The Uses of Incommensurability in Anthropology

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5086764
AutoresR Handler (0000-0002-8742-9533, autor correspondente)
Ano2009
Volume40
Fascículo3
Páginas627-647
Data de publicação2009-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
EditoraProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.0.0101
OpenAlexW1984514923
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas26
Referências citadas31

In common usage, the verb has two distinct meanings: on the one hand, to liken, to describe as similar; on the other hand, to note similarities and differences. When speakers have the first mean ing in mind, they can assert that because two phenomena are different, they be (apples and oranges, as we say). Such usage shades into a related one that has explicit evaluative overtones: people say that two phenomena cannot be compared when they mean to rank one decisively above the other. (For example, you can't compare [the quality of] major-league baseball to [that of] little-league baseball.) When people have the second meaning in mind, the question often becomes: given two similar phenomena, significance should we attach to their differences? For anthropologists, this question (in the study of human culture, difference does difference make?) has always been crucial. In this essay, I will explore I consider to be the productive use not just of difference, but of incommensurable difference. To study the relationship between similarity and difference entails consideration of the relationship between apparently discrete phenom ena (things) and the linguistic and cultural categories we use to group them. Do people group things together because they are similar, or do they conceive them to be similar because they group them together? (We can ask the same questions about differences.) More generally, the question what is a thing? has bedeviled modern anthropology and modern social sciences. In his seminal treatise on method, Emile Durk heim wrote, The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things. According to Durkheim, social facts should be considered as things since they are external to individual actors. But Durkheim also knew that social facts are not things since, unlike other natural phenom ena (such as those of biology), they include, and are in part constituted by, he famously called collective representations.1 As we shall see, the comparative study of collective representations entails translation, which in turn raises the issue of incommensurability?the situation of phenomena that are, ostensibly, impossible to measure or compare in terms of the same metric

Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology