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This article reassesses the distinctiveness and vitality of anthropology at a time when
many disciplines study society or culture and quite a few have embraced ethnography
and fieldwork. The distinctiveness of anthropology is not therefore implied simply by
a particular object of study (society or culture) or by a particular method (fieldwork).
Recently, Wendy James (2003) has published an outstanding synthesis of the richly
facetted anthropological tradition and the current challenges. What I seek to add to her
portrait is an explicit argument about the distinctiveness of anthropology deriving from
a particular way of relating to the object that infuses the resulting knowledge, and to sug-
gest a new and invigorated ‘turn’. By tracing the development of anthropology through
previous turns, the article makes a case for the pertinence of the anthropological field,
owing to its power at bringing ethnography and epistemology into coincident view.
The present moment in European social anthropology is replete with promise, at
least if we look at its potential contribution to knowledge of social worlds and processes.
If the times also cause anguish for the profession, politically and economically, it is all
the more important to remind oneself of the strength and necessity of anthropology
persisting in its quest to produce knowledge of the everyday, of the lives of ordinary
people across the globe, of social forms and of the relationship between individual
action and the larger history. In this paper, my focus is mainly on European social
anthropology, as developed in a Durkheimian tradition, rather than the Boasian
cultural anthropology of the United States, even though there has been a remarkable
convergence of interests over the past decades (as will be apparent from my references
in the following pages). More than anything, the Durkheimian legacy resides in the
awareness of humans as social to the core. With it goes a wholeness of vision that
allows for a comprehensive analysis of social forms, individual actions, collective beliefs,
material restraints and creative expressions. Thus even culture is a social fact; the point
is that there cannot be a ‘non-social’ anthropology, a human science which sets aside
the kind of sociality ‘we find celebrated in the humanities, in poetry, religion or music’,
to quote Wendy James (2003:301).
Around 1980 anthropologists in general became wary of grand narratives seeking
to analyse social systems and cultural wholes; to be on the safe side they reported
on global complexity and fragmented everyday lives. In the wake of the vital debate
on representation, many anthropologists in Europe and elsewhere lost sight of the
theoretical ambition to understand the world in terms that parted company from the
∗ This article was first prepared for the symposium ‘Facing fieldwork. Challenges for anthropology
in a globalising world’ organised by the WDO in Leiden in December 2003. The contributions of
the organisers, co-speakers and audience are gratefully acknowledged. In particular I wish to thank
the appointed discussant (now the editor of Social Anthropology), Peter Pels, for thoughtful and
pertinent comments that helped me clarify issues for the printed version of my talk.
Social Anthropology (2005), 13, 2, 133–149. © 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists 133
doi:10.1017/S0964028205001199 Printed in the United Kingdom
terms in which the different worlds portrayed themselves, though without losing
sight of the latter. Some abandoned the idea of a unified discipline altogether. In
1996, Henrietta Moore, for instance, claimed that anthropology no longer existed as a
discipline; what we had was only a multiplicity of practices (Moore 1996:1). I would like
to contest this. While one cannot but agree that anthropology consists of a multiplicity
of practices, it does not follow that anthropology is no longer a distinct discipline. The
wholeness of vision alluded to above is something that anthropologists share, as well
as basic acknowledgement of the core sociality of humans (see also James 2003:298).
My ambition here is to contribute to the present explication of social anthropology
as one discipline, inclusive of a multiplicity of practices by which the whole is both
realised and subtly changed. It is not a matter of launching a new ‘school’ with a coherent
set of theories but of acknowledging the fact that the worlds in which anthropologists
are engaged always leave their own mark upon analysis and theory, and vice versa.
Anthropology is fundamentally reflexive in that sense, and so obviously ‘historical’. In
order properly to assess the implications of this reflexivity we shall first retrace some
of the steps taken by anthropology in the previous century in order to tease out both
continuities and new turns in anthropological awareness. This serves as a necessary
background to the identification of current challenges.
