ABSTRACTNo comprehensive research of Erasmus’ ethnological mind has been published, so far. Erasmus’ attitudes toward Turks and Jews were discussed analytically but not synthetically or comparatively. An attempt to widen the ethnological scope and to define and classify Erasmus’ attitudes toward different non-Christian groups is presented here. Christian Europeans were at the top of Erasmus’ echelon. Second to them were ‘half-Christians’, i.e. Turks, or Muslims in general. Below them were Jews, and lower in the hierarchy were black Africans. Yet, no (...) one was unworthy of conversion to Christianity, even barbarians of the third kind – according to Bartolomé Las Casas’ sort – the most inferior barbarians, slaves by nature, as defined by Aristotle. According to Las Casas, these barbarians were too low to ask for God and were not candidates for conversion to Christianity. Erasmus’ believed that Barbarians of any kind deserved Christianity without being brutally forced to accept it. Yet, in practice, converts from Judaism to Christianity were rated, even by Erasmus, as lower than Christians. This, in addition to the principle that Christian peace excludes war against the Turks, is the very essence of Erasmus’ pax et concordia. (shrink)

The ethnology of religion as a relatively new discipline and a separate branch of religious studies, which arose as a result of interdisciplinary study of ethnos and religion, studies various aspects of their interaction. First, within the framework of the ethnology of religion, terminological and semantic problems are solved: how to define and which semantics to put into the concept of ethnos and religion, ethnic religion, national religion, national church, and others like that. Secondly, this science considers the (...) ontological status of ethnic group and religion, that is, the possible existence of religion and ethnos in their interconnection and interaction. Second, the ethnology of religion poses and decides whether religion is an indispensable, organic feature of the ethnic group and what is religion about ethnos and ethnos in relation to religion. Investigating the functionality of religion and ethnos, the ethnology of religion, fourthly, deals with the problem of the origin and the origins of these two phenomena: whether they are one-time or different. Fifthly, the influence of religion on the formation of an ethnic group is revealed, and vice versa. Sixth, the ethnology of religion determines the patterns of ethnicity and religion in their interaction. And last, the ethnology of religion has to predict the prospects of the interrelations and mutual influence of the ethnic group and religion on the future. (shrink)

