Thinking a bit about the anthorpology of the moderns that Latour proposes in AIME. Such anthropology would be very wary of the Moderns' self-description in terms of domains (science, politics, religion, economy...) and would rather look for something else that underlies both their practices and the way they describe them. Been yesterday at the premises of the Intercultural University of Veracruz (UVI) here in Xalapa to attend to the launching of the La Comunidad Transgredida by Fortino Domingues Rueda. His work looks at a hybrid: urban Zoques, a population of native people who have become citizens of big towns. Fortino is himself a Zoque. The UVI is full of anthropologists of all non-white groups (to some extent, non-Modern). Maybe they are the ones who could carry out an endeavor such as an anthropology of the moderns. And I recalled the work of José Maria Arguedas (who killed himself in 1969) in Spain. He went to a traditional (i.e. non-modern) rural community to study Spanish peasants in order to understand the hybrid which is the peasant culture in the Andes. In a world of hybrids, the natives of hybridism have the experience of becoming modern. Arguedas talks about this (it was something that drove his suicide, as he hints in "The fox of up above and the fox of down below"). Hybrids are in a position to reckon the pains of becoming modern with the accompanying relativism that, as Latour writes also in AIME, "never traffics in hard cash".
Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
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