Social Analysis

Anthropologists debate the primacy of epistemology over ontology, and vice versa, or whether the one is bound always to implicate the other. Our collective and personal history, however, makes the lived world what it is for us, and not all explicit knowledge is constituted in the same way, with the same purposes in mind and within the same sets of binding parameters. Thus, the task of ethnography is to inquire into the different nature of the different forms and modes of constituting knowledge, even while we strive to understand what our own histories make us take for granted as self-evident. This article argues that as a profoundly radical endeavor after knowledge, ethnography goes to the very roots of inquiry into what it is to be human and thus provides for anthropology as a continuing comparative project of fundamental importance to the human sciences.

This article seeks to describe the social preconditions of the emergence of science in Scotland since the Enlightenment and what came to be unknown in the process. It addresses the way in which the geologist James Hutton generated a specific category of 'men of scientific observation' as opposed to 'men of common observation'. In doing so, he, like other Enlightenment thinkers, transformed an existing spatial ordering of social relations into a temporal one. This formed one of the early steps in the development of a genuinely anthropological epistemology, whereby knowledge of the human lies with the 'primitive' other and with his or her knowledge of the world. Anthropology is thus the scientific observation of common observation and, as Lévi-Strauss pointed out, a specific form of common observation.

In this article I sketch out some fundamental aspects of ethnographic practice and understanding within the framework of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Their synthesis, created through continuous field research and self-transformative thinking, offers a deeper understanding of psyche, unconscious, and imagination as the generative matrix of human cultural life-worlds. Moreover, this view posits ethnographic experience and creation of critical gnosis as the primary condition for the restoration of anthropological self-understanding and the pursuit of truth-bound knowledge and action.

The article begins with the assumption that modernity is undergoing a profound change. The focus is on the structural transformation of two typical modern institutional regimes: the academic discipline and the territorial nation-state. Their demise as the predominant institutional forms in the realms of science and politics signals the end of the modern project—or at least the need for its profound redefinition. It is suggested that such a redefinition entails a radical conceptual shift in the social sciences and that the meta-theoretical expression of this shift can be designated as 'dialogical pluralism'. At a theoretical level, both modernization theories and the recent program of 'multiple modernities' are rejected. A plural modernity, with several distinct varieties, seems a more promising perspective.

This article holds that deeply entrenched assumptions about the nature, provenance, and value of truth can be brought into view and examined critically when set against the backdrop of a radically different set of concepts and practices that are associated with truth seeking in contemporary Afro-Cuban divination. Drawing briefly on an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which Cuban cult practitioners use oracles, the article seeks to formulate a radically alternative concept of truth. This viewpoint eschews common premises about the role of 'representation' in the pursuit of truth in favor of a notion of truth as 'conceptual redefinition'. If the ethnography of divination in Cuba forces the analyst radically to reformulate the concept of truth, what effect might this new approach have on the project of anthropology itself?

This article proposes a theory of what knowledge is and a method of how knowledge comes about. To separate epistemology from knowledge provides the starting point for questioning epistemology in two ways. Firstly, the analytical relations by which anthropologists claim that they have gained ethnographic knowledge are examined and compared to the claims to knowledge made by male initiates in Bolivip, Papua New Guinea. Secondly, these aesthetics of epistemology are compared with the social relations by which anthropologists and Bolivip men come to know through other persons. The article then takes up Wagner's 'relative objectivity' and considers how it enables an ethnographic comparative method between Bolivip and Barth's interpretive paradigm of 'secrecy'. Having unhinged epistemology from knowledge, the article closes by reconnecting them, with a different view of each appearing as a result.

Starting with the axiom that, for anthropology, the only relevant epistemologies and ontologies are those offered by the peoples we work with, this article offers a sketch of the current debate around the once famous ideas of 'fetish' and 'fetishism'. Focusing on the way that this debate has been extended in studies of Afro-Brazilian religions, the argument employs fieldwork and bibliographic data from one of these religions, candomblé, in order to present a native theory of the creative process underlying what has been baptized with the strange names 'fetish' and 'fetishism'. In short, this native theory holds that the creative process consists more in the actualization of already existing virtualities contained in beings and objects in the world than in the model of ex nihilo production, which is characteristic of our dominant Judeo-Christian and capitalist cosmologies.

