The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology

177 Pages·2015·0.96 MB·English

by  François Laplantine

The Life of the
Senses
i
SENSORY STUDIES SERIES
General Editor: David Howes
ISSN: 2052–3092
As the leading publisher of works on the social life of the senses, Bloomsbury
is pleased to announce this new series dedicated to exploring the varieties of
sensory experience. By delving into the sights, sounds, scents, savours, textures
and rhythms of diverse times and places, Sensory Studies provides many
stimulating insights into how people make sense of the world through the
senses. Incorporating approaches from across the humanities and social
sciences, this series offers a fresh way to understand culture within a diversity
of contexts. It will feature translations into English of key works in other
languages, beginning with François Laplantine’s The Life of the Senses . It will
also present critical investigations of the sensory dimensions of politics and
religion, food and architecture, art and commerce, affect and performance,
among other topics.
Through positioning the senses as both object of study and means of inquiry,
the Sensory Studies series will make for sensational reading and testify to the
deep interpretive and explanatory power of sensuous scholarship. “The
sensoriom is a fascinating focus for cultural studies” ( www.sensorystudies.
org ).
François Laplantine, T he Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal
Anthropology
Michael Bull and Jon P. Mitchell (eds), Ritual, Performance and the Senses
Rupert Cox, The Sound of the Sky Being Torn: A Political Ecology of
Military Aircraft Noise
ii
The Life of
the Senses
Introduction to a Modal
Anthropology
François Laplantine
Translated by Jamie Furniss
With an Introduction by David Howes
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
iii
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway
London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2015
Original Text © François Laplantine, 2005
This translation of L e social et le sensible is published by arrangement with Téraèdre
Publishing.
English language translation © Jamie Furniss, 2014
Jamie Furniss has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identifi ed as Translator of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2484-3
P B: 978-1-4725-3196-4
ePDF: 978-1-4725-3480-4
ePub: 978-1-4725-2238-2
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Series: Sensory Studies, 2052–3092
Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

