The conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture:

a reply to Philip Swift

João Pina-Cabral
Institute of Social Sciences
University of Lisbon

7 May 2021
NB: Unpublished manuscript. Not for quotation.

Abstract:
This text is a response to Philip Swift’s paper, where he critiques issues concerning
ethnographic theory raised in my book World: An anthropological examination (2017, HAU
Books). Inspired by the work of Donald Davidson, I argue that indeterminacy and
underdetermination are conditions for all communication and that, in light of that, a
position of metaphysical pluralism provides us with a better account of the conditions of
possibility of the ethnographic gesture than the kind of ontological pluralism that Swift
espouses.

I thank Philip Swift for his learned paper, as well as the editors of HAU, both of whom
have generously granted me this opportunity to debate the epistemological bases of the
conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture. I embarked upon this project in
the 1990s and it remains an ongoing task; World (2017) turned out to be merely the first
relay station on that voyage (2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2021).
Some might argue that Swift’s preference for a stress on failure to communicate
and my preference for a stress on the possibility of communication are a matter of a glass
half full or a glass half empty. After all, he comes to agree with me that ‘worlds are not
cosmic capsules, self-contained and sealed off from each other.’ Very well then, so if
that is the case, what are the conditions of possibility of that communicability which
makes ethnography possible? This is what I have aimed to investigate, and that is why I
am so disturbed by the focus on linguistic and cultural incommunicability that permeated
our discipline at the turn of the twentieth century.
I remain convinced that, at root, the two central reasons that led me originally to
undertake this effort remain valid: one, the need to open ethnographic accounts to
relations with world that go beyond the linguistic interaction of self-conscious subjects;
the other, the need for an account of ethnography that safeguards the ethical
communality of the inhabiting of world by all live creatures (see Pina-Cabral 2020a).
Early on, inspired by Merleau-Ponty, I came to the conviction that these two steps were
essential if we were going to build an Anthropology that decidedly left behind the
primitivist heritage of our discipline, which has been so detrimental to our present day
participation in the broader discourse of the sciences (Pina-Cabral 1992).
The focus of anthropologists on the failure to communicate (the deflationist
disposition) is historically distracting and fails to account for the essential mixedness of
all humans. Furthermore, over and above that, we are in need of a methodological
approach that breaks decidedly with Parsonian individualist discoursivism (as personified
in the continued hegemony of the methodological inspiration of Clifford Geertz and
David Schneider). In a world like ours, where anthropology is no longer the preserve of
a restricted group of imperially central savants, we need to address the ethnographic
subject’s role as an integral object of all ethnographic analyses—that which Ernesto de
Martino used to call, aporetically but prophetically, our ecumenical ethnocentrism (2016
[1964]).
At the end of his paper, Swift argues in favour of ‘pagan proliferation' as the
fundamental human condition (or, contrariwise, as Derrida would put it, against
logocentrism as the ultimate ethnocentrism—1967: 11-14). As it happens, this position
is much to my liking, I agree with it—and, by the way, it is not as outlandish a theory as
Swift seems to fear. In fact, I have in the past published a paper defending a similar
perspective, called ‘Sarakatsani Reflections on the Brazilian Devil’ (2008). So, at this
point, the problem is to explain why we get at similar results from such different
assumptions.
I reckon that the root of our disagreement, to put it simply, is that, for me, we
need to assume the world’s emergence (that is, the presence of world) in order to have
multiple worlds, otherwise we would have no context of communication and we would
all be ignorant of the worlds of others. That is to say, in order for us to know that the
world of others looks different to ours, we need a common reference; our worlds have to
overlap to a considerable degree. Note: considerable, never total! Thus, we are all, to a large
extent, part of the same world; we are all equally constituted by the participatory
belongings of world (the surrounding appartenances, as Lévy-Bruhl called them). This
applies at all levels of sense-making: to different ‘cultures’, to persons endowed with
propositional thinking within each ‘culture’, to our communication with members of
other species, and ultimately to our being part of life itself.
Has it not been pointed out often enough that, as live organisms, persons are
biotic pluralities? That is, our very constitution as embodied entities involves a symbiosis
(an interaction) with other species that are, within and outside our bodies, in constant
communication. Observe how biologists take for granted the meaning of the concept of
‘community’: e.g., ‘The microbial community in the human gut represents one of the
densest known ecosystems. Community composition has broad impacts on health, and
metabolic competition and host selection have both been implicated in shaping these
communities.’ (Wexler et al 2016: 3639) The use of the word ‘community’ here is by no
means to be taken as a metaphor, since these ‘microbial communities’ that our organic
existence as persons depends upon are based on ‘symbiotic interactions’, which ‘encode
diverse effectors that may provide new avenues for shaping the microbiome to improve
human health.’ (ibid.)
My point here is that these complex communicational networks are social in
nature both at microbial level and at more complex levels of life’s organization—
including human relations with other species and with other humans. The kind of
propositional thinking which singular persons within human historical cultures are
endowed with (which is all the communication that seems to concern Swift and his
friends) can only emerge because it is based and dependent upon the kind of intentional
thinking (including the microbiotic communication) that we share with other species and,
ultimately, because of the intentionality of life (Thompson 2007). For bacteria, fungi and
viruses to communicate with me and within me, we all have to live in a broadly common
world.
However, while the sociality that involves humans is not limited to humans, our
modes of interaction differ considerably from that of other species in the way in which
personal ontogeny, within the historically shaped cultural environments where humans
live, gives rise to an effect of transcendence—that is, a capacity to be reflexively aware
concerning one’s own presence in the world. Personal transcendence is the door to
symbolic modes of interaction among humans, allowing for a new and distinct level of
communicational interaction. Most likely, this is only considerably distinct (not totally
so) from the sort of weaker transcendence that is manifested by some other mammals,
such as elephants, dolphins, or whales. It is, however, considerably so to the extent that
human symbolical systems are significantly more complex that those of other mammals.
Yet the effects of this scaffolded transcendence that characterises humans are not limited
to human-to-human engagement, since once they have occurred they pluralise the world
metaphysically at all of its levels (on metapersons, see Pina-Cabral 2019).
Nevertheless, transcendence never completely separates persons from world—as
humans, we remain embodied, as Mauss so repeatedly stressed. To say of an aspect of
the world that it is singular—that it is present—means to say that emergence has
occurred, that some sort of boundary has been traced (see J. Hattiangadi 2005). But
emergence never fully unmoors from the ground of its emergence; no singularity is ever
absolute. Underdetermination manifests itself at all levels of life—the singular human
person is just another such level. The other side of the coin of this is that the very
possibility of emergence requires world; worlding is only possible in world. No person
can close off their mind from the world. Shaun Gallagher has recently argued with
empirical data that if we were to close ourselves off from the world and from
communication with other live beings we would simply stop thinking (2014). As
Davidson put it, ‘The possibility of thought comes with company’ (2001: 88).
Emergence occurs at all levels of life and in all relations between them. Sociality is
always anterior and alterity never vanishes absolutely. That means, world is always there;
it is both a result and a condition for worlding among persons. When we emerge as
persons in our infancy, we already find ourselves ‘thrown into’ the world, as Heidegger
insisted (see Withy 2011).
Worlding never stops and, therefore, worlds differ, that is, the drift towards
différance (both diverging and deferring) was there in the beginning and will never cease
(see Derrida 1968). Metaphysical pluralism is not to be parsed into separate ‘ontologies’
since it applies to emergence and entanglement in life in general. It is ‘metaphysical’ to
the extent that it assumes the underdetermination of emergence, and it is ‘pluralist’
because no world is ever completely determinate and closed onto itself. In short, as
William James intended when he ‘embraced the vague’, there is no preferred level of
underdetermination and indeterminacy.1 Therefore, there are no ultimately separate
worlds—as, oddly enough, Swift comes to agree at the end of his paper! All attempts at
reducing indeterminacy to this or that particular scale (namely, different ‘cultures’ or
‘languages’) are ultimately unsatisfactory. When ontologists insist on ‘translation’ as an
activity that occurs essentially between languages/cultures, they fail to see that ‘members
1Again, interestingly, Swift’s call on James’s pragmatism is actually in many regards very akin to my own (Pina-Cabral
2020b).
of the same culture/language’ also experience indeterminacy among themselves, and that,
ultimately, all persons experience indeterminacy by relation to the person they were in
the past.