The ethnology of religion is a relatively young field of religious studies that emerged as a result of an interdisciplinary study of ethnicity and religion. It is she who studies the great variety of aspects of the interaction and combination of these social phenomena, although, as is well known, religion and ethnicity are the object of attention of various branches of science - religious studies, ethnology, anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, history, etc. Each of them in their context analyzes (...) their essence, functionality, history, even some specific aspect of their interaction. The emergence of the ethnology of religion as a separate sphere of religious science due to the need for a holistic approach to the study of a complex system of relations "religion-ethnos" in all their diversity of forms, types, types. The synthetics of social phenomena that have arisen as a result of the interaction of ethnicities and religions have prompted to life at first comprehensive studies of these phenomena, and later - a synthesis of the sciences that studied them. The latter is a testimony to the further development of human knowledge, a necessary step towards an in-depth understanding of the relationship between ethnic and religious. These social phenomena throughout history are so closely intertwined that during certain periods of social life significantly influenced the tendencies and directions of the world historical process, determined the character of the formation of its laws. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 67.4 (2006) 675-696 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]History of Religion Becomes Ethnology: Some Evidence from Peiresc's AfricaPeter N. Miller Bard Graduate CenterAbstractThe relationship between history of religion and ethnology on the one hand, and antiquarianism and them both, on the other, lie at the core of this essay. These lines of inquiry come together in the work of Nicolas Fabri de (...) Peiresc (1580-1637), the intellectually adventurous Provençal late humanist. Peiresc's correspondence with a renegade in Tunis, an adventurer in Ethiopia, and a missionary once based in Guinea provided him with remarkably direct information about the customs and practices—the moeurs—of contemporary sub-Saharan Africans. The content of these letters has not found its place in histories of anthropology or histories of antiquarianism.I.Bound up amidst Peiresc's copies of his letters to the Paduan antiquary Lorenzo Pignoria from the winter of 1615–16 is a text of four sides entitled, in large letters, "Delli Popoli della China" and continuing, in smaller ones, "written by P. Ioannes Pietro Maffei History of the Indies, Fr. Antonio di Saint Roman, in the History of the East Indies, Fr. Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza Augustino, in the books on China, and others." 1 The reading notes [End Page 675] that follow are interesting for one reason: though labelled "Delli Popoli della China" they are almost entirely about religion in China. At this stage of Peiresc's thinking at least, history of religion seems interchangeable with ethnography.In his letter to Pignoria of 4 January 1616, Peiresc acknowledges having time to page through ("di transcorrere un poco") Maffei, Gonzales, and Saint Roman where he found some information about figures they had discussed, and also about artificial grottoes used for domestic refrigeration, "which I did not note when I read it the first time." He asked if Pignoria wouldn't mind inquiring as to whether there was a more precise impression of a particular Chinese plaque or medallion—Pignoria had sent him one but Peiresc pronounced it "not as exact as I would like." 2Peiresc begins with the gods that were worshipped (these included deceased parents and friends, as well as the occasional living person) and auguries. This then leads to mention of the clothing and hair styles of those priests making offerings to the gods. Some of this information was derived from that octagonal medallion. Peiresc also noted down the presence of a vase, as if for libation, and other instruments for offerings.These authors, he continued, observed that the Chinese revered the God of Heaven above all the others. Peiresc recorded that Gonzalez mentioned that he was indicated by use of the first letter of the alphabet, that this character looked a bit like "AF," that it was called "Guant," that he was honored with a solemn festival every near year, at the new moon in March, with vocal and instrumental music during which his priests applied themselves for an entire day to a board groaning with meat, poultry, fish, and fruits (no wonder the earlier reference to the gluttony of the priests). For the greater veneration of the King he was called the "Son of Heaven."Mention of the King led to discussion of the monthly festivals in the provinces when priests bore a portrait of the King, on gold, through the streets with great reverence. But then, citing from Maffei, Peiresc proceeded to jot down observations made about Chinese seaside towns and the domestic interior. This, in turn, led to some observations about dining—and, therefore, feasting—practices.Finally, Peiresc returned to the aforementioned medallion, whose details now seemed to him to represent just such an honorific feast. But he was especially interested in the practice of indicating the name of God with a single Chinese character, or cipher. This reminded him, he wrote, that the [End Page 676] Basilidian gnostics, as recorded in Epiphanius, represented the god of heaven with the seven Greek vowels AEHIOUY. He... (shrink)

Anthropology is the study of humanness, and the tension between cultural particularity and human universals has always enlivened the sub-discipline of ethnology. For example, efforts to show that logic and emotion vary with culture raise meta-theoretical questions of ontology and epistemology. Since the Boazian and Malinowskian revolution, however, the trend has been to delineate humanness in terms suggested by a given people, avoiding the fraught terrain of species ontology. But just as there is a global ecology, so there is (...) a global culture, seen as the sum of human intelligibilia. Linking the two is the central human problem, which evolved consciousness must solve. Critical realism offers a meta-theoretical description of the human-world relation capable of grounding both particular and comparative discussions. This paper uses a critical realist anthropology of consciousness to indicate its ethnological potential. Then by applying the result to two contemporary ethnological statements, by Kirsten Hastrup and Tim Ingold, it explores the approach's practical utility. Essentially, there must be a reality that exists independently of human consciousness, for consciousness evolved. With it emerged morality, and a morally warranted anthropological task is to accurately describe the world's structure as it impinges on any cultural mode of knowing. (shrink)

A panorama of ethnological studies during the last two or three years must cover considerations as apparently remote as the margin of error in estimating the age of radio-active elements on the one hand and, on the other, the question of whether ethnology originates from the sciences of Man or the sciences of Nature. This widening of the scope of ethnological studies is matched by the widening of public interest in ethnological problems, or, to put it more precisely, in (...) problems presented in the terms and by the aid of ethnological formulae. It should be noted, moreover, that also the traditional domain of ethnology is in a process of expansion, stretching from the study of the so-called savage or primitive social forms, without hesitating any longer, to the field of modern society and its most complex activities. (shrink)

In this essay I deploy Sartre's phenomenology of the gaze as the foil to demonstrate the cultural and philosophical movement from ethnology to ethnophilosophy that produces a specific conception of Africa. The violence of the Western gaze on Africa led several ethnological and anthropological excavations of Africa's cultural beingness, and the eventual creation of ethnophilosophical reason. Despite the obvious limitations of ethnophilosophy, I argue in this essay for a conception of cultural agency around which we can properly understand “Africa” (...) as a meaningful site, a territorial imaginary that is far from the ethnophilosophical imagination, but not too far. Ethnophilosophy serves as the platform around which we can commence a reconstruction of an African self that is sufficiently recuperated, through false memory and historical reinvention, to return the gaze and renegotiate its freedom. (shrink)

In the work of these thinkers, Kurasawa finds little justification for two of the most prevalent claims about social theory: the wholesale "postmodern" dismissal of the social-theoretical enterprise because of its supposedly intractable ...

