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- Seminar, Department of Philosophy, Parahyangan Catholic University,
Bandung, Indonesia, August 3, 2007
- by Wim van Binsbergen
- Professor of the Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Erasmus
University Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and Senior Researcher, African
Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands; Editor of Quest: An African
Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie
- binsbergen@ascleiden.nl
- http://www.shikanda.net
- http://www.quest-journal.net
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- Philosophers, all over the world,
- make language-based, i.e. textual pronouncements
- About
- the human condition, the world as known to our senses, and whatever
(if anything) may lie beyond our senses;
- the extent and limitations of our faculties of knowing;
- the formal logical conditions under which our pronouncements are well-formed and
our truth claims well-founded
- ___________
- 1) My argument in this first section reflects my views as
published, in Dutch, in my Rotterdam 1999 inaugural lecture Culturen
bestaan niet, and: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, ‘De empirische
benadering van interculturaliteit: Tussen culturele antropologie en
interculturele filosofie’, Krisis: Tijdschrift voort Empirische
Filosofie, 1. 1: 59-6; and as subsequently published in English in Quest:
An African Journal of Philosophy, 2001; and in my 2003 book Intercultural
encounters, final chapter, under the specific heading of philosophy as, to some extent, an
empirical science. My general ideas on fieldwork and philosophy, in the
rest of the present argument, have been worked out more extensively
throughout the latter book.
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- In the process, philosophy usually appears as
- a self-contained language game (Wittgenstein),
- which is only accountable to itself and its professionals (the
philosophers),
- and not to any non-philosophical outside authority
- For instance in such fields as politics, political ideology, religion,
the media, power relations in academia, in the community and in the
family
- nor to any empirical test by which the contents of philosophical
pronouncements is judged in terms of its matching the evidence of the
world of the senses ‘out there’
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- If we may roughly divide contemporary philosophy in the North Atlantic
tradition (which is far from being the only one!) into
- Continental style and
- Analytical style
- Then we note that these styles differ in their emphasis on
accountability
- In the analytical approach a philosophical pronouncement is only
meaningful to the extent to which it explicitly stipulates the method
by which its claims to truth may be ascertained
- The continental style is rather by way of association, hermeneutics,
rhetorics (in the Aristotelian sense), an appeal to introspection, and
a host of literary devices which may persuade the reader of relevance
and truth without any strict, explicit method of substantiation being
indicated
- From an analytical point of view, much continental philosophy is
meaningless or at best poetical; from a continental point of view, much
of analytical philosophy is irrelevant and superficial
- But neither of the two would maintain that philosophical accountability
is primarily towards empirical reality
- It is here that philosophy differs in principle from empirical sciences
such as ethnography, religious studies, and history
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- When Western philosophy emerged some 2600 years ago, the terrain over
which it was supposed to make pronouncements was virtually unlimited
- For no specialised fields of science and scholarship had yet emerged
- or at least, had yet established themselves in the Ancient Greek world,
which at the time was only a relatively backward and culturally
dependent and historically recent periphery of the ancient cultures of
West Asia and Northeastern Africa
- Meanwhile the edifice of science and scholarship has developed to such
an extent, that more and more has been eaten away from philosophy’s
ancient unboundedness
- Psychologists are now joining with sociologists, anthropologists and
economists to define essential aspects of the human condition;
- astronomers do the same with physicists, geologists, biologists and
chemists to define the same for the non-human natural world;
- Etc. etc.
- More and more, philosophy has become the field where conceptual,
methodological, theoretical and logical foundations are explored while
the application of these foundations by the empirical scientists is no
longer in the hands of
philosophers
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- Usually philosophers have even alarmingly little direct influence on
these empirical applications
- as a result these empirical applications in the hands of scientists and
scholar are sometimes naïve and uncritical
- More typically, each empirical discipline has its own foundational
sub-discipline
- where philosophically-aware specialists make foundational explorations,
which are then ploughed back into their empirical discipline
- In such a way that most rank-and-file members of that discipline
implicitly rely on such foundational research without being able to
engage in it themselves or to critique its results
- Having started out as an empirical social scientist and historian, I
take it that my Rotterdam chair of foundations of intercultural
philosophy is engaged in such foundational research
- Caught between the Scylla of highly competent and specialised full
philosophers, and the Charibdis of highly competent and specialised
full empirical scientists
- Each of which believes to have reason to be sceptical, critical and
suspicious – even dismissive – of my current type of research and
publications
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- In the Analytical style, the respective competences of philosophers and
empirical scientists are more or less agreed to be complemetary, and
their discussions are often highly fruitful for both fields
- In the continental style, however, philosophers have often continued to
make sweeping, intuitive statements about the world and the human
condition
- For instance on such highly fashionable and admittedly timely topics as
identity, culture, ethnicity, globalisation, the state, power,
conflict, violence, democracy, fundamentalism, etc.
