ON THE SOURCES OF AN ANTI-REALIST VIEW OF RELATIVISM IN SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Keywords:
cultural relativism, scientific realism, essentialism, history of anthropology, politics of knowledge, methodology of anthropological researchAbstract
The history of methodological debates in sociocultural anthropology is burdened with numerous issues which not only make understanding and teaching anthropology and conducting research difficult, but also impede the practical application of the discipline, especially in the public sphere. Research into methodological history shows that one of the most important issues with this is the anti-realist view of relativism. This view has been imputed into the discipline from the interdisciplinary scene and has, under heavy political pressure been widely disseminated. Relativism, which has in debates on the scientific status of the discipline been marked as the main satellite of the postmodernist "undermining" of truth, science, morals and other so-called universal human values is decidedly not the relativism which sociocultural anthropology has nurtured since its academic establishment. On the contrary, anthropological relativism was supposed to enable the comparative understanding of cultures, and as a consequence have the successful cementing of the discipline’s scientific status – both in academia and in the public sphere. This was made possible precisely through the application of relativism as a guarantee of the objectivity of description and the reliability of understanding, which also served to mitigate the methodological issue of the legitimacy of the comparative method. However, the original, disciplinary-specific view of relativism, as the foundation of good anthropological science, has been lost in time and replaced with an anti-realistic view which is incompatible with public service and has serious potential to undermine the discipline’s academic authority.
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