Abstract
Using an approach derived from the anthropology and sociology of knowledge, this article explores the historical emergence of European social theory and its contemporary place in the human sciences. I direct ethnographic attention to a sense of crisis or impasse in social theory’s capacity to frame and to analyze the complexity of contemporary relations in the world. By reanalyzing this crisis talk as a phenomenological reaction to the growing (sub)specialization of social theory, I offer a new way of thinking about social theory in terms of specialized analytical attentions. I also suggest how we can move from crisis talk to a new ethics of theoretical complementarity, inspired by Dilthey, which I term “multiattentional method.”
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank George Marcus whose Center for Ethnography at UC-Irvine sponsored the lectures from which this article is drawn. For brilliant commentary on, and criticism of, those lectures James Faubion and Kaushik Sunder Rajan earned my deep thanks and praise. I would like to thank a group of students past and present who took the time to read an earlier draft of this text and to weigh in with insights of their own: Jaideep Chatterjee, Jess Falcone, Daena Funahashi, Drew Johnson, Towns Middleton, Jen Shannon, Eli Thorkelson and Marcus Dubois Watson. And, not least, I am grateful to Kirk Dombrowski and George Baca for their much-needed encouragement and openness to publishing this essay at Dialectical Anthropology.
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Boyer, D. On the ethics and practice of contemporary social theory: from crisis talk to multiattentional method. Dialect Anthropol 34, 305–324 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9141-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9141-6