“If you study anthropology,” a seasoned anthropologist once told a student exploring the possibility of pursuing a degree in the discipline, “you will never see the world with the same eyes again.”

To be sure, this sounded like both a promise and a threat. And, in hindsight, it might have been a bit of both: a promise, because indeed anthropology traces the fascinating open-ended possibilities of what we can be in this world, beyond what we are at any given time, in any given place. And a threat, because interrogating the here-and-now and continuously asking “what is possible” means renouncing the comfort of reassuring certainties – of absolute knowledge.

To never see the world with the same eyes again is both enchanting and unnerving – a way to inhabit what anthropologist Paul Stoller (2023) calls the “between.” “When you do anthropology,” Stoller argues, “you are sometimes compelled to stretch your imagination to the limits of comprehension – and beyond. If you allow the imagination to stretch with experience … you can find yourself in the between” (102).

A paradox that drives what anthropologists do

Some anthropologists see their discipline as a science, others as a humanistic endeavor. Alfred Kroeber (2003: 144) called anthropology “the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.” For those who define anthropology as a science, to speak of an anthropological imagination might pose a contradiction in terms.

What does science, a mode of knowledge production invested in “facts” and “objectivity,” have to do with the imagination – a way of envisaging virtual situations and possibilities not present as such? Is anthropology not meant to understand the world at hand? And if so, does that not require precisely an observation of that world as it is rather than the imagination of something else, something external to the empirical reality in front of us?

Asking these questions gets us at the heart of anthropology’s definitional paradox – a paradox that productively drives what anthropologists do. For one can argue back in response to the questions above: sure, one might say, anthropologists want to understand the world as it is, but don’t they – like everyone else – do so through the limitations of their own cultural categories and the constraints of their own historical common sense, which shape how that reality is perceived?

And, if one can never fully step out of one’s cultural and historical situatedness to perceive the world as is, is it not precisely imagination – our capacity to call forth myriad other ways of perceiving, conceptualising and engaging the world – that we need in order to get closer to the world as it is?

This conundrum is precisely what anthropology can be said to be. It is a kind of ouroboros, a snake appearing in ancient Greek iconography as eating its own tail. In other words, anthropology is a field of study that seeks to understand the world as constituted by humans by constantly interrogating and expanding its categories of analysis through a process of imagination.

Anthropologist Laura Nader put it thus: “For me anthropology is the freest of scientific endeavors because it potentially does not stop at the boundaries that interfere with the capacity of the mind for self-reflection” (quoted in De Lauri 2013).

Anthropologist Matthew Engelke (2018: 6-7) echoes this sentiment, claiming that “anthropology is very good at questioning concepts, at questioning ‘common sense.’ One of the discipline’s trademark clichés is that we make the familiar strange and the strange familiar … a cliché, but not less true for being so.”

And it is precisely this paradox that drives the anthropological imagination: a realisation that to understand worlds, we need to reach beyond their limited concepts and images, and doing so, we come closer to what those worlds are likely to be.

Imagination and understanding

Common textbook definitions of socio-cultural anthropology refer to it as “the study of human behavior” (Haviland, Crawford, Fedorak 2002: 14); “the study of cultural behavior, especially the comparative study of living and recent human cultures” (Bonvillain 2012: 6), or “the study of the full scope of the human diversity … and the application of that knowledge to help people of different backgrounds better understand one another (Guest 2014: 7).

Yet these definitions do not quite capture the generatively paradoxical nature of what one can call the anthropological imagination. Indeed, anthropologists do study concrete social and cultural behaviour. Ethnography – the method of observing, engaging with and listening to people everyday life – is a cornerstone of the discipline.

But to do ethnography well, anthropologists must deploy the imagination: “Ethnography,” as Paul Willis (2000: xviii) argues, “is the eye of the needle through which the threads of the imagination must pass.” For it is through imagination that one must understand how concrete observed practices make sense, how they relate to the social, political, and economic contexts of their unfolding, as well as to larger structures of power. “Imagination,” Wills says, “is thereby forced to try to see the world in a grain of sand.”

An invitation to “see the world in a grain of sand”

The course “Anthropological Imagination” is an invitation to exercise precisely your ability to “see the world in a grain of sand” – a journey along which one might, as the anthropologists quoted above put it, “never see the world with the same eyes again.”

Each of the following four chapters take on a topic of interest to anthropologists today, including security, loneliness, masking, and the Afro-Atlantic. The topics might seem unrelated at first glance. They are not. What they have in common is that they illustrate how to pursue an anthropological imagination departing from different concrete issues and phenomena that concern us all, directly or indirectly: what questions to ask, how to contextualise and compare, how to link current the topics at hand to related social phenomena, and how to describe them in ways that move the imagination along the lines described here.

Author: George-Paul Meiu

References

Bonvillain, N. (2012). Cultural Anthropology. Third Edition. Pearson.

De Lauri, A. (2013). “Think Like an Anthropologist: A Conversation with Laura Nader.”

Engelke, M. (2018). How to Think Like an Anthropologist. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Guest, K. J. (2014). Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. Norton.

Haviland, W. A., Crawford G. W., Fedorak S. A. (2002). Cultural Anthropology. First Canadian Edition. Thomson.

Kroeber, K. (2003), “Curious Profession: Alfred Kroeber and Anthropological History.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, 30(3), 144–55.

Stoller, P. (2023). Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Willis, P. (2000). The Ethnographic Imagination. Cambridge: Polity.