Pre-modern peoples understood humans and animals as one reversible cycle

Evidence

Once animals had a more sacred, more divine character than men. There is not even a reign of the “human” in primitive societies, and for a long time the animal order has been the order of reference. Only the animal is worth being sacrificed, as a god, the sacrifice of man only comes afterward, according to a degraded order. Men qualify only by their affiliation to the animal: the Bororos “are” macaws. This is not of the prelogical or psychoanalytic order - nor of the mental order of classification, to which Levi-Strauss reduced the animal effigy (even if it is still fabulous that animals served as a language, this was also part of their divinity)-no, this signifies that Bororos and macaws are part of a cycle, and that the figure of the cycle excludes any division of species, any of the distinctive oppositions upon which we live. The structural opposition is diabolic, it divides and confronts distinct identities: such is the division of the Human, which throws beasts into the Inhuman - the cycle, itself, is symbolic: it abolishes the positions in a reversible enchainment - in this sense, the Bororos “are” macaws, in the same way that the Canaque say the dead walk among the living. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 435

Categorization

• XREF: Directly opposes Levi-Strauss structuralist taxonomy and connects to Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange vs. structural opposition theme; worth pairing with Jameson’s account of the shift from symbolic to structural thought. — connects to: Pre-modern societies underwent change without experiencing it as accelerated rupture — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 409; Premodern cultures operated under differently structured rationalities and value systems; The truism humans are animals is revolutionary because western culture denies it — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 51
• DEFINE: Defines the symbolic cycle versus structural opposition — a core simulacra-adjacent concept where reversible identity replaces binary division.

Broader Connections

• Premodern cultures operated under differently structured rationalities and value systems #corroborates (0.75)
• Pre-modern societies underwent change without experiencing it as accelerated rupture #corroborates (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 409