Anthropology. The Paradox of the Secular

8/13/2019 Anthropology. The Paradox of the Secular

1/4

B R U C E K A P F E R E R

Anthropology. The paradox

of the secular

Secularism defines the orientation of most contemporary thought in the philosophiesand social sciences. So much an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment, their sec-ularism manifests the potency of human thought finally liberated and liberating, ademythologizing force that replaces God with Man, that sees human beings as the

architects of their own destinies. This is the thoroughgoing argument of the disciplineof anthropology regardless of conceptual or methodological orientation. Secularismalso declares knowledge, all branches of valid knowledge to be grounded in rationality,a rationality guided by the rule of reason and usually that defined in European andNorth American Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment discourses. Here the com-mitment of anthropology is less certain and considerably divided. What constitutesreason and rationality is at the root of much anthropological endeavour and the his-tory of debate over theory and method in the discipline resounds with its irresolution.In many ways the dominating figure of Kant looms over anthropological discourse(even in his current Nietzschean extension or rejection) but there is a deep suspicion

as to whether ideal or transcendental reason is independent of its daily or ordinaryarticulations in routine practices. In other words, abstract reason is always directedand filled with cultural assumptions constructed in the dynamics of a contemporaryhistory. All reason and rationality is of this order. Scientific or logical Reason is noexception and anthropologists argue the problematics of this fact when applied to therigorous exploration and understanding of human practices which are formed in dif-ferent historical and cultural circumstances. Such a problematic is compounded in aview, held by many anthropologists, that all human beings are in one way or anotherauthorities as to what is the nature and meaning of being human. In other words, theauthority does not rest with any particular and historically specifically located body

of human beings, no matter how politically, economically or technologically domi-nant. In fact, forms of practical knowledge or reason constructed in such contexts of dominance may distort and subdue other forms of practical knowledge that otherwisemay yield understanding of both a specific and more general nature. Louis Dumont’sannoying point, anathema to many, but a development from the great Marcel Mauss,is that the mythologised realities of an India of his investigation refuse comprehensionthrough the individualistic terms of a European modernism. Simultaneously, seriousattention to such Indian discourse (perhaps most tragically revealed in the very crisisof its colonial demythologisation or securalisation) provides insight into the nature of colonial structurings and the kinds of reconfigurations of the human subject underwayin recent European and North American history.

Anthropology’s distinction and potential contribution is founded in the paradox

SECULAR ISM. PERS ONAL VALUES AND PROFESS IONAL EVALUAT IONS 341


2/4

that there are limits to the rationality and reasoning of the demythologised and secu-lar realities integral to its very invention. Furthermore, many of its more important‘discoveries’ are grounded in a recognition that theories and methods that engage rela-tively unproblematically modes of description or analysis that embed naively or unre-flectively those assumptions drawn from within the anthropologist’s own existentialrealities can seriously subvert the generation of understanding. If anthropology isthrough and through a demythologising practice it simultaneously makes a distrust of such practice vital to its method of knowledge production. Anthropology is secular-ism’s doubt.

Of course, the history of anthropology demonstrates that this has not always beenthe case and there is by no means agreement on the matter now. Much anthropologywas committed to demonstrating the power of its secular thought and that all formsof practice could be bent to a largely western reason, thus demythologised. This wasthe colonising force of a variety of functionalisms and structuralisms, and much cri-tiqued by anthropologists, including the proponents of such perspectives.Postmodernist and postcolonial anthropology sustains such criticism but these too,

even despite attacks on the rationalism and totalism of other anthropologists, are nerv-ously continuing a very western-dominant demythologising course, often of a cele-bratory kind. Anthropology is bound to a secular rationalism whether its practitionerslike it or not, which may account for why old theories never seem to die. Thus a post-modern assault on overly coherent, value-integrated, and subject-effacing modernistperspectives has seen the re-emergence, redressed and in postmodern guise, of a highlyrelativised individualist particularism, subjectivism, transactionalism, a domesticatedmore user-friendly Marx and a modified Durkheim. All this is quite consistent with ananti-progressivist stance, but I suggest that the continual circling and repetition of debates in anthropology is motivated by the paradox, namely the secularist distrust at

