Michel Leiris' Anthropology and the Ontology of Finitude: Reading the Ethnographic Writings Through the Lens of "Miroir de la Tauromachie"

• Published in: MLN Vol. 129; no. 4; pp. 1009 - 1034
• Main Author: Inston, Kevin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2014; Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subjects: Anthropology; Bullfighting; Colonialism; Cultural anthropology; Cultural identity; Cultural studies; Culture contact; Ethnography; Finitude; Ontology; Race relations; Reading; Society; Violence
• ISSN: 0026-7910; 1080-6598; 1080-6598
• DOI: 10.1353/mln.2014.0091

Leiris' change in ethnographic perspective proves essential for his efforts to disentangle his discipline from colonialism with which it is historically and geographically linked, to make it serve the cause of global emancipation. 5 The infinitely finite or constitutively unfinished quality of the subject/object relation, the impossibility of total identity, does not produce an imperfect ethnography unable completely to grasp its object of study but a dynamic mode of inquiry which contests the world order by unsettling rather than settling cultural identities and borders. [...]I shall consider how anthropology's potential to disrupt identities and orders supplies its role in supporting anti-colonial movements.\n The anthropological subject and object would neither occupy fixed positions nor fuse together in an imaginary communion but would interact through a sense of shared difference as the basis of exchange and reciprocal transformation.