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Reflecting on Reflexivity

Reflecting on Reflexivity

T. M. S. (Terry) Evens | Don Handelman | Christopher Roberts

(2016)

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Abstract

Humanness supposes innate and profound reflexivity. This volume approaches the concept of reflexivity on two different yet related analytical planes. Whether implicitly or explicitly, both planes of thought bear critically on reflexivity in relation to the nature of selfhood and the very idea of the autonomous individual, ethics, and humanness, science as such and social science, ontological dualism and fundamental ambiguity. On the one plane, a collection of original and innovative ethnographically based essays is offered, each of which is devoted to ways in which reflexivity plays a fundamental role in human social life and the study of it; on the other—anthropo-philosophical and developed in the volume’s Preface, Introduction, and Postscript—it is argued that reflexivity distinguishes—definitively, albeit relatively—the being and becoming of the human.


Don Handelman is Sarah Allen Shaine Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Hebrew University and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.


T. M. S. (Terry) Evens is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.


Christopher Roberts is Professor of Humanities and Religion at Lewis and Clark College.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Reflecting on Reflexivity i
Reflecting on Reflexivity - The Human Condition as an Ontological Surprise iii
Contents v
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Section I - Reflexivity, Social Science, and Ethics 21
1 - Is There a Difference between Doing Good and Doing Good Research? 25
2 - The Ethic of Being Wrong 44
3 - Cosmopolitan Reflexivity 62
4 - Religionist Reflexivity and the Machiavellian Believer 90
Section II - Reflexivity, Practice, and Embodiment 121
5 - Wittgenstein’s Critique of Representation and the Ethical Reflexivity of Anthropological Discourse 124
6 - Human Cockfighting in the Squared Circle 142
7 - Perfect Praxis in Aikido 173
Section III - Reflexivity, Self, and Other 199
8 - Tension, Reflection, and Agency in the Life of a Hausa Grain Trader 201
9 - Reflexivity in Intersubjective and Intercultural Borderlinking 228
Section IV - Reflexivity, Democracy, and Government 255
10 - The Latent Effects of the Distribution of Political Reflexivity in Contemporary Democracies 257
Postscript - Reflexivity and Social Science 270
Index 303