Anche Boas è stato a Helgoland : le scienze sociali e l'audacia epistemologica

Boas was also in Heligoland. The social sciences and epistemological audacity The article reflects on the epistemological conformism of critical and militant anthropology, which seems to oppose the system of (political and economic) power while confirming a reductionist conception of scientific knowledge. While theoretical physics, over the twentieth century, has moved away from naive materialism (precisely in the name of a conscious empiricism), a certain engagé conception of social science has willingly accepted economic determinism or materialist realism. The essay seeks to place at the centre of anthropological theory an empiriocritical conception of reality, which goes beyond dualism by recovering Gregory Bateson's reflection on "Mind" and the truly relational conception of knowledge: we only know what we relate to and, as both quantum physics and ethnopsychiatry maintain, what we can know is only the nature of that relationship. The general aim of the essay is to recover the line of social thought which, from Franz Boas to Joseph Henrich, has sought to represent the human being beyond dualisms, that is, without reducing the human being to his 'spirit' or his 'flesh', but also without pre-emptively removing any biological or symbolic determination in their lives.