Epilogue
This epilogue presents some conclusions, beginning with a comparison between Claude Lévi-Strauss's story of Amazonian natives who drown captives to see if they are human, and the story of hunters who journey to the pig village to probe their own humanity. The latter story is self-reflexive and thus perspectivist in a way the former one is not. Key to this perspectivism is the relationship between sign and thing. These are mimetic relations, in which one thing is similar but not identical to another. There is “slippage,” and this becomes a source of insight when comparing the self and the “other.” The mythic journey to the village of the pig people can be compared to the first trip into space and the view of Earth afforded thereby: the space trip does not actually distance us from ourselves as much as the mythic trip does. The journey from human reality to pig reality reprises an ancient “reversal” in roles, from hunter to hunted, which has been an important wellspring of metaphoric thinking. The universal human value of being able to look back at ourselves from a different place was noted by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who also noted the difficulty of doing so — a dilemma of the human consciousness, which the material in this book addresses.