Interdisciplinarity and Knowledge Configurations in Anthropological Disciplines

Abstract

This article is an introduction to the issue’s special section “Theories in Conflict: Discussion as a Mechanism of Social Knowledge Growth”, featuring contributions by Dmitriy Antonov, German Dziebel, Pavel Kostogryzov, Stepan Petryakov, Lidia Rakhmanova, and Sergei Sokolovskiy. The articles included in this thematic section of the journal analyze the various contexts of contemporary anthropological knowledge – historical, ideological, conceptual, and pragmatic. A discussion of the history and current state of knowledge in terms of competing paradigms, consensus, and conflict in various multidisciplinary fields of inquiry within the social sciences and humanities, and especially in anthropological subdisciplines and research domains, as well as a comparison of national research traditions and institutions that resolve methodological controversies and disputes, allows readers to become acquainted with a broad panorama of theoretical and historical issues that have but rarely attracted the attention of social scientists. The authors, dwelling on cases from several anthropological subdisciplines – the anthropology of religion, political anthropology, anthropology of food, legal anthropology, economic anthropology and cognitive anthropology – examine the functioning of multiparadigmatic knowledge and its influence on the state of these areas, and discusses the problem of the transformation of theoretical knowledge in situations of poli-, multi- and post-paradigmatic situations.