Figurational Life Writing and Indigenous Lives in the Rain Forests of the Americas

Abstract

Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology lends itself to an analysis of autobiographies by the Japanese Canadian scientist-ecologist David Suzuki, the ethnographer-sociologist Claude Lévy-Strauss and the humanist Michel de Montaigne. This figurational reading focuses on their contact with Indigenous peoples in the Americas and their transformation of life writing from an individualist Eurocentric perspective to a longed for reversal of Elias’s established-outsider relation..

Keywords:

• established-outsider
• indigenous lives
• Euro-American life writing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Heinze, “Einleitung.”

2 Elias, “Introduction,” li.

3 Elias, “Introduction,” xxvii–xxix, xlviii.

4 Elias, “Introduction,” xxxi.

5 Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits,” 29.

6 Buschendorf, Franke, and Voelz, Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes, 5.

7 Elias, “Introduction,” xx.

8 Augustine, The Confessions, 40.

9 Augustine, The Confessions, 40.

10 Adams, The Education, xxi.

11 Wang and Money, Fashioning the Elusive Self.

12 Wang and Money, Fashioning the Elusive Self, 29.

13 Labaree, Ketcham, Boatfield, Fineman, The Autobiography, 44.

14 Elias, “Introduction,” xxxi.

15 This essay is based on my earlier research on Suzuki’s autobiographies in different contexts. See Hornung, “Chinese Garden Culture”; “Ecology and Life Writing”; and “Life Sciences and Life Writing.”

16 Suzuki, Metamorphosis, 53.

17 Suzuki, Metamorphosis, 135–137.

18 Suzuki, Metamorphosis, 7.

19 Suzuki, Metamorphosis, 155.

20 See Suzuki, Metamorphosis, 223.

21 Elias, “Introduction,” xxi.

22 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 10.

23 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 11.

24 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 11.

25 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 114–115.

26 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 115.

27 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 117.

28 Elias, “Introduction,” xxxi.

29 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 134–135.

30 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 135–136.

31 Elias, “Introduction,” xxx–xxxi.

32 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 140.

33 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 142.

34 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 145.

35 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 150.

36 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 150.

37 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 157.

38 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 162.

39 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 164.

40 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 172.

41 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 171.

42 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 172.

43 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 172.

44 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 185.

45 See Elias, “Introduction,” xxii.

46 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 187.

47 See Elias, “Introduction,” xxxi.

48 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 192.

49 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 194.

50 Suzuki and McConnell, The Sacred Balance, 12.

51 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 192.

52 Elias, “Introduction,” xlii–xliii.

53 Suzuki, The Autobiography, 275, 277.

54 Elias, “Introduction,” xvii.

55 Todorov, The Conquest of America, 3.

56 See Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind.

57 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 62.

58 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 386.

59 Lévi-Strauss, We Are All Cannibals, 87.

60 Elias, “Introduction,” xxxii–xxxiii.

61 Lévi-Strauss, We Are All Cannibals, 73.

62 Montaigne, The Complete Works, 504.

63 Olney, Metaphors of Self, 83–86.

64 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 397.

65 Eakin, How Our Lives.

66 Madsen, “Human Exceptionalism,” 124; Vizenor, Interior Landscapes.