Contingency and simulacrum: haikais for anthropologists

Abstract

Starting from the tradition of haiku, I go through anthropology in search of its edges in the deconstruction of the word. The themes are many: the ethical relationship to otherness, the place of description of the Other as method and episteme, self-representation, academic conflict, writing as redemption, the limit of knowledge, other ethnographic modalities. Through an acephalous metaphysics based on Bataille, the poems seek an encounter with the limit of the word itself and of meaning. I acknowledge the status of the contingency of knowledge in the world, and here I seek strategies of insistence, like the legitimacy of the simulacrum (text, image, film, and others), in transit between knowledges. In a gesture inspired by the work of Maureen Bisilliat, with the intersection of photography and literature, I present a visual work in dialogue with the series of poems, anthropology and its questions.