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PREFACE

I

The problem set that serves to guide my work centers on the basic anthropological question of what makes human beings tick. For me, that question is posed best in terms of how humans do what they do rather than why. By formulating the question in this way, I bracket the matter of motivation, putting it aside. I thus wittingly pre-judge the answer to my question and highlight the irony of asking what makes human beings tick. If motivation, in the causal sense of the term, is a secondary consideration only, then specifically human conduct is in the end incomprehensible in terms of one thing or part moving another. Rather, it must be grasped ‘holistically’, as self-movement of a peculiar kind, the kind in which, oxymoronically, ‘free will’ remains tied to external agency. The movement that concerns me, then, belongs at bottom not to a clock but to a kind of self.

Logically, such movement, where cause and effect are both different from and identical to each other, is exemplarily paradoxical. This circumstance obliges the anthropologist to investigate basic self-identifying, which is to say, the meanings imprisoned in our actions. Such lived or tacit meanings implicate self-identifying because they disclose the sense of our selves—personal, social, and cultural—as this sense, exhibiting a hopeless ambiguity, is both determinate of and given in action. Insofar as it is determining, the sense of self is understood to effect the action; insofar as it is given, the sense of self is seen as informed by the action. In either case, though, to reintroduce the paradox, the sense of self is only imperfectly distinguishable from the action and therefore always imperfect or open to one degree or another. But given its intrinsically purposeful nature, the sense of self is what gives meaning to and makes immediate sense of the action.

In view of the focus on self-identity as it is imprisoned in action, my approach is, I suppose, an anthropology of practice. This approach pictures practice, though, as a matter of ethics before anything else, including power and aesthetics. It features the manner in which the self conducts itself toward the ‘other’, that is, toward that which fundamentally enables the self. In effect, although I neither doubt the ultimate primacy of the other and the historical and contingent nature of our existence, nor fail to keep this primacy in observant account, for purposes of grasping what makes us tick as humans, I privilege the constitutionally limited or ambiguous way in which we, both individually and collectively, create ourselves and discharge our inescapable responsibility. In other words, in measured reaction to the essential but also, in serious part, befogging thrust of social science as science, to the mechanical move to explain, whether through causal or motivational relations, social phenomena, I want to bring into prominent account the relative bearing of the inexplicable moment of responsible or human agency on these phenomena. If personhood marks the intersection of self and other, of constituting and constituted activity, then I aim to highlight the element of personal agency that somehow emerges on that ecliptic plane, where the creative moment corresponding to the uttering or thinking of ‘I’ results in, to evoke Durkheim's singular insight, an act of moral being.

By ‘ethics’ I intend primarily not the scholastic department of philosophy that goes by that name, but the creative and paradoxically natural conduct whereby humans together determine their own good, thus informing themselves and their world, both wittingly and not, with second nature or value. By taking ethics and ‘otherness’ in tandem, I suggest that anthropology is by its very nature ethics, for otherness is one notion without which anthropological inquiry makes little if any sense.

Regarding anthropology as ethics does not mean that empirical research is not also necessary to the anthropological enterprise. On the contrary, in part what makes anthropology unique as ethics is its empirical discipline. But once the primarily ethical nature of anthropology is well and truly registered, ‘empiricism’ cannot abide. That is to say, although the ‘facts’ must be gathered, they never speak for themselves, and whosoever speaks for them always betrays value judgments and ethical determinations. There is, of course, nothing new about the observation that facts demand interpretation, and that interpretation necessarily conveys a particular and therefore value-laden point of view. What is new here is that I take this observation to entail not simply that as social scientists we need to be reflexive, but that we need to rethink the ontological presuppositions of our science.

As it is essentially paradoxical and ambiguous, self-movement demands that the anthropologist revise the received notion of reality in Western thought. That notion not only fails to admit of ambiguity; it positively disallows it. The ontological change I propose, then, is radical. I contend that the only way in which we can satisfactorily address the defining empirical problems of anthropology at their core is by rethinking the very gestalt that serves as the ontological scaffolding on which these problems have been determined.

