Naturalism, Analogism, Symbologism

I like Descola too, and am likewise especially taken with his grid (or perhaps we should call it his Generative Grammar?). TH's Question 1 - that is, how does Descola's schema account for the conditions of possibility of his own anthropology? - is one that would be interesting to pursue further, perhaps with access to his other writings. It is especially intriguing in that the alleged functionalist symbiosis with analogical societies would involve a discontinuity with the (Naturalist) local ideology of the functionalist anthropologists, presumably occasioned by putting on their anthropologist hats. This in turn would suggest that multiple positions on the grid are in fact available within a given society (or perhaps this is only rendered possible by the social forms of organized inquiry particular to modern/Naturalist societies, which may just be another way of saying that "Naturalism is an ontology capable of generating analytical systems that are not only capable of grasping themselves but all other possible ontologies"). This problem seems germane to (the critique of) symbology, which would probably have to understand in Descola's terms as an occasionally assumed, impoverished analogism underpinned by a practical naturalism. In order to pursue this line of thinking, it would be necessary to extend Foucault's investigation of analogism and naturalism as historical forms whose genealogy we can investigate, specifically the latter as a mutation of the former; analogism as it persists in symbology could then be understood as a collective memory of the form of organization whose suppression enabled our current classificatory schemas and social collective, retaining an unconscious structuring force as a kind of " limit-experience" of the social, to use a Foucauldian phrase. This would tie in nicely with Foucault's account (in OoT, not HoM) of the madman as "the man of primitive resemblances" (49). In some sense, the madman (exemplified by Don Quijote) is the lone analogist in a naturalist world. Madmen, as Jared Lee Loughner has reminded us of late, generally sound like symbologists, and this is no mistake if, as I am suggesting, both bring to the surface in different manners the unconscious remains of a largely suppressed analogical imagination. As I closing hypothesis, then, I would like to posit that symbological literature may be best understood in these terms as a colonization and instrumentalization of the limit-experiences associated with the analogical system by the local ideologies of naturalism proper to the late capitalist world order.