PHILIPPE D ESCOLA

On anthropological knowledge
Among the various social sciences to have emerged in the course of the past two
centuries, anthropology is probably the only one that is still pondering over the
definition of its subject matter. To proclaim that it deals with mankind as a social species
is hardly enlightening, since other sciences have the same general object and apply to it
more specialised methods than those we can boast of. True, anthropologists draw their
public recognition from the mastery of a specific body of knowledge: using data they
have gathered the world over, they categorise and compare kinship systems, conceptions
of the person and forms of ritual agency; they analyse myths, dietary prohibitions
and plant taxonomies, and strive to understand the principles underlying exchange,
hierarchy or magic causality. But these objects were entrusted to anthropology by
default when, in the course of colonial expansion, Europeans were confronted overseas
by enigmatic customs and bizarre institutions that no other science was prepared to
include in its own, already well circumscribed, territory. Methods of description had
then to be improvised, typological criteria had to be invented, incongruous facts had to
be grouped into categories that would grant them an appearance of unity. Furthermore,
most anthropologists now vehemently deny with a temerity that does not always
envision the consequences that their object should be restricted to the traditional
study of the institutions and beliefs of those few faraway peoples that have remained at
the margin of modernity. Airports, warships, street gangs and the European Parliament
have now fallen within the scope of anthropological inquiry, alongside industrial plants,
laboratories of genetic engineering and the Hong Kong stock exchange. This is all
very heartening, no doubt, and bears testimony to the loudly proclaimed capacity for
renewal in a discipline that conquered its autonomy by incorporating the lore of socalled primitive societies into the topics formerly discussed by comparative law and
the history of religions. But this de facto annexation of new fields of empirical research
should not prevent us from evaluating our claims for expansion: what exactly are the
assets that anthropology can avail itself of in order to justify its forays into domains that
seemed way beyond its jurisdiction no so long ago? Except by a process of transposition
that remains at best very metaphorical, can the lessons drawn from the study over many
decades of Melanesian initiation rituals or Australian aboriginal marriage systems really
serve to throw light on the construction of gender difference among the staff of a modern
hospital or help us understand the evolution of European legal systems in respect of
filiation and descent? Except that they all claim to be anthropological, does a monograph
on the mythology of an Amazonian tribe have something in common with a study of
anorexia among the wealthy young of Madrid or an essay on the symbolism of colours
in the Middle Ages? Is it rather the case that so many different enterprises have now
clustered under the banner of anthropology that the huge extension acquired by this
label condemns it to mean almost nothing, save the desire of those who employ it to
signal that they favour a qualitative approach to social facts? To put it bluntly, do we still
share a common language, a common purpose, a common method, now that we have
seen fit to expand anthropology beyond its traditional domain (which at least provided
Social Anthropology (2005), 13, 1, 6573. 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists
DOI: 10.1017/S0964028204000849 Printed in the United Kingdom

