Guattari and Anthropology: Existential Territories among Indigenous Australians

Glowczewski emphasises here her debt with regard to Guattari’s thinking by tracking some steps in the exchanges that they had over the years about her continuous fieldwork with Warlpiri people in Central Australia. She also comments anthropological debates that took place around the notion of rhizome, the notion of ‘society against the state’ popularised by Pierre Clastres and Indigenous understanding of ‘copyleft’. ‘In the early 1980s, the decade Guattari called Les Années d’Hiver (The Winter Years), when he was testing the concepts, graphs and machines of his Schizoanalytical cartographies, in his seminar, it was sometimes difficult to understand what was happening in his intellectual garage, full of spare parts and oil. But a very tangible flux regularly emerged, like an illumination that sketched out a route, onto which everyone would graft certain of their own questions, a flux of collective desire. It was a passionate subjectivation, shared with Guattari through a multitude of singularities: a vocalisation of ideas, as Deleuze put it.’ First published in 2011.