Abstract
For almost 50 years now, historians (and, to a lesser degree, philosophers) of science have been enthralled by anthropology. But the way in which they have been enthralled depends on whether the historians investigated pre-modern or modern science. Pre-modern science refers to an immense and motley field, covering millennia of systematic thought about nature and including the astrometeorological observations of ancient Mesopotamia, the natural philosophy and mathematics of ancient Greece, ancient India, and ancient China, the Mayan calendars of pre-Columbian Meso-America, the intertwined Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Latin medical, mathematical, and astronomical traditions of the Middle Ages, the early modern European theories of everything from the mechanics of Galileo and the astronomy of Kepler to the alchemy of Paracelsus and Newton, and much, much else – in short, anything that was not recognisably ‘modern science’, an equally ill-defined term that could mean anything from science since Copernicus (circa 1543) to the emergence of technoscience after 1945. The one thing all of the historians of premodern science have had in common is the double challenge of making their objects of inquiry first, intelligible, and second, worthy of intellectual attention as something other than a history of error and false beliefs. They understood those anthropologists who sympathetically reconstructed the seemingly strange belief systems of other cultures from careful ethnographies to be comrades-in-arms, both intellectually and morally.
The historians of modern science, especially of contemporary science, also embraced the methods of ethnography, but now deployed to make sense of scientists at work in the laboratory and the field. These ethnographies set out to make the apparently familiar strange, rather than the apparently strange familiar. And whereas the historians who imagined themselves as ethnographers of the past sought to restore some measure of respect to their subjects, many scientists suspected the ethnographers of present science of trying to undermine the respect due to them. This was a charge strenuously denied by the ethnographers who followed scientists around, but a gap still separates the ethnographers, who pride themselves on taking a distanced, even ‘Martian’ perspective on contemporary science, and the scientists, who insist that they, the practitioners, understand what they are doing best. To a rough approximation, the historians of premodern science made common cause with anthropologists in making the apparently irrational rational (though not necessarily true), whereas the historians of modern science turned to anthropology to make the apparently rational irrational (but not necessarily false).
Geoffrey Lloyd, a British historian and philosopher of the science of ancient Greece and China, and Aparecida Vilaça, a Brazilian anthropologist who has studied indigenous Amazonians, pursue the possibilities and limitations of the analogy between their respective disciplines and subject matter in this engaging book. They call their conversations ‘metalogues’, in honour of anthropologist Gregory Bateson's name for a conversation about some knotty question, which he imagined as an exchange between father and daughter that gave free rein to questions that were at once simple and deep and perhaps unanswerable. Such metalogues are philosophical in raising issues that a properly disciplinary conversation (or one between practically minded grown-ups) would briskly wave aside as too nebulous or too complicated or just too hard. But in contrast to philosophical dialogues in the tradition of Plato, there is no lead interlocutor and no point scoring. One reason that the conversations between Lloyd and Vilaça richly repay the reading is that they are genuinely exploratory, both sides open to surprise and contradiction. As historian and philosopher of ancient Greek and Chinese thought and as anthropologist of a people, the Wari’, who have until fairly recently lived without much contact to other cultures, both Lloyd and Vilaça seek to understand belief systems that are not their own but to which both have paid the compliment of devoting decades of study. They strive for sympathetic understanding without conversion. Although Lloyd's books have illuminated the works of Aristotle for thousands of students (of whom I am one), and although Vilaça became the adopted daughter of Wari’ parents, Lloyd is not an Aristotelian; Vilaça is not a Wari’. This double perspective, shifting between close and far (or perhaps between inside and outside), is essential to the book's mission, which is somehow, per impossibile, to align those two perspectives.
