ABSTRACT
Moses said to Israel: ’How can you let your doing precede your listening? Does not the deed usually arise from learning what to do?’ They answered him: ‘We will do whatever we will hear from God.’
From this also derives the saying: ‘He whose works exceed his wisdom, his wisdom will endure.’ (Midrash [21], in Plut, M., The Torah: A Modern Commentary)
The anthropological investigation of the “beliefs” of non-Western people has been one of the century’s crucial foci for assessing anthropology’s methodology and the nature of cultural difference this methodology implicates. Evans-Pritchard (1937), Needham (1972), Gellner (1985) and more recently Sperber (1996) have all contributed signifi cantly to the perennial question concerning the function of apparently “irrational” or unverifi able beliefs, especially those we usually term religious, cosmological or supernatural, and the role of cultural relativism in assessing the social and cultural functionality of these and other beliefs. They have been aided by the abiding concern with the nature of knowledge, language and translation on the part of many notable analytic philosophers of this century, including Quine (1968), as well as philosophers of science such as Barnes and Bloor (1982) and Bhaskar (1979).
