Anthropology in Practice

Anthropology in Practice
Social and cultural anthropology is “the study of common sense.” Yet common sense is, anthropologically speaking, seriously mis-named: it is neither common to all cultures, not is any version of it particularly sensible from the perspective of anyone outside its particular cultural context.

It is the socially acceptable rendition of culture, and is thus as variable as are both cultural forms an social rules – those wins axes that define the formal objects of anthropological theory.

Whether viewed as “self defense” or as “obviousness,” common sense – the everyday understanding of how works – turns out to be extraordinary diverse, maddeningly inconsistent, and highly resistant to skepticism of any kind.

It is embedded in both sensory experience and practical politics – powerful realities that constraint and shape access to knowledge.

How do we know that human beings have really landed on the moon? We are usually convinced of it – but how do we know that our conviction does not rest on some misplaced confidence in the source of our information?

If we have reason to doubt that others are entirely successful in making sense of the world, how do we know – given that we cannot easily step outside our own frame of reference – that we are doing any better?

To be sure, this challenge to what we might call scientific and rational credibility was not what the earliest anthropologists (in any professionally recognizable sense) had in mind.

To the contrary, they were convinced of their own cultural superiority to the people they studied, and would have reacted with astonishment to any suggestion that science could be studied in the same way as “magic.”

Much recent anthropological work has indeed inspected the claims of modern technology, politics and science. Notably, the entire field of medical anthropology has challenged the claims of a crass scientism that – as Nicholas Thomas observes in a somewhat different context – has failed to keep pace with developments in science itself.
Anthropology in Practice