KIRSTEN HASTRU P

Social anthropology. Towards a

pragmatic enlightenment?∗

This article reassesses the distinctiveness and vitality of anthropology at a time when
many disciplines study society or culture and quite a few have embraced ethnography
and fieldwork. The distinctiveness of anthropology is not therefore implied simply by
a particular object of study (society or culture) or by a particular method (fieldwork).
Recently, Wendy James (2003) has published an outstanding synthesis of the richly
facetted anthropological tradition and the current challenges. What I seek to add to her
portrait is an explicit argument about the distinctiveness of anthropology deriving from
a particular way of relating to the object that infuses the resulting knowledge, and to sug-
gest a new and invigorated ‘turn’. By tracing the development of anthropology through
previous turns, the article makes a case for the pertinence of the anthropological field,
owing to its power at bringing ethnography and epistemology into coincident view.
The present moment in European social anthropology is replete with promise, at
least if we look at its potential contribution to knowledge of social worlds and processes.
If the times also cause anguish for the profession, politically and economically, it is all
the more important to remind oneself of the strength and necessity of anthropology
persisting in its quest to produce knowledge of the everyday, of the lives of ordinary
people across the globe, of social forms and of the relationship between individual
action and the larger history. In this paper, my focus is mainly on European social
anthropology, as developed in a Durkheimian tradition, rather than the Boasian
cultural anthropology of the United States, even though there has been a remarkable
convergence of interests over the past decades (as will be apparent from my references
in the following pages). More than anything, the Durkheimian legacy resides in the
awareness of humans as social to the core. With it goes a wholeness of vision that
allows for a comprehensive analysis of social forms, individual actions, collective beliefs,
material restraints and creative expressions. Thus even culture is a social fact; the point
is that there cannot be a ‘non-social’ anthropology, a human science which sets aside
the kind of sociality ‘we find celebrated in the humanities, in poetry, religion or music’,
to quote Wendy James (2003:301).
Around 1980 anthropologists in general became wary of grand narratives seeking
to analyse social systems and cultural wholes; to be on the safe side they reported
on global complexity and fragmented everyday lives. In the wake of the vital debate
on representation, many anthropologists in Europe and elsewhere lost sight of the
theoretical ambition to understand the world in terms that parted company from the

∗ This article was first prepared for the symposium ‘Facing fieldwork. Challenges for anthropology
in a globalising world’ organised by the WDO in Leiden in December 2003. The contributions of
the organisers, co-speakers and audience are gratefully acknowledged. In particular I wish to thank
the appointed discussant (now the editor of Social Anthropology), Peter Pels, for thoughtful and
pertinent comments that helped me clarify issues for the printed version of my talk.

Social Anthropology (2005), 13, 2, 133–149. © 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists 133
doi:10.1017/S0964028205001199 Printed in the United Kingdom
terms in which the different worlds portrayed themselves, though without losing
sight of the latter. Some abandoned the idea of a unified discipline altogether. In
1996, Henrietta Moore, for instance, claimed that anthropology no longer existed as a
discipline; what we had was only a multiplicity of practices (Moore 1996:1). I would like
to contest this. While one cannot but agree that anthropology consists of a multiplicity
of practices, it does not follow that anthropology is no longer a distinct discipline. The
wholeness of vision alluded to above is something that anthropologists share, as well
as basic acknowledgement of the core sociality of humans (see also James 2003:298).
My ambition here is to contribute to the present explication of social anthropology
as one discipline, inclusive of a multiplicity of practices by which the whole is both
realised and subtly changed. It is not a matter of launching a new ‘school’ with a coherent
set of theories but of acknowledging the fact that the worlds in which anthropologists
are engaged always leave their own mark upon analysis and theory, and vice versa.
Anthropology is fundamentally reflexive in that sense, and so obviously ‘historical’. In
order properly to assess the implications of this reflexivity we shall first retrace some
of the steps taken by anthropology in the previous century in order to tease out both
continuities and new turns in anthropological awareness. This serves as a necessary
background to the identification of current challenges.

Looking back. The turns of anthropology in the

twentieth centur y

As a distinct academic discipline, anthropology is largely a product of the twentieth

century, even though it had forerunners such as evolutionism and diffusionism.
This means that anthropology is a predominantly modern discipline that somewhat
ironically took it upon itself to understand the disappearing non-modern world. Renato
Rosaldo has suggested that western anthropology was driven by an imperialist nostalgia –
a mourning of what the west had itself destroyed (Rosaldo 1989:68ff.). Although
the development of the discipline was, of course, gradual and far from unified, it is
possible to identify a series of major breaks, indicating shifts of ‘exemplars’, in the sense
suggested by Kuhn in his discussion of paradigms (Kuhn 1969:198ff.). Looking back on
modernism, Edwin Ardener suggests the following map of the development of British
anthropology:

MODERNISM

EARLY MODERNISM CONSENSUS LATE MODERNISM

HISTORICISM FUNCTIONALISM STRUCTURAL- STRUCTURALISM
(Evolutionism FUNCTIONALISM
Diffusionism)

1900 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

F IGURE 1. Modernism in British anthropology (after Ardener 1987:51).