- Without taking sufficient trouble to equip themselves with
state-of-the-art empirical scholarship concerning such matters
- Hence assertions based on highly selective personal experience,
introspection, chance meetings, an unanalysed personal ideological
perspective, are proposed not as literary essays or journalism but as
philosophical wisdom
- As if the great diversification and erosion of the ancient unboundedness
of philosophy’s field of competence had never taken place.
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- I have remained enough of an empirical scientist,
- and I have invested enough sweat, blood and tears in my own fieldwork
as a basis of my own empirical pronouncements in that capacity over the
decades,
- to have much patience with such continental philosophers
- Even though I often have to admit that,
- since they do not have to invest most of their research time in meeting
the high standards of ever more elaborate methodological and empirical
requirements of an empirical discipline
- And also because their thought, powers of imagination, powers of
verbalisation, and their being fertilised by wide and profound reading,
- Such continental often combine their unfounded empirical pronouncements
with unprecedented insights and
wonderfully stimulating hypotheses of great heuristc value for further
empirical research
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- I therefore propose that we agree
- that the borderline between philosophy and the empirical sciences is
thinner and more porous than is often thought, and
- that important and stimulating traffic is taking place across that
borderlie
- In two directions, i.e. vice versa
- Let us now consider three contexts particularly conducive to an
empirical dimension in philosophy
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- The three contexts are:
- The historiography of philosophy
- Studying situations that have not yet been rendered in texts
- Studying other socio—cultural situations than our own
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- The first condition conducive to an empirical dimension in philosophy is
when we wish to make pronouncements about thought systems other than our
own but still belonging to the same philosophical tradition, i.e. when
we study the history of philosophy. Here the philosopher’s conceptual
and theoretical autonomy (with all the uncoumbered arrogance for outside
constraints it may contain) gives way to the humble dependence on given
texts, i.e. methods of identifying, authenticating, publishing and
interpreting such texts, where the said arrogance gives way to all the
meticulou, intersubjective, methodological care of the historian of
philosophy – merely one specialism within the wider field of the history
of ideas. This is in fact a field of empirical enquiry, although of
course the researcher needs to be well versed in philosophy to be
effective here.
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- The second condition conducive to an empirical dimension in philosophy
is when we wish to make pronouncements about situations that have not
yet been rendered in text,
- either because the specific social transactions typical of that
situation are not primarily text-based although the actors may or may
not be fully literate (eg. The interactions between parents, friends,
lovers, in any society)
- or because the general socio-cultural framework of the actors involved
is illiterate (a situation in many peasant societies in all
continents,,and also common in societies based on a hunting and
gathering economy)
- With little exaggeration, philosophy is mainly the processing of given
texts into new texts. Philosophers tend to rely on texts as
self-evidently present
- Cultural anthroplogy by contrast is the science that covers with texts
that which has not yet been covered by texts before
- hence the relative dominance of anthropology in the study of Africa,
where most pre-coonquest situations before the colonial conquest were
illiterate
- and not in Asia, where widespread literacy has been the basis for major
powerful states and civilisations for several millennia
- Being confronted with a given socio-cultural situation that has to be rendered into text, means
that the given nature of that situation is to be rendered validly and
reliably into the descriptive text. It is an empirical challenge of
method, in which the author’s pre-established knowledge, and access to
that knowledge through introspection, hardly plays a role.
- This is all the more obvious when
our empirical task of text creation involves a society other than
our own.
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- Especially in the course of the twentieth century (‘the linguistic
turn’) philosophers have given much thought to what happens when aspects
of reality are represented in text. Time is lacking to consider these
debates in detail here.