Contrary to that, Swift argues for ontological pluralism. Apparently, he finds it
easier to believe that there are many worlds rather than that world is a field of
differentiation. By refusing to pass from translation into interpretation, he remains within an
anthropocentric register in which thinking is seen as foundationally linguistic and not,
beyond that, rooted in life’s intentionality. Ontological pluralism remains inadvertently
logocentric because it does not focus on life’s intentionality but on the personal ‘mind’ as
shaped by words. This can be seen in Swift’s defence of his ‘foreignizing’ of translation:
‘that is to say, encountering conceptual difference in the course of translation, [and
importing] this difference from the source language into the analyst’s language, so as to
transfigure the latter’—as if, fundamentally, it were only a matter of natural languages
(and the customary ‘cultures’ that ethnographers are encouraged to hypostatize) and not
a matter of communicating in general, of being in life. As Davidson himself told Lepore
at the end of his life, ‘we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and
knowing our way around in the world generally. I conclude that there is no such thing as
a language—not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have
supposed.’ (in Lepore n.d.: 19) The same, of course, could be argued of Tylorian (or, if
they prefer, Boasian) ‘cultures’. Although Davidson claimed he was a realist, it must not
be assumed that he thought it possible to reduce sense-making to a final, correct
description of the world. This is what he means to convey when he claims his monism is
‘anomalous’. He is quite explicit about this point (even although he fully realizes that the
word ‘anomaly’ was badly chosen—2005b: 308-309; 2001a [1980]: 170-184). Ultimately,
therefore, he puts existence before essence; whilst the ontologists primarily conceive of
existence within essence. Their ‘ontology’ does not distinguish between occurrence and
sense-making (they contemplate no ontological complexity). We talk of aspects of world,
they talk of notions of world.
According to Swift, all that I have written concerning the ill-effects of the all-or-
nothing fallacy and against the exacerbation of difference between worlds is a grand
Quixotic battle against windmills. He is entitled to his judgement. From my perspective,
however, try as I may, I see that the positions I struggle against do actually behave like
evil giants, even if for some they appear masked as windmills. Among other things, they
help reproduce anthropology’s enclosure in its primitivist cul-de-sac. By failing to
understand that indeterminacy and underdetermination are aspects of all communication,
the deflationist approach reduces the problems of interpretation to (mostly linguistic)
group-level encounters, that is, it reproduces modernist sociocentrism as a background
assumption. This is politically perverse in two ways: firstly, it reduces the internal life of
a culture and a language to a flat ground, failing to see that all human encounters are
pervaded by the effects of value creation and power; secondly, it polarises cultures and
languages, thus hiding the fact that the fundamental human condition is one of
transculturality and linguistic plurality. It radicalizes the borders between ‘groups’ and
thus it hides the fact that the real history of humans in this world has always been one of
both understanding and misunderstanding—both of them at the same time. As humans,
we are all mestiços. As it turns out, even the Neanderthals and the Denisovans interacted
creatively with homo sapiens sapiens in the depths of history. If I fight this Quixotic
struggle it is because I am concerned with producing an analysis of the conditions of
possibility of the ethnographic gesture that accounts for the postimperial conditions of
the world that we ... either already live in or want to live in.
In order to do this, I needed an account of belief that overcame the mentalist
assumptions that led to the paradoxes Needham identified in his classical treatise against
anthropological representationalism (1972). Encouraged by him, I found use in
Davidson’s analytical trajectory. Of course, this being said, I do not mean to defend
Davidson à outrance—I never have. In fact, I am far more at home with the late
Davidson—after he re-encountered his initial inspiration in Plato’s Philebus (1990
[1949])—than in the more aporetic essays of the 1960s and early 1970s that so irritated
the generation of American philosophers of the ‘semiotic turn’ in the 1990s. As it
happens, not only did Davidson’s thought evolve but also, in particular, I feel he remains
too tied to the mode of arguing that, in his day and age, constituted the common ground
of American philosophy: the legacy of Quine’s ‘linguistic behaviourism’. Still I do find
his account of interpretation a central inspiration for ethnographic theory, because it can
help us overcome the logocentric (discoursivist) propensities that anthropology has ailed
from over the past decades. In this regard, I am merely taking one step further Ingold’s
proposals (1991) by conjoining them with an approach to cognition that focuses on
embodiment (Thompson and Varela 2001).
