Personal Anthropology Research Articles

Strictly Confidential Anthropology

Anthropological interest in secrecy and silence – and related aspects such as lying, knowledge, memory, and forgetting – has been long and precarious. Through what may be called personal anthropology, in this article, I describe both private and professional anthropological experiences including family memories, fieldwork sites, and academic practices. By recalling state socialist ideology, censorship, and family secrets, I illustrate how citizens have relied on each other in order to counter state hegemony. I highlight how surveillance in Romania expressly encouraged my informants as well as the secret police to engage in mutual intelligence and observation tactics as evasive tactics. Building on these strategies, I argue that academic life is not immune to secrecy, silence and covert action. I introduce an anthropologist who worked for the Hungarian secret police, and consider how academic life continues to rely on covert programs and an institutionalized hierarchy to promote and maintain its structures and interests.

Between Ethnography and Mission in India: The Anthropology of Stephen Fuchs

This essay is an inquiry in the anthropology of Stephen Fuchs who worked as a missionary in India for more than half a century. As any ethnographer, Fuchs faced the epistemological problems of observation, participation, judgement and explanation. These problems are shaped by the set of values an anthropologist displays in either hidden or more open ways. That is why knowledge of the ‘personal anthropology’ (David Pocock) of a scholar is important for the assessment of his or her anthropological research. The personal anthropology of Stephen Fuchs in his descriptive ethnographies of small-scale communities in central India around the middle of the last century is a good case in point. Its retrieval reveals the epistemological dilemma between scholarly and missionary work.

Whose Love? Which Truth? A Postmodern Encyclical

The most remarkable characteristic of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate is its theologically robust mode of discourse: a pervasive and unapologetically Trinitarian and Christological, substantive argument, based in a robust theological anthropology of person and society as gift, and a peculiarly Platonic and Augustinian rhetorical mode of discourse. Caritas reveals the implicit, hidden, and faulty theological and philosophical commitments of secular reason— which, when used as a medium for the Gospel, can too easily taint the true doctrine the Church attempts to convey with it—proclaiming instead a radically orthodox diagnosis of and prescription for a disenchanted, love-and-truth starved—yet Enlightenment-weary—postmodern world.

`The truth is alive'

Kierkegaard argued that the scientific method was inappropriate for gaining an understanding of human experience; the natural science of the physical world and the social philosophy of the human condition must, he felt, be clearly differentiated if one hoped to take account of the richness, the inwardness and the individuality of human experience. This article takes Kierkegaard's stance against a certain kind of scientism as the starting point for a discussion of the nature of scientific knowledge and an elaboration on the place of the individual agent in the social-scientific accounting of that agent's behaviour. Aspects of Kierkegaard's argument are first introduced, followed by the pointing up of some of its more contemporary anthropological resonances. Criticisms of a Kierkegaardian position are next mooted, such as might be made from the `scientific' standpoints of Ernest Gellner and Karl Popper. From this triangulation the article offers some conclusions on the kind of truth sufficient for a personal anthropology of experience.

The Social Anthropology of Women and Feminist Anthropology

The Social Anthropology of Women and Feminist Anthropology

The Problem of Freedom in Contemporary German Sociology

Despite the many years separating Herbert Marcuse and Ralph Dahrendorf,' nearly the span of a generation, and notwithstanding a number of similar subjects treated by both and, especially, similar influences of sociological tradition to which they were both exposed, these two authors can be seen as the representatives of two different ways of sociologizing: this is what I am chiefly concerned about demonstrating in this essay. With regard to the similar subjects, given the impossibility of attempting an exhaustive analysis, we must be content to underline the importance, for both, of the main issue under discussion in this essay-i.e., freedom, with particular reference to its relationship with utopia-in dealing with which they both used many of the same terms. Moreover, this subject unites the two authors in a common feeling of social commitment and concern which at times becomes a specifically political commitment, plainly visible in the evolution of their work. Marcuse, whose point of departure was a phenomenological-existential outlook very clearly evinced in his early philosophical writings, proceeds in his thinking through a re-assessment of the Hegelian dialectic and ultimately arrives at a Marxist line of thought whose ethical and political ideals he assimilates and maintains to the end, in an increasingly fervent denunciation of the evils of contemporary society, to which greater pathos is lent by the psychoanalytical bent of his analysis. Dahrendorf, while more immediately sociological, also takes Marx as his point of departure. However, he applies to Marx a method carried over from the Weberian tradition of taking a distance from any over-schematic or unilinear interpretation of social questions and in a certain sense anticipates other more recent mediations between the two great keys to the interpretation of sociology: Marxism and Functionalism, both insufficient to express his personal anthropology, derived from Kant and Popper, or his adherence to the liberalist ideal. We cannot, however, take the fact that Marcuse held to a tradition more rigidly than many of his colleagues from the same Frankfurt School as a reason to accuse him a posteriori of not having kept up with the times. On the contrary, as we know, a kind of symbiosis came to be established in the 60's

An Exercise in Applied Personal Anthropology

This paper represents an attempt to raise three points with regard to the study of dance and social anthropology. First, I have stressed the importance of an anthropological perspective in contrast to other perspectives in connection with ethnographies of dance. Second, I have briefly outlined a few ontological and epistemological implications of treating social anthropology itself as a language-based, rather than as a Behavioural science. Third, I have only barely indicated the epistemological consequences involved in accepting the idea of a personal anthropology.In fact, it is the latter point which suffers most from the following brief treatment, for while the subject matter for a deeper analysis is present in this essay (i.e. the parts of texts of articles written before I read anthropology), it has mainly been subjected to a fairly standard anthropological critique. There are those who might say that this could have been done without the benefit of the idea of a personal anthropology.

Personal Anthropology. A Sketch for a Structure of Man

Personal Anthropology. A Sketch for a Structure of Man