AnthropologicaI perspectives: disturbing the structures of power and knowledge

Michael Herzfeld
The articles in this issue of the International experience - to propose or refine arguments of Social Science Journal, which continue the dis- a more or less general nature, and especially to cussion of current trends in social and cultural challenge pre-existing paradigms by showing anthropology begun in the previous issue, all why particular cases do not fit them. Underlying this set of common themes is share one important characteristic. In each article, the author shows us something of the his- the central concern that perhaps best defines torical development of anthropological thought anthropologys mission in the world today. This as refracted through the prism of a particular is the questioning of received wisdoms that topic. Although the subjects treated here are reflect the totalizing domination of global diverse, it is precisely this diversity that lends society by social and political paradigms largely conceived in, and for, the unity to the collection, for it West - that broad coalition helps to highlight a degree Michael Herzfeld is Professor of Anthroof commonality which is of industrial powers capable pology at Harvard University, 33 Kirkespecially noteworthy in a of inventing and using the land Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, email: herzfeld@wjh.harvard.edu. discipline notorious, in the technologies of control at a The author of Cultural Intimacy: Social view of some critics, for its planetary level. Poetics in the Nation-State (1997). he has internal fragmentation. We In the previous issue, I written extensively on anthropological have already glimpsed this suggested that anthropology and semiotic theory, the ethnography of common ground in the earlmight provocatively be Southern Europe, local politics, nationalism, and the reproduction of social ier set of articles. Here we defined as the comparative knowledge. He is editor of American Ethgain an enhanced sense of study of common sense. To nologist. The Editor wishes to thank Proits origin in the parallel trathe extent that ideas of the fessor Herzfeld for his invaluable assistjectory of the discipline sensible are increasingly ance as editorial adviser for the two through the variety of toppresented in global terms, issues of the ISSJ reviewing issues and perspectives in anthropology. ical territories discussed in we may now also say that these essays. anthropology may serve as Among the resulting similarities, the fol- a discourse of critical resistance to the conceplowing stand out with particular clarity: the use- tual. and cosmological hegemony of this global fulness of traditional anthropological categories common sense. The essays presented in this for the analysis of modern society; the paradigm issue of ISSJ are all, in their appropriately shift from static structures to a clearer under- diverse ways, illustrations of how anthropology standing of culture as entailing agency and pro- can protect a critically important resource: the cess; the significance of teleology as an object very possibility of questioning the universal as well as a feature of theory (something that logic of globalization and exposing its historiwas also clear in the earlier set of articles); and cally narrow and culturally parochial base by the use of certain ethnographic cases - usually hearing other voices is preserved through the those of which the authors have the most direct critical investigations of anthropology. If, for
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example, economic rationality can be seen as the driving force behind current representations of rationality, Nurit Bird-Davids article shows why many of the worlds people will not be persuaded. What from the perspective of the dominant discourse looks like irrational traditionalism emerges, on closer inspection, as an alternative logic. The comparison may also coincide with evidence that state global agencies do not necessarily act in accordance with their own stated rationality, an observation that underscores the importance of maintaining a strong sense of the conceptual and social diversity that still exists in the world. Several of the articles (notably those by Bird-David, Escobar, and Milton) highlight these dimensions of the disciplines present framework of activity. The concerns are practical as well as academic. These three authors, implicitly but unequivocally, show that the isolation of the ivory tower from the real world has indeed been a remarkably significant political development, in which anthropologists (among others) have allowed a particular representation of reality to marginalize their perspectives and so stifle their critical contribution. They can now resist this move by historicizing and contextualizing the conventional wisdoms that have gained political ascendancy in the global arena. Thus, for example, Arturo Escobar embraces a post-structuralist position, of the kind that uninformed critics particularly charge with refusing to engage with the real world. In point of fact, Escobar advocates active opposition to precisely that lack of engagement and the critics are unlikely to be happy about that, for it is their logic that comes under fire as a result. For those concerned with the cultural and social impact of development, as for those who argue that environmentalist programmes must be far more sensitive to cultural values in order to stand some chance of success (as Kay Milton demonstrates here), this is indeed a necessary move for anthropology. Interestingly, we also find a similarly activist perspective argued in areas of anthropology that in the past were usually relegated to the zone of the purely academic - notably kinship studies, an area in which John Borneman argues for a transformation that is both intellectually more defensible and politically more just. Even

