ABSTRACT
Anthropology would know what it is to be human, and to write this knowledge, while the self-consciousness, the capacity for reflexivity and irony, of human being means that 'the human' is a moving target. The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers gave us the model of the 'fragment' as a piece of work defined by its incompletion. This chapter considers the anthropological account as a generic fragment by itself: The anthropological text becomes a fragment the moment it is written. The text will invariably represent social life as somehow universally concretized, as if beyond particular circumstances and subjectivities. 'Better' anthropologists, learn from Leach, and to aspire to genuine insight, is to come to a true understanding of the nature, the quality, the source and the subject matter, of anthropological writing. One writes anthropology and one gains insight by virtue of the particular way in which that writing comes to be seen to be provisional – and is seen beyond, overcome.
