Oscillations

Reading Group

Two reading groups have run under the auspices of Oscillations. Both are now concluded.

Symmetric Anthropology as a Practice (2024-2025)

Oscillations sought to actively educate people about the experiments happening at the margins of the World in places like Amazonia, Melanesia, and elsewhere, thinking-with the consequences they can have for the lives of ordinary people. We named the reading group, “Symmetric Anthropology as a Practice,” in so far as we sought to make explicit and sharpen the political consequences of this method of thinking-with Ancients, and the possibilities it opened for new kinds of social organization and experience.

Themes:

  • Symmetric anthropology and its various methods, practices, and genealogies [Levi-Strauss, Wagner, Strathern, Viveiros de Castro, Latour, Laruelle]
  • The emergence of Sky-Earth Systems Science (SESS) out of symmetric anthropology.
  • Cosmology. The Universe, the Sky, the Earth, Nature [ordinary physics, formal sciences] & Concrete practices within SESS [house and body-practices and techniques].
  • Ethnogenesis, or becoming a People through thinking-with. The social scaling of thinking-with [personhood and exchange, kinship and family systems].
  • Polycentric polytheism & non-standard Abrahamism.
  • Prophets, Kings and Priests. Peace, Warfare and Diplomacy.
  • Regional and World-systems [galactic polities, kingdoms, state, Empire]
  • Mythologiques [Amazonia, Melanesia, Ancient Civilizations].
  • Forms of talk. Sacred texts, prophecy, poetry and song.

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Anthropology at the Intersection of Worlds (2021-2023)

Of what relevance is anthropology, and what must it become at this moment, at the intersection of worlds? At the ends of one and the beginning of the Human?

Readings: Roy Wagner, François Laruelle, Patrice Maniglier, Anne-Françoise Schmid, Davi Kopenawa, Alain Badiou, Marilyn Strathern, Edward Butler, Donna Haraway, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Gerardo-Reichel Dolmatoff, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Plato, Proclus, Hesiod, Jadran Mimica, Bernard Narokobi, the Huainanzi, Laozi, The Pyramid Texts, the Watunna, the Popul Vuh, Roger Penrose, Richard Feynman, Isabelle Stengers, Lynn Margulis, E.P Odum, Rachel Carson, James Lovelock, Lukáš Likavčan

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