A markdown version of an essay by David B. Zilberman

on-cultural-relativism-and-radical-doubt.md

title	author	date
On Cultural Relativism and "Radical Doubt"	David B. Zilberman	1995

Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, in their study of culture¹, mention in passing that Descartes, the man who commenced the new Western philosophy by introducing his method of "radical doubt", was also the first one who detected the problem of cultural relativism. And indeed, as we read in Chapter 1 of his "Discourse on Method":

It is true that while I only considered the manners of other men I found in them nothing to give me settled convitions; and I remarked in them almost as much diversity as I had formerly seen in the opinions of philosophers. So much was this the case that the greatest profit I derived from their study was that, in seeing many things which, although seem to us very extravagant and ridiculous, were yet commonly received and approved by other great nations, I learned to believe nothing to certainty of which I had only been convinced by example and custom.²

This observation is important in two different aspects. It reaches us as the voice of the epoch when impressions of far travels and overseas discoveries were fresh and agitated curiosity, the epoch particularly rich with talks about striking, sometimes fantastically exaggerated, variety of manners. What is significant is that Descartes drew his conclusions by no means in favor of the uncompromising empiricism of his elder co-founder of the new philosophy, Francis Bacon, who described this diversity of manners as no more than the variously decorated "idols of the crowd", overshadowing the reality of experience which unveils itself only to the unvarnished eye of the investigator, after scientifically controlled experiment.

On the contary, for Descartes, his observation of the varity of manners was only the last step before falling into doubt about the legitimacy of his "metacultural" claim to see reality as it is. He was far from scoffing at strange customs as deceptive fantasies; he acknowledged their reality and ranked his own mental habits alongside, and possibly below theirs—as his mind was open enough to learn from other cultures. What a striking contrast indeed, with Bacon, the forefather of the modern "objectifying empiricism" and with epistemological attitudes so paradoxically predominant among professional anthropologists of today. Butg Kroeber and Kluckhohn are quite right: Descartes was not just a "curious onlooker of cultural variety".He was the first who recognized a kind of philosophical problem that is posed in cultural relativism, and thus proved anthropology possible as a science: Insofar as "strange manners" are objectively different, they can be investigated.

Now to the second aspect: the subject of scientific consciousness.The progenitor of modern phenomenology considered two sides of the problem. Understanding of a culture can differ not only because cultures themselves are different but also owing to the variability of the explorer's comprehension of the same cultural content when different methods are used. Properly speaking, Descartes was more preoccupied with the second possibility than with the first. So he can be considered a founder of the philosophy and methodology of anthropological science which, quite symptomatically, emerged before the science itself did.

He tirelessly pondered over many things which could be called into question until he finally stopped before the only thing which looked indubitable, that is, doubting itself. Then Descartes tried to scrutinize its existence, in the two basic modes of "extension" and "thinking", the second being acceptable as certain, (because it was certainly a "doubting thinking") while the first only as contingent (because the "extension" of doubting is always uncertain). Thus, for Descartes, the variety of cultures, though objective, is just a contingency, while the explorer's subjective doubting about each of them is evidential.

But here Descartes happened to meet the opponent who nearly forced him to take the just introduced division back. Thomas Hobbes translated and published in London, in 1680, "The Six Metaphysical Meditations" of Descartes, with sixteen letters appended containing his critical remarks and accompanied by Descartes' answers. In his criticisms, Hobbes repeatedly stated that an intently directed thought is immediately materialized by its extension—and that makes its existence doubtful, no less radically than the existence of "non-thought" material things (which incidentally can be someone else's previously materialized "extensions" of intentional thinking, of even previously expressed thoughts of the same subject.) Hobbes, the founder of political science snd stout supporter of "nominalistic voluntarism" in philosophical interpretation, pointed out that:

...we collect by reasoning nothing of or concerning the nature of things, but of the names of things, that is to say, we only discover whether or not we join the names of things according to the agreements which at pleasure we have made concerning their significations; if it be so (and so it may be) ratiocination will depend on words, words on imagination, and perhaps imagination, as also sense, on the motion of corporeal parts of an organic body.³

