Social Analysis

This article puts archaic Greek perceptions of nature in dialogue with Bruno Latour's work on Gaia. I begin by summarizing Greek narratives of the archaic period that highlighted nature as a vital, wild, and daimonic terrain that existed outside but also penetrated and sustained Greek society and subjectivity. My central argument is that this daimonic realm of nature historically shaped modern understandings of society and culture, and is becoming ever more explicit in the uncertain conditions of the contemporary Anthropocene. The article continues to connect this argument to Latour's conceptual persona of Gaia: by approaching Gaia as an elemental and daimonic force that conditions human subjectivity and social relations, it ultimately seeks to renew our understanding of the complex, cosmic interdependencies that shape modern Anthropocene societies.

This article centres on the logics of knowledge transmission that underpin healing rituals among the Sharanahua of Western Amazonia. From an observer's outlook, these rituals bring together no more than two participants: the shaman and the patient. Each of them has access to different kinds of knowledge relating to the supernatural entities involved, their relationship with illness, and how they relate to and interact with shamans. The difference between these two forms of knowledge can only be understood by reflecting on their heterogeneous modes of transmission. The patient acquires their representations of the therapeutic action in an ordinary context of knowledge transmission, whereas the shaman obtains his esoteric knowledge exclusively via ritual transmission. The article proposes a descriptive model that distinguishes ordinary knowledge transmission from ritual knowledge transmission.

This article discusses three recent books that focus on the mutual relation between science and religion, particularly as it emerges in prophetism. The first is Timothy Jenkins's (2013) reanalysis of a 1950s study on an end-of-the-world cult referring to UFOs; the second is Stephan Palmié’s (2023) collection about Afro-Cuban religion in Miami and Havana in its relation to science; and the third is Ramon Sarró’s (2023) study of a Kongolese scientist/inventor who proposed a writing system under prophetic inspiration. The three books are comments on what it is to practice critical analysis in a world where the interaction of science and religion is not to be treated lightly, for its effects are ever more complex, ever harder to decipher. Albeit adopting very diverse tones, all three books carry deeply humanist, political warnings.

In a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay “The Mathematics of Man,” which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologists interested in how models and other forms of patterned transformation operate within social and cultural life, as well as in how we attempt as anthropologists to gain an analytical handle on them. In continued collaboration with Küchler, in the present issue we have invited anthropologists whose work speaks to these concerns to comment on the contemporary relevance of Lévi-Strauss's argument, encouraging them to be as explicit about the shortcomings and potential dangers of Lévi-Strauss's call to mathematics as they may be of its enduring insights and promise.