An ontology that portrays reality as basically ambiguous is markedly out of keeping with ‘ontology’ in the strict sense, which denotes a determinate and entitative reality and is the final target of all postmodernist criticism. But a reality that is fundamentally ambiguous does not break down finally into things in themselves, entities with absolute boundaries. As a result, neither intellectualism nor empiricism, neither idealism nor materialism, can serve in the end to make such a reality perspicuous. These standard theoretical offerings are predicated on the received acceptation of ontology and are therefore ill equipped to entertain ambiguity that is basic.

By the defining empirical problems of anthropology I intend the problems keyed to otherness, whatever their institutional bearing (magic, religion, polity, social organization, etc.). Closely tied to the question of otherness are the consequential problems of today's social theory, problems turning on the antinomies of the relative and the absolute, or of the particular and the universal, and of subject and object, or self and other. For example, in light of the genocidal events and massively destructive military conflagrations of the twentieth as well as the twenty-first century, and of the question of power that arises in their connection, postmodernism has set out to deconstruct the precepts of a universal reason and self-transparent self or subjectivity.

By embracing reality as basically ambiguous, the antinomies implicated by these dire social problems get redefined as nondualisms, such that their principles are both opposed to and continuous with each other. As a result, the principles are neutralized neither by an idealist nor a materialist reconcilement. Instead of abstract logical oppositions, they reappear as profound tensions or vital dynamics. It is a key understanding of the argument of this book that human existence is virtually indistinguishable from these tensions. For anthropological purposes, rather than thinking of humans as a particular kind of physical or even socio-cultural being, a positive object or sheer subject, it is fruitful to consider humans in terms of a constitutionally ambiguous force, the dynamic of which is reflexive. Such a dynamic implicitly identifies itself as a difference between self and other as well as between the relative and the absolute. Put another way, being human amounts to the situational and reflexive negotiation of these and related differences. Given this picture of the human condition, conflict and violence remain endemic. But by contrast to the picture in which self and other are simply opposed to each other, absolute conflict, the kind characterizing the total exclusionism displayed by genocidal activity, becomes logically inconceivable and ethically insane.

There is no proving this picture of human existence. The change of ontology I pro-pose is a matter of conversion, not proof. Nondualism redescribes reality; it does not explain it. Nevertheless, I can offer three good reasons for making the change. First, nondualism offers a practical disciplinary advantage: it allows for a fresh approach to empirical anthropological problems that remain intractable, despite powerful attempts to resolve them. In the present book, I address in particular the abiding anthropological problem of rationality—what used to be called the problem of primitive mentality. Second, nondualism offers a phenomenological advantage: it captures an experiential side of our existence that science cannot acknowledge without exposing the constitutional positivism of the scientific perspective as ultimately a pretense. In this volume, that side of our existence is disclosed in terms of sacrifice and our fundamental otherness to ourselves. Third, nondualism offers an ethical advantage: by allowing genuine value and discretionary activity as givens in any human universe, it revitalizes the ameliorative and irenic force of ethics. In this connection, the present work propounds anthropology as an ethics and projects a selfdom whose boundaries are perceived to connect no less than to separate. Given such an anthropology and selfdom, anchored in paradox and nondualism, and despite the very real efficacy of scientific practice, the world is projected as basically and truly enchanted. I mean by ‘enchantment’ precisely what Weber had in mind when he set out his famous thesis about rationalization and the disenchantment of the world.

II

From the standpoint of method, the anthropology and selfdom I intend call for a strenuous reflexivity. This method instructs one to doubt or throw into question what one ‘knows’. Deploying it, Descartes found, famously, that he was left with his self alone—his “I think” or cogito. Some 325 years later, using the same method, albeit differently, Foucault discerned to the contrary that it is above all the self that misleads and imprisons, and that therefore needs to be undone. Unfortunately, although he catches his philosophical forefather in a flagrant act of self-deception, once it is seen (as Foucault himself came to see, or so I argue in chapters 11-12) that in the theorized absence of some agentially significant sort of selfhood there is nothing to remediate by his own sort of doubt, Foucault's revision also turns out to be less than coherent. What indeed is liberated, we may ask, when one's self is exposed as preponderantly a seductive systemic illusion created by the often demonic (but also productive) and always ubiquitous magician to which Foucault gave the name of power?