Swift’s refuting of Davidson’s lesson is based on a long tradition of refusing
indeterminacy and underdetermination as grounds for communication. This is why
Robert Fellepa’s book on the implications of Quine’s ‘indeterminacy’ for ethnographic
theory was so revolutionary (1988); and also why it was simply disregarded by his
contemporaries. Davidson says ‘If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and
other behavior of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs2 largely consistent and true by our
own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or
as saying anything’ (Davidson, 2001: 137, my emphasis). Swift interprets this to mean
‘there cannot be radical conceptual alternatives to the way we think’. The problem here
is the word ‘radical’ and I often regret that Davidson took it on from Quine and kept on
using it. It might have been better just to have dropped it. Over the years, and at my
own expense, I have found that there is something highly suspicious in the fascination
anthropologists have for finding things ‘radical’.3
What is radical? I suppose, ultimately, this adjective means that an aspect of
something is more important than others because it is its root, its basis, or foundation.
So the correct use of ‘radical’ would imply being closer to what is basic. But the problem
is that it is commonly interpreted otherwise: it is interpreted to mean ‘absolutely’,
‘completely’, in toto, even at times ‘very much’. In any case, this is how Swift reads
Davidson. But does he really think that Davidson is meaning by the sentence quoted
above that everything an other says has to be absolutely true to me, otherwise it can
make no sense to me? It is absurd to imagine that that might be what Davidson, a
profoundly erudite person, could be saying. In any case, this is contrary to how
Davidson theorised truth (2005a). So, why do people engage in such an absurd
supposition? Does Davidson not explain that he means ‘largely’, that is ‘to a
considerable degree’? Swift rephrases Davidson as saying that ‘all languages are so many
different ways of saying the same things, all of which are more or less easily translatable
and comprehensively expressible in English.’ Is it not a bit unwise to take Davidson to
have been an ignorant, bigoted fool?
Swift fails to grasp the implications of indeterminacy and underdetermination as
conditions for interpretation, for communication and for emergence in life; this is why
he is incapable of seeing that Davidson does not speak in absolute terms but in relative
terms. As a result, he gets Davidson to say absurdities. Swift argues that ‘against
Davidson’s ‘principle of charity’ one might (...) insist instead on a principle of alterity which
would consist in the rule that agreement or equivalence is never to be assumed at the

2Be warned not to read ‘beliefs’ to mean ‘mental representations’ (see Pina-Cabral 2017: 73-99).
3Swift is inspired by Foster’s critical essay, where Davidson’s position is critiqued based on a rhetorical manipulation of
the word ‘radical’, but where no alternative proposal for human communicability is even mildly attempted (‘It is not part
of the purpose of the present essay to make a positive case for the thesis in question.’ 1998: 133-4).
outset.’ Well, the problem is that Davidson’s ‘principle of charity’ is ‘a principle of
alterity’, since it assumes that indeterminacy and underdetermination are not hindrances
but conditions for all communication.
Again, Swift is free to be ungenerous to Davidson, but is that wise? Is his
argument a ‘reasonable’ interpretation of Davidson? And there is more: the price he
pays for turning Davidson’s arguments into an absurdity is too high. With just a little
generosity, he could have turned Davidson’s principle of charity into a truly visionary
insight, that opens up interactions with other deeply valuable insights within
anthropological theory; such as Pitt-Rivers’ take on grace (2017), Wittgenstein’s critique
of Frazer’s magic (2018), Needham’s take on polythetic categories (1975), or Jean Lave’s
approach to situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991). Is he, therefore, entitled to be
ungenerous? I feel that both Wikan (1992) and Hastrup (1995), among others, have
made valuable contributions to ethnographic theory out of taking a more generous
approach to Davidson. Therefore, those who choose to miss these are doing so at their
own peril.