Because this book is both about perspective and enacts perspective in the authors’ careful labelling of their own standpoints (identifying themselves in their exchanges by discipline, as ‘Philosopher’ and ‘Anthropologist’, rather than by their names), I should be equally forthcoming about my own perspective before going any further. I am a historian of early modern European science who has made occasional excursions into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This means that I too have had the experience of reading a text by a sixteenth – or seventeenth – and sometimes even a twentieth-century author and thinking, ‘This is absolutely bonkers’ – and yet knowing, with strong evidence at hand, that the author of the claims and speculations I found outlandish was utterly brilliant and completely sincere. What separated us was not intelligence (my early modern author was unquestionably my superior) but a different way of thinking. I formulate the difference with deliberate vagueness: it is not always clear whether the difference lies in what counts as an acceptable argument, or in how evidence is weighed, or in the goals pursued, or in what things do and do not exist in the world, or all of the above.
Let me make this concrete: as part of a study of the origins of probability theory, I once read a treatise, Liber de ludo aleae (On Games of Chance, comp. c. 1564, publ. 1663), by the Italian mathematician, physician, inventor, astrologer, and natural philosopher Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576). Historians of mathematics credit Cardano with almost inventing probability theory, and I could see why. Cardano was a gifted mathematician who was a pioneer in algebra and rational mechanics. In his treatise on gambling, he sets forth fundamental concepts like equiprobability, odds, and independent probabilities, using many of the examples (e.g. multiple throws of a fair die) that are still standard in elementary textbooks on probability. But Cardano was himself an inveterate gambler, and, as he tells his readers, he believed that he played with a daemon by his side, who skewed the game in his favour. This assumption is of course entirely incompatible with later formulations of mathematical probability. Reading other works by Cardano – or for that matter, Robert Boyle or even arch-rationalists like René Descartes – can induce the same vertiginous sense of being in the company of someone who seems simultaneously hyper-rational (and shrewd to boot) and, well, bonkers. The historian's job is to make sense of both the brilliant and the bonkers parts as an intelligible whole.
But intelligible to whom? So far, I have been of Lloyd's and Vilaça's party: we are all in the business of make the apparently incomprehensible comprehensible, on the warranted assumption that our subjects, whether ancient Greek philosophers or Renaissance mathematicians or Wari’ shamans, are as rational and reasonable as we are. But who are we? Here I respectfully part company with Lloyd and Vilaça, who contrast the beliefs of their subjects with those of ‘moderns’ or sometimes, ‘modern commentators’. Who exactly are these moderns, and what do they believe? Lloyd and Vilaça apparently think the answer is self-evident and therefore don’t specify what or whom they mean. Perhaps all early modern historians working on the cusp between the premodern and the modern develop a princess-and-the-pea sensitivity to the elusive meaning of the word ‘modern’, but the syndrome is especially acute among historians of early modern science. The raison d’être for the institutionalisation of the history of science as an academic discipline in the twentieth century was the conviction, spread by a number of remarkably successful books in English, French, and German, that science was the engine of all modernity, the creator of the modern world and the force that had separated the West from the rest. Quite aside from the question of whether the claim was true or not, there was the fatal vagueness of the term itself: did becoming modern mean having a scientific revolution? An industrial revolution? A demographic revolution? A democratic revolution? Each of the above has been proposed, singly or in combination, although the events in question may be separated by centuries and stand in no clear causal connection to one another. For example, Saudi Arabia has embraced the latest technoscience but is still an absolutist monarchy, is industrialised but only with regard to petroleum and has an average household size in its capital city Riyadh of 5.7, compared to, say, 2.5 in London or 1.75 in Berlin. Is Saudi Arabia modern?
