How do we know what we know, and why know anything at all? I
think anthropology is about meta knowledge: how people find, create, interpret
and share knowledge. Meta-knowledge is
the knowledge that we have about knowledge, and anthropology does this better
than anything. Pace Philosophy. But Tim Ingold called anthropology
‘philosophy with the people left in’, and this is my all-time favourite
characterisation of what we do as anthropologists.
Anthropology is the about the potential of undisciplined
knowledge, and consists—at least the really interesting parts of it do—of
undisciplined knowledge, knowledge outside of the disciplining power of knowledge
and the knowledge of power (our original sin, anthropologically speaking).
Anthropology holds out the possibility of
getting past the Foucauldian roadblock: that is, the roadblock to thought that
has been presented by Foucault’s thought itself and his ideas about the
disciplining of knowledge as road-blocks or limits to discursive knowledge.
(Wittgenstein was there first, but abandoned that position; not so Foucault).
The knowledge/power nexus has been seductive, addictive, but
unproductive. Or, to the extent that it
has been productive, it has been productive of more of the same. Foucault’s
verbal volume in other mouths seems to anaesthetise many minds and, like
Marxism, to compel repetition of the master’s insights. However valuable this
is, it is not a (one of many, no dobut) way(s) forward.
The Foucauldian paradigm, like Structuralism
before it, strands us in a hall of mirrors in which everything, we always
already know, is a simulacrum, a transgression/transformation, a disciplining
of discourse, a rupture.
What is real? Does it matter? Of course it does: but why does not ‘not
real’ matter so much? That perhaps is
one of the really real anthropological questions.
The history of ‘interesting’: what catches attention, what
makes mere rock (the substance) a stone, that is something that can be used, or
used to make a stone tool. And all the sequellae of that original ‘ah, that’s
interesting … what can I do with it?’
Why are there social relations and not ‘nothing’--that is, not a Hobbesian vision, which is still a set of relations, however, bloody, but actually no relationships at all--that is,
purely single organisms as ‘populations’? Effectively, why is there ‘society’
and not just ‘population’ (and what are the consequences of treating societies
as if they were ‘populations’, e.g. genocide, vaccines, racism, statistics,
modern economics, etc.
Why does the zeitgeist bite? Why does the zeitgeist (culture, discourse,
ideology) always get us one way or another?
Why are we seduced by cultural schemes, leaders’ dreams, Microsoft’s
‘themes’?
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