As it happens, I suspect this tendency does not originate in anthropology but has
its source in the philosophical fights for stardom of the late 1990s. Most anthropologists
get their philosophy second hand. People like Skinner, Rorty, Hacking, or Searl, in their
struggle for stardom, needed to push the rather disturbing figure of Davidson off to the
side. This led to a systematic misreading of his work and to a failure to engage with his
contemporary response to their largely unfounded accusations.4 In the case of Rorty,
this misreading even involved producing manipulative videos on You Tube of his grand-
self interviewing shy-old Davidson.5 This reminds me of what, during the same period,
was done in anthropology to the poststructuralist thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s by the
faux savants of postmodernism. By means of manipulated silences and historically
unsound misinterpretations, the profound insights they proposed were simply wiped off
the anthropological canon. So much so, that we are having to literally reinvent the wheel
a quarter of a century later.
As Swift puts it, after engaging in translation, ‘we do not come away with all our
terms intact’. This is absolutely true, quite as true as, once ethnography has occurred, the
‘other’ also has not come out with all their terms intact. Ethnography is an historical
aspect of globalization (here understood in its broader ecumenical sense). It cannot be

4 As to Hacking’s quote reproduced by Swift, it is either based on a truly ‘radical’ ignorance of what ‘charity’ meant for
Quine and Davidson, or it is a magnificent example of unethical academic slandering.
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjWTuF35GtY&list=PL1ndy4NAQ6i4VRa5cY1qIXzpT-auJxwTs
said that the ethnographer and the locals previously had separate worlds that
henceforward became one world. In fact, to go back to the Azande case Swift cites, it
seems all too convenient to forget that Evans-Pritchard was only paid by the Sudanese
Administration for going to Sudan because the Azande were undergoing a highly
disruptive epidemic of witchcraft accusations that had followed upon having been
subjected to resettlement in densely populated villages by the colonial administration.
The same goes all the way down Africa during the Classical Period: for the problems
with Nuer ‘leopard chiefs’, for the songs of the Pygmies of Ituri Forest, for Kykuyu Mau-
mau revolts, for Bemba hunger, for Ndembu matrilineality and village breakdown, for
Nyakyusa age-villages challenged by Christianity, for the ultimate unicity of modern
Zululand, for Xhosa conquest, etc. The history of Southern African anthropology
should have taught us all beyond any doubt that to dream of radically separate cultures is
a deeply perverse undertaking. This was why Gluckman, Fortes, the Wilsons, and
Radcliffe-Brown among others felt the need to distance themselves from Malinowski in
the late 1930s at the height of British colonial power (e.g. Gordon 2018), and we should
not have forgotten that lesson.
Swift’s quote of Davidson’s sentence concerning flat-earthers is actually a perfect
exemplar of what can happen when we depend on the uncharitable manipulation of
quotation. The fascinating thing is that Davidson’s original point was precisely that, even
although someone might be wrong about something, that does not mean they are wrong
about most things. This kind of ‘interpretive charity’ strikes me at least as a reasonably
safe anthropological approach, not an absurdity. How come his meaning was so awfully
twisted? For example, can we safely conjecture that he was not ‘taking seriously’ the
thought of Plato’s contemporaries about which he was so well informed?
According to Swift, Davidson’s account ‘entails that the ancients (...) held such
alien concepts about “earth” that, since we do not share them, we could not understand
– but historians and anthropologists would surely dispute this. Or else it implies that the
ancients did actually believe, exactly as we do, that the earth is a cool, solid body circling
round a large star – but this seems extremely questionable as well.’ To the contrary,
interpreted in a just slightly less agonistic fashion, Davidson might be held to be saying
that there is a lot of truth in the earth that flat-earthers believed in, just that what they
called earth does not take into account a lot of ‘beliefs’ that we today take into account
when we refer to earth. So, it was and it was not the same earth they were referring to—
no problem with the ambiguity! We are not obliged to decide for one or the other,
because it is all a matter of more or less—we are ready to embrace the vague, as James
would have advised. The point being that there was a lot of truth about what the
ancients believed about the earth otherwise we would have no way of knowing at all that
we do not agree with them concerning the flatness of the earth.
