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The anthropological production of knowledge has at least two elements: fieldwork and analysis. Some might want to add a third one, namely description… - Thomas Hylland Eriksen
" "The anthropological production of knowledge has at least two elements: fieldwork and analysis. Some might want to add a third one, namely description; you first collect a body of empirical material through various field methods, you then describe whatever it is that you’ve discovered and, finally, you analyse the findings. Many, including the author, are sceptical of the distinction between description and analysis because the (anthropological) analysis inevitably begins in the (ethnographic) description itself and, indeed, already with observation. No all-encompassing, neutral description exists of anything, and nothing has a meaning independently of that ascribed to it. Already the delineation of the field of enquiry – socially, thematically, spatially, with respect to the concepts used – necessarily entails that reality ‘out there’ is presented in a selective and theoretically biased way. It is impossible to describe everything, or to give equal emphasis to everything one has observed.
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About Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (6 February 1962 – 27 November 2024) was a Norwegian anthropologist. He was a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, as well as the 2015–2016 president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
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Additional quotes by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Although it is necessary to be conscious of variation, the problem of boundaries, political misuse, change, flows and conceptual inaccuracy, it would be tantamount to intellectual suicide for anthropology if it were to discard a concept that tells us that people with different backgrounds, who have been raised in very different environments, live – to a greater or lesser extent – in different life-worlds and see the world in different ways. Thus, it seems necessary to keep the culture concept, but in an ideal world, it would be locked securely in a cupboard and taken out only when it was needed. In most cases where the culture concept is used cursorily today – inside and outside of anthropology – it would prove unnecessary to unlock the cupboard.
Mauss, Polanyi and Sahlins took issue with a view of humans which assumed that they were individualistic, maximising and fundamentally selfish creatures. They associated this view with libertarianism and mainstream economics, but, in other contexts, a similar view of ‘man’ as a fiercely competitive individualist has been associated with that of Darwin’s adherents, who claim that social and cultural phenomena must be understood within the framework of evolutionary theory. The slogans ‘the struggle for survival’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’, and the often uncritical use of the word ‘competition’ used to designate the dynamics of procreation and many other human activities, have been typical of Darwinist interpretations of humanity for decades. Against this background, it is astonishing that a growing number of evolutionary scholars now emphasise that cooperation, mutual trust and long-term reciprocity relations are evolutionarily adaptive.
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Kinship builds upon two complementary principles: descent and marriage. But both can be manipulated and fiddled with, by natives as well as by anthropologists. There exists a considerable critical literature about kinship; some of it was mentioned briefly at the beginning of this chapter, and we now turn to a slightly more detailed examination.
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