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us with an empirical object and a technical jargon)? This is not an entirely rhetorical
question and we had better resolve it ourselves before other disciplines decide that we
are obsolete, as is already happening in the United States with the slow encroachment
on to the territory of social anthropology by so-called cultural studies.
Different answers to this kind of soul-searching are already available on the
epistemological market. For instance, one may try to define anthropology by its
content, that is, by the type of things current anthropological theories deal with. In
Europe, at least, especially in the United Kingdom and France, this subject matter seems
to be social relationships: that is self-explainable relationships between participants
in social systems of various kinds. The problem, of course, is that such a definition
applies to other social sciences as well, notably sociology, history, social psychology or
even economics, as was already clear in the ambitious Durkheimian programme from
which this conception of anthropology derives. One could try to narrow the field
a little and look at what anthropology has been best at doing from the vantage
point of neighbouring disciplines. This is what the late Alfred Gell did when he
proposed that anthropology is . . . considered good at providing close-grained analyses
of apparently irrational behaviour, performances, utterances, etc. (Gell 1998: 10). I
am in full sympathy with such a definition, since this is precisely what I have been
trying to do myself for the past 25 years. But one has to admit that it excludes its
converse, that is, close-grained analysis of apparently rational behaviour, such as the
study conducted by Edwin Hutchins in his remarkable monograph on distributed
cognition in a United States Navy training ship, a study which is nevertheless considered
by most anthropologists to fall within the scope of the discipline (Hutchins 1995). Such
a definition could even be said to exclude kinship, that most sacred of anthropological
heirlooms, since one could argue that there is nothing intrinsically irrational in naming
kin in such or such a way, or in prescribing such or such a category of potential
spouse. Specifying anthropology by its content always leads to the little game of
finding counter-examples that do not fall within the boundaries of the definition,
although they are widely accepted in professional journals as legitimate pieces of
anthropological research; and that is not counting the fact that one would also have to
face tricky questions about the great transatlantic divorce between culture and social
relationships as the competing subject matters for our discipline.
Another approach, which I favour, is to look for methods of investigation that
are shared by all anthropologists independently of the various conceptions they hold
of their object of study methods that go beyond merely paying lip-service to our
professed common dedication to participant observation (or ongoing conversations
to use a more trendy expression). This not an easy task either, since there seem to be
little relation in terms of method between, say, a study of nicknames in a Sicilian village,
a general theory of marriage exchange and a cognitive account of ritual efficacy. Also,
one should be careful in such matters to look at what anthropologists really do rather
than at what they say they do a lesson that can be drawn from the burgeoning field
of social studies of science. For anthropologists, like other scientists writing about the
general guidelines of their inquiries, tend to adopt a normative discourse that clouds
their actual practice: they are prone to state the objectified results of their research, to
draw epistemological or philosophical lessons from it and to codify their methods in a
quasi-axiomatic form, rather than expound with full ingenuity the windings, the doubts
and the accidents that mark out the course of their enquiries and render them possible.

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Radcliffe-Brown, to name one of our most illustrious ancestors, is a good case

at hand. We all know that he defined anthropology as a nomothetic science, the
purpose of which is to elicit laws using the comparative method by contrast with
idiographic disciplines such as ethnography and history that strive to produce faithful
descriptions of contemporary or past societies (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). But such an
epistemological decree was more faithful to the distinctions introduced in the late
nineteenth century by the controversies of the Methodenstreit than to the complexity
of the anthropology that Radcliffe-Brown himself was practising. For, by separating
so starkly anthropology from ethnography, he was forgetting, or rather feigning
to forget since he was himself a competent ethnographer that anthropology is
subservient to the minute process of observation and description of practices and
institutions that ethnographical monographs render available. It is from these constantly
enriched sources that theoretically minded anthropologists extract the elements of
their generalisations, and they do so with a practical know-how that is the more
difficult to formalise in that it draws its efficacy from the shared mastery of another,
still less formalised, know-how: that which is developed in the course of fieldwork.
This expertise renders us familiar with the rarely explicit procedures of objectification
through which data are obtained, filtered and presented procedures that we have
difficulty in describing to non-anthropologists, or even in teaching to our students
when we bother to do so, but from which is nevertheless derived the intuitive grasp
we have of the material gathered by fellow anthropologists that we put to use when we
attempt to organise it in meaningful generalisations.
Radcliffe-Brown was thus deliberately ignoring the fact that, inasmuch as it is
dependant upon ethnography as a very particular mode of knowledge, anthropology
also requires a dose of identification with its object. For ethnography claims this
specificity of using as a tool of investigation the subjectivity of observers who
experiment with a way of life different from the one they are accustomed to, so as
to provide a kind of experiential guarantee of the coherence and consistency of their
knowledge of the social practices in which they engage in the field. And this subjective
process cannot be kept entirely at bay when it comes to dealing with the objectified
facts that result from its operation. Of course, it is hardly surprising that RadcliffeBrown banned this disposition to experiment upon oneself with the distinct behaviour
of others what we usually call comprehension from the instruments of our discipline.
After all, he saw anthropology as an extension of the natural sciences, the legitimacy
of which could only be established by breaking with the hermeneutical tradition, a
tradition that few European anthropologists were willing to endorse at the time anyway.
Finally, Radcliffe-Brown was right in my opinion when he assigned to anthropology
a nomothetic objective, but he was wrong when he considered explanation to be
a purely inductive process. You will remember that, according to him, explanation
had to abide by the experimental method and follow a procedure in three stages: the
observation of facts, the formulation of hypothesis and the verification of hypotheses
by a new observation. Such attempts at comparative generalisation are not unknown
in anthropology. It is what ethnologists commonly do when they try to detect among
societies neighbouring the one they study a type of belief, of behaviour or of institution
that seems to present enough consistent properties in spite of the variability of its
actual manifestations for it to be taken as a sort of regional invariant. But this kind of
typological induction never led to the formulation of laws such as those of the natural

