Relationship, connection, and engagement have emerged as key values in recent studies of human–animal relations. In this article, I call for a reexamination of the productive aspects of detachment. I trace ethnographically the management of everyday relations between biologists and the Kalahari meerkats they study, and I follow the animals’ transformation as subjects of knowledge and engagement when they become the stars of an internationally popular, televised animal soap opera. I argue that treating detachment and engagement as polar opposites is unhelpful both in this ethnographic case and, more broadly, in anthropological discussions of ethics and knowledge making. [human–animal relations, science, media, ethics, engagement, detachment]
The article offers a sympathetic critique of the original formulations of multi‐local/multi‐sited ethnography. The ‘multi‐sited imaginary’ values unboundedness and promotes methodological freedom, but it also implies a problematic reconfiguration of holism (on a grander scale). Whereas these formulations were extremely productive in straining against certain methodological rigidities, their very success in breaking down ‘boundaries’ has given rise to new problems in the doing and writing of ethnography. Written from the perspective of a recent Ph.D. graduate and first‐time fieldworker, the article suggests we reconsider the value of self‐imposed limitations, of boundedness as a methodological tool. What role did the bounded field‐site play for its so‐called ‘traditional’ practitioners in social/cultural anthropology? What role could it play for anthropologists who have taken on board the precepts of multi‐sitedness? Based on a case study from my own fieldwork in Corsica, I argue that we could think of boundedness (paradoxically) as a productive way of challenging holisms and deferring closure. The bounded field‐site, rethought as an ‘arbitrary location’, becomes an explicitly ‘partial’ and incomplete window onto complexity.
Anthropology has been largely absent from the recent explosion of interdisciplinary enthusiasm with hospitality across philosophy, political science, and cultural studies. Yet anthropology's living engagement with hospitality has been far deeper than that of any other discipline. This essay, which introduces the volume, aims to revitalize hospitality as a frontier area of theoretical development in anthropology by highlighting the topic's connections to some of our discipline's most vibrant themes and concerns: ethical reasoning, materiality, temporality and affect, alterity and cosmopolitics, sovereignty and scale. Résumé L'anthropologie a été la grande absente du récent engouement interdisciplinaire pour l'hospitalité qui a fédéré philosophie, politologie et études culturelles. Son engagement concret sur cette question est pourtant beaucoup plus profond que celui de toute autre discipline. Le présent essai, qui préface le volume, vise à raviver l'hospitalité en tant que zone frontière du développement théorique en anthropologie, en mettant en lumière ses liens avec certains des thèmes les plus vivants de notre discipline : raisonnement éthique, matérialité, temporalité et affect, altérité et cosmopolitique, souveraineté et échelle.
This comment on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's article, “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology,” considers his definition of what it means to “take seriously” the world of the other, which he regards as the quintessential anthropological move. It means leaving the other's world in a state of suspended possibility, avoiding either belief or disbelief, assent or dissent. Candea's piece draws out the logic of the complementary and inverse move that grounds Viveiros de Castro's stance: “not taking seriously” the world of the “same,” in this case, that of Western intellectuals such as Richard Rorty or Gilles Deleuze. Here “not taking seriously” involves (somewhat counterintuitively) argument, agreement and disagreement, rejection or adoption, of different visions. Candea identifies this controlled asymmetry between treatments of “us” and “them” as the major distinction between Viveiros de Castro's position and an older relativism, a difference that shields the former from the classic “self-refutation charge.” But this controlled asymmetry in turn raises the question of how we are to identify which visions we as anthropologists ought to take seriously and which we ought not to: where, in other words, do we draw the line, procedurally, between “us” and “them”? Candea argues that keeping this problematic and perhaps irresolvable question in view is the specific role of an “endo-anthropology” (the impossible figure of an “anthropology at home”), which is the necessary counterpart of Viveiros de Castro's “exo-anthropology.”
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