134 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

 The named classical theories in this model are all ‘grand narratives’ and symptoms
of the modernist ambition to explain everything social or cultural by reference to
one comprehensive scheme. The explanations have different exemplars, and in my
view Ardener’s model neatly indicates when and where the major shifts occurred; new
genres of writing emerged at these points that we may identify as these new turns in
anthropology. Looking first at functionalism and structural functionalism, we can see
both as expressions of a biological turn making an impact (foreshadowed by Durkheim)
from the mid-twenties onwards. For Malinowski, biology entered his theoretical
thinking through being the primary cause of culture – the latter seen as instrumental in
fulfilling the primary biological needs and derived, secondary social needs of humans.
For Radcliffe-Brown, biology had a more stringent status as exemplary science; he
suggested that society was akin to a biological organism, and that anthropologists
should set out to identify the natural laws of society by addressing both the morphology
(social structure) and the physiology (social processes) of concrete societies.
The biological turn in European anthropology was part of a larger trend between
the wars that sought to unify scholarship in the image of the natural sciences, and base it
on rigorous positivism. This trend also pervaded the field of linguistics, fuelling the idea
of language as an objective phenomenon existing independently of the spoken word.
Already in 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure had suggested a distinction between ‘langue’
and ‘parole’ that was to take root and develop into a very fertile period in general
linguistics in Europe. Without going into detail, it will be generally acknowledged that
because of this development, linguistics became the paradigmatic discipline among the
human sciences (including anthropology). If we accept Ardener’s scheme, the linguistic
turn finally displaced the biological with the advent of structuralism around 1960. The
1960s were generally a time of major metamorphosis in anthropology, owing to the
demise of colonialism and the end of ‘tribal ethnography’ (Leach 1989).
The linguistic turn had pervaded Dutch anthropology earlier than that, notably
in the work of De Josselin de Jong, but if we stick to Ardener’s depiction of the
grand modernist narratives, structuralism is mainly associated with British social
anthropology leaping definitively from function to meaning (as proclaimed earlier by
Evans-Pritchard). In my own view, structuralism in the French version is probably
the grandest of all grand modernist narratives, because it potentially embraces all
of human history and thinking, and because Lévi-Strauss is a master narrator. His
oeuvre is the most comprehensive example of the linguistic turn, more or less explicitly
stated as such in a programmatic article from 1952 in which he declared that language
and culture are manifestations of similar logical operations (Lévi-Strauss 1967:67). If
French structuralism can be seen as the pinnacle of modernism in anthropology, it also
contributed to the gradual undermining of the rationalist legacy including one of the
basic premises of modernism, i.e. that the world can be known as it really is. Instead,
it became implicitly clear that the world could only be known as something else, for
instance a language or a structure. The point is that the complexity of the world defies
clarity of description except by way of some sort of model or theory. The terminology
and metaphors, in short the ‘turn’ of any science fashions the theoretical possibilities
and directs the attention towards some phenomena rather than others. In this sense,
we might see structuralism as a precursor of the idea that cultures are not objectively
existing entities out there but have merely been written by anthropologists. When this
was finally articulated – not least by American anthropologists such as Clifford and
Marcus (1986) – postmodernism and the debate on representation were well under way.

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 135
 Postmodernism can be defined in diverse ways. Here I use it simply as a summary
term for that phase in the human and social sciences in which increasingly strong
arguments were voiced against the exemplary status of the natural sciences, as expressed
in the biological turn, and against the high-powered rationalism associated with the
linguistic turn in general, and with structuralism in particular. In the course of this
process, a new scepticism arose about well-established anthropological categories such
as culture, language and society that had become naturalised in scholarly terminology.
Not surprisingly therefore, postmodernism comprises all the various trends of post-
structuralism.
In the 1980s, the linguistic turn in anthropology was being replaced by a literary
turn that took literature rather than language to be the exemplar for society and culture.
(This is where Ardener’s model stops, because at his time it was still impossible to see
where it went, except that it would somehow take anthropology beyond modernism
as he perceived it.) Although it is consistent with the American lead in the debate on
representation that the literary turn in European anthropology should have owed a lot
to the tradition of Boas and Geertz, the Dutch and the British interest in semantics
effectively paved the way. British ‘semantic anthropology’ bridged the gap between a
straightforward interest in language and the meaning of terms on the one hand, and
cultural interpretation and the power of objectification on the other (Parkin 1982). It
could be argued that in European anthropology the literary turn is just a continuation
of the linguistic turn, yet there is a distinctly new interest in the narrative construction
of reality, ranging from biography to anthropology. The literary turn implied both
a methodological device allowing the world to be analysed in terms of narratives of
different range, and an epistemological attack on the modernist idea that the world is
immediately accessible to the scholarly gaze or can be positively known as it is. This was
the background for the various social constructionist trends that paradoxically often
forgot the social part of the equation.
It was also the precondition of a strong hermeneutical bent in anthropology in
the 1980s and onwards. In the United States it had been foreshadowed by Geertz and
his claim that anthropologists read culture over the shoulders of the natives (1973:452).
Now it became known as a fact that culture was ‘a text’ in its own right and that the task
of anthropologists was critically to read those texts that floated around in the world
and increasingly became known as ‘discourses’.
The hermeneutical trend is closely connected with another dominant point of view
in the last two decades of the twentieth century, namely the phenomenological. As
Michael Jackson (1996) has shown, the notion of phenomenology covers a variety of
viewpoints in anthropology, but at its core is a shared concern with a world that is not
simply constructed, discursively or ideologically. The same applies to the social world
with which anthropologists are concerned. Merleau-Ponty says:

Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express
perception or any judgement. It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other
objects as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the
mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in
contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any
objectification . . . The social is already there when we come to know or judge it (Merleau-Ponty
[1962] 2001:362; my emphasis).

For some anthropologists the phenomenological approach has given rise to the
unwarranted idea that to know the social world is simply to give oneself over to it and

136 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

to deal with it intuitively. Michael Taussig provides an example when he says of the
new object of anthropology that:

It calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being represented and
not as suspended above and distant from the represented . . . that knowing is giving oneself over
to a phenomenon rather than thinking about it from above (Taussig 1992:10).

