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Paper short abstract:

Drawing from the writings of Wittgenstein, Bourdieu and de Certeau, this paper explores the ethical reflexivity of anthropological discourse, which appears to be not just a representation of reality, but also an invitation for the reader to engage critically and creatively with it.

Paper long abstract:

In his late writings, Wittgenstein analyzes the description of action in terms of rules by applying it to his own writings. He remarks that using the language of rules when describing someone else's action, like anthropologist do, is not to neutrally represent phenomenal reality in the realm of words, but to engage in a relation with the reader of the description. By analyzing its own practice in its own terms, anthropological discourse can thus develop a specific ethical reflexivity. Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau have explicitly taken up this approach from Wittgenstein. Like him, both authors use their own method of describing action in terms of rules to describe the practice of anthropological discourse itself. This leads them to spell an anthropological understanding of the relation between their own practice and those to which it is addressed. For Bourdieu the ethical import of his own discourse consists in its critical potential. De Certeau insists on the ethical importance of the creative potential of a description that would place the reader in the situation of action. Drawing from two examples from my research on contemporary finance, I will try to show that this ethical reflexivity helps us to stabilize the objects that we study, since it clarifies our relation to them, which is always also a relation to our potential readers. While the ethical and the objective content of anthropological discourse are not related in a simple way, the clarification of each helps the clarification of the other.