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..