Truly, we cannot bypass the attempt at understanding the world from the natives’
point of view (so to speak), but knowing in the sense of giving oneself over to a
phenomenon is not necessarily all that anthropological knowledge is about. As Merleau-
Ponty has it again in a programmatic statement on phenomenology: ‘To return to
things in themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which
knowledge always speaks’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962:ix); knowledge speaks of something
from which it therefore parts company. Nevertheless, the return to things in themselves
by some anthropologists has been taken to imply a non-theoretical stance towards
the world, something vaguely experiential, based on an intuitive being-in-the-world
from where one may report humble narratives about the particular. While humility and
particularity are certainly both called for, phenomenology as I understand it does not
entail abstention from generalising. It may, however, pose new questions about the kind
and range of generalisations that we may suggest and open up for renewed recognition
the possible gap between living the world and knowing it, whether as lay person or
specialist.
All theories are products of human understanding, and this understanding parts
company with that which is understood. There is a disjunction between the world
and our understanding of it, as one of the fathers of phenomenology, Edmund
Husserl, has it (1968 [1950]). This does not devalue the understanding, but it does
question the modernist (and positivist) assumption that we can simply describe the
world as it is; this assumption is correlated with a view of science as an ambition
of clarification against which Donald Davidson suggests a radical interpretation: it
is ‘radical’ because it is distinct from those (local) interpretations that are already
afloat in the social space (Davidson 1984:125ff; cf. Hastrup 1995). The latter implicitly
incorporates the priority given by Husserl to the phenomenon in our understanding
of it over the phenomenon itself, because it is only there that we can know what we
are talking about: that is to say a particular interpretation originating in a particular
perspective on the world. Again, there is a clear affinity to hermeneutics and to the
debate on representation in anthropology, insisting on the situatedness and partiality
of anthropological knowledge. While they are derived from distinct philosophical
traditions, hermeneutics and phenomenology converge in post-modern anthropology.
In a continuation of Ardener’s scheme, we may depict post-modern trends (and the
literary turn) like the diagram on the next page.
To reiterate: possibly the most significant shift from modernism (including both
the biological and the linguistic turn) to post-modernism, which came to be conflated
with the literary turn, was the implicit shift from clarification to radical interpretation
as the basic objective of anthropology. This shift is pervasive and took us definitively
beyond the metaphysical notion of culture as something that simply is. With hindsight,
far from reducing anthropology to little (and inconsequential) stories and intuitive
understanding, phenomenology has given form and substance to a necessary double
consciousness in the anthropological practice – that is, a consciousness of a world of
ethnographic detail and practical, embodied lives on the one hand and of the conditions
of knowledge on the other. In short, the more constructive legacy of phenomenology

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 137
 Post-modernism

Hermeneutics // Phenomenology

(Narrative/Discourse) (Practice/Experience)

1980 1990 2000

F IGURE 2. Post-modernism in anthropology.

and, I would argue, of postmodernism is an awareness that in anthropology, ethno-

graphy and epistemology constitute part of the same picture.

The present challenge. Reshaping the f ield

Part of the lesson from the post-modern period is that the particular field of interest
to which anthropology addresses itself is not, and cannot be, an abstract social system
that determines the actions of individuals. As Clifford Geertz put it in 1995,
Human beings, gifted with language and living in history, are, for better or worse, possessed of
intentions, visions, memories, hopes and moods, as well as passions and judgements, and these
have more than a little to do with what they do and why they do it. An attempt to understand
their social and cultural life in terms of forces, mechanisms and drives alone, objectivised variables
set in systems of closed causality, seems unlikely of success (Geertz 1995:127).

This rings true, but it does not necessarily entail the individualism of (some) post-
modern thinkers, nor does it lead to a conflation of biography and anthropology, as some
narrative anthropologies imply. Largely modernist ‘methodological nationalism’ (or
‘culturalism’) gave both logical and historical priority to the system – the whole – over
individuals. This approach fared well during both the biological and the linguistic turns,
but it could not be upheld after the modernist demise. Conversely, the ‘methodological
individualism’ of various post-modern trends made the opposite claim and gave logical
primacy to the individual act. Both now seem unsatisfactory because they reproduce an
untenable opposition between the whole and the part, whether they are named structure
and agent, society and individual, or history and biography. At present, anthropology
strives to get beyond the implicit determinism of both the modernist and the post-
modernist epoch. Anyone who has done anthropological fieldwork will have realised
that individuals are neither speaking cultural truths, nor are they entirely free from
them.
Because fieldwork is no longer seen as a matter of mapping social systems and
clarifying their nature but rather as a matter of engaging and radically interpreting lived
social worlds, anthropologists are bound to address the mutuality of the whole and

138 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

the part, however these terms are defined. Whether the whole is constituted by a local
community (and such do still exist), a building site or a theatrical stage, and whether the
part is seen as an individual community member, a bricklayer or a player of Shakespeare,
anthropologists must direct their attention towards the mutual implication of the
perceived sense of collectivity and the sense of person. For the ‘ceremonial animal’,
‘all human action relates in some way to arenas of culturally specified significance we
participate in with others’ (James 2003:7). In the field we are faced with a problem of
perception: the social appears given and largely unremarkable, all the while concealing
its own contingency and emergence (Jenkins 1999:7). The anthropologist must keep
within view at the same time both the driving force of the social (for the actors) and its
contingency (for the outside gaze).
Because individuals are by their nature parts of a larger social space (Toren 2002a),
but also represent discontinuities within it (Ardener 1989:154), the social space is
in practice permanently contested and reshaped. Fieldwork reveals how in practice
agreements are reached or broken. The social space is dynamic, as aptly described by
George Herbert Mead, when he said (in 1934): ‘As a man adjusts himself to a certain
environment he becomes a different individual; but in becoming a different individual
he has affected the community in which he lives’ (Mead 1965:215).
This constant interplay between the individual and the community makes the
anthropological object emergent rather than pre-fixed. It does not mean that the field is
constructed by the anthropologist, as opposed to being real, but it does mean that the
field is contingent on analytical objective and scale. It also implies that anthropological
knowledge attaches itself both to those processes by which the social is defined and
negotiated in individual practices and to those processes and institutions by which the
emergent whole is recurrently objectified as a given social form, thus providing some
of the shared images to which people may attach subjective understandings.
It is the wish to understand and to transcend subjective perceptions of the world
as given that sends anthropologists into the field. Even though the idea of wall-to-wall
culture there to be scrutinised by the anthropological gaze has broken down, fieldwork
is still all important. It is only by attending to the once-occurring acts and the ‘eventness
of being’ (Bakhtin 1993) that we can access those processes by which the social emerges
as an objective force that, paradoxically, contributes to the shaping of unprecedented
acts and events. All this remains unspoken in daily life, which is where anthropology
has a genuine contribution to make to the understanding of the emergent complexities
of the everyday – making history with time.
When objectified cultures or societies were replaced by global complexities as the
overall interest of anthropological endeavour, a huge step towards a realisation of the
emergent nature of social forms was taken. The paradoxically antiquarian nature of
modern anthropology, studying cultures that were, was replaced by a genuine interest
in the present. As it happened, globalisation itself was soon objectified and came to
signify simply the mixture of cultures, the criss-crossing of cultural flows and the general
hybridisation of social worlds in the present era. While certainly not insignificant, these
interests blocked the way for a subtler understanding of complexity as a lived reality,
at all times and in all places.
At the level of everyday life to which anthropologists direct their singular attention,
the sense of coherence and objectivity in the social space – be it a society or another
community of (perceived) shared interests – emerges through individual practices and
negotiations of relatively simple social rules. These are generally acknowledged as
givens, though not necessarily articulated as ‘rules’ (of marriage, of transmission of