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sciences, neither by Radcliffe-Brown nor by those who use it empirically for more
limited purposes.
There is another standard way to explain, which Radcliffe-Brown leaves out: the
deductive method. The omission is all the more paradoxical as it was Durkheim, of
whom he claimed to be a follower, who gave this approach its legitimacy (Durkheim,
1960 [1897]; 1973 [1897]). It is the method that Levi-Strauss uses, for instance, when
he studies the laws of marriage operating in elementary systems of kinship: as these
laws can be represented in models where individuals are distributed in marriage classes,
one can posit that an element constitutive of the system of social relations (the relation
of exchange between two marriage classes, for instance) corresponds to an element
constitutive of the model (a relation of permutation between units represented by
symbols). The deductive character of the model derives from the fact that it provides
a structure that is reputedly isomorphous with the objective process studied, the
deductive transformations operated within the model being conceived as homologous
to the transformations of the real phenomena.
In their everyday practice, by contrast with their normative claims, anthropologists
thus resort to very diverse methods and paradigms, the results of which are nevertheless
commonly ratified as belonging to the discipline by the professional community that
sustains its existence. It becomes clear from my preceding remarks that three procedures
stand out in this common know-how deployed by anthropologists: description,
comprehension and various forms of explanation. One could see in these operations
an alternative way of presenting the three stages traditionally distinguished in the
construction of anthropological knowledge: ethnography, as an acquisition of data
on a particular social group described as a totality; ethnology, as a first attempt at a
generalising synthesis dealing with a set of societies at the scale of a cultural area, or
with a supposedly homogeneous class of phenomena; anthropology proper, finally, as
the study of the formal properties of social life in general (Levi-Strauss 1958: 386
9). But this analogy is misleading for, if the three stages refer in principle to objects
and methods that are clearly compartmentalised and that may even be incompatible,
as authors like Dan Sperber argue (Sperber 1982: ch. 1), by contrast, the trilogy
description/comprehension/explanation takes the form of a continuum that cannot
be segmented easily.
Let us go back to these three procedures to see in what way they blend into one
another. Description, it would seem, requires no description: for lack of appropriate
measuring instruments, ethnographers only need to be attentive and curious about
everything; they must be able to render in writing sometimes complex interactions and
sequences of actions, and to transcribe adequately utterances spoken in languages that
they seldom master perfectly. However, in a science where the observer and the observed
share common properties, description is never that simple. True, one must eschew ones
own prejudices and avoid moral judgements, but it is impossible to attain a position
of perfect axiological neutrality and to extricate oneself completely from the schemes
of objectification through which one has learned to decipher reality. Furthermore,
ethnographic knowledge is predicated upon the personal and continuous relation of a
specific individual with other specific individuals, a knowledge which thus proceeds
from a set of circumstances that are never identical, and the result of which is not
strictly comparable with any other knowledge, not even the one acquired by preceding
ethnographers in the same population. As has been remarked, the ethnographers
workshop is their own self and the relations that they have managed to establish

