Metoda w antropologii. Uwagi na marginesie „Refleksji na temat badań terenowych w Maroku” Paula Rabinowa

Abstrakt

Field research is a special kind of cognitive procedure. Paul Rabinow, like no other in the history of anthropology, had revealed the „anatomy“ of this procedure characterizing cognitive activities involved in this kind of research. "Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco" tell us about the identity of anthropology more than some of the discussions which took up on this subject. Rabinow delivers a critical evaluation of the modernist model of anthropology by disclosing discrepancies between assumptions and methods and actual conditions of acquiring knowledge about investigated reality. But what is even more important: he demythicizes anthropology by demonstrating that what is rendered by anthropology is not the reality itself but its presentation. Rabinow gives thereby a new identity to anthropology. The anthropology is still defined by the method of ethnographic fieldwork but this method is conceived as a reconstruction of a process of interpersonal interaction.