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 139
property, of ascribing leadership) that apply to the humble, day-to-day life (whom to
marry, where to invest, whom to elect). Rules in this sense are neither fully understood
nor followed blindly; they are part of the background knowledge that makes people
sense the horizon of a ‘we’ (Taylor 1995; Hastrup 2001). The complexity of the social
world emerges in practice and through individual action, bringing together relatively
few and simple components into what appears a coherent and extremely complex whole.
Some of the resulting patterns become institutionalised and outlast individual action;
they become ‘objectified history’ in Bourdieu’s terms (1990). Even so, they must be
constantly confirmed in practice. Social rules are operative, and societies realised only
through the actions of people, understanding themselves as integrally part of a ‘we’
(Taylor 1995:173).
The resulting complexity of the social space, which is a kind of bottom-up causality
(not to be confounded with individualism), cannot be observed as a whole, but it can
be perceived when anthropologists place themselves in the field of tension between the
individual and the social in the same way as the local protagonists. Because the social
is not (only) a collection of facts, but also the instituting processes and the connections
between them, it cannot be observed or documented as such. This does not mean that it
is unreal, only that its reality must be expressed in theoretical terms. In that sense, it has
to be written; anthropology cannot revert to modernist assumptions of direct access to
objective realities and representations.
In another context I have discussed illusion as a key to understanding how society
is realised in the actions of people engaged in the gradual fulfilment of what they see as
the current and relevant drama (Hastrup 2004a; 2004b). Illusion is to be understood in
the theatrical sense of ‘suspense of form’ rather than suspense of plot; what makes the
drama gripping for both players and audience is not uncertainty about the outcome, but
the process of getting there. Until the drama is over, the participants act in the interest
of completing the story. This applies to all social spaces, in which agents gradually
realise what they perceive as the ‘play’ through their actions. This applies equally to
the long-term perspective on history and the short-term perspective of everyday life, in
which people play their part in a larger plot that transcends them because it is linked in
space and time to other people, other moments and other stories. Conversely, the self
emerges as a character within a plot structure that is always deeply social; social reality
is not reducible to either the whole or the parts.
The mutual constitution of wholes and parts has profound implications for our
sense of the field and the kind of knowledge fieldwork produces. It is not automatically
knowledge about culture, nor does it allow for a blowing up of biography to all there
is to be said about history. The question is how we make connections between the
individual and the community – the one and the many – without reducing either to a
side-effect of the other. Methodologically we get there by way of fieldwork, seen not
as simply informative but as a performative mode of knowing (cf. Fabian 1990:3ff). As
a social space, the field entered by the anthropologist is itself a ‘practiced place’ (cf. de
Certeau 1984:117), and in that sense much more than simply a trope (pace Gupta and
Ferguson 1997).
The individual and the social evolve with subtle interplay; this is what we get at
through fieldwork, in which we also participate and come to realise the impossibility
of achieving independent, objective knowledge. As Tim Jenkins has it:
‘subjectivity’ is the price that has to be paid to do fieldwork. The anthropologist gets caught up
in the series of events that constitute social life, where there is no objective truth, but simply
potentially exclusive versions of the truth that together constitute the event (Jenkins 1994:443).

140 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

Fieldwork in this sense points towards a particular, ethnographic mode of perception,
consisting of, and steeped in, social relations. It is a characteristic of anthropology that
it creates knowledge through relations (Strathern 1993). In the field, anthropologists
connect to people through personal relations, investigate how people consciously
connect with each other and how they enter into far-reaching and unknowable social
relations through their acts, thereby contributing to the sense of the whole. The
pertinence of fieldwork is precisely to engage the social worlds that others live, and
therefore to situate oneself in the amorphous field between subjective and objective.
Anthropology remains a science on an awkward scale, having to find its way between the
inconsequential narration of the particular and ‘the violence of abstraction’ (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2003). The awkward scale is not simply a function of identifying the
relevant connections between the subjective and the objective, but of realising that social
forms are themselves of varying scales, between which social agents slide effortlessly in
an endless process of recontextualisation.
If Christina Toren is right (as I believe she is), when she says, that as ‘humans we
have the world in common, but, as ethnography demonstrates exhaustively, we live it as
it conforms to our own account of it – an observation that is as true for a western scientist
as for a Fijian chief’ (Toren 2002b:107), then we have to investigate further the field of
tension between the shared world and the subjective account, a field that is productive
of new ontologies, perceived locally as givens but known anthropologically to be
contingent. Through fieldwork, and through an attention to the complexity and scale
of the social as practised, anthropology makes a unique contribution to knowledge. By
its comparative insight into the production of social ontologies, anthropology exposes
the malleability of history and the possibility of alternative courses. If subjectivity is
the price we have to pay, it is a price that is worth paying. We cannot get in touch with
reality without making ourselves part of it.
One could simply say that the anthropological contribution to knowledge is based
in ethnography, had this term not been debased by being imported either as a ‘method’
into other disciplines (often meaning little more than that the investigator actually
talked to people), or by being seen merely as a way of presenting data (incorporating
direct quotes from informants). In anthropology, ‘ethnography’ is so much more; it is
neither simply a method (a synonym for fieldwork) nor a particularly thick description
of local realities. Both of these are subsumed by a particular sensitivity to the world –
a mode of perception that includes a reflexive awareness of, and respect for, local
particularities and complexities on the one hand, and the theoretical intervention
implied by representation on the other. As already said, ethnography and epistemology
are simultaneously present in the anthropological object. In that sense, ethnography
always transcends itself. Recently, Jean and John Comaroff have identified the present
challenge thus:

It is to establish an anthropology-for-the-present on an ethnographic base that dissolves the

a priori distinction between theory and method: an anthropology, of multiple dimensions, that
seeks to explain the manner in which the local and the translocal construct each other, producing
at once difference and sameness, conjuncture and disjuncture. An anthropology that takes, as its
mandate, the need to make sense of the intersecting destinies of human lives, wherever they may
happen to be lived out (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003:172).