The reason such questions matter to Lloyd and Vilaça's undertaking is that they frequently contrast the beliefs of the Wari’ people and those of the ancient Greeks and Chinese with those of us moderns. From context, I infer that the ‘moderns’ who find these beliefs ‘strikingly counterintuitive’ (2) are a much more select group than the inhabitants of countries with a high-speed internet connection and a state-of-the-art airport. Many of the claims circulating on social media platforms in Europe and North America would also be counterintuitive (to put it politely) to the ‘moderns’ implicitly meant by Lloyd and Vilaça, although those who make and accept such claims are adepts of the latest technology. My guess would be that the ‘moderns’ of this book roughly correspond to its intended readership: mostly students and academics at universities. Getting this straight matters because what most consistently unites the many fascinating examples of beliefs given by Lloyd and Vilaça from their areas of expertise is rarely a strong analogy among them but rather the fact that they all affront the sense of what is plausible, possible, or even intelligible according to the lights of this small, select group of ‘moderns’ – thus inadvertently affirming the lopsided logic that led to the gross asymmetry between the history of premodern and modern science and that lumps together the past of ‘modern’ cultures with the present of others. I am certain that this was not the authors’ intent, and I raise these points only to underscore one of their own main theses: perspective is a crucial determinant of what counts as intelligible to whom. In what follows, I will use ‘moderns’ in the narrow sense, unless otherwise specified.
With the perspectives of the authors, the assumed readers, and this reviewer in mind, we are ready to add the further perspectives of the book's subjects, be they Wari’ shamans or ancient Greek and Chinese sages. The conversation between the Philosopher and Anthropologist opens with a startling example of a report that strains the reader's belief and is evidently meant to do so: an eye-witness account of a human turning into a jaguar and back again. Because this report and others like it serve as the touchstones for much of the discussion that unfolds in the rest of the book, it is worth quoting at length: “When To’o Xak Wa [the Anthropologist's adopted Wari’ mother] was around 5 years old (my guess after she pointed to a child this age to tell me how old she was), one morning, after a row, her mother went to the stream and, while there, was invited by a young man, her sister's son, who called her ‘mother’, to accompany him fishing to a spot further on, where, he said, there was a lot of fish. The young man carried her on his back for a section of the path. After a time, the mother began to hear familiar voices calling her, saying: ‘It's an animal who called you! It's not a Wari’! Look, here's your daughter! She's crying a lot.’ The true nephew shouted at the one pretending to be him, whom everyone except the abducted woman knew to be a jaguar: ‘Leave my mother on the ground!’ That was when she realized that her supposed nephew had been licking leaves along the path, just like jaguars do. She looked carefully and saw a small length of tail. Because of her kin calling to her insistently, the jaguar-nephew let her go and vanished. According to To’o, the mother was covered in jaguar fur after being carried. When I asked her whether the mother had feared the jaguar, To’o replied: ‘She wasn’t afraid. It was a wari’ [a person]’” (7–8)
The Anthropologist explains that afterwards To’o's mother still retained some jaguar characteristics: for example, transforming blood (jaguar food) into maize chicha (Wari’ food) in her body. ‘Having become identified with the jaguars, To’o's mother had started to have two bodies simultaneously, fused: one human, the other animal’. (9). Among the Wari’, shamans possess a special ability to change back and forth between animal and human form and between animal and human perspectives. The Anthropologist recounts another episode that she herself witnessed: the jaguar-shaman Orowam, the Anthropologist's adopted Wari’ grandfather, began talking to his fellow jaguars, which the Anthropologist could not see. Nor could the other Wari’, but they were so alarmed that they told their children to run away. Orowam was still human enough to tell his jaguar companions that the Anthropologist was his granddaughter, not prey. (And the unseen jaguars were human enough to advise Orowam to ask for compensation for allowing the Anthropologist to film him.) ‘At this moment, Orowam had his two bodies, or better his two perspectives, alternating fast, jaguar-human-jaguar-human’. (58).
