ABSTRACT
Hence I have been conscious of myself professionally as a student of revitalization movements and of my career project as the study of revitalization. In this chapter I wish to continue to explore this revitalization of consciousness with the simple additional thought that in some way anthropology itself, perhaps the social sciences entirely, have themselves been revitalizing for the kinds of wretched selves who find themselves singled out and moved by Newton’s hymn. I mean that through the ‘amazing’ work of our methods of abstraction we regularly transform self consciousness into system consciousness. And that’s a good thing too. But would ‘saved’ or ‘salvation’ be apt words for the rapture or epiphany obtained by these mainly
intellectual operations? We have at least returned the self to the whole (Fernandez 1986: Ch. 8). Or in a rather more recondite vocabulary I find useful and shall return to below: the social sciences have been revitalizing by saving us from the complexities and contrariness of cultural consensus by putting forth collective representations purporting to account for how systems operate so as to assure our social consensus.1
