Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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of, including, at least at the end of the day, in relation to temporal authority? No wonder that Derrida speaks here of “wild-eyed ecumenism” (ibid.). The projected pluralistic order would have to be secured by a superordinate authority, which, for obvious reasons, can only be temporal. This possibility is predicated on the supposition that by subjecting the religious differences to a controlling institutional force—a sovereign political order—they can be retained and allayed at the same time. The trouble is that from the standpoint of the absolutism of these monotheisms (an absolutism so absolute that it occasions “radical and rabid” conflict), there really is no principled room for a higher sovereign force. Only where boundaries are reconceived as essentially relative, such that they always connect as they separate, does there seem to be any real hope for enduring community. But of course, this understanding of boundaries is nondualist and flies in the face of the absolutism at issue. By contrast to pluralism, nondualism promises community in which ‘identity’ is fundamentally relative rather than absolute and is therefore incapable of serving as a sine qua non of communal inclusion.
My method of inquiry is both phenomenological and anthropological. With phenomenology, I focus on tacit knowledge and experiential understanding. In this connection, I am especially concerned with the deep senses of self—and therewith of other—promoted by dualism and nondualism considered not as forms of logic as such but of social existence. Nondualism, which refuses to rend logic from existence, recommends just such an analytical strategy. I mean thus to avoid intellectualism or the presumption (perhaps the sorest affliction of social science) that most if not all human acts are behavioral conversions of prior programmatic predications, and position myself to grasp how dualism and nondualism actually move people. For within one's deepest—which is to say, one's most comprehensive, implicit, and absorbing—sense of self, act and idea may be virtually indistinguishable from each other.
Because tacit knowledge and experiential understanding run deep, they are ordinarily not open to reflection. Giving an anthropological turn to the phenomenologist's techniques for overcoming this difficulty, I try to bring to the surface critical presuppositions of Western thought and reason. I do so in two key ways: first, by taking up cases from ‘home’, that is, cases focused on the profound problematicity of Western dualism or so disturbingly extreme as to present the Western self as anthropologically other to itself; and, second, by plumbing Western thought and reason directly in view of the ethnographic fact of cultures—so-called other cultures—not readily intelligible in the usual terms of this reason and thought. In so doing, determinedly going beyond phenomenology to ethics, my aim is not simply to open to question fundamentals of Western selfhood, but to rethink these fundamentals by critically taking instruction from the ethnographic other as well as from the otherness in ourselves.
What makes the following study anthropologically novel as well as radical, then, is its explicitly ontological charge. Indeed, this charge recasts the discipline, not simply because it opens to question anthropology's deepest philosophical presuppositions and directly draws inspiration from certain philosophical literature, but because at the same time it (along with the philosophically anomalous sense of ethics I propose) derives from straightforward, empirical anthropological deliberations, thus making of our discipline a co-equal partner in a philosophically received enterprise. The revisions of self and reason I intend entail nothing less significant than a reconceiving of reality, from terms of dualism to terms of nondualism. One object of embracing reality as essentially uncertain and ambiguous is to re-emphasize the human condition as a condition of discretion and responsibility, and thereby to refocus and revitalize ethics as the (foundationless) foundation of social existence. Because it is keyed to uncertainty and process, this sense of ethics not only goes beyond but also throws into question the fixed morality of what I have earlier called moralism.
Another object of addressing the very nature of reality is to acknowledge the ethno-graphic enterprise as ontological at its very core. The claim is that the most fundamental problems of anthropological research may well yield to inquiry, but not simply by virtue of empirical analysis, however vital and necessary such analysis is. At bottom, these problems want explicit ontological deliberation. Such defining ethnographic problems as what is the nature of kinship? or how can there be order in a society without government? or, as is germane to the present work, what is the sense of magico-religious presumption? are problems of otherness, and they require for their resolution nothing less radical than ontological conversion. Going beyond phenomenological prescription to ethical act, the idea is not simply to bracket or suspend our received notion of reality (thus exercising the so-called phenomenological epoché) but to change it. By doing so, one hopes to affect, even if only in a small way and the long term, reality itself. The object is to disrupt the rigid pre-epistemological propositions—the material or practical a priori understandings—through which ‘reality’ is made to appear for us and against which nothing in our world seems normally to speak. Put another way, one wants to change the notion of reality so that it affords the opportunity for new modes of practice in the common project of social life. Underlying this ambition is that ideas can be powerful, and as those of (to select august figures) Plato or Descartes or Darwin or Freud or Marx demonstrate, there are none more so than ideas that bear roundly on the nature of reality.
Empirical research is a positively crucial condition of ethnographic inquiry. But that hardly means that that is all there is to the practice of ethnography: the discipline's pronounced turn in recent decades to sophisticated questions of interpretation theory plainly suggests otherwise. This turn, which focuses on the beholder's share in the determining of what there is, constitutes a distinct caution against the ‘empiricism’ that tends to lurk beneath the general idea of empirical research—that all knowledge is synthetic in nature, a matter of sensory perception, or that the facts speak for themselves. What is striking about the hermeneutic turn in anthropology, though, is that while it has occasioned an acute awareness that there is no such thing as an unbiased ethnographic perspective, it has only rarely grasped that the biases the ethnographer brings with her necessarily comport a taken-for-granted picture of what there is—that is, an implicit ontology. Instead, correlative to the disciplinary rise in importance of such topoi as women's and post-colonialist studies, emphatically the tendency has been to take the biases as primarily political in nature, as matters of power. It would seem that in reaction to the realization that the effort to maintain sheer ethnographic objectivity and impartiality is naive, the anthropologist, rotating dualistically, has been inclined on the whole to expressly politicize the discipline. This shift appears to have turned on an undeniably attractive logic to the effect that if implicit political bias is unavoidable, then one may as well assume, with all due deliberation, an explicit political position.
The resulting positions, the bulk of which move to empower and dignify the relatively powerless, are, surely, splendid and salutary in themselves. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the consideration that perfect objectivity is indeed a chimera, insofar as it saps the life from the consideration that without the bias of relative objectivity ethnographic practice per se has no ‘scientific’ warrant, this politicization may itself be naive. It takes very little reflection to see what we all experience on a day-to-day basis anyway—that although there can be no observed in which the observer is not participant, the ‘distance’ between observer and observed is patently relative and varies precisely with the nature of the perspective the observer takes. And while it cannot afford the observer a view from nowhere, ‘objectivity’ can be efficaciously assumed as one such perspective. The critical point is that if when adduced on behalf of a political position ethnography (qua ethnography rather than pure political discourse or power play) is to serve effectively, it must take scrupulous care not to impugn its own relative objectivity, for its special force in relation to political argument must rest with its comparatively objective determinations.
But here what I particularly want to bring out about this politicizing movement is that, ironically, it seems not to have alerted the discipline substantially enough to the problem of empiricism as an implicit and obstructive dogma underlying ethnographic interpretation. Indeed, arguably the emphasis on ‘power’ as the defining concept of this anthropological turn continues, at least tacitly, to lend support to this dogma. To see this, one need only consider that ‘power’ is itself an inherent bias, one that carries with it a picture of reality consistent with the positivist idea of objectivity from which such empiricism takes flight. The