The conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture

Abstract

This piece is a response to Philip Swift’s article in this issue, where he critiques issues concerning ethnographic theory raised in my book World: An anthropological examination. Inspired by the work of Donald Davidson, I argue that indeterminacy and underdetermination are conditions for all communication and that, in light of that, a position of metaphysical pluralism provides us with a better account of the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture than the kind of ontological pluralism that Swift espouses.