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between this self and some members of a society. Therefore, the data that they gather
cannot be fully dissociated from the situations in which they find themselves immersed
often by chance, from the role they are led to play sometimes unknowingly in local
politics, and from their dependency upon various persons who become their main
providers of information. And what ethnographers make of this information, in turn,
bears testimony to their education, to their character, to their personal history: all
elements that contribute to channelling their attention and defining their preferences.
All this is a commonplace for anthropologists; but it also implies that ethnographic
data differ from experimental data in that they result in a knowledge that is, strictly
speaking, not replicable, since it derives from an intersubjective exchange the conditions
for which are never identical.1
In spite of these personal variations, however, there is a striking, even uncanny,
homogeneity in the way ethnographers build up their knowledge in the course of their
investigations. And this homogeneity has to do with the sheer rhythm of fieldwork,
with the fact that the process of understanding a foreign culture requires a series of stages
that appear almost identical in their duration for all observers. This point was brought
home to me in Cambridge many years ago by Meyer Fortes as he was recounting a
conversation with his mentor Malinowski, just before leaving for his own fieldwork
with the Tallensi. Malinowski had told him that he expected to receive a first disgruntled
letter in about two months, in which Fortes would complain about the food, the climate,
the lack of privacy and the general impossibility of making sense of what the natives,
as they were called at that time, were doing or saying. Another letter would follow
approximately four months later in a more optimistic tone, reporting steady progress
with fieldwork and the dawning of a few working hypothesis about what was going on.
Then, after almost a year in the field, Fortes would write again to Malinowski telling
him that the job was almost done, with only a few remaining details to clear up. And
this would be the critical moment. For a few weeks later a new letter would follow in
which Fortes would explain that he had got it all wrong, and that he required more
time in order to weigh new information that had modified his previous understanding
of the social system.
I had myself just come back from almost three years in Amazonia when I met
Fortes, and I was both pleased and taken aback by this piece of ethnographic wisdom
because that was exactly the path that my own fieldwork had taken. True, Levi-Strauss
who was my thesis supervisor had been less explicit than Malinowski during our last
conversation before I left for South America: as I was explaining in tedious detail how
I intended to proceed in my investigations, he just said Laissez-vous porter par le
terrain (Let the field decide for you), which I now take as a very laconic equivalent
of Malinowskis advice to Fortes. But the remarkable thing about the anecdote is that
all my own students also sent me the same types of letter at the same stages in their
fieldwork, independently of their personal temperaments and abilities. This is why I
have come to the rustic conclusion that, where fieldwork is concerned, rhythm and
duration are the methods that matter.
There are other methods, though, but they are so intuitive that they seldom receive
a reflexive treatment. For obvious reasons, ethnographers cannot possibly deliver a
faithful copy of the reality observed; rather, they offer as it were a scale-model, a

This point has been argued especially clearly by J. Fabian in his Time and the other (1983).

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likeness of the salient features of the prototype that may never be fully described. They
are thus led to use two contrivances: composition, which selects in the continuity of
their experience pieces of action or utterances reputedly more significant than others,
and generalisation, which invests these episodes with a meaning that can be expanded
to the whole group under study. For all that, the resulting descriptions are not false or
biased, at least not deliberately, inasmuch as the multiplication of ethnographies of the
same society a common situation nowadays allows for a form of verification by
convergence. But to describe, for ethnographers, is not only to give an account of what
they observe; it also means organising for their own use, according to ordered sequences
and patterns of behaviour, the flux of what they see and of what they are told. This
almost unconscious filtering results from an aspiration to understand acts or utterances
that are often enigmatic, by confronting them with responses that we, as ethnographers,
would have brought ourselves to the circumstances that fostered these reactions. This
amounts to a spontaneous movement of identification with the motives that one may
detect behind the action of others, rather than an identification with the culturally
codified responses that these motives generate, a distinction that marks the dividing line
between methodological relativism and moral relativism. Yet these inchoate attempts at
interpretation are not purely speculative, especially during the first months in the field.
They also have a very pragmatic function for the ethnographer. For fieldwork is an
accepted process of socialisation and enskilment that shapes the bodies, the judgments
and the behaviour of observers immersed in an unfamiliar community of practice. By
inferring among their hosts coherent schemes of behaviour, ethnographers build up a
sort of idiosyncratic precis de savoir-vivre governing the relations that they establish
with them, and they are thus able to compare constantly the degree of coincidence of the
actions they observe and participate in with the interpretations they have constructed
of them.
Understanding, however, is not only understanding for ones own sake. It also
requires making others understand others being here the community from which
the ethnographer proceeds. By becoming public, usually in writing, interpretation
resorts to other procedures and its very nature thus changes. The most common of
these procedures, typical of the standard monograph, is contextualisation: a custom, an
institution or a belief that appears quite bizarre at first sight is replaced in its local context
so as to dispel its oddness by illuminating the field of meaning in which it is embedded.
Paradoxically, the internal coherence of social life as it was daily experienced by the
ethnographer becomes here a kind of proof that the phenomenon under study is indeed
a legitimate scientific object, since it becomes functionally and semantically compatible
with other phenomena that have undergone a similar test of autonomisation. One
may also contextualise on a wider scale by inductive generalisation. The phenomenon
formerly apprehended within the context in which it was observed will be taken
as a variation within a wider set of similar phenomena that may be recognized in
neighbouring societies of the same cultural area. Thanks to this process, these societies
will thus render manifest a regional style that will help dilute the seeming exceptionality
of the original phenomenon, a standard method developed many years ago by the Dutch
school under the name of ethnologisch studieveld.
It is finally possible, but more risky, to widen even more the field of generalisation
and to detect a great number of occurrences of a phenomenon beyond the region
in which it was described for the first time, a process that allows one to gain by
extension what one loses in comprehension, but which may strip the said phenomenon

