Carlo Severi is professor at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Janet Lloyd has translated more than seventy books from French, including Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press.
"Here is an ambitious, comparative anthropology of mnemonic arts
proposed with special attention to visual imagery and related
'techniques for constructing memorable knowledge.' Severi has
conducted extensive research among Kuna peoples of Central America
and is influenced by the brilliant ruminations of the cultural
theorist Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Severi calls for recognition of
deliberately ambiguous 'ways of organizing differences' to propose
particular understandings 'that do not recognize any
pre-established center of epistemological priority.' 'Oral
cultures' represent knowledge in teasing instability and
incompletion, he asserts, for community members seeing an Apache
pictograph or hearing an Iatmul myth are expected to fill in
details from their senses of how the world works and what is at
stake during a given performance event. 'A society's memory is
never single, ' Severi reminds readers, and 'every ... memory is,
inevitably, the memory of a person' bound to forget details and
invent replacements. Exegeses further vary according to political
and aesthetic needs of the moment. Through a 'chimera principle, '
counterintuitive juxtapositions of heterogeneous ideas, references,
and parts-of-wholes (think gargoyle as a synonym of chimera)
instigate imagination, even as wisdom is recalled and creative
problem solving is undertaken. . . . Recommended."
-- "Choice"
"This highly engaging and deftly written book is the fruit of
exemplary scholarly work and is likely to become an indispensable
reference for future research on the anthropology of memory and the
so-called 'oral' cultures. . . . The Chimera Principle is an
exceptionally detailed and analytical work of great academic value,
which can nevertheless be read by non-specialists and be of
interest to a broad and diverse reading public. Putting the old
argument about the supposed fragility of memory among so-called
'oral' societies, as well as the common view that pictography was
either a communication system that is forever lost to us or an
'unsuccessful attempt to invent a type of writing, ' on an entirely
new basis, The Chimera Principle is a fascinating work that makes
an important contribution to the anthropology of memory."
-- "Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford"
"The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imaginationis
making a contribution to different fields of interest in
anthropology: memory, ritual, and images, among others, bringing
them together in a coherent argument... this is not just a
collection of essays, on the contrary it is a very coherent volume
with a sustained narrative that unfolds chapter by chapter."--Roger
Sansi "Anthropological Forum"
"Carlo Severi's The Chimera Principle is an essential work of
anthropological literature for the study of so-called 'oral'
societies but also for researchers interested in the transmission
of memory, belief, oral tradition, and so on.... Due to his
groundbreaking reflections on the old anthropological concepts, The
Chimera Principle has all the values of the monumental
anthropological synthetic works worth reading and 'thinking
with.'"--Katja Hrobat Virloget "American Anthropologist"
"Originally published in French in 2007 and now available in
English for the first time, Carlo Severi's influential The Chimera
Principle is a book that seeks to transform the anthropology of
memory and imagination, as its subtitle suggests. Based on Severi's
fieldwork among the Kuna of Panama, as well as on his extensive
bibliographic knowledge of art and anthropology, the book considers
long-standing anthropological questions such as the relationship
between oral and literate cultures, the prevalence of the mnemonic
form in Amerindian the ambiguous character of shamanic singers...
and the relevance of projection to the anthropological concept of
belief."--Guilherme Orlandi Heurich "Current Anthropology"
"The centrality of comparative interpretation to anthropology is
dazzlingly illustrated in Severi's The Chimera Principle. This is a
book in the grand tradition of Claude Levi-Strauss' Mythologiques.
Severi begins with a meditation on a Zande harp, followed by a
discussion of the art historian Aby Warburg's expansive efforts to
understand so-called primitive art. Warburg visited the Hopi in
1895-96 and became fascinated by children who, when asked to draw
lightning, drew a snake. The lightning-snakes they drew become the
prototype of Severi's chimeras, artistic productions that Western
analysts have consistently misinterpreted in terms of the
referential function of language--a tack that leads them to
categorize such objects as "crudely realistic," "abstract,"
"decorative" or "imaginary" (Severi 2015a:33-34). None of those
terms, Severi argues, gets at the mnemonic and ritual functions of
such arts, and he sets out on a grand quest, mainly across the
Americas (but with forays into Oceania and New Guinea) to create a
new "anthropology of memory and imagination," as the subtitle of
his book has it."--Richard Handler "Reviews in Anthropology"
"There are at least two ways of constructing memories, Severi
urges. The first is narrational: legends, myths, and stories based
on linear sequences in established genres. The second,
contrastively, is a song form, depending on an iconic formulation
of knowledge: as in shamanistic ritual action that constructs
complex images characterized by simultaneity and condensation of
certain commonplaces that the tradition would transmit. But the
images are also chimeras: allusive, contradictory, unfinished,
calling on the imagination of culture members to be collaboratively
or dialogically exercised in ceremonial contexts for the purpose of
together 'remembering' 'the culture'... Carlo Severi's book
evidences much careful archival scholarship that would reconstrue
earlier anthropological understandings of 'primitive art'; rather
than representations of the world, here are objects of memory and
imagination that provide a codification of mental space. The book
calls for a comparative anthropology of iconographic traditions
that work through the mnemonic use of images - understood as the
'non-Western memory arts' (p. 19)."--Nigel Rapport "Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute"
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