Abstract

SARRO, Ramon. 1921: crisis, ethnography and prophecy. Etnográfica [online]. 2022, vol.26, n.3, pp.855-869.  Epub Jan 30, 2023. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.12559.

In this Jorge Dias 2021 lecture I intend to provide a genealogical and diachronic dimension to the ways in which anthropology, crisis and the notions of permanence and anachrony have been woven together from the earliest days of our ethnographic method now 100 years ago. I begin by commenting on the well-known simultaneity of the birth of British ethnography (Malinowski 1922; Radcliffe-Brown 1922) and the sense of European crisis expressed in those years not only by philosophers, theologians and social thinkers, but also by poets and artists, and most paradoxically by T. S. Eliot in his long poem The Waste Land (Eliot 1922). I also want to point out that the emergence of the scientific method in anthropology was accompanied by a great epistemological silence that forced us to silence, amongst others, the “voice of prophecy” (Ardener 1989) which, like the voice of poetry, acts as a diagnosis and rebellion against the crises imposed, externally or internally, on culture. This silence has made it difficult for anthropologists to perceive the entanglements between rupture and continuity, and between the historical “principle of copresence” and the “principle of succession” (Rancière 1996). Rancière’s critique of Febvre is thus used to understand why anthropology has been reluctant to grasp the force of difference (rebellion, prophecy, innovation) in oceans of similarity. I conclude by arguing that 100 years after the birth of the discipline, we find ourselves today in a situation similar to that of 1922. Much like then, we live today in a waste land, in a seemingly endless and globalised ruin. But also now, as in 1921, living among ruins triggers imaginations about permanence, about pasts, about history, about “culture” and allows the principle of copresence to take precedence over the principle of succession.

Keywords : crisis; ethnographic method; prophecy; anachronism; ruins.

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