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of the last shreds of objective reality that it still retained in the previous stage of
generalisation. Shamanism, totemism and many other anthropological fetishes were
born in this manner. Radcliffe-Brown notwithstanding, inductive generalisation does
not explain, save in the very restricted sense where a phenomenon is determined by
being ascribed to a class, the predicates of which are condemned to remain arbitrary
since they amount to no more than the addition of the properties retained in each object
so as to allow it to be subsumed in the class. The only possible analogy with the natural
sciences that comes to mind is taxonomy, perhaps a more charitable way of defining
inductive generalisation than its assimilation to the collecting of butterflies.
Is there a methodological specificity to this stage of ethnological comprehension, a
style of discovery that anthropology could claim as being properly its own? The partial
identification of observers with those that they observe is a movement of adequacy of
the self to others which cannot be said to be the privilege of ethnographers and which
corresponds quite well to the definition that Diderot gave of truth when he wrote that it
is la conformite de nos jugements avec les e tres [the conformity between our judgments
and beings], that is, not the delusive aspiration to a perfect coincidence between the
veritas cognoscendi and the veritas essendi, but, more simply, an expression of the hope
often disappointed but always blooming that one may recognise in others something
that one knows about oneself. Understanding by contextualisation and generalisation
also amounts to a process of truth by adequacy, although not directly an adequacy of
the self to others. It is rather a correspondence between a type of reality observed by
one and a type of reality observed by others, and thus an adequacy between a singularity
established by subjective experience on the one hand, and an addition of particulars
forming a more encompassing singularity on the other. It can then be decreed truthful
inasmuch as it becomes fruitful for the intelligibility of the varieties of human experience
at the same time as it answers to the criteria of consistency that have been assigned
to it.
To explain deductively, finally, is usually portrayed in anthropology as a threestep procedure: isolating a certain class of reputedly recurring phenomena; making
hypotheses as to the relations existing between these phenomena; and elaborating a
model of these relations in order to study their formal properties. However, by contrast
with the models of Newtonian physics, the deductive nature of which was guaranteed
by a logical-mathematical system of connections between laws, anthropological models
are seldom deductive in a literal sense. No rigorous procedure, save the use of the most
elementary tropes and logical connectors, allows one to validate the legitimacy of the
deductive transformations performed by the models, since the latter are only material
arrangements graphs, tables, diagrams intuitively constructed in order to figure out
in space the structure of repetitive processes. They may be efficient when they account
for all the observable facts; they may be predictive if they permit to anticipate the
variations of the elements that compose them; they may even be formalised a posteriori,
with topological tools for instance; but they never attain the deductive exactness that
a mathematical codification warrants. The truthfulness of the model thus lies in the
postulated adequacy between, on the one hand, its internal structure (that is the elements
retained in its composition and the relations linking them) and, on the other hand, the
hypothetical structure of the phenomena that the model aims at accounting for. It is
sometimes said that this adequacy may be verifiable if the model is able to accommodate
unexpected facts. But this only means that a relevant class of phenomena has been
correctly identified and that their properties have been correctly deduced (certainly an

