‘Subjective’ and ‘Objective’ in Social Anthropological Epistemology

Abstract

Anthropology has often been accused, especially by social science disciplines which have modelled their epistemologies and methodologies on those of the physical sciences, ¹ of being not only without rigor but especially of not being objective. Being subjective is, of course, bad.

I wish to thank Michael Kosok for a reading of this paper and for the discussion which followed; it illuminated many points. I am particularly indebted to him for clarifying the problem of observer effects on socio-cultural systems and the question of the utility of perturbation observation.