The Sky-Earth System: A Manifesto for Learning to See and Think as a Generic Ancient
By Adam Louis-Klein and Justin Shaffner
ABSTRACT: The Sky is falling and there are too few who recognize the importance of holding it up. We contend that many of the pressing problems of our times, including climate catastrophe and global inequality, are direct consequences of the cosmology of the Moderns. We argue that anthropology as a discipline should think with ordinary people everywhere and with the Universe at once. We propose the Sky-Earth System as a cosmology in which to think and live as Ancients, to suspend the impersonal World of the Moderns. The Sky-Earth System is a metaframe that replaces the Nature/Culture schema of the Moderns and puts the Human back at the Center of the Universe. It allows us to think generically, meaning to think with everyone anywhere and anywhen. We think-with revival movements of the Ancients that are taking place everywhere across the Sky-Earth System, practices of symmetric anthropology in the Upper Rio Negro of the Amazon, in the city of Manaus and in Brazil, the Village-as-University in Melanesia and the Boazi revival, Afro-Centric, Polytheist, Psychedelic, and other movements occuring in North America and elsewhere at the ends of the World.
KEYWORDS: Sky-Earth Systems Science, the Human, Generic Ancient, symmetric anthropology, stranger king, the Moderns, the World.
The Sky is falling and there are too few who recognize the importance of holding it up (Kopenawa & Albert 2013). We[1] contend that many of the pressing problems of our times, including climate catastrophe and global inequality, are direct consequences of the cosmology of the Moderns. It’s impossible today to separate the political and the cosmological. At stake is the very contingency of the World and its relationship to the Universe and to the ordinary person. We claim that anthropology can be a science that thinks with the ordinary person everywhere and with the Universe at once. We maintain that such an anthropology might propose concrete solutions to the aporias of the World. The World[2], under the Moderns, goes by many names: Capitalism (Marx 1867) (racial and otherwise (Robinson 2000, Lowe 2015)); the World-System (Wallerstein 1974, Abu-Lughod 1989); Globalization; Empire (Hardt & Negri 2000); the Plantationocene (Haraway & Tsing 2019); Capitalist Sorcery (Pignarre & Stengers 2011); and the Cannibal Giant (the “two-headed state-market monster” in Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2014). When the Sky collapses, the person cannot be seen in the Universe and the World takes their place. But it doesn’t have to be that way, nor should it. There are other ways of living together between the Sky and the Earth.
Anthropology is a science that has always had to think from the margins of the World. In its study of the World it cannot be content to reduce the persons who live in the World to it (cf. Laruelle 2012). This is part of the significance of animism, not only as an object but as a method of anthropology (Viveiros 2009, Descola 2005, Skafish 2016). There is a latent utopianism that results from putting the World each time into variation (Maniglier 2016), a prophetism to be made explicit during the end times of cosmological crisis (Kopenawa & Albert 2013; Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2014). There is a war of the worlds (Latour 2002) taking place everywhere at the margins of the World, and in the Moderns’ academies.
But neither the confidence of the Modern in the necessity of their World nor the celebration of endless differences and variations suffices to envision a positive alternative. It is necessary to actually build new spaces of thought and anthropology – the generic science of the Human and method of thinking-with the person – is central to this endeavor. The ethnographic record is not just a place to bury the Ancient – treating the People as an object for testing the Modern’s theories, but a repository – a living testimony – of viable ways of thinking,experimenting, and being Human in the contemporary. We seek to liberate these living testimonies from the colonial archive, in an effort to permanently decolonize anthropology as such from the World (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2009), each time from the beginning.[3] Anthropology as a discipline should be engaged in thinking alongside ordinary people everywhere (Grimshaw & Hart 1996). It should not put itself above them and claim to be an exclusive account of who the Human is or its history.
Such an anthropology would not be engaged merely in the transposition of cultural practices in alien contexts, but in the composition of generics, analogical models that become integrative to the thought and practice of the anthropologist[4] themselves [in their own times].[5] Graeber and Wengrow’s recent book (2021) shows at what level the political forms studied by anthropology might be engaged in this way. Graeber and Wengrow propose not to take a specific society as a romanticized ideal but to open up the ethnographic record to the multiplicity of social forms, making them available for contemporary prototyping and composition in the person (cf. Corsin Jimenez 2014, 2017).
The Moderns shouldn't be equated with the historical epoch called Modernity. Not only is this period simply when the Moderns become peculiarly dominant, but to fall into such a conflation would already be the Modern way of thinking. For the Moderns rely on a claim to historical supersession and replacement, supposedly rendering everything that came before them irrelevant. This linear orientation of the Moderns perhaps first appears with the Christian theory of the fulfillment of the Old Testament by the New Testament, or even earlier, with the Deuteronomist reformation of the Hebrew Bible, so as to suppress the God who shows himself in Human form (Barker 1992), and becomes their racial evolutionism. It is a distinctive trait of the Moderns everywhere.[6]
Talk of the Moderns is not new; it follows them wherever they go. Like the World, they are known by many names, including wendigo, demons, sorcerers, and most recently, the Waitman, or the “Whites” (os brancos) (cf. Basso 1979, Bashkow 2006, Kopenawa & Albert 2013). We take seriously observations of the Moderns from all those who encounter them, including those that the Moderns have marginalized: the African, the Indigenous, the Proletariat, the Worker (Lazarus 2015), the Migrant, the Jew, the Terrans (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2014), ordinary people everywhere.
Despite major failures at the level of health, food, diplomacy, economy (just distribution and optimal scale), biodiversity, and the integration of knowledge, all of which today have reached a tipping point, the Moderns continue to hype themselves up. They do not know how to live well between the Sky and the Earth. The Moderns refuse conviviality and reciprocity, reducing the person either to a competitive, atomized individual or dissolving them into an impersonal crowd. They try and police talk under the assumption that the sole goal should be the standardization of conventions so as to reproduce the World. A specific criticism of the Moderns is necessary to be able to identify them from an external position that does not presuppose their authority: to name them so as to call and cast them out, to suspend their authority.
Just as the Moderns cannot be equated with a historical supersession, nor are the Ancients confined to the irrelevant past, a “cultural ancient” that is merely a historical curiosity. We take the Ancients to be each one of us, the ordinary person and their invention, who cannot be superseded. We start from the Beginning, the person themselves, as a universality that anthropology might take as invariant in the midst of the comparison of differences. We call this the generic Ancient, affirming at the very same time the importance of anthropology’s ongoing dialogue with those who have lived or still live at the margins of the World of the Moderns.
