Crisi e non crisi dell'antropologia

Abstract

Anthropology is here taken as cultural anthropology, or ethnology according to European continental tradition. Crisis are not a sign of the end of anthropology but of its vitality. Whenever the flproblematic or methodological approach tends to be modified a crisis is apt to be diagnosed. During the first period of anthropology, as a scientific discipline, the origin of culture was seen as the main problem. and the «primitives» were approached as the archives of human history. Personal contact in field-research, that became the established rule in the second period, dissolved the illusion of the archives and made the discovery that those who had been erroneously thought to be out of history were indeed true men with full cultural and social life. The human phenomenon in all its diversity of cultural forms emerged as the real aim of anthropology irrespective of societies complex or simplex (if such ever existed). In this perspective the appeal for urgent anthropology sounded equivocal and proved «disastrously divisive». New problems and new methods were pursued in an effort of «rethinking» all anthropological issues and in the expansion of field-research. Consistently diverseness (alterità in Italian) in its different forms and cultural change in its dynamic process came to the fore as the true object of anthropology. No real difference is to be seen between «exotic» and «domestic» types of field-research.
A further critical issue has been the ethics of anthropology. There are two facets in this problem: one structural, regarding the establishment of anthropology as a profession which brougth about a formulation, of norms of professional ethics; the-other methodological, regarding the apparent opposed roles implied in being at one time «observer» and «participant». Finally anthropology, as the study of different cultural systems and of the dynamic process of change, is to be regarded as one specialisation in the «context» of anthropology as the general study of man.