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Showing papers by "Fredrik Barth published in 1966"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: By showing the general problems social anthropology is grappling with, the ways that anthropologists think are revealed, and how their difficulties in part arise from the character of the social reality itself, which the authors confront and try to understand.
Abstract: I wish to emphasize this fundamentally empirical view: we discover and record, we do not comment and evaluate. The fundamental approach is thus that of science and not of moral philosophy. We seek the data not for the insight they may give us in our own 'human' problems of existence, not for answers to ethical dilemmas or the purpose of life. The varieties of human societies is a field of empirical knowledge and inquiry in its own right. It should hardly be necessary to emphasize this, were it not for the prominence of humanist orientation in universities and the utilitarian and 'social problem' justifications used in many social sciences. As well as discovering and recording, we also try to systematize this knowledge about human societies in what may conveniently, if somewhat ambitiously, be called explanatory models?models in the broad sense that they are representations of an interrelated set of assumed factors that determine or 'explain' the phenomena we observe. But there is one circumstance that makes our discipline different from the natural sciences. From our own life, we feel that it is undeniable and true that human behaviour is prominently shaped by consciousness and purpose. Anthro? pologists are therefore prepared to speak about things like beliefs, obligations, and values, not just immediate, overt behaviour. This also means that an explanatory model for behaviour can be different from the models used in natural science. Human behaviour is ' explained' if we show (a) the utility of its consequences in [ 20 ]

9 citations