28 research outputs found
Kinky Empiricism
Get PDFUncorrected proof. Supplemental material: http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/633In this article, which takes James Clifford and George Marcusâs Writing Culture as its starting point, I make the case for a kinky kind of empiricism that builds on the singular power of anthropological ways of knowing the world. Kinky empiricism takes established forms to an extreme and turns back to reflect on its own conditions of possibility. At the same time, it deploys methods that create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the settings and among the people they describe. I begin to make this argument by way of a close rereading of moments in Writing Culture. I then turn to David Humeâs writings on empiricism, which, I suggest, offer the ingredients for an empiricism that is both skeptical and ethical because it includes among its objects of inquiry the apparatuses through which reality is known. I end by exploring dangers and possibilities associated with kinky empiricism by juxtaposing a moment from my research on state building in Dutch New Guinea with the approach taken in Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonbergâs groundbreaking study, Righteous Dopefiend. In rereading Writing Culture, I find the ingredients of a more affirmative stance toward anthropology than is usually associated with Writing Cultureâone premised on the need for what Michel-Rolph Trouillot once called âan epistemology and semiology of all anthropologists have done and can do.
From Irian Jaya to Papua: The Limits of Primordialism in Indonesia's Troubled East
Full text linkPage range: 115-14
Real food
No full textComment on Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Review of Guardians of the Land: Louis Fontijne's Study of a Colonial District in Easter Indonesia
Full text linkPage range: 141-14
