Rough Metaphysics: The Speculative Thought and Mediumship of Jane Roberts

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A powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of thought and their speculative ideas

What sort of thinking is needed to study anomalies in thought In this trenchantly argued and beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish explores this provocative question by examining the writings of the medium and rough metaphysician Jane Roberts (19291984). Through a close interpretation of her own published texts as well as those she understood herself to have dictated for her cohort of channeled personalitiesincluding one, named Seth, who would inspire the New Age movementSkafish shows her intuitive and dreamlike work to be a source of rigorously inventive ideas about science, ontology, translation, and pluralism. Arguing that Robertss writings contain philosophies ahead of their time, he also asks: How might our understanding of speculative thinking change if we consider the way untrained writers, occult visionaries, and their counterparts in other cultural traditions undertake it What can outsider thinkers teach us about the limitations of even our most critical intellectual habits

Rough Metaphysics is at once an ethnography of the books of a strange and yet remarkable writer, a commentary on the unlikely philosophy contained in them, and a call for a new way of doing (and undoing) philosophy through anthropology, and vice versa. In guiding the reader through Robertss often hallucinatory world of concepts, Skafish also develops a series of original interpretations of thinkersfrom William James to Claude Lvi-Strauss to Paul Feyerabendwho have been vital to anthropologists and their fellow travelers.

Seductively written and surprising in its turns of thought, Rough Metaphysics is a feast for anyone who wants to learn how to think something new, especially about thought.

Reviews

"Lucid, insightful, and absolutely original, Rough Metaphysics vastly expands the scope and possibility of the anthropological discipline. Peter Skafish demonstrates how, despite our academic prejudices to stabilize knowledge in a contextually bounded self, we must learn new modes of thought that enable us to listen to what someone like Jane Roberts can reveal about our own multiplicity and the possibilities that this recognition might entail."Eduardo Kohn, author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human

"Highly original, beautifully written, and thoughtfully structured, Rough Metaphysics escapes the recursive loops by which socio-cultural anthropology often proceeds, allowing Peter Skafish to probe more deeply than almost anyone else into the implications of taking seriously the ontological framework of an anthropologists interlocutor. In doing so, he offers a sharp criticism of anthropologys persistent concern with categories of analysis that obviate such attention."Marilyn Strathern, author of Relations: An Anthropological Account

Author Bio

Peter Skafish is director of both the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry and the social sciences division of the Sol Foundation. He has held research and teaching positions at the Collge de France; McGill University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Bauhaus University, Weimar, and is translator and editor of Eduardo Viveiros de Castros Cannibal Metaphysics (Minnesota, 2014).