These intersections are not simply observable, so to understand both individual destinies
and the larger history we must keep the concrete details of social life within view
and have the courage to theorise. Theorising in this sense does not entail a return

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 141
to grand narratives but to a renewed sense of connectedness, ‘a connectedness that is
neither comprehensive nor uniform, primal or changeless, but nonetheless real’ (Geertz
2000:224). Fieldwork allows anthropologists to sense unobservable connections, not
from above or from an objectivist perspective but from within, so to speak. In one
recent book, it is put as follows:
The defining feature is listening for the unsaid, looking for the visually unmarked, sensing the
unrepresented, and thus seeking for connections among parts of the obvious which remain locally
unstated. To that degree, fieldwork of the kind anthropologists attempt is indispensable (Dresch
and James 2000:23).

Once again, we see how ‘social anthropology is engaged . . . in recasting the relationship
between what is obvious and what is not’ (Jenkins 1999:7). This recasting is based in
direct studies of social life, but fieldwork
in fact occupies only a fraction of the lifetime of the anthropologist; even though imaginatively
inspiring throughout a career, it cannot measure up to the time spent by anthropologists mulling
over written texts, and in effect working as historians do (James 2003:302).
The significance of this observation in the present context lies both in its recognition
of the constant dialogue with predecessors in the field and in the resulting awareness
of the historicity of anthropology itself. At another level this sustains the view of our
enterprise as one of radical interpretation rather than clarification in the terms of Donald
Davidson, introduced above.
What is more, directing the attention towards social complexity as discussed above
also makes anthropologists realise the surplus of experience that qualifies the social.
Not all experience is reducible to knowledge (Jackson 1996:3). Phrased otherwise,
anthropology discloses the fact that there is always a historical surplus of events, actions
and thoughts. These may linger without necessarily contributing to the larger order
as perceived, but they provide possible sites of resistance or sources of new historical
turns. This also applies to the ‘surplus’ of thought in anthropology that defies any neat
depiction of its history, such as the one suggested in the preceding pages. Again, we
stumble upon a genuinely anthropological contribution to knowledge, achieved on the
basis of a particular relationship to the world under study.
To re-establish a legitimate field of interest that is neither objective nor subjective,
but still as real as it gets, we must acknowledge what cannot be local knowledge –
that individuals playing their part are actually realising the whole that is perceived as
objective, and conversely, that individuals emerge as social characters in consequence of
their actions. Through the performative mode of knowing and its inherent reflexivity,
anthropology understands how the frame is part of any event, in a very profound
sense. Both persons and worlds change imperceptibly in the process of realising what
is; yet for individuals playing their part, there is not necessarily a sense of movement,
because just as complexity emerges from the bottom, so the frame moves along with
the individual act. The moving frames of social life constitute the anthropological field
as the source of a distinct and vital knowledge of worlds and histories, and of social
forms at various scales.

Looking ahead: A new turn?

Having reassessed the field as a moving frame, we may rearticulate the nature of
anthropological knowledge and take some of the previous insights further towards

142 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

a new turn: that is, a new set of metaphors, interests and perspectives that will enable
us to arrive at a new understanding of both social form and individual action. In the
modernist era, anthropological knowledge was largely presented as knowledge about
other cultures and social relations; it consisted largely in ontological propositions about
the organisation of (other) social systems and thoughts. The result was an encyclopedic
knowledge that posited itself as object-knowledge in the triple sense of attaching itself to
objects, working by way of objectification and itself becoming an object to be possessed
and recycled. Gradually, this view outlived itself, and it was realised that most of what
had passed for ontology in anthropology was in fact located in our experience of it, and
in the way in which it was registered, or silenced. Knowledge has become (implicitly,
at least) acknowledged as relational, both in the sense that it attaches itself to relations
between people or between people and objects, and in the sense that it emerges within
a dialogical field (see Hastrup 2004c for an expanded discussion).
If the anthropological object is emergent, as discussed above, and has no fixed
ontological status, be it as a culture, a society or a community, outside of local
perceptions of ‘givens’ and ‘rules’, the field has to be continually redefined. Evidently,
when it comes to analysis, a sense of closure must be attained; the network must be ‘cut’,
so to say (Strathern 1996) implying a temporary objectification of relational knowledge.
Generally, however, the acknowledgement of relational knowledge has important
implications for the generalisations that anthropologists may venture – and without
which they could not fulfil their ambition to transcend the ethnographic moment.
Instead of the ‘horizontal’ generalisation about culture or society (from wall-to-wall,
so to say) proposed by the modernists, anthropologists have moved towards ‘vertical’
generalisations about the processes – and varying scales – through which meanings and
practices become temporarily objectified in a dialectic relationship between individual
and community.
We arrive at a point where we may see how anthropological knowledge connects
to a particular epistemology, where the relation to the object or the mode of knowing
of necessity bends back into the object itself. As Tim Jenkins has it, ‘the accounts
build in the relation of outside observer to object, as if it were a property of the object
itself’ (1994:443). If in fieldwork the anthropologist gets to know by way of social
relations, this relational aspect has a more general bearing on the processes by which
facts are established as relevant in the first place. Ontology and epistemology converge
in anthropology.
This leads to a peculiar problem concerning evidence (Hastrup 2004c). In the
experimental sciences ‘evidence’ is generally taken to mean material facts, statistical
correlations or at least something that appears independent of the concrete analysis. If,
in anthropology, the (social) relation to the object is already installed as part of the object
when anthropologists begin to understand it, ethnography cannot be disengaged from
the theoretical (or, indeed, moral) objective of the investigation. What is more, because
anthropological knowledge is based in social relations that are specific and historical,
the relation between the object and the scope of the investigation cannot be reduced to a
standard relationship that can then be eliminated or neutralised in the final presentation
of the results (as it would be possible in optics, for instance, to discount the known
refraction of a particular lens). Experience itself cannot be taken as evidence in the
traditional sense because experience cannot be attributed to someone standing outside
the situation of which the experience is purportedly evidence. Fieldwork is a ‘total social
situation’, where experience, interpretation and evaluation make a seamless whole.

