Broken Premises

Abstract

This article attempts to explain in an unpedantic way how knowledge is arrived at in anthropological research. It does so by telling two anecdotes about the author's misinterpretation of people's activities while he was in the field. These errors, which are paradigmatic of anthropological research in general rather than the result of the author's obtuseness and superficiality alone, demonstrate the difficulty of conceptualizing the cultural Other. The article shows how objectivity and subjectivity, established conceptual schemas and unexamined personal feelings hinder the apprehension of this Other. The author is bold enough to believe that such an experience, undergone by all anthropologists, reproduces on a modest scale the discourse on Tradition and Modernity developed by the great 19th-century social theorists and that fieldwork is essentially a personal reinvention of the sociological/anthropological wheel.