Anthropological Theory

Ostensibly a book written with a view towards publicly promulgating an anti-racist agenda by synthesizing a vast body of mid-20th-century biological and genetic science, Fernando Ortiz’s El engaño de las razas (1946) remains one his least commented-upon works. Eclipsed in its scholarly reception (both nationally and internationally) by its immediate predecessor, El contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) and its English translation (1946), El engaño de las razas also appears to have been shadowed by (or simply assimilated into) the spate of post-Second World War anthropological anti-racist pronouncements culminating in the 1951 UNESCO Declaration Against Racism. However, paying close attention to Ortiz’s analytical and rhetorical strategies reveals that El engaño is by no means a mere anti-racist tract in the guise of a (characteristically learned and vociferously poetic) Latin American ensayo. As I will argue, the text merits our attention today not only because it refracted and subjected a larger, international anthropological agenda of the time to a local perspective, but also because its analytical tropology – arguably – only entered anthropological theorizing about human biology, heredity, and sociality under the sign of relationality from the 1990s onward. I suggest that in outlining a metapragmatic ethics and politics of metaphor Ortiz also anticipated a de-stabilization of representationalist accounts of ‘race’ that goes well beyond social constructionism.

To what extent can anthropology still help us to understand the world around us at a time when this world is characterized by processes of political and economic multipolarity, and the decolonization of knowledge? The political questioning of cultural decentring is an opportunity for anthropology to build a new epistemological conception of decentring. Against and beyond cultural relativism, ethnicism or ontological perspectivism, the issue is knowing how to decentre in any situation, ‘here and now’, from oneself as much as from each ‘we’, searching for tangible and intangible limits, and making those borders places of observation and understanding of increasingly more cosmopolitan social and cultural lives. I develop and propose this new conception in three stages. The first contextual stage highlights the importance of border situations and the necessity to account for them in order to tackle globalization as an observable social fact, beyond and against frozen representations of Others’ cultures and identities. The second stage explores the possibility of a post-culturalist decentring. In this reflection I turn to philosophy, from Rousseau to Foucault and Agamben, to find cues for an epistemological conception of decentring. In the last part I emphasize the understanding of situations, and rehabilitate reflexive ethnography and the situational inductive approach as the foundations of contemporary anthropology.

Building on recent efforts in this direction, this essay provides arguments in support of the concept of responsivity, developed by the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, and its importance in anthropological theorizing. Responsivity is a way of thinking about relations between self and Other, structure and agency, universality and particularity that escapes the dichotomy which usually characterizes such conceptual pairings. By defining ‘responding’ as a relationship to the Other as other, and by defining ‘the Other’ as what we respond to, Waldenfels’ concept enables anthropologists to theoretically overcome the contradiction between radical and empirical alterity. This potential is illustrated in a discussion of the responsive aspects of other approaches to empirical otherness: the sociology of the stranger, psychoanalysis and semiotics. Through comparisons that stress points of contact and compatibility, the notion of responsivity is thrown into sharper relief. At the same time, familiar anthropological approaches to alterity are re-presented in a changed light.

Once a matter of beliefs, symbols, values and worldviews, religion has progressively appeared in recent anthropological works as material religion, a highly concrete phenomenon based on affects, senses, substances, places, artifacts, and technologies. But what happened to transcendence, the dimension of religious worldmaking that remains beyond – hidden, untouched, unseen, unheard or unfulfilled? Is it necessarily the ‘other’ of material religion, a residual category that carries no ethnographic value? Retaining an emic concern with authority and a reflexive awareness about processes of boundary-making, in this article I approach material religion as a field of problematization inhabited by anthropologists and religious subjects alike. I examine some of the protocols whereby Pentecostal Christians in Ghana engage critically with the problem of materiality in their own religion, and argue that this operation lends ethnographic access to the role of transcendence in material religion’s everyday.

This article presents an approach to pictorial-diagrammatic modelling that was developed and used in ethnographic research on a quasi-global, networked cultural arrangement – specifically, hardcore punk. By facilitating visual mapping, thinking, and conceptualizing, this approach constitutes a methodological apparatus – or ‘experimental system’ – that helps to bridge the gap between collections of particular, situated ethnographic accounts and the development of a broader analysis of multi-scalar networks of relationships. A specific feature of this apparatus is its heuristic function, whereby research questions and approaches, on the one hand, and development and use of the model, on the other, recursively and mutually inform each other. The article advocates for a more formalized and systematic use of such tools in ethnographic research, and suggests new ways to move beyond ethnography’s predominantly verbal and scriptocentric tradition. On a broader level, this retrospective analysis provides an example of the usually opaque, and rarely discussed, process of crafting ethnographic ideas, concepts, and approaches.