The Philosopher labours to make sense of these stories, where ‘making sense’ means finding an interpretation that would reconcile the Wari’ accounts with what moderns (defined in the narrow sense) think is possible. Drawing on a rich trove of examples drawn from ancient Chinese and Greek thought about transformations, he tries out various hypotheses. Is it possible that the Wari’ are dreaming or hallucinating, as the ancient Chinese sage Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, and awoke not knowing ‘whether he is Zhou who dreams he is butterfly or a butterfly who dreams that he is Zhou’? (14). Or perhaps the Wari’ think of such transformations as metaphorical, a way of expressing not literal fact but a different kind of truth about how the ordinary sometimes becomes the extraordinary, as Plato sometimes used myths to make a philosophical point. The Anthropologist is gently discouraging. Not only do the Wari’ not class stories of transformation as dreams or hallucinations; they would not even accept the categorical distinction between humans and butterflies implicit in Zhou's musings. For the Wari’, the boundary between humans and at least some animals is fluid. Jaguars have ‘mind, intelligence, and feelings’ (11), which is why they want to abduct humans in the first place, to make them kin, and also why they relinquish their victims when family members protest. As for metaphors, the Wari’ are in this respect positivists, with an extensive vocabulary for distinguishing between ‘true and false and real and fake’ (19) but none for distinguishing between the literal and metaphorical.
If the incomprehensible cannot be made comprehensible to moderns by being re-assigned from reality to dreams, illusions, or metaphors, then perhaps the strange can be made familiar (or at least familiarly strange) by analogies to traditions usually thought to be part of the moderns’ own intellectual lineage. The Philosopher notes that the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles claimed that he had been ‘born as a boy, as a girl, as a bush, a bird and a fish’ (26) and generalises to the kinship of all living beings as a possible shared underlying assumption among the Wari’, Empedocles, and evolutionary biologists, who are at least all agreed on how ‘transformations challenge rigid species boundaries’. (27). But ascent to this giddy altitude of generality blurs the specificity of all three ways of thinking. Quite aside from the question of the mechanisms of transformation (or whether mechanism is even a question), there is the recalcitrant fact that the Wari’ apparently do not believe in the kinship of all living beings but only of a select few species, and then only for a select few individuals among those species (shamans among humans). As the Anthropologist repeatedly emphasises, the Wari’ don’t think that the jaguars transform into humans from the jaguars’ own point of view. The jaguars always see each other as humans: ‘the jaguar is a person acting as a hunter, with bow and arrows’. (47). The strange remains stubbornly strange.
Or does it? It is true that moderns do not worry about being abducted by wild animals (in my neighbourhood, this would be wild boars and foxes rather than jaguars), much less being turned into them. Yet the sense of kinship with other species remains strong, even among city-dwellers who don’t interact even minimally with any animals except house pets. To meet the gaze of a fox encountered on an early morning walk is to feel a pulse of wordless communication, fox and human each reading the other's gait, posture, and expression. Despite the sternest of bans on anthropomorphism in the scientific study of animal behaviour, the annals of ethology from Charles Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) to the latest issue of the journal Cognitive Ethology are chockful of attempts to blur the boundary between how humans and other species understand each other and the world. And in many cultures and in many epochs, from Aesop's Fables to George Orwell's Animal Farm, humans have chosen to teach moral and political lessons to other humans by means of humanised animals – but animals that are portrayed as still true to their alleged species nature, whether as cunning foxes or dim-witted sheep. Why do children's books overflow with animals who invite each other to tea, drive cars, go to the dentist, wear clothes, and generally conduct themselves as if they, like the jaguars, think they are humans? Anthropomorphism (or is it zoomorphism?) is so ubiquitous we barely notice it. More than that, even the most modern of modern adults experience a frisson of pleasure when animals act like humans. So, apparently, do the Wari’: the Anthropologist reports that in another case of a girl's mother being transformed into a jaguar, those listening to the story laughed when the jaguar-mother pulled a thorn from the girl's foot, ‘marvelling at the jaguar's very human gesture’. (10). Depending on what one chooses to focus on – the content of beliefs or spontaneous responses – the Wari’ attitudes toward jaguars can seem either surpassingly strange or reassuringly familiar.