Davidson’s quote, however, was taken out of context. The beginning and end of
the paragraph were erased, so we cannot understand why he said what he said. The part
Swift quotes was preceded by the following words: ‘... it cannot be assumed that speakers
never have false beliefs. Error is what gives belief its point. We can, however, take it as
given that most beliefs are correct. The reason for this is that a belief is identified by its
location in a pattern of beliefs; it is this pattern that determines the subject matter of the
belief, what the belief is about. Before some object in, or aspect of, the world can
become part of the subject matter of a belief (true or false) there must be endless true
beliefs about the subject matter.’ (2001: 168)
But then, the conclusion is also chopped off, producing what is apparently an
absurdity: ‘If someone believes none of this about the earth, is it certain that it is the
earth that he is thinking about?’ Swift leaves us at that, failing to quote what immediately
follows: ‘An answer is not called for. The point is made if this kind of consideration of
related beliefs can shake one’s confidence that the ancients believed the earth was flat. It
isn’t that any one false belief necessarily destroys our ability to identify further beliefs,
but that the intelligibility of such identifications must depend on a background of largely
unmentioned and unquestioned true beliefs.’ (Davidson 2001: 168, my emphasis) On the
basis of this strategically chopped quote, Swift then argues that Davidson evinces a
‘disposition (...) to anathematise alternative possibilities of thought or talk.’ But that is an
incorrect portrayal: Davidson does not do that and, in fact, to the contrary, he is
concerned with capturing precisely how, in spite of the occurrence of alternative
possibilities of thought or talk, one can still understand other people, other species, other
‘cultures’, other natural languages, even oneself at different moments in time.
Swift then goes on to argue that ‘for those who espouse it, the idea of
incommensurability has never meant that some system of concepts is fully and forever
unintelligible.’ Very well, if that is the case, then, we are all in agreement. The problem
is, it all starts again: if that is so, how does that process of intelligibility occur? For,
without it, the very idea of incommensurability makes no sense. And then, we need ask:
incommensurability between what and what? That is the whole point: why limit
indeterminacy and underdetermination to the level of ‘cultures’ that meet across
linguistic gulfs? Precisely, in doing that, one is succumbing to the kind of ethical
ambivalences that so trouble people like Nigel Rapport—and with good reason, even if
his individualist solution fails ultimately to satisfy our analytical needs (e.g. 2017). And,
of course, ‘frameworks are not fixed for all time’—well, surely, that is what we are
discussing. By the time Swift engages in a kind of rollercoaster of confused cross-
referencing between the positions I am supposed to espouse and the positions he
wrongly attributes to Davidson, all safety is thrown to the winds—we cross the mirror
into Wonderland. Better leave it at that. As I said above, if indeed we commonly agree
that no world is ever fully closed onto itself and that there are worlds to the extent that
world is a field of differentiation, then the question is not that my concern with
communicability is a kind of Quixotic paranoia, but rather that he still has to account for
how communication is possible and how, beyond worlds, there is always world.
For some reason that escapes me, Swift concedes to Rorty the interpretive
charity that he denies to Davidson, even although Rorty gets so easily trapped in
‘Western’ (Anglo-American) ethnocentrism in ways that Davidson, a classical scholar,
never would. Rather than look for inspiration in Gellner (his bogeyman), Rorty, or
Vattimo, Swift would find easier solutions with Derrida, who explains that logocentrism
is the ultimate form of ethnocentrism (1967: 11-14). Yes, Derrida too was a métis, which
perhaps helps to understand his leaning towards an ecumenical perspective.
Vattimo’s insight that ‘there is little chance that I could ever conceive what it
might be like to think like an Amazonian, since I am not an Amazonian’ is true beyond
doubt, of course. The problem is that it applies to all levels of communication, not only
between ‘cultures’: so, there is also little chance that Amazonian A could ever conceive
what it might be like to think like Amazonian B, since she is not Amazonian A.
