Anthropological realism in a scientistic age

Anthropology is a realist discipline. In this article, I draw a sharp distinction between realism and scientism, or objectivism, arguing that realism requires the recognition of the contexts and contingency of all knowledge, including ethnography, whereas scientism – a rhetoric that invokes science as its source of authority – paradoxically occludes recognition of its own context of production. A realist position, anchored in social experience and aware of the limitations that such an entailment involves, is thus far better situated to explore the political implications of anthropological theory, especially in a world where market consumerism, neoliberalism and audit culture, as well as certain authoritarian regimes, have, to their political advantage, substituted quantitative rhetoric for critical thought