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 143
 Embedded in the above argument is an identification of an incipient new turn in
anthropology. Bringing the lessons of both modernism and post-modernism along,
anthropology takes a new step. At first sight, to remain within the (largely post-
modern) range of small narratives (as opposed to the grand narratives of modernism)
seems advisable in view of the manifest complexity of the world and the singularity of
experience. However, this solution is also paradoxically positivist, and embedded in a
view of scholarship as simply a clarifying enterprise. In so far as anthropology is about
radical interpretation and about venturing explanations of how the parts combine to an
emergent, if objectified, whole that influences both identity and agency, reports of the
everyday cannot substitute for anthropological knowledge. I would subscribe to the
view held by Wendy James, that ‘anthropologists do share a hunch that there is more
of a systematic character to the underlying formats of social life than meet the eye, or
can be described in everyday language by individual participants’ (James 2003:298).
There is no return to grand modernist theory in this; there is, rather, a wish
to acknowledge the pragmatic foundations of anthropology, in my view subsuming
(while not discarding) both the phenomenological and the hermeneutical trends of
postmodernism. In a pragmatic anthropology we hear echoes of William James and
John Dewey (as well as George Herbert Mead to whom I referred above), but because
of the intervening years and the many lessons learnt en route between modernism
and postmodernism, it takes us further. A pragmatic anthropology acknowledges that
theories are not final answers to human riddles but, to paraphrase William James
(1974:46), temporary instruments through which we can handle social complexities.
Theories about the world are of the same world and have concrete effects: there are no
significant differences in the abstract that do not also make a concrete difference. In that
sense, intentions and consequences are interlocked, not only in the social worlds under
study but also in the scholarly field. This definitively breaks anthropology away from
the metaphysical presumptions of modernism, and transcends latent (post-modern)
phenomenological righteousness on behalf of the concrete. A pragmatic anthropology
acknowledges its own contribution to the perception of the world; a disinterested
anthropology seems impossible.
The turn that we are experiencing at the moment also redresses the balance between
the material and non-material dimensions of social life that was thwarted by the latent
idealism of the (sometimes exaggerated) discursive and narrative interest during the
literary turn. It also takes the phenomenological interest in the spatiality of bodily
perceptions and projections to a more comprehensive conclusion than that offered so
far by theories of practice and experience. Merleau-Ponty says:
Space and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact of his birth, the
perpetual contribution of his bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than
thought . . . Space has its basis in our facticity. It is neither an object, nor an act of unification on
the subject’s part; it can neither be observed, since it is presupposed in every observation, nor seen
to emerge from a constituting operation, since it is of its essence that it be already constituted, for
thus it can, by its magic, confer its own spatial particularisation upon the landscape without ever
appearing itself (Merleau-Ponty 1962:254).

A communication with the world more ancient than thought; people always live on the
surface of the earth and are subjects to its texture, shape and fecundity. These features
‘provide a base line to our human lives, not only our pragmatic activities, but to our
conceptual understandings of the organised qualities of differentiated space, and our
orientation within it’ (James 2003:213).

144 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

 In a sense, the social and the geographical space are conflated in experience. It is
not possible to ‘think away’ the actual geographical location of social life; lives are
always grounded. Movements in space inscribe social life on the land, and with time
particular paths are cleared and certain directions presented as more natural than others.
We might even say, again with Wendy James, ‘that the experience of physical places
and the journeys between them is one of the commonest underpinnings of the human
being’s characteristic sense of living in a “formatted” social space from early childhood
and earliest memory’ (James 2003:67).
To theorise (that is properly to understand) this socio-material space, we need
to establish a double horizon of the external and the bodily space against which
the individual stands out (Katz and Csordas 2003:278). The external space is not a
metaphysical space to which anthropologists have privileged access; the idea that we
can stand outside or above a particular field is replaced by an ambition to situate oneself
elsewhere within the field of inquiry (Jackson 1996:9). The external space is external
only in relation to particular bodily spaces. Both are profoundly material spaces; taking
embodiment seriously recovers experience from a latent narrative or discursive idealism.
The material parameters of the world are not only the physical environment, but also
very much the presence of other social actors each with their bodily perceptions and
projections (Hastrup 2004b).
If I were tentatively to name the present turn (which is still happening and therefore
not yet clear), I would suggest that we are on the verge of a topographic turn that once
again will alert us to the materiality of the world and to the actual space in which
people dwell. Topography implies a detailed description of landscapes that combines
geography, settlements, political boundaries, legal realities, traces of past histories,
place-names and so on into a comprehensive knowledge of particular spaces. The social
spaces that anthropologists study incorporate all of these features; individuals cannot
play their part without giving due consideration to the topographical realities of their
projected space. The ‘turn’ I seek to identify here is not a return to cartography and
map-making in general. In itself, a map is based on a cartographic illusion, bracketing
both way-finding and map-making – those processes by which the map comes into
being in the first place – and positing the map as a direct representation of the world
(Ingold 2000:234). By contrast, the topographic turn is distinguished by taking seriously
both the movements of the social agents, and the paths they carve out, physically and
socially, through their way-finding. The concreteness and materiality of topography
thus defies the abstract map (the territory as represented), and is closely linked up with
experience and practical mastery of the environment (Ingold 2000:239). This also, and
significantly, implies an acknowledgement of the temporality of social life that is absent
from the idea of direct mapping (as representation). What is more, we may combine
the idea of topography with the fertile notion of choreography, as a distinctly social
organisation of spatial practices (see, for instance, James 2003:5,91,101). Geography,
politics and history merge with choreography and social form in the notion of a social
topography.
Already, we can see how the notion of topography opens up new insights and adds
to older ones; these insights are anthropological. Individuals, dwelling in particular
worlds, live with their own cartographic illusions of fixed forms and social rules.
Because the frame is always part of the event, there can be no direct perception of the
contribution of each action to the realisation of the form. The topographical metaphors
are incipient in many current debates; routes, spatial practices, horizons, movements,

