Arguments for humility: lessons for anthropologists from six texts

Journal article

In support of a lean and humble anthropology I discuss six key articles that provide indirect arguments for humility. In summary, these articles teach us that the terms of a discussion may be flawed and cannot be resolved by agreeing shared meanings (Gallie); we must accept limits on what we can know (Nagel); depictions, visual representations are potentially confusing, forms of translation across media types are ubiquitous; (Wolf); portraits are exemplary performances of the self, even the most casual depictions are of the act of posing; (Berger); varying meanings may be associated with a single item, which may convey different things to different people in different places and at different times (Miller and Woodward); and that accounts of a social group and its ideas must encompass vagueness and inconsistency rather than present a misleading coherence and consistency (Favret-Saada). Together these provide reasons for developing a humble anthropology, one that recognizes its incompleteness and revisability.

Authors: Zeitlyn, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 31-46
• Publication date: 2022-01-01
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nzaye5rov
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: vagueness; humility; sparsity; meaning; JASO