The Displaced Object (in the Intimate, Shared Memory of Ingrid Geist)

Abstract

This essay is a tribute to the memory of Ingrid Geist. It begins with a personal recollection that describes the last moments of a friendly relationship and shared learning with this researcher whose activity that promised so much was ended by death in the moment in which she reached her highest maturity. After a personal recollection this tribute takes the form of an analysis of the book Liminaridad, tiempo y significación: prácticas rituals en la Sierra Madre Occidental published by the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in 2006. In this book, whose object of study is not easy to grasp since it is a complete rejection of positivism, Ingrid Geist has made a great effort to gather together a group of relatively kindred disciplines in whose knowledge she wanted to explore deeper (phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophy in its broad sense and Peircian semiotics) and others in which she wanted to enter (a sociological anthropology dedicated to observing marginal cultures, Greimasian semiotics, a theater that is strongly performative and, for the same reason, oriented towards what has been the tendency to call itself “performance”). All this to such an extent that a great part of her investigation has consisted of a disciplinary exploration which has made her way of seeing also an experience of unstable advance. The research is inspired by the revealing studies of Victor Turner.