MIGHT ANTHROPOLOGISTS BE WRONG? ANTHROPOLOGY, SCIENCES AND HISTORY

Abstract

From the very academic origins of social (or cultural) anthropology, two regimes of lmowledge do oppose in any of the different approaches that are juxtaposed under that label: that' s to say, briefly, Science and History (in the sense of "nomothetic" versus "idiographic"). This couple of "themata" has been invested with a variety of forms -explanation versus comprehension, analysis versus interpretation, theory versus hermeneutic, etc.-. Those oppositions could be useful to distinguish in our discipline, Marxist anthropology from LéviStrauss structuralism; or cognitivist from "interpretative anthropology". What' s the sense of that kind of binary oppositions? Just in order to answer, I will propose two things: first, a theoretical anthropology of anthropological theories; second, an empirical research, the cross-cultural anthropology of "mistake", that is linked to a research on "mistakes in anthropology".