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The art of conviviality

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DOI: 10.14318/hau6.2.020

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 2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 323–343

SPECIAL SECTION

The art of conviviality

Andrew Brandel, Institute for Human Sciences

This essay proposes a conception of anthropology as a romantic science concerned with

what Lévi-Strauss called a posteriori logics. I shift our attention from disagreements in
conceptual knowledge to conditions of possible experience—that is, to the grounds of the
emergence of concepts in life together, com vivere. Such conviviality, I suggest, offers to us
another way to understand the work of ethnography as a sensibility through which we place
our own logics at risk. This picture of anthropological thought, moreover, demands that we
reimagine the contours of the history of the field, remaining open to what might count as
or for anthropology.
Keywords: History of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss, Novalis, romanticism, aesthetics

To be one with all that lives! With these words virtue removes its
wrathful armor, the spirit of man lays its scepter aside and all
thoughts vanish before the image of the world’s eternal unity, just as
the rules of the struggling artist vanish before his Urania. —Hölderlin

Thus Hyperion writes to Bellarmin, lamenting both his exile and his schooling, the
pursuit of knowledge having left him a stranger before nature. “Oh, man is . . . a
beggar when he thinks.” When Bellarmin asks his friend to recall his youth, Hyper-
ion replies, “When I was still a serene child, and knew nothing of all that surrounds
us, was I not then more than I am, after all . . . the reflection and struggle?” But as
much as Hyperior’s words and Grecian hermitage capture a theoretical longing for
an ancient and natural order of things, Hölderlin’s protagonist is never so far at re-
move from the trappings of human life among others, open to contestation within
various registers of intimacy, as itself an engine of thought. His is a love affair, not
with solitude but with underlying agreements. A string of passionate encounters
ensues, what Paul de Man calls “a series of initiations”; first as a student, then a
friend, and later a lover. In the first instance, he meets the knowledge of his day and
rapidly rises above it. In a second, with Alabanda but also Bellarmin, we find the

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Andrew Brandel.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.020
 Andrew Brandel 324

force of friendship: “it is the specific mood of innocent man to be a ‘friend’ of na-
ture . . . in a powerfully spontaneous way. In a friendship between men this feeling
prevails in its purest form. Friendship is unity, and beyond that, it is conversation
(Gespräch) within the sphere of unity, the worldly equivalence of the conversation
between the gods and the child that was at the beginning of things” (de Man 1956:
32–33). In love, he writes, we reach the experience of this unity.
In the figure of Hyperion’s initiations, we encounter an imagination of what
it means to live and to think together, across multiple registers. It is a descrip-
tion at once familiar to the anthropologist, of thought grounded in conviviality,
in life lived with others with whom we share an intimacy that allows our forms
of thought, the very conditions of our experience of the world, to be challenged.
Life with those who offer not only competing answers to our questions but also
competing questions.1 If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested, anthropology consists
in the pursuit of a posteriori logics, I understand ethnography to be the sensibility
through which we arrive at their shore, in the ways we live with others, in human
bodies, in spirits, or in their words. Dialectically we produce knowledge, gather
up of descriptions of states of affairs, kinship terms, modes of production and
consumption, superstitions, rituals—concepts are produced and contested. But by
means of this knowledge, our world and the logics that order it are transformed;
we arrive we hope, he says, at some measure of wisdom. It strikes at the very heart
of the transformations in Lévi-Strauss’ own thinking, as he lived among the struc-
tures of Murngin kinship and Kariera totems, with Bororo myths and Swaihwe
masks. We encounter others, as Heidegger taught us, not only in their immediate
presence to us but also in our involvement in a world we share, in which we live
with, com vivere, the products of their collective (un)consciousness, their words,
or their art. Life after all is not lived in the company of embodied humans alone
but also among texts.
We risk ourselves in engaging, moreover, not only new ideas but also new forms
of thought. Lévi-Strauss calls this the condition of the anthropologist (see also
Brandel 2015) a vocational narrative often chided as heroic but that, upon deeper
inspection, reflects the fragility of the ethnographer who stands to learn from the
world and not just about it, and who, in so doing, has sacrificed not only the surety
of her own convictions, even their very foundations. It is a way of thinking and liv-
ing ever struggling to find a footing in the world, ever on the move. “Ethnographic
experience,” Lévi-Strauss once said, “is an experimental form of research on some-
thing which escapes you” ([1991] 1998: 168).
This essay is an attempt to consider the epistemic and existential stakes of this
picture of anthropological thought by tracing its expression in the development
of Lévi-Strauss’ oeuvre, and in the conviviality (Geselligkeit) of the early German

1. In life together we meet resistance, we recognize that we mark one another, we are un-
settled, but at a minimum we share a boundary. We agree, Wittgenstein says, in a form
of life. And as our concepts are never fully unbound from this life, these exchanges
transform not only our ideas but also the very soil from which they spring. I am re-
minded of what Veena Das calls her “love affair” with anthropology, “in which when I
reach bedrock I do not break through the resistance of the other, but in this gesture of
waiting I allow the knowledge of the other to mark me” (2007: 17).

