The reciprocity of perspectives
in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie socialeSearch for other papers by Roy Wagner in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
All currencies in US Dollar
As a tactic of cognitive self‐awareness, the reciprocity of perspectives is not so much a subjective metric for intercultural comparison as it is an internalised property of human sentience, which I label as a subject/object shift: the transposition of ends and means. Understood most broadly as a universal application of the double proportional comparison, made famous by Claude Lévi‐Strauss as the canonical formula for myth, the reciprocity of perspectives, instead of opposing the innate and the artificial (e.g. ‘nature’ and ‘culture’) to one another, presupposes a reciprocal, self‐contradiction between the two. I examine the self‐transformative and tactical character of the reciprocity of perspectives and its effects on language itself, which ceases to be an instrument of communication and takes on the role of communicator or persuader – that of the user rather than the tool.