MODERNISM
1900 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 135
Postmodernism can be defined in diverse ways. Here I use it simply as a summary
term for that phase in the human and social sciences in which increasingly strong
arguments were voiced against the exemplary status of the natural sciences, as expressed
in the biological turn, and against the high-powered rationalism associated with the
linguistic turn in general, and with structuralism in particular. In the course of this
process, a new scepticism arose about well-established anthropological categories such
as culture, language and society that had become naturalised in scholarly terminology.
Not surprisingly therefore, postmodernism comprises all the various trends of post-
structuralism.
In the 1980s, the linguistic turn in anthropology was being replaced by a literary
turn that took literature rather than language to be the exemplar for society and culture.
(This is where Ardener’s model stops, because at his time it was still impossible to see
where it went, except that it would somehow take anthropology beyond modernism
as he perceived it.) Although it is consistent with the American lead in the debate on
representation that the literary turn in European anthropology should have owed a lot
to the tradition of Boas and Geertz, the Dutch and the British interest in semantics
effectively paved the way. British ‘semantic anthropology’ bridged the gap between a
straightforward interest in language and the meaning of terms on the one hand, and
cultural interpretation and the power of objectification on the other (Parkin 1982). It
could be argued that in European anthropology the literary turn is just a continuation
of the linguistic turn, yet there is a distinctly new interest in the narrative construction
of reality, ranging from biography to anthropology. The literary turn implied both
a methodological device allowing the world to be analysed in terms of narratives of
different range, and an epistemological attack on the modernist idea that the world is
immediately accessible to the scholarly gaze or can be positively known as it is. This was
the background for the various social constructionist trends that paradoxically often
forgot the social part of the equation.
It was also the precondition of a strong hermeneutical bent in anthropology in
the 1980s and onwards. In the United States it had been foreshadowed by Geertz and
his claim that anthropologists read culture over the shoulders of the natives (1973:452).
Now it became known as a fact that culture was ‘a text’ in its own right and that the task
of anthropologists was critically to read those texts that floated around in the world
and increasingly became known as ‘discourses’.
The hermeneutical trend is closely connected with another dominant point of view
in the last two decades of the twentieth century, namely the phenomenological. As
Michael Jackson (1996) has shown, the notion of phenomenology covers a variety of
viewpoints in anthropology, but at its core is a shared concern with a world that is not
simply constructed, discursively or ideologically. The same applies to the social world
with which anthropologists are concerned. Merleau-Ponty says:
Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express
perception or any judgement. It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other
objects as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the
mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in
contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any
objectification . . . The social is already there when we come to know or judge it (Merleau-Ponty
[1962] 2001:362; my emphasis).
For some anthropologists the phenomenological approach has given rise to the
unwarranted idea that to know the social world is simply to give oneself over to it and
It calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being represented and
not as suspended above and distant from the represented . . . that knowing is giving oneself over
to a phenomenon rather than thinking about it from above (Taussig 1992:10).
Truly, we cannot bypass the attempt at understanding the world from the natives’
point of view (so to speak), but knowing in the sense of giving oneself over to a
phenomenon is not necessarily all that anthropological knowledge is about. As Merleau-
Ponty has it again in a programmatic statement on phenomenology: ‘To return to
things in themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which
knowledge always speaks’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962:ix); knowledge speaks of something
from which it therefore parts company. Nevertheless, the return to things in themselves
by some anthropologists has been taken to imply a non-theoretical stance towards
the world, something vaguely experiential, based on an intuitive being-in-the-world
from where one may report humble narratives about the particular. While humility and
particularity are certainly both called for, phenomenology as I understand it does not
entail abstention from generalising. It may, however, pose new questions about the kind
and range of generalisations that we may suggest and open up for renewed recognition
the possible gap between living the world and knowing it, whether as lay person or
specialist.
