Some preliminary notes on actor–observer anthropology

Abstract

The epistemic continuum of anthropology extends “ideally” from the position of a detached observer to that of an implicated actor. Yet this sketch raises questions. From the side of detached observation, do not structures and forms takes the place of the actor, who becomes, so to speak, the observer verifying his own models? Is not participant observation self‐limiting when it posits the ideal of fusion of consciousness, which forbids it from asking the question of otherness? Finally, when the actor assumes the status of observer, is there not the risk of seeing what one already believes, of failing to achieve detachment?The extreme position of objective observer comes up against the specific otherness (the identity) of a subjectivity that is out of reach, and the extreme position of subjective actor comes up against the impossibility of objectivation. An ideally theoretical ethnography is blocked by the actor's irreducible quiddity and an ideally naïve ethnography by the exoticism of theory. In one case, the approach comes down to “anthropology in the absence of Man”; in the other to “Man in the absence of anthropology”.The purpose of the article is to show that an anthropology that conjoins actor and observer is possible in an approach that combines a “state of the issue” and an essay in anthropological epistemology.