In response to this objection, Descartes seemed almost ready to take his suggestion on cultural relativism back, or more properly and meaningfully, he confined it to the sphere of language only:

...There is in ratiocination, a conjunction not only of words, but of things signified by words; and I much admire that the contrary could possibly enter any man's thoughts; for whoever doubted but that a Frenchman and a German may argue about the same things, though they use very different words and does not the Philosopher dispreove himself when he speaks of the agreements which at pleasure we have made concerning the significations of words? For if he grants that something is signified by words, why will he not admit that our ratiocinations are rather about this something, than about words only?⁴

But was it not doubting things that made it possible for Descartes to recognize some of them (the manners) as "cultural" facts? It was not the suggestive activity of his thinking that created them as such, but it was his qualified readiness comprehend that necessitated his capacity to judge about them as such.

Let us take a simple example. The proposition 2×2=4, is not a statement of cultural fact. But the judgment, "I know (or: "It is necessary", ..., probably, ..., etc.), 2×2=4" is comprehensible as a statement of cultural fact: because of the qualified type of judging attitude, i.e. owing to the modality of the judgment. Some would probably argue that statements like "I know that..." as well as notions of knowledge, are merely redundant, a kind of "information noise" rather than inculcations of "objective facts". But that is not true. These statements are signifiers of the particular fact that the subject of investigation had assimilated and transcended his subject-matter in a ready-to-report manner.

But what then, if his very "transcendability" is doubted, as in the case of cultural relativism of all possible modalities of that kind. Does it mean calculation of probabilities of the cultural relativism of all possible ways of realization of certain facts as "cultural"? Probably not. But perhaps, the accomplishment of this observation would reproduce the structure of the anthropologist's consciousness, not the individual of course, but as the notion socialized into science: a double of the explored variety of cultures and explorative operations anticipates and imitates each of them in various ways, thus making the investigation of the real variety somewhat useless.

This second aspect of cultural relativism has hitherto escaped the attention of cultural anthropologists. In even the most sophisticated version of cognitive (ethics/emics)⁵ and structural anthropology,⁶ the mentality of the investigating subject is stiffened dogmatically in a mono-modal representation of its relation to a self-evident empiricity. Cartesian doubt never touches it, and is never turned against its integrity.

There certainly must be objective reasons for this neglect, and they can easily be found. As a matter of fact, the modalization of judgment which, as it was noticed above, is the only way of distinguishing some facts as "cultural", can never bring forth knowledge by itself. Kant was the first who epitomized this circumstance in his "Critique of Judgment". Only loosely associated observations of taste and purpose can be drawn instead.⁷ Many anthropologists have since certified that Kant was right in his conclusions.

Thus the representatives of the school of "cultural relativism" (Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovitz) tried quite outspokenly to approach other cultures with the criteria of taste. What is even more notable, the same criteria were applied to extimation both of their field findings and of their theoretical generalizations.⁸ On the other side of the spectrum, we meet with the rigorous functionalist anthropology whose basic postulates are just slightly reformulated teleological judgments.⁹ But neither the first nor the second extreme can provide knowledge of another culture. What they report is just a set of "either/or" judgments of taste and purpose, while quite non-discriminating as to their own modalization. Nobody can tell where the uncertainty of fact belongs, whether to the cultural thing or to the culturing mentality. So far, modern anthropology is still unable to provide scientific knowledge in the strict sense, either of other cultures or of its own method.

It seems, however, that the cognitive and structural anthropology must be exempted, because they rest on, and are concerned with the linguistic and language-like aspects of culture. And even Descartes acknowledged the legitimacy of language relativism. But if someone ever succeeds in correlating all cultural facts with the linguistic calculus of modal judgments about these facts, he will thereby turn cultural facts back into the extra-cultural existence of explicit things, as soon as the last "I know that..." is removed. Thus every attempt at modal logic is concluded by reducing it to the non-modal kind.¹⁰ What is the real subtext of this necessity? from where did doubt and modalized judgments appear?

