The Concrete Universal
For forty years, the dominant paradigm of anthropology has been based on a radical questioning of its “scientific” claim to universalism, associated both with the political imperialism of colonization and with a blindly objectivist and implicitly ethnocentric epistemology. However, despite its political postulates (making the voice of subaltern heard), ethical (the consent of the subjects studied and the dialogical approach), methodological (including the observer located in the observation field), “postmodern” anthropology hardly seems able to escape the need to account for a “truth”—of course partial—about lived situations, existing cultures and identities. This contribution aims to explore again the epistemological tension between universalism and relativism, in order to show that the latter, to be made fruitful, should be both nuanced—favoring one of the two poles cannot help to eliminate the other—and considered as unsurpassable—any aim of truth taking place both in a limited place and in a universal horizon. The notion of “concrete universal” contributes to identify the conditions of possibility and expression of this tension by describing the universally cultural nature of the human being, in the guise of a being of belonging, always woven with symbolic links and mediations.