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achievement in itself), not that the knowledge produced in such a way would unveil the
essential truthfulness of the object in the manner of the ancient ideal of an adaequatio
rei et intellectus. This is not to say that such an object is entirely immaterial as has
been objected to structuralism, for instance since its traces or effects can be detected
in institutions, discourses and practices. But its reality can only be verified within the
model that specifies its conditions of existence, not by an empirical observation of its
actual working in social life.
It is no wonder, then, that when we look at what anthropologists really do, whether
in the field or in the seclusion of their studies, it becomes difficult to separate neatly
and according to epistemological dicta the combination of description, comprehension
and explanations our trade uses as tools. Although there is a certain likeness between
these procedures and the classical three stages of anthropological research, the latter
are in fact a purified definition of operations that are most often intertwined. For the
ethnographic moment is descriptive, but also implies a good measure of comprehension
through a partial identification with others, while the ethnological moment subordinates
inductive explanation to a comprehensive approach, and if the anthropological moment
theoretically falls under the jurisdiction of hypothetico-deductive explanations, it is
nevertheless not independent of the previous procedures that have rendered it possible
by providing autonomy and substance to certain classes of phenomena used in the
building of models. This is why anthropology, in the wider sense of the term, is not an
endeavour that could be characterised by a clearly circumscribed domain of inquiry,
or even by a type of method answering to the logical requirements set forth by the
philosophy of science. It should be seen, rather, as a certain style of knowledge that
is, as a pattern of discovery and a mode of systematisation that are supported by a
set of skills progressively acquired through practice, both a turn of mind and a tour de
main, a particular knack picked up through experience and acknowledged among others
who have gained the same proficiency in dealing with social facts in our own special
way. This is why, also, the procedures followed for the assessment of anthropological
research by peers sometimes appear opaque to fellow scientists in other disciplines: for
judgments are passed not only by reference to sheer results, but also according to their
compliance with the specifications of a largely implicit modus operandi.
It is time now to return to my initial question: do we, as anthropologists, have
anything specific to offer to help humankind understand the varieties of its experience of
the world? Can the style of knowledge that we have developed over time be transposed
beyond the particular circumstances that have presided over its birth and the culturespecific concepts that we have inherited from this historical genesis? Are we reluctant
imperialists riding the waves of globalisation and trying to peddle half-heartedly our
used wares to people who have no real need for them, or do we still have a contribution
to make to a non-ethnocentric understanding of the human condition? I think we do.
For if the concepts we use abstract templates such as society, culture or representation
were indeed born in a specific place at a specific time, and are not necessarily the precious
exportable assets that we deem them to be, the style of knowledge that we have devised
is undoubtedly an original bequest to our fellow denizens of the planet. Although a
Chinese or an African anthropologist may have indeed should have misgivings
about the adequacy of the intellectual tools that we have forged in the west to account
for our own perspective on their world, they nevertheless adapt with a remarkable ease
to the combination of investigative methods, guided intuitions and self-taught skills
that form the basis of our trade. In that sense, the universality of anthropology is very

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different from the universality of, say, the laws of physical reality; it does not proceed
so much from a metalanguage that is but the codex of our own cosmology, but from
a novel form of understanding the otherness of others, an extension of the universal
working of intersubjectivity into a kind of knowledge that everyone can master and
render fruitful without paying an unnecessary tribute to the dogmatic wrapping with
which we try to justify its legitimacy.
Philippe Descola

Ecole
des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales
52, rue du Cardinal-Lemoine
F-75005 Paris, France
descola@ehess.fr

References
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1973 [1897]. Les r`egles de la methode sociologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the other. How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency. An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. 1958. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Introduction, in Structure and function in primitive society. Essays and
addresses. London: Cohen and West.
Sperber, D. 1982. Le savoir des anthropologues. Paris: Hermann.

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