Rethinking Anthropology
Abstract
The essential core of social anthropology is fieldwork–the understanding of the way of life of a single particular people. This fieldwork is an extremely personal traumatic kind of experience and the personal involvement of the anthropologist in his work is reflected in what he produces. Alongside their dogmatic ignorance of the facts of life, Trobrianders also maintain that every child should resemble its mother's husband but that no child could ever resemble a member of its own matrilineal kin. If the Trobrianders say—as they do say both in word and deed—that the relation between a father and his son is much the same as the relation between male cross-cousins and as the relation between brothers-in-law, but absolutely different from the relation between a mother and her child, then people must accept the fact that this is so. There are many forms of ideology which might form the basis for such a pattern of ideas.