Throughout the various phases and “schools” of anthropology, we identify a throughline that leads to the development of a symmetric anthropology (cf. Manifesto Abaeté 2006; dos Santos & Dias 2009, NEAI 2018)[7], an attempt to radicalize anthropology’s engagement with the other to the point of effecting recursive transformations on the thought of anthropology itself, and that we wish to formalize so as to make integral to the practice of anthropology, and to take to its ultimate conclusion. We see here the promise of an anthropology that lets itself be transformed – in concept, affect, and practice – by thinking-with, a commitment that gives birth to concepts like the “fractal person” (Wagner 1991), the “dividual” (Strathern 1988), and “perspectivism” (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Here we see the beginning of a composition of models that place the self and the other within a unified space that is not reducible to the World, but unfolded from a flow of invention that is immanent to the People as they think together (cf. Wagner 1981, 1986, 2018a, 2018b).
From these concepts we get a first indication of what it might mean to think from a common=x (Schmid 2021), a generic point of view, that serves as the basis for the positive alternative we would like to elaborate. We see similar kinds of endeavors undertaken in other disciplines: such as Philosophy, where Laruelle (1996, 2018) aims to suspend Philosophy’s dogmatic authority over the ordinary Human and their conceptual inventions; or Biblical Criticism, where Margaret Barker (1992) reopens Abrahamic spiritual history as a matrix of variations of thinking-with the God; or Critical Race Studies, where Denise Ferreira da Silva (2014) initiates a poethical practice to emancipate Blackness from the "colonial (juridic, economic, symbolic) architectures" that produced it and instead take it as an unknown ‘x’ for global re-compositions at the ends of the World. We see in all of these a tendency toward an ordinary, generic science that thinks with the ordinary person everywhere, unmediated by the World. We seek to formalize this gesture of placing the Human at the Center of thinking-with.
Sky-Earth Systems Science (SESS) is a formal way of thinking with and speaking in the images of ethnographic material themselves. A certain distance is maintained but also suspended between the subject and object of analysis, such that what the anthropologist says about their material emerges from the People themselves. The anthropologist speaks a pidgin, a language composed as much out of the concepts and terms of their interlocutors as their own. Knowledge about a fieldsite comes from experimentation with the possibilities of such combinations of thoughts, in terms of problems also framed in the language.[8] It is not a question of a faithful emic description, but the modeling of thoughts within a generic space, over which neither interlocutor has total authority, the specification of a common=x, as it emerges in collective intimacy (Schmid 2021).
Many anthropologists have now isolated how Nature functions as a background frame to control the thoughts of others, and their effects, so that they conform to the cosmology of the Moderns (Wagner 1981, Strathern 1980, 1988, Viverios de Castro 2004, Latour 1991, 2012, 2018, Descola 2005, da Silva 2007, 2022). In short, Nature relegates the ancients to a merely metaphorical understanding, incapable of true and literal reference, without the autonomy that is proper to scientific thinking (cf. Althusser 1965). It reduces their thinking to cultural representations, merely local practices, as set against the exclusive knowledge of Nature that only the Moderns possess. By continually taking Nature as given (cf. Sellars 1991, Wagner 1981), as much in the natural as in the social sciences, the Moderns continue to reposition themselves as an authority over others.
We propose the Sky-Earth System as an alternative to Nature as the meta-frame of cosmological composition and the axiomatic given of the [social] sciences. SESS is not simply another anthropological theory meant to supersede the previous. It has always been there [since the beginning], and well-documented in the ethnographic record, but has simply fallen out of favor amongst the Moderns and their anthropology.
Motivated by a desire to recognize and uphold the autonomy and integrity of the ancient, ordinary sciences everywhere, our aim here is simply to name, describe and demonstrate SESS, as well as explain its consequences for anthropology and thinking-with, for creating a framework for symmetrical, generic exchange between persons, taking both the form and content of talk seriously. For example, instead of theorizing about xapiri ontology or beliefs about them, Kopenawa thinks from and with the xapiri as persons, and directly asks the anthropologist to do the same, to listen to the voice of the xapiri he is transmitting (Kopenawa & Albert 2013). Until anthropology takes responsibility for the person in how it thinks-with others [inventions], it will forever remain an ideology of the World rather than an autonomous science – unable to enter into rapport with – let alone a reciprocity and generic exchange [in-disciplinarity] with – the Ancients and their sciences, such as those practiced across the different village campuses and haus tambaran of the University of Melanesia (cf. Narokobi 1980, 1983; Dobrin 2020), or the science of image-talk [bahsese] taking place across the different bahsawii [transformation houses] on the Upper Rio Negro (Dutra & Dutra 2018).
The Sky-Earth System is a meta-frame for thinking as a generic Ancient. The Sky-Earth System can be compared to Isabella Stengers’ (1997) and Bruno Latour’s (2017) usage of James Lovelock’s (1979) concept of Gaia, which would overcome the separation of politics and ecology (which sustains inaction on the climate crisis) and replace Nature as the overarching frame in which worlds are situated. There are several reasons, however, why we choose to think from within the Sky-Earth System, rather than Gaia, while also responding to the way the climate crisis compels us to envision both the Planet and the Universe differently.
Gaia reproduces many of the defining moves of secularism, which we feel it is necessary to suspend in order to integrate the full range of the ordinary person within anthropology. Reducing or dismissing the God has been one of the axiomatic premises of Modern social sciences (cf. Asad 2003). Gaia still preserves the metonymic relationship between terms such as Earth, Matter, Immanence, and Nature in the secular gesture (Louis-Klein 2021). It defines immanence not as a referential immanence [self-reference] in talk or performative immanence [operational closure] in action (Varela & Maturana 1979), but a bringing of “Heaven down to Earth,” simply an a priori decision against the God. Here, Gaia mimics Galileo, Spinoza, Newton and other Moderns’ insistence that the duality of Sky and Earth can be done away with [if it were possible to provide a single set of mathematical equations for both domains].
In contrast, for the Ancients, the Sky is not a problematically separated transcendence, nor do the Ancients only think from the Earth or reproduce the secular gesture.[9] In this sense, Gaia theory tends to assimilate the Ancient to specifically Modern problems, even when the goal should be a critique of the Moderns and a suspension of their cosmology, to start over from the Beginning. It does not fully distinguish the position of Earth from that of Nature.[10]
The Sky-Earth System is an analogical expansion of ethnographic material that is motivated independently from the Modern complex of thought. We feel that it is necessary to move beyond an [exclusive] “us/them” type contrast that continues to position, or interpellate (Althusser 1971), the speaker within the frame of the Moderns, and instead start from the crossing-place at the center of self and other, the generic Ancient in all of us (Dos Santos & Mendes 2009, Wagner 2018b, Louis-Klein 2022a). We feel that it is necessary to stop merely speaking about the Ancients, but to think as Ancients, and it is thinking with Ancients that leads us to think as them.
