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    The Logic of Invention
    The Logic of Invention
    The Logic of Invention
    Ebook207 pages2 hours

    The Logic of Invention

    By Roy Wagner

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    About this ebook

    In this long-awaited sequel to The Invention of Culture, Roy Wagner tackles the logic and motives that underlie cultural invention. Could there be a single, logical factor that makes the invention of the distinction between self and other possible, much as specific human genes allow for language?
     
    Wagner explores what he calls “the reciprocity of perspectives” through a journey between Euro-American bodies of knowledge and his in-depth knowledge of Melanesian modes of thought. This logic grounds variants of the subject/object transformation, as Wagner works through examples such as the figure-ground reversal in Gestalt psychology, Lacan’s theory of the mirror-stage formation of the Ego, and even the self-recursive structure of the aphorism and the joke. Juxtaposing Wittgenstein’s and Leibniz’s philosophy with Melanesian social logic, Wagner explores the cosmological dimensions of the ways in which different societies develop models of self and the subject/object distinction. The result is a philosophical tour de force by one of anthropology’s greatest mavericks.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHAU
    Release dateFeb 5, 2019
    ISBN9781912808526
    The Logic of Invention

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      Book preview

      The Logic of Invention - Roy Wagner

      manuscript.

      chapter 1

      The reciprocity of perspectives

      Imagine a tree whose top foliage cuts the shape of a human face against the sky, say the Tolai people of East New Britain, in Papua New Guinea, "and fix the shape of that face in your mind, so that it appears as a real face, and not just a profile. When you have finished, go back to the tree, and visualize it as a free-standing object without reference to the face. When you have both images firmly fixed in your mind, just hold them in suspension and keep shifting your attention from one to the other: tree/face, face/tree, tree/face, and so

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