Some of the most important transformations in the field of social and cultural anthropology over the last three decades appear to have had little or no impact on its educational and institutional structures.
One of the vectors taken by these transformations has undoubtedly been a deepening of the critique of the ‘great divides’ that both founded the discipline and continue to represent one of the main obstacles to its future development.
Rather than just abstractly proclaiming the absence of any criteria for hierarchizing societies sociologically or cognitively, a series of movements within and at the margins of anthropology started to explore the empirical, theoretical and ethical-political consequences of this position.
As early as the 1970s, Roy Wagner sought to break with the epistemological great divide that presumes anthropological reflection is exclusive to the West, arguing that anthropology should be primarily understood as a way of relating to otherness, a disposition existing in any human collectivity. In the 1980s, Marilyn Strathern expanded on this theoretical approach, transposing the rupture from the epistemological level (itself a continuation of the rupture with the ontological ethnocentrism of conceiving distinct types of society) to the methodological level. Demonstrating that the anthropology on other societies has to take into account the anthropology produced by other societies, Strathern’s work opened up the possibility of an anthropology on our own society which is more than just our own anthropology.
In the 1990s, Bruno Latour extended the potential reach of this methodological innovation even further by proposing, in the wake of Wagner’s reverse anthropology and Strathern’s auto-anthropology, a symmetric anthropology capable of investigating and analyzing our own society with the same degree of originality and sophistication with which anthropologists are capable (at least sometimes) of discussing other societies. As well as suspending any judgement over a supposed underlying distinction between ourselves and others, Latour’s symmetric anthropology dispenses with any hypothesis concerning the intrinsic superiority of our ways of knowing (which means avoiding the notion of nature as reality-in-itself) and aims to apply the same investigative procedures used by ethnographers researching other societies to the study of our own ‘central’ institutions (science or politics, for example).
Launching Abaeté Network for Symmetric Anthropology midway through the first decade of the 21st century, our aim is to interconnect and develop these intellectual movements from the final 25 years of the last century. Our first step involves breaking with a division into ‘specialities’ that merely continues to reflect the great ontological divide between us and them, a separation anthropology claims to have abolished years ago. This aim in mind, Abaeté seeks to unite researchers who investigate societies usually designated ‘indigenous’ or even ‘primitive’ (‘ethnologists’?) with those who research their ‘own’ culture or so-called ‘complex society’ (‘anthropologists’?).
Secondly, we anticipate that the transversal connections between these researchers will help stimulate new interconnections and paradigm shifts on the epistemological and methodological axes involved in ethnographical and anthropological investigation. Hence investigative procedures usually favoured in one empirical field can be combined or collided with others. Moreover, the correlations and collisions between practices and forms of knowledge revealed in different investigative fields will, we hope, enable a plural and complex comparison between different domains and levels of distinct sociocultural formations – an exercise capable of going beyond a simplistic comparative approach limited to contrasting ‘us’ and ‘them.’
Put otherwise, the dialogue between empirical investigations into the ways of thinking, forms of organization and modes of interaction found in different forms of sociality – whose common factor is, perhaps, the fact they act as alternatives to dominant forces – may catalyze the destabilization of dominant models which seek to impose themselves on ourselves and others.
From a more formal point of view, Abaeté will function in line with the intellectual and ethical principles which inspired its creation. This means that rather than involving a supra-individual entity possessing its own intentions and interests, Abaeté functions as a name attributed to a network of relations or a set of relations in network. In this sense, our aim in launching Abaeté is simply to intensify real or potentially pre-existing networks of interactions, as well as amplifying the effectiveness of their interventions.
For merely practical reasons, we have registered a ‘Laboratory of Symmetric Anthropology’ with the CNPq (National Research Council) Directory of Research Groups and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, composed in principle by researchers affiliated to this University. However, it comprises neither a ‘head office’ nor a ‘central station,’ but simply a relay designed to facilitate connections between the different nodes making up the Abaeté network. As parts of this network, its different branches may be activated at different moments, taking advantage, for example, of pre-existing scientific meetings – in which it may organize groups and roundtables – or, on the contrary, promoting its own meetings and other specific activities. Other developments we leave for the future to determine.
Dictionaries tell us that the Tupi-Guarani term ‘abaetê’ means “a good, true, honest, revered man,” in the sense of a moral human being – or a ‘fine person’ in other words. On the other hand, the verb ‘abaetar’ (whose generic meaning is ‘to cover with baeta’ or ‘to wrap in baeta,’ that is, to protect oneself with fluffy wool) means, in Pernambuco, 'to revolt, become indignant.’ Finally, the Lake of Abaeté (the ‘gloomy lake,’ in Itapuã, Salvador, Bahia, which acquired its name because of its dark waters) was always a popular location for washing dirty linen and paying homage to Oxum.