Re: AUT: Lots of Wildcat (UK/US) stuff newly online

[Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 26/10/2004 11:43 PM, "Peter Jovanovic" <peterzoran@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> http://www.againstsleepandnightmare.com/wildcat/SUBSPAGE.html#_ftn1
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Thanks for this - I have been looking for this stuff for ever.

Briefly reading through it... The Darkness in El Dorado stuff is
surprisingly good, but I would make the comment that it has misread the
(actually interesting) problem. The issue isn't one of pinko liberals beign
upset about Napoleon Chagnon's analysis of Yanomamo violence (which is, as a
matter of fact, suspect in a number of ways). The important issue here isn't
that somebody like Zerzan feels he needs to pretend that societies like the
Jivaro or the Yanomamo did not have very high rates of violent death. That's
a minor fact about Zerzan's own pathologies.  Whether this violence supports
Chagnon's theories is only of slightly greater interest. The serious
question, or rather, project, is to understand this remarkable social field
presented by the Yanomamo and other Amazonian societies in its own terms, as
a potential, and in fact radical, ontological configuration.  Engaging in a
stale debate about the reproductive success of violent males, or worse, a
debate about the inadvisability of 'returning' to a past which is simply not
represented by the Yanomamo, is really very silly. I can only recoment
people have a read of such works as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's "From the
Enemy's Point of View" and (for those lucky to understand Portuguese) "A
inconstância da alma selvagem", or the works of Maybury-Lewis. Once you get
a glimpse of how these lifeworlds are structured, and get an idea of just
how different they are from the idealizations of romantic, oedipal
narcissists like Zerzan, you can kiss goodbye to this pointless debate about
whether it is a good idea to return to the trees. And that is a
fantastically liberating thing to do. The real lesson that we can learn from
the Yanomamo is not about the fate of some  self-promoting journalist and
his equally self-obsessed victims, but about possibility of a radical
reconfiguration of humanity. It's a shame that the otherwise extremely sharp
folks at Wildcat should walk right past the gold pot and on to pick a fight
with the rainbow.






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