Oscillations

Symmetric Anthropology as a Practice (2024-2025)

Dates: 2024-2025

Mission:

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.

Oscillations is a ministry, a missionary and diplomatic work, using symmetric anthropology and Sky-Earth Systems Science (SESS), to bridge the cultural survival and autonomy of peoples at the margins of the World, with the reconstruction and revitalization of Ancients within the World (see https://www.academia.edu/105365384/The_Sky_Earth_System_A_Manifesto_for_Learning_to_See_and_Think_as_a_Generic_Ancient). We do this by directly working with peoples in places like Amazonia and Melanesia, while also deconstructing-and-reconstructing the Abrahamic matrix of the World, through thinking-with polycentric polytheism alongside Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Oscillations is an active practice of critique and obviation of the Moderns, through calling each person to be accountable to the other as a fractal person. Each person comes to be part of a collective person [a family, ethnos, nation, kinship unit] through being called to give and ask for reasons from the other, to think-with. This is a concrete, ordinary, and rational practice which we developed in the reading group, in online spaces, and elsewhere.

Aims:

  1. Formalize (in formal terms) what thinking-with is.
  2. Practice the ongoing symptomology and critique of the Moderns [obviation, headhunting, ordinary talk, World-suspension, online practice], and arrive at a positive description of generic, Ancient science.
  3. Define symmetric anthropology and its pragmatic and political consequences.

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.

Lecture/Seminar series:

We anticipated inviting various speakers, thinkers, and artists to our sessions throughout the year and opening these sessions to the public.

Schedule

A session-by-session record of this reading group was not preserved.