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325 The art of conviviality

romantics (Frühromantiker), gathered together in drawing rooms of Jena two cen-

turies ago. This collective of writers and philosophers, translators, and naturalists,
collaboratively authored an alternative reception of the Copernican Revolution,
drew foreign philosophical thought and artistic forms into the German tradition at
a time when Hegel dismissed the world, and brought scientific and poetic experi-
mentation together to the betterment of both. I draw them together here through
their respective attempts to affirm a Kantian legacy, while demanding it be made to
reconcile with the force of the world in which we live among others, to transform
even the grounds of subjective experience. Through a conception of anthropol-
ogy as a romantic science, we arrive at a notion of conviviality, which, on the basis
of knowledge, makes possible a more existential transformation of the conditions
of that knowledge. Rather than trace a genealogy of inheritances and resistances
through Rousseau or Hegel, however, I engage them in the register of a romantic
ethnography, as those among whom I myself live. If ethnography invites instruc-
tion from the world, such conviviality also transforms our thanking about anthro-
pology, much as Victor Turner learned from Muchona the Hornet, or Sidney Mintz
from Don Taso. In this way, we do not know beforehand what counts as or for
anthropology. And if anthropological thought is thus fragmentary, ever striving,
constantly upended by life, then we must rethink the ways we tell the stories of
our discipline and approach that history likewise in an ethnographic mode—not
through an account of the lives of others but by living with them and allowing them
to mark us.
In recent years, Alain Caillé (2009, 2000; Adloff 2016) has turned sociological
theory toward the language of conviviality as an ideal expression of a social organi-
zation built upon the Maussian gift; that is, on exchange that is simultaneously self-
interested and altruistic, dutiful, and spontaneous. From city streets, it has been
evoked as “radical” formulation invoking difference with an encompassing ethical
horizon and without falling into communitarianism, or the insidious politics of
integration and multiculturalism once popular in European discourses (Valluvan
2016). Anthropology, on the other hand, has been drawn to local conceptions
and practices of conviviality, ranging from the “amelioration” of difference as a
response to ubiquitous state violence in Johannesburg (Vigneswaran 2014), to the
fragility of negotiation and translation in the register of everyday life of neighbor-
hoods in Catalonia and Casmance (Heil 2014), and in the Amazon as an “aesthetics
of community” encompassing and exceeding European categories opposition, an
unfolding play between constructive and destructive forces (Overing and Passes
2000). One finds in these accounts echoes of classical anthropological definitions
of hospitality, from Lewis Henry Morgan’s ([1881] 2003) “communistic living” and
Marcel Mauss’ (1923) preconditions of the receipt of the gift. By the same token,
efforts to transform the trope of hospitality through a recuperation of Augustus
Pitt-Rivers’ figure of the stranger has revealed how rather than merely holding the
threat of otherness in abeyance, such spaces are also essentially transformative
(Candea and da Col 2012).
Yet as Lévi-Strauss’ critique of Mauss reveals, there is another register that makes
the hospitality to the thought of others possible but that is also restructured in light
of that encounter. It is into this space that I think reading Lévi-Strauss alongside

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 Andrew Brandel 326

romanticism becomes especially productive.2 Together, I will argue, they allow us

to trouble our assumptions about who is the subject of anthropological thought,
through the language of art. The Jena circle inaugurated a call for an intellectual
and spiritual collaboration not merely as joyous agreement, nor as an overcoming
of difference (or otherwise spectacularly transcending the distance to the mind
and world of the other) but as a waiting in moments of resistance. This was the
project of Sympoesie and Symphilosophie, a motif for a “new epoch of science and
art,” defined by the “merger” of individuals (Individuen zu verschmelzen), and the
generation of “fantastic combinations.” It is borne from an intimacy that can bear
disagreement, and works not only at the level of conceptual difference but on the
conditions of our experience. Conviviality, then, as resource for the poetic remak-
ing of the world. This poetics gives us a way of critically waiting in such tension,
neither resolving nor abandoning, an insistence on the merging life—and therefore
the sciences that examine it—with art.

The skillful means of a poetic disposition

For Lévi-Strauss the relationship between anthropological knowledge and wis-
dom rests on the specialness of our object of inquiry. It is not just possible but
essential, he writes, to “postulate that, when we uncover a deep structure, there
will be an even deeper, and yet another deeper after that” (Lévi-Strauss 2014). My
thinking about the nature of such wisdom begins with Lévi-Strauss’ reply to Paul
Ricoeur’s (1963) charge of structuralism’s latent Kantianism. If the pursuit of social
structure takes as its guide the “constraining structure of the human mind,” then
structuralism proceeds in what Lévi-Strauss himself calls the “manner of Kantian
philosophy.” Yet, “unlike the philosopher,” the anthropologist does not begin from
the constraints of his own thought, or “the science peculiar to his society and his
period, as a fundamental subject of reflection in order to extend these local find-
ings into a form of understanding, the universality of which can never be more
than hypothetical and potential” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 10). The anthropologist is
attuned to “empirically collective forms of understanding, whose properties have
been solidified . . . in countless concrete representational systems.” (1969: 11) The

2. Maïté Maskens and Ruy Blanes (2013) have been inspired by a distinct tradition of ro-
manticism through Cervantes and a desire for militant subversion. I sense a greater af-
finity, however, with Michael Jackson’s (1989) radical empiricism, moving in the inter-
stices or clearings of thought, to gather one’s self. Another kin lineage might be through
Vincent Crapanzano’s (2004) “transgressive montage,” which not only tries to dislodge
experiential categories by pointing to their constructedness but also tries to subvert
the aesthetic criteria that are the conditions of such constructions. There is a manifest
kinship as well with Vincent Debaene’s (2014) rendering of Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology
as an entropological and endless circulation between documentation and evocation,
transforming the connection between the work of art, science, and myth. Lévi-Strauss
thus becomes the fulcrum on whom the French tradition of anthropology pivots in its
connection to literature.

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327 The art of conviviality

transcendental philosopher examines the conditions of possibility of experience in

general beginning from her own.
It is this argument with which Ricoeur takes issue, calling structuralism “Kan-
tianism without a transcendental subject”—a label Lévi-Strauss is happy to accept.
It is “an inevitable consequence, on the philosophical level, of the ethnograph-
ic approach [he has] chosen; [his] ambition being to discover the conditions in
which systems of truths become mutually convertible and therefore simultane-
ously acceptable to several different subjects, the pattern of those conditions takes
on the character of an autonomous object, independent of any subject” (Lévi-
Strauss 1969: 11). Thus when he speaks elsewhere of “a posteriori necessity” in
relation to the possibility of a logic (say, of totemic classification) the grounds of
which are utterly contingent, he notes an apparent paradox of using a language
that connotes, as philosophy likes to say, a truth everywhere and in every case, to
connect terms themselves not intended to fulfill this function. Lévi-Strauss pro-
vides two resolutions: 1) a posteriori logics only appear impossible with regard to
history and not within the coherence of the system wherein they are manifest and
2) neither the images of myth nor the material of the bricoleur are “products of
‘becoming’” but rather “condensed expressions of necessary relations which im-
pose constraints with various repercussions at each stage of their employment”
(Lévi-Strauss 1966: 36).
For Lévi-Strauss, anthropology pursues how “systems of truths,” collective
forms of understanding, become “acceptable” to multiple subjects. “Time” and
“space” as concepts within systems of representations (not as pure judgments, a
distinction that eludes Durkheim’s use of the language of categories of the under-
standing) do not bear the burden of transcendental correspondence to particular
objects—between Kant and Hume, they are subject to deductions that are at once
empirical and necessary. The anthropologist does not start from a transcendental
subject because her inquiry begins between them, in their mutual participation
in a conceptual network, under a posteriori conditions that are nevertheless de-
terminate of the possibilities for empirical concepts. He says, by way of critique
of Rousseau’s political philosophy (and his reasons for moving away from it), that
the Social Contract similarly posits a “direct relationship between individual and
collectivity . . . for me, it is these intermediaries (between the two) that gives social
life its flesh and blood” ([1991] 1998: 169). The difference highlights a point Lévi-
Strauss makes elsewhere, regarding the depth wherein structure resides. It is worth
recalling that in Structural anthropology, he returns to Franz Boas’ distinction be-
tween the unconscious and the conscious precisely to reveal this shortcoming of
Durkheim’s and Mauss’ sociological method in beginning from the “native catego-
ries of thought.” Important as conscious models of systems of representation may
be, they are “just as remote from the unconscious reality as any other” (Lévi-Strauss
1967: 245–46). Ino Rossi (1973) has argued that for Lévi-Strauss, anthropology
borrowed from Kant an investment in the structure of experience, but from Mauss
a conviction that social and mental substrates thereof were likewise sites of condi-
tions of possible experience.
Lévi-Strauss’ view, then, is that we proceed in a Kantian spirit, insofar as he is
likewise in pursuit of logics, only empirical ones (a variation perhaps of what Kant
called general but applied logic) rather than pure elementary logic. Kant ([1787]

