Death of a few celebrated truths and others still worth re-stating
Firth produced a great work but he was also a great man. Having set out to study political economics in New Zealand, Raymond Firth encountered Malinowski and decided to become an anthropologist. The fieldwork and books followed, on subjects ranging from Polynesia to the housing projects of London. S...
में बचाया:
| में प्रकाशित: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jso, |
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| मुख्य लेखक: | |
| स्वरूप: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| भाषा: | Anglais |
| प्रकाशित: |
Journal de la société des océanistes
2010
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| विषय: | |
| ऑनलाइन पहुंच: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| सारांश: | Firth produced a great work but he was also a great man. Having set out to study political economics in New Zealand, Raymond Firth encountered Malinowski and decided to become an anthropologist. The fieldwork and books followed, on subjects ranging from Polynesia to the housing projects of London. Some of these were masterpiece, likeWe, The Tikopia (1936) or TheWork of the Gods in Tikopia(1940). An immensely rich store of ethnographic material, laid out precisely and clearly but also theoretical works on key areas: religion, symbols, etc. in which, well before the postmodernists, Firth voiced his skepticism about «grand theories», Marxism, Structuralism, etc. The author of the lecture next asks the question: Why should we celebrate a great anthropologist if anthropology is nothing more than a bunch of narrative fictions written by Europeans with the complicity of their native informants (Marcus) and is therefore a dying literary genre? He replies that there are two ways of deconstructing a discipline: one that leads to its dissolution and the other that leads to its reconstruction on a more rigorous and analytically more effective basis. The author opts for the second way and analyses several issues: the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic, and their respective roles in producing social relations. He then seeks to identify among all social relations, those that have the capacity to bind a certain number of human groups into a Whole that endows them with an overarching shared identity and makes them into a society. He shows that the only relations that have this capacity are political-religious relations, not kinship relations or economic relations. Lastly, considering the trade of the anthropologist, he sets out a number of conditions that must be fulfilled in order for this job to constitute a scientific, critical approach more necessary than ever for analyzing and understanding the new world order that sprang up with the fall of the BerlinWall and the Twin Towers attack on 9/11/2001. |
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