Every student of the early history of mankind, and their numbers have greatly increased of recent years, must be well acquainted with the recent conflict between the advocates of diffusion in interpreting the origins and world-wide manifestations of civilization and those of independent development, or, in more exact terms, of the spontaneous generation of cultures. To an unbiassed observer of the evidence, it must also be a matter of astonishment that the ethnologists of the latter school have for so long (...) refused to admit a distribution of ideas, beliefs and customs which are not only of proved historical but daily and common occurrence. It is impossible to enter a library or a club, or to walk down Regent Street and look into the shop windows, without realizing that world-diffusion is the very stuff of civilized existence. It is impossible to travel the remoter regions of the globe to-day without being constantly reminded of London, Leeds and Manchester. Nobody, again,would dream of controverting the known phenomena of the spread of great religions, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, from a single original centre. The school of independent development of cultures not merely ignores or twists to its own purposes a gigantic mass of evidence bearing upon the subject in dispute and capable of being interpreted in only one way; it displays a singular disregardof common sense and human nature. The innate conservatism of humanity, its readiness to live on the. (shrink)

This article re-examines the closing sections of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things in order to address the longstanding question of whether he is best understood as a philosopher or a historian. My central argument is that this question misses the crucial point of Foucault's work, which is to historicize the notion of history, which Foucault takes to be central to the historical a priori of modernity. An examination of his historicization of History thus reveals that Foucault is neither simply (...) a philosopher—because he conceives of philosophy in modernity as a historical enterprise—nor a historian—because his own historical approach is designed to transform the modern historical a priori from within. This analysis also sheds new light of Foucault's relationship to psychoanalysis and his conception of critique. (shrink)

