Obstinate truths: Eigensinn, epistemic contrarianism and the outer edges of anthropological knowledge-making

Abstract

This article examines a central epistemological dilemma of the post-truth moment: how anthropology can remain committed to grounding knowledge in vernacular meaning-making when everyday understandings of the world increasingly draw on exclusionary ideas. Reflecting on unsettling theories about climate change and the environment encountered in my home village in the southern Austrian Alps, an area affected by rapid ecological change, I explore what happens when ethnographic attention reaches the outer edges of anthropological knowledge production. Drawing on Alf Lüdtke and Antonio Gramsci—two theorists who probed such edges from within their own historical conjunctures—I argue that taking seriously eigensinnige (obstinate) modes of everyday sense-making about environmental change offers a crucial analytical opening. Attending to these antagonistic truth claims not only illuminates the fraught relationship between vernacular and normative forms of knowledge-making but also compels us to rethink the nature of the everyday itself.