Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-w79xw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-16T19:15:20.725Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Concluding remarks: for programmatic inquiries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

James D. Faubion
James D. Faubion
Affiliation:
Rice University, Houston
Get access

Summary

In his dismissal of the historical anthropology that Jean-Paul Sartre develops in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Claude Lévi-Strauss pronounces of historical inquiry itself:

It consists wholly in its method, which experience proves to be indispensable for cataloguing the elements of any structure whatever, human or non-human, in its entirety. It is therefore far from being the case that the search for intelligibility comes to an end in history as though this were its terminus. Rather, it is history that serves as the point of departure in any quest for intelligibility. As we say of certain careers, history may lead to anything, provided you get out of it.

(Lévi-Strauss 1966: 262)

I do not advocate a return to the high rationalism that in part motivates Lévi-Strauss' relegation of historical inquiry to the domain of the mail clerk and short order cook. I do, however, want to suggest (and have good reason to believe that I am following Lévi-Strauss in doing so) that much of what Lévi-Strauss pronounces of such inquiry should also be pronounced of ethnographic inquiry, into which what used to be thought of as sociocultural anthropology has increasingly dissolved from the mid-1970s forward. The catalysts of that dissolution are diverse.

Type
Chapter
Information
An Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 268 - 276
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×