This article examines the English scholar James Cowles Prichard's attention to language and comparative philology within his wider project on the natural history of man. It reveals that linguistic evidence was among the most important elements for Prichard in his overarching scientific aim of investigating human physical diversity, and served as the evidential foundation for his ethnology. His work on Celtic comparative philology made him not only one of the earliest British adopters of German comparative grammar, but a comparative (...) philologist of European stature in his own right. More generally, linguistic evidence helped Prichard to keep his magnum opus, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, as logically ordered as possible, and therefore to turn ethnology into a discipline with analytical aspirations on a global scale. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is to show that there is a clear line of continuity between the early Stoics’ and Cornutus’ works, as all of them assumed that the ancient mythmakers had transformed their original cosmological conceptions into anthropomorphic deities. Hence, the Stoics from Zeno to Cornutus believed that the names of the gods reflected the mode of perceiving the world that was characteristic of the people who named the gods in this way. Accordingly, the major thesis advanced (...) in the paper proposes that the Stoics conducted their etymological analyses so as to gather ethnographical information about the origin and development of the existing religion. When doing so, they treated the conventional mythological narratives as sources of information about the early conceptions of the cosmos. Th us, the Stoics from Zeno to Cornutus employed etymology as a certain research strategy: they analyzed the names of traditional deities so as to extract the physical and moral beliefs that constituted the ancients’ world picture. Treated as ethnologists, the Stoics seem to equate piety with retrieving philosophical truths obscured under the guise of primitive mythical formulations. Furthermore, when unravelling the original worldview inadvertently transmitted by the poets in their poems, the Stoics reconstruct the history of religion and contribute to the development of ancient anthropology. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s ‘ethnological approach’ to the philosophy of mathematics, in particular his discussion of calculation as an experiment and the limits of empiricism in mathematics, is presented against three interrelated backdrops: (1) James’ critique of Spencer’s evolutionary empiricism, specifically regarding necessary truths; (2) the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, led by Haddon and Rivers, whose Reports implicitly confuted Spencer; and (3) the subsequent work of Malinowski, especially his supplement to Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning, a book sent to (...) Wittgenstein upon its publication in 1923. String figures as mathematics is a main illustrative example. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Anthropology cannot be distinguished from other social and human sciences by its own particular object of study. Apparently concerned with the so-called “primitive” peoples, or peoples “without writing,” it developed into a science at the same time that these peoples were declining, or at least losing their distinctive characteristics. For the last ten years or so, some anthropologists have turned to studying the so-called civilized societies. Clearly, then, anthropology issues less from the existence of a specific object of study than (...) from an original way of formulating problems which are shared by all the sciences of man. Anthropology acquired its importance by studying social phenomena which, because of their strangeness and difference from those of the observer's own society—and not because they were any simpler—afforded an insight into certain properties which are at once general and basic to all social life. We could compare the anthropologist's position in the social sciences to that of the astronomer in the natural sciences: man is apprehended through his remotest manifestations, over a distance which acquires temporal, spatial, and moral value. The distance which separates the anthropologist from his object of study reduces the complexity of what he can see, but, making a virtue out of this constraint, it forces him to perceive only those phenomena which may be considered essential. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The essay elucidates the intellectual and historiographical phenomenon of migration to the forefront by engaging with the perceptions of the Teutonic/germanic migrations of the fifth century among a few major Victorian ethnologists and historians. It focuses particularly on the unique view of the ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham. While many Victorian historians of the mid-nineteenth century became obsessed with the Teutonic narrative, arguing that these ancient tribes had conquered vast territories of Europe, Latham, in contrast, downplayed the impact (...) of Teutonism, discounted the vastness of the Teutonic expansion in Europe and expressed his doubts regarding the alleged Teutonic purity of the English nation. Instead, Latham advocated for an ethnological investigation, drawing conclusions which were critical of the very influential Teutonic narrative that he considered misleading, since it was founded solely on superfluous ancient historical sources. Latham’s challenge of the prevailing thesis, hence, reflected a heightened mid-nineteenth century debate between ethnology and history. Rather than delving into the historical migrations themselves, the study of the perception of Teutonic migrations contributes to the understanding of how these historians and ethnologists differentiated between ‘ideal’ and ‘destructive’ historical migrations while inserting different meanings to the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘language’. (shrink)

Responding to the long-standing debate concerning whether Michel Foucault is a philosopher or a historian, Amy Allen questions the incompatibility that this opposition suggests. Foucault can be considered neither a historian nor a philosopher in isolation. Rather, given his own account of history and critique in his early text, The Order of Things, we should understand Foucault as a philosopher whose critical interventions are historically contingent. This commentary asks about the role of linguistics in critical theory, as it is the (...) third counterscience listed alongside ethnology and psychoanalysis. Does a Foucault-inspired critical theory privilege the linguistic turn, even above and beyond the critical potential of either psychoanalysis or ethnology? Secondly, this commentary questions the truly critical power of Foucauldian critique in light of a defanged postcolonial theory, which is partially rooted in Foucauldian thought. Specifically, this commentary asks whether Edward Said, a postcolonial theorist explicitly influenced by Foucault, should be considered emblematic of this Foucauldian critique despite Said's complete assimilation into the status quo. (shrink)

Based on the question about the anthropological in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, this paper orders the forms of anthropological and ethnological readings that have been done to the philosophy that he developed after his return to Cambridge in 1929; drawing their limits and possibilities from the form of wittgensteinian writings.Given that, since the end of the 20th century until today the studies on the matter have increased, we will elucidate the differences that these readings have when presentinga “wittgensteinian anthropology”; (...) especially, from the epistemic differences between a descriptive reading and a theoretical reading. (shrink)

