Common Sense, Anthropology of

Abstract

Common sense is not uniform across all sociocultural groups. Anthropologists typically confront the differences among ‘common senses’ at the very start of ethnographic fieldwork; their informants treat as self-evident actions and other phenomena that to the anthropologists are opaque and sometimes even absurd. From anthropology's relativist and empirical perspective, claims to a universal rationality are themselves a parochial form of common sense. Western-inspired theoretical models such as rational choice theory thus actually resemble everyday habits of reasoning and rest on culturally parochial and historically shallow assumptions of universal validity. Still earlier claims to a higher form of reason, used to defend atheism and agnosticism against religious authority, are similarly revealed as local versions of common sense, and thus as culturally as well as historically contingent. By removing common sense from the realm of the banal, and treating it instead as worthy of critical dissection even as it appears in their own ordinary assumptions, anthropologists also bring their reflexive and critical understanding to bear on the relationship between common sense and power.