With admirable persistence and dedication to the principle of maximum charity, the Philosopher turns to questions of trust and doubt, ringing the changes on skeptical arguments from Plato to Descartes to Hume and beyond. These are questions of epistemology, about how we know what we know and whether our knowledge is reliable. In the language of current philosophy, it is not enough for a belief to be true; it must be a warranted true belief. How do the Wari’ warrant their beliefs and assess whether or not the stories about human–animal transformations ‘are just fabrications cooked up by individuals anxious to claim superior knowledge for themselves and to use their positions to manipulate and control their fellow humans’ (69)? Do some skeptical Wari’ query the powers of the shamans, as some ancient Greek medical practitioners queried the powers of magical healers? The Anthropologist's reply is at once disconcerting and disconcertingly familiar: the Wari’ do distinguish between truth and lies, and disputes about medical diagnoses do occur, but their trust is first and foremost achieved through a dense network of social relationships.
This is one point at which the narrower definition of the ‘moderns’ becomes relevant. As the recent experience of the pandemic has demonstrated, the vast majority of residents in what are generally called modern Western urban societies also decided whom and what to trust concerning the advisability of vaccinations and other medical advice on the basis of the consensus among friends and family; only a tiny minority (the moderns in the narrow sense) attempted to apply properly epistemological criteria – for example, by seeking out and assessing rival medical and scientific counsel. As in the case of the Wari’, belief is mostly belief in other people (the root sense of the English word ‘belief’ as confidence or trust in another person), not belief in proven propositions, a point the Philosopher echoes in the distinction between a true friend and a true proposition. As the Philosopher observes, science is ‘provisional, probabilistic, liable to be revised’. (77). For most of us, Wari’ or not, our close circle of intimates is life's anchor. For us as for them, giving someone the lie, especially a close friend or family member, is socially destabilising and therefore avoided. Like the Wari’, many of us may harbour doubts about a neighbour's claims but prefer to make a joke of them or resort to some other stratagem to sidestep a confrontation that would damage the good relations upon which we rely every day. As the Anthropologist explains, ‘A reliable person [among the Wari’] is someone who has plenty of relations and does not quarrel and fight (within the village or within the close social group) … Everyone could be right or wrong, or even partially right or wrong. But they do not say this to someone to their face’. (72–73).
In contrast, epistemology thrives only in scattered agonistic cultures, whether in the philosophical duels of ancient Greece, the courtly debates of mediaeval South India or Renaissance Italy, or the seminar of the modern university. All of these anomalously combative situations are embroidered with rituals, from the mediaeval disputatio to the modern dissertation defense, which are designed to defuse the potential for social rifts and even violence. They are as cordoned off from ordinary social interactions as boxing matches. The point of such staged confrontations is, as the Philosopher puts it apropos of the Masters of Truth in ancient Greece, to exclude the views of all your opponents, just as the point of the boxing match is to knock out your adversary. This is not exactly a recipe for social harmony, and it is hard to imagine it being successfully generalised to society at large, however useful it may be in the pages of a scientific journal or at a philosophy colloquium: witness the war of all against all unleashed on social media.
Although it is never explicitly remarked upon by the interlocutors in these metalogues, both Anthropologist and Philosopher adopt this non-confrontational stance toward their subjects and toward each other to a striking degree. Toward their subjects, it amounts to a methodological principle. The Philosopher (speaking also as a Classicist) sees his mission as understanding the beliefs of the ancient Greeks without necessarily subscribing to them; the Anthropologist tries ‘to just let them [the Wari’] speak, without interfering’. (37). Both emphasise the respect due their subjects; both reserve the right to retain their own points of view while refusing to impose it on their subjects. So far, so sociable. But there is a glaring asymmetry in their positions: much as the Philosopher might like to buttonhole Aristotle and ask him whatever was he thinking in that passage on some people being natural slaves in the Politics, they will never meet face to face, whereas the Anthropologist lived among the Wari as their adopted kinswoman. When her 1-year-old son suffers from a urinary tract infection, she first turns – out of courtesy? Out of respect? Out of loyalty to anthropological principles? – to her adopted grandfather, the shaman Orowam, to cure him. When the cure fails, she decides to treat her son with antibiotics, briskly if briefly returning to her own view of truth.
