ABSTRACT
The model of knowledge that was largely dominant in the 1960s left things as they were: with social phenomena being considered as a system of relations between previously cut-up terms, in other words as like a language, a particular language, which is but a minute part of language in general. Obviously this model, as such, is rarely affirmed today. It is often either tempered and, so to speak, softened, or else jettisoned by those seeking to restore dignity to that which had been devalued. One of anthropology’s principal tasks—indeed its vocation—is to carry out a radical critique of the assumptions. The true object-subject of anthropology, which is to say above all ethnography, has always been the emotions. The experience of fieldwork is an experience of sharing in the sensible.