areas once thought to be the domain of pure aesthetics and thus to be socially epiphenomena] and politically insignificant, such as music (as David Coplan shows us), become sites of a political engagement. This makes the analytic separation of the intellectual from the political increasingly indefensible and raises embarrassing questions for those who continue to insist on maintaining that separation. All these arguments have to do with the distribution of power, and all in some sense reflect an uneasy awareness that globalization has reduced, or at least threatens to reduce, the arenas of choice for all societies. Anthropology thus becomes a precious resource, not only because of the esoteric knowledge of strangely different cultures that it can offer (although this in itself is not trivial), but also because its characteristic techniques of defamiliarization can be made to question the globalizing assumptions that increasingly dominate political decision-making. This critical stance required a conscious effort to free anthropology from some of its own historically accumulated associations with nationalism, colonialism, and global economic control. Anthropologists now freely admit that their epistemology is profoundly Western in origin - this acknowledgment must be the first stage in creating the necessary critical distance - and, as Escobar points out, the anthropological endorsement of some early development efforts in Third World countries underwrote very particular forms of order and rationality. When Escobar insists that the distinction between applied and academic anthropology has become tired and unproductive today, he is challenging a part of the currently dominant symbolic order - of which the logic of development constitutes another segment. By turning the spotlight of anthropological analysis on this global cosmology, we can identify its workings more clearly and so stand back in order to make more informed decisions about the extent to which we are prepared to go along with it. Order, as Ossio points out here, is the major concern of cosmological systems from the historiography of Guaman Poma (and the pre-existing schemata that informed it) to the argumentation of modern physics and chemistry. That scientific practices are themselves subject

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to social and political constraints has been the subject of sustained ethnographic investigation (see Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Rabinow, 1996; Traweek, 1988). From one perspective, environmental and other political debates are disputes over the predominance of one or another type of order, and, as Milton notes, arguments about the relationship of nature to culture - which increasingly take cognizance of various indigenous ways of framing that relationship - extend this concern right into the heart of anthropological theory. Bird-David makes a strikingly similar point about the significance of economic models derived from the populations to which they are applied. A world deprived of these other views would be a truly impoverished world - and we must ask whose interests are served by so depleting its conceptual resources. Even (or especially) the reduction of all kinship to the family, as Borneman points out, reduces the spaces for alternative arrangements that would make possible compassion and care for those who do not fit in - those whom the prevailing cosmology defines as polluting (see Douglas, 1966) - and universalizes a set of values that was hitherto perhaps quite peculiar in the comparative global terms in which anthropologists work. To put this another way, we might say that the very possibility of comparison, essential to any notion of ethical choice, is being eroded. There is an obvious analogy with the plight of bio-diversity in the world. An economistic version of survivalism does not offer much hope of alternative futures. That model, like the related socio-biological perspective, derives from the bourgeois, Western milieu that informs so much of the global culture of today (see especially the critiques in Sahlins, 1976a; 1976b). Ironically, this makes the vaunted universalism of such rationalities seem dangerously parochial. Recognition of local values does not commit us to extreme relativism, however, and indeed the authors in this issue explicitly reject that approach. The extreme relativist position is one in which respect for all cultures is reduced to an absurd caricature, a socially impossible and logically self-contradictory argument in which all moral and empirical judgment is suspended. How then does one deal with cultural values like ethnocentrism? How is one to con-

front genocide? Clearly, cultural relativism, if it is to have any meaning at all, must be resituated in a pragmatic vision. Expressed as a general ethical Diktat rather than as a socially responsible position, cultural relativism ends up defeating the purposes for which it was originally, and with the best of intentions, formulated as an epistemological creed (see also Fabian, 1983). The rethinking of relativism requires a specifically historical reconsideration of its role. And it is the specifically historical accessibility of the paths towards the present configuration of power that makes a critical purchase, as David Scott calls it, feasible as well as desirable. By the same token, it is the demonstrable effects of documented processes of environmental and social intervention that make it absurd, as Kay Milton reminds us, to regard all causal explanations as equally satisfactory or all outcomes as equally beneficial - but we must always ask whom they harm or benefit, thereby situating them in a particular social environment. The common reluctance of anthropologists to get involved is an abdication of responsibility, easier to sustain when we rest on a universalist form of relativism. Against this catatonic condition, a reminder that we inhabit a socially and historically specific moment, a diflerent moment, is the best antidote. The particularism of ethnography is not, then, a means of saying that anything goes, but a reminder that what purports to be a global rationality is itself historically and culturally specific in origin, and - what is even more important - a way of making space for what Escobar describes as the alternative projects of subaltern populations. If the Western-derived rhetoric of fair competition demands that there should be a level playing field, it should not then be the West - if we follow the Wests own logic - that also appoints all the umpires. And even the West is itself hardly an unproblematic category (see Carrier, 1992): a judgment of taste and cultural capital grounded in hierarchy, it has served particular hegemonies devastatingly well. Integral to the project of creating more space for other perspectives is a critical historiography of anthropology itself. Many of the essays gathered here grapple directly with this more historical appraisal of anthropology; each

