Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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accountability and critical scrutiny that one owes to one's own self. The fact that self-and-other constitutes an axis of direction rather than a dichotomy proper, and that the anthropologist is therefore constantly burdened with the task of forging the distinction between what is self and what is other about the other, only goes to show the inescapable way in which anthropology, even at its most empirical, is ethics.
Not only where but also how one draws the line between selfness and otherness marks the degree to which one is open to difference, and in the absence of such openness, ethics, considered in terms of the question of what is owing to the other, is effectively drained of meaning. To be sure, in the face of the various ‘isms’ that, on the basis of corporal difference (race) or some kind of categorical affiliation (nation, for instance), find it all too easy to make a hard and fast distinction between self and other, one might well ask why the difference is not given in absolute terms but in fact always remains a relative matter. I address this question in chapter 11, where, analyzing phenomenologically, I suggest that emergent consciousness, with a dialectical and immensely consequential cunning, appropriates to itself the kind of absolute boundary Descartes posited for things that extend in space, thus in principle sealing itself against otherness and constructing the self-other relationship as a dualism.
The principal methodological implication of the sort of translation I propose here, then, in focused accordance with the hallowed proscription on ethnocentrism, is that the anthropologist prepare herself in a disciplined manner to sacrifice her understanding of self and world on behalf of the other's otherness, but by no means in the interest of sheer relativism or the wholesale approbation of all that the other is and does. This discipline takes the form of ontological and phenomenological reflexivity, such that, in virtue specifically of the ethnographic interaction, whether on the ground or in the reading, one deconstructs one's own sense of self and reality. But such self-deconstruction does not take itself as its own end. Instead, its object is to create a substantial void in the anthropologist's second nature, which, since this nature too abhors a vacuum, and in virtue of the ethnographic consultation, fills itself with another—a reconstructed— sense of self and reality. In result, a fresh common ground is shaped, on the strength of which we will not have done the impossible and changed places with the other, but, in a way that ultimately defies rational determination, we will have made the other's point of view our own, including, very likely, a coefficient of contempt for ourselves.
III
The present work began as a short concluding section to an earlier monograph, Two Kinds of Rationality (1995). That study is highly theoretical but directly anchored in my ethnographic field research of an Israeli kibbutz. In what was to be an afterword, I set out to address even broader problems raised by the book's analysis. In order, though, to facilitate publication of Two Kinds of Rationality, I was persuaded to detach the projected afterword, allowing it to grow into its own book—the present one. Nevertheless, there remains an important, umbilical attachment between the two volumes. The ethnography of the kibbutz (as well as my career-long reworking of Evans-Pritchard's Nuer ethnography) stands to the present exercise as a conceptual provider, an instructor of ideas, as well as an empirical case study. For this reason, taken together the two works enact the kind of anthropology I extol below, an anthropology as ethics: the other or the ethnographic community is virtually consulted by the self or the anthropologist, thus identifying the other, not only as an object of inquiry and even criticism, but also as an anthropologically insightful agent in its own right. It seems to me that under the influence of postmodernism and its standard operating procedure of reflexivity, it has perhaps become too easy to claim something of the sort. But anyone who reads Two Kinds of Rationality will find that my anthropological approach has been substantially as well as critically informed by certain ideas on which I found the kibbutz to rest. These ideas bear on the nature of the creative capacity for generation, and in the final chapter of this volume (chap. 14), I find it edifying to revisit them.
My project is patently anthropological, yet it also stands at a tangent to the onto- logical presuppositions on which the discipline has characteristically been predicated. Indeed, by seeking to redefine decidedly what it means to be human—away from the received understanding and toward the idea of essential ambiguity and an irreducible dynamic—I am trying to undermine anthropology as we know it. In my view, despite many sincere, significant, and impelling proclamations more or less to the contrary, the received understanding remains at bottom static and dualist. By ‘at bottom’ I do not have in mind ethnographic practice, so much of which is admirable in purpose and splendid in accomplishment; rather, I refer to the epistemic plane in which the ontological presuppositions rest, presuppositions that in decisive part arose with modern science itself. It is easy to pay lip service to the sort of radical shift of definitions I propose. But if the redefinition is to be material, then the ‘study of man’ will have to change accordingly. It will have to become, above all, a peculiar kind of ethics, the kind bent on learning systematically—and in this broad sense, scientifically—about the other by also learning from the other.
My ontological contention about ethics and dualism is large, and its concomitant views about the nature of the human sciences are, in spirit, unusually philosophical for many orthodox anthropological frameworks. Traditional approaches aside, in a significant sense my project does not always fit comfortably even into certain of the prevailing avant-garde anthropological turns of the day. Its movement to at once embrace the political but vigorously refuse what I see as political reductionism in the discipline's adoption of the very same movement possibly puts the project in a kind of anthropological no man's land. But I nonetheless hope that my thesis of ontological conversion and the attendant ideas set out in this volume are worth pondering. By critically embracing the ontological enterprise that all social science really is (but is so hard pressed by constitutional scientistic pretension to deny), I hope here at least to have opened a view to a different way of conceiving of anthropology. I hope also to have shown that this way lends itself to argument and reason, and that it bears substantial disciplinary and interdisciplinary promise.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been many years in the writing, and a great many more in the thinking. Over these years I have benefited from comments (the less than appreciative ones included) of a number of readers. John Caputo, whose work I admire, very kindly agreed to read my interpretation of the biblical story of Abraham's ‘binding’ of Isaac (my chap. 2), although my request to do so came to him out of the blue. Christopher Browning expertly commented on my analysis of the Holocaust (chap. 4), and John McGowan did the same for my critique of Habermas (chap. 6). I feel very fortunate to have as university colleagues these two superb scholars. My departmental colleagues, Arturo Escobar and Peter Redfield, provided thoughtful commentary on my chapters on Foucault (chaps. 11 and 12) and rationality (chaps. 7 and 8), respectively. My old and very dear friend, Jeffrey Obler, a gifted intellectual and teacher, whose recent passing I deeply mourn, carefully read my chapter on the Holocaust (chap. 4), as well as the two excurses on ethics and Derrida (chaps. 3 and 13).
Given the long gestation of this book, earlier versions of many of the chapters have had a number of readers who, in various capacities, provided me with valuable commentary. In this connection, I wish to thank especially my brilliant (now deceased) teacher Mike (M. G.) Smith, my friends Craig Calhoun and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and my friend and student Steven Klein. What has become the concluding section of chapter 14 sharply benefited from a close,