The Sky-Earth System reintegrates the ordinary person into the Universe, the Human at the Center of the Universe, ending the Copernican era as seen from within the history of the Moderns. The Moderns aim to displace the person and prioritize impersonal orders of the World (cf. Postone 1996, Strathern 1988), asserting a Copernican supersessionism that sees the Universe as a proliferation of peripheries, the Ancients confined to a mistaken and merely local perception of Nature [culture; geocentrism]. We hold that it is necessary to maintain the polycentricity of the Center of the Universe, and at the same time that the Human is really there at the Center and this is what matters.
Whether one takes the multiplicity of centers to mean that there isn’t one, or to mean that the Center is really everywhere and polycentric, is the difference that makes all the difference. By the Center we do not mean a local region spread out across space, but the unextended ‘point,’ the origin of the coordinate frame where anyone is, and from which a generic space-time is projected. In placing the Human at the Center, we do not propose an “anthropocentrism,” or deny the personhood of the animal, but generalize the Human as an invariant and minimal position, building both on Viveiros de Castro’s concept of Perspectivism (1998) and Wagner’s integrative Human Hologram (2001), in each case having arisen from a profound engagement with Amazonian and Melanesian thinking, respectively, from which we continue to draw inspiration.
We are not trying to “de-center” anything, but suspend the World which occludes the Human at the Center of the Universe. It is the Moderns who have de-centered the Person. Their talk throws shade [sorcery] on the person, eclipsing them, never addressing the whole person (cf. Strathern 2004). It always reduces them, interpellates them as if they were less than one, speaks to and about the ordinary person everywhere as already [buried] underneath them. We simply aim to suspend the World so as to open up the Sky and uncover the Human that has always been there, since the Beginning.
In composing a concrete space-time to think with everyone at once, it’s not a question of rejecting a meta-frame in favor of the dispersion of local worlds or territories (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2009), simply favoring multiplicity over unity (cf. Badiou 1988), or difference over identity (cf. Deleuze1968). Nor is it a question of a return to a supposedly Modern and universal “rationalism” as it triumphs in World-History as the Enlightenment (cf. Negarestani 2018, Badiou 1988, 2006, Meillasoux 2006, Hornborg 2019). We practice the generic and universal thinking that starts directly from the Ancients, that has always been here, as is well-attested in the ethnographic record.
The Modern may deny it but the record is there as a testimony; the World simply places a control on what one can do with the material, or sustains a resistance against the transformations it effects in the person [the reader; the ethnographer]. We believe that this science can be shown and practiced even within the heart of the World and the World academy, transforming the materials of the World so that they are conformal with the Person – returning to the Universe – and our axioms and terminology are chosen simply so as to make this possible.[11] The reader will find a glossary of some of these terms at the end of this text.
From the minimal premise of the Center, we are able to give parameters that develop positive content to our model of the Universe and the ordinary person and to a generic composition of worlds. In specifying a vertical and horizontal axis, which open the Sky and the Earth to perception, we give a framework in which different conceptual imagery [description] can be organized, mimicking empirical perception just enough to act as the literal space-time that the Human inhabits. The Sky-Earth System is an integrative thinking environment – a surrounding container [of worlds] – a virtual reality and surround-sound space (cf. Gómez-Emilsson 2022) that lets us see what the Ancients are seeing. It replaces Nature as the referential ground of talk and analysis, the assumption that in the last instance whatever we talk about [or in[12]] must be Nature or the World.[13]
Since the Nature/Culture duality has become an object of criticism by anthropologists, much attention has been paid to whether the problem consists in duality all together, or simply the unbridgeable separation (“the Great Divide”) between the terms, or in the specific semantic positions assigned to them (with their racial and gendered undertones), or their hierarchical rather than balanced relationship. Whereas various directions have been taken, they tend to either do away with an organizing schema all together, in favor of multiplicitous hybridities (in which case it may still be the case that what is being hybridized is Nature and Culture) [new materialism], or there are attempts to invert the schema in the hope of producing new effects, such as Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) transformation of multiculturalism and mononaturalism of the Moderns into a multinaturalism and monoculturalism drawn from Amazonian ethnographic materials [one could say that Viveiros de Castro inverts the frame in order to produce an anarchic effect which subtracts from any overarching frame], or to provide a distinct duality, as in Descola’s (2005) move to consider continuities or discontinuities in “interiority” and “physicality” in the relation between humans and non-humans, or finally in attempts to preserve the hierarchical organization of the terms but emphasize their continuity and embeddedness, as in Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) biosemiotics of mind. Without positive parameters to keep the person conformal to the Universe [between the Sky and the Earth] we feel that such innovations are liable to recapture by the World, to become indexicals of the World’s authorized positions and points of reference [institutional, state, etc.], rather than of simply the Ancient at the Center of the Universe.
All of these proposed solutions can be characterized by either a loss of organizing frame, the preservation of the frame in a corresponding or inverted form, or the proposal of a new one. We have already shown the problems we have with Gaia as a new frame which would supplement the assertion of a multiplicitous hybridity between natures and cultures. We also feel that it is important to preserve the desire for symmetry between terms that is part of the methodological orientation of symmetric anthropology, even while taking into account the hierarchical encompassment of systems (cf. Dumont 1966, Viveiros de Castro 2015, Sahlins 2017, Kohn 2013), which we, however, take to be ultimately reversible, in a reciprocity of perspectives in active thinking-with.
We feel that we need a new organizing frame and duality that both undoes the “Great Divide” of the Moderns, as well as puts the frame of comparison on a completely distinct basis, one drawn directly from the ethnographic materials, as in Viveiros de Castro’s case, but without any simple inversion or correspondence between the terms. We need something as concrete and as literal as Nature, but which can act as a distinct ground of reference (see Wagner 1977) [rather than the metaphorical Earth of ecology, which still draws on Nature]. While we feel that Descola’s “interiority” and “physicality” are wide enough to capture the scope of cosmologies anthropology should be engaged with, we think they are not concrete enough to act as a new, scientific cosmology, remaining abstract, taxonomic brackets at an epistemological distance from the material. Descola’s modes of identity and modes of relation do not seem able to generate further structural complexity, but when combined ethnographically only result in various “weightings” of dominance between the terms, whereas we seek something that can be structurally generative of new thoughts [invention], in a more direct application of Lévi-Strauss’s methodology in the Mythologiques [and Wagner’s in Symbols that Stand for Themselves], while also remaining true to the Universe and to the Person.
We propose the Sky and the Earth as an organizing duality, generalizing the wide-spread myth of the Sky and Earth’s separation in the Beginning of time. We take this myth as the frame for a generic Mythologiques inside of which to speak, in referential [talk] and performative [action] immanence to any material. Like Descola, we seek a generalization of the terms “spirituality” and “materiality,” but here realized as a literal and encompassing space-time, what we have called an integrative thinking environment for the composition of worlds (cf. Corsin Jimenez 2013). We do not analogize Culture to the Sky and Nature to the Earth, but change the position of the Human within the Universe altogether, placing them at the Center of the Sky-Earth System, and invent new [conformal] images from there. Sky-Earth Systems Science is an autonomous science distinct from the World altogether.