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 Andrew Brandel 328

1901: B78) distinguishes general from particular uses of the understanding, the
first containing the absolutely necessary rules of thought and the second consti-
tuted by rules for thinking about this or that object, hence as the organon of par-
ticular sciences. Within general logic, pure logic pertains to a priori principles and
thus makes up the canon of the understanding and reason, while applied logic is
“merely a cathartic of common understanding.” Anthropology becomes a neces-
sary partner to philosophy in the elaboration of human knowledge—a view that
Kant himself might, if in some other fashion, endorse—as the science of a posterio-
ri necessities within empirical systems of truths. We then understand Lévi-Strauss’
critiques of Sartre’s claim of a de jure or absolute difference between dialectical
and analytic reason, and its replacement with a conception of the dialectic in ad-
dition, as the “necessary condition for (analytical reason) to venture to undertake
the resolution of the human into the non-human” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 246). The
difference between the two is relative; dialectical reason is constitutive insofar as it
is the “bridge” that analytical reason “throws out over the abyss,” and as such is the
gesture by which analytic reason reforms itself in the face of the social world.
The progress of ethnographic analysis is not (as in Rousseau) with the dissolu-
tion of differences between systems but with the “reintegration of culture in nature”
(Lévi-Strauss 1967: 247). The distinction of an order of inquiry then marks out
anthropology as the “principle of research” to this end, precisely because philo-
sophical inquiry makes one a “prisoner of his own Cogito.” Sartre’s “socializing” of
the Cogito, “merely exchanges one prison for another” (Lévi-Strauss 1967). Or put
another way, Sartre’s move trades in the possibility of a science of man for a science
of men. It is for this reason that Lévi-Strauss elsewhere calls Rousseau of the Dis-
course the founder of the human sciences (and specifically ethnology), and not, say,
Descartes, for we are liberated from the prison of the egoism by our methodology,
and our radical risking of ourselves qua the other (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 34).
Rather than invert a hierarchy established by Sartre regarding two different ways
to approach the world (through their contradictory temporalities), Lévi-Strauss
puts them on equal footing. On Lévi-Strauss’ reading of Sartre, dialectical reason
is at risk of being “carried away by its own elan”; but even more, we must avoid too
that “the procedure leading to the comprehension of an other reality attribute to
it, in addition to its own dialectical features, those appertaining to the procedure
rather than to the object.” Thus, not “all knowledge of others is dialectical.” Sartre’s
mistake is in thinking of our knowledge of the other as standing in dialectical rela-
tion to their thought. Lévi-Strauss claims Sartre’s language of a progress-regressive
method thereby for anthropology, but doubles it. First we observe, we analyze our
data, we put these ethnographic observations into the context of whatsoever his-
torical antecedents can be unearthed. But a second move is required on another
plane, one in which analytical reason tries to ford the distance (determined in the
first) to the “ever unforeseen complexity of this new object and the intellectual
means at its disposal” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 253). The new totality that is formed is
then met with others, and little by little we accumulate mass, like the dualities of
Caduveo body painting. At every step, such a procedure requires moreover that
reason double back, to recall the totality that is both means and ends of the opera-
tion. In this way, analytical reason is said to account for dialectical, where the latter
can account for neither itself nor its counterpart; dialectical reason then at end is

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329 The art of conviviality

“only a reconstruction, by . . . analytical reason, of hypothetical moves about which

it is impossible to know.” That is to say, dialectics involve a reconstruction of the
history of consciousness, which, in Lévi-Strauss’ view, need not in reality contain
the “truest” kernel of the matter, since superstructures do not progress and improve
teleologically but rather reflect transformations of socially successful elements in
the face of historical events.

Art: Or, how we come to a posteriori necessity

If we understand our object in terms of a posteriori necessities, taking them seri-
ously cannot be limited to encountering them at a distance as intellectual objects
but must instead find a way to ford the distance between the conditions of my ex-
perience and theirs. At the same time, we must avoid naïve notions of cultural rela-
tivism gone awry, the solipsism of “going native.” As Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman,
Michael Jackson, and Bhrigupati Singh (2014) have shown through attention to the
place of the Churinga in his thought, for Lévi-Strauss scientific and mythological
patterns are mediated in the artistic mode. But this is not to suggest any expression
is a pure form of one or the other pattern of thought; rather Lévi-Strauss’ concep-
tual figurations stand in dynamical and internal relation to one another, not as pure
forms expressed by individuals. If myths are transformed through bricolage with
a set of elements, the same set might be worked on simultaneously through poetic
construction—but without recognizing the dynamism of these exchanges, we mis-
recognize the authorship, say of Oedipus or Antigone, or even Mythologiques, and
ascribe to it a false character.
While relatively few commentaries exist on the relevance of art to Lévi-Strauss’
anthropology, those that have recently emerged have begun to reshape contempo-
rary appreciation of the structural legacy, especially in relation to the artistic nature
of anthropological thought itself. Boris Wiseman’s (2007) account of Mythologiques
both as a treatise concerning aesthetic problems (especially creation) and as itself
such a creation, as a “mytho-poem,” is exemplary of such a move. He reads Lévi-
Strauss’ “scientificity” as marked likewise by an “aesthetic,” insofar as they “make
manifest the hidden connections that link myths into a single whole and bring to
light . . . necessity”3 (196). Claude Imbert (2009) takes another route, through Lévi-
Strauss’ varied attempts at addressing a fundamental set of questions to a problem
of anthropological knowledge: one related to the nature of structure, another to his
fieldwork in the Mato Grosso, and a third to his inheritances of certain achieve-
ments of the Maussian-Durkheimian legacy. The ultimate “anthropological fact”
of the peculiar weave of ethnological data and “anthropological configuration” re-
volves around the quest for the symbolic mediations of the subject and object, not
“[propositionally] frozen in transcendentalism” but as a continuous flux between
two points. This line of inquiry calls for artistic activity, as the meditational spur
that allows us entry not only into the questions posed by fieldwork but also by
those of the modern world. Thus, anthropology’s “scientific interest” moves away
from the limiting demands for “concreteness” and “immediacy” and “towards the

3. My reading differs from Wiseman’s on the meaning and place of universality in Lévi-
Strauss, and, on Mythologiques status as poem. My own sense is we require a finer
distinction between the poetical and the poem.

