Knowledge, Self-Knowledge, and AnthropologyWebb Keane Abstract Anthropology displays a peculiar and long-standing, if uneven, resistance to the various modes of positivism and, more generally, determinism, that have tended to dominate other social sciences. Although most flamboyantly evident in the interpretive turn and subsequent versions of post-structuralism and post-modernism, some form of this resistance has been a persistent feature of cultural anthropology since the nineteenth century. This paper examines a few key moments in this history. It argues that underlying today's often bitter disagreements over what we can or should know about human societies are some important unifying assumptions. One of the key figures in these assumptions, and the methodologies they inspire, is the knowing and self-knowing subject. That figure's persistence in many otherwise divergent approaches to anthropology is bound up with a shared, usually tacit, concern with the problem of freedom. |