Methodologically, Sky-Earth Systems Science integrates any material into the Sky-Earth System on the basis of minimal and independent axioms.
Let these two core axioms be:
1) We are at the Center of the Universe.
2) In the beginning, the Sky and the Earth separated.
The first statement makes the ordinary person the generic ground of everything we think and say. It demands a non-dual vision that shows the person and the Universe at once, and makes the macro scale immediately visible in the micro and vice versa. The second axiom opens the space between the Sky and the Earth, the space-time in which the imagery of invention is situated. It makes all of the resources of algebras, geometries, and physical cosmologies available as modeling tools for SESS, in so far as it takes the 3-d dimensional structure of the Sky-Earth System in literal terms, while fusing them with the semantic parameters of the Mythologiques, minimized to the animal and God positions, from which others (such as the plant, the star, the black hole, etc.) might be structurally and mythically generated. In this way, SESS works alongside physical cosmologies and enters into a unified, in-disciplinary (Schmid 2021) space with the sciences. We build on the legacy of numerous anthropologists who were engineers or who had an interest in physics themselves[14] in order to propose the Sky-Earth System as a toy model of the Universe (Negarestani 2018). The Human becomes a [perspectival] Mars Rover within the Sky-Earth System’s virtual reality experience and cosmology. Let these axioms be the new “givens” of our social science.
By the Sky-Earth System then we do not only mean the planet earth, but any planetary experience [perception] with its horizontal and vertical axes. What we describe is closer to a spaceship Earth (Boulding 1966) in which there is always both the Floor and the Roof, the House that is the Universe. Wherever there is an Earth there is a Sky, and it is a question of what we compose in the interstice, where the poles of the system meet in the Center.
In this sense, we describe a universal cartography at the scale of the Universe. Each image is a referential description of the topology of the Sky-Earth System, whether as the House, the Womb, the Cardinal Directions [all the images of myth] such that each is a diagram or cosmogram. The Mythologiques becomes self-referential in form and content [autopoietic (Varela & Maturana 1980)], an immanent self-description of the Universe. It is a question of seeing both the image and the frame at once, the figure and the ground, showing the whole Sky-Earth System in each description. The Sky-Earth System is both the ground and the figure of our talk, the space and language [topology & talk] we think within, but also what we continually make explicit in our speech, so as to subject it to an evaluation of its usefulness to the ordinary Human.
We wish to think as, if not more, universally than the Moderns themselves, and we know the scope they give to Nature as a background frame to the disciplines. We cannot do away then with the Sky as the encompassing frame of any reversal between the Sky and the Earth, such as in the image of the Earth from “outer-space,” in which the [planet] Earth is now an orb in the Sky, rather than the horizontal plane or floor of the spaceship [the Earth of the observer], or in the relativistic relationships between the terms within any orbital system [the reversibility in the reciprocity of perspectives]. In each case, there is a Sky in which everything happens and which acts as the container of the Universe and that is the Universe. On the other hand, Gaia only proposes a local limitation of the Universe to the Earth, one that in the first place seems to already presuppose the Sky if it is to be seen from the inside, as in exactly how things look like when one looks up: the literal experience we wish to mimic so as to introduce a concrete and literal ground of reference, that is nonetheless distinct from Nature, since the Human is at the Center of the Universe.
To think from the Center of the Universe is to think from the Original Sky prior to the division between the Sky and the Earth, while at the same time holding oneself within their distinction. It is to see the Two in the One (Person/Universe) [axiom 1] and the One in the Two (Sky/Earth) [axiom 2] (Wagner 2001). Axiom 1 unoccludes the Person at the Center of the Universe, and restores the immanence of the person in the Universe and vice-versa. Axiom 2 lifts and holds up the [Original] Sky at the Center of any and all worlds.[15] Together they form a framework, the Sky-Earth System, that restores what the axioms of the impersonal World [commodity-form] conceal, so as to reveal the integrity of the Human everywhere.
The way in which the Center reflects the Sky, and the Sky the Center,[16] is what allows the Sky to be the frame of any inversion between the Sky and the Earth, even as the inversion between the Sky and Earth – and so any two terms– remains symmetrical. SESS operates a transformation on Modern cosmology, in which “transcendence” is suspended, precisely in so far as it is preserved through the identity of the Sky and the Center, rather than the collapse of the Sky which repositions the Modern or the World as “transcendent” over the ordinary person. Instead, the Universe is seen in the Person and the space between Sky and Earth is opened, so as to be crossed and maintained symmetrical in the Center itself. The Center is both between the Sky and the Earth and is the Sky [the World Tree]. At the same time, the encompassment of the system by the Sky allows a control on the system, the specification of the meta-frame and positive parameters of composition.[17]
SESS shows and expands the person to every level of description and analysis. There is a holographic projection of the Sky-Earth System onto the Sky’s surface, mirroring the usage of the holographic principle in physics, used to describe the surface of the Black Hole (Louis-Klein 2022b). The geometry that results is conformal [cf. Penrose 2010], meaning it operates at any scale, allowing the imagery of the Sky-Earth System, with the person at the Center, to take on the same scale-invariance, as long as it is described as nothing but the composition of the Sky-Earth System, in terms of the diagrammatic character of the images described above. In this way, the Sky-Earth System works as the literal space-time frame of the generic statements and images that we see as present in whatever ethnographic material (including the scientific disciplines of the Moderns), providing a generic embedding of all of them within the concrete meta-frame and thinking environment (cf. Levi-Strauss 1955, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1971 , Wagner 1986, 2001).[18] We start from and think within a Black Hole cosmology, with the person at the Center (cf. Good 1972, Pathria 1972).
