Re: [-empyre-] Epilogue

[Gabriela Vargas-Cetina <gabyvargasc@prodigy.net.mx>]

Dear all,

I'm usually a lurker, but being an anthropologist and thus part of a
discipline that created the primitives, I want to say that today in
anthropology the primitives do not exist.  If they ever existed at all,
which is doubtful, it is hard to know what their social life was like.  I
hope we can end this discussion with a feeling of coevalness for all peoples
in the world, and recognize that it is everywhere, in every society and
every time past and present, that we become enriched by our partners.  Thank
you for a wonderful discussion.  I look forward to the panic.

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina


-- 
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Fellow
Cornell University 
Society for the Humanities
A.D. White House 
27 East Avenue 
Ithaca, NY 14853-1101
Tel. (607) 255-9284
email: rv55@cornell.edu

Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas
Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán
Carretera a Tiximín Km.1
Mérida, Yucatán, México
Tel (999) 930 0090 ext. 207
email: gvcetina@uady.mx


On 4/2/07 8:09 AM, "Nicholas Ruiz III" <editor@intertheory.org> wrote:

> It is difficult to end this month on empyre...and
> already the next month has begun.
> 
> My life changed when I began reading Baudrillard, and
> with each permutation of his thought, my thought was
> perturbated as well.  I will miss him, and the thought
> of him roaming the world.
> 
> One last quote for empyre, but not forever:
> 
> "'Natural' death is devoid of meaning because the
> group has no longer any role to play in it.  It is
> banal because it is bound to the policied and
> commonplace individual subject, to the policied and
> commonplace nuclear family, and because it is no
> longer a collective mourning and joy.  Each buries his
> own dead.  With the primitives, there is no 'natural'
> death: every death is social, public and collective,
> and it is always the effect of an adversarial will
> that the group must absorb (no biology).  This
> absorption takes place in feasting and rites.
> Feasting is the exchange of wills (we don't see how
> feasting would reabsorb a biological event).  Evil
> wills and expiation rites are exchanged over the
> death's head.  Death deceives and symbolically gains
> esteem, and the group is enriched by a partner."
> 
> from Symbolic Exchange and Death p.164
> 
> Perhaps we can walk away from this event like
> primitives, 'enriched by a partner'...
> 
> NRIII
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III
> Editor, Kritikos
> http://intertheory.org
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