An anthropology of singular beings

Rebuilding anthropology

Albert Piette has been working for some time to refound anthropology. He is radically opposed to the reduction of anthropology to sociology, a discipline that he considers too general and powerless to find singular presences. Sociology studies collectives and relationships while Piette intends to promote a science of the singular human in its relationship to other humans and non-humans. To do this, we must describe each human being here and now, in connection with others in a specific situation, and at the same time, because this human has a history before the situation of study, we must also account for this history. . This attention to present beings is initially in line with the work of Latour and in the proximity of pragmatic sociology, which no longer aims at criticism but at providing a detailed account of what is said, experienced, even if it means populating the anthropology of beings as unexpected as God. But gradually, Piette distanced himself from Latour’s nominalism. Thus, God will be first mentioned because he is present in the life of the religious community studied: Piette adopts a methodological theism by provision which describes equally the presences of the parishioners and their God. Then, his thought progresses towards a realism recognizing that certain beings are not only effects of presence but that they indeed exist — while others do not. This realism thus brings anthropology closer to philosophical ontology.

In his Letter to anthropologists, Piette returns to the method in anthropology to challenge the primacy of religions over individual beings. Although Albert Piette is not the first to draw attention to the danger of a knowledge of the general to the detriment of the singular, he does so with new force, in a short, clear and rather convincing book. Aristotle (Second Analytics, I, 31, 87b) considered that there was no science other than the general. To think scientifically about a phenomenon, it is necessary to include it under a category allowing us to answer questions like “ who is it ? “. The particular is therefore only known under one category. To this knowledge through the general, we then oppose the singular which is not a simple particular case but a case irreducible to a general thought. We can certainly defend a less metaphysical conception of knowledge, the fact remains that the primacy of the general over the particular in scientific explanation remains fundamental: this is the position contested by Piette who intends to defend anthropology as a science singular humans.

Indeed, Piette aspires to a delicate and rigorous knowledge of the singular. The social sciences must avoid the naivety of knowing the individual out of context, but to avoid this danger, the inclusion of the individual in relationships that go beyond and constitute him seems to prevent knowledge of his singularity. To think of the individual human being in terms of relationships, structures, interactions is already to think of it as an effect, the result of a process which, once understood, does not help to grasp its singularity but on the contrary reduces it. to an example of a category. Piette’s adversary is therefore relationism, which he defines as follows:

A perspective that considers that there are only relationships and that everything is explained by relationships would therefore be relationist. Relationist would also be a theory which, while starting from individuals, focuses on the “ between » individuals, as well as a method that values ​​relational play to produce knowledge. (p.42)

To defend his anti-relationism, Piette follows the definitions of “ relationship » in the dictionary The Robert. The concept of relationship that emerges from this study is firstly that of a relationship constituting individuals, the individual appearing reducible and second in relation to relationships. This reading of the dictionary is not just linguistic work because it allows us to return to the main relationist currents such as structuralism, interactionism or even Latour’s actor-network theory already mentioned. What are the arguments against the primacy of relationships and against the reduction of the singular ? I identify four main ones, by reconstructing the argument of the work without adopting its order of presentation, which does not need to be repeated given its perfect readability.

Singular human beings

The first argument is empirical. Close observation of human beings always reveals what is irreducible to the relationships that the individual instantiates. Before adopting a given role or being the instance of a given node in a structure, but also after these connections, the individual continues to be more than these relationships. Even in a specific situation, it is rare for the individual to be totally absorbed by his task, his function, his habitus, his interaction. Piette calls this state the minor mode of existence and he grants it crucial anthropological importance. In the recent The origin of belief (Berg International, 2013), he sees in this ability to be present while relaxing one’s attention one of the singularities ofhomo sapiens by which he came to believe in the incredible: the dead are still alive.

To describe the individual who is irreducible to the relationships at play in the present situation, the anthropologist must adopt a method where perception as brought into the presence of the individual outside of linguistic and cultural mediations plays a central role (p. 56-7 ). The anthropological method will therefore be a phenomenography, a description that does not neglect what does not initially appear relevant in the situation. And phenomenography allows for an ontography, a comprehensive description of the singular present being (p. 76-77).

