What do the stories of the beginnings of humanity say about us? Are some really more “rational” than others? Wiktor Stoczkowski, anthropologist, director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Ehess), tries to answer it in the book In Search of Another Genesis. Anthropology of the “irrational” (The Discovery, 460 pages, 15 euros).
Through the study of a seemingly grotesque myth, that of the Ancient Astronauts – which has experienced new popularity since the broadcast of the hit series Ancient Apocalypseon Netflix –, the book aims to pose “the bases of an anthropology of Western knowledge, necessary to understand not only the ‘irrational’ ideas that offend our common sense, but also those that we hold to be emblematic of rationality”.
How did you come to study myths about the origins of mankind?
Anthropology is often defined as a comparative study of all societies, including our own. Recurring cultural traits lend themselves particularly well to this comparative approach. This is the case with “narratives of origins”, which explain the genesis of men and the emergence of human culture. They are found in all societies and at all times.
In the West, this role was for a long time reserved for the story of the biblical Genesis, with its idea of divine creation, original sin and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In the XVIIIe century, philosophers endeavored to substitute conceptions based on reasoned deductions, independent of revealed doctrine and often in flagrant contradiction with the authority of the Bible, as in the Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
In the 19the century, the prehistorians take over from the philosophers, proposing an unprecedented conception of the origin of man, nourished by newly discovered archaeological remains.
For the anthropologist, it is interesting to trace this intellectual evolution and to understand the stakes: this allows us to compare our way of conceiving origins with those that exist or existed in the past, in other cultural traditions. But there is more: it also encourages us to no longer relegate speculative conceptions of origins to the imprecise category of the “irrational”, reputed to be illogical, unpredictable and pathological.
Anthropology seeks to discover the rules, sometimes very strict, that each culture defines to establish its own criteria of rationality. In this book I have tried to show that an anthropology of“irrational” is thinkable, because it is possible to reconstitute the rules of a singular rationality that underlies seemingly anarchic conceptions.
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