Indeterminacy and underdetermination never go away—they are the very ground upon
which communication is possible, not a hindrance to communication. This was Quine’s
most profound insight; why do anthropologists find it so difficult to digest? By
entertaining Vattimo’s and Rorty’s points of view, Swift and his friends are silently
opening themselves to the effects of the representationalist background assumptions that
they claim to reject.
Swift’s account of translation and of ‘conceptual bending’ turns out to be
perfectly compatible in substantive terms with what I defended recently in ‘On
embracing the vague’ (2020). He believes otherwise, but only because he interprets
Davidson’s notion of interpretation in a representationalist way. He is the one who is
stuck within ‘synonymy’, not Davidson or myself. Thus, I find Swift’s polarization
between ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ only marginally helpful, since it remains
attached to objectified languages, failing to understand that all linguistic communication
(like all communication) is based on a triangulation with world.6 Concepts change as
experience changes, and it does so equally on both sides of the ethnographic boundary,
all of the time. Monica Wilson’s writings on the Nyakyusa of Lake Nyassa region in the
1950s remain one of anthropology’s most profound treatments of the notion of ‘being in
company’ (1951). Her insights echoed the structural-functionalist hegemony of her day.
Yet, at the same time, the Nyakyusa themselves, in the throes of Christianization, were
also discovering that ukwangala (roughly translated as ‘good company’) was not quite like
what they had thought after all. That too enters into how we read her books today (see
Bank and Bank 2013, Morrow 2016). To reduce ethnographic encounter to translation is
to close oneself off from its ethical dynamics and dangerously to bypass the effects of
power on communication.
Concerning Swift’s final section on what he calls ‘paganism’, I find that I mostly
agree with the substantive drift of his proposals—that is why I argue for metaphysical
pluralism as the fundamental condition of sociality. Where I am not comfortable is in his
romantic (Herderian) love-affair with semiotic virtualism—a phantasmatic take on world,
which sees it as constructed by words, as an exercise in the unmoored reproduction of
ever more exotic representations. Yes, of course, ‘the number of differing modes of
expression is essentially indeterminate’—there is no surprise there, since all
communication is based on indeterminacy. So one is puzzled at the end, when he comes
round and, whilst defending ‘ontological pluralism’ insists on showing precisely (and
correctly) what the problem is with it; why the ontologists’ distaste for interpretation is
not really the safest pathway for anthropology to follow in the decades to come.

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6 Which, by the way, also includes other persons—just so you don’t automatically think we only meant ‘things’.
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Prof. João Pina-Cabral

Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon
Av. A. Bettencourt 9,
1600-198 Lisbon, Portugal

pina.cabral@ics.ulisboa.pt

João Pina-Cabral is Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences of the

University of Lisbon (Portugal) and Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the
School of Anthropology and Conservation of the University of Kent (UK). He was co-
founder and President of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology and of the
European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Over the years, his work has dealt with personhood and the family; ethnicity in
postcolonial contexts; the relationship between symbolic thought and social power; and
ethnographic theory. He has carried out fieldwork in Portugal, southern China (Macau)
and northeast Brazil (Bahia). His books include Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: The Peasant
Worldview of the Alto Minho (NW Portugal) (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986); Between China
and Europe: Person, Culture and Emotion in Macau (Continuum, Oxford 2002); Gente Livre:
Consideração e Pessoa no Baixo Sul da Bahia (Terceiro Nome, São Paulo 2013) and World: an
anthropological examination (HAU Books, Chicago 2017, free access online:
www.haubooks.org/world ). He co-edited with A. Pedroso de Lima Elites: Choice,
Leadership and Succession (Berg, Oxford 2000), with Frances Pine On the margins of religion
(Berghahn, Oxford 2008), with Christina Toren The Challenge of Epistemology (Berghahn,
Oxford 2011), and with Glenn Bowman After Society: Anthropological Trajectories Out of
Oxford (Berghahn, Oxford 2020).