Kant's Paradox and Anthropology: Issues of Representation

Inevitably, the above concerns regarding the absolutist interpretations of Kant’s vision are directly linked to the politics of representation of reality and the issues of universalism and ethnocentrism in anthropology (see Asad 1973 and 1993, Bourdieu 1977, Fabian 1983, Needham 1984, Pratt 1986, Herzfeld 1987, Clifford 1988, Grimshaw and Hart 1995, Katz and Csordas 2003, da Col and Graeber 2011, among many others). These issues are directly related to the Kantian paradox of a common sense, following the crisis of the intellectuals in the 1970s, which raised methodological and ethical problems between the idealism inherited in the anthropological vocation (a united world) and its gap from the historical reality of ethnographic representation

First, the teleological and moral aspect of Kantian thought of an ideal future utopia is set against the dystopia of history, which conforms to the separation of the content of “the world” from the form of “a world” in terms of the “lower” and “higher” realms in the history human thought. Second, Kantian anthropology is a type of practical (i.e. “pragmatic”) Judgement, referring to a specific way of thinking, in which the particular is enabled to communicate with the universal in a twofold manner: a “determinative” way, i.e. local knowledge tested under a priori universal laws, and vice versa, a “merely reflective” way, i.e. the universal law tested according to a particular local or personal reality (as in Allison 2001, 15). And third, the Kantian anthropological project is by definition a pragmatic negotiation with an emerging history-on-the-making, open to potentiality to create a better world, free from inequality and war; to fulfil the Dream of the Child for World Peace. Since for Kant the project of anthropology is a type of “pragmatic” Judgement, on the basis of which human relations and networks are built, and since the essence of Judgement is defined by Taste, it follows that the paradox of Kant’s pragmatic idealism is elevated to a methodological problem regarding the politics of representation and the gap between the anthropological theory and vocation (universalism), and the ethnographic practice and subjectivity (particularity). This chapter argues that the recent turn to subjectivity, following the death of ethnographic authority that emerged with the “crisis of the intellectuals” in the 1970s, exposes the gap between the anthropological theory and the practice of ethnography. This carries wider implications regarding the vocation of pragmatic anthropology and its relevance to the great changes