the centre of anthropology.Anthropology probably locates such a paradox more centrally than many cognate

disciplines. It has always stressed the diversity of human experience and has by andlarge insisted on a comparative method that attempts to sustain the authenticity of dif-ference, of the different realities that it draws within its comparative net. While itspractitioners may not be explicit about the matter, the great potential contribution of anthropology rests in my view on a particular ontology of reason and rationality thathas its source in the Enlightenment. This is not a commitment to reason or rationalsecularism of that particular kind which consigns all thought bar its own to the dust-bin of unreason or the irrational without so much as a second thought. In anthro-

pology such a cavalier attachment to a secular rationalism has been too free, forexample, to label practices as magic and witchcraft without closer inspection and hasthus been drawn into hasty error, as Wittgenstein has shown. Rather what I refer to isa method more often implicit than explicit in anthropology that joins the Cartesiannotion of radical doubt with the phenomenological recommendation of the willingsuspension of disbelief. It is the methodological conjunction of these orientations inanthropological practice that decentres certainty and continually opens up possibilityin interpretation and understanding. Contemporary calls for decentring in an anthro-pology influenced by deconstruction and postmodernism are not necessarily aban-doning the Enlightenment, but perhaps taking up in different vein some of its morefruitful indications.

Radical doubt, epitomised in the thought of Descartes but everywhere engaged in

342 DOSS IE R


3/4

the revolutionary ideas of such figures of the dawning age of secularism as Leibnitz,Newton and Kant is the engine of reason and rationalism, the force for the construc-tion of new and world-shattering knowledge. With Descartes, radical doubt involvesa questioning of one’s own subjective or, as Kant expanded the point, sensory knowl-edge. This is particularly so in as much as the meaning of subjective knowledge is con-ditioned and communicated by authority that is external to the subject, andunquestioningly taken for granted. I stress that the notion of radical doubt was notanti-subjective but deeply concerned with both the grounds of subjectivity – thatwhich the subject too readily assumed or took for granted – and with potentiallyreconfiguring this subjectivity, altering its horizonal orientation, its ontologicalground. Descartes and Newton were not anti-subjective – they wanted a conjunctionof the objective with the subjective, the subjective to ultimately authenticate what wasobjectively known. The anthropological method of fieldwork and the recommenda-tion of participant observation are deeply Cartesian in their imagination.

It must be stressed that the radical doubt to which Descartes gave voice wasalready the spirit of a larger secularism (beyond that of the search for scientific knowl-

edge). This was manifest in political and religious upheaval, the overthrow of thedivine right of kings continuing through to the current attacks against totalitarian statesystems of whatever political hue, the press for other political and economic freedomsand the emergence of innovative forms of religious belief and practice. Radical doubtgains its force as a destroyer of those certainties about the nature of reality and experi-ence that are in some way or another formed independently of these realities or denyaspects of their dimensionality. It is antagonistic to closure – even to those, scientificand otherwise, it may paradoxically bring into existence. If radical doubt is integral tosecularism – secularism as the dialectics of suspicion – it is theoretically the enemy of that secularism that recasts itself in the image of those certainties it may have deposed,

secularism as blind faith, belief, secularism as the new form of the religious.Anthropology grounded in radical doubt bears as its specific generative crisis the

recursivity of radical doubt. This is the concern to attack, on the one hand, whatappear to be the certainties of anthropologists and, on the other hand, the certaintiesof those whose ways of existence anthropologists encounter. Without such recursivitya mockery is made of radical doubt. It is to declare for one’s opinion, hypothesis andview without submitting it to the scrutiny of suspicion. It apes science or the attain-ment of rigorous knowledge by succumbing, in fact, to a kind of religious attitude thatprotects one’s own subjectivism in the process of ‘objectively’ deconstructing that of another. This is especially problematic for a discipline such as anthropology which

