Between shame and a shared world: Toward a democratized theory of heterodoxical awareness

Abstract

This article develops a democratized account of heterodoxy that draws attention to how heterodoxical discourses may implicitly arise through social interaction. The analysis is based on one rural Brazilian woman’s claim that it tastes better to eat beans and rice by using one’s fingers. Formerly common in Brazil prior to the 20th century—across identities, regions, and classes—the practice of “eating by hand” was gradually erased from public life, and reconstituted as a mark of non-whiteness, through what Norbert Elias described as a “civilizing process.” The woman’s claim registers as a heterodoxical response to hierarchized and racialized notions of taste arising from this process of historical erasure. The analysis draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory to situate the woman’s claim within a wider field of taste, while engaging with Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that aesthetic judgments may implicitly disclose shared and more equal worlds. Whereas Bourdieu’s famous account of heterodoxy focuses on leaders, experts, and spokespersons of the dominated skilled in the “work of making explicit,” the contribution draws on scholarship in analytic philosophy to argue that critical historical awareness may emerge in what philosophers of language and linguistic anthropologists call pragmatic presuppositions. The heterodoxical pragmatic presuppositions implicit in the woman’s claim conjure a notion of semiotic equality, which is disclosed as a defeasible presupposition of the ethnographic situation in which she makes her claim.