As against these two intellectual giants, it seems to me that when it is practiced unfailingly, reflexivity always leaves us in limbo, ever between self and other, such that the self is fixed only in its movement of becoming other to itself. This movement marks an eternal return that reiterates—with a peculiar twist—the essential and dynamic ambiguity of the other. Accordingly, both self and other are reaffirmed as they are cleared away: the other is reaffirmed as ‘other’ or what is irreducible to the self, and the self is reaffirmed as ever under construction (or, what amounts to almost the same thing, deconstruction), in view of its necessary, paradoxical foundation in the other. Whereas the wholly other, being nowhere in particular, is essentially homeless, the self, although positively defined in terms of indwelling or identity, can never quite go home again, because the security of its home has always already been breached as a condition of its being. The peculiar twist mentioned just above in relation to the Nietzschean notion of eternal return consists in the responsibility imposed on the self in the face of its at once limiting but enabling otherness. As a result of this condition of indebtedness, which arises together with reflexivity, the self-other tension and its attendant world of human existence are from their inception matters of ethics.

Using the method of doubt, Descartes—driven by philosophy in the identitarian sense given it by Plato, the sense in which ‘to know’ is always to know a thing in itself (an identity)—sought to arrive at indubitable knowledge or, more exactly, self-certitude. Certain knowledge and self-certain selfhood stand (and fall) together, since the cogito is implicit in the very idea of certain knowledge: how can the predicate be fixed and certain if its subject—that which knows—does not enjoy self-certitude? Foucault, however, having seen, felt, and documented the oppression of such an ‘enlightened’ epistemological regime (and, tellingly, echoing the Judeo-Christian God's punishing ‘critique’ of the First Couple for having fallen headlong for the Serpent's fascinating projection of their very own godlike selves), deployed the same method to expose the Cartesian or self-certain self as a pretense of power. The object of the present methodological exercise in reflexivity is neither exactly to secure nor to debunk the self. The object is, rather, in what I take to be the defining spirit of anthropology, to journey intellectually in search of otherness as it is found in both the other and the self. The idea is to make intelligible, with disciplinary rigor and purposefulness, what is ultimately irreducible to the self.

On the face of it, this endeavor—to make intelligible what is by definition unintelligible, or to reduce the irreducible—would seem self-defeating. But the appearance of unqualified contradiction here is a function of presupposing intelligibility to be nothing but a question of what has before now given the Occidental self its principal bearings, namely, reason in the strict sense. Once we set this formal presupposition aside, it becomes possible to conceive of the process of anthropological translation in terms other than strictly reductionistic ones. The terms I have in mind picture translation as, in a loose sense of the word, dialectical: the particulars of the other are indeed bent to fit those of the self, but not without the latter themselves suffering significant deformation in the process. The anthropologist must attend not only to the negative possibility of ethnocentrism, but also to the positive possibility of eccentrism: having done what he can to decenter himself (his self), the anthropologist opens himself to redefinition in terms of the other. Intelligibility, then, is wrought by virtue of a distinctly creative act, in which the reduction of the other by the self-preserving self is ultimately neutralized rather than finalized. It is neutralized because the self preserves itself only by becoming other to itself, thereby preserving both itself and the other for otherness.

Accordingly, making the other intelligible need not be, and at bottom is not, a question of reducing the other by appealing to reason or any other cognitive medium as a common ground, but rather of fashioning a common ground. The possibility of this immensely creative but utterly quotidian activity certainly has much to do with what obtains beforehand in the way of suppositions and presuppositions—and these, as the hermeneuts tell us, are prejudicial by nature. In view of the history of imperialist enterprise, inasmuch as this enterprise proceeded under the principle of enlightenment, it cannot be doubted that the presumption of reason—though still not, as I argue in this book, without its great and undeniable merits—has wrought damages of horrific impact and colossal proportions. Suppositions and presuppositions make a powerful difference.

