About the Objects and Words of Anthropology
How can one relates the concepts and words of Socio-Anthropology to the notions, words, visions, customs and behaviours of the people which it observes? Does not Socio-Anthropology enjoy, - under the qualification of being a science, with which it agrees without batting an eyelid, - the formidable advantage still recognized, even if unmeritted, of telling the truth, to teach people how they live and consequently how they should behave? The Socio-Anthropology’s products value rests in fact on a form of information processing similar to that used within the hard sciences where there exist reference points, toolkits, proceedings, built up and established by the practices of disciplines over the years. Socio-anthropology has no equivalent frame of reference except the set of theories on which gather such or such social scientists group. These theories pose right away the existence of a social (sometimes a cultural ) as a material would-be equating the natural of hard sciences. If it seems clear now that only real dialogue between all kinds of knowledge asserts itself upon sciences in general, it seems yet more important that social sciences learn how to build the social, making use of the knowledge of peoples concerned and that they cease to dictate it from a congealed set of concepts that have little been tested. This imposition betrays in fact the extension of the political role that the Modern Constitution allots to the natural sciences, considered as true definitions of Nature, to the social sciences and particularly to Socio-Anthropology.