ABSTRACT
Ethnography bears witness, in this respect, to a dizzying array of imaginative viewpoints: children of different co-wives argue in an African house compound; an Amazonian shaman in his hammock recounts the antics of the creator gods as they make the universe during the myth time. Few anthropologists would dispute Malinowski's pre-eminence in establishing what we now call the 'anthropological imagination'. His Argonauts of the Western Pacific is the paramount case of the ethnography understood as a method of imagining the lives of unfamiliar others. The sheer scale of coordinated social activity entails that the awareness of many individual people must be engaged sporadically with common objects of imagining in order for life together to go on. The psychologist Fred Attneave was amongst the first to recognize that ambiguous visual phenomena provide valuable insights. Since human acts take place with others in mind, then, as Leo Coleman discusses in this volume, imagining, whether intentionally or not, is 'sociocentric'.
