Anthropos today: reflections on modern equipment by Paul Rabinow

Author:Paul Rabinow [Rabinow, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sociology, Social Science, Anthropology - Methodology, Culture - Semiotic models, Philosophy, Methodology, General, Anthropology, Culture, Cultural, Civilization, Semiotic models, Anthropology - Philosophy, History
ISBN: 9780691115665
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2003-12-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Form

There are two human discoveries that are rightly referred to as the most difficult of all: the art of governing men, and that of educating them; and meanwhile we are still debating their ideas

—Immanuel Kant

The anthropology that concerns me is one that is practically and essentially mediated by a form of actual experience. There have been different names given to the practice that grounds anthropology in empirical work. The names from the past—fieldwork, participant observation—are no longer adequate to the practice I am seeking to conceptualize. Regardless of how one might best characterize this practice (a topic to which I return below), it eventually passes through one or another form of figuration, especially writing. The traditional name for that practice of figuration is ethnography, but that term is inadequate and misleading, at least as concerns my enterprise. The kind of anthropology I am undertaking does not make ethnic groups its primary objects of study. Rather, as we have seen, it concerns a different range of objects (problematizations, apparatuses, assemblages) and entails a mode that puts the self, in its relationship to itself, to others, and to things, in motion as well as in question. The challenge of form, therefore, is how to bring these diverse aspects together. This challenge includes the practice of inquiry in its experiential dimension. It also includes the dimension of ethnography that I do want to retain: the writing dimension. The graph of ethos, logos, and pathos constitutes a privileged site for inquiry and experimentation.

Immanuel Kant, Réflexions sur l’éducation, trans. Alexis Philonenko (Paris: J. Vrin, 1993), p. 78.

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