ABSTRACT
When all is said and done, when all epistemic warrants and methodological prescriptions have gone, when good sense and moralistic injunctions have run aground, when all guarantees of stable ground have come undone – all that is left is the principle of invention: Nothing is given, everything is invented. It is this that Roy Wagner (2016, 35–36) taught us, is it not? It is this that he encouraged us to (un)learn, when he put it to us that all learning comes in the form of a shock, that all study is given over to an improvisation it barely manages to control, to a dance of forms out of which it does not merely hallucinate but must invent that which it seeks to understand, drawing it in, taking it on, transforming both knower and known through the very dynamics of dance that render ‘culture’ itself nothing but an act and process of invention and turn anthropologists as much as ‘all human beings, wherever they may be’, into ‘fieldworkers of a sort, controlling the culture shock of daily experience through all kinds of imagined and constructed “rules”, traditions, and facts’. It is this that he intimated when he intimated that invention gives way not only to that which is learned but to the very faculties that make learning possible in the first place, that by which the world is deemed stable or changing, safe or perilous, cosmos or chaos, such that order and disorder, ‘known and unknown, conventional regularity and the incident that defies regularity are tightly and innately bound together, they are the functions of each other and necessarily interdependent. We cannot act’, he ruminated, ‘but that we invent each through the other’ (2016, 51).
