From Bible to Paleontology, Wiktor Stoczkowski screened the original stories of humanity, including that of the “theory of ancient astronauts”, which is experiencing a revival of popularity today. The anthropologist thus questions our criteria for the definition of “rationality”.
words collected by Fabien Trécourt
What do we say about the accounts of the beginnings of humanity? Are there really more “rational” than others? Wiktor Stoczkowski, Anthropologist, Director of Studies at the School of Hautes Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), tries to respond to them in the work in search of another genesis. Anthropology of the “irrational” (La Découverte, 460 pages, 15 euros).
Through in particular the study of an apparently ubiquitous myth, that of the ancient astronauts – which has experienced a new popularity since the broadcast of the Apocalypse Ancient Success series, on Netflix -, the book aims to pose “The Bases of an anthropology of Western knowledge, necessary to understand not only the “irrational” ideas which offend our common sense, but also those which we hold for emblematic rationality “.
how are you come to study the myths on the origins of humanity?
Anthropology is often defined as a comparative study of all societies, including ours. Recurring cultural features lend themselves particularly to this comparative approach. This is the case with “stories of the 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 of the Garden of Eden. In the 18th century century, philosophers have endeavored to replace conceptions based on reasoned deductions, independent of the revealed doctrine and often in flagrant contradiction with the authority of the Bible, as in the Speech on the origin and foundations of inequality among men, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
In the 19th e century, prehistorians take over from philosophers, offering an unprecedented conception of the origin of man, nourished by newly discovered archaeological vestiges.
For the anthropologist, it is interesting to retrace this intellectual evolution and to understand the challenges: this makes it possible to compare our way of conceiving the origins to those which exist or existed once, in other cultural traditions. But there is more: it also encourages not to relegate the speculative conceptions of origins in the imprecise category of the “irrational”, renowned 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 tried to show that an anthropology of the “irrational” is thinkable, because it is possible to reconstruct the rules of a singular rationality which underlies the apparently anarchic conceptions.
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