Taking people seriously (the 2015 Robert H. Layton Lecture)

Abstract

Taking the people we study seriously has resurfaced in recent years as a core aim of the ethnographic and anthropological endeavor. In this lecture, I present my way of taking people (i.e., my Vezo friends in a fishing village in Madagascar) seriously. For me, this involves understanding the multiple sources of their knowledge and the different ways of knowing that they mobilize in particular contexts and for particular purposes, at different ages, and fueled by different kinds of experience and cognitive resources. The argument is developed on the basis of empirical material that draws on an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologists and cognitive psychologists.