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 145
dwelling etc. are commonplaces these days. In general, there is a resurgence of interest in
the materiality of the world, both in terms of the physical environment in which people
live, the material objects they handle, the next-to-physical force of social institutions,
the embodiment of history and – significantly – the driving force of language. In
many ways, the anthropologies of practice, experience and embodiment associated
with phenomenological interest have already contributed to the acknowledgement of
this pervasive materiality of the world, though without theorising it as part of the social.
This is the challenge of the present.
As I see it, the topographic turn has been facilitated also by the anthropology of
landscape in the 1990s (e.g. Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995), which has demonstrated that
landscapes were not simply backdrops to action but integral parts of it – a movement
foreshadowed no less significantly by subtle ethnographic analyses of how people
attach themselves to places invested with moral value irrespective of the anthropological
denunciation of localised cultures (e.g. Olwig 1997). One of the benefits of proclaiming
a new turn (while also recognising the continuities) is to direct attention towards
new or forgotten issues, among which are scale and density. There is no way to deal
adequately with these issues here; I note only that it makes a vital social difference
whether five thousand people live within the walls of a single village or spread across a
wide desert.
I believe that the topographic turn and pragmatist insight will lead to renewed
reflections also on the historicity of anthropology, which is no longer seen as a threat to
‘scientific’ (in the broad sense of the term) ambition but fundamentally supportive of
it. Anthropology deals in histories, but it does so without claiming to be immune from
history itself (Toren 2002a:201). This is actually the strongest basis for its legitimacy.
The double horizon of geographical and social spaces that we associate with the
topographic turn is neither modernist nor post-modern, but simply anthropological –
an adjective that adheres to a particular mode of attending to social life, wherever it
takes place.

A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l a u t h o r i t y. P r a g m a t i c e n l i g h t e n m e n t

The time has come to wind up the argument. Keeping both direct engagement with the
world and theoretical ambition alive and acknowledging their interconnectedness helps
us situate anthropology within the larger field of disciplines studying the social and/or
the cultural. By their long-term engagement with the world anthropologists know how
action and awareness merge. The qualitative nature of anthropology thus reflects the
quality of social life itself.
The ethnographic mode of attention implies a being in touch with reality, and in
turn leads to a renewed awareness of anthropology as defined by its epistemology rather
than its object. Realising that the mutually defining relationship between part and whole
makes both of them emergent realities, we cannot speak of an anthropological object
outside of a particular analysis. The object is a product of a particular epistemology,
a way of knowing rather than a pre-established ontological entity. This also implies
that we cannot generalise horizontally about whole cultures, societies or systems of
meaning; instead we must aim at generalising vertically about those processes by which
meanings are established, challenged and altered through unique events from which
emerge complex social forms that are perceived as objective realities.

146 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

 This particular mode of knowing may be applied to a variety of social forms and
scales. Anthropologists have moved confidently into studies of pertinent global issues
such as violence, the migration of refugees and human rights (see, for instance, Malkki
1995; Daniel 1997; and Hastrup 2001a; 2001c; 2003; Wilson and Mitchell 2002). They
persist in using their discipline to create understanding that may correct some of the
wrongs we are witnessing. In this sense, anthropology cannot but be engaged (cf.
Lamphere 2003).
Whatever the quantitative scale of particular anthropological investigations, all such
research is qualitatively unified by being grounded in experience of social spaces that
demonstrate how parts and wholes are mutually defining and emergent realities. As
newcomers to particular fields, anthropologists may arrive at an unprecedented insight
into the dynamics of the social that is denied to long-time residents because for them
the frame and the act move naturally together. The contingent is concealed and only the
obvious is perceived. Ethnographic sensitivity to the everyday and the anthropological
perception of contingency as a source of historical surplus, may contribute to a larger
sense of connectedness and renewed historical consciousness. Even when studying
global relations, anthropologists are carving out a particular slice of the social, as
defined by a particular and mutually defining relationship between individual act and
global effect. Many a discussion of globalisation seems completely devoid of both
agency and history, but I would argue that, here too, the distinctive anthropological
contribution lies in keeping the individual act and the social fact within the same
frame.
While we cannot describe the world simply ‘as it is’, because it is far too complex,
we can at least acknowledge the social complexity within which ordinary life unfolds as
eminently worthy of our attention. Through a biological, linguistic, literary and now
perhaps topographic turn, complemented by the related importation of metaphors and
ambitions, social anthropology has remained distinctly its own. The promise of the
present moment lies not solely in reframing traditional interests in new terms (some
may be old, but they will emerge recontextualised) that will change our knowledge
of the world and its potential to transcend both modernism and post-modernism
and fulfill the promise of what Hilary Putnam has called a pragmatic enlightenment
of the present (2004:89ff). The enlightenment of the eighteenth century aspired to
reflective transcendence, to justice and to critical thinking, and posited the possibility
of rationalising and realising an ideal society by way of reason. The present, pragmatic
enlightenment maintains the critical perspective on conventionalised knowledge but
discards the notion of an ideal state that can be achieved through rational argument.
At every moment in history, the ideal is open for negotiation. Yet, as Putnam suggests,
it is possible to believe in some sort of progress – not in the sense of belief in a
unidirectional history or a teleological drive towards the perfect social state, but rather
in acknowledging the possibility of learning from history. The pragmatic enlightenment,
as I perceive it, is a vital counterpoint to current anti-enlightenment feelings, often found
embedded in fundamentalist rhetorics of all kinds (James 2003:306). Fundamentalism
implies an epistemological closure, a belief that one’s world is locked within a unique
historical situation that only insiders can perceive correctly. Fundamentalists typically
refuse to acknowledge that ‘others’ can even begin to understand what it means to be
‘us’, and put an end to all dialogue, all the while claiming a superior right to influence
the history of other people (Ignatieff 1999:89). To counter this, we need to maintain and
expand distinct anthropological knowledge of how lives are lived and histories made

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 147
by unprecedented acts and unique events, and of how understandings are created in
practice.

