ABSTRACT
If one were to ask what has been the major, or, at any rate, the most conspicuous and visible theoretical development in social anthropology in recent years, the most plausible answer would be: the emergence of so-called interpretive anthropology, the hermeneutic twist, the switch from social structure to meaning as the principal focus of interest. The justification or validation of this shift of vision would run something as follows: earlier anthropological styles had forgotten, or neglected, the fact that the accounts of alien cultures were offered, not by some culturally disembodied spirit endowed with a divine objectivity and transcendence of all cultural assumptions, but, in reality, by a culturally embodied observer, whose vision is as suffused by his own culture as the vision he is claiming to fix in the ethnographic record. A sound anthropology is one which is as acutely sensitive to the cultural idiosyncrasy of the anthropological object. To single out the former for special treatment, to give him or her licence and exemption from critical scrutiny is, all at once, a disastrous methodological error and a mark of moral and political fall from grace.
