Department seminar: Kevin Cahill
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Kevin Cahill (University of Bergen). The title of the lecture is "Interpretivism and One of its Discontents". NB: Due to corona restrictions the seminar is postponed until further notice.
Main content
Seminar paper
In his 1974 From the Native’s Point of View, Clifford Geertz wrote "The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe; a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures."
In his 1993 paper, Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’ within the Context of the World Cultures?, Melford E. Spiro attacks both the "cultural determinist" methodologies he finds at the root of the work of Geertz and of other well-known interpretivists, as well as Geertz’s specific claim in the passage above about the peculiarity of the Western conception of the self. To support the latter attack, Spiro invokes the work of Unni Wikan, whose Balinese fieldwork, according to Spiro, directly contradict Geertz’s own claims about how the Balinese conception of the self supposedly differs from the Western conception. In this talk, I try to show that Spiro’s overall attacks on interpretivism are misguided, and that his specific attempts to use Wikan’s work betrays a fundamental confusion about the sort of claim Geertz is making.
About the lecturer
Kevin M. Cahill is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen. His main interests are in Skepticism, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Wittgenstein, Early Analytic Philosophy, and in the relationship between Analytic and Continental philosophy.
He is currently co-leader (along with Prof. Sorin Bangu) of the NFR funded project "Mathematics with a Human Face: Set Theory within a Naturalized Wittgensteinian Framework". The forthcoming presentation is part of an overall argument from his latest book. "Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture: Naturalism, Relativism and Sceptisism. Routlege 2021".