Kirsten Hastrup
Institute of Anthropology
University of Copenhagen
Frederiksholms Kanal 4
DK-1220 Copenhagen K
Denmark
kirsten.hastrup@anthro.ku.dk

References
Ardener, E. 1987. ‘Anthropology and the decline of modernism’, in Overing, J. (ed.), Reason and
morality, 47–70. London: Routledge.
1989. ‘The voice of prophecy. Further problems in the analysis of events’, in Chapman, M. (ed), The
voice of prophecy and other essays, 134–54. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1993. Towards a philosophy of the act. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bourdieu, P. 1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Certeau, M. de. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds.) 1986. Writing culture. The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Comaroff, J., and Comaroff, J. 2003. ‘Ethnography on an awkward scale. Post-colonial anthropology
and the violence of abstraction’, Ethnography 4: 147–79.
Mitchell, J., and Wilson, R. (eds.) 2002. Claims, rights and entitlements. Anthropological perspectives.
London: Routledge.
Daniel, E. V. 1996. Charred lullabies. Chapters in an anthropography of violence. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Davidson, D. 1984. ‘Radical interpretation’, in Inquiries into truth and interpretation, 125–39. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
De Saussure, F. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris.
Dresch, P., and James, W. 2000, ‘Introduction. Fieldwork and the passage of time’, in Dresch, P., James,
W., and Parkin, D. (eds.), Anthropologists in a wider world. Essays on field research, 1–25. Oxford:
Berghahn.
Fabian, J. 1990. Power and performance. Ethnographic explorations through proverbial wisdom and
theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Free Press.
1995. After the fact. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
2000. ‘The world in pieces. Culture and politics at the end of the century’, in Available light, 218–63.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J. (eds.) 1997. Anthropological locations. Boundaries and grounds of a field
science. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hastrup, K. 1995. A passage to anthropology. Between experience and theory. London: Routledge.
(ed.) 2001a. Human rights on common grounds. The quest for universality. The Hague: Kluwer.
2001b. ‘To follow a rule. Rights and responsibilities revisited’, in Hastrup, K. (ed.), Human rights on
common grounds. The quest for universality, 57–74. The Hague: Kluwer.
(ed.) 2001c. Legal cultures and human rights. The challenge of diversity. The Hague: Kluwer.
2003. ‘Violence, suffering and human rights. Anthropological reflections’, Anthropological Theory 3:
309–23.
2004a. Action. Anthropology in the company of Shakespeare. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.
2004b. ‘All the world’s a stage. The imaginative texture of social spaces’, Space and Culture 7: 223–36.
2004c. ‘Getting it right. Knowledge and evidence in anthropology’, Anthropological Theory 4: 455–72.
Hirsch, E., and O’Hanlon, M. (eds.) 1995. The anthropology of landscape. Perspectives of place and
space. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

148 KIRSTEN HASTRUP

Husserl, E. 1968 [1950]. The idea of phenomenology [translated by W. P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian].
The Hague 1968.
Ignatieff, M. 1999. ‘Nationalism and toleration’, in Mendus, S. (ed.), The politics of toleration. Tolerance
and intolerance in modern life, 77–106. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment. Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London:
Routledge.
Jackson, M. 1996. ‘Introduction. Phenomenology, radical empiricism and anthropological critique’, in
Jackson, M. (ed.), Things as they are. New directions in phenomenological anthropology, 1–50.
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
James, W. 2003. The ceremonial animal. A new portrait of anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
James, W. 1974. Pragmatism and four essays from Meaning and Truth. New York: New American
Library.
Jenkins, T. 1994. ‘Fieldwork and the perception of everyday life’, Man 29: 433–55.
1999. Religion in everyday life. Oxford: Berghahn.
Katz, J., and Csordas, T. J. 2003. ‘Phenomenological ethnography in sociology and anthropology’,
Ethnography 4: 275–88.
Kuhn, T. 1969. The structure of scientific revolutions (second edition), Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lamphere, L. 2003. ‘The perils and prospects for an engaged anthropology. A view from the United
States’, Social Anthropology 11: 153–68.
Leach, E. 1989. ‘Tribal ethnography. Past, present, future’, in Tonkin, E., McDonald, M., and Chapman,
M. (eds.), History and ethnicity, 34–47. London: Routledge.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1967. ‘Linguistics and anthropology’, in Structural anthropology, 66–79. New York:
Doubleday.
Malkki, L. 1995. Purity and exile. Violence, memory and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in
Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mead, G. H. 1965. Mind, self and society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.
Moore, H. 1996. ‘The changing nature of anthropological knowledge. An introduction’, in Moore, H.
(ed.), The future of anthropological knowledge, 1–15. London: Routledge.
Olwig, K. F. 1997. ‘Cultural sites. Sustaining a home in a deterritorialised world’, in Olwig. K. F., and
Hastrup, K. (eds.), Siting culture. The shifting anthropological object, 17–38. London: Routledge.
Parkin, D. 1982. ‘Introduction’, in Parkin, D. (ed.), Semantic anthropology, xi-li. London: Academic
Press.
Putnam, H. 2004. ‘Enlightenment and pragmatism’, in Ethics without ontology, 87–129. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press.
Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and truth. The remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Strathern, M. 1993. The relation. Issues in complexity and scale [Inaugural lecture]. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
1996. ‘Cutting the network’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 517–35.
Taussig, M. 1992. The nervous system. London: Routledge.
Taylor, C. 1995. ‘To follow a rule’, in Philosophical arguments, 165–80. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
Toren, C. 2002a. ‘Comparison and ontogony’, in Gingrich, A. and Fox R. G. (eds.), Anthropology, by
comparison, 186–203. London: Routledge.
2002b. ‘Anthropology as the whole science of what it is to be human’, in Fox R. G., and King, B. J.
(eds.), Anthropology beyond culture, 105–24. Oxford: Berg.

T O W A R D S A P R A G M AT I C E N L I G H T E N M E N T ? 149