techniques used by the Cashinahua and other “people with design” can be considered as “perspectival techniques”, meaning techniques enabling the onlooker to change point of view. I also consider the possibility of baptizing these design systems as “abstract chimeras”. I use chimera in the sense given to the term by Severi, calling attention to the tension between what is shown and what is hidden in an image. I argue that in the case of Amerindian design systems we are dealing with extremely minimalistic images, which suppose a real engagement of the act of seeing with the image. I show how different formal characteristics of the composition of the images constitute techniques for the focalization of the gaze, whose kinesthetic effect consists in projecting the onlooker into the graphic space, causing the opacity of the surface to disappear and producing movement and profundity in the perceptive space. The line produces the suggestion of tra...
Os instigantes textos de Els Lagrou e Shirley Campbell publicados nessa sessao dialogam, em maior... more Os instigantes textos de Els Lagrou e Shirley Campbell publicados nessa sessao dialogam, em maior ou menor grau, com uma polemica sobre o mesmo tema que ocorreu ha quase 20 anos, na Inglaterra, e cuja transcricao se tornou um classico para quem se aventura pela antropologia da arte. Em 1993, houve uma serie de debates envolvendo questoes controversas na antropologia, posteriormente publicados na coletânea Key Debates in Anthropology , editada por Tim Ingold. Dentre os debates, um chamou especial atencao, sobretudo para os antropologos que, pouco a pouco, voltavam a lidar com a producao de cultura material e tambem com performances, tanto em contextos ocidentais, quanto em realidades “nao-ocidentais”. Trata-se da discussao travada entre Joana Overing, Peter Gow, Jeremy Coote e Howard Morphy acerca da possibilidade do uso transcultural da nocao de estetica. O acalorado debate nao mobilizou apenas esses quatro intelectuais. Alem deles, uma serie de outros nomes importantissimos para o...
Este artigo visa mostrar, a partir da analise do papel da micanga na historia, nos mitos e nos ri... more Este artigo visa mostrar, a partir da analise do papel da micanga na historia, nos mitos e nos ritos de diferentes grupos amerindios, como este item pode nos permitir lancar nova luz sobre temas importantes na discussao contemporânea da etnologia e estetica amerindia, como a importância dada pelos amerindios ao ‘saber fazer', o conhecimento da origem e o papel dos donos das substâncias e dos dominios. Outro tema central a socialidade amerindia e o papel da incorporacao das forcas agentivas da alteridade na constituicao da pessoa. Mostramos que a ‘captura' das forcas exogenas contidas na micanga segue uma logica estetica local. Por ultimo o artigo chama a atencao para o rendimento teorico da superposicao sistematica dos discursos amerindios que dizem respeito a artefatos e a corpos, mostrando como corpos sao produzidos esteticamente e artefatos existem em intima correlacao com corpos. On the Way of Beads: Art and Alterity Among Amerindians Through the analysis of the role of ...
Pour interpréter les faits de culture, l’anthropologie a longtemps adopté un modèle linguistique ... more Pour interpréter les faits de culture, l’anthropologie a longtemps adopté un modèle linguistique et symbolique. L’approche proposée ici se démarque de cette approche traditionnelle, et propose d’étudier plutôt les différentes manières dont l’image et la parole s’entremêlent dans la production des corps, des signes et des mémoires au sein d’une société. Cet ouvrage présente les résultats des recherches d’un groupe de chercheurs français et brésiliens, qui a déjà donné lieu à la publication d’un premier livre consacré à l’image dans un contexte rituel. Le dossier est ici rouvert afin d’étudier, dans un contexte amérindien et populaire, la façon dont les mots et les images se construisent mutuellement pour tisser un système de mémoire inscrit dans les corps et dans les artefacts
The power of discourse in ritual performance: rhetoric …, 2007
... Besides the poetic procedures of repetition and the extensive use of tropes (for metaphor as ... more ... Besides the poetic procedures of repetition and the extensive use of tropes (for metaphor as well as metonymy, see J. Fernandez 1991), ritual language uses a special vocabulary of what my interpreters called" old words of the ancestors" or" words from other Pano languages". ...
