Circumstantial Knowledge

Circumstantial Knowledge
Social and cultural anthropology – the precise name is more of an indication of local intellectual histories than of any substantial difference, despite the fur that flew around the distinction in he 1970s – is above all an empirical discipline.

Whether it is also empiricist is a very different issue.

It is mediation between serious commitments to the evidence of pragmatic, on the spot research on the one hand, and serious engagement with critics of overweening “ethnographic authority” often level against it on the other.

In classic essay 1973 ,: “Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture,” Clifford Geertz declared that the analysis of culture – with which he equated anthropology – was “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one on search of meaning”.

This was to ploy one of the polarities that had haunted and still haunts the discipline.

To a greater degree perhaps than any other, anthropology has straddle the divide between the social sciences and the humanities and been stretched uneasily between a broadly positivistic explanatory approach to social and cultural phenomena, and an emphatic exploration of communication and significance.

It may be hard to imagine a synthesis of “experimental” and “interpretive” science, but neither these terms nor the “laws” and “meanings” they sought respectively to reveal appear in the same way today.

Inevitably, then, anthropology must occupy a middle ground that gives the lie to those who would claim that empirical scholarship and relative critique are mutually incompatible.

It occupies a middle ground in yet another sense, and one that must be grasped in any approach to anthropological epistemologies.
Circumstantial Knowledge