Anthropological Discourse in the Performative Context of Body-Spatial Experience

Abstract

The article deals with the discovery of a performative context of anthropological discourse. This requires a revision of customary discursive codes “nature/culture” and “culture/civilization” as they are built on the false dualism of the spiritual and the material. It reveals itself in discursive erosion of positional places that ruin each other. Shifts that accompany such a state of things reveal an archaic layer of body-spatial experience based on a non-controversial duality. The projections of this experience, through customary discursive codes, discover non-controversial binary pairs. Fundamental for descriptive ontological judgments of culture is an “internal/external” pair. For normative (ethosrelated) judgments of culture, it is a “close/distant” pair. Together, they make a body-spatial logic of connection in the anthropological discourse between the descriptive and normative levels, thus forming in it various human types through anthropological projections. For cultural discourse, the performative context generally reveals itself as anthropological deixis that makes relevant historically diverse language representations of culture.

Keywords

• anthropological discourse
• performative context
• duality
• ontology of culture
• ethos of culture
• body-spatial experience
• anthropological deixis