人类学为什么重要

• 塔拉少女

  2022-08-29
  然而，所有的人，无论是科学家还是人文主义者，都有一些共同点，那就是他们认为可以从世界之外的某个地方来衡量这个世界，要么在世界纸上，要么在遥远的前方。由此，他们可以回过头来对客观世界的运行发表意见，并且以一种权威的姿态去否定那些只关注日常生活琐碎事务的人所提出的观点。基于他们的有利位置，他们声称自己可以解释那些别人无法理解和领会的事情。……我在这里所提出的人类学有这一个完全不同的目的，这个目的并不在于说明或解释他者的行为方式，也不是将人们置于他者的位置，或者说将他们归入“已然理解”那一类。相反，我所提出的人类学是要求意识到并接纳他人的存在，学习他们的生活经验，并且将这一段经历带回到我们的想象图景中。这一图景乃是关于人类生活应当是怎样的、未来状况如何、存在何种可能性的。于我而言，人类学建立在这种想象力和经历的结合之上。……批评家可能会将其视为一个弱点或缺陷，因为他们认为这种浸入缺乏客观性。但是对于我们来说，这正是人类学能施展其长处的源头所在，因为客观性并不是我们所要追求的东西。我们所追求并希望得到的是智慧。客观性和智慧绝不相同，甚至它们在某种程度上指向不同的目的。知识所探索的是如何将事物与特定的概念和思想范畴联系起来，使它们可以被阐释，并且在某种程度上可以被人预测到。我们经常会说，要用知识来武装自己，或者说用知识来增强自我防御能力，以便更好地应对逆境。知识能够给予我们力量、控制能力以及抵御攻击的免疫力。但是，我们越是在知识的堡垒中寻求庇护，我们对周围所发生的事情的关注就越少。我们会说，既然我们都已经知道了，为何还要去参与呢？相反，所谓的智慧就是要到外面的世界去冒险，勇敢地体验那些地方正在发生的事情。也就是说，要让他者出现在我们的生活中，去关注和关心他者，知识是对事物的确定和归类，它能使我们的头脑得到休息；但智慧却是开放和不确定的，它会让我们感到焦虑和不安。知识是用来武装自...
• 塔拉少女

  2022-08-19
  在研究中，学者们只在乎从这群人当中收集他们对某个刺激的意识反应，而不是去探寻关于这个世界它们能向我们展示和提供什么。精心设计的研究方法使学者与他们保持着一定的距离。因为方法是客观性的保证，能够确保研究结果不被研究者与他们的研究对象之间的亲密情感参与所左右。然而，对于人类学来说，这种参与至关重要。所有的研究都需要观察，但在人类学中，我们的观察并不是通过将他者客观化来实现的，而是要关注他们，看他们做了什么，听他们说了什么。我们是与他们一起做研究，而不仅仅是去研究他们。我们将这种做研究的方式称为“参与观察”，这也是人类学这门学科的一块基石。
• 塔拉少女

  2022-08-29
  这个处于危险边缘的世界是我们唯一拥有的世界。尽管我们对其他星球抱有许多幻想，但我们目前无处可逃。而且，我们也无法穿越回去以尝试寻找另一条通往当前的路径。我们目前所处的时空位置就是最大的实际，我们只能从这个实际出发。正如卡尔·马克思（Karl Marx）在很早之前就注意到的：人们自己创造自己的历史，但并不是在他们自己选定的条件下创造。
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  As that most anthropological of artists, Paul Klee, declared in his ‘Creative credo’ of 1920: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.’
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  Indeed the very term ‘community’, from the Latin com (‘together’) plus minus (‘gift’), means not just ‘living together’ but ‘giving together’…. Identity in community is thus fundamentally relational: who we are is an index of where we find ourselves, at any moment, in the give and take of collective life. This sense of identity, however, is strikingly at odds with the constitution of the modern state, which tolerates nod difference among its citizens but rather demands equality in obligation and entitlement. Identity, for the citizen, is not about belongs to others, to community or to place. It is rather an attribute that belongs to you, a right or possession that your own, and that can even be stolen. The potentially explosive charge of the concept of identity, and its capacity to wreak p...
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  According to philosopher Giorgio Agamben, our modern idea of humanity is the product of an ‘anthropological machine’ that relentlessly drives us apart, in our capacity for self-knwoledge, from the world which we and other creatures inhabit. We think of ourselves as human subjects, adrift in a world of material objects. The division has been both the source of the split between cultural and biological dimensions of human existence, and the obstacle which ha so far derailed all attempts to achieve a more participatory understanding of human life in the world. To break the dead lock called for nothing less than a dismantling got the machine. In this spirit I believe the task of anthropology is to go beyond the idea of humanity, or at least to frame if differently (29-30).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  For thinking is no more confined to the replication of the already thought than is practice to the already done… The aim of anthropology, in short, is to make a conversation of human life itself. This conversation — this life — is not just about the world… it is the world. It is the one world we all inhabit (25).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  After all, stones do wander, descending scree-strewn slopes under their own weight, or carried by water, ice or ocean waves. And they do make sounds when stuck, against each other or by other things. It is as though each stone had a distinctive voice, as humans do. If by speech we mean the way we humans have of making our presence audibly felt, them might not the same be said of stones in their resounding? I this sense, they too could speak (22).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  … other people cannot be ranked on any scale of reason, intelligence or maturity that might justify taking their thought and practice less than our own (15).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  Knowledge seeks to fix things within the concepts and categories of thought, to hold them to account, and to make them to some degree predictable…. It gives us power, control, and immunity to attack. But the more we take refuge in the citadels of knowledge, the less attention we pay to what is going on around us… Knowledge fixes and puts our minds at rest; wisdom unfixes and unsettles. Knowledge arms and controls; wisdom disarms and surrenders. Knowledge has its challenges, wisdom has its ways, but where the challenges of knowledge close in on their solutions, the ways of wisdom open up to a process of life (9).
• 塔拉少女

