Philosophy, History, Anthropology

Abstract

Abstract There was once a famous quarrel between philosophy and poetry, as to which of the two had the better claim to deliver wisdom. That is no longer a live issue. But a not too dissimilar battle continues to be waged between philosophy, history, and social anthropology. Which of these studies can contribute more to our understanding of the human condition? What should we expect from each and how easy is it to combine their insights? What methods should we use to resolve the question of what, on the one hand, is true of all human beings as the human beings we all are, and what, on the other, must be acknowledged to fall on the side of the culturally variable? Of those three disciplines, the youngest or most recent, social anthropology, is perhaps the most straightforward both in its aims and in its methods, however controversial the results delivered remain. Its remit is the study of contemporary societies, in all their rich variety and complexity, from their kinship systems, economies, and technologies, all the way to their rituals and mythologies and, precisely, their views on the human condition. Modern ethnographic accounts alert us to the almost incredible diversity in belief systems and values. Yet that very variety poses severe problems of interpretation. Ethnographers are generally committed to understanding the societies they study in the societies’ own terms in the first instance, using actors’ categories, as the jargon goes, rather than their own observers’ ones. Yet eventually each society’s ideas have to be translated into the ethnographers’ own terms.