IMAGINING THE ALTERITY THE POSITION OF THE OTHER IN THE CLASSIC SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY (original) (raw)
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Thinking With Others: Savage Thoughts about Anthropology and the West
Small Axe
It has long been a cornerstone of Western philosophical thought that humans are unique because they can be both the subject and object of knowledge. A knowing subject can treat the world as her object, but she can also treat herself as an object to be known. Immanuel Kant called this the faculty of understanding and distinguished it from other faculties in that its main function was to allow for self-awareness, a capacity that he said "raises [humans] infinitely above all other living beings on earth." 1 That is to say, for Kant human beings are special because they think themselves. This self-consciousness develops first through self-observation-thinking about our own thought-and then through observation of the external world and of other human beings-thinking about others.
2016
A longitudinal review of the anthropological literature will show that usage of the concept of "ontology" has increased dramatically: Drawing on Google Scholar one can see that between 1960 and 1990 there were only eight articles published which had anthropology and ontologyrelated words in the title, while between 1990 and 2016 the number was approximately 90. And akin to the ontological maneuver of a reversal of perspectives, our impression is that these 90 merely comprise the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In other words, anthropology has literally become awash with debates invoking ontology in a myriad ways-and, crucially, in ways that are often mutually incompatible. Opening Google Scholar's gates of knowledge-or, more correctly, the digital sediments of research texts-will therefore lead you to "ontology" being inferred in what may seem as sprawling and ultra-diverse anthropological discourses.
In this paper, what is under discussion is the role that anthropological conceptions play in the manner people think and behave. Such conceptions are understood as particular interpretations of what is to be a human being. None of these conceptions is thought to come naturally but imposed by the interests of some economic and political elite. Thus, I propose a dialectical and critical method for comprehending some interpretations of human phenomena through the analysis of what Peruvian think about themselves (as an everyday comprehension) through their own accounts (texts of several types and genre), in order to uncover the imposed definitions or images of human being that are configuring and founding their identity and behaviour. The outcome expected from this ongoing research is a critical analysis of the unexamined conceptions of the human being imposed in the Peruvian society, this analysis means a contribution to forging the ways for liberation out of the exclusiveness and projected expectations associated to the hegemonic conception of globalized human being.
Reframing Social Reality in the Post-Exotic Conjuncture: A New Ethos of Anthropological Inquiry
2014
This article seeks to contribute toward the recalibration of anthropology as a social science discipline vis-à-vis an emerging historical conjuncture increasingly free of Western hegemony, and thus necessitating the reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production as well as the disciplinary reframing of social reality. Accordingly, the article argues for the delinking of disciplinary practice from the prevailing Euro-American epistemological hegemony currently in the throes of an epistemic panic induced by the inextricable nexus between Western power’s post-imperial detumescence and the discipline’s institutional senescence. The article aims to redeem disciplinary practice from its moral timidity and cognitive capture, since the adoption of neo-liberalism as the discipline’s default paradigm, and its surrender to a credo of interpretivism sanctioned by metropolitan travelling theories that generate knowledge claims as imported theory-mediated mystifications of cultural others. As a corrective the article proposes an alternative conception of the practice of anthropology as a field science of the human condition based on mesography as a new research ethos that offers a methodological exit from the tyranny of ethnography.
Social Anthropology, Radical Alterity And Culture
Canberra Anthropology, 1992
If not millions, at least thousands of first-year anthropology students have encountered the discipline through two editions of Roger M. Keesing's book Cultural anthropology: a comparative perspective (1976 and 1981). In it the author suggests a definition of culture in phrases which by now must have been almost endlessly quoted. Cultures are ideational systems which comprise systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that humans live. Culture, so defined, refers to what humans learn, not what they do and make (Keesing 1981:68-69).* Later in the same chapter, under the heading 'The danger of reification', Keesing warns: 'A culture' is always a composite, an abstraction created as an analytical simplification ... But there is a danger of taking this abstraction we have created as having a concreteness, an existence as an entity and causal agent 'it' cannot have. Both specialists and nonspecialists are prone to talk about 'a culture' as if it could be a causative agent... or a conscious being ... as if 'a culture' could do things ... We need to guard against the temptation to reify and falsely concretize culture as a 'thing', to remember that 'it' is a strategically useful abstraction from the distributed knowledge of individuals in communities (1981:72). In his recent paper, 'Theories of culture revisited', Keesing observes that his warning has not been heeded. 'With our all-inclusive conception of "culture", as it has passed into popular discourse, have gone our habits of talk that reify, personify and essentialize' (1990a:48). Moreover, '[i]f radical alterity did not exist, it would be anthropology's project to invent it' (1990a:46). This view echoes perspectives which meanwhile have been propagated in such widely cited works as Anthropology as cultural critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986), Writing culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and Culture and truth (Rosaldo 1989), to mention just three. While few anthropologists would disagree with the view that we ought not to reify culture, it seems to me important to retain the concept itself. Responding in this article to Keesing I would warn therefore against its total deconstruction. It is true, but presumably superfluous to state, that people (within a defined area or tradition) are not one hundred per cent 'cultural' in the sense that they have learned
World Anthropologies. Cosmopolitics for a new global scenario in anthropology.