All theories are products of human understanding, and this understanding parts
company with that which is understood. There is a disjunction between the world
and our understanding of it, as one of the fathers of phenomenology, Edmund
Husserl, has it (1968 [1950]). This does not devalue the understanding, but it does
question the modernist (and positivist) assumption that we can simply describe the
world as it is; this assumption is correlated with a view of science as an ambition
of clarification against which Donald Davidson suggests a radical interpretation: it
is ‘radical’ because it is distinct from those (local) interpretations that are already
afloat in the social space (Davidson 1984:125ff; cf. Hastrup 1995). The latter implicitly
incorporates the priority given by Husserl to the phenomenon in our understanding
of it over the phenomenon itself, because it is only there that we can know what we
are talking about: that is to say a particular interpretation originating in a particular
perspective on the world. Again, there is a clear affinity to hermeneutics and to the
debate on representation in anthropology, insisting on the situatedness and partiality
of anthropological knowledge. While they are derived from distinct philosophical
traditions, hermeneutics and phenomenology converge in post-modern anthropology.
In a continuation of Ardener’s scheme, we may depict post-modern trends (and the
literary turn) like the diagram on the next page.
To reiterate: possibly the most significant shift from modernism (including both
the biological and the linguistic turn) to post-modernism, which came to be conflated
with the literary turn, was the implicit shift from clarification to radical interpretation
as the basic objective of anthropology. This shift is pervasive and took us definitively
beyond the metaphysical notion of culture as something that simply is. With hindsight,
far from reducing anthropology to little (and inconsequential) stories and intuitive
understanding, phenomenology has given form and substance to a necessary double
consciousness in the anthropological practice – that is, a consciousness of a world of
ethnographic detail and practical, embodied lives on the one hand and of the conditions
of knowledge on the other. In short, the more constructive legacy of phenomenology
T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 137
Post-modernism
Hermeneutics // Phenomenology
(Narrative/Discourse) (Practice/Experience)
Part of the lesson from the post-modern period is that the particular field of interest
to which anthropology addresses itself is not, and cannot be, an abstract social system
that determines the actions of individuals. As Clifford Geertz put it in 1995,
Human beings, gifted with language and living in history, are, for better or worse, possessed of
intentions, visions, memories, hopes and moods, as well as passions and judgements, and these
have more than a little to do with what they do and why they do it. An attempt to understand
their social and cultural life in terms of forces, mechanisms and drives alone, objectivised variables
set in systems of closed causality, seems unlikely of success (Geertz 1995:127).
This rings true, but it does not necessarily entail the individualism of (some) post-
modern thinkers, nor does it lead to a conflation of biography and anthropology, as some
narrative anthropologies imply. Largely modernist ‘methodological nationalism’ (or
‘culturalism’) gave both logical and historical priority to the system – the whole – over
individuals. This approach fared well during both the biological and the linguistic turns,
but it could not be upheld after the modernist demise. Conversely, the ‘methodological
individualism’ of various post-modern trends made the opposite claim and gave logical
primacy to the individual act. Both now seem unsatisfactory because they reproduce an
untenable opposition between the whole and the part, whether they are named structure
and agent, society and individual, or history and biography. At present, anthropology
strives to get beyond the implicit determinism of both the modernist and the post-
modernist epoch. Anyone who has done anthropological fieldwork will have realised
that individuals are neither speaking cultural truths, nor are they entirely free from
them.
Because fieldwork is no longer seen as a matter of mapping social systems and
clarifying their nature but rather as a matter of engaging and radically interpreting lived
social worlds, anthropologists are bound to address the mutuality of the whole and
T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 139
property, of ascribing leadership) that apply to the humble, day-to-day life (whom to
marry, where to invest, whom to elect). Rules in this sense are neither fully understood
nor followed blindly; they are part of the background knowledge that makes people
sense the horizon of a ‘we’ (Taylor 1995; Hastrup 2001). The complexity of the social
world emerges in practice and through individual action, bringing together relatively
few and simple components into what appears a coherent and extremely complex whole.
