Evidence in Socio-Cultural Anthropology: Limits and Options for Epistemological Orientations

Abstract

This article identifies what Sir Edmund Leach once called 'amongitis' as one of socio-cultural anthropology's major problems that make interdisciplinary dialogues on evidence-based epistemological topics difficult. Topics of wider and larger scale, however, can and should be addressed if anthropology brings out more fully its implicit epistemological strength of a dialogical relationship between objectivism and subjectivism. The current conditions of a globalizing world actually transform this possibility into a necessity. In order to face this need, a new realism is proposed that is capable of dealing with the conditions and challenges of a second modernity. Two ranges of epistemological sources are suggested that may inform such a new realism. One range is based in the traditions of Western philosophy, while the other is rooted outside the secularized or theological legacies of monotheism.Any assessment of the epistemological basis for socio-cultural anthropology and ethnography requires a consideration of the nature of evidence in these fields (Engelke 2008). What assumptions prevail with regard to evidence, and what can we say about corresponding practices? In the first section of this article, I approach these questions by summarizing briefly the differences of relevant legacies in some neighboring disciplines. As we will see, I believe that socio-cultural anthropology's dialogical, fieldwork-based orientation places it in a unique position to overcome a subjectivist-objectivist dichotomy that prevails in some of these related fields. In the article's second section, I examine several specific epistemological legacies of socio-cultural anthropology that have been actively engaged in this dialogical enterprise during recent decades. | Andre GingrichThis leads me to identify some of the challenges of what has been called a 'second modernity', which we are said to be about to enter. In the third and final section, I inquire about the epistemological and evidence-related contents of the challenges imposed upon us by this second modernity and explore the available options for reinvigorating our epistemological skills. Leaving 'Amongitis' BehindMost authors who deal with the subject will agree that epistemology is concerned with human knowledge-with its conditions, its possibilities, and its limits. In the present context I thus focus on the conditions, the possibilities, and the limits of ethnographic and anthropological knowledge. Unavoidably, this involves answers to questions such as "knowledge about what, and about whom?" Here is where the notion of evidence enters our discussion, either implicitly or explicitly. Epistemological implications can and should be considered from various other angles as well, but addressing them through a perspective on evidence helps to emphasize the empirical foundations of socio-cultural anthropology. In one way or another, the discipline has always been embedded in ethnographic fieldwork and rooted in ethnography. For this very reason, it is clear what kind of evidence is most...

Transitions: Notes on Sociocultural Anthropology's Present and Its Transnational Potential

“…Chunks of classical positivism sit around here and there, pieces of exhausted constructivism mingle with elements of phenomenology in one part, with pragmatism in a second, and with Wittgensteinian approaches in a third. As I have recently argued elsewhere (Gingrich 2009), each of these epistemological approaches offers specific advantages and disadvantages for the pursuit of sociocultural anthropology moving into its new transnational and postnational eras.…”

“…It will also be important to move beyond that legacy as an exclusive source of epistemological inspiration, while anthropology develops further into its transnational era. We all know that there are also other epistemological legacies, whether they are Indian, African, Buddhist, or indigenous (Gingrich 2009).…”