The Mirror and the Mind by Katja Guenther;

Author:Katja Guenther;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

As Lévi-Strauss’s plea makes clear, however, such preservation was necessary in order to preserve a privileged site for the investigation of the Western self, using the Other as a mirror to reflect on ourselves.

Lévi-Strauss’s argument was prominently challenged by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in a seminar he taught in 1966, and later published in Of Grammatology, where he offered a close reading of “A Writing Lesson.”102 Derrida commented on Lévi-Strauss’s “Rousseauist” reading of the encounter, which posited the corruption of a “crystalline” society through the encounter of writing.103 He agreed with Lévi-Strauss that writing could establish power differences, but he suggested that we needed a broader view of it, one that went beyond Lévi-Strauss’s Western ethnocentric account. If we were no longer guided by what Westerners considered writing, Derrida argued, but rather by a generalized version—what Derrida called “arche-writing”—it would become clear that the Nambikwara were not bereft of writing, and thus social hierarchies, before Lévi-Strauss’s arrival.104 Lévi-Strauss inadvertently pointed to the existence of this broader form of writing when he described the way the Nambikwara added “dots and zigzags on their calabashes.”105 It followed then that we could not see the Nambikwara as innocent, waiting for a singular moment of corruption. Nostalgic accounts of an innocent and preliterate society were ethnocentric myths.

In Carpenter’s engagement with the mirror in Papua New Guinea, we see a similar development. Carpenter too expressed anxiety that the so-called primitive societies he studied might not be truly pure, and his investigations with the mirror led him to the conclusion that there was no age before media, no prelapsarian moment. Mirrors were everywhere, and so human history could not be told as a story of a fall from “tribal man” and a future redemption from the thralls of writing, but rather as the multiple and contradictory effects of many different forms of media. But this merely sharpens the irony of Carpenter’s trip to Papua New Guinea: he came to this conclusion—the realization that “tribal man,” understood as humanity before mirrors, was a myth—only when he found a living specimen.

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