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 Andrew Brandel 330

production of intelligibility as an essential part of exchange and social life. The

ethnographer turned anthropologist was summoned to detect an ongoing process
of rationality, and its concomitant differentiation in contemporary times” (Imbert
2009: 136). I want to draw out this figuration of Lévi-Strauss’ work as evidence of
a “philosophical mind” having become aware of its own suppleness vis-à-vis the
world, and explore how we might think of such an “opening” of the mind as a sci-
entific project.
Already at the Departure of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss draws the return
from the field into the writing of ethnography, to publication, to the “scrap(ing)
clean of all this fungus.” By the time we receive the Apotheosis of Augustus, on
our way back to France, we find the anthropological hero drenched in the micro-
organismic debris of life with others. “The investigator eats his heart out in the
exercise of his profession.” When the situation in the field deteriorates utterly, it
becomes a “time, above all, of self-interrogation. . . . What is, in point of fact, an
anthropological investigation?” He offers some preliminary suggestions. “Does it
follow upon some . . . radical decision—one that calls in question the system within
which one was born and has come to manhood” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 374)? He finds
in the desolation of his supremely immediate situation, his mind wandering back
home before him on the tune of Chopin’s Etudes, op. 10. Hence Lévi-Strauss’ own
surprising inversion—that one might shatter his or her ties to home only to find
its true impression in a supposed radically other world. But we leave the detour of
a play the anthropologist scribbled on paper in the western Mato Grosso to find
we still have no answer to the “contradiction implicit in the circumstances of (the
anthropologist’s) choice.” It was meant, he tells us, only to attest to the “disorder”
of his mind in that moment of self-examination. Lévi-Strauss’ suggestion is that
behind even the conformist anthropologist, some feeling of the inadequacy of, or
detachment from, the home seems to prod him along “already .  .  . ‘half-way to
meet’ societies unlike his own.” We move from objectivity at first “out of the ques-
tion” in our society, where we from the start are implicated, to bringing another
“under scrutiny” and in so doing “all is changed.” What had been “present to us as
a moral dilemma, can now be a pretext for aesthetic contemplation” (Lévi-Strauss
1961: 382–83).
This detachment from transformations ongoing in our society leads to a star-
tling discovery, “that certain civilizations . . . have known quite well how to best
solve problems with which we are still struggling.”4 The dissatisfaction at home
with a problem sets us out already on our journey to find another teacher, one who
may well have had the best answer even centuries ago. Very subtly we have to come
to a relativism that is nevertheless open to critique—in this way, it escapes both
the erasure of meaningfulness and of authoritarian unthinking (the twin threats of
skepticism-cum-solipsism and dogmatism). Eclecticism tempered with the capac-
ity nevertheless for exclusion; epistemic pluralism that submits itself still to a prin-
ciple of adjudication. Criticism, though never perfect, is ever bettered as the “field
of investigation” grows. It is asymptotic and “truth” marks the zero incline. He asks,

4. As Debaene notes, quoting Lévi-Strauss, “As the instrument of his own observation, the
ethnographer must cease to be ‘a purely contemplative intelligence’ in order to become
‘the involuntary agent of a transformation conveyed through him’” (2014: 42–43).

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331 The art of conviviality

“What, after all, have I learnt from the masters I have listened to, the philosophers
I have read, the societies I have investigated, and that very Science in which the
West takes such a pride? Simply a fragmentary lesson or two which, if laid end to
end would reconstitute the meditations of the Sage at the foot of his tree” (Lévi-
Strauss 1961: 294). The contradiction between critic and conformist, analysis of
and enmeshment within conditions of experience, is also dissolved in the last mo-
ment, as we recognize there is there no conflict—it is their isolation that produces
the appearance of distinction. It is a condition proper to “humanity as a whole
and bears within itself the reason for its existence . . . or what is the use of action,
if the thinking which guides that action leads to the discovery of the meaningless”
(Lévi-Strauss 1961: 396). This resolution cannot be thought but must rather be felt.
If there are many stages, “as in the Boddhi tree” or the system of philosophy, “they
exist as a single whole,” and if we are to reach shore thereupon, “I shall be called
upon continually to live through situations, each of which demands something of
me, I owe myself to mankind, just as much as to knowledge. . . . Like the pebble
which marks the surface of the wave with circles as it passes through it, I must
throw myself into the water if I am to plumb the depths” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 396).
Allow me to juxtapose the pictures of the world and thought Lévi-Strauss offers
in the first volume of Mythologiques with the one he borrows from Boas in The
Savage Mind: first, “myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the
world of which it is itself a part” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 341), and second, “it would
seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and
that the new worlds were built from the fragments,” which he amends to recognize
the “continual reconstruction from the same materials” of thought, such that “the
signified changes into the signifying and vice versa.”5 Where—the question seems
to beg itself—might anthropological thought fall? Though the bricoleur works with
those “messages” that have been disclosed in advanced, the scientist, “whether he is
an engineer or a physicist” is always in pursuit of “that other message” (Lévi-Strauss
1967: 20). Lévi-Strauss writes in the Overture to The raw and the cooked, that such
an ethnological study aims to “show how empirical categories . . . which can only be
accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting
the standpoint of a particular culture—can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools
with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of proposi-
tions” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 1). And then at the very end, when having rehearsed the
outcome of his mythographic study of the given dialectic, we are confronted with
a problem of structural method; “for if the myths of a particular society admit of
every kind of combination, the set as a whole becomes a nonredundant language;
since all combinations are equally meaningful . . . in this case mythography would
be reduced to a form of lallorhea” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 333). Thankfully, this is the
not case, if we follow three methodological rules. First, various iterations of a myth
are “not all situated on the same level of mythological thought”; second, the capaci-
ty to fix the variables and their “relative degree of complex” means that versions can
be arranged in a “logical order”; and finally, each iteration provides an “image of
reality” such that, in our critical position, we are “able to replace the relation orders

5. The first reference is to Boas (1898: 18). The second is Lévi-Strauss’ addendum to Boas’
quotation, from Lévi-Strauss (1967: 21).