Ce dossier est consacré à une réflexion, entre anthropologues et historiens de l’art, sur le rôle... more Ce dossier est consacré à une réflexion, entre anthropologues et historiens de l’art, sur le rôle de l’ambigüité dans la représentation visuelle. Potentielle, double ou chimérique, l’image ambiguë a récemment suscité la réflexion, dans les deux disciplines, en termes nouveaux. Pour en rendre compte, nous avons réuni des recherches menées par des ethnologues et des réflexions autour de l’exposition Une image peut en cacher une autre, où le thème de l’ambigüité de l’image était appréhendé du point de vue de l’histoire de l’art. En dialogue avec des historiens de l’art, des ethnologues interrogent, à partir d’autres horizons, la notion de chimère. Selon les différentes cultures, entre invisible et donné à voir, cette notion peut se décliner d’une autre manière que dans la tradition occidentale, se radicaliser, ou se démultiplier sur d’autres registres que la seule vision. C’est cette complexité de l’image ambigüe, et l’espace de recherche que cette complexité ouvre en anthropologie et ...
Este artículo muestra el modo en que los cashinahua conciben la relación entre identidad y difere... more Este artículo muestra el modo en que los cashinahua conciben la relación entre identidad y diferencia en su arte gráfica, en su sistema de mitades y en su filosofía marcada por un dualismo dinámico, donde el otro participa en la constitución del yo, y viceversa, y donde cada posición es siempre hipotética -y ritualmente reversible, posee claras cualidades perspectivistas. El estilo del pensamiento perspectivista implica una constante conciencia de la posibilidad de cambio de puntos de vista.
In this article I explore the ontological turn in anthropological theory through three interconne... more In this article I explore the ontological turn in anthropological theory through three interconnected approaches. First, I situate the academic success of Amerindian ontologies in the context of recent debates on the urgency of addressing the political consequences of the anthropocene. Secondly, I undertake an archaeology of the concept of perspectivism as a central stage of the ontological turn, showing how the sub-discipline of Amerindian ethnology has always had a vocation for Copernican turnings, from the time of Montaigne until today. In conclusion, I argue for a return to aesthetics and poetics as the quintessential domains for exploring how different ontologies can teach us to look at the world differently. To understand the multiple versions of Amerindian relational ontologies we have to be able to perceive the relational character of the aesthetics they reveal. The argument is sustained by a short presentation of Huni Kuin (Cashinahua) aesthetics as revealed in huni meka, a...
After depicting the contemporary scene of Huni Kuin ayahuasca shamanism and artistic agency, I an... more After depicting the contemporary scene of Huni Kuin ayahuasca shamanism and artistic agency, I analyze a selection of image-songs from this ritual. The songs unveil the workings of embodied perception and synesthesia, that is, the transductions of bodily sensations and perceptions in vision, rhythm, song and sound. The experience entails a process of other-becoming where to know means to see through the eyes of Other; to be covered with the skin/ornaments of those beings one has consumed and to sing through their voice. This other-becoming is a becoming in a deleuzian sense, which means that the lived experience is situated in-between the space of self and other. In this context the expression “you are what you eat” has specific implications for one’s health and for the acquisition of agentive and perceptive capabilities of other beings. The ritual technique of almost becoming consists of alternatingly producing and undoing temporary transformations through song.
The Huni Kuin (Cashinahua) from the Northwestern Amazonian rainforest value design very much and ... more The Huni Kuin (Cashinahua) from the Northwestern Amazonian rainforest value design very much and call themselves, along with signi cant non- human others, keneya beings – beings ‘with design.’1 The presence of design points toward speci c cognitive, agentive and transformational capacities. The engendering of pattern in body painting and weaving is a female art and is understood by men and women alike to condense complex thought pro- cesses. In this chapter, I intend to show how patterns manifest connections across different topological levels of space-time and capture – in a visual formula – the logic of multiple relations and iterations that compose any single being. The art of patterning, thus, constitutes a relational topography, showing how proper distances should be kept and created, while showing, at the same time, how these distances collapse during the transformational processes of other-becoming that characterise all personal biographies of human beings in this Amerindian relational ontology.
