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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 eldwork. The distinctiveness of anthropology is not therefore implied simply by a particular object of study (society or culture) or by a particular method (eldwork). 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 suggest 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 eld, 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 nd 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 rst prepared for the symposium Facing eldwork. 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, 133149. 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists doi:10.1017/S0964028205001199 Printed in the United Kingdom

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terms in which the different worlds portrayed themselves, though without losing sight of the latter. Some abandoned the idea of a unied 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 reexive in that sense, and so obviously historical. In order properly to assess the implications of this reexivity we shall rst 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 identication 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 unied, 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 LATE MODERNISM EARLY MODERNISM CONSENSUS STRUCTURALISM FUNCTIONALISM STRUCTURALFUNCTIONALISM

HISTORICISM (Evolutionism Diffusionism)

1900

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

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

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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 Ardeners 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 rst 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 fullling 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 eld 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 Ardeners scheme, the linguistic turn nally 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 Ardeners depiction of the grand modernist narratives, structuralism is mainly associated with British social anthropology leaping denitively 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 L vi-Strauss is a master narrator. His e 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 (L vi-Strauss 1967:67). If e 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 dees 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 nally articulated not least by American anthropologists such as Clifford and Marcus (1986) postmodernism and the debate on representation were well under way.

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Postmodernism can be dened 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 poststructuralism. 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 Ardeners 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 objectication 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 oated 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 objectication . . . 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
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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 MerleauPonty 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 clarication against which Donald Davidson suggests a radical interpretation: it is radical because it is distinct from those (local) interpretations that are already aoat 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 afnity 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 Ardeners scheme, we may depict post-modern trends (and the literary turn) like the diagram on the next page. To reiterate: possibly the most signicant shift from modernism (including both the biological and the linguistic turn) to post-modernism, which came to be conated with the literary turn, was the implicit shift from clarication to radical interpretation as the basic objective of anthropology. This shift is pervasive and took us denitively 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
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Post-modernism

Hermeneutics // Phenomenology

(Narrative/Discourse)

(Practice/Experience)

1980
F IGURE 2. Post-modernism in anthropology.

1990

2000

and, I would argue, of postmodernism is an awareness that in anthropology, ethnography 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 eld 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) postmodern thinkers, nor does it lead to a conation 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 postmodernist epoch. Anyone who has done anthropological eldwork will have realised that individuals are neither speaking cultural truths, nor are they entirely free from them. Because eldwork 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
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the part, however these terms are dened. 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 specied signicance we participate in with others (James 2003:7). In the eld 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-xed. It does not mean that the eld is constructed by the anthropologist, as opposed to being real, but it does mean that the eld is contingent on analytical objective and scale. It also implies that anthropological knowledge attaches itself both to those processes by which the social is dened and negotiated in individual practices and to those processes and institutions by which the emergent whole is recurrently objectied 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 eld. Even though the idea of wall-to-wall culture there to be scrutinised by the anthropological gaze has broken down, eldwork 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 objectied 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 objectied and came to signify simply the mixture of cultures, the criss-crossing of cultural ows and the general hybridisation of social worlds in the present era. While certainly not insignicant, 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
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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 objectied history in Bourdieus terms (1990). Even so, they must be constantly conrmed 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 eld 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 fullment 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 eld and the kind of knowledge eldwork 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 eldwork, seen not as simply informative but as a performative mode of knowing (cf. Fabian 1990:3ff). As a social space, the eld 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 eldwork, 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 eldwork. 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).

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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 eld, 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 eldwork is precisely to engage the social worlds that others live, and therefore to situate oneself in the amorphous eld between subjective and objective. Anthropology remains a science on an awkward scale, having to nd 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 eld of tension between the shared world and the subjective account, a eld that is productive of new ontologies, perceived locally as givens but known anthropologically to be contingent. Through eldwork, 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 eldwork) 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 reexive 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 identied 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
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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 dening 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, eldwork 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 eldwork
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 signicance of this observation in the present context lies both in its recognition of the constant dialogue with predecessors in the eld 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 clarication 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 qualies 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 dees 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 eld 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 reexivity, 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 eld 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 eld as a moving frame, we may rearticulate the nature of anthropological knowledge and take some of the previous insights further towards

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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 objectication 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 eld (see Hastrup 2004c for an expanded discussion). If the anthropological object is emergent, as discussed above, and has no xed ontological status, be it as a culture, a society or a community, outside of local perceptions of givens and rules, the eld has to be continually redened. 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 objectication 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 full 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 objectied 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 eldwork 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 rst 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 specic 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 nal 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.

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Embedded in the above argument is an identication of an incipient new turn in anthropology. Bringing the lessons of both modernism and post-modernism along, anthropology takes a new step. At rst sight, to remain within the (largely postmodern) 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 objectied, whole that inuences 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 nal 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 signicant 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 eld. This denitively 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 unication on the subjects 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).

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In a sense, the social and the geographical space are conated 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 beings 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 eld is replaced by an ambition to situate oneself elsewhere within the eld 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-nding and map-making those processes by which the map comes into being in the rst 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-nding. The concreteness and materiality of topography thus dees 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 signicantly, 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 xed 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,

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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 signicantly 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 OHanlon 1995), which has demonstrated that landscapes were not simply backdrops to action but integral parts of it a movement foreshadowed no less signicantly 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 benets 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 ve 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 reections also on the historicity of anthropology, which is no longer seen as a threat to scientic (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 eld 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 reects 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 dened by its epistemology rather than its object. Realising that the mutually dening 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.

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This particular mode of knowing may be applied to a variety of social forms and scales. Anthropologists have moved condently 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 unied by being grounded in experience of social spaces that demonstrate how parts and wholes are mutually dening and emergent realities. As newcomers to particular elds, 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 dened by a particular and mutually dening 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 fulll the promise of what Hilary Putnam has called a pragmatic enlightenment of the present (2004:89ff). The enlightenment of the eighteenth century aspired to reective 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 ones 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 inuence 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

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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

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