Kant, in the same "Critique", pointed out that, simply, judgments of taste and purpose spring up where the difference in tastes and purposes is unavoidable, i.e. due to the principle of multipositionality at work. This state of affairs is again, two-sided. For example, in the case of judgment about cultures: There are many of them (at least two, a culture of the investigator and a culture of the investigated), as well as of judgments about one culture and its possible realizations. In so far as this relativism is internally duplicated, it cannot be eliminated from our knowledge.

Anthropologists have learned with difficulty how to copw with the plurality of cultures. They come armed with the plainly positivistic, comparativist methods of detecting diffusions and borrowings, as well as with the quasimetaphysical, universalistic postulates of functionalism and "strict" structuralist models. But they are still unable to overcome the inner inconsistency of their investigatory position. From this side, the discipline of anthropology grows sporadically. Until some new "facts" are found which disprove the previously held theory, or until some new conception dawns on some lucky anthropologist, which entails a change in the treatment of the old "facts" to the degree that the previous theory, having once been satisfactory, becomes on the contrary, unapproachable, i.e. "non-falsifiable" by the same facts.¹¹ Of course things can be settled one way or another by splitting the anthropological discipline into two or many different sciences, or by giving up its epistemological commitments and their replacement by aesthetic, socially functional, and other incentives. But all these moves cannot overshadow the basic fact of non-realization of the subjective, modal relativism of anthropology itself.

Attempts at a new approach to the process of doubting and the phenomenon of modalized consciousness were undertaken by Edmund Husserl.¹² In his "Experience and Judgment" we find the following description of the "ego which is at odds with itself":

'Poly-ego-ism' underlying the nature of the doubting modalized consciousness is a disagreement of the ego with itself. It is here no longer a question of the mere phenomenon of the cleavage of perception, but of a disagreement of the ego with itself, though a disagreement founded and motivated by these passive occurrences. The ego is now at odds with itself, is in dissension with itself, inasmuch as it is inclined to believe now this, now that. This being-inclined, then, does not merely signify the affective pull of the attracting possibilities; rather they attract me in their being, and I go along now with one, now with the other, in an active position-taking which to be sure, is obstructed again and again. This going-along-with of the ego is motivated by the weight of the possibilities themselves. These possibilities, as attractions, issue in a tendency toward judgment, which I actively followed for a certain time, and which entails that I bring about something like a momentary personal decision in its favor. But then, in consequence of the effective claims of the opposing possibilities, I remain stuck fast... This being-inclined-to as an impulse to act; an inclination to act as a feeling-oneself-drawn into an act of judging thus or so, belongs to the phenomena of reaching out, tending, of striving in the broader sense and must be distinguished from the position-taking of the ego, from the act of judgingg, which (as in active doubt) may be accomplished only momentarily, but by which I espouse one of the two sides... The ego, as it were, goes along part way in the accomplishment, but it does not go all the way to firm resolution of belief.¹³

Here, as at a focal point, two different faces of the problem are superimposed, with this description (which is, indeed, nothing more than a description so far) projected against the problem of anthropological understanding. Two alternative moves can be foreseen: either into the dull infinitude of psychoanalysis (fortunately there seem to be no more volunteers) or into the new fashionable games of the anthropologist with his one and indivisible self. (That is probably why Wittgenstein, the genius of truisms, is getting so popular among anthropologists nowadays. No wonder. His advice is "not to think")¹⁴ In any case, it is clear that no accumulation of scientific knowledge is possible with the investigatory position devoid of its inner cultural reflection. Just another endless version of Hamlet's situation...

In order to realize this situation as a "cultural" fact, here it is proposed to consider the "planned misfit understanding" within the anthropological approach. Anthropology is a moderns science and, like all modern scientific disciplines, it rests on the "presumption of understanding". According to this presumption, there can be no facts which ever escape comprehension: at least by someone, in some specific position, some time and in some part.

But, a considerable part of modern anthropology consists in studies of traditional societies. Besides being a new science, it is useful from time to time to consider itself related to a certain scientific tradition. So it would not do harm to find out what makes the traditionalist mentality so different from the modernist outlook. Both the theoretical and pragmatic activity of traditionalist thinking rests, on the "presumption of misfit understanding". According to this second presumption, there must be some things which always escape understanding: at least by _any_body from any position, any time, in any part.

