The door in the middle: six conditions for anthropology

Abstract

This essay proposes that, in order to bring to fruition in our empirical research (both ethnographic and comparative) the profound critical discoveries that have characterized anthropology since the late 1950s, anthropology must adopt a 'door in the middle'. That is, (1) to assume a position of minimal realism, (2) to work with a notion of limited interest in the study of the human condition, (3) to capture the process of triangulation in the constitution of meaning, (4) to open once again the debate concerning universals by a more complex approach to the issue of determination, (5) to re-engage creatively with systemic analysis through a mitigated structuralism, and (6) to adopt a theory of relations of domination that avoids the pitfalls of the notion of power as violence.