Some of the resulting patterns become institutionalised and outlast individual action;
they become ‘objectified history’ in Bourdieu’s terms (1990). Even so, they must be
constantly confirmed in practice. Social rules are operative, and societies realised only
through the actions of people, understanding themselves as integrally part of a ‘we’
(Taylor 1995:173).
The resulting complexity of the social space, which is a kind of bottom-up causality
(not to be confounded with individualism), cannot be observed as a whole, but it can
be perceived when anthropologists place themselves in the field of tension between the
individual and the social in the same way as the local protagonists. Because the social
is not (only) a collection of facts, but also the instituting processes and the connections
between them, it cannot be observed or documented as such. This does not mean that it
is unreal, only that its reality must be expressed in theoretical terms. In that sense, it has
to be written; anthropology cannot revert to modernist assumptions of direct access to
objective realities and representations.
In another context I have discussed illusion as a key to understanding how society
is realised in the actions of people engaged in the gradual fulfilment of what they see as
the current and relevant drama (Hastrup 2004a; 2004b). Illusion is to be understood in
the theatrical sense of ‘suspense of form’ rather than suspense of plot; what makes the
drama gripping for both players and audience is not uncertainty about the outcome, but
the process of getting there. Until the drama is over, the participants act in the interest
of completing the story. This applies to all social spaces, in which agents gradually
realise what they perceive as the ‘play’ through their actions. This applies equally to
the long-term perspective on history and the short-term perspective of everyday life, in
which people play their part in a larger plot that transcends them because it is linked in
space and time to other people, other moments and other stories. Conversely, the self
emerges as a character within a plot structure that is always deeply social; social reality
is not reducible to either the whole or the parts.
The mutual constitution of wholes and parts has profound implications for our
sense of the field and the kind of knowledge fieldwork produces. It is not automatically
knowledge about culture, nor does it allow for a blowing up of biography to all there
is to be said about history. The question is how we make connections between the
individual and the community – the one and the many – without reducing either to a
side-effect of the other. Methodologically we get there by way of fieldwork, seen not
as simply informative but as a performative mode of knowing (cf. Fabian 1990:3ff). As
a social space, the field entered by the anthropologist is itself a ‘practiced place’ (cf. de
Certeau 1984:117), and in that sense much more than simply a trope (pace Gupta and
Ferguson 1997).
The individual and the social evolve with subtle interplay; this is what we get at
through fieldwork, in which we also participate and come to realise the impossibility
of achieving independent, objective knowledge. As Tim Jenkins has it:
‘subjectivity’ is the price that has to be paid to do fieldwork. The anthropologist gets caught up
in the series of events that constitute social life, where there is no objective truth, but simply
potentially exclusive versions of the truth that together constitute the event (Jenkins 1994:443).
These intersections are not simply observable, so to understand both individual destinies
and the larger history we must keep the concrete details of social life within view
and have the courage to theorise. Theorising in this sense does not entail a return
T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 141
to grand narratives but to a renewed sense of connectedness, ‘a connectedness that is
neither comprehensive nor uniform, primal or changeless, but nonetheless real’ (Geertz
2000:224). Fieldwork allows anthropologists to sense unobservable connections, not
from above or from an objectivist perspective but from within, so to speak. In one
recent book, it is put as follows:
The defining feature is listening for the unsaid, looking for the visually unmarked, sensing the
unrepresented, and thus seeking for connections among parts of the obvious which remain locally
unstated. To that degree, fieldwork of the kind anthropologists attempt is indispensable (Dresch
and James 2000:23).
Once again, we see how ‘social anthropology is engaged . . . in recasting the relationship
between what is obvious and what is not’ (Jenkins 1999:7). This recasting is based in
direct studies of social life, but fieldwork
in fact occupies only a fraction of the lifetime of the anthropologist; even though imaginatively
inspiring throughout a career, it cannot measure up to the time spent by anthropologists mulling
over written texts, and in effect working as historians do (James 2003:302).
