Paper short abstract:

By analysing Hip-Hop MC's awareness of "flow", intended as the rhyming skill of the rapper, the paper reflects on Socrates' famous statement ("I know that I know nothing") to indicate a move anthropology can claim to exit from the margins of the public debate.

Paper long abstract:

Against the mainstream assumption of his time - that relegated the popular world to primitive thought - Gramsci wrote that “any man is a philosopher”. Nadia Seremetakis has more recently argued that rural elderly people engage in sensory-driven meta-commentary while sipping coffee and “re-tasting” their day - exactly like Proust, informed by Bergson’s view on time and interiority, did with the madeleine. Does this not suggest than any person is rather an anthropologist of themselves? By analysing Hip-Hop MCs' awareness of “flow”, intended as the rhyming skill of the rapper, the paper will indicate a move anthropology can claim to exit from the margins of the public debate - dominated by the new Cartesianism of emerging neuro-science. This move means for anthropology to turn into a “possession of the people of the world” - as put by Dell Hymes in a different historical conjuncture – by establishing an alliance with the informants' performative self-awareness. Instead of a “turn”, the paper will call for a “jump” into the rapper’s realisation to flow in order to practice and imagine innovation.