TY - JOUR
T1 - Reality remodeled Practical fictions for a more-than-empirical world
AU - Rodseth, Lars
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022/3/1
Y1 - 2022/3/1
N2 - Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate the “aesthetic” advantages of idealization and simplification. These advantages have been largely ignored in recent decades, as anthropologists have come to favor ever more intricate and encompassing accounts. The resulting “ethnographic involution,” I suggest, has steadily diminished anthropology as a source of usable, socially shared knowledge. Much the same problem, interestingly, was confronted long ago by Max Weber, who developed the method of “ideal types” precisely as a way to grasp, represent, and investigate the complexity of historical reality. Weber converged in this regard with his contemporary at Halle, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). Since the late twentieth century, Vaihinger’s “fictionalism” has attracted renewed interest within philosophy and beyond. Yet his notion of “as-if ” reasoning—a via media, I would argue, between particularism and positivism—remains virtually unknown within anthropology.
AB - Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate the “aesthetic” advantages of idealization and simplification. These advantages have been largely ignored in recent decades, as anthropologists have come to favor ever more intricate and encompassing accounts. The resulting “ethnographic involution,” I suggest, has steadily diminished anthropology as a source of usable, socially shared knowledge. Much the same problem, interestingly, was confronted long ago by Max Weber, who developed the method of “ideal types” precisely as a way to grasp, represent, and investigate the complexity of historical reality. Weber converged in this regard with his contemporary at Halle, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). Since the late twentieth century, Vaihinger’s “fictionalism” has attracted renewed interest within philosophy and beyond. Yet his notion of “as-if ” reasoning—a via media, I would argue, between particularism and positivism—remains virtually unknown within anthropology.
KW - Boas
KW - Fictionalism
KW - Ideal types
KW - Models
KW - Vaihinger
KW - Weber
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U2 - 10.1086/719660
DO - 10.1086/719660
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85130944039
SN - 2575-1433
VL - 12
SP - 217
EP - 234
JO - HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
JF - HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
IS - 1
ER -