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does so in relation to its specific objects of study. Escobar, for example, worries about the extent to which anthropology may have been compromised by its involvement in the heavyhanded hegemony of earlier development schemes. In related vein, Scott, largely following Tala1 Asad, suggests that historical selfawareness should not lead anthropologists to join in the kind of political theodicy whereby colonialism is blamed for all present ills and anthropology rejected as its conceptual lackey, but should instead interrogate the conditions under which that situation has been sustained (see also Mbembe, 1992). Viclav Hubinger, writing from the viewpoint of a country where anthropological models have sometimes appeared as source of legitimation for the new capitalist domination in Eastern and Central Europe, similarly notes that anthropology was born of the project of modernity itself (much as, one might add, was the concept of tradition), and traces to that hegemony the exclusion of formerly Eastern bloc countries from the dominant idioms in European anthropology today. There is a direct parallel, in fact, between Hubingers observation and Scotts demonstration that it is the criteria o relevance, set f by those with institutional power in the academy, that define the lines of exclusion and engagement. A,$d Borneman, whose work is grounded ethnographically in his examination of the legal rtgimes of the former states of East and West Germany as constituting a virtual moiety system (1992, pp. 3-4), and who thus transposes traditional anthropological frames of reference onto the socialist-capitalist confrontation over the definition of modernity in the heart of the West, derives much of the strength of his argument from the extraordinarily longterm persistence of the heterosexual nuclear family as the defining unit of social universalism that lay at the heart of anthropology itself. This has proved to be another type of exclusion that reveals much about the value system underlying the larger modernist project of which anthropology has been a part. Exclusion is the social dimension of what, as a conceptual construct, we would call determinism. In-built teleologies transform the contingent into common sense, or what Douglas (1975) calls self-evidence (to revert for a

moment to the theme of the previous ISSJ issue). Particularly dramatic in this regard is the story of ways of understanding the relationship between society and environment, a tale that, as Milton tells it, traces out the vicissitudes of determinism in anthropological theory more generally. Early attempts to establish sweeping correlations between ecological conditions and social arrangements did not hold for long; possibilism (which focused on constraints rather than on causes) left too much unexplained; and Marvin Harris (1974) attempt to explain all social institutions as rationally adaptive did not either adequately address the besetting issue of teleology or furnish clear evidence that other modes of causal explanation should be considered inferior. A central reason for the latter failure is symptomatic of larger issues within the discipline. The attempt to explain the Hindu ban on beef consumption exemplifies this difficulty. From a Western, economistic perspective, it is no doubt true that the conservation of the resources provided by a plough animal would seem rational. But this does not alone account for the greater inclination of some cultures than of others to practise such useful self-denial. Are we to deduce that some cultures are objectively more rational than others? Any such assumption is necessarily circular because it grants analysts the right to sit in judgment on the cultures of the world, ranking them in a hierarchy of adherence to the principles of pure reason while remaining exempt from such judgment themselves. As we have already seen, moreover, rationality is itself a culturally parochial phenomenon. Mary Douglas symbolic explanation - that all food taboos rest on principles of taxonomic organization - does not prejudge cultural rationality in this way, but recognizes the cultural specificity of different types of reasoning conjoined only by the common formal properties possessed, she suggests, by all systems of thought (Douglas, 1966). It is also an explanation that works well for the taboos of the cultures that themselves lay claim to transcendent rationality - not a bad test of adequacy by their own standards of proof. The cultural ecology approach is in fact flawed by the assumptions of functionalism as well as of ethnocentrism. It rests on a teleo-

