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nearly there...not that you cared
Jul. 11th, 2010 02:34 pmReading Richard Shweder's Thinking through Cultures somewhat more rigorously than I read it in the late 1990s, alongside Wade Davis' popularly aimed Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures, I think more than ever than I can make a case for the ad hoc multiculturalism of mystical groups in ancient zones of cultural collision.
I replace an appalling sentence here with the simpler note that my own methodology probably owes a lot to my semi-remembered reading of his book a decade or more ago, but since I didn't get that far and never returned to it, most of my subsequent insights come from other, parallel thinkers.
Shweder's downloadable essay "Antipostculturalism (Or, The View from Manywheres)" makes the methodological case for his position, while summarizing the various dominant schools of anthropology against which he is contending. He holds a professorship at a major university, and his syntheses are perceptive but require a slow and alert reading in order to follow the nuances of the argument. Hence it would be silly to start summarizing his positions and the data underpinning them. I would inevitably misrepresent something.
"The knowable world is incomplete when seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular." This does not quite address the three Kantian questions, "What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?" but it provides a point from which to start, in what Shweder calls "post-Nietzschean anthropology."
Why he calls it post-Nietzschean, I'll leave for you to find out, those of you who care about the subject.
The further in you go, the bigger it gets.
( * )
I replace an appalling sentence here with the simpler note that my own methodology probably owes a lot to my semi-remembered reading of his book a decade or more ago, but since I didn't get that far and never returned to it, most of my subsequent insights come from other, parallel thinkers.
Shweder's downloadable essay "Antipostculturalism (Or, The View from Manywheres)" makes the methodological case for his position, while summarizing the various dominant schools of anthropology against which he is contending. He holds a professorship at a major university, and his syntheses are perceptive but require a slow and alert reading in order to follow the nuances of the argument. Hence it would be silly to start summarizing his positions and the data underpinning them. I would inevitably misrepresent something.
"The knowable world is incomplete when seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular." This does not quite address the three Kantian questions, "What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?" but it provides a point from which to start, in what Shweder calls "post-Nietzschean anthropology."
Why he calls it post-Nietzschean, I'll leave for you to find out, those of you who care about the subject.
The further in you go, the bigger it gets.
( * )