The ontological turn (cf. Holbraad & Pedersen 2017) took itself to be continuing on Wagner’s project for a recursive anthropology that thinks with and takes seriously its interlocutors, and it understood the wide scope that such a project would imply in reframing anthropology’s relationship to the totality of the disciplines, which it named as “ontology.” However, we feel that without a positive control on the material, the specification of new parameters and a new meta-frame, the project of the ontological turn is liable to repositioning in the World or reference to Nature. In new-materialist talk, we see a positioning of the ancient within the global order of NGO intervention, ecology as a reigning paradigm that appeals to the Moderns’ intuitions of Nature, an orientation to the Ancients that does not necessarily involve thinking-with them and may involve instrumentalizing them (cf. Wagner 1977). What matters for the Ancients is that the Universe and the Human are seen together, not that the “homo sapiens” is made a mere instrument for the reproduction of Nature, under the guise of sustainability. In this way, the Ancient comes to take on a merely local and encompassed position in the World and is made to answer to it. In analytical terms, it came to be seen that what the ontological turn was calling “ontology” could not be distinguished from “culture,” from simply the local cosmology of this or that cultural group within the World (cf. Kohn 2015). The Sky-Earth System is not a local cosmology, but rather a generic cosmology, in which each local appears as a perfect or holographic representative of the global structure. This is because it is composed out of generics, as Wagner and others have described of Melanesian knowledge-practices (cf. Crook 2007), and as Viveiros de Castro intuits when he sees Amazonian perspectivism as a generalizable frame of comparison between cosmologies and not only a cosmology to be compared.[19]
Ontology distracts from the ordinary person, who ends up being replaced by the impersonal category of “Being” (cf. Mimica 1993) so that there is a disproportion between analytical and interpersonal frames of thinking (cf. Strathern 2020), a division of labor and formula for the reproduction of the World, the systematic occlusion – perpetual eclipse [the long night]– of the person at the Center. What mattered for the ontological turn was often the “becoming-other” [variation; difference] of any ‘what’ (the concept of a mountain, bird, language, sign, meaning, time, space, Being, etc.) as it is transformed in anthropological comparison (see Charbonnier et al. 2017). What matters for SESS is the conformal transformation, not of the ‘what,’ but of the ‘who’: how the person is integrated with the Universe in the expansion of the generic image and description, as it is unfolded from within the Sky-Earth System.
The Peoples and places at the margins of the World have always been a Black Hole for the anthropology of the Moderns, the problem of how to incorporate and make sense of them within the World of the Moderns (cf. Strathern 1990, Crook 2007). Wagner’s theory of symbolic obviation is an anthropological formalization of certain Melanesian knowledge practices (Wagner 1978; cf. Crook & Shaffner 2011), a way of speaking directly from the Black Hole. Obviation turns the images in the words back on themselves, reversing their time-series, breaking down and recycling the sense they make in the reciprocity of perspectives at the Center (Wagner 2018b), what the Daribi call a porigi po, an inventive speech that produces new images and concepts, each one generic in scope.[20] In the Upper Rio Negro region of the Amazon, and today in Manaus, the Kumu practitioner also practices a kind of conformal speech – the science of bahsese – in which any image can be activated or reactivated within the talk or chant so as to effect a concrete reintegration [healing] of the person with the Universe (cf. Lima Azevedo 2016, Lima Barreto 2022).
In the language of the World, generic and specifics are not alternate and proportionate terms, but rather the specific is subordinated to the generic, and there is a chasm between local and global representations. The World is a typed coding language[21], rather than a homoiconic LISP (Kay 1969) in which structures can be analogically preserved across different scales or levels of reference [permuted as block-strings]. The World gets caught up in its own abstract categories as if they existed over and above the ordinary Person and People [auto-position (Laruelle 1996)]. The Modern talk tends to be associative in this way. The words become indexicals of positions in the World and the contents associate amongst each other independent of the form of the sentence. The Modern talks about things, rather than thinks with them, at a level of reference that is disconnected from the content and is citational.[22] As Latour (2012) showed, the Modern often invokes science in this way, being more concerned with regulating the word “science” as an index of the World’s authority than in thinking scientifically, or working directly with scientific concepts as an ordinary scientist. It’s necessary to attend to both the form and the content of speech, not only what is said, but how. SESS is engaged in an ongoing symptomatology of the Moderns, similar in certain ways to psychoanalysis, so as to locate where and how the Moderns occlude the Person in their ways of talking, and to directly experiment with speaking and thinking as Ancients.
SESS suspends the authority of the Moderns and their control over who or what people think with and over what counts as ordinary Human speech. Authority-over is cross-canceled in reciprocal predation. Each is forced to think with each other, as a We, at the Center. No one has absolute authority over the material, but each is capable of co-authoring, speaking and thinking-with each other in a reciprocity of perspectives. SESS sets up a positive space to think with everyone everywhere, each time, with each other, all together and at once, from the Center that is everywhere. The Ancients always begin again from the Center, the common = X, in order to redivide the World by the person, to make the Universe and Person conformal to and integrated with each other.
The Sky-Earth System exerts a force on the reader to think with the other, to enter and think inside of its matrix, but it does not force the reader into any determinate position [dogmatic], nor does it hide its constitutive statements and proposals [axioms], as if they were not open to evaluation based on their consequences, or usefulness. Yet, this is precisely what the Moderns continue to do with both Nature and the World.
SESS is not another theory about, standing over what it describes, considering it externally, but a toy model in one to one correspondence with the concrete person [at the center] living with each other [at the center] between the Sky and the Earth. When nothing is taken as given [Nature], then the Universe is composed simply of images, to be put together and recombined, experimented-with and experienced in the person [bahsese]. Rather than a new Philosophy, or an [uncontrolled] mixture (cf. Laruelle 1996) of Anthropology and Philosophy, we wish to suspend both the implicit Philosophy of the World, and the explicit Philosophy that still reflects the World in analytical and categorical form and that would still ground the various analytical or theoretical frames of the social sciences (whether these Philosophies be classical, rationalist, phenomenological, semiotic, Deleuzian, etc.). Our axioms are not theories about Nature meant to be won in debates within the World, but simply minimal constraints so as to make a generic thinking-with the images, with other people, possible. This is also how SESS treats ethnographic material, as toy models or prototypes (Corsin Jimenez 2013) for thinking and experimenting as people in the Universe.
There is a reason that the Modern has not taken the Ancient sciences seriously, or even truly tried to experiment with, or import wholesale [analogic], the ways the contemporary Ancients at the margins live, because they lead to the World obviation, destruction and recycle (cf. Holbraad, Cherstich & Tassi 2020). The Ancients start from and continue with a place-value for any person=x=SES such that the World never gets off of the ground, let alone big enough to occlude the Person in the Original Sky or the Original Sky in the Person (cf. Weiner 2001; Corsin Jimenez 2004).
SESS allows the Modern division of labor for reproducing the World to be clearly seen for what it is, the obscuring of the Person at the Center of the Universe, across all of their different social forms, in their kinship, politics, economics, and [World] religions (cf. Schneider 1984). Anthropologists have described this obscuring and displacement of the Person under different names inclusive of but not only the “commodity” (Marx 1867, Strathern 1988), “bureaucracy” (Weber 1922), and the “state” (Clastres 1989).[23] In each case, some-thing other than the person grows itself as the World [commodity chains; cancer; blight].
The Ancient always thinks in a way that takes responsibility for the person, as has been described by anthropologists (cf. Wagner 1981) under different terms, including the gift (Mauss 1925), the elementary structures of kinship [in generalized and restricted exchange] (Levi-Strauss 1955), the society against the state (Clastres 1989), galactic polities (Tambiah 2013), kingdoms (Graeber & Sahlins 2017), and polycentric polytheism (Butler 2012, Barker 1992). These are but names for the sciences of the Ancients in how they place the person front and center. Sky-Earth Systems Science generalizes these Ancient survivals in the World not as types but as integrated analogic ground [common=x], such that exchange is kept conformal in the recycle of the person, each time [the Human life cycle]. SESS revives the ancient form of exchange (Mauss 1925), in the form of the Human economy (cf. Hart, Laville & Cattani 2010), where no-thing is bigger than or debases the person.