More fundamentally, though, the dialectical possibility of generating a common ground does not rest with these pre-existing notions and attitudes, whether or not they comport reason. Instead, it rests with the ontological primacy of self-and-other as an essential tension. Considered as a tension rather than sheer opposition, the self- other relationship shows itself also in terms of continuity. Put another way, by virtue of this relationship people always already, in practice, enjoy a common ground. But in this form, the common ground does not exactly pre-exist: it obtains as a moving dynamic, something ever in the making. In which case, of course, it can never be fixed beforehand, and, for this reason, always goes to affirm abiding otherness. A firm and immovable common ground bespeaks only the selfsame or identity and renders otherness impossible. But otherness abides, and because it does, we never do arrive at the common ground—we only travel in its direction.

As the academic study of humankind, the profession of anthropology uniquely specializes in this mode of travel. Conceived of as a universalizing but intrinsically non- culminant journeying toward the other, anthropological translation carries definite methodological implications. It implies that the traditional goal of capturing ethno- graphically a specimen other-culture indulges a monographic idolatry, a disciplinary devotion to written presentations of social and cultural orders as if these orders were basically fixed and decided. But if the common ground is in fact always on the move, then such monographs present false pictures of ethnic realities. For not only is the ground ever shifting beneath the seven-league feet of the professional anthropologist, but also the ethnic realities themselves are ceaselessly engaged in the building of their own social and cultural common grounds.

This criticism of previous anthropological practice is hardly new, although the discipline is still straining to come to terms with it. In this connection, the sense of anthropological translation proposed here definitely does not imply that anthropology should, in view of such epistemological conceit, abandon the study of others in favor of self-study alone or even preponderantly. This now familiar remedial strategy, although impressively grounded in the fear of reducing the other to ourselves or, with Orientalism, to our counter-selves, serves to reinforce the dualism of self and other. It thus ironically also promotes the understanding of the self as absolute. What is more, the fact that the ethnic realities we study are never really fixed but are themselves always under self-construction and deconstruction suggests that the transformation of definition they suffer at the hands of the ethnographer is not in itself an imposition. The picture of ethnography as inherently intrusive or worse betrays a critical and evidently hard-to- dispel misunderstanding of the studied realities as utterly self-contained, if not culturally, at least in their capacity for self-determination. But the ethnographic interaction is no different in principle from the social interactions that take place from ‘within’. To be sure, the ethnographic interaction dramatizes the self-other and internal-external axes of social interaction, and for this reason is peculiar and carries special risks. But these are relative matters, for the tensions of self-and-other and internal-and-external constitute axes around which any social interaction revolves. The question that needs to be asked in respect to ethnographic ‘authority’, then, is not how we obviate this authority, but rather what form it should take and what the moral tenor of the definitional transformations it brings about should be.

If we are to understand the other, we must initiate a respectful process of give and take in which we need to be prepared to offer ourselves up, on behalf of our intellectual project, to otherness—not to resist but instead to enhance the way in which we are always already open to the other in spite of ourselves. One consults the other and, once so informed, modifies oneself accordingly, validating the other's otherness. When doing so, however, to make an absolutely critical caveat, one need always bear in mind that the anthropological (as distinct from theological or even zoological) other is, while peculiarly representative of otherness per se, also a self or egoity in its own right and therefore subject to the same ethical accountability and critical scrutiny that one owes to one's own self. The fact that self-and-other constitutes an axis of direction rather than a dichotomy proper, and that the anthropologist is therefore constantly burdened with the task of forging the distinction between what is self and what is other about the other, only goes to show the inescapable way in which anthropology, even at its most empirical, is ethics.

Not only where but also how one draws the line between selfness and otherness marks the degree to which one is open to difference, and in the absence of such openness, ethics, considered in terms of the question of what is owing to the other, is effectively drained of meaning. To be sure, in the face of the various ‘isms’ that, on the basis of corporal difference (race) or some kind of categorical affiliation (nation, for instance), find it all too easy to make a hard and fast distinction between self and other, one might well ask why the difference is not given in absolute terms but in fact always remains a relative matter. I address this question in chapter 11, where, analyzing phenomenologically, I suggest that emergent consciousness, with a dialectical and immensely consequential cunning, appropriates to itself the kind of absolute boundary Descartes posited for things that extend in space, thus in principle sealing itself against otherness and constructing the self-other relationship as a dualism.

