Epistemology of reciprocity. What social relations cannot show

Abstract

Both classical and structural anthropologies have always thought reciprocity as one   of the key social process to guarantee stability and peace within human societies. Despite the differences between Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss, they both believe that reciprocity is the main vector of social recognition and, therefore one of the main vectors of peace too. Nonetheless, if we can agree that reciprocity is important to human groups, it would be unavoidable to notice that it is also one of the biggest threats that humans have to manage as reciprocity is the figure of the most dangerous violence that human groups have to face: the violence of vengeance. Vengeance is nothing more that reciprocal violence. We should then distinguish between a good reciprocity – the one with which recognition can be spread through the whole community – and a bad reciprocity that threaten every human group. With the Derridian concept of differance, we show that these two faces of reciprocity cannot be opposed but integrated into a wider theory of reciprocity, which considers complex and systemic epistemology of social sciences.