- Their general conclusion is that such rendering leads not to a faithful
one-to-one mirror image, but to a fundamental distortion, largely
influenced by the author and his or her assumptions about the world, and
forced into the straightjacket of the specific, and limited, syntactic
and semantic structures of the text’s specific language. Text has been
recognised, in many ways, as a trap and a mystification, imposing
distinctions, labels and other forms of organisation upon a reality that
may be organised in totally different ways, if at all.
- Hence textuality is the worst possible strategy of intercultural
encounter, e.g. in knowledge production – if one wishes to cross
cultural boundaries, one should rather make music, dance, be silent, or
engage in silent ritual together.
- On the other hand, textual representation may be distortive yet it is
inevitable: we largely perceive the world coherently, can only make
sense of it, manage and control it, on the basis of our rendering that
world into texts that are thought, spoken or written (as the textual
nature of philosophy already indicates, but there are many more grounds
for this argument).
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- When even today Continental philosophers do not hesitate to make
pronouncements about the human condition and the world, it is usually in
a context where they mean: the human condition and the world of people
like themselves (i.e.
- Present-day
- middle-class
- male
- Academics
- Belonging to the Judaeo-Christian tradition
- of the North Atlantic and its southern extensions, Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa, South America, and other regions where
intellectuals identify closely with North Atlantic culture)
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- Such a neglect of historical and geographical diversity of experience,
identities, cultures and predicaments,
- amounts to a sleight-of-hand, an extreme myopia, not to say a violence
of self-centredness and the exclusion of others and Others
- Yet however until quite recently such violence of thought went virtually
unnoticed and unchallenged
- I can only selectively mention a few steps in the recent correction of
this hegemonic myopia:
- 1930s – Césaire; pioneer Afrocentrist writers; Gandhi;
- 1940s – Shahrir; the rise of critical (humanist or Marxist) cultural
anthropology (Herskovits, Kluckhohn, Gluckman); the rise of
structuralist anthropology (Lévi-Strauss)
- 1950s – Fanon, Nkrumah, Senghor, de Beauvoir;
- 1970s – the fertilisation of anthropology (Geertz) by hermeneutics etc.
(Ricoeur) – particularly interesting in the present context because
Geertz was not only a leading anthropologist of his generation, but
also a major author on Java
- 1980s – the proliferation of viable alternative approaches
- Postcolonial philosophies: Mudimbe, Bhabha, Spivak;
- the rise to academic respectability of feminist philosophy;
- the initiation of the Black Athena debate by Martin Bernal;
- the establishment of intercultural philosophy by Kimmerle (my
Rotterdam predecessor), Mall and Wipper
- Beyond anthropology: the ‘sage philosophy’ of Odera Oruka
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- As a result of these developments, that have been among the greatest
achievements of the 20th century and in which thinkers from
outside the North Atlantic played a major role, two main benefits:
- We are now fully aware of the necessity of a counter-hegemonic,
non-Eurocentric, intercultural (as well as gender-conscious!)
perspective in philosophy
- And at the same time we now have
- (contrary to the situation in the times of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Scheler,
Wittgenstein, Heidegger and even Sartre)
- a fully-fledged empirical science, cultural anthropology, that has at
its disposal
- highly sophisticated techniques and methods,
- tested out in tens of thousands of empirical field situations, academic
supervision relationships, and scholarly debates,
- for the empirical description of the value orientations, cosmologies,
even the epistemologies, of ‘other cultures’
- And yet the philosophical reminder that all this confident rendering of
other cultures into text, is distortive, a sign of hybris, and
potentially hegemonic
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- So the third context conducive to an empirical dimension in philosophy
is when we wish to make pronouncements about other cultures than our
own. Here we can no longer be so blindly competent and myopic that we
just impose our own self-evidences for the facts and perceptions of the
other cultural situation.
- In so far as this ‘other culture’ comes to us in the form of the texts
competent owners of that culture have produced themselves (as is often
the case in Asian situations) philosophers are still comfortably at home
in their standard game of processing one type of text into another type
of text.
- But if local texts are non-existent or only peripheral to the local
situation we seek to explore philosophical, then ethnographic fieldwork
seems to be the only research strategy left.
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- Cf:
- Lepore, E., 1993, 'Principle of charity', in: Dancy, J., & Sosa,
E., eds., A companion to epistemology, Oxford/ Cambridge (MA):
Blackwell, pp. 365-366; first edition published in 1992.