This pragmatic moment of truth raises a question that goes largely unaddressed in these wide-ranging conversations: what if the focus had shifted from beliefs to actions? The Anthropologist explains that after 2001 and the arrival of evangelical missionaries, many Wari’ had converted to Christianity. She does not question the sincerity of these conversions, although she does contrast her efforts to respect and understand Wari’ perspectives with the missionaries’ strident criticism of them. It is unclear from the Anthropologist’s account whether the Wari’ converts fully accepted the missionaries’ explanation that the former Wari’ views about human–animal transformations were the result of diabolical deceptions. But when the Philosopher asks why the Wari’ believed the missionaries (not only were they outsiders; surely much of the Christian bible must have struck the Wari’ as both exotic and implausible), the Anthropologist has a brutally pragmatic answer: ‘In the beginning, all that the missionaries had to convince the Wari’ was antibiotics and technology. They gave medicine to nearly dead persons and they were cured in a couple of days….Their [the Wari’'s] world was changing and they wanted to try new sources of power’. (82). The unanswered question hangs in the air: do beliefs, whether about ontology or epistemology or proof or truth, really matter so much to the Wari’ or to us? In the end, isn’t the dominant rationality about what works? As the Philosopher concludes after an exchange about whether the Wari’ have an ontology of becoming rather than of stable objects, ‘what sense does it make to talk ontological talk here or in philosophy in the first place? The Wari’ just get on with their lives …’. (95–96).
The Philosopher and the Anthropologist adopt the same respectful, non-confrontational stance toward each other's disciplines that they adopt toward their subjects. Having participated in several interdisciplinary projects that derailed because clashes between disciplinary perspectives could not be overcome, I greatly admired the interlocutors’ intellectual openness and willingness to learn from each other, even when the questions and the answers must have seemed mismatched to both parties. Disciplinary socialisation is almost as deep and indelible as military training, and it must have taken an effort of both patience and perspectival suppleness on both sides to persevere, especially since gambit after philosophical gambit failed to make sense – at least sense to moderns as narrowly defined – of the Wari’ stories of transformation. In the final chapter, the Anthropologist and the Philosopher reflect on the difference between their disciplines. The philosopher has been in search of similarities – to ancient Greek or Chinese thought on metamorphoses or the transubstantiation of the eucharist or simply in the shared human predicament – while the Anthropologist emphasises differences and distinctions.
Both Philosopher and Anthropologist admit to being driven by ethical commitments distinctive to their disciplines at a particular historical juncture. The Anthropologist remarks that had she been writing about the Wari’ a generation earlier, she would have been defending their rationality, presumably to colleagues (and public opinion) still in the thrall of works like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's La Mentalité primitive (1922). But now with ‘their human status guaranteed (at least to anthropologists)’, she feels free to focus on how the Wari’ differ from the inhabitants of ‘modern Western societies’, whom she does not hesitate to call the real barbarians (106–107). Conversely, when the Philosopher began his study of ancient Greek philosophy, his discipline was struggling to cast off the received view that everyone but the Greeks were barbarians who had not had the good fortune to be enlightened by what Classicists used to call ‘the Greek miracle’. One reason why anthropology proved so intellectually fertile for Classicists who rebelled against the tradition of elevating the Greeks at the expense of other peoples as ‘“rational” and “enlightened” like us’ (106) was the way it could be used to reveal the alien and even irrational side of these alleged intellectual comrades. In the arcs of their careers, the Philosopher and Anthropologist traced trajectories in opposite directions: she from the familiarising (the Wari’ are just people like us) to the estranging (but they believe things we can barely comprehend); he from the estranging (Aristotle is not just like the colleague down the hall, only a good deal smarter) to the familiarising (there is a common humanity reflected even in the apparently oddest passages of ancient Chinese and Greek thought).