The anthropologist is not invited thereby to imitate his respondents and forerunners. But the basic congeniality of the "inner" anthropological problem and the "presumption of misfit understanding" is noticeable. This congeniality is objective and being such, it necessitates introduction of the "planned misfit understanding" into the anthropological method.

If anthropologists refuse to introduce it, Hobbes will supersede Descartes in their three-centuries-long duel, and political science will engulf anthropology just as it has almost devoured sociology. For sociologists were more reckless in their bare methodological issues and bare concern with "social facts". To get this revision, a special domain of anthropological studies should be demarcated. It must be revised for models fo realization of the above-described situation. This would be a subject-matter of the "misfit-understanding" anthropology.

The operation of its models can be compared to the principle of uncertainty in physics, and their incentive, to the productive force of "avidya" ('ne-science') in Advaita Vedānta. But these comparisons are good only as initial landmarks. Consequently, all the cultural facts are to be composed as correlative to a few axial working principles. There is no more need to doubt these principles, in their turn, as initial facts, for they are to be deliberately introduced as 'doubtful', controversial ones, and this makes their double-doubting redundant. For that very reason, their study must constitute an inherent and unalienable subject of a reformed anthropology.

To prove this, let us place anthropology among some related disciplines. Thus, theology is the actual discipline concerned with definite cultural statements. Linguistics is interested in those phenomena and processes of communication which are indefinite in principle, i.e. usually fail to become facts of realization. Hence this discipline cannot be complementary to theology, but can easily complement anthropology. Political science and sociology ignore both definite cultural statements and indefinite facts. History, of course, should not be missing from this list of comparables.

Its disciplinary function (which is certainly different from the feeling of "lived history") consists in studying possibilities (i.e. social dynamics, in the etypmological meaning of "dynamics" as possibility) rather than actualities (which are bound to social activity and thus belong to anthropology) of arrangement of the totality of cultural facts grouped around some particular axial principle. In this case, the power and order of every grouping would completely determine the concreteness of its individuals: which is the main ambition of the science of history as the "idiographic" discipline.

Now philosophy alone seems missing from our list. But its subject matter, though being critical and reflective and in these aspects somewhat resembling the principle of "misfit understanding", is not specifically associated with the studies of culture. Philosophers must be preoccupied with philosophy itself, rather than with the "philosophical consciousness" naturalizing itself in various critical realizations of other disciplines. With this latter consideration in mind, it should be stated with all possible clarity that that our anthropology of "planned misfit understanding" must be different from what is called "dialectical" anthropology, mainly because the anthropological method, rather than the matter of understanding is the basic issue of its concern; and for this reason, anthropology cannot be subordinate to either to pure philosophy or to ideological considerations.

Of course, anthropological thinking, once doubt is accepted into its inner constitution and transformed therin into a method, cannot help but reflect its own controversied by way of splitting "facts" before approaching them, in this sense, regardless of whether the nature of the facts themselves is controversial or not. This thinking can be easily branded as "conflicting", "antithetical", etc., and "planned misfit understanding" can be mistaken for a paronymic of "contradiction" in thinking about nature itself.

But in this case, this reflective thinking, though being pure negativity in itself, is only able to activize itself after our insistence, as a negativity doubting even this very negativity rather than denying cultural facts. Only after that doubting being is taken into itself, may it return to the facts and thus take them positively, critically, or dialectically. To prove the specificity of anthropology as a scientific discipline appropriating the self-critical and in-advance-of-itself-critical understanding as crucial for its demarcation from an "anthropologizing philosophy", especially the dialectical one, let us take an excursion into Hegel's treatment of the same problem of Understanding, which, as we shall see, is axial for anthropology as a science sui generis.

In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel places Understanding as a mediatory link between Perception and Consciousness, with its own and their contradictions being negated and sublated into the idea of Self-Consciousness. Now how does this Understanding work?

Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with the _character of familiarity. To break up an idea into its ultimate elements means returning upon its moments, which at least do not have the form of the given idea when found, but are the immediate property of the self. Doubtless this analysis only arrives at thoughts which are themselves familiar elements, fized inert determinations. But what is thus separated, and in a sense is unreal, is itself an essential moment, for just because the concrete fact is self-divided, and turns into unreality, it is something self-moving, self-active. The action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle which is self-enclosed and at rest, and, qua substance, holds its own moments, is an immediate relation, the immediate, continuous relation of elements with their unity, and hence arouses no sense of wonderment. But that an accident as such, when cut loose from its continuous circumference—that which is bound and held by something else and actual only by being connected with it—should obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and independence on its own account—this is the portentious power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of pure ego.¹⁵

This interpretation looks in some aspects similar to the phenomenological description of the radically doubtingt "ego at odds with itself", but actually, its conceptual treatment is different. Here, Understanding is opposed to the nature of fact, while in Husserl's phenomenology, understanding, even though impaired by doubt, is treated as a natural fact about consciousness itself. In terms of the philosophy of the Notion, the subjective activity of Understanding meets its objective counterpart in Force of Nature, or in the case of anthropology, of Culture.

Thus, the action of forces of culture, i.e. cultural norms, is objectively the same in its relation to the unity of differences which is being subjectively realized when the mind understands about the circle and its parts or elements. Force is a self-conditioned principle of unity; the differences are the "expressions of force", the unity evolves the differences out of itself. Understanding similarly is a self-conditioned process; it consists in reducing differences to "explaining" these differences from itself. Owing to this parallelism of performance, Understanding insists on the establishment of a "kingdom of laws" in nature or culture, which is in its entirety the meaning of the world so far as Understanding goes.

But, if there is a failure in understanding, this automatism would induce the understanding mind to intrude and "correct" the natural state of affairs in some other culture, i.e. Understanding is bieng transformed into Force, and the commitment to scientific objectivity is abandoned. The secret of this too easy transformation is, that, from the "scientific" point of view (i.e. philosophically speaking, from the point of view of Kantianism, positivistically oriented and replete with logicism), "laws" per se are looked on as an inner realm, which merely "appears" in the detailed particulars which those laws control, and in which those laws are made manifest. The differences, in fact, are "phenomena", the laws themselves are behind the scenes. The world as a whole thus becomes distinguished into a realm of phenomena and the realm of noumena.

These two realms set a new problem to the mind, and must again be brought together in a more complete way than understanding can do. This new state of consciousness is self-consciousness. But if self-consciousness unites two positions, the empirical and the theoretical, it is also free to judge what is "regularity" and even to impose its own preconditions upon external reality. This for example is, exactly what happened, as some assure us, when the theoreticians of the British school of social anthropology extended their theoretical presuppositions (functionalism as a method of understanding) into the field of force—and thus identified themselves as functionaries and defenders of the British colonial administration.

In this role it is only natural for them to abandon their previous, "theoretical" position of passive understanding of other cultures, in order to "regulate" the corresponding societies in the functionalist's preconditions. Perhaps many functionalists themselves would deny this transformation. But we have a much more convincing example of the unmasked transfusion of Understanding into a Cultural Force, exactly in accordance with a Hegelian scheme, in the case of Soviet "cultural engineering". That was the most radical attempt of "understanding" other cultures by forcing them to change without any functionalist commitments. The attempt was not only controversial in its external, objective consequences, but also very dramatic for anthropology itself as a science, which was arrested for a few decates at the primitive "ethnographic" stage.¹⁶

Now it must be clear that the chain of "regularity" and convertible correspondence between Understanding and Force can be broken without damaging the scientific status of anthropology, only if this is performed within the science itself, by the device of "planned misfit understanding" as a quite legitimate and fruitful way for anthropology to extricate itself from the immanent temptation of "cultural imperialism". This means turning the anthropological mind towards its own culture. The more critically and forcefully the anthropologists doubt their own society and, in the microcosm-macrocosm way, their own anthropological community within that society, the better it can be both for anthropologists and for society. Anthropology would be disciplined in its method and society would be taught to respect other cultures.

