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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the way anthropologists do their work and the similarities and resonances with the work of psychotherapists. Accepting a distinction between participant observation and ethnography this paper will discuss the affinity between anthropology and systemic psychotherapy.

Paper long abstract:

My title derives from the writings of Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot’s work influenced post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. I refer to his essay on Foucault entitled ‘Foucault as I imagine him’ (Blanchot 1987). In his own essay, in the same volume, Foucault shows his appreciation for Blanchot’s writing, and contrasts the interiority of saying ‘I speak’ with the exteriority of literature in which ‘the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse…than a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues’ (Foucault, 1987, p. 11). This is a thought which stands outside subjectivity ‘setting its limits as though from without’ (Foucault 1987, p.15). These ideas suggest that firstly thought is always enclosed within certain codes and structures that have historically constituted and delimited it, and secondly that the task and responsibility of thought is to attempt to reflect the outside of these structures, ‘the thinking in a new way’ rather than ‘legitimating what is already known’. I argue that this is where anthropology and the psychotherapy meet. Both anthropologists and psychotherapists work from inside the relation between themselves and people and things and both ought to keep an eye on colonizing processes. In this paper my emphasis will not be on psychoanalytic theory being put to use in anthropological interpretation, but on the affinity between anthropologists and psychotherapists in what we actually do and how we work. This is relevant to all of anthropology but perhaps particularly to how we teach.