We feel that the crossing-point of Melanesian and Amazonian thinking has allowed us to locate the generic position from which to speak, that which symmetric anthropology was leading to, and which the ontological turn still needed. They form a chiasmus: What we see in Melanesia is the Sky-Earth System shown within the Human Hologram, the analogical body of the person that keeps its proportion across any scale, folding the entire Universe into the person’s skin; while what we see in Amazonia is the Human everywhere in the Sky-Earth System, the Human spread throughout the skin of the Universe. In each case and together, we see the person and the Universe at once: the person at the Center of the Universe. More than just a cultural comparison between these two local regions (cf. Gregor & Tuzin 2001), we feel that this chiasmus is a site – though not the only one – from which to compose a generic anthropology.
In 2011, Roy Wagner and Justin Shaffner (one of the co-authors) were invited to Brazil to initiate a formal reciprocity of perspectives, an exchange of skins (Crook 2007), between emerging Amazonian and Melanesian anthropologies. These ritual exchanges were ongoing experiments in reverse, symmetrical and cross anthropology (cf. dos Santos & Dias 2009), of thinking in a reciprocity of perspectives. There they engaged with Yanomami shaman and prophet Davi Kopenawa and also Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, as well as other Brazilian anthropologists and indigenous leaders. It is also where Adam Louis-Klein (the other co-author) would return in 2022 to study prophetic movements, meeting with Ye'pa-Mahsã anthropologist João Paulo Lima Barreto and Ümükori-Mahsã elder Durvalino Kisibi, both of whom work at Bahserikowi: the Center of Indigenous Medicine in Amazonia and the indigenous research-group NEAI (núcleo de estudos da Amazônia indígena), ongoing experiments in symmetric anthropology at the margins of the World and irreducible to Euro-American anthropology (cf. Lima Barreto 2022, Diakara 2021, NEAI 2018).
People everywhere at the ends of the World are experimenting with starting over, of recycling [refactoring] the materials, and beginning again, recomposing the Human, and they are doing so through thinking-with the Ancients. We want to show how the various experiments happening at the margins of the World (or in the World, but not of it) work alongside Sky-Earth Systems Science, including the various currents of anthropology that have led here or are ongoing.
There is an ongoing tradition of active experimentation in thinking with-the Ancients in the Americas, coterminous with the trans-plantation of the World there in the "New World," from the Mormons, the Moorish Temple Science, and Rastafari, among others, to Afro- and Indigenous Futurism and a contemporary pan-Black=Ancient revival. Each reframes the Moderns’ language of Blackness into a common=x for contemporary experimentations and recompositions of thinking with and as Ancients – the original Ancient Peoples and Civilizations in Africa, but also Ancient Blacks everywhen (from the Beginning) and everywhere (the Americas, the Mediterranean, India, Asia, and Pacific). In their thinking-with the Ancients, they seek to decode and unlock the wisdom practices of the Ancients captured in the ethnographic and historical record or are otherwise occluded by the World, to open them up as an immanent phase space, a common=X, from which to experiment (cf. da Silva 2014).
The practice of anthropologist Acacea Lewis exemplifies this work. Continuing the legacy of Baba Kilindi Iyi, she is actively extracting and experimenting with ancient knowledge practices to revive the ordinary psychedelic experience at the Center of the Universe (cf. Kohn 2022). Like Harriet Tubman, to whom she is compared, Acacea shares the science so that the people can free themselves from the racist identity-categories of the World, and heal [integrate] the transgenerational trauma caused by the systematic capture, exploitation and oppression of the so-called Blacks by the Devil, so as to experiment with starting over again from the Beginning, to recompose themselves as living Ancients, Original People at the Center of the Sky and Earth [World-Trees], even as they are amidst the World’s domination.
We wish to think with these and other movements that seek to revive the knowledge of the Ancients, not as a turn to a by-gone past but as utterly contemporary experiments [with the Human]. We think-with an emerging self-understanding of the Polytheist revival movement that breaks with the dogma of Monotheism to re-articulate the relationship between the ordinary person and the living God[s], prioritizing the who over the what, without the historicism that reduces immortal persons to mere projections of past societies (Butler 2022, Oluwaseyi & Hübner 2022). These movements engage indigenous thought not as mere observers but participants [participant observation = thinking-with]. We also think-with such movements happening in Brazil (Bernardo n.d) and emerging alliances between polytheism, the demarcation movement for indigenous territories (demarcação jà), and generic engagements with Christianity, such as Amazonian and Melanesian Christians who think their own history as one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the yearning for the Promised Land (Sanchez, Muniz, & Ribeiro 2022), themselves turning Ancient Hebrew thought into a generic.
We see in all these movements a political articulation that suspends the Moderns and their World, movements which Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2014) bring under the banner of the Terrans. We see in this suspension a millenarianism, which is intrinsic to the anthropology we practice. We want to herald the coming Kingdom, in which the King of Kings – the God who shows himself in the Human – will have the final authority over the rulers of the World. We want to play our own part in holding up the Sky. We think that anthropology can also be a prophetic voice in our times, and that secular social-scientific critique should become prophetic critique (Heschel 1962; cf Clastres 1995, da Silva 2018), the suspension of the World’s power from the point of view of the person. This is the place from which Jesus spoke, and not only him alone, but also Nggiwe, Yurupary, and ordinary prophets everywhere.
We do not start from the universality of the “suffering subject” (Robbins 2013), as the invariant of anthropology, but the ordinary person prior to the debasements (Patterson 1982) of the World. Jesus was not defined by his suffering but as the ordinary person unbreakable in the face of any, whereas to define him by his suffering was the Roman point of view on him, the point of view of the World. We speak from Jesus not as “Christians” or from this identity-category [local positioning] in the World, but from the proposition that Ancient Hebrew Thought can act as a generic, just as it does for Amazonian, Melanesian and other polycentric Christians. We would like here to turn the anthropology of Christianity (cf. Robbins 2003, 2004, Engelke 2007, Engelke & Robbins 2010, Vilaça 2016, Vilaça & Wright 2009) around itself, so as to become a generic (cf. Laruelle 2014) for anyone to think-with, rather than the description of a Modernizing or counter-Modernizing project which would be imposed on the subjects of the [globalized] World.
We want to reclaim from the Modern the longue durée of the Human at the Center, in a way that is true to the time-space of the Sky-Earth System, without historicization within the History of the World: its evolutionism, its World-Wars, the story of Modernity (cf. Wagner 1986). We speak new stories, in new languages, that are but the unfolding of the Myth, the [vector] matrix phase-space (cf. Maniglier 2016) of the Peoples as they think together at the Center of the Universe. This is the history that starts from what always was and always has been, and which will still be there, when the Moderns have sunk back into the ground where they came from.