  2022-09-08
  事实上，“社区”/“共同体”（community）这个词来自拉丁语“com”（共同）加“munus”（礼物），意思不仅是“共同生活”，而且是“相互给予”。我们归属于社区，因为我们每个人都不同，所以会有一些东西可以给予他人。因此，社区中的身份从根本上说是关联的。我们是谁，在任何时候都是我们从集体生活的相互给予和索取中发现自己的一个索引。然而，这种认同感与现代国家的宪法明显不符。现代国家的宪法不容忍公民中的差异，而是要求义务和权利平等。对公民来说，身份不是属于他人、社区或某个地方的，而是属于你自己的一种属性，你拥有的一种权利或财产，身份甚至可以被偷走。身份这一概念的引爆潜力及其导致政治浩劫的能力，恰恰在于关系和归属这两种意义之间的矛盾。每当某个社区或共同体感到自己受到国家权力的威胁时，就会出现这种矛盾。在这种情况下，人们会被要求声明他们在归属上的差异。这就是重新塑造他们从中获得归属感的关系，以此作为他们内在继承属性的外在表达。它是要把社区的“我们”变成“像我们一样的人”，团结起来反对“他们”，以此来捍卫共同的遗产或文化精髓。这就是族群现象的根源所在。
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  The currently favoured out-of-Africa hypothesis has a race of superior beings dispersing from its African cradle to colonize the world. It is a hypothesis that strikingly resembles the story of colonial conquest by White Europeans favoured by Darwin and his contemporaries. The story may have been turned upside down, but the structure is the same: one dominant race, equipped with superior intelligence, supersedes the rest (114).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  Science is a rich patchwork of knowledge which comes in an astonishing variety of different forms. Scientism is a doctrine, or system of beliefs, founded on the assertion that scientific knowledge takes but one form, and that this form has an unrivaled and universal claim to truth (108).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  Social relations are made in performance.In life, relations are not given in advance but have continually to be performed. Relations of kinship, for example, are performed in countless acts of care and attention in which people are nourished, raised and educated. Yet the person nurtured within the matrix of kinship relations is an organism, growing in an environment that includes human and non-human others. Nurturance and growth are but two ways, respectively social and biological, of describing the same process of ontogenesis, of the continual generation of being — or in a word, of life … The love of parents for their children, for instance, arises from the prolonged intimacy of life in the home; it is not an effect of their probably genetic relatedness But it is no less ‘biological’ for...
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  Philosophers are reclusive souls, more inclined to turn inwards into a studious interrogation of the canonical texts of thinkers like themselves — mostly, though not exclusively, dead white men — than to engage directly with the messy realities of ordinary life. Anthropologists, to the contrary, do their philosophizing in the world. They study — above all through a deep involvement in observation, conversation and participatory practice — with the people among who they choose to work… Anthropology… is philosophy with the people in. (4)
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  By liberating biological variation from the shackles of genetic inheritance, and cultural difference from the yoke of heritage, we can finally lay the demons of race and culture to rest. Humanity is indivisible into discrete races for precisely the same reason that it is indivisible into discrete cultures. That reason lies in history (128).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  ‘All human beings’, as Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, ‘are endowed with reason and conscience.’ To emphasize this unity, scientists reclassified extant human beings as members not just of the same species but of the same sub-species, designated Homo sapiens splines. Doubly sapient, the first attribution of wisdom — the outcome of increasing brain size and complexity — marks humans out within the world of living beings. But the second, far from marking a further subdivision, registers their decisive break from that world. With this beak, unparalleled in the history of life, humanity is supposed to have been set on the road to civilization. Thenceforth, our ancestors found themselves on both sides of the fence: both in nature and out of it. And it is with this...
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  For Darwin’s many readers, the book provided a convenient narrative, apparently backed by scientific authority, which at once accounted for the entitlement of people of European descent to inherit the earth, and justified the adventures of colonization and genocide wreak upon populations beyond the continent. Eventually, this narrative would condense around a single word, one of the most incendiary in the recent history of ideas. That word was ‘evolution’ Many leading anthropological museum were established in the same period, dedicated to the public demonstration of this sequence. In them, materials collected from dispersed peoples or places ere gathered together according to their level of culture. But this also meant dispersing the materials from each place or people into separate typo...
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  Westerner, it turns out, are always conspicuous by the absence. For in truth, they have never existed. Despite strident assertions of the universal values of modernity, by philosophers and statesmen alike, it is not practicably possible to live by them. Cosmopolitan, rational and uncompromisingly self-interested, belong nowhere and to no-one, the modern wester is a figment of our imagination (49).
• Adieudusk

  2018-11-12
  The kind of anthropology I propound here… is not to interpret or explain the ways of others; not to put them in their place or consign them to the ‘already understood’. It is rather to share in their presence, to learn from their experiments in living, and to bring this experience to bear on our own imaginings of what human life could be like, its future conditions and possibilities. Anthropology, for me, thrives on this engagement of imagination and experience… My kind of anthropology, indeed, is not in the business of ‘knowledge production’ at all. It aspires to an altogether different relation with the world. For anthropologists as for the people among whom they work, the world is not the object of study but its milieu. They are, from the start, immersed in its processes and relations....