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Mr Demaitre showing an illustrated journal to inhabitants of the Ramu valley, Papua New Guinea, c. 1930.
de IHomme. Paris

Muste

logical presupposition not unlike Malinowskis assumption that social institutions served the purposes of satisfying the collective psychological needs of a population: that institutional practices regulating the availability of foodstuffs and of the other necessities of life must serve the populations rational adaptation to its environmental resources. This position reproduces the teleological weaknesses of earlier functionalism by presupposing purpose where in fact only effect can be identified. Not coincidentally, 1 suggest, this approach is broadly consistent with some of the most powerful forms of development intervention described by Escobar. From the perspective of a universalist logic, the rationality of ecological adaptation harmonized perfectly with the
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designs of apparently well-intentioned development agencies - much as the functionalist arguments of Malinowski, for all their circular teleology, at least had the virtue of countering colonial ideas about the fundamental irrationality of natives. But such formulations remain flawed for one simple reason: they continue to locate the capacity for universal reasoning in the minds of authoritative interpreters, thereby reinforcing the power of international agencies to exercise control over local social actors by telling them where their interests lie, and brooking little or no disagreement (see Ferguson, 1990). The opposition between a universalizing rationality and local concepts undergirds the long-standing debate which pits substantivists

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against formalists, and which is described here very reason, their intransigence suggests someby Bird-David as culminating in an ethnographi- thing worth pursuing, important questions cally grounded rejection of formalist models requiring an answer, powerful forces sustaining that seek to disinter the economic from all other an increasingly global and monolithic undersocial forms of life. Drawing largely on the standing of common sense. This indicates an approaches developed by Arjun Appadurai, important role for anthropologists in the future James Carrier, Marshall Sahlins, and especially although practitioners of the discipline should by Steven Gudeman, she shows how essentialist also be careful not to let go of the specialized attempts to oppose gift to commodity sys- knowledge and unusual comparative perspectems of value reproduces the global cultural tives that they have acquired through the more hierarchy articulated by the capitalist West, exotic types of study as well, for it is precisely and argues instead for an economic anthro- by juxtaposing the Nayaka with New York that pology that pays close attention to the indigen- they are able to find their Archimedean patch ous forms of economic reasoning - including of solid ground outside the structures that they those of Western economists, when appropriate. now seek to examine. Bird-David rightly traces For, as anthropologists relinquish the view of this aspect of her approach back to Sahlins their discipline as exclusively concerned with treatment of capitalism as a cultural system. the study of exotic Others, they also face the The perspective is critical in a double sense: it cosmological or symbolic aspects of their own offers an incisive intellectual critique of presumed rationality - a point raised directly received wisdom, and it is also necessary to the here by Juan Ossio - and so find the boundary success of any search for a more inclusive between them and us increasingly difficult world. Against the positivist view that only huge to sustain. Therein, it should be emphasized, lies a samples and the logic of Western scientific great opportunity. For if anthropologists some- rationality can provide solutions, anthropologists times appear greatly anguished by the apparent thus pit the prolonged intensity of field exposure marginalization of their discipline and its rela- (a statistical measure in its own right) and an tive exclusion from the exercise of meaningful analytical stance that is not solipsistically power, they might reflect that certain co-opta- grounded in its own cultural milieu (or that is tions of their discourse - such as Samuel Hunt- grounded in its own object of study but recogingtons (1996) expropriation of the concept of nizes that circumstance). The resulting perspecculture, for example, raised here by VBclav tive draws its inspiration from unfamiliar ways Hubinger - now invite a serious critical of construing the social, natural, and material response. Yet the task becomes correspondingly world. But this interest in other ways of conmore difficult as the politics and worldview ceiving reality does not make anthropologists under study move closer not only to home but the unthinking cultural relativists that they have to the centres of effective power. Anthropology sometimes seemed to be in the past. The extreme forms of cultural relativism entails the unveiling of intimate practices that lie behind rhetorical protestations of eternal are those in which cultures are treated as so truth, ranging from thats always been our cus- incommensurable that no mutual understanding tom, in almost every village and tribal society is possible, and no moral judgment is permissstudied by the anthropologists of the past, to ible. As long as anthropologists treated societies the evocation of science and logic by every as isolates, this was perhaps a defensible posmodem political elite (see, for example, Bal- ition: each could be approached on its own shem, 1993; Zabusky, 1995). We should not terms. As, notably, the critique by Johannes be surprised if those whose authority may be Fabian (1983) has emphasized, however, the compromised by such revelations do not take effect is to relegate others to the status of too kindly to becoming the subjects of anthro- passive objects held in the anthropologists omniscient gaze. Moreover, the refusal to exerpological research. They can also take much more effective cise moral judgment tended to produce mechanmeasures to block such research than could the istic ethical models for field conduct; these colonial subjects of yesteryear. But, for that models effectively paralysed scholars who

