Sanchismo
in Ethnologia Europaea
Author:
K. Anne Pyburn
K. Anne Pyburn
Indiana University
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Substantivism and formalism have been tossed around by anthropologists for many decades. Are people basically rational and guided by the logic of their cultural context, or irrational and guided by belief at the expense of observation? So far the answer appears to be “yes.” These two perspectives have never died out of anthropology, and one of these two beliefs about human nature can be teased out of most treatises (Wilk 1996). Hobbes vs. Locke, Weber vs. Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss vs. Evans-Pritchard; for Bruno Latour (1993), we have never been rational; for Marshall Sahlins natives think differently (1995); for Eric Wolf it is the anthropologists who are irrational (1982).