A Genealogy of Method

What is culture? The history of our discipline - whether we call it ethnology or social anthropology - shows that there is not a constant answer to this question, or even a constant object of study. How can we search for a unifying answer to what makes us human even as we precisely observe how immensely differentiated we are? And how can we explain that such difference is the very core of what makes us similarly human? This book explores the idea of ethnography as a method for understanding cultural flow in particular contexts, and suggests that anthropology can do its most important work by tracing the history of social formations. Nothing about culture is static - and yet something called culture sustains itself over time. Anthropology is the discipline best placed to understand culture, even as the concept continues to be challenged in our field.This short volume presents the 2019 Ad. E. Jensen Memorial Lectures given at the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University, Frankfurt. The lectures reflect on the current moment in - and the capacity of - contemporary anthropology to consider the discipline's basic premises, through the lens of classical thinkers. Through a set of four lectures, this book takes up anthropology's most basic question - the meaning of culture - and brings it back to the forefront of the discipline, asking how it is that our unique method is able to elicit both fine-grained particularity about specific social orders and speak to the definition of that which makes us human.To note, the Frobenius Institute itself writes this about the lecture series: "Each year the Frobenius Institute invites an internationally renowned researcher to give a series of guest lectures during the summer term. The lecture series is dedicated to Adolf Ellegard Jensen (1899-1965), who in 1946 was appointed Director of the Frobenius Institute, as well as Director of Frankfurt's Museum of Ethnology. The subject of these lectures is usually centred on Jensen's main research interests, which were myth, ritual and cult. However, the invited guests are free to choose their own preferred subjects."