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might otherwise have wished to become more involved in various forms of activism. Clearly that response has fallen foul of its inherent contradictions and is consequently now giving way to a more engaged anthropology. As Kay Milton points out here, the abandonment of the rejectionist mode of relativism now permits anthropologists to return to the arena of public debate - less, perhaps, as applied anthropologists than as informed commentators on social and cultural consequences that do not lie within the purview of other social sciences. Her example of the relationship between car ownership (and use) and American social ideologies - may we call them cosmologies? - is an excellent illustration of how useful it may be to transgress the old boundary between them and us. Such transgressions clearly necessitate some degree of reorientation with regard to the entities that anthropologists take as their primary units of research. The old model of bounded cultures, grounded as it was in colonial and nationalist models (Handler, 1985; see also Hannerz, this issue), came under attack in Fredrik Barths celebrated critique of the idea of the ethnic group (1969). Yet the notion of bounded cultures, which received strong impetus both from nineteenth-century folklore studies and from post-World War I1 culture and personality approaches (e.g. Benedict, 1946), dies hard. For one thing, as Ulf Hannerz notes, industrial concerns often see anthropologists as useful sources of textbook knowledge about how to deal with people of alien culture. Today, however, most anthropologists would be deeply uneasy at this use of their work. In essentializing cultures for the express purpose of invading their economies and lifestyles, such crude co-optations of anthropological knowledge directly conflict with the respect for cultural diversity that marks the discipline. Anthropologists especially reject the implication that the target cultures of such exercises are in some way less rational, more symbolic, and less worthy of retention in a thoroughly global world than are the cultural arrangements promulgated by the industrial West. On the contrary, the comparativism of anthropology requires a common framework. Against the notion that there has been a distinctive moment that we can characterize as uniquely modem,

we can set the persistence of certain schemata that are not confined to the so-called primitive societies in which they were originally identified by anthropologists. Symbolism itself is such a property. Hubinger, for example, productively invokes the idea of the cargo cult (originally identified in Melanesia) to explain the almost messianic appeal of capitalism to the countries of the collapsing Soviet bloc. Lindstrom, however, warns us that generalizing representations of the imitation of the West by Melanesian cultists to all the worlds peoples curiously reproduces and reinforces a consumerist romance tale (1995, pp. 56-57). Yet it is surely useful to recall that symbolism is as much a feature of Westem industrial modernity as it is of the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. Hubinger and Lindstrom converge in implicitly acknowledging that the discrimination between European and other societies is part of a global taxonomy that serves distinct political and economic interests. Anthropologists may observe the effects of that taxonomy in the course of their fieldwork among peoples classified as other, who often actively resist - and certainly resent - its demeaning implications. The difficulty (and this seems to be the major lesson to be learned from Lindstroms critique) is that our own fables of global commonality can too easily seem to play into the very ideologies and hierarchies that we think we are attacking; yet our well-intentioned rejection of radical difference remains a powerful antidote to bigotry and domination. Inequality exists within the West, Hubinger reminds us, as well as in countless other zones of political and cultural engagement. Globalizing otherness is a useful instrument for disturbing the certainties of the powerful, but it can too easily be transmuted into complaisance: we must never forget that global interests are always particular interests. Those interests are encoded and enacted as teleology, in a manner that today is perhaps most obvious at the level of the nation-state. They become vitally significant in that, as Veena Das observes, national bureaucracies (and, to an increasing degree, supra-national agencies) appropriate to themselves the sufferings of individuals and groups. This process is perhaps not unlike the gradual assumption by monarchies of the right of vengeance, a process

