ABSTRACT
Anthropology is at once the most resolutely academic and the most fiercely antiacademic of disciplines. Its commitment is to human understanding of a very fundamental kind, and it continues to exist and thrive only thanks to a university system which-at least in principle, if no longer in practice-is dedicated to the production of knowledge for its own sake. Yet at the same time, anthropologists have been foremost in challenging the claims of academia to deliver authoritative accounts of the manifold ways of the world, along with the implicit ranking of such accounts above those that might be offered by ‘ordinary folk’ whose powers of observation and reason have supposedly not been cultivated to the same degree. This challenge commonly appears in the form of a critique of the assumptions of so-called ‘Western discourse’, a discourse founded upon a claim to the supremacy of human reason and whose natural home and breeding ground is the academy. Through the practice and experience of fieldwork, anthropologists have been more inclined to privilege the kinds of knowledge and skill that are generated in the course of people’s practical involvements with one another and with their environments, in their everyday lives. The paradox is that by doing so, they are undercutting the intellectual foundations of an organization of knowledge without which anthropology, as a discipline, could not exist.
