The art of conviviality

Abstract

This essay proposes a conception of anthropology as a romantic science concerned with what Lévi-Strauss called a posteriori logics. I shift our attention from disagreements in conceptual knowledge to conditions of possible experience—that is, to the grounds of the emergence of concepts in life together, com vivere. Such conviviality, I suggest, offers to us another way to understand the work of ethnography as a sensibility through which we place our own logics at risk. This picture of anthropological thought, moreover, demands that we reimagine the contours of the history of the field, remaining open to what might count as or for anthropology.