Excursions in Realist Anthropology: A Merological Approach
About this ebook
The book’s approach starts from an acceptance that understanding is always incomplete, always improvable. This sort of partiality is viewed throughout the book as a strength. The challenge of anthropology is that it involves forms of translation: often across languages, but always between the unstated and the explicit. Accepting provisionality and incompleteness in the resulting translations provides ways of finding a middle ground between extreme versions of positivism and relativism. As such, this book argues for moderate realisms in a dappled world.
About the author
Roger Just is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK where he taught for ten years after having been a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, first in Modern Greek Studies, and subsequently in Anthropology. He undertook research in the late 1970s and early 1980s in rural Greece, and for three years was Assistant Director at the British School at Athens. He has also carried out work in Indonesia, and on artisan fishers in both Australia and East Kent.