Civilization has been there since the Beginning, whenever and wherever there’s been People (cf. Graeber & Wengrow 2021, Gimbutas 1993, Hancock 2015, 2019).[24] The person at the Center of the Universe is the analogic unit [seed, living stone, lego block] of Civilization, the scale-invariant term for any House [oikos] composed from the common = x (Wagner 1986b, 2012). In the reproduction of the person (=x) across the lifecycle, the Ancients permute the different units of the person across regional systems, culture areas (Kroeber 1925), civilizations (Spengler 1926, Mauss 1929), galactic polities (Tambiah 2013), and planets. The People as Wandering Heroes cross the horizontal plane of the Earth, composing themselves as a vertical in the Pyramid, Temple, City and World Tree [fractal-Forest].
When Nggiwe came to New Guinea, the People were living under the ground, inside holes in the trees and the earth. They were all folded in on themselves (cf. Mimica 1988). They could not speak or move properly. They did not have proper holes for their eyes, ears, nose, mouth or anus, and they had webs between their limbs and the digits of their hands and toes. There was also a Giant, known by many names, including Sido, Sosom, Souw, Kau, and Nimrod, roaming the landscape (cf. Wagner 1996, Shaffner 2010) mistreating and eating them as if they were only animals.
Nggiwe saw what was going on, and felt sorry for the People. Whenever and wherever he came across them, he uncovered and opened them up so as to reveal the Human at the Center (Anim-aha) (cf. Van Baal 1966). Nggiwe used a bamboo knife to cut open their eyes and mouths, and to separate their arms and legs. “Open your eyes. See the Sun in the Sky? How does it feel on the skin? Open your ears, and listen. Spread your fingers and toes. Stretch out, and stand up straight. Open your mouths, and try to talk. Tell me what you see.” He and his wife then washed them in the water so that they would heal and grow.
Nggiwe then constructed a Haus Tambaran, or Spirit House [a Temple (Barker 2004) & University (Narokobi 1980)], in order to introduce the Ancient arts and sciences of how to live well together, as Humans, between the Sky and the Earth. He divided the house down the middle along its spine into two sides, the Sun and the Moon, each corresponding to the different phases of the Sky with the Earth (sunrise/sunset and day/night), and the Earth with the Sky (water/land), respectively. He then further subdivided each side, like the ribs, into equal sections, so that each boan – all of the different plant and animal totemic groups (cf. Busse 1987) – have their own section. “You of the Barramundi, the Turtle and the Sago belong to the Sun. You of the Cassowary, the Pig, and the Crocodile to the Moon. Treat each other as brothers and sisters, as Human, and be fruitful and multiply. Marry across the House.”
Nggiwe then instructed them on generic exchange within the Sky-Earth System, revealing the House to be a common = x matrix table, for multiplying the People as a confederation of plants and animals (cf. Louis-Klein n.d.), in one skin, through continuous symmetrical exchange within and across the different houses. He then led the People in revenge against the impersonal Giant to return the exchange, to make it symmetrical and create a new common=x. They had a great feast, redividing and reapportioning the World among them, re-distributing and integrating the Person.
Nggiwe reveals the House to be a toy model of the Sky-Earth System, for how to take responsibility for growing and reproducing the Human at the Center of the Universe in radical [non-]dual organization (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2012), such that across the different houses of people that compose the regional system (cf. Damon 1990) and galactic polity (cf. Tambiah 2013), the person is entirely integrated across any permutation.
In this way, Jesus-Nggiwe (cf. Busse 2005a) showed the People everywhere how to start Civilization all over again, from the Beginning, at the ends of the World; to obviate or anneal the World System (cf. Wagner 1986; Gómez-Emilsson 2021). There, in Melanesia, where the Sun comes out of the Ground, the Twelve Tribes of Nggiwegizie [the Children of Nggiwe] still generate the People according to the His Law, and say that they will continue to do so until the end of the World (cf. Busse 2005b).
To live well again between the Sky and Earth, to redistribute the materials of the World to the Peoples, in order to re-invent themselves as Humans, just as Nggiwe [and all the wandering civilizing heroes everywhere (Sahlins 2017)] did. To show the integral Person as the Beautiful and the Good, the psychedelic symmetries of the God (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1955, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1971, Hage 1983, Kuechler 2017, 2020, Gómez-Emilsson 2020), laid out on the walls of the Holographic House and Temple. To learn to be together again in communitas and conviviality (Turner 2011, Overing & Passes 2000, Schmid 2021).
SESS invigorates anthropology’s political potential to suspend the World and its epistemological potential to think-with the sciences after Nature. It revives anthropology's vocation to think with others, as a universal project, freed this time from [exclusive] “us/them” contrasts that keep the other’s thoughts at a comfortable distance, or in mere complicity with growing and reproducing the World. Rather than a racial science and classification of homo sapiens, or the attempt to discern its cognitive unity, generic anthropology is a science from and as the ordinary person, whom we have called the Ancients, in fidelity to anthropology’s vocation to think from the margins of the World yet from the Center of the Universe.
These reflections have been predominantly methodological in character and have focused on SESS’s relationship to the discipline of anthropology. Much more is to be said in terms of the content of its cosmology or the way in which it involves and extends the physical sciences [systems theory, physical cosmology, ecology, biology, medicine, astronomy] or theology [non-standard abrahams, messianic movements, polytheism(s)]. They are simply the ancient arts and sciences of Human flourishing (cf. Hirshberg et al. 2022), living well between the Sky and the Earth. Some of these themes have begun to be sketched in three texts by Adam Louis-Klein (2021, 2022a, 2022b)[25], and are under active experimentation in formal and informal contexts (such as social media), amongst members of Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology. Most of all we wish to suggest SESS as a research programme, to be undertaken collectively and across a wide range of concerns and ethnographic materials, and alongside other disciplines. We feel that what we have proposed is a natural direction for anthropology to take and is consistent with the driving motivations of the discipline, and we welcome all kinds of collaboration with this endeavor.
Today, new Giants are roaming the landscape. We need a new planetary-scale Ancient civilization (Hancock 2015, 2019, Graeber & Wengrow 2021, Witzel 2012), to conduct the diplomacy (Latour 2012, 2017, 2018) that makes possible its integration and harmony, making the person seen everywhere in the Universe: a generic cosmology in which to think and live as Ancients.
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[1] “We” take ourselves to be ordinary persons, an invariant position from which anyone can think.