As for the first aspect, it must be clear that the "planned misfit understanding" constitutes an inherent distinction and structuring feature of the anthropologist's mentality rather than of the discipline itself. Figuratively speakng, it is an inner springwhich repeatedly impes the anthropologist tolook into other cultures not only for "facts" but for motives for doing his science. For Descartes, the fact of the variety of manners was the final stroke that turned his thoughts toward "radical doubt". In a similar way, the anthropologist, who departs more or less deliberately for other cultures in search of what seems important to his doubting mind, can penetrate into them only to the degree of his doubt being respondent.

Thus for example, Clifford Geertz drew the concept of a religion as a cultural system from a series of facts—irreconcilable cognitive, physical, and moral contradictions—which aroused doubts; and concluded his analysis with a most explicit statment that that the only way to "think" towards an understanding of other cultures is a symbol-free readiness of the anthropologist to grasp the cultural facts as they are displayed by the informants and thus to enter the culture as deeply as he is invited to (cf. in particular his "think" description of "kapar", the gesture of fear among Balinese).¹⁷

This, of course, is only one possible resolution for the doubting mind, in the plain apodictic sense. Victor Turner resolved it differently by placing the socio-psychological conflict in the sources of the cultural organization of ritual. From this, he inferred the notion of "anti-structure", as not implying "structure" as something demosntrable at all. The locus and source of the "antithetical" cultural conflicts are always hypothetical both for the subjects of culture and the anthropologist, but the deontic force of conflict is beyond doubt.¹⁸

Milton Singer found the most natural approach to the understanding of culture in those situations where the participants themselves are aware of the artificial and deliberate nature of their actions and explain them to the anthropologist correspondingly, i.e. as "cultural performances". Hence the anthropologist never touches the "reality": he always has to hypothesize what seems to be performed and explained as the "cultural meaning" taken as such by the performers.¹⁹

These three theoretical approaches, different as they are, still have something in common. This "something" is a striving towards a "positional relativism", towards taking a displaced position for understanding the strange culture by learning beforehand how to understand. That is why we find them corresponding to the first, and the most indespinsible, step in "radical doubt" turned upon itself. The specific importance of this step, as liberating the mind from dogmatism and customary ways of thinking, was also stressed by Descartes. He recollected that, "...while travelling, having realized that all those who have attitudes very different from our own are not for that reason barbarians or savages but are as rational or more so than ourselves, and having considered how greatly the self-same person with the self-same mind who had grown up from infancy among the French or Germans would become different from what he would have been if he had always lived among the Chinese or the cannibals... I found myself forced to try myself to see things from their point of view".²⁰

But the spring can propel only if it is wound in the opposite direction. There is another possibility hidden in the anthropological mentality which still remains unnoticed and unappreciated in terms of its own worth. This is a peculiar ability to be repelled by a certain treatment of material, to avoid unilateral judgment on the problems under consideration. Take, for example, the immediate reactive movement towards "impressionism" which arose from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's attempts to mathematize the concept of "social-structure"²¹ or from C. Levi-Strauss' logistic exercises in "dual oppositions".²² These reactions imparted an adverse moment in the development of anthropological thought.

But the same "counterpoint" in this development becomes by far more meaningful and important for anthropology when associated with the specific critical reactions agains the "Western parochialism" of anthropological theory itself. Shortly after the appearance of Louis Dumont's "Homo Hierarchicus", based on the structural analysis of Indian caste society, it was followed by a host of critical rejoinders and doubts about the applicability to Indian civilization of such typically western contrapositions as "authority" and "power", "hierarchy" and "equality", "individualism" and "wholism"; "democracy" and "totalitarianism", etc.²³²⁴ All these objections are quite legitimate and make sense of a greater appeal to the indigenous ways of understanding other cultures. But they also have another motive, usually overshadowed: to preserve the state of the "ego at odds with itself" by overruling the universalistic solutions which would eradicate doubt. Quite naturally, the crucial reflective step should be taken right here. It must consist in casting doubt on such and similar constrapositions not only as applicable to Indian civilization but to the Western one as well. And this would mean exactly the "planned misfit understanding" of one's own cultural position.

