“What even the cowherds and women know”

Abstract

In this commentary I interrogate the implicit picture of anthropological knowledge as vulnerable to errors because its primary scene is taken to be an encounter with an alien society. Using a method of autobiographically inflected ethnographic writing, I ask how the philosophical fantasy of “the logical alien,” which Wittgenstein untangles, finds another version in the anthropologist's imagination of anthropology as the scene of encounter with the wholly Other. In such cases the idea of a mistake settles on dramatic moments when the anthropologist avows an error in translation, a misrecognition, or an instance of unknowingly breaking a taboo. By taking a long-term perspective on the vulnerability of knowledge, which reveals itself over time, I draw attention, instead, to the connections between the knowledge of the alien and our own everyday modes of knowing. We miss these connections if we stay with the stark oppositions of truth and falsity, mistakes and correction.