■ In this article, anthropology is seen as a Western cosmopolitics that consolidated itself as a formal academic discipline in the 20th century within a growing Western university system that expanded throughout the world. Like other cosmopolitics, anthropology reflects the historical dynamics of the world system, especially those related to the changing roles 'alterity' may play in international and national scenarios. Some of the most fundamental changes in anthropology in the last century were due to changes in the subject position of anthropology's 'object' par excellence, native peoples all over the planet. But, currently, there is another element which was never duly incorporated by previous critiques and is bound to impact anthropology: the increased importance of the non-hegemonic anthropologists in the production and reproduction of knowledge. Changes in the conditions of conversability among anthropologists located in different loci of the world system will impact the tension between metropolitan provincialism and provincial cosmopolitanism, increase horizontal communication and create more plural world anthropologies. Keywords ■ global diversity and anthropology ■ metropolitan provincialism ■ provincial cosmopolitanism ■ world system of anthropology À memória de Eduardo Archetti I view the issues that anthropologists address, their theoretical preoccupations, contributions to knowledge, dilemmas and mistakes, the heuristic and epistemological capabilities of the discipline, as embedded in certain social, cultural and political dynamics that unfold in contexts which are differently and historically structured by changing power relations. The main sociological and historical forces that traverse anthropology's political and epistemological fields are connected to the dynamics of the world system and to those of the nation-states, especially regarding the changing roles that 'otherness' or 'alterity' may play in such international and national scenarios.
L’anthropologie, discipline des sciences humaines née dans la période coloniale, a contribué à produire de l’exotique, à créer l’altérité et à reproduire la logique d’altérisation en son sein (Cunin and Hernandez 2007). Au cours de l’histoire, les populations locales, les « indigènes » ont été « altérisés » dans un contexte où de nombreux anthropologues se sont rendus complices du colonialisme (Harrison 1991; Mafeje 1976). Le processus d'altérisation caractérisant la démarche anthropologique est peu étudié au sein de la discipline - bien qu’elle soit fondée en partie sur l'étude d'un objet construit par un processus d'altérisation, donnant lieu à la production d'un « Autre anthropologique » (Kapferer 2003) - et ce au profit de recherches axées sur une altérité parfois essentialisée (Trouillot 2003). Pour éviter de reproduire ces méfaits, comment peut-on penser l’anthropologie aujourd’hui en s’inspirant de perspectives décoloniales, souvent marginalisées dans l’enseignement de cette discipline ? En quoi ces perspectives tirent leurs sources de divers mouvements sociaux de décolonisation ? Cette présentation dressera un portrait non-exhaustif des réflexions actuelles menées dans ce sens, considérant ainsi les approches « autres-que-occidentales » (Harrison 2008). Plusieurs orientations seront abordées : 1) réécrire l’histoire de la discipline; 2) repenser les théories anthropologiques; 3) déconstruire les fondements épistémologiques; 4) développer des outils méthodologiques en vue de pratiquer une « recherche anthropologique éthiquement et politiquement responsable » (Harrison 2008; Smith 1999). L’exemple du développement théorique de la notion d’altérisation servira d’illustration à cette réflexion car, dans une perspective décoloniale, le concept d'altérité devient désuet. Ainsi, l’étude des processus de construction de la dite « altérité » doit faire acte d'une nécessaire « déprise épistémologique » (Mignolo 2013).