- Malpas, J.E., 1988, ‘The nature of interpretative charity’, Dialectica,
42: 17-36
- McGinn, C., 1977, ‘Charity, interpretation and belief’, Journal of
Philosophy, 74: 521-35
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- Cf. Jackson, M., 1989, Paths toward a clearing: Radical empiricism and
ethnographic inquiry, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.
- Drewes, Annette., 1995, Words and silences: Communication about
pregnancy and birth among the Kunda of Zambia, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis
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- Cf. my book Tears of Rain (1992)
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- Personalism and mechanicism in the local notions of baraka (divine
grace) in the popular Islam of North African peasants, 1968-
- The cosmology of time: Headman Kapesh among the Nkoya people, Zambia,
Central Africa, survives the collapse of the (local version of the)
tower of Babel
- Becoming a sangoma: the epistemology of spirit mediums/diviners/healers
in Southern Africa, 1988-
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- In 1968 I conducted my first fieldwork, into popular Islam in North
Africa. As Geertz has argued (Islam observed, 1968) Islam everywhere in
the world has absorbed and accommodated pre-Islamic local custom, and
thus, among peasants in the mountains of North Western Tunisia
(Khumiriyya), I found a very informal and relaxed form of Islam (this
was before the major worldwide pendulum swing towards formal Islam since
the late 1970s) combined with the veneration of trees, rocks, springs,
and (adjacent to these natural items) small shrines associated with a
purely local saint, considered to be dead and invisible – in ways
perhaps not too different from popular Islam in some rural areas of
Indonesia.
- I soon found out that, just like in the existing ethnographic and
Islamological literature (e.g. Westermarck, Chelhod) the local
population made sense of the complex world of the sacred by reference to
the basic concept of baraka
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- My puzzle, as a budding ethnographer,
- was to link
- the myriad locally (emically) recognised manifestations of divine and
spiritual power around us in the valley,
- and the many different ways in which the local people interacted with
these manifestations
- with an abstract, more or less etic, standardised reformulation of baraka in analytical
terms
- And to justify such linkages as I believed I could make between belief,
action and basic cosmological principle
- By systematic reference to what actions the local people were
performing vis-à-vis these emic manifestations of the sacred
- And how they would speak about these actions and manifestations
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- I soon learned that I could freely share in the local actions directed
at manifestations of the sacred, abd observe ongoing rituals in full
detail
- but that people were not used to articulate in speech such underlying
conceptualisations as seemed to govern their overt behaviour. The sacred
was taken for granted, seldom even put into words, it was not
problematised (for the elders and the local myths about saints were
considered to contain definitive and non-problematic knowledge), nor
contested (except in the rare cases when formal Islamic agents from town
visited the village and challenged the peasants’ popular forms of
Islam!).
- So my fieldwork became a struggle to try and bring people to articulate
in words what they were not used to articulate, and thus to retrieve and
make explicit an underlying structure that should be there – as I assume
on the basis of my three and a half years of undergraduate and early
graduate training.
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- At the time I did not understand the problematic nature of my assumption
of an underlying structure. Now I think that the only real structure was
to be found in the overt, public ritual actions, and in the relatively
few and stereotypified verbal comments with which that action would
locally be accompanied. Any underlying structure that I would
reconstruct to underlie the local religious system as a whole, is likely
to be an invention, a textual imposition, of my own making. But perhaps
ethnography is condemned to be mainly such an alien construct.
- My main way to link my emerging mental model of what baraka could be ‘in
essence’, and local tangible religious action, was to put before my
informants hypothetical cases – i.e. little narratives involving real or
invented people engaging in ritual situations, and asking my informant
which use of words, which labels, which concepts, which explanations, as
advanced by me in these narratives. At first this gave rise to
irritation: ‘Do you think we have been lying to you?!!!’ But gradually,
as my competence in local symbolic and communicative idiom improved and
my understanding of Khumiri religion slowly grew, I more or more managed
to come at the same wave length as my informants, and to make the
conversations on these hypothetical cases interesting and humoristic.
