Commensurability, bicultural, and domestication: Epistemological grounds and consequences in experimental anthropology

Dmitriy Yu. Doronin
The Russ­ian Pres­i­den­tial Acad­e­my of Nation­al Econ­o­my and Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion

Com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty, bicul­tur­al, and domes­ti­ca­tion: Epis­te­mo­log­i­cal grounds and con­se­quences in exper­i­men­tal anthro­pol­o­gy

Abstract. This paper focus­es on three con­cepts – com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty, bicul­tur­al, and domes­ti­ca­tion, aim­ing to con­sid­er their epis­temic sig­nif­i­cance in socio- cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gy. All clas­si­cal non-rel­a­tivis­tic anthro­pol­o­gy rest­ed on the idea of com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty, while the incom­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty as a prob­lem did not even exist there: “sav­age” and “civ­i­lized” cul­tures were assumed by default to be com­men­su­rable. For con­ve­nience, I will refer to such pos­i­tivis­tic “com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty by default”, which is before or out­side rel­a­tivis­tic and inter­pre­tive anthro­pol­o­gy, as “com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty-1”. How­ev­er, there is anoth­er – the hermeneu­tic – under­stand­ing of com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty, devel­op­ing in the “post-rel­a­tivis­tic era” of anthro­pol­o­gy; I will call it “com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty-2”. This is a more reflex­ive and crit­i­cal form, which assumes that under­stand­ing comes not through an exact knowl­edge or trans­la­tion of a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an alien cul­ture, but rather as an inter­mit­tent process of a con­tin­u­ing “long talk” that changes the inter­locu­tors. This “long con­ver­sa­tion” can be inves­ti­gat­ed, for exam­ple, as a sequence of com­mu­nica­tive sit­u­a­tions.
The ques­tion of com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty in inter­pre­tive anthro­pol­o­gy and inter­pre­ta­tive soci­ol­o­gy involves the study of epis­tem­i­cal­ly obscure, “mud­dy” com­mu­ni­ca­tion sit­u­a­tions between rep­re­sen­ta­tives of dif­fer­ent cul­tures. These are sit­u­a­tions in which uncer­tain­ty, ambi­gu­i­ty, anom­aly, illu­sions and errors in under­stand­ing are con­sid­ered epis­tem­i­cal­ly con­struc­tive, rather than neg­a­tive, phe­nom­e­na (from the pos­i­tivist view­point).
Such sit­u­a­tions can be depict­ed through the con­cept of epis­temic murk (Michael Taus­sig), that char­ac­ter­izes a state of anthro­pol­o­gists on the road to bicul­tur­al­ism, enter­ing into the alien cul­ture. Domes­ti­ca­tion, in all like­li­hood, can be con­sid­ered as a mech­a­nism for achiev­ing bicul­tur­al­ism.

Key­words: com­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty, bicul­tur­al, domes­ti­ca­tion, exper­i­men­tal anthro­pol­o­gy, inter­pre­tive anthro­pol­o­gy, “long talk,” “epis­temic murk”, Altai Repub­lic, shaman­ism

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20192228

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