The significance of this observation in the present context lies both in its recognition
of the constant dialogue with predecessors in the field and in the resulting awareness
of the historicity of anthropology itself. At another level this sustains the view of our
enterprise as one of radical interpretation rather than clarification in the terms of Donald
Davidson, introduced above.
What is more, directing the attention towards social complexity as discussed above
also makes anthropologists realise the surplus of experience that qualifies the social.
Not all experience is reducible to knowledge (Jackson 1996:3). Phrased otherwise,
anthropology discloses the fact that there is always a historical surplus of events, actions
and thoughts. These may linger without necessarily contributing to the larger order
as perceived, but they provide possible sites of resistance or sources of new historical
turns. This also applies to the ‘surplus’ of thought in anthropology that defies any neat
depiction of its history, such as the one suggested in the preceding pages. Again, we
stumble upon a genuinely anthropological contribution to knowledge, achieved on the
basis of a particular relationship to the world under study.
To re-establish a legitimate field of interest that is neither objective nor subjective,
but still as real as it gets, we must acknowledge what cannot be local knowledge –
that individuals playing their part are actually realising the whole that is perceived as
objective, and conversely, that individuals emerge as social characters in consequence of
their actions. Through the performative mode of knowing and its inherent reflexivity,
anthropology understands how the frame is part of any event, in a very profound
sense. Both persons and worlds change imperceptibly in the process of realising what
is; yet for individuals playing their part, there is not necessarily a sense of movement,
because just as complexity emerges from the bottom, so the frame moves along with
the individual act. The moving frames of social life constitute the anthropological field
as the source of a distinct and vital knowledge of worlds and histories, and of social
forms at various scales.
Having reassessed the field as a moving frame, we may rearticulate the nature of
anthropological knowledge and take some of the previous insights further towards
T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 143
Embedded in the above argument is an identification of an incipient new turn in
anthropology. Bringing the lessons of both modernism and post-modernism along,
anthropology takes a new step. At first sight, to remain within the (largely post-
modern) range of small narratives (as opposed to the grand narratives of modernism)
seems advisable in view of the manifest complexity of the world and the singularity of
experience. However, this solution is also paradoxically positivist, and embedded in a
view of scholarship as simply a clarifying enterprise. In so far as anthropology is about
radical interpretation and about venturing explanations of how the parts combine to an
emergent, if objectified, whole that influences both identity and agency, reports of the
everyday cannot substitute for anthropological knowledge. I would subscribe to the
view held by Wendy James, that ‘anthropologists do share a hunch that there is more
of a systematic character to the underlying formats of social life than meet the eye, or
can be described in everyday language by individual participants’ (James 2003:298).
There is no return to grand modernist theory in this; there is, rather, a wish
to acknowledge the pragmatic foundations of anthropology, in my view subsuming
(while not discarding) both the phenomenological and the hermeneutical trends of
postmodernism. In a pragmatic anthropology we hear echoes of William James and
John Dewey (as well as George Herbert Mead to whom I referred above), but because
of the intervening years and the many lessons learnt en route between modernism
and postmodernism, it takes us further. A pragmatic anthropology acknowledges that
theories are not final answers to human riddles but, to paraphrase William James
(1974:46), temporary instruments through which we can handle social complexities.
Theories about the world are of the same world and have concrete effects: there are no
significant differences in the abstract that do not also make a concrete difference. In that
sense, intentions and consequences are interlocked, not only in the social worlds under
study but also in the scholarly field. This definitively breaks anthropology away from
the metaphysical presumptions of modernism, and transcends latent (post-modern)
phenomenological righteousness on behalf of the concrete. A pragmatic anthropology
acknowledges its own contribution to the perception of the world; a disinterested
anthropology seems impossible.
