The epistemological model in the origins of modern anthropology: Disciplinary consequences from a historical-philosophical perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/dra.2024.982Keywords:
history of anthropology, Rivers’ ethnographic model, Malinowski’s functionalism, textual epistemologies, sensory epistemologies, epistemological model of objectivityAbstract
In the Anglo-Saxon tradition the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait, in 1898, is considered the foundational event of modern anthropology in three modalities: social/cultural, visual, and sensory. Drawing on the epistemological analysis of ethno-visual practices and the scientific discourse of that expedition, I propose reflecting on the model of objectivity in the origins of anthropology to verify that sensoriality was originally conceived as an object of anthropological study rather than ethnographic epistemology. Based on this, the article demonstrates that the substitution of the empiricist model of objectivity by Haddon and Rivers, leaders of the expedition, with the rationalist-functionalist paradigm of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski deepened into textual epistemologies that, until the late twentieth century, kept ethno-filmic practices at the margins of the discipline. In the conclusions, the previous developments are taken to articulate the terminological clarifications necessary for a proposal of affiliation between the mentioned anthropology variants in relation to the new framework of multimodal anthropology.
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