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Refutable Anthropology and Falsified Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Georges Guille-Escuret
Georges Guille-Escuret*
Affiliation:
C.N.R.S., Paris
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Extract

Is anthropology a science? To put the question today amounts to a reply in the negative. The representatives of the ‘true’ sciences are not alone in suggesting a conjunctural or crippling lacuna which would preclude membership by right of the prestigious world, which, however, the name ‘humanistic sciences’ seems to demand. We should remember that some years ago Claude Lévi-Strauss caused a shudder to run through his discipline by describing it as a ‘flattering imposture’. Since then denigration has spread constantly, and it no longer consists of deploring a slowness, an equivocation or a handicap which we would have the hope of remedying: it is definitely a fatality which we are from now on invited to confirm.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 188 , December 1999 , pp. 3 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

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References

Notes

1. This expression, which prompted many reactions, featured in an interview given to the newspaper Le Monde (8 October 1991).

2. It goes without saying that this suspicion does not affect a more classical philosophy of knowledge which does not cultivate ambiguity of thought in relation to the ‘extension' of science.

3. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1997), Impostures intellectuelles, Paris: Odile Jacob. This book reprints as an appendix the article which appeared in Social Text.

4. See Georges Guille-Escuret (1998), ‘Desmodèles aux patrons: les sciences humaines en tenaille'. Les temps modernes, 600, 265-284.

5. Sokal and Bricmont, op. cit. (2nd edn; 1999), 34.

6. Sokal and Bricmont, op. cit. (1997), 193.

7. Karl Popper (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson, 40-41; French edition (1973) La logique de la découverte scientifique, Paris: Payot, 37. The French edition uses the barbaric term falsifiabilité (‘falisifiability’), for which, except in the quotations, I have preferred to substitute the word refutabilité (‘refutability' with, however, less hesitation than the numerous authors who have already made this rectification).

8. Anastasios Brenner (1999), ‘Experience', in Dominique Lecourt (ed.), Documents d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris: PUF, 400-404.

9. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), Le totémisme aujourd'hui, Paris: PUF.

10. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958), Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon.

11. Karl Popper (1985), Conjecture et réfutations. La croissance du savoir scientifique, Paris: Payot.

12. Popper op. cit. (1959), 41; (1973), 38.

13. Sidney Mintz (1985), Sweetness and Power, New York: Penguin Books; French translation (1991), Sucre blanc, misère noire. Le goût et le pouvoir, Paris: Nathan.

14. See especially Michel Panoff (1977), Ethnologie: le deuxième souffle, Paris, Payot.