If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time,
and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this
exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and
if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of
departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice,
starting with Levi-Strauss.
For several years, the author has advocated an anthropology of
"proximity" in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has
studied such emblematic places of Western modernity as the Parisian
Metro, and such emblematic "non-places" as airports and freeways,
treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others
might judge less "pure" or "significant" than systems of filiation
or matrimonial alliance. The proper place of the ethnographer, he
argues, is sufficiently distanced to comprehend a system as a
system, yet participatory enough to live it as an individual. How
can one best arrive at such a place?
This book answers by outlining an approach to anthropology that
focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in
making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification
that create the difference between same and other. Why trace a line
of demarcation between societies thought to warrant and require
anthropological observation and others (namely, our own) thought to
demand a different type of study? Once anthropology, through its
study of rites, takes social meaning as its principal object, the
necessity for a "generalized anthropology" that includes the entire
planet seems obvious, especially in view of the rapid proliferation
of new networks of communication and the integration ofindividuals
into those networks.
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