This talk uses a series of images to evoke a form of diagrammatic reasoning which lies beyond the stranglehold of western dialectics of the universal and particular, the general and the individual, the abstract and the concrete, structure and event. 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology…

The apparent duality of “the universal” and “the particular” arises from what a Buddhist might call “primal confusion”: the sensory-cognitive delusion that phenomena exist as distinct, individual entities whose existence is separate from everything and everyone else. Like many confusions and delusions, this one often encodes real…