An anthropologist friend despairs at his subject. It has, he says, collapsed into the assertion of necessary relations between brothers-in-law and beavers. It is obsessed with classification. He barely exaggerates. Its history, as Douglas and Isherwood proudly recall,[*] has been one of 'continuous disengagement' from the 'intrusive assumptions of common sense'. It is therefore scarcely surprising that perhaps the most insistent claim throughout this history, and at no time more insistent than now, is that the common sense of daily life itself, vernacular thoughts and actions, are not what they seem, that they contain within them or in some sense reveal a pattern, a structure, even a logic, which their agents do not know and which it is the task of the anthropologist to uncover, infer, impute, to in some way make plain.

LRB 3 April 1980 | PDF Download