Learning one's culture by its critical sublation: this peculiar anthropological asceticism must be the second step of "radical doubt". Otherwise the anthropological discipline will be reduced to imitating the non-congenial creation of a phony "polycultural mess", and to borrowing "analogs" and methods from other sciences. All these are links of the same chain. It should be remembered that when Roberto de Nobili appeared before the Madurai Brahmins, with his head shaved and clad in the Brahmic robe but preaching the Gospels, he was rejected not because he poorly imitated a brahmin or was not covnersant both in the Brahmanic philosophy and his Gospel (he succeeded very much in both), but because he was branded a poor Christian.

The creation of a self-sufficient and self-respecting anthropology is apparently on the agenda. It must include a study of infrastructures of the discipline, i.e. of the modal alternatives of a "planned misfit understanding" of the previously studied facts, and must also give due consideration to the uncertainty of the anthropologist's investigatory position, both in the sense of "role complementarity" and division of the epistemic functions within the body of unified science, as well as in the sense of a qualification of anthropology's "cultural individuality", which is as it were, incomprehensible by itself, until it arrives at the moment of "knowing the Other". The essential attainment would be a realization of the methodological project first drafted by Descartes. "Radical doubt", if practiced by anthropologists in the situation of both "outer" and "inner" cultural relativism, would result in the maturation of their science, relieved from the fetters of emmpiricism and positivism, and transformed by a "planned misfit understanding".

Notes

Footnotes

1. Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, 1952, 'Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions', Harvard University Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology Papers 47(1), Cambridge, Mass. ↩

2. Rene Descartes, 1904, Discourse de la methode, Ouvres de Descartes, publieés par Ch. Adam et P. Tannéry, t. IV Paris. ↩

3. Thomas Hobbes, 1680, Six Metaphysical Meditations by Renatus Descartes with Objections of Sir Thomas Hobbes, Lonon, pp. 126-127. ↩

4. Ibid., pp. 127-128. ↩

5. F.G. Lounsbury, 1965, 'Another view of the Trobriand Kinship categories', in: American Anthropologist 67(5), Part 2 (special publication), Formal Semantic Analysis, E.A. Hammel (ed.). ↩

6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1963, Structural Anthropology, Basic Books, New York. ↩

7. Immanual Kant, 1915, Critique of Judgment, translated by Bernard, London. ↩

8. Alfred R. Lindesmith and Anselm L. Strauss, 1950, 'A Critique of Culture-Personality writings', in: American Sociological Review 15, October, 1950. ↩

9. Karl Hempel, 1965, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays, in: The Philosophy of Science, New York. ↩

10. B. Donchenko, 1964, 'Modal Logic', in: The Philosophical Encyclopedia 3, Moscow. ↩

11. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, 1959. ↩

12. Edmund Husserl, 1972, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson, New York, London: Collier Books, pp. 104-139. ↩

13. Edmund Husserl, 1973, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 303. ↩

14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1968, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, New York: The Macmillan Co. ↩

15. G.W.F. Hegel, 1967, The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J.B. Baillie, New York: Harper Colophon Books, pp. 92-93. ↩

16. David B. Zilberman, 1976, 'Ethnography in the Communist Society', in: Dialectical Anthropology 1(2), Winter 1976, pp. 135-160. ↩

17. Clifford Geertz, 1966, 'Religion as a Cultural System', in Michael Bandon (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Relgion, London: Tavistock; New York: Praeger. ↩

18. Victor W. Turner, 1969, The Ritual Process, London, New York. ↩

19. Milton Singer, 1968, 'Culture', in: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York: The Macmillan Co. and The Free Press. ↩

20. René Descartes, op. cit. ↩

21. David B. Zilberman, 1971, 'Social Anthropology: The Dynamics of Development and Perspectives', in Voprosy filosofii 2, Moscow. ↩

22. Bob Scholte, 1971, 'Penelopean Efforts of Claude Levi Strauss', in: Ethnology 4. ↩

23. Louis Dumont, 1970, Homo Hierarchicus, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ↩

24. McKim Marriott and Ronald B. Inden, (in press), An Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems. ↩