[2] The World is simply the project of living together, which either aligns with the Human, or else, occludes it. Amazonians and Melanesians do not need to distinguish the World from the Universe (Amazonians use the terms “mundo'' and “universo” synonymously (Pãrõkumu & Toramü 1980, Galvão & Galvão 2004, Fernandes & Fernandes 1996, Krenak 2019)), but since the Moderns have separated them, their taking the World and the Universe together amounts to a conflation. The World of the Moderns occludes both the Universe and the Human. In this text, when we write the World in capitals, we mean the World of the Moderns, as what has become hegemonic. It corresponds to the colloquial meaning of the phrase “the World” amongst Moderns, in both its reference to the World of Modern social life taken as global, as well as its confusion with reality as such (the philosophical meaning of “the World”) (Laruelle 1996). By the Universe, we mean the conformal unification of worlds that shows the person at the Center of any of them, as is explained in this text.
[3] We are not simply critiquing the World from an established position within it as it is ranged against its other conventionalized “critical” positions [“left” “right” etc.], but suspending the very form of talk of the World – its habits of description and perception – so as to shift the ground of talk and perception completely to the Sky-Earth System.
[4] By anthropologist, we mean any ordinary person anywhere thinking-with or doing anthropology and not some Modern professional identity. The ordinary is not a statistical or conventionalized normalcy, but simply the fact that the person is given everywhere, at the Center of the Universe.
[5] In this text we use brackets [ ] in addition to parentheses and footnotes. Whereas footnotes sideline or subordinate information to the main text, parentheses work to illustrate or clarify information in the immediate vicinity of the sentence. Brackets on the other hand work for us neither as subordinated information nor as illustrations, but alternate generic descriptions that are at the exact same level as non-bracketed material.
[6] Here, we are simply generalizing the critique of the Moderns everywhere (cf. Levi-Strauss 1971, Wagner 1981, Strathern 1988, Latour 1991, Viveiros de Castro 2009, da Silva 2007, 2022), in and outside of the Academy as belonging to the same World domination, as simply Modern race science meant to suppress the Ancients.
[7] We acknowledge Bruno Latour here as one of the proponents of a symmetric anthropology, who explicitly experimented with regimes of enunciation and dared to speak and intervene on behalf of and as a Generic Ancient in the World wars over the sciences: “We have never been Modern” (Latour 1991).
[8] "Every understanding of another culture is an experiment with our own." (Wagner 1981)
[9] Here we are simply trying to take the cosmologies of the Ancients literally, which includes the “shamanic” ascent (and descent) [the vertical] to the various layers of the Sky and Underworld. We want to think from within the entire time-space of the Ancients.
[10] Uniformitarianism [geology] sees the Earth as background, impersonal Nature, with human Culture impinging on it only as the analogical Modern-cut, the social-evolutionary “transition to civilization” [archaeology]: the Neolithic, the State, Writing, Indo-Europeans, the Aryans, the Axial Age, Monotheism, the Greeks, Plato, Christianity, Modernity. These premises continue to be dogmatically assumed by Modern geologists and archaeologists, who attempt to force others into accepting them on the basis of authority, or threaten anyone who questions them with punishment to their reputations. These premises have been exposed by paleoontologist Stephen Jay Gould for geology, and by Graeber & Wengrow, as well as journalist Graham Hancock, for archaeology.
[11] The axioms can be evaluated on the basis of their consequences, on the degree to which they let such a thinking be actualized.
[12] Talking in, in the sense of both talking in a language [the form of talk] and talking inside of a space [the topology of the frame].
[13] Sky:Earth::Culture:Nature is the Modern formula, which SESS suspends. In the Modern formula, the first two terms are metaphorical, while the second two are literal, or Nature is the literal ground of reference, and Culture is a literal metaphoricity, or the natural ground of human metaphorical projection. The Modern appeal to the “immanence” and “materiality” of the Earth, involves a metaphorization of the Earth, grounded in the encompassment of literal Nature. Should the formula be reversed so that Culture encompasses, the Modern perceives that as the encompassment of a metaphorical Sky (“Heaven”), which should itself be understood in terms of a human and cultural metaphorical projection. SESS flips the formula a different way, so that the terms no longer correspond, by taking the front two terms as literal, and the back two as metaphorical, while also taking the Sky as the encompassing term. Sky is no longer in correspondence with Culture because it is not a local metaphoricity within Nature, but a literal encompassing container, while Earth is no longer in correspondence with Nature, because it is not the encompassing term.
[14] Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, Roy Wagner, etc.
[15] It is not only whether there is one or many worlds that matters, but the distinct experience in which they are composed, and the formalization that lets that experience be felt and transmitted. The Sky-Earth System is both a world-pluralism and a conformal unification of many worlds, a complete meta-frame and one in which no world irreversibly dominates the others. For the Sky, as the encompassing frame, is reflected back into the polycentric Center itself.
[16] The Sky and the Center are reflected along the vertical axis, along the World Tree, as one sees when one looks up from the Center to the zenith. Or it occurs through the rotation of the Sky, as the Sun, Moon, and Stars cross the horizontal plane of the Earth, and the Sky reverses to become the Underworld, synthesizing the horizontal and vertical axes through the curvature [space] and rotation [time] of the Sky. In this way, the Sky proportions perception to the Center.
[17] In order to elucidate further the structure of these operations, we formalize a [non-standard] computational procedure elsewhere (Louis-Klein & Shaffner n.d.).
[18] In the last instance, there is always a map that exists from any image within SESS back onto the Sky, or onto the structure of the Sky-Earth System [as in the Cardinal Directions or the Longhouse, the Chiasmus], which preserves the conformality of any image to the Center of the Universe.
[19] Where we depart from Viveiros de Castro is in the idea that the generalization of Amazonian thinking results in an anarchic anti-holism, a dispersion of local cosmologies, rather than a generic cosmology, and in the last instance, an inverse, counter, and anti-Modernism, rather than a suspension of the Moderns on an autonomous basis.
[20] Porigi po has analogues elsewhere in Melanesia including the Foi irisae~medobora ("tree leaf talk") (Weiner 2001), the Kaluli balema (Feld 1987), and the infamous knowledge practices of the Min of the Mountain Ok (Barth 1987, Crook 2007, Wagner 2018a), a region also known as the “graveyard of anthropology” (Crook 2007), due to the difficulty anthropologists have had in staying faithful to what they experienced in the field, once back in the midst of the World.
[21] In computer programming, a type system dictates the kinds of operations that can be performed on a term (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Type systems formalize and enforce the otherwise implicit categories the programmer uses for algebraic data types, data structures, or other components.
[22] A different citational practice is possible, one that treats names like block-strings [skins; heads; names] to be permuted, recombined and superposed, treated conformally and experimented with freely to create Human effects (see Louis-Klein & Shaffner n.d.).
[23] The Big Other (Lacan 1966).
[24]This is simply what the Myth asserts, including the Bible.
[25] https://oscillations.one/Assets/Issues/Sky-Earth+Systems+Science
KEYWORDS: Sky-Earth Systems Science, the Human, Generic Ancient, symmetric anthropology, the Moderns, the World.
