ABSTRACT
Anthropological knowledge seems to serve as a means to reconcile the alleged unity of mankind with an enormous variety of cultural forms. From the very outset anthropology has faced a bundle of problems in its endeavour to deal with social experience in other cultures. The chapter suggests that the concept of common sense had only appeared sporadically in anthropological works as a subject-matter or theoretical category. It shows the importance and properties of common sense understood as the experiential mood upon which other cultural forms are parasitic, while tracing it back through the models used for conceptualizing the relationship between anthropologist and cognized culture. Anthropological knowledge should be treated as a symbolic form which, to a certain extent, will always be a product of the anthropologist's culture. The problem of valid anthropological interpretation comes down to establishing shared meanings between the participants in the discourse, that is., between the subjects of a culture and the researcher.
