I first became interested in questions of method as research topics in themselves during my doctoral fieldwork on Corsica. Discovering fieldwork as a phd student made me wonder about the arbitrariness of the anthropological habit of studying a general idea (identity and belonging, say) in a particular place (a Corsican village). One of my earliest articles focused on the paradoxical value of this arbitrariness. It argued that anthropologists produce distinctive kinds of knowledge by making concepts cut through place and places cut through concepts. This concern with the relationship between places and ideas remained an abiding theme in my later work, where it extended into the question of the temporality of fieldwork, and more broadly into questions of comparison.
In parallel, one of my first teaching assignments involved lecturing on the second year undergraduate theory course in Cambridge. As a reward for taking on the ever unpopular and notoriously boring lecture topic of ‘functionalism and structural-functionalism’, I was allowed to introduce a new topic. I decided to go even more vintage by giving a lecture on the forgotten 19th century sociologist Gabriel Tarde, as a counterpoint to the then holy trinity of Marx-Durkheim-Weber. This eventually led me to organise a conference on Tarde and Durkheim, which in turn led to an edited volume including contributions by Marilyn Strathern, Bruno Latour, Nigel Thrift and others, now in its second edition with new translations of two of Tarde’s key essays: The social after Gabriel Tarde.
And what about structural functionalism? Well, nearly 15 years on, I am still teaching it and still not bored! In fact a renewed interest in the functionalists’ concern with form, formalism and formality has sparked one of the emergent themes of my research at the moment. Along the way the course of which these lectures were a part was also turned into an edited volume: Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory.
In Corsica, questions of identity and cultural difference were highly contested and politicised, and (as in the rest of France), discourses of benign cultural self-affirmation were in complex tension with discourses of nationalist or even racist exclusion. Thinking through my role as an anthropologist in relation to this ambivalent set of tensions led me to question the consensus then emerging around the Ontological Turn, that the production, recognition and amplification of alterity was in itself a proper goal for anthropological analysis. While sympathetic to many aspects of the Ontological Turn, I contributed to a number of exchanges and discussions in which my key concern was to point to some of the blindspots of the turn, particularly in relation to the possibility and stakes of an anthropology of Euroamerican realities. I eventually came to the view that the Ontological Turn’s commitment to alterity is best understood as a heuristic device, one amongst a range which have inhabited anthropological comparison since the inception of the discipline. On this view, the Ontological Turn was neither as ‘vintage’ (primitivist, apolitical, etc.) as some of its critics claimed, nor perhaps as unprecedented as some of its proponents first suggested.
<aside> <img src="/icons/branch_red.svg" alt="/icons/branch_red.svg" width="40px" /> Comparison, its heuristics, history and possibilities, lay at the intersection of a number of the themes above. Applying for and then managing an ERC research grant for a comparative project on freedom of speech gave me the impetus to tackle the question of anthropological comparison head-on. The first result was a paper distinguishing what I call ‘frontal’ and ‘lateral’ comparisons in anthropology, a distinction which is beginning to take on. My book Comparison in Anthropology: The impossible method followed and provided A conceptual history and constructive re-imagination of anthropologists’ comparative method - with diagrams.
</aside>