Materialist anthropology of writing

Abstract

Writing has been studied from various disciplines, primarily within the realm of field anthropology. For the past decade, various studies have clarified different areas of research, shaping what we call writing theories. However, these disciplines lack a philosophical approach. The purpose of this paper is to outline what we believe should be the lines of inquiry to achieve this endeavor.

We will address two aspects that underlie the materialist method we apply to writing: 1) the idea of Man and 2) the anthropological space. From these perspectives, we will defend the following thesis: from writing (differentiated from the guidelines of the oral regime), from «written thought» ideas come from the «earth itself». For this reason, writing will confirm the effectiveness of its discourse, of its transposition to the logos itself, insofar as writing establishes the rupture of time (unlike orality), a transposition that appeals to contents in which ideas are formalized, from worldly philosophy, as the message itself that carries within its internal dialectic the possibility of accounting for the mythical story, the legend, the thought proper to agraphy, barbarism, the return to the very origin of ideas.