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that in Europe and elsewhere underlies the states standing as the only possible source of justice; it also parallels the states arrogation to itself of the moral force of kinship to such a degree that nepotism and other familistic arrangements become the symbolic pollutant (corruption) of the polity. This is the same process to which, in Bornemans view, the anthropological exaltation of the family has lent such unfortunate authority, suppressing alternative ways in which social relationships not sanctioned by the state and by powerful international organizations might provide a bulwark of affection and care against the reality of suffering. It is an irony of this historical turn that the model of the family should be so deeply rooted in Christian ethics, in much the same way, as Asad (1993) has argued, as the similarly universalistic category of religion also depends on criteria defined by the Christian tradition. Das traces the genealogy of her own current perspective on suffering back to Durkheim and Weber, in whom, however, she identifies the teleology of an argument that sees mutilations as the means of creating societal identification. She stands these writers on their heads by pointing out that the agents of state or industry may inflict excesses of pain that they, as agents, can then use to increase their power. Their capacity to routinize suffering grows in the making, especially in the present age of rapid and intensive media reproduction, and is backed by an elaborate exegetical apparatus what Weber and others have called theodicy, offering salvation as the balm for present agonies and a cosmological explanation of the persistence of suffering in the world. In the sense that theodicy is now generated by the sources of suffering themselves, teleology is also tautology: the proclamation of common sense has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, enshrined in the circularities of bureaucratic forms of dictatorship and repression. The state, in such cases, becomes adept at explaining its failures to provide complete freedom as the marks of a transcendent success - the dictatorial coup detut, for example, that promises to save a nation from itself. And every well-intentioned bureaucratic (or religious) system can be so transformed by those willing to use physical as well as subtler forms of violence in the pursuit of sectional interests (see Kapferer, 1988).
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Suffering is one side of a coin, the obverse of which, as Das recognizes, is the extraordinary creativity of human beings in coping with it. That creativity is not a free flow of spontaneous culture with no history. On the contrary, it responds to past events, and makes its meanings clear by playing with recognizable because already existent - structures of form and meaning. Thus Coplans recognition that national music can be a site of resistance as well as enforced (seeming) acquiescence illustrates the limitations of official teleology, a condition which Das also documents in her comments on the extraordinary forms of resistance that people are able to carve out of the apparently intractable spaces of repressive power. Music is structured, says Coplan, and this inescapable aspect of the definition of music sets the limits to postmodernist attempts to deny the existence of structure in cultural and social life. But it is also the enabling property for improvisation - for the rethinking of order, cosmology, syntax, musical form, even of identities long held to be primordial. This is the basic tension of all human production: the fact of structure creates illusions of fixity, but is itself a necessary precondition of invention - for all social production is, as Coplan observes, necessarily also a matter of process, not of static forms (see also Moore 1987). In consequence, no symbolic form is immune to transformation, transmutation, or straightforward abuse (defined in terms of its prior commitments). A democratic vocabulary and constitution are not immune to dictatorial expropriation. As the anti-dictatorship slogan expressed its rejection of the Greek colonels 1967-74 usurpation of demokratia: in the land of democracy, democracy has died. Conversely, as this slogan shows, the trappings of repression can also be turned into the instruments of revolution - much as, mutatis mutandis, the rhetoric of a strict morality becomes the enabling condition for what, in its own terms, are highly immoral antics. For such is the fundamental lesson that village ethnography can teach the study of states and of international relations. It is also instructive to find that while anthropologists who study economics and development issues have embraced the discourse-oriented insights of postmodern or post-structuralist thinking, it is those who deal with the arts who have, in a contrary move, sought instead

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to rediscover structure and order. This, too, is a reversal of our conventional expectations. What these anthropologists share, however, is the empirically grounded understanding that effective knowledge is to be sought in the dialectical space in which neither positivism nor deconstruction predominates, but where the pragmatics of the field experience open up our readiness to accept and embrace surprising concatenations. If, then, the inclusion of ecologies, economics, musics, and sufferings in a single framework may seem distinctly odd, the reader should treat the puzzlement thereby experienced as a vicarious introduction to fieldwork. That
~ ~

activity is a process akin to problem-solving in social life, in which the learning of culture largely proceeds through an edification by puzzlement (Fernandez, 1986, pp. 172-79). As a reaching for larger, more inclusive explanations of experience, it is at the same time a questioning of order - and especially of claims that a given order is rooted in eternal truth, whether cosmological or scientific. It is, in a word, the critical appraisal of common sense. It is thus a fundamental source of human understanding, accessible only at moments when the categorical order of things no longer seems secure.

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