The paper deals with the contemporary state of semiotic ethnology in Poland (connected with New Polish Ethnology group), its internal and external influences, its specifics, subjects and its reaction to the other theoretical propositions. The “neotribe” of New Polish Ethnology was established by few younger scholars, ethnologists in the early 1980s, in an opposition to the dominant stream of positivistic ethnology. Today they have become classics of Polish anthropology, masters that have educated a new generation of (...) their students, and lead some anthropological institutes. The most inspiring set of theories that influenced the group and its heirs was taken from Soviet semiotics of culture (Lotman, Uspensky, Toporov, Ivanov), and French structural-semiotics (Levi-Strauss, Barthes), but there are some individual differences also. On that basis they have developed a specific scope, aim and methods of interpretation with as its key terms myth and mythical thinking. They have explained many cultural events (relation we-others, body image, commercials, and anthropology itself) within the framework ofmythical thinking, making it the most productive and attractive frame of interpretation within Polish humanities and social sciences. In the 1990s they had to face critical ethnography, deconstruction and postmodern anthropology and they did it with perfect flexibility that even strengthened their project, because the potential of reflexivity and self-consciousness lied within semiotics from its beginning. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An introduction to the ethnography and human geography of non-European peoples, this book deals with the economic and social life of a number of groups at diverse levels of cultural achievement and in different regions of the world. International in its scope the book covers: Malaysia, Africa, North America, Canada, Siberia, the Amazon, Eastern Solomon Islands, India, Central Asia and the Middle East. Originally published in 1934. This re-issues the seventh edition of 1949.

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-...

We have learned by now not to see myth as simple entertainment or a babbling. Where the nineteenth-century eye could find only an out-of-date toy left behind by childish peoples or a cultural stage-set for leisured social circles, the human sciences have taught us to recognise an authentic expression of man: myth says with utmost seriousness something that is of essential importance. What is more, it is a way of living in the world, of orienting oneself in the midst of (...) things, of seeking an answer in the quest for the self. We owe this alteration of perspective to a whole group of scholars: Cassirer, Van der Leeuw, Unger, Preuss; we owe it in a quite special way to Maurice Leenhardt and to the original work which his recent death left uncompleted. (shrink)

A Geographical Approach for Measuring the Creative Capital. Case Study: Creative Capital Index of Slovakia Calculation of creativity index is a part of a modern quantification wave, in some cases also formulation of the spatial differentiation of social and economic phenomena required from the academic sphere by the decisive sphere. Policy makers have interest by this means to help themselves in obtaining public for their objectives. The creative capital as a sum of quantifiable creativity indicators is in this contribution (...) operationalized including the social capital, which is out of accord with a traditional understanding of creativity following the Florida's concept of the creative class. Methods for creativity index formation are introduced at the global level of states as well as at the regional level of a given state. There are substantial differences among both indexes results and statistical data on export of creative goods that are well documented on example of USA and China. Terminological chaos associated with the concepts of creative class and economy is thus extended with a chaos in the interpretation of findings, what contributes to the critique of the Florida's concept of creative class. There arise doubts that the quantification of creativity indexes with correlation quantification with other economic and social factors as GDP, entrepreneurship, inequality, Index HDI1) ; is maybe right in terms of mathematics, but it does not reveal the casual connections. The research purpose of the contribution is a geographical approach to the creative capital. The case study incorporates the Slovak regions, creativity index calculation and its spatial differentiation in form of map expression. The scientific goal lies in a confirmation of hypothesis about a dominant position of Bratislava region, and thus the capital of Slovakia. A limit of calculation is the choice of indicators which were strongly determined by the accessibility of statistical data. (shrink)

This text derives from a recording, and transcripts, of the introduction which Althusser gave on 6 December 1963, to a seminar for students in the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, offered at his invitation by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. Althusser takes the opportunity to raise questions about the status of social science and suggests that Bourdieu and Passeron represent slightly different strands of contemporary research practice, partly as a result of their different formation and practice since themselves leaving the École. (...) Althusser first considers the relation between the human sciences and the traditionally instituted Faculty of Letters or Humanities. What is the origin of the compulsion to constitute a science of human relations? Given that the social sciences have established themselves, Althusser then tries to define their nature. He suggests that they have three forms: as abstract and general theory, as ethnology, and as empirical sociology. He discusses the pros and cons of each in some detail. Althusser then asks what are the features which constitute sciences and concludes that they must always possess discrete theoretical perspectives corresponding with discrete components of reality but must also possess an element of self-referentiality or, as he puts it, must be objects to themselves. Althusser suggests that his contemporary social sciences are not philosophically adequate by the criteria which he advances. He proceeds to introduce Bourdieu and Passeron in such a way as to invite consideration of whether their practices meet his criteria. (shrink)

