“Between Where We Are and Where We Could Be”: The Locus of the Philosophical in Anthropology

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of relationship between the anthropological and the philosophical styles of theorizing and draws on the disciplinary debates about the place of anthropology among the humanities and social sciences. The compatibility of relativism, with its stake in cultural diversity, and the need to attend to universal human issues has been one of the core issues in anthropology ever since its inception. Anthropologists, reflecting on the methodological foundations of their own discipline, often think of its ethics as grounded in a complicated intermediate position between the theory and the irony of academic research, or between the practical and the humorous dimensions of the “field”. What metaphors come into play when this ethics becomes, or is replaced by, philosophy in anthropology? How are these metaphors produced in anthropology at the border of academic theory and public discourses? I do not provide definitive answers to these questions but attempt to scrutinize them in the context of never-ending methodological discussions.