This article explores how different formal techniques used by the Cashinahua and other “people wi... more This article explores how different formal techniques used by the Cashinahua and other “people with design” can be considered as “perspectival techniques”, meaning techniques enabling the onlooker to change point of view. I also consider the possibility of baptizing these design systems as “abstract chimeras”. I use chimera in the sense given to the term by Severi, calling attention to the tension between what is shown and what is hidden in an image. I argue that in the case of Amerindian design systems we are dealing with extremely minimalistic images, which suppose a real engagement of the act of seeing with the image. I show how different formal characteristics of the composition of the images constitute techniques for the focalization of the gaze, whose kinesthetic effect consists in projecting the onlooker into the graphic space, causing the opacity of the surface to disappear and producing movement and profundity in the perceptive space. The line produces the suggestion of tra...
Os instigantes textos de Els Lagrou e Shirley Campbell publicados nessa sessao dialogam, em maior... more Os instigantes textos de Els Lagrou e Shirley Campbell publicados nessa sessao dialogam, em maior ou menor grau, com uma polemica sobre o mesmo tema que ocorreu ha quase 20 anos, na Inglaterra, e cuja transcricao se tornou um classico para quem se aventura pela antropologia da arte. Em 1993, houve uma serie de debates envolvendo questoes controversas na antropologia, posteriormente publicados na coletânea Key Debates in Anthropology , editada por Tim Ingold. Dentre os debates, um chamou especial atencao, sobretudo para os antropologos que, pouco a pouco, voltavam a lidar com a producao de cultura material e tambem com performances, tanto em contextos ocidentais, quanto em realidades “nao-ocidentais”. Trata-se da discussao travada entre Joana Overing, Peter Gow, Jeremy Coote e Howard Morphy acerca da possibilidade do uso transcultural da nocao de estetica. O acalorado debate nao mobilizou apenas esses quatro intelectuais. Alem deles, uma serie de outros nomes importantissimos para o...
Este artigo visa mostrar, a partir da analise do papel da micanga na historia, nos mitos e nos ri... more Este artigo visa mostrar, a partir da analise do papel da micanga na historia, nos mitos e nos ritos de diferentes grupos amerindios, como este item pode nos permitir lancar nova luz sobre temas importantes na discussao contemporânea da etnologia e estetica amerindia, como a importância dada pelos amerindios ao ‘saber fazer', o conhecimento da origem e o papel dos donos das substâncias e dos dominios. Outro tema central a socialidade amerindia e o papel da incorporacao das forcas agentivas da alteridade na constituicao da pessoa. Mostramos que a ‘captura' das forcas exogenas contidas na micanga segue uma logica estetica local. Por ultimo o artigo chama a atencao para o rendimento teorico da superposicao sistematica dos discursos amerindios que dizem respeito a artefatos e a corpos, mostrando como corpos sao produzidos esteticamente e artefatos existem em intima correlacao com corpos. On the Way of Beads: Art and Alterity Among Amerindians Through the analysis of the role of ...