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 Andrew Brandel 332

we have already obtained by an absolute order” in terms of their ordinal degree of

transformation from the “directly observed reality” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 333–34).
The multiplicity of levels appears then as the price that mythic thought
has to pay in order to move from the continuous to the discrete. It has to
simplify and organize the diversity of empirical experience in accordance
with the principle that no factor of diversity can be allowed to operate for
its own purposes in the collective undertaking of signification, but only
as the habitual or occasional substitute for the other elements included in
the same set. Mythic thought only accepts nature on condition that it is
able to reproduce it. (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 341)
“Art,” he writes, “lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magi-
cal thought” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 22). The art-product, Kant’s work of genius,6 is
both an “object of knowledge” and a “material object.” And if the scientist and the
bricoleur represent inverse relations to the manifold of structure and event, ends
and means, the artist seems to do both at once—“the painter is always mid-way be-
tween design and anecdote, and his genius consists in uniting internal and external
knowledge, a ‘being’ and a ‘becoming,’ in producing with his brush an object which
does not exist as such and which he is nevertheless able to create” (Lévi-Strauss
1967: 25). The artist’s creation is both a “material” object and an “object of knowl-
edge.” If the scientist changes the world (effects events) by means of structures,
and the bricoleur by means of events fashion structure, the artist works with a set
of objects and events it then unifies “by revealing a common structure (26). Art
thereby integrates structure and event, and attempts to communicate by means of
it with either the model, the material, or the user (or future user). In this way, as
to the relation to the object (or the product of the creative activity, more precisely)
and the event, mythological thought and artistic production are likewise inverted.
The balance that is struck in any case by these various arrangements, Lévi-Strauss
warns, is easily tipped over.

§
The problem of the subject recurs, then, in relation to its capacity to remake the
world through art. If we trace a genealogy from Lévi-Strauss to Jung to the roman-
tic philosopher F.  W.  J. Schelling, we find the subject displaced however in art’s
counterpart in mythology (Bowie 2003). Schelling regards ideas in the realm of
mythology as the products of a “natural consciousness . . . left to its own devices,”
distinct from the free action of the subject. Schelling’s compatriot A. W. Schlegel, is
likewise interested not in the intentional activity of the subject but “the surrender
to the other,” a return to another way of inhabiting the world. As we reach out to

6. Marked by the relation of the imagination to reflective judgment’s production of con-

cepts. Beautiful art, in the technical sense as the work of genius, excites universal sat-
isfaction without appeal to concepts, igniting a free play of reason and imagination
without one subsuming the other under a law (Kant 1793). This interweaving of forces
reveals a harmony between Nature as a whole and the “ways in which we think about
and related to it” (Bowie 2003).

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333 The art of conviviality

touch reality, we find ourselves ever confronted by antimonies of reason, and so as

we recognize the inadequacy of our thought to the world, Lévi-Strauss once said,
we might begin to doubt even thought itself, and by extension ourselves. Neverthe-
less, guided by “several thousand years’ experience,” we are convinced of a middle
ground, and “this is the level of scientific understanding, intellectual activity, and
artistic creation” ([1991] 1998: 162). It is this sensibility in Lévi-Strauss that I am
proposing romanticism helps us to clarify.
Schlegel’s notebooks of 1797–98 provide an analytical frame for the group at
Jena: “The Romantic imperative calls for the mixing of all poetries. All Nature and
Science should become Art. Art should become Nature and Science. Imperative:
Poesy should be moral, and Morality should be poetic.” Not art to the exception of
science but inclusive of it; the surrender to the world that includes me, and its ac-
knowledgment as a creative process. The collective writes in Athenäumsfragment
§116:
[Romantic Poetry’s] aspiration is not merely to reunite all the distinct
species of poetry once more. . . . It desires that poetry and prose, genius
and criticism, poetry of art and natural poetry, mingle and fuse in a lively
and sociable poetry, one that makes life and society poetic, that poeticizes
wit and fills the forms of art with everything good, with the vibrations of
humor . . . the midpoint between the represented and the representer, free
of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and
can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, it can multiply
it in a perpetual series of mirrors. . . . Romantic poetry is in the arts what
wit is in philosophy, and what society and sociability, friendship and love
are in life . . . [it] should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It
can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare
try to characterize its ideal.
Though literature is perhaps its primary form, it is not exclusively so. Romantische
Poesie is meant instead to signify a much broader field of creative activity. Gather-
ing up eclectic sources and forms, it a poetics defined only by the most abstract
qualities—fantasy, mimesis, and sentimentality. By the time of the 1800 Gespräch
über die Poesie, “the poetic” came to be associated “with the creative power in hu-
man beings, and indeed with the productive principle in nature itself ” (Beiser
2003: 15). “Poetry, taken in the widest sense is the power to create the beautiful and
to present it,” simultaneously the “immediate production or creation of something
real . . . invention in and for itself ” and in a metaphysical sense as the creative act
of genius that “reveals the divine within himself by making the universal and ideal
something particular and real.”7 The youthful Novalis, perhaps the most radical
of the group, imagined poesy as a free employment of the faculties, inspired by
Goethe’s picture of organic growth. Drawn to the natural sciences, to mineralogy
and chemistry, as much as to poetry, in Jena Novalis envisioned an “imaginative
transformation” (Kneller 2006: 202), bridging cold Kantian reason with a mode of
inhabiting the world that allows the world to lead the “self where it needed to be.”
During the course of his education, Novalis’ poetic science moved away from the
haphazard and solely external (sensory) taxonomy of Werner’s system of geology