Another argument, more subjective, supports the anthropology of the singular. We feel that we are irreducible to the relationships that according to some should define us. We have the intimate experience that to exist individually is to endure beyond the relationships we enter into (p. 50-1). We feel it particularly during metaphysical experiences such as the awareness that we alone can “ die our death » (p. 70). Such an experience even has ethical consequences since Piette urges us to learn to love the detail of human gestures, the singularity of vulnerable presences (p. 79-80).

This subjective argument may seem irrelevant, based on a too particular philosophical conception of existence. Since the argument insists on the singular experience of the self, it could well be based on a subjective illusion from which we would expect criticism thanks to an increase in scientific objectification. But the external critical posture assumes that agents do not have the resources to make diagnoses and to assert for themselves a distance from constraints. The forgetting of internal criticism, itself well fought by the sociology of criticism, is more profoundly the forgetting of the subjective point of view which makes me feel that I am not only what relationships make me.

The evidence of the existence that everyone is and feels in various ways at every moment, the effect that it has to exist, to live here and now, this is what I place at the center of an anthropology of existences. . (pg. 25)

The strength of the argument is therefore to appeal to an irreducible subjectivity which is not that of an autonomous self transcending the empirical and the human sciences. Piette is careful not to reactivate a tradition of the triumphant self.

The genesis of singular beings

Against relationism, Piette offers a third, more speculative and rather surprising argument (p. 59-68): relations are perceptible individuals and not constructions for the purposes of explanation. As part of the ontological turn in the social sciences, such an approach adopts the point of view of the agent who experiences the presence of relationships such as hierarchies, social differences, romantic relationships, etc. To understand this mode of presence of relationships, we must not substantiate the relationships but understand them as first existing virtually in individuals before becoming concrete.

Such a reduction of relationships to individual dispositions makes it possible to think about relating. Starting from an individual outside of relationships but having the capacity to bond, we can see relationships emerge. Thus, describing a priest preparing to say mass allows us to follow how he will enter into a relationship with God, also posed as an agent present in the situation. But by having given ontological depth to the priest and to God, we will not reduce them to the relationships that will arise in the situation. While Latour set out to show how the social is born, rather than assuming it to be active, by making beings emerge from relationships, Piette shows us, conversely, the relationships born from human individuals. If we follow the argument correctly, sociology or anthropology focused on relationships would forget the real genesis of relationships as it manifests in our experience. Perhaps it is giving a lot to personal experience to use it to rule on the priority of the singular over the relationships which would constitute it. ?

Finally, and this is the fourth argument, our author seems to rely on an ontological and not only methodological postulation: what exists is irreducibly singular. Singularity would be neglected by the social sciences, including ethnography, which want to recognize in the individual the traces of the past and present relationships that constitute them. His argument, barely outlined, is more speculative than empirical: defining the human in its ultimate reality through the singular.

But what of the acquisition of the dispositions to connect ? If all relationships presuppose individuals, if the individual is never the simple effect of relationships, can we describe him other than as a self-founded subject? ? Gabriel Tarde, whom Piette mentions to rightly refuse his annexation to the relationist current, has clearly posed this problem of the articulation of the singular, which is first, with the regularity and generality that we observe at all levels of the reality. By focusing on the presence rather than the genesis of individuals, Piette avoids the speculations of Tarde and Leibniz on the dynamics of all human or non-human beings whose impulses to exist produce regularities and relationships through their encounters. stable. If the anthropologist prefers not to explore such metaphysics, can he avoid the problem of acquiring the dispositions to bind ? The genesis of the singular individual, if it does not want to reduce the individual to the social relations which constitute him, must question, as Tarde did, the vital dynamic which, jointly with social transformation, produces the singular individual studied in present situations.

We can, without reducing the originality and relevance of Piette’s remarks, affirm that the anthropology of singulars that he offers us is a reaffirmation of the primacy of understanding over genetic explanation. For Piette, we must understand the singular before explaining its genesis and its acquisition of dispositions to relate, at the risk of no longer giving due credit to the explanation – or at least of diminishing it more than necessary. However, by downplaying the explanation, the anthropologist who values ​​an ethics of attention and care will perhaps no longer provide us with the means for a political transformation of society for the benefit of singularities in search of freedom.