ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the insights of writers who have suggested that the work of scholarship is part of an intellectual labour process. It positions itself within this mode of disciplinary self-reflection and explains to think through how scholarly dispositions towards choices of subject, theory and method in anthropology are formed. Rather than emphasizing inwardness and interiority, the chapter deploys a methodological reflexivity that turns the optics outward. It focuses on the how different forces in the political and economic conjunctures that have prevailed over the last half-century condition anthropological practices. The chapter calls radical, runs counter to dominant paradigms that are premised on coherence, integration and stability. It focuses on conjunctures and fields of forces which condition our practices in what the author insists, following the realist tradition, is a world out there that cannot be understood solely as a ‘social construction’.