Pour interpréter les faits de culture, l’anthropologie a longtemps adopté un modèle linguistique ... more Pour interpréter les faits de culture, l’anthropologie a longtemps adopté un modèle linguistique et symbolique. L’approche proposée ici se démarque de cette approche traditionnelle, et propose d’étudier plutôt les différentes manières dont l’image et la parole s’entremêlent dans la production des corps, des signes et des mémoires au sein d’une société. Cet ouvrage présente les résultats des recherches d’un groupe de chercheurs français et brésiliens, qui a déjà donné lieu à la publication d’un premier livre consacré à l’image dans un contexte rituel. Le dossier est ici rouvert afin d’étudier, dans un contexte amérindien et populaire, la façon dont les mots et les images se construisent mutuellement pour tisser un système de mémoire inscrit dans les corps et dans les artefacts
The power of discourse in ritual performance: rhetoric …, 2007
... Besides the poetic procedures of repetition and the extensive use of tropes (for metaphor as ... more ... Besides the poetic procedures of repetition and the extensive use of tropes (for metaphor as well as metonymy, see J. Fernandez 1991), ritual language uses a special vocabulary of what my interpreters called" old words of the ancestors" or" words from other Pano languages". ...
Ce dossier est consacré à une réflexion, entre anthropologues et historiens de l’art, sur le rôle... more Ce dossier est consacré à une réflexion, entre anthropologues et historiens de l’art, sur le rôle de l’ambigüité dans la représentation visuelle. Potentielle, double ou chimérique, l’image ambiguë a récemment suscité la réflexion, dans les deux disciplines, en termes nouveaux. Pour en rendre compte, nous avons réuni des recherches menées par des ethnologues et des réflexions autour de l’exposition Une image peut en cacher une autre, où le thème de l’ambigüité de l’image était appréhendé du point de vue de l’histoire de l’art. En dialogue avec des historiens de l’art, des ethnologues interrogent, à partir d’autres horizons, la notion de chimère. Selon les différentes cultures, entre invisible et donné à voir, cette notion peut se décliner d’une autre manière que dans la tradition occidentale, se radicaliser, ou se démultiplier sur d’autres registres que la seule vision. C’est cette complexité de l’image ambigüe, et l’espace de recherche que cette complexité ouvre en anthropologie et ...
Este artículo muestra el modo en que los cashinahua conciben la relación entre identidad y difere... more Este artículo muestra el modo en que los cashinahua conciben la relación entre identidad y diferencia en su arte gráfica, en su sistema de mitades y en su filosofía marcada por un dualismo dinámico, donde el otro participa en la constitución del yo, y viceversa, y donde cada posición es siempre hipotética -y ritualmente reversible, posee claras cualidades perspectivistas. El estilo del pensamiento perspectivista implica una constante conciencia de la posibilidad de cambio de puntos de vista.
In this article I explore the ontological turn in anthropological theory through three interconne... more In this article I explore the ontological turn in anthropological theory through three interconnected approaches. First, I situate the academic success of Amerindian ontologies in the context of recent debates on the urgency of addressing the political consequences of the anthropocene. Secondly, I undertake an archaeology of the concept of perspectivism as a central stage of the ontological turn, showing how the sub-discipline of Amerindian ethnology has always had a vocation for Copernican turnings, from the time of Montaigne until today. In conclusion, I argue for a return to aesthetics and poetics as the quintessential domains for exploring how different ontologies can teach us to look at the world differently. To understand the multiple versions of Amerindian relational ontologies we have to be able to perceive the relational character of the aesthetics they reveal. The argument is sustained by a short presentation of Huni Kuin (Cashinahua) aesthetics as revealed in huni meka, a...
After depicting the contemporary scene of Huni Kuin ayahuasca shamanism and artistic agency, I an... more After depicting the contemporary scene of Huni Kuin ayahuasca shamanism and artistic agency, I analyze a selection of image-songs from this ritual. The songs unveil the workings of embodied perception and synesthesia, that is, the transductions of bodily sensations and perceptions in vision, rhythm, song and sound. The experience entails a process of other-becoming where to know means to see through the eyes of Other; to be covered with the skin/ornaments of those beings one has consumed and to sing through their voice. This other-becoming is a becoming in a deleuzian sense, which means that the lived experience is situated in-between the space of self and other. In this context the expression “you are what you eat” has specific implications for one’s health and for the acquisition of agentive and perceptive capabilities of other beings. The ritual technique of almost becoming consists of alternatingly producing and undoing temporary transformations through song.
Uploads
Papers by Els Lagrou