7. A. W. Schlegel and F. W. J. Schelling respectively, as cited in Beiser (2003: 17).

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 Andrew Brandel 334

and closer to Goethe’s active empiricism.8 Classification in his view required also a
thoughtful consideration of the internal make up of things (the endogamous rela-
tions of mineral and organic nature) (Novalis 1988: vol. 3, 141). The aim was not
to impose a subjective order on the world, but in arranging knowledge of nature,
to reveal its underlying structure (370). The organization of scientific knowledge
moreover requires both a principle of necessity and of completeness (358). How do
we come to know Nature? By means of our body, which is a variation of the whole,
what later he would call the world-all; the individual is a member of the world
(Weltglied) (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, 551). Knowledge of the world through its variant
is a symbol of the essence of existence, an analogy. Scientific knowledge (of nature)
is transformative, not merely mimetic. “Nature, through its study, through experi-
ments and observation, refers to us, and the examination of ourselves, through
experiments and observation, refers to the outer world. . . . We can examine the in-
ner soul of nature only through thought, just as [we can only] examine the body of
nature and the external world through sensation” (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, 429). Like
Goethe’s scientific method, his is an “active empiricism” (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, 641),
one that requires the play of critical imagination and thorough observation. It was
Goethe, after all, who wrote of “the experiment as mediator between subject and
object,” and who imagined the human body as the exacting instrument of system-
atic inquiry. This position had allowed him to maintain both the freedom of the
individual and the “objectivity” of scientific method by calling for the great prolif-
eration of free positions. Goethe describes his “genetic method” beginning from
the empirical encounter with an object and following its creation through a series
of steps to its originary moment, and nevertheless holding this progression in the
mind as an “ideal whole.” As nature leaves no gaps, one has to approach progres-
sion as if it were an “uninterrupted activity,” achieved by “dissolving the particular
without destroying the impression itself ” (Goethe 1988).
Part and parcel to the fundamental character of such an effort of writing (and
living) was the fragment, a “text for thinking” Novalis liked to say, which ebbed
between completeness and incompleteness. Fragments stand outside mereological
adjudication. Any suggestion, or representation, is determinately incomplete—if
the issue were to be settled, the fragment would cease to be what it is. Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy read the fragment as an embodiment of the
promise of the System, as the systactical (as they say, in Heidegger’s language) ideal.
The System is the System-Subject.9 “Because the System itself must be grasped ab-
solutely, the fragment as organic individuality implies the work, the organon. ‘Sys-
tasis’ (association, coming together) necessarily takes the place of the organicity of
an organon, whether it be a natural creature, society, or a work of art. Or rather,
that it be all of these at once, as is indicated by the absence of a specific object for

8. Dalia Nassar has traced their shared conception of knowledge as an infinite activity
within and upon the world, through “creative, living thinking”—a process immanent to
the world itself, or more precisely to nature, from which the knower is never detached,
a potentiation (2011: 86). Thus Goethe and Novalis share a conviction, as she quotes
from the latter, that “idealism is nothing but genuine empiricism.”
9. We must moreover bear in mind the distinction here between the espirit systematique
rather than the espirit de systems.

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335 The art of conviviality

the totality of the Fragments” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1998: 47). The frag-
ment manifests the truth of the work, in its relation to the System, “or better yet
the absolute fragmentary grasping of the System thus depends on the dialectic con-
cerning the Work taking place within the fragment” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
1998: 47). It is the fragment’s self-containment, seeds as Novalis calls them, and its
call for association (in criticism), like the Hermetic divination of Proteus, in which
the fallow soil is forever being remade for the harvest.

The poetics of apprenticeship (to the world)

Stephen Spender has compared Novalis’ Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798–99) with Arthur
Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre (1871). This comparison is, I think, quite useful—where
the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud captures a series of cherished images of nature in
charming—if ecstatic—evocation of the senses, Novalis’ aim is properly Naturphi-
losophic. The latter is chasing after the sober resolution of “impassioned dreams”—
as Spender quotes from Manheim’s translation; “therefore, he who feels an inner
calling to impart the understanding of nature to other men .  .  . must first give
careful regard to the natural causes of this development and to learn the elements
of this art from nature. Having thus gained an insight he will devise a system based
on experiment, analysis, and comparison hereby these means may be applied by
any individual” (Spender 2005). It is this first task of such a science of nature that
is set out in his novelistic fragments. The first book, The novice (Die Lehrlinge) is
an introduction to the scene, opening a clearing: “various are the roads of men”
(Mannigfache Wege gehen die Menschen). And then from far away, the narrator
hears, “the incomprehensible (Unverständlichkeit) is solely the consequence of
incomprehension.” But “holy writing requires no explanation,” for the word of
“whoever speaks true” (wer wahrhaft spricht) is a “chord of the symphony of the
World-all” (ein Akkord aus des Weltalls Symphonie) ([1845] 1984: 61). The voice
is speaking, we come to find, of “our teacher.” He has spent his life in search of
experience, analyzing the movement of celestial bodies, and gathering up and ar-
ranging all manner of natural debris, arranging them into orderly rows. What was
strange “ordered itself within him.” He came to see no single thing by itself; rather
he “heard, saw, tasted and thought at the same time” and “delighted in bringing
strangers together” ([1845] 1984: 63). Here we have the first taste of Lehrlinge’s es-
sential insight about the unity of nature, and thus the unity of its study. For Novalis,
the art of apprehending nature is to be learned from nature itself. The “teacher”
becomes a conduit for the instruction of nature, for our apprenticeship at its feet as
to the manner of its study.10
Confused by the myriad voices, all of which in turn seem correct, the astute
novice becomes anxious. At once, another voice chimes in to assure him and relays

10. The second book opens, “it must have been a long time before man thought to give the
various objects of their senses common names (gemeinschaftlichen Namen) and placing
them in opposition to themselves” (Novalis [1845] 1984: 64). The history of the world
becomes distorted and divided as the history of humankind. Many voices try their
hand at explicating nature in the course of the text. One exclaims science and poetry
are two aspects of the same friendship with nature, whereby scientists gather and order
stores, and poets make them into “daily food and consolation of human hearts” (75).

