This article considers what happened to American anthropology, which was initiated by the scientist Franz Boas, who commanded all fields of anthropology,physical, biological, and cultural. Boas was a brave field worker who explored Eskimo land, and inspired two famous students, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, to cross borders in new kinds of studies. After this florescence, there was a general return to linear descriptive positivism, superficial comparisons of quantitative cultural traits, and false evolutionary schemes, which did not introduce us to (...) the personalities and inner worlds of the tribal peoples studied. The 1953 study by the philosopher David Bidney was a revelation. Bidney enunciated and clarified all my doubts about the paths of anthropology and his work became to some extent a model for a narration of the story of American anthropology. In many ways he envisaged a semiotics of culture formulated by Lotman. I try to illustrate the fallacies listed by Bidney and how they have been partially overcome in some later anthropological studies which have focused on symbolism, artistry, and subjective qualities of the people studied. I then try to give an overview of the school started by Lotman that spans all human behavior, that demonstrates the complexity of meaning and communication, in vast areas of knowledge, from art, literature, science, and philosophy, that abjured strict relativism and closed systems and has become an inspiration for those who want anthropology to encompass the self and the other, and Bahtin’s double meaning. This paper was inspired by Bidney as a call to explore widely all possible worlds, not to abandon science and reality but to explore deeper inner interrelations and how the aesthetic may be indeed be paramount in the complexities of communication. (shrink)

The present essay focuses on the relation between conversation and culture. Through a reading of Plato's "Symposium," it highlights a conversation which reflects on culture while in its midst, combining critique with erotic ritual. Eros, the selected topic of the Symposium, is described by Socrates as a Daimon, a being between God and mortal, whose intermediary state reflects back on conversation itself as daimonic, and on culture as daimonic conversation. This notion of conversation serves as a basis for a cultural (...) critique, on the one hand, of an anthropology that limits itself to an observation of culture as closed and defined forms and, on the other hand, of demonic rather than daimonic notions of conversation. (shrink)

Knowledge and human liberation are epochal challenges and a key question here is what the meaning of knowledge and the meaning of human liberation are. This article argues that knowledge means not only knowledge of self, society and nature as conceived within the predominant dualistic logic of modernity but also knowledge of transcendental self beyond sociological role playing, knowledge of nature beyond anthropocentric reduction and control, and knowledge of cosmos, God and transcendence in an interconnected spirit of autonomy and interpenetration. (...) Liberation means not only liberation from oppressive structures but also liberation from one’s ego and the will to control and dominate. The article discusses the transformative link between knowledge and liberation through a critical dialogue with Jürgen Habermas and Sri Aurobindo, focusing mainly on their works, Knowledge and Human Interests and Synthesis of Yoga. The article does not simply compare and contrast Habermas and Sri Aurobindo or compare and contrast the so-called Western rationality and Eastern spirituality but seeks to create a condition for transformative criticism for both. (shrink)

This essay describes conversation as an ensemble accomplishment that can be illuminated by critics working with specific texts within a rhetorical framework. We first establish dialogue as the key concept for any criticism of conversation, specifying the rhetorical dimensions of interpersonal dialogue. Second, we show how template thinking is particularly dangerous for conversational critics and suggest a research (anti)method, based on a coauthorship, that provides a thoroughgoing dialogical access to texts. Finally, we exemplify dialogic criticism of a conversational text by (...) analyzing the famous 1957 dialogue of philosopher Martin Buber and psychologist Carl Rogers. (shrink)