By means of a tale of food poisoning as retribution, this article describes a kind of reasoning that consciously defies commonsense logic. The lived validity of this form of reasoning emphasizes the necessity of an epistemology for anthropology that puts the analysis of relations between people at the heart of our understanding of human reasoning and its ontogeny. An ethnographic analysis of how certain island Fijians give form to kinship relations through the production, exchange, circulation, giving, and consumption of food suggests that it is the very specificity of intersubjective relations between particular persons that make them a proper focus for the anthropologist's attention. It follows that intersubjectivity is central to anthropology as an epistemological project whose fugitive object of study can only be ourselves, even while its focus is bound to be on others.

This article deals with connections between phenomenological approaches and the production of valid generalizations in the making of ethnography. The argument is constructed through the presentation of valid generalizations that have a bearing on the intersubjective feelings of belonging among the Tupinambá Indians (south of Bahia). These feelings arise both from living in a small kinship compound, with its sense of immediacy and personalized attachments to space, and from becoming part of the larger category of Tupinambá people and territory. The intertwining of lived experience and a broader comparative perspective on sociality, raised both by Americanist and more general theoretical debates in anthropology, is considered. From this perspective, the article presents different processes of connection making as epistemological tools for ethnographic generalizations, constructed in a constant overlapping of scales.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, anthropologists failed to elaborate on theoretical concepts such as the 'human condition'. In face of the fact that they did not abandon their scientific calling or the label 'anthropology', this must surely be taken as surprising. The article argues that this silence is possible due to an ideational performance here called the 'all-or-nothing syndrome'. This depends on a skeptical fallacy: the condition of those who, because they cannot have it all, despair of having what is there to be had. The article also explores the Davidsonian notions of 'indeterminacy' and 'underdetermination' as possible paths out of this quandary. It suggests an approach to ethnographic knowledge based on the principles that underscore the mechanisms of control that engineers call 'fuzzy logic'.

This article identifies what Sir Edmund Leach once called 'amongitis' as one of socio-cultural anthropology's major problems that make interdisciplinary dialogues on evidence-based epistemological topics difficult. Topics of wider and larger scale, however, can and should be addressed if anthropology brings out more fully its implicit epistemological strength of a dialogical relationship between objectivism and subjectivism. The current conditions of a globalizing world actually transform this possibility into a necessity. In order to face this need, a new realism is proposed that is capable of dealing with the conditions and challenges of a second modernity. Two ranges of epistemological sources are suggested that may inform such a new realism. One range is based in the traditions of Western philosophy, while the other is rooted outside the secularized or theological legacies of monotheism.

Anthropology, with its deep commitment to fieldwork, has produced, through the dialectics of learning and unlearning, a contradictory self-understanding of the nature of the knowledge it has produced: one that is driven by a search for certainty, on the one hand, and by a desire for surprise, on the other. This article narrates a genealogy of anthropological perspectives that derive from the latter desire, the one that aims to undermine constantly that which is taken for granted. It shows how this perspective—often underappreciated these days in places where anthropological knowledge has been required to legitimate itself on an activist ground—has affected the way in which the author, a Japanese anthropologist, understands his fieldwork experience in Guatemala.

There has been much discussion in anthropology of the problem of belief and of the difficulties inherent in understanding and interpreting alternative life-worlds. One consequence of anthropological understanding and interpretation being intimately tied to the epistemological and ethical project of contextualization is that other people's knowledge is often rendered as parochial, defined by its local contexts and scope. This article discusses the recent conversion to radical Protestant beliefs in a community in northern Kenya that has resulted in new forms of knowledge and agency. The moral continuities and discontinuities between researcher and researched cannot in this situation be glossed by making the informants rational in context or by asserting the existence of culturally distinct worldviews. The article explores how this sets up a series of epistemological and ethical dilemmas that shape both the research project and the research process.