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 Andrew Brandel 336

a cryptic story, known by most as the fairytale of the Hyazinth and Rosenblüt-
chen (Rose Petal). The story begins with Hyazinth in a state of nonconsciousness,
surrounded cheerily by the trappings of nature and his beloved Rosenblütchen. A
stranger arrives and tells the couple of all the marvelous places he has traveled and
leaves a book in an undecipherable script. Stirred to action by the stranger’s words,
Hyacinth sets out to find the “mother of things,” Novalis’ famed metaphor of the
veiled maiden. He wanders the world until finally he makes his way to the resting
place of the heavenly maiden where he falls asleep to reach her holy heights. There
he stands before her, and once he lifts her veil, his own Rosenblütchen falls into his
arms. The journey represents the loss and reclamation of the paradisiacal “immedi-
ate consciousness of the whole world.” But this return is one that moves forward as
it moves back.
For Novalis, “feeling” itself pertains to the relation of the self to itself. Against
J.  G. Fichte, Novalis argued that the reflection of the subject on itself could not
rely on the positing of an Absolute subject who stood in a position outside reflec-
tion but rather self-feeling I was nothing other than representation. The distinc-
tion comes down to a technical incongruity between immediacy and self-reference.
Rather than ascribe to self-reference an exogamous fact-act (Tathandlung), the in-
tuited subject, Novalis argues that Fichte had conflated intuition and thought; self-
reference was in reality an act of representing what was given immediately, namely
the content of what was properly intuition (what Kant would call sensation, and
Novalis renames “feeling” and at times “not-knowledge” [nicht-Wissen] or “faith”
[Glaube]) and as such had to be distinguished for conceptual thought. When we
see self-feeling/self-intuition (Selbstgefühl) reflected in the “mirror of thought” we
think it is just as it appears; really we have caught nothing but the representation,
the mirror image of that intuition, not feeling itself. This grounds the sciences in a
“theory of intuition” that incorporates—in opposition to the Enlightenment view—
feeling and imagination with reason, and distinguishes Stoff (the substrate of rep-
resentation) from Materie (the substrate of intuition). The imagination mediates
between these binaries.
“Everything,” Novalis wrote, “irrespective of whether we reflect upon or sense
it, is an object and so stands under the laws of the object. . . . Presentation is also
object” (§290 of his Fichte Studien [1988: vol. 2]). These oscillations of the imagi-
nation, furthermore, are bound to essence of freedom, and thereby to the ethical
project of Bildung. Novalis famously writes in the Blüthenstaub (Pollen), “we are on
a mission: we are called upon to educate the earth.” And of anthropology, Novalis
tells us that if it is to be “truly tranquil and freely active in every kind of situation,”
that is “thoroughly healthy” and indicative of a “true presence of mind” then it
should strive unto a harmonious state of the negative and the positive activities
(that is, the subjective and the objective). He elaborates: “artist through morality”
and in brackets “the complete and perfect artist is above all moral through himself—
so too the complete and perfect human being in general” (Novalis 2007: 39). In a
stunning move beyond Kant (and one especially pertinent to ongoing theorization
in anthropology of the everyday), Novalis suggests that the “world making” capac-
ity of the imagination is not a transcendental overcoming of the noumena but an
“appearance . . . rooted in ordinary life” (Kneller 2006: 205). Novalis calls such or-
dinary events “a sensation of immediate certainty . . . the appearance (Erscheinung)

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337 The art of conviviality

strikes us particularly at the sight of many human forms and faces, especially in a
glimpse of some eyes, some demeanors, some movements, or at the hearing of cer-
tain words, the reading of certain passages, certain perspectives on life, the world,
and fate” (as cited in Kneller 2006).
While Fichte began from identity of the I and itself in self-consciousness, an I
that posits itself and meets its limit (Anstoß) only insofar as it does (and abstraction
from which leads to the Absolute-I), Novalis regards a structure of representation
that places the I outside itself as removing its essential nature, namely its unity. The I
is not transparent to itself, because such knowledge would require understanding the
ground of that awareness in the first place, nor is I merely productive of itself outside
of a representation qua intellectual intuition. If we take the radical proposition that
consciousness is a “being outside being in being,” we might regard the I as a sign
(Frank 1989, 1997; Frank and Kurz 1977)—that is, as nothing, except for that every-
thing is given to it, and neither it nor the given are anything without the other. No-
valis uses the language of schema to describe the relation between sign and signified,
which he borrows from Kant’s definition as the link between the necessary and the
free (the receptive and spontaneous grounds of knowledge). It is through the schema
moreover that we understand the mutual intelligibility of signs to multiple subjects.
Andrew Bowie (2003: 90) explains, “language can only be understood as language
via the assumption that the necessitated . . . events in which it is instantiated . . . are
linked to the meaning intentions of a (free) subject. Communication is possible,
then, via the ‘as it were, free contract’ inherent in language.” Communication oper-
ates through the simultaneous acceptance of object-ive, or applied necessity of the
signs publically used and the acknowledgment that other language users are likewise
capable of free intentional meaning that might escape me. Language in its use car-
ries with it the possibility of its failure. In our reliance on this schematic relationship,
Novalis says, the I “paints” its own image under the “mirror of reflection” and “the
picture is painted in the position that it paints itself ” (as cited in Bowie 2003: 91).
They are (re)united in a transcendental poetics mutatis mutandis—the possibility
that through poetry one might take hold of what appears hopeless. The educated
feeling, at which we arrive at the end of the journey, is not the original identity of the
self and nature but rather one that has been rediscovered. Art mediates these modes
of thinking/relating, which we earlier called dialectical historical consciousness on
the one hand and mythological thought on the other. He says in relation to Fichte:
The law of the concept and the law of the object must be one—only in
reflection to be separated. . . . There [the I] is as an intelligence, here, as
a pure I, free. There it separates its reflective activity from its essence—it
goes outside of itself—here it unites both—it goes within itself. It must
do the former, in order to do the other. The latter is the purpose, the
former the means—the means produces the purpose.  /  All knowledge
should produce morality—the moral drive, the drive to freedom leads to
knowledge. Being-Free (Freyseyn) is the tendency of the I—the capacity
to be free is the productive imagination—harmony is the condition of
its activity—hovering, between opposites. . . . All Being, Being as such,
is nothing but Being-Free—hovering between extremes, which it is
necessary to unite and necessary to separate. (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, §555;
italics in the original)

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 Andrew Brandel 338

This Ichheit (I-ness), as a productive power of the imagination, Novalis goes on to

write, produces the extremes between which it hovers—it is this hovering that pro-
duces reality as such. This conception of the I has met with a wide variety of inter-
pretations. Kristin Jones has summarized a field of interconnections: “for Haering,
Novalis was proto-Hegelian; for Walter Benjamin, he embraced a filled infinity of
reflection not unlike Leibnizian monads; for Lacoue-Labarthe, his most important
influence was Kant’s third Critique, though he supported a discursive equivocity
that puts him in the company of Blanchot and Derrida; for Frederick Beiser, he of-
fered a Platonic argument for vitalist organicism; and for Manfred Frank, Novalis’
Kantian anti-foundationalism anticipated aspects of post-modern theories of the
subject and of knowledge” (2013: 13). More fruitful for our purposes, however,
might be his connection to Hölderlin (Kuzniar 1987), with whom this essay began,
and their mutual insistence on a realm of Being that escapes us, save for an “infinite
approximation.” For Hölderlin (especially in Hyperion) as for Novalis, we travel
multiple roads at once, some where the subject feels itself master of the world, and
others where we are nothing. Hyperion’s journey, like Novalis’ activity of the I, stag-
es encounters with possibilities each of which prove—independently—untenable,
and we can rest in the end only in our restlessness (Lamore 2000). If we are to move
beyond the shadow of idealism and reconcile it with the drive to empiricism, per-
haps it can only be achieved through a recognition of unity in Absolute Being; that
is, by thinking the “concrete and internally differentiated” unity of both the world
and of thought, as ongoing activity (Nassar 2014).
To speak of the self as nothing but representation, as empty of inherent exis-
tence, is to recognize also that there is no great distance between concepts and
life. Returning to conviviality, I said at the outset that it could be distinguished
from anthropological notions of hospitality, even those that understand the latter
as transformative, because it must maintain a distance between the level at which
concepts are exchanged and the life behind those exchanges. Conviviality, then, is
activity at both registers simultaneously.