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- In the end, after my return from the field and after more than two years
of struggling with my copious fieldnotes of verbatim conversations and
detailed ritual observations, I hit upon a solution that I still (after
nearly forty years) find satisfactory:
- I propose to see the emic concept of baraka as inherently dynamic and
contradictory, with a semantic field extending between two opposing
poles:
- At one extreme, baraka is nothing but divine grace, and requires the
direct personal submissive and respectful relationship of a human being
to Allah and to the local saint who as ‘close to’ (wali) Allah can
intercede with Allah on behalf of the living supplicant; here prayer, hallal
sacrifice, and niya (pious humble intention) are at the centre of the
ritual process. This I call the personalistic pole of baraka.
- However, there is also a more compelling, even magical side to baraka,
where it is more like a fluid quality which (much like Polynesian mana,
which invaded the History of Religions as a generalised analytical
concept in the late 19th c.) saturates a person, object or place to a certain degree, and which from
that initial source may be derived
(much like static electicity) and conveyed on to another
carrier. Here the management of baraka is mechanicistic and
manipulative, for a specific egoistic purpose, and without any emphasis
on the need of a humble submissive relationship with Allah and His
saints.
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- I found (in ways for which I need a two-volume ethnography to describe,
so out of scope here) I could interpret almost all specific
pronouncements and observations involving baraka along these two poles,
and much to my amazement, it turned out that people’s words (and
thought, apparently) could oscillate from one pole to the other and back
within one and the same ritual situation, even within seconds.
- Of course I could not try to verify this etic construct of baraka
emically, in conversation with my informants, because I had hit on
something that (even though an analytical construct) revealed the
contradictory and tautological workings of a religious basic concept.
This contradictory and protean nature allowed for the working of Khumiri
religion and the social processes it underpinned, provided the local
actors were not aware of these contradictions. They could never have
afforded to support my findings even if I would have been able to convey
these in the local peasant dialect of Arabic.
- Over the decades I have written a great deal on my Khumiri research,
although the two-volume final account is only now being finalised. See http://www.shikanda.net,
under African religion and Berber culture, for access to my scholarly
texts supporting the present argument.
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- If the West’s path of scientific knowledge was opened with the Neolithic
invention of the package of writing—the state—organised
priesthood—science, then for an appreciation of the predicament of
knowledge in Africa today we need to remind ourselves that the first
knowledge revolution never really took root in African soil before the
20th century CE, when it came in the trappings of colonial and
missionary domination.
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- This is of course the kind of overstatement one would make in a
provisional presentation like the present one,
- Admittedly, it does not do justice to, for instance, African Islamic
scholarship throughout the second mill. CE; or to the very wide popular
spread of Islam and Christianity, with unmistakable notions of
transcendence, in sub-Saharan Africa in the second half of the 2nd
mill CE
- Nor to the fact that (probably in stimulus invention triggered by
Sumerian examples) one of the most influential literate societies of
Antiquity, that of Ancient Egypt, arose in the African continent albeit
not in sub-Saharan Africa;
- Nor to the fact that large (through largely or fully illiterate, and
economically precarious) states did arise in the interiors of West and
South Central Africa in the course of the second millennium
- Nor to the fact that (as we have seen) organised priesthoods managing
some form of endogenous (proto-) science are certainly found in West
Africa (Ifa etc.) and Southern Africa
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- Yet the statement to the effect that the First Knowledge Revolution
never really took root in African soil before the 20th century CE does
contain a fair measure of truth
- Think of the African reluctance of explaining human death by reference
not to guilty human witchcraft but, transcendence-fashion, to
supernatural powers; of the great difficulties of establishing and
maintaining formality in formal organisations, the state, the economy,
etc.
- I am tempted to illustrate the implications of the limited penetration
of the First Knowledge Revolution by a present-day (i.e. last quarter of
the 20th c. CE) example from rural western central Zambia.
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- My first prolonged stay at the Njonjolo royal capital of King Kahare of
the Nkoya Mashasha people was in the early 1970s. It soon became clear
that in the myths and legends circulating in that community, the royal
figure of Kapesh Kamunungampanda (‘Kapesh who Joined the Forked
Branches’) was very prominent:
- in order to steal the moon from heaven so that his child might wear it
as a royal ornament, Kapesh ordered his people to build a very high
tower (or ladder) out of forked branches – common building material but
also the format of a common type of cult shrine. After much hardship and
protest, the tower collapsed, many people died and the survivers were
scattered -- the beginning of the diversity of nations and of languages.
- The story is familiar from the Bible, and also occurs elsewhere in
Zambia, the Mozambican-Angolan belt, and sparsily throughout Africa.