The turn that we are experiencing at the moment also redresses the balance between
the material and non-material dimensions of social life that was thwarted by the latent
idealism of the (sometimes exaggerated) discursive and narrative interest during the
literary turn. It also takes the phenomenological interest in the spatiality of bodily
perceptions and projections to a more comprehensive conclusion than that offered so
far by theories of practice and experience. Merleau-Ponty says:
Space and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact of his birth, the
perpetual contribution of his bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than
thought . . . Space has its basis in our facticity. It is neither an object, nor an act of unification on
the subject’s part; it can neither be observed, since it is presupposed in every observation, nor seen
to emerge from a constituting operation, since it is of its essence that it be already constituted, for
thus it can, by its magic, confer its own spatial particularisation upon the landscape without ever
appearing itself (Merleau-Ponty 1962:254).
A communication with the world more ancient than thought; people always live on the
surface of the earth and are subjects to its texture, shape and fecundity. These features
‘provide a base line to our human lives, not only our pragmatic activities, but to our
conceptual understandings of the organised qualities of differentiated space, and our
orientation within it’ (James 2003:213).
T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 145
dwelling etc. are commonplaces these days. In general, there is a resurgence of interest in
the materiality of the world, both in terms of the physical environment in which people
live, the material objects they handle, the next-to-physical force of social institutions,
the embodiment of history and – significantly – the driving force of language. In
many ways, the anthropologies of practice, experience and embodiment associated
with phenomenological interest have already contributed to the acknowledgement of
this pervasive materiality of the world, though without theorising it as part of the social.
This is the challenge of the present.
As I see it, the topographic turn has been facilitated also by the anthropology of
landscape in the 1990s (e.g. Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995), which has demonstrated that
landscapes were not simply backdrops to action but integral parts of it – a movement
foreshadowed no less significantly by subtle ethnographic analyses of how people
attach themselves to places invested with moral value irrespective of the anthropological
denunciation of localised cultures (e.g. Olwig 1997). One of the benefits of proclaiming
a new turn (while also recognising the continuities) is to direct attention towards
new or forgotten issues, among which are scale and density. There is no way to deal
adequately with these issues here; I note only that it makes a vital social difference
whether five thousand people live within the walls of a single village or spread across a
wide desert.
I believe that the topographic turn and pragmatist insight will lead to renewed
reflections also on the historicity of anthropology, which is no longer seen as a threat to
‘scientific’ (in the broad sense of the term) ambition but fundamentally supportive of
it. Anthropology deals in histories, but it does so without claiming to be immune from
history itself (Toren 2002a:201). This is actually the strongest basis for its legitimacy.
The double horizon of geographical and social spaces that we associate with the
topographic turn is neither modernist nor post-modern, but simply anthropological –
an adjective that adheres to a particular mode of attending to social life, wherever it
takes place.
A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l a u t h o r i t y. P r a g m a t i c e n l i g h t e n m e n t
The time has come to wind up the argument. Keeping both direct engagement with the
world and theoretical ambition alive and acknowledging their interconnectedness helps
us situate anthropology within the larger field of disciplines studying the social and/or
the cultural. By their long-term engagement with the world anthropologists know how
action and awareness merge. The qualitative nature of anthropology thus reflects the
quality of social life itself.
The ethnographic mode of attention implies a being in touch with reality, and in
turn leads to a renewed awareness of anthropology as defined by its epistemology rather
than its object. Realising that the mutually defining relationship between part and whole
makes both of them emergent realities, we cannot speak of an anthropological object
outside of a particular analysis. The object is a product of a particular epistemology,
a way of knowing rather than a pre-established ontological entity. This also implies
that we cannot generalise horizontally about whole cultures, societies or systems of
meaning; instead we must aim at generalising vertically about those processes by which
meanings are established, challenged and altered through unique events from which
emerge complex social forms that are perceived as objective realities.
T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 147
by unprecedented acts and unique events, and of how understandings are created in
practice.
Kirsten Hastrup
Institute of Anthropology
University of Copenhagen
Frederiksholms Kanal 4
DK-1220 Copenhagen K
Denmark
kirsten.hastrup@anthro.ku.dk
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