Anthropological thought and its history

I have tried to follow two registers of anthropological thinking, dwelling on sparks
of shared inspiration. One I have called knowledge, dialectical and analytical, con-
ceptual and empirical, propelled by distinctions and the work that happens at lim-
its, of a world, of a self, between me and others, between words and the world.
The conditions of possibility of that knowledge are more difficult to upend, to put
under risk, or to transform, as they can be reached only through those concepts
and that language that they simultaneously ground. To think of anthropology as
a romantic science, then, is to consider how ordinary moments might allow us to
recognize the underlying agreements we share in forms of life that enable limits
and difference to appear to us but that also allows us to transform that condition.
The art of cultivating a disposition is then a kind of self-work, a preparation that
allows us to be challenged at the level of our very relation to the world; one that
distinguishes the knowledge that allows us to reach wisdom (and to abandon itself)
from the end in itself. The art of anthropology (Gell 1999) is not merely in the

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339 The art of conviviality

material traces we leave, in monographs or field notebooks, but in comporting our-

selves to the possibility of transforming the conditions of our knowledge. Through
fragmentary sensibility we hover between these registers because they are integral
to one another. The capacity to rest in (rather than resolve) what appears to us as
in tension, to recognize they are once the same and different, is what I have been
calling the aesthetic sense.
This productive hovering between the registers of difference and identity, in
which we turn to life with others, from the wise and knowledgeable of the worlds
we study, to our disciplinary colleagues, to the ghosts whose books we cherish,
opens up the horizon of who or what might count for anthropological thought,
and by extension, as a part of its history. Many have suggested that a concern with
structure came at the expense of history and infrastructure. Lévi-Strauss writes that
the problem of Marxism in anthropology pertains to the thought that “practices
followed directly from praxis,” but that are in fact mediated by a conceptual scheme
“by the operation of which matter and form, neither with any independent exis-
tence are realized as structures, that is as entities which are both empirical and in-
telligible” (1966: 130). It is to this manifold that our attention is drawn, not to either
axis in itself. The distinction Lévi-Strauss made with respect to Sartre’s division of
dialectic and analytical reason is thereby a difference in their readings of Marx.
Sartre missed that for Marx, meaning is not absolute but rather “superstructures
are faulty acts which have ‘made it’ socially” (1966: 254). For Lévi-Strauss there
is an important difference between the historian’s interest in history, and anthro-
pology’s (between the super- and infrastructural, and their mediating schema). If
the historian’s fundamental dilemma is between “teaching” and “explaining,” one
option appears to be to take flight from history, either by appeal to the bottom, to
individual psychology, or to the top, to biology and ultimately cosmology. There is
another possibility, however, when we recognize history as having no distinct ob-
ject to itself, as a product of its method. We do not throw history away—we simply
take it as the beginning of the search for meaning, rather than the end. Where the
continuity desired by the ingenieur, it might be objected, considered abstractly is
opposed to the concrete praxis of life, Lévi-Strauss suggests the latter is “no less
derivative than the former” because “for praxis to be living thought, it is necessary
first (in a logical and not a historical sense) for thought to exist . . . [it] must be
given in the form of an objective structure of the psyche and brain without which
there would be neither praxis nor thought” (264).
Thus we return full circle to the nature of conditions of experience and with an
anthropological history of anthropology—I have argued that anthropology is con-
cerned not with a symbolic order that merely represents an otherwise concrete re-
ality (like rose-colored glasses), but with genuine knowledge at its limits. The stakes
then are not in the tolerance of multiple adjacent, intransigent worlds but with
possibilities for being together. Anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss told an American
audience, are “the ragpickers of history”—a phrase that was met with much con-
sternation ([1991] 1998: 122). We, like the societies in which we live, manifest a
multitude of attitudes toward history—some set up chronologies and others, gene-
alogies; some struggle against time and others make cults to it (125). History and
structure, time and space, self and other, appear from one angle distinct and from
another, identical. This was the lesson of Marx’s Feuerbachian critique of Hegel

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 Andrew Brandel 340

and Wittgenstein’s language games, that problematic disjuncture is not a problem

in the world but in the approach we adopt. Our logics organize and connect the ap-
pearance of our concepts, lives, events, even our epistemes. And if anthropological
thought is marked by the seriousness with which it encounters new logics, then so,
too, should such perspectives and their relations to the past be brought to bear on
the history of anthropology.
My hope has been to offer conviviality as an alternative starting point through
which we accept with equanimity such tensions rather than erase them or resolve
them. Such an openness to surprise, seems to require of us, in Jane Guyer’s (2013)
words, “a refined sense of unresolvability . . . seen as truer and better in human af-
fairs than certainty.” Her sense that poetry and scientific empiricism might, to use
Ben Okri’s phrase, share a hunger for the widening of the world, for “more life,”
captures precisely what is at stake between Lévi-Strauss and romanticism. If this is
our entrance into a picture of anthropological thought, it is for the same reason, an
invitation to rethink its history and to include among its vaulted names countless
others whose marks have been left indelibly on our lives.

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L’art de la convivialité
Résumé : Cet essai propose de concevoir l’anthropologie comme une science ro-
mantique qui s’intéresse à ce que Lévi-Strauss appelait la logique a posteriori. Je
déplace notre attention, en l’écartant des désaccords conceptuels et en l’orientant
plutôt vers les conditions d’expérience de notre savoir, c’est à dire vers le terrain
d’émergence des concepts: la vie en commun (com vivere). Cette importance de la

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 343 The art of conviviality

convivialité permet de comprendre le travail ethnographique comme une sensi-

bilité, à travers laquelle nous risquons nos propres modes de raisonnement. Cette
image de la pensée anthropologique requiert de plus que nous réimaginions les
contours de l’histoire de cette discipline, en gardant l’esprit ouvert quant ce qui peut
potentiellement constituer l’anthropologie.

Andrew Brandel is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Aus-
tria. He is currently completing a book on the figurations of literary thought in
contemporary Berlin, and is coediting a volume on the anthropology of texts.
 Andrew Brandel
 Institute for Human Sciences
 Spittelauer Lände 3
 1090 Vienna, Austria
ABrandel@jhu.edu

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 323–343

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