The principal methodological implication of the sort of translation I propose here, then, in focused accordance with the hallowed proscription on ethnocentrism, is that the anthropologist prepare herself in a disciplined manner to sacrifice her understanding of self and world on behalf of the other's otherness, but by no means in the interest of sheer relativism or the wholesale approbation of all that the other is and does. This discipline takes the form of ontological and phenomenological reflexivity, such that, in virtue specifically of the ethnographic interaction, whether on the ground or in the reading, one deconstructs one's own sense of self and reality. But such self-deconstruction does not take itself as its own end. Instead, its object is to create a substantial void in the anthropologist's second nature, which, since this nature too abhors a vacuum, and in virtue of the ethnographic consultation, fills itself with another—a reconstructed— sense of self and reality. In result, a fresh common ground is shaped, on the strength of which we will not have done the impossible and changed places with the other, but, in a way that ultimately defies rational determination, we will have made the other's point of view our own, including, very likely, a coefficient of contempt for ourselves.

III

The present work began as a short concluding section to an earlier monograph, Two Kinds of Rationality (1995). That study is highly theoretical but directly anchored in my ethnographic field research of an Israeli kibbutz. In what was to be an afterword, I set out to address even broader problems raised by the book's analysis. In order, though, to facilitate publication of Two Kinds of Rationality, I was persuaded to detach the projected afterword, allowing it to grow into its own book—the present one. Nevertheless, there remains an important, umbilical attachment between the two volumes. The ethnography of the kibbutz (as well as my career-long reworking of Evans-Pritchard's Nuer ethnography) stands to the present exercise as a conceptual provider, an instructor of ideas, as well as an empirical case study. For this reason, taken together the two works enact the kind of anthropology I extol below, an anthropology as ethics: the other or the ethnographic community is virtually consulted by the self or the anthropologist, thus identifying the other, not only as an object of inquiry and even criticism, but also as an anthropologically insightful agent in its own right. It seems to me that under the influence of postmodernism and its standard operating procedure of reflexivity, it has perhaps become too easy to claim something of the sort. But anyone who reads Two Kinds of Rationality will find that my anthropological approach has been substantially as well as critically informed by certain ideas on which I found the kibbutz to rest. These ideas bear on the nature of the creative capacity for generation, and in the final chapter of this volume (chap. 14), I find it edifying to revisit them.

My project is patently anthropological, yet it also stands at a tangent to the onto- logical presuppositions on which the discipline has characteristically been predicated. Indeed, by seeking to redefine decidedly what it means to be human—away from the received understanding and toward the idea of essential ambiguity and an irreducible dynamic—I am trying to undermine anthropology as we know it. In my view, despite many sincere, significant, and impelling proclamations more or less to the contrary, the received understanding remains at bottom static and dualist. By ‘at bottom’ I do not have in mind ethnographic practice, so much of which is admirable in purpose and splendid in accomplishment; rather, I refer to the epistemic plane in which the ontological presuppositions rest, presuppositions that in decisive part arose with modern science itself. It is easy to pay lip service to the sort of radical shift of definitions I propose. But if the redefinition is to be material, then the ‘study of man’ will have to change accordingly. It will have to become, above all, a peculiar kind of ethics, the kind bent on learning systematically—and in this broad sense, scientifically—about the other by also learning from the other.

My ontological contention about ethics and dualism is large, and its concomitant views about the nature of the human sciences are, in spirit, unusually philosophical for many orthodox anthropological frameworks. Traditional approaches aside, in a significant sense my project does not always fit comfortably even into certain of the prevailing avant-garde anthropological turns of the day. Its movement to at once embrace the political but vigorously refuse what I see as political reductionism in the discipline's adoption of the very same movement possibly puts the project in a kind of anthropological no man's land. But I nonetheless hope that my thesis of ontological conversion and the attendant ideas set out in this volume are worth pondering. By critically embracing the ontological enterprise that all social science really is (but is so hard pressed by constitutional scientistic pretension to deny), I hope here at least to have opened a view to a different way of conceiving of anthropology. I hope also to have shown that this way lends itself to argument and reason, and that it bears substantial disciplinary and interdisciplinary promise.