Paper short abstract:

I argue that anthropology has always been in the middle of an ontological ambiguity: can an intellectual system based on abstract concepts (that is anthropology) grasp and describe an intellectual system based on metaphysical entities (religion)? My answer to this question is: it cannot.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I use my own ethnographic and meta-ethnographic experiences in south-western Ghana and in London as an illustration, and I explore the anthropological controversy and ambiguity deriving from the following suggestion: one cannot understand anything unless one becomes the other. But if one truly becomes the other, there is no way back to the "self". Therefore, becoming the other entails losing academic authority, quitting objectivity (modern or post-modern), and accepting the disappearance of the constitutive distance between the (academic) self and the other. In the paper I describe what happens when the anthropologist becomes the other, to him/her personally, as well as, to his/her academic career (the dire consequences of professional treason), and I discuss the question of whether anthropology, as we know it, is still possible when one escapes the prison of western intellectual superiority.