A Moment of Reflection About the Construction of Knowledge In a Post-Modern Research Set-Up. (original) (raw)
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Paying homage to a great sociologist comes in many forms, that of disciple on the one hand and critic on the other. Disciples carry and propagate the faith, transmitting it to new generations. Whereas some o¡er valuable insights into the practices and thoughts of the great social scientist, there can be costs to discipleship. Defense of conceptual and methodological orthodoxy can sti£e further intellectual development and lead to sectarian allegiance. By contrast, the critic brings assessment and evaluation, identifying those rough edges and slippery slopes where the disciple fears to tread. Criticism, properly conducted, identi¢es the strengths as well as the limits of any novel theoretical perspective. The polemical critic, however, not so much evaluates as dismisses the work for failing to meet the standards of some opposing theoretical persuasion. With a theoretical axe to grind, the polemicist anxiously wishes to score points of intellectual distinction rather than o¡er insights of genuine evaluation.
The Place of Theory: Rights, Networks, and Ethnographic Comparison
Social Analysis, 2013
The relationship between theory and place has remained a central problem for the discipline of anthropology. Focusing on debates around the concepts of Human Rights and Networks, specifically as these traverse African and Melanesian contexts, this paper highlights how novel ideas emerge through sustained comparison across different regions. Rather than understand places as sources of theories to be applied to other contexts, we argue that anthropologists need to recognise how new concepts are generated through reflexive comparison across different regions. This analysis leads us to question a widespread propensity to understand places as the sine qua non of anthropological theory, proposing instead that place emerges retrospectively as an artefact of comparison. We conclude that while it is therefore necessary to acknowledge the analytic construction of Africa and its subregions, there remain compelling reasons to recognize its analytic utility. The New Melanesian Ethnography, a phrase coined over twenty years ago (Josephides 1991), is no longer so new. The reason is the rapid increase, since the 1990s, of anthropological studies that have sought to address topics neglected by this literature. Work by authors such as Robert Foster (2008), Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington (1999), Bruce Knauft (1999), and Joel Robbins (2004) has been at the forefront of making the anthropology of 2 Melanesia investigate the effects of colonialism, post-colonialism, nationalism, commodification, Christianity, and so on. These authors of course have a point. As Marilyn Strathern herself admitted in an interview with Cambridge Anthropology in the mid-1990s, she and her then husband were 'snobs' during their first fieldwork in the 1960s and stayed clear of Christian churches (Czegledy 1992: 5). They did so despite the fact that the Lutheran Church had become established in their research area before they commenced their fieldwork. The obvious benefits of expanding the thematic scope of Melanesianist anthropology should not, however, result in throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. A designation used more by its critics than by its practitioners, the New Melanesian Ethnography transcended, even as it anticipated, the anthropological auto-critique of the 1980s. Disciplinary certainties about the ethnographer's authority had begun to crumble before Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) was published, because the ethnographic work by authors such as Roy Wagner (1974) and Marilyn Strathern (1980 had started to ask unsettling questions about the assumptions anthropologists had conventionally brought to bear on their study of social groups and gender. Unlike some of the reflexive critique that was to follow, however, the New Melanesian Ethnography presented ethnography as a form of theory or, to put it more directly, refused a straightforward distinction between theory and ethnography. Reflexivity was a function of anthropological fieldwork, not a practice abstracted from it. The reflexive turn the New Melanesian Ethnography anticipated has taken several directions in anthropology, but its subtle relationship between ethnography and theory has not received
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This paper considers the application of Foucauldian perspectives within sociology. While Foucault’s epistemology has generated novel historical and philosophical interpretations, when transposed to sociology, problems arise. The first of these concerns the association of knowledge and power, and the concept of ‘discourse’. Foucault suggested that there are ‘rules’ of discursive formation which are extraneous to the ‘non-discursive’ realm of ‘reality’. This formulation is consequently both deterministic and incapable of supplying explanations of why some practices become discursive which others do not. This determinism is reflected in some sociological analyses of embodiment, offering a model of the ‘body’ which is passive, and incapable of resisting power/knowledge. Secondly, Foucault’s notion of the ‘self’ moves to the other extreme, inadequately addressing the constraints which affect the fabrication of subjectivity. Sociological accounts do not always recognise the ambiguities which consequently result from efforts to use Foucauldian positions. It is argued that post-structuralists other than Foucault may offer more to sociology.