-/- Winner of the 2020 Josiah Royce Prize in American Idealist Thought, presented by the Josiah Royce Society, for demonstrating the extent to which Josiah Royce’s ideas about race were motivated explicitly in terms of imperial conquest. -/- Another white Man’s Burden performs a case study of Josiah Royce’s philosophy of racial difference. In an effort to lay bare the ethnological racial heritage of American philosophy, Tommy J. Curry challenges the common notion that the cultural racism of the twentieth century (...) was more progressive and less racist than the biological determinism of the 1800s. Like many white thinkers of his time, Royce believed in the superiority of the white races. Unlike today, however, whiteness did not represent only one racial designation but many. Contrary to the view of the British-born Germanophile philosopher Houston S. Chamberlain, for example, who insisted upon the superiority of the Teutonic races, Royce believed it was the Anglo-Saxon lineage that possessed the key to Western civilization. It was the birthright of white America, he believed, to join the imperial ventures of Britain—to take up the white man’s burden. To this end he advocated the domestic colonization of Blacks in the American South, suggested that America’s xenophobia was natural and necessary to protecting the culture of white America, and demanded the assimilation and elimination of cultural difference for the stability of America’s communities. Another white Man’s Burden reminds philosophers that racism has been part of the building blocks of American thought for centuries, and that this must be recognized and addressed in order for its proclamations of democracy, community, and social problems to have real meaning. (shrink)

I wish to discuss the constitutive conditions ‐ and aporias ‐ of the representations of the other in philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. In so doing, I show that crucial to the problem of ‘tolerance’ is the answer to such questions as: How do we represent the stranger and the other? How does this representation come into being? How can it ‐ in given instances ‐ be changed? I shall suggest that the arts may play a decisive role in this (...) process.In this paper I shall attempt to outline a double thesis: (a) the philosophical theory of the experience of something other requires the challenge of ethnology as the science of the stranger; and (b) conversely, however, ethnology itself requires a theory of cultural strangeness, which although always presupposed is never developed. I shall pursue this thesis in three stages. In the first section, I shall say something about the philosophical study of the other and its latent affinity with ethnology. In the second section, I shall take some key terms from the current dispute within ethnology over methodology, and attempt to show that the experience of something other (alien) requires a medium to express, or rather to describe, this experience. This problem of ethnographic depiction and description, lying between science and art; and the suggested solutions to this problem, developed particularly by postmodern American cultural‐anthropology, namely an aesthetisization without art, leads to the third section of this paper. This provokes the following question: what does art ‐ that moment which remains hidden within the contemporary ethnological discussion ‐ have to offer to our understanding of the (cultural) other? Further, we may ask, as paradoxical as it may at first sound, whether it is precisely from art, perhaps indeed only from art, that the way is to be found leading towards that which hasn't yet been problematized in all these contemporary intercultural debates: an ethic of intercultural understanding as the most important precondition for intercultural tolerance or toleration. (shrink)

Ethnological and ethnolinguistic research can pose a wide range of different ethical challenges for researchers and the communities in which they work. Ethnologists and ethnolinguists study human societies from different angles to understand their cultural traits, linguistic variability, etc. Such research can advance our understanding of social groups and contribute to the production of knowledge and may even benefit certain communities. But it can also create risks for participants and communities (e.g., loss of privacy, stigmatization, persecution), and for researchers themselves (...) (e.g., loss of access to a field area, loss of control over the research process and results). These risks and other ethical challenges, and the means to address them, deserve special attention from ethnologists and ethnolinguistics. (shrink)

The phrase ‘Lebensform’ had a long and varied history prior to Wittgenstein’s use of it on a mere three occasions in the Philosophical Investigations. It is not a pivotal concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But it is a minor signpost of a major reorientation of philosophy, philosophy of language and logic, and philosophy of mathematics that Wittgenstein instigated. For Wittgenstein sought to replace the conception of a language as a meaning calculus by an anthropological or ethnological conception. A language is not (...) a class of sentences that can be formed from a set of axioms, formation and transformation rules and the meanings of which is given by their truth-conditions, but an open-ended series of interlocking language-games constituting a form of life or way of living. Wittgenstein’s uses of ‘Lebensform’ and its cognates, both in the Investigations and in his Nachlass are severally analysed, and various exegetical misinterpretations are clarified. (shrink)

Radin's timeless critique of anthropological theory and methods from a humanistic perspective provides an overall assessment of the field of ethnology, its shortcomings, errors, and misdirections.