An Anthropologian?

Parables and Images will be my intellectual man drawer where I'll store fragments that seem meaningful, interesting, or just somehow hard to dispose of.

I have positioned myself here, a little playfully, as an 'anthropologian'. Unlike theologians who would recognise that their object of study is impossible to confine to a Petri dish, social scientists sometimes seem to imagine human life to be an object we can study at some kind of remove. In fact, calling ourselves 'social scientists' in the first place seems quite arbitrary bearing in mind the range of approaches to knowledge it allows for, reflecting perhaps a contemporary tendency to place scientific knowing above all other knowings. By way of contrast, we could quite easily reclaim the earlier designation of those interested in the physical world as 'natural philosophers'.

In fact I prefer this archaism. Maybe we are social philosophers, or as Tim Ingold would have it, simply practitioners of philosophy "with the people in". Human life is immanent to us as researchers, and indeed transcendent in its complexity and range. And like theologians we can recognise our task, attempting to map that which we cannot rise above, as a necessary impossibility, necessary because navigating through this immediate unknown of Us is the only way to prevent mystery becoming mere uncertainty, hope becoming frustrated desire, and our irresistible relativism becoming interminable drift.

Thinking of the researcher as an anthropologian is my way of reminding myself that I am cosubject with those whose lives I want to represent through ethnography. Academia can bestow a dubious authority on its own, but we can use this authority as a host would, to allow others into one's domain, at risk to our comfort - an elegant symmetry with the fact that we are simultaneously guests in the field subject to others' hospitality.