-
Immanent Human(ism)s: Engagements with James A. Boon
- Anthropological Quarterly
- George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
- Volume 90, Number 4, Fall 2017
- pp. 1155-1174
- 10.1353/anq.2017.0065
- Article
- Additional Information
ABSTRACT:
The "human" is often set apart from the rest of nature on account of the presence of logos, the capacity to reason and construct a deductive argument, and the capacity to imagine, to transpose one's self to a realm which is numinous and inaccessible to anyone other than the self. Humanity translates that relationship by saturating tactility with meaning: art, literature, structures, war. Anthropology, in its turn, has been imagined as the discipline that would be capable and willing to make legible to the world the translation of this intimate relationship between the numinous and the tactile, to facilitate the efforts of the human to be understood by the world around her, to straddle immanence and the hereafter. If, however, the human becomes decentered from the core of anthropology in a gesture that privileges the non-human in its many genres (the non-human animal, technology, nature in general), what remains as the ethical dispensation of the discipline? If the immanent frame of humanity is threatened only by the human, what becomes of anthropology's engagement? What sorts of futures, what kinds of publics are made possible or become foreclosed?