Volver a signos y formas: de ficción, antropología y literatura

we don't usually notice the habits we inhabit. It is only when the world's habits clash with our expectations that the world in its otherness, and its existent actuality as something other than what we currently are, is revealed. The challenge that follows this disruption is to grow. The challenge is to create a new habit that will encompass this foreign habit and, in the process, to remake ourselves, however momentarily, anew, as one with the world around us. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think, 63. Abstract We might understand fiction as a way of rationality that is not limited to what we take to be literary texts. Fiction is also installed in some knowledge disciplines since the nineteenth century. To talk about anthropological fiction involves analyzing some sort of rationality tied to anthropology, one of whose elements has to do with where and how we trace limits between human and non-human beings. In the face of a planetary environmental crisis, there is an anthropological quest quest to expand, or transform, the limits of the human, or least to acknowledge different ontologies or what Descola calls mondiation. An example is Eduardo Kohn's research, who uses the Peircian sign to rethink relations between humans and non-humans. Attending to Peirce's classification of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs, Kohn attempts to dismantle the idea that the only existing representation is a symbolic one, typical of human language. If, as he argues, there are other semiotic and non-symbolic relationships, which are nevertheless forms of representation, we come up with an alternative anthropological semiotics that is based on amplifying the idea of representation to the non-human. Having said that, the notion of fiction has at least two dimensions that we would like to explore: an anthropological one, close to the concept of the imagination, and a literary one that is tied up to the production and circulation of texts that the Western tradition has