Just a Foreword? Malinowski, Geertz and the Anthropologist as Native

Abstract

Read through semiotic analysis, the narrative intrigue of (theevenemential and cognitive dimension of) the anthropologist’s work revealsthe epistemological configuration encasing some central and interrelatedquestions in anthropology: the communication-interaction between anthropo-logists and other inter-actants, their invention-application of some meta-languages and the subsequent intercultural translations of concepts andprocesses. To explore this configuration, I compare a foreword written byMalinowski and another one written by Geertz. In these forewords, they resortto refined stories to frame complex argumentations. In Malinowski’s fore-word, two superposing stories are told: (1) a tale of a subject’s performancenewly endowed with professional competences (the ethnologist) and a discip-line possessing a more modern and positive knowledge (Functionalist ethno-logy) and (2) a symmetric tale of exchanged messages (with relative sanctionand counter-sanction) between an enunciator (who has to lay the foundationsof this science) and an addressee (who has to confirm the validity of mes-sages). To lay these foundations, the enunciator implicitly proposes an episte-mology based on some values (such as ‘penetration’, ‘progression’, and the‘overcoming of limits’) privileging the metaphor of space and the cumulativeaspect of process. As far as Geertz’s foreword is concerned, the enunciatorhas recourse to two different stories: (1) one concerning the interactionbetween Geertz and his editor (rather than with natives) to justify his herme-neutic position and (2) another one, larger and including, concerning thereversal of causality relationships to reaffirm the value of coincidence. If inMalinowski’s foreword, stories are used to redefine some programmaticprinciples (‘discontinuity’ and the combination of ‘three different oxymora’)through which ethnology can be given a scientific nature and a new founda-tion, in Geertz’s foreword, on the contrary, value is given to ‘coincidence’ and‘writing’ in its multiple forms and (paradoxically, for an interpretativist) abinary discursive epistemology and a style of thought privileging the non-terminative and imperfective process have been combined.