should be concerned with the dimensions of human existence in all its diverse and con-tinually differentiating forms, and about which there can never be any absolute or finalclosure. Radical doubt not applied recursively becomes the instrument of self assertionagainst other possibilities, a blind religious kind of secularism, that simply affirmswhat is already ‘known’ but in fact is shielded from critical inspection. This has beenthe fate of much anthropology both in its beginnings in the nineteenth century and inlater applications of an unexamined self-confident rationalism and a desire to celebratepragmatic individualism.

Much of the recent hoo-ha over the concept of culture in anthropology and therenewed debate that surrounds the culture concept seems oblivious to its key role in adiscipline whose contribution derives from a commitment, even an extreme commit-ment, if this is possible, to radical doubt. The concept of culture is more than a mere

SECULAR ISM. PERS ONAL VALUES AND PROFESS IONAL EVALUAT IONS 343


4/4

relativising instrument. It opens the possibility of other ways of being human that notonly indicate a limit, for example, to modes of western secular understanding, but alsoopens ways to challenge dominant subjectivities and revise scientific visions or otherruling opinions concerning the nature of being human. The orientation to culture, anopenness to other ways of life, is a method for facilitating the necessary recursivity of radical doubt.

Kin to radical doubt is the notion of the willing suspension of disbelief. Perhapsgiven greatest place in Husserl’s phenomenology (in the concept of bracketing, whichrather than being the enemy of Cartesianism is an extension from it), it is method-ologically vital in an anthropology that seeks to enter within those realities it aims toexpose to greater comprehension and understanding. This is particularly so in ananthropology that is committed to a view that all human beings in their practices, forinstance, contribute even unselfconsciously to the understanding of what it is to behuman. This perhaps offends most of all that secular rationalism, that virtually reli-gious secularism, that refuses to relinquish its hold on reality and which most oftenresults in the reduction of all difference to the boring and dull repetition, often in

‘lower’ register, of what it already reckons the ‘truth’ to be. It is not the boredomwhich is difficult – boredom and rigour are probably inseparable bedfellows – ratherthe way the commitment to secularism in the form of belief (rational secularism assuch) militates against openness.

The suspension of disbelief does not mean the exchange of rationalism for mysti-cism, which is how some anthropologists appear to practice the suspension of disbe-lief, or else react to the idea. Such exchange in my opinion is nothing more than theother side of rationalism itself, as in the Victorian fascination with magic or currentNew Age dabblings. Rather the method of the radical suspension of disbelief is oneway to overcome the prejudices, the unexamined assumptions which are as much the

product of demythologised realities as they may be of mythologised ones. It enablesthe exploration of the nature of the phenomenon to be grasped within its own termssomething which an overcommitted and unreflected secularism can block or prevent.

Anthropology is a practice of secularism that must often be anti-secular in aneffort to break through what is often a blinding prejudice that can be the self-samelimitation of secularism, a secularism that defeats itself and a passion for understand-ing, in its very secularist zeal. Anthropology’s commitments are ideally open so as tochallenge even rationality and reason as a necessary method for engaging with the pos-sibilities of being human. Its dialectics of suspicion, combining radical doubt with thesuspension of disbelief, is essential to anthropology as a rigorous knowledge practice.

Such a dialectics, too, is necessary to the liberating possibility of a discipline whichideally strives to break the constraints to knowledge and understanding that is, para-doxically, internal to the pursuit of rational knowledge as much as it may appear to beits external enemy.

Bruce Kapferer Department of Social AnthropologyUniversity of Bergen Fosswinckelsgate 6 5007 Bergen Norway

344 DOSS IE R

Documents

Anthropology. The Paradox of the Secular