The problem set that serves to guide my work centers on the basic anthropological question of what makes human beings tick. For me, that question is posed best in terms of how humans do what they do rather than why. By formulating the question in this way, I bracket the matter of motivation, putting it aside. I thus wittingly pre-judge the answer to my question and highlight the irony of asking what makes human beings tick. If motivation, in the causal sense of the term, is a secondary consideration only, then specifically human conduct is in the end incomprehensible in terms of one thing or part moving another. Rather, it must be grasped ‘holistically’, as self-movement of a peculiar kind, the kind in which, oxymoronically, ‘free will’ remains tied to external agency. The movement that concerns me, then, belongs at bottom not to a clock but to a kind of self.
Logically, such movement, where cause and effect are both different from and identical to each other, is exemplarily paradoxical. This circumstance obliges the anthropologist to investigate basic self-identifying, which is to say, the meanings imprisoned in our actions. Such lived or tacit meanings implicate self-identifying because they disclose the sense of our selves—personal, social, and cultural—as this sense, exhibiting a hopeless ambiguity, is both determinate of and given in action. Insofar as it is determining, the sense of self is understood to effect the action; insofar as it is given, the sense of self is seen as informed by the action. In either case, though, to reintroduce the paradox, the sense of self is only imperfectly distinguishable from the action and therefore always imperfect or open to one degree or another. But given its intrinsically purposeful nature, the sense of self is what gives meaning to and makes immediate sense of the action.
In view of the focus on self-identity as it is imprisoned in action, my approach is, I suppose, an anthropology of practice. This approach pictures practice, though, as a matter of ethics before anything else, including power and aesthetics. It features the manner in which the self conducts itself toward the ‘other’, that is, toward that which fundamentally enables the self. In effect, although I neither doubt the ultimate primacy of the other and the historical and contingent nature of our existence, nor fail to keep this primacy in observant account, for purposes of grasping what makes us tick as humans, I privilege the constitutionally limited or ambiguous way in which we, both individually and collectively, create ourselves and discharge our inescapable responsibility. In other words, in measured reaction to the essential but also, in serious part, befogging thrust of social science as science, to the mechanical move to explain, whether through causal or motivational relations, social phenomena, I want to bring into prominent account the relative bearing of the inexplicable moment of responsible or human agency on these phenomena. If personhood marks the intersection of self and other, of constituting and constituted activity, then I aim to highlight the element of personal agency that somehow emerges on that ecliptic plane, where the creative moment corresponding to the uttering or thinking of ‘I’ results in, to evoke Durkheim's singular insight, an act of moral being.
By ‘ethics’ I intend primarily not the scholastic department of philosophy that goes by that name, but the creative and paradoxically natural conduct whereby humans together determine their own good, thus informing themselves and their world, both wittingly and not, with second nature or value. By taking ethics and ‘otherness’ in tandem, I suggest that anthropology is by its very nature ethics, for otherness is one notion without which anthropological inquiry makes little if any sense.
Regarding anthropology as ethics does not mean that empirical research is not also necessary to the anthropological enterprise. On the contrary, in part what makes anthropology unique as ethics is its empirical discipline. But once the primarily ethical nature of anthropology is well and truly registered, ‘empiricism’ cannot abide. That is to say, although the ‘facts’ must be gathered, they never speak for themselves, and whosoever speaks for them always betrays value judgments and ethical determinations. There is, of course, nothing new about the observation that facts demand interpretation, and that interpretation necessarily conveys a particular and therefore value-laden point of view. What is new here is that I take this observation to entail not simply that as social scientists we need to be reflexive, but that we need to rethink the ontological presuppositions of our science.
As it is essentially paradoxical and ambiguous, self-movement demands that the anthropologist revise the received notion of reality in Western thought. That notion not only fails to admit of ambiguity; it positively disallows it. The ontological change I propose, then, is radical. I contend that the only way in which we can satisfactorily address the defining empirical problems of anthropology at their core is by rethinking the very gestalt that serves as the ontological scaffolding on which these problems have been determined.
An ontology that portrays reality as basically ambiguous is markedly out of keeping with ‘ontology’ in the strict sense, which denotes a determinate and entitative reality and is the final target of all postmodernist criticism. But a reality that is fundamentally ambiguous does not break down finally into things in themselves, entities with absolute boundaries. As a result, neither intellectualism nor empiricism, neither idealism nor materialism, can serve in the end to make such a reality perspicuous. These standard theoretical offerings are predicated on the received acceptation of ontology and are therefore ill equipped to entertain ambiguity that is basic.
By the defining empirical problems of anthropology I intend the problems keyed to otherness, whatever their institutional bearing (magic, religion, polity, social organization, etc.). Closely tied to the question of otherness are the consequential problems of today's social theory, problems turning on the antinomies of the relative and the absolute, or of the particular and the universal, and of subject and object, or self and other. For example, in light of the genocidal events and massively destructive military conflagrations of the twentieth as well as the twenty-first century, and of the question of power that arises in their connection, postmodernism has set out to deconstruct the precepts of a universal reason and self-transparent self or subjectivity.
By embracing reality as basically ambiguous, the antinomies implicated by these dire social problems get redefined as nondualisms, such that their principles are both opposed to and continuous with each other. As a result, the principles are neutralized neither by an idealist nor a materialist reconcilement. Instead of abstract logical oppositions, they reappear as profound tensions or vital dynamics. It is a key understanding of the argument of this book that human existence is virtually indistinguishable from these tensions. For anthropological purposes, rather than thinking of humans as a particular kind of physical or even socio-cultural being, a positive object or sheer subject, it is fruitful to consider humans in terms of a constitutionally ambiguous force, the dynamic of which is reflexive. Such a dynamic implicitly identifies itself as a difference between self and other as well as between the relative and the absolute. Put another way, being human amounts to the situational and reflexive negotiation of these and related differences. Given this picture of the human condition, conflict and violence remain endemic. But by contrast to the picture in which self and other are simply opposed to each other, absolute conflict, the kind characterizing the total exclusionism displayed by genocidal activity, becomes logically inconceivable and ethically insane.
There is no proving this picture of human existence. The change of ontology I pro-pose is a matter of conversion, not proof. Nondualism redescribes reality; it does not explain it. Nevertheless, I can offer three good reasons for making the change. First, nondualism offers a practical disciplinary advantage: it allows for a fresh approach to empirical anthropological problems that remain intractable, despite powerful attempts to resolve them. In the present book, I address in particular the abiding anthropological problem of rationality—what used to be called the problem of primitive mentality. Second, nondualism offers a phenomenological advantage: it captures an experiential side of our existence that science cannot acknowledge without exposing the constitutional positivism of the scientific perspective as ultimately a pretense. In this volume, that side of our existence is disclosed in terms of sacrifice and our fundamental otherness to ourselves. Third, nondualism offers an ethical advantage: by allowing genuine value and discretionary activity as