Do they meet in the middle? Certainly, in a shared modesty that is as much ethical as it is epistemological: the precondition for taking what other people think seriously, whether they hail from another century, another culture, or another discipline, is some combination of respect and a conviction that there is something to be gained from persevering in what is often an arduous conversation – all the more so if one's interlocutors are fragmentary texts whose authors can no longer be cross-examined. Implicit in this modesty is a sharpened awareness of how shaky and incomplete one's own knowledge is, how susceptible to revision and how in need of expansion. This is the shoal upon which most interdisciplinary ventures founder: stamina flags as disciplinary defensiveness reasserts itself. Curiosity about what other peoples think is never just courtesy; we listen attentively because we believe we have something valuable to learn. To sustain that more-than-courteous curiosity over the length of a book is an achievement in its own right.
Whether that curiosity is rewarded with conclusions is quite literally a matter of perspective. What emerges from these metalogues are not concepts and clarifications but a mise en abyme of perspectives. First, the perspectivism of the Wari’ themselves and not only the shamans who can shift between human and animal perspectives. As the Anthropologist emphasises, the Wari’ are past masters at nimbly changing perspectives, especially among close relatives. One reason that philosophical categories like ‘truth’ and ‘proof’ are such a bad fit for the Wari’ is not because they lack a solid grasp of empirical reality but because they admit the possibility, perhaps the inevitability of multiple perspectives. ‘Corn is always corn; chicha is chicha; blood is blood, for someone in a specific situation. But if they change the position, the thing changes too’. (92). These perspectives are tied not just to persons but to social situations: it is more important to maintain relations than to be right. Second, the multiple perspectives of the ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers, from the musings of the dreaming sage Zhuang Zhou to Aristotle's observations of insect metamorphosis. Third, the perspectives of the Anthropologist and the Philosopher, both personal and disciplinary, which in the end are declared by mutual consent to be complementary – another case of a relationship being more important than being right?
Finally, there is the perspective of the moderns, whose presumed bafflement at the beliefs of the Wari’ is the book's departure point and leitmotif. These moderns are a shadowy but persistent presence throughout. I have already expressed my doubts about who exactly they are, but for the sake of simplicity, let us just equate them with the likely readers of this book: university-educated; conversant in English and probably at least one other language; philosophically inclined if not card-carrying philosophers. Will they be satisfied with the book's irenic message of perspectivism, however stimulating they may find the specifics of the discussion? As someone who teaches students who fit the description of likely readers, I can report that perspectivism nowadays belongs to the bon ton of the seminar – to the point that the fast-disappearing subjunctive mood in English is being reinvented by a slight interrogative rise in the intonation at the end of a declarative sentence, as if to suggest a diffident reluctance to impose one's views on others. They are, after all, only one's own views. But unlike the Wari’, who preserve the peace by flexibly assuming the perspective of others, in some cases even of other species, the participants in the seminar discussion increasingly assume that perspectives are rigidly fixed, set in stone by personal identity and experience. It would be an exaggeration but not an untruth to describe this emergent brand of perspectivism as a reinvention of Leibniz's monads, each locked within an individual subjectivity, able to broadcast but not receive.
Much of the animus directed against the ‘moderns’ by both the Philosopher and the Anthropologist in their conversations is aimed at the moderns’ (now construed in the broad sense of current Western urban societies) swaggering arrogance: their readiness to dismiss other peoples as barbarians or less than human; their overweening confidence in science over all other claimants to truth; their condescension toward other intellectual traditions; and their pugnacious insistence on being right, triumphantly right, to the exclusion of all alternatives. Examples of such attitudes, sometimes with tragic consequences, are still all too ready to hand. Yet there is another side to the agonistic intellectual cultures – by no means all of them modern or Western – that prefer a confrontation rather than a reconciliation of perspectives. To debate assumes the possibility of inhabiting another perspective, if only in order to refute it, and also the possibility of persuasion by arguments independent of persons. Implicit in the premises of debate is an assumption of universalism: everyone is capable of understanding if not accepting everyone else's perspective; everyone is capable of being persuaded of another perspective by argument. This is a very different version of perspectivism than that arrived at by the interlocutors in this dialogue. But it is one arguably more consonant with their own humane, capacious vision of all of us sharing the same human predicament, whatever our differences.