iv
CONTENTS
The Extended Sensorium: Introduction to the Sensory and
Social Thought of François Laplantine vii
David Howes
Translator’s Preface xv
Jamie Furniss
Prologue 1
1 The Brazilian Art of the Ginga : Walking, Dancing,
Singing 3
2 The Choreographic Model 13
3 Pains and Pleasures of the Binary: The Dichotomy of
Meaning and the Sensible 19
4 The Semantic Obsession 37
5 The Sensible, the Social, Category and Energy 53
6 Two Precursors to an Anthropology of the Sensible:
Roger Bastide and Georges Bataille 67
7 Living Together, Feeling Together: Toward a Politics of the
Sensible 81
8 Sensible Thought: Thinking Through the Body- subject in
Movement 95
Epilogue in the Form of Seven Propositions: Toward a
Modal Anthropology 105
Supplement: Sensing Tokyo 125
Notes 131
Bibliographies 139
Index 147
v
vi
The Extended Sensorium:
Introduction to the
Sensory and Social Thought
of François Laplantine
David Howes
François Laplantine is the paragon of a hybrid thinker. He studied
philosophy under Paul Ricoeur in the Paris of the late 1960s, but an
encounter with the great psychoanalytic anthropologist, George Devereux,
drew him out of philosophy and into both psychoanalysis, which exposed
him to the underside of conscious or “rational” thinking, and into
anthropology, which immersed him in the study of modes of living and
thinking undreamt of in Western philosophy, such as the Afro-Brazilian
religion known as Candomblé. 1 Another important infl uence during his
student days was the cinema, particularly the New Wave cinema of Godard
and Truffaut. As Laplantine notes in conversation with Joseph J. Lévy, his
training was philosophical by day and cinematographical by night, when he
would go with his friends to see fi lms (Lévy 2002: 14). Cinema- going became
a lifelong passion, and he continuously references fi lmmakers and fi lm
scenes in his writing the way other scholars cite academic texts.
Laplantine defi nes cinema as made up of “permanently transforming
sensations” (p. 116). He does not treat fi lm as an object but rather as a “way
of knowing”. It is a way of knowing that exceeds language (the standard
medium of philosophy) on account of the way it traffi cs in auditory and
visual sensations—that is, in “sounds and images in motion” (in Lévy 2002:
132). 2 The ostensible aporia between words and images is not a barrier for
Laplantine, as it was for the young Wittgenstein, who famously wrote: “The
limits of my language are the limits of my world” (2004: 34). Rather, it is an
invitation, an opportunity to think otherwise, which is to say to think
sensually . Cinema does not seek to state “what is the case”; it shows. Cinema
is the art of showing things in ways that words cannot, whence its appeal to
Laplantine, and a growing number of English-s peaking anthropologists
vii
viii INTRODUCTION TO LAPLANTINE
attuned to the senses, such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor (1994), Anna
Grimshaw (2001), David MacDougall (2005) and Sarah Pink (2006). 3
Attending to the Sensible
Attending to “the sensible” (l e sensible ) is a key theme of Laplantine’s
approach to the social. 4 For him, “modes of living in society cannot be
reduced to systems of signs” (contrary to Lévi-Strauss), and “the social does
not exist except by way of the sensible” (contrary to Durkheim) (in Bragard
2007: 20). He criticizes Durkheim for saddling anthropology with the
idea of “the social fact” as a purely objective construct, stripped of any
temporality, subjectivity, or sense- ability. While this move may have been
necessary to the establishment of sociology and anthropology as “social
sciences” distinct from the “natural sciences” of psychology and biology, the
fact remains that “social phenomena are sonorous, visual, tactile, gustatory
and olfactory phenomena” (in Bragard 2007: 15). This leads directly into
Laplantine’s defi nition of anthropological fi eldwork as a form of participant
sensation in a given culture’s mode of living:
The experience of fi eldwork is an experience of sharing in the sensible
[ partage du sensible ]. We observe, we listen, we speak with others, we
partake of their cuisine, we try to feel along with them what they
experience (p. 2).
There is no fi ner defi nition of the methodology of sensory ethnography than
this, and Laplantine is one its most consummate practitioners.
Laplantine’s career as an ethnographer spans four different terrains (and
continents): Ivory Coast, France, Brazil, and most recently the cities of Tokyo
and Beijing. 5 His scholarly output is equally far- ranging. It consists of over
two dozen books: in ethnopsychiatry, medical anthropology, the anthropology
of religion, political anthropology, urban anthropology, ethnographic
description, cinema, and other works that defy classifi cation on account of
their hybridity, such as L e métissage (with Alexis Nouss), T ransatlantique ,
and Le social et le sensible . The last book, which is translated here under the
title T he Life of the Senses , will be the fi rst of Laplantine’s books to appear in
English. This moment has been far too long in coming, as it was for Michel
Serres’ The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (1985/2008), another
French text of key relevance to the expanding fi eld of sensory studies. 6
Before delving into the argument of this book, I would like to draw
attention to a particularly formative experience which Laplantine underwent
in the early 1980s, that he has not discussed much in his writing, but which
Lévy managed to draw out of him in the interview. In 1983, Laplantine went
to Brazil at the invitation of some former students. There he continued his
exploration of alternative forms of consciousness and healing that had
begun in France (e.g. Laplantine 1985) through studying Kardecian
INTRODUCTION TO LAPLANTINE ix
Spiritism, Umbanda and Candomblé. He was initiated into the fi rst grade of
Candomblé, which he came to regard as a form of “sacred theatre”. In his
interview with Lévy, he relates how Candomblé initiation begins with the
identifi cation of one’s o rixa , the “master of the head” who then orients one’s
personality. This identifi cation is achieved through a divinatory technique
which involves throwing cowry shells (originally from Africa) on the ground;
the disposition of the shells is then interpreted by one’s master. In Laplantine’s
experience, Candomblé apprenticeship is
absolutely not by the book, not intellectual, but tactile, olfactory, musical,
chromatic and above all alimentary. It is based on a system of precise
correspondences between the personality of each [apprentice] and the
cosmos, in its various components: food, colors, perfumes and musical
sounds. Living in ignorance of this harmony is to falsify one’s life and to
risk falling sick, according to the adepts of Candomblé. An accord is
therefore sought between the singular personality of each one and the
cosmos in community [with others] (in Lévy 2002: 76).
A complete initiation takes many years, and involves periods of complete
isolation in a tereiro , spending hours quietly meditating. At other times, the
apprenticeship is of “an extreme sensoriality”. As Laplantine relates,
It is an experience of sensory awakening [l ’éveil des cinq sens ] and also of
symbolic fi liation in a relation of dependence to the one who initiates you
and guides you simultaneously to a heightened personalization and a
heightened socialization (in Lévy 2002: 77).
Three things stand out about these observations: the emphasis on the
communal, the emphasis on the sensual, and their interconnection. Laplantine
was already attuned to the social due to his anthropological training, and
attuned to the sensate due to his love of cinema. The experience of initiation
sensitized him to the intricacy of their interrelationship. This nexus would
constitute the fulcrum of his thinking going forward and issue, fi nally, in the
extraordinary treatise you have before you.
Modal Thinking
The Life of the Senses is part philosophy, part anthropology, part fi lm theory
and part philology (both in the conventional sense of the “science of
language” and the archaic sense of the “love of learning and literature”). 7 A
good place to pick up the multiple threads of Laplantine’s argument is
Chapter 5, where he takes aim at “categorical thought”. 8 Categorical
thought, which Western culture inherits from the Greeks, attributes
properties to those things it isolates from the fl ux of existence and cleaves to
the logic of the excluded middle. As such, it is inimical to life and living (l a