Elsewhere I have demonstrated (van Binsbergen 2005 and in preparation)
that this distribution is not due to the spread of Christianity, and
that specifically the name Kapesh (without Bantu etymology) goes back to
the Sanskrit word for ‘forked pole, gable’ – but that is not the point
here.
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- When, over the decades, I returned to
Njonjolo to collect ethnographic data and oral history, it turned
out that King Kapesh had been given a place in the Kahare genealogy. The
national archives revealed the existence of a heriditary title Kapesh in
neighbouring Kasempa district, and also in Kahare’s area Kapesh was the
hereditary title of a village headman, some 30 km from Njonjolo. In 1989
I was pressurised to go and visit the latter: he was a nonagenarian, and
might die any day, taking the most precious historical information into
his grave, for he himself had
been among the builders of the tower, who had only survived by sheer
luck and presence of mind – stepping aside when the tower collapsed.
- Of course I realised that in SC Africa, incumbents of a title when
stating the official history of their dynasty, will speak in the first
person singular also when describing events many generations before the
present incumbent. However, that obviously intelligent and nominally
literate others, with extensive urban experience, and with whom I had been in intensive
discussion for decades, apparently perceived complete continuity between
mythical times and the present, was a great surprise to me. Not only had
Vico’s and Hegel’s historicity failed to penetrate Nkoya consciousness –
even the First Knowledge Revolution seemed to have left Nkoyaland untouched.
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- From the late 1960s, I spent two decades objectively and distantly
studying ecstatic religion in North and Central Africa as an
anthropologist and historian.
- However, in 1988, during fieldwork in Francistown, Botswana, an
apprenticeship started which culminated, three years later, in my
graduation as a sangoma in Southern Africa’s main divinatory and healing
cult – a status which I have kept up in practice ever since and on which
I have extensively published
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- Where it all started: Francistown, Botswana (1989), its sangoma lodges
(5) and my residence as a researcher in an urban ward (10)
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- See:
- ‘Becoming a sangoma’ (see: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991d,
‘Becoming a sangoma: Religious anthropological field-work in
Francistown, Botswana’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 21, 4: 309-344,
also at: http://www.shikanda.net/publications/ASC-1239806-046.pdf and http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/become.htm
; and chapter 5 in my book Intercultural encounters: African and
anthjropological lessons towards a phjiulosophy of interculturality,
Berlin etc.: LIT (see: http://www.shikanda.net/intercultural_encounters/index.htm
)
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- Important aspects of the sangoma epistemology were the following:
- Although there was a complex cosmology widely differing from that of
prevailing North Atlantic culture and science, that cosmology was
scarcelyt explicitly mediated in speech, but had to be guessed at on the
basis of chance remarks, divinatory practices, the implications of
rituals, etc.
- As a basis for divination that cosmology also implied a specific local epistemology, ‘Ways
of knowing’ (Peek). Learning to be a sangoma was acquiring theoretical
and especially primary mastery of that epistemology, by actually being
able to divine effectively in ways the client could identify as valid
and based on extrasensory knowledge
- Such intercultural ethnographic knowledge could only be acquired by
praxis, over many years of actually engaging in divination with real
clients
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- The amazing thing was that the epistemology – however relying on
extrasensory perception in a way that is anathema in Western
sensorialist epistemology since Kant – did turn out, in my subjective
experience of so many sessions over the years, of being equally valid as
Western dominant epistemology. If I put on my sangoma uniform, went
through the preparatory rites and started to divine, I did have access
to knowledge that was valid and reliable (my clients were the judges of
that) but which I could not have acquired through sensory means. In
other words, it is as if reality, far more complex and rich than we can
anticipate, turns a different face to us depending on the set of
cosmological and epistemological principles with which we approach
reality.
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- These concrete examples, and the theoretical remarks that preceded them,
make very clear
- how tricky the path of the ethnographer is, especially in the field of
cosmology and epistemology,
- and how long the road is that the text-obsessed philosopher must go
before he is able to render, somewhat validly and somewhat reliably
(more we cannot ask) the cosmological and epistemological implications
of a living community, into text that is not only philosophically
recognisable and stimulating, but that is also empirically sufficiently
grounded to be admitted, by a forum of expert ethnographers, as a fair
representation of the local culture.
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Notes
