Cosmogony Today: Counter-Cosmogony, Perspectivism, and the Return of Anti-biblical Polemic

Abstract

In this article I review critical thought about cosmogony in the social sciences and explore the current status of this concept. The latter agenda entails three components. First, I argue that – even where there is no mention of cosmogony – contemporary anthropological projects that reject the essentialist ontology they ascribe to Western modernity in favour of analytical versions of relational nondualism thereby posit a counter-cosmogony of eternal relational becoming. Second, I show how Viveiros de Castro has made Amazonian cosmogonic myth – read as counter-cosmogony – exemplary of the relational nondualist ontology he calls perspectival multinaturalism. Observing that this counter-cosmogony now stands in opposition against biblical cosmogony, I conclude by asking, what are the consequences for the study of cosmogony when it becomes a register of what it is about – when it becomes, that is, a medium of polemical debate about competing models of cosmogony and the practical implications they allegedly entail.