The Eyes of the Stranger

This book comes out on the centenary of the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of Western Pacific (1922), the birth date of modern anthropological ethnography. Reconsidering the critical reflections developed in this century towards positivist anthropology and ethnographic authorship, the book articulates a radical critique of Cultural Anthropology's claim to propose itself as a social science on the basis of data constructed from so-called "participant observation". Fieldwork, as a scientific practice of confrontation with human diversity, does not generate factual data but points of view that - as James Clifford states - are only partial truths. However, those data are fundamental clues to historical understanding. The book consists of four chapters, of which the first three ("L'evanescente legittimazione dell'antropologia culturale", "Le ambiguità dell'etnografia antropologica" and "Relatività etnografica") constitute the pars destruens, while the fourth ("Etnografia e comprensione storica") tries to sketch a pars construens.