Abstract

BALBI, Fernando Alberto. The investment of theory in ethnography in social anthropology. Rev. Mus. Antropol. [online]. 2020, vol.13, n.2, pp.203-214. ISSN 1852-060X.  http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.31048/1852.4826.v13.n2.25508.

Abstract In this article I analyze how theory operates in ethnographic research in social and/or cultural anthropology. I argue that ethnography involves the deployment of certain analytical procedures that lead to the relativization of theory -and, eventually, to its reformulation- through its confrontation with ethnographic materials: the dynamic integration of the native perspectives in the analysis; the combination of holism, the restriction of the preselection of ethnographic materials, and their strict contextualization; and various uses of comparison. Next, I illustrate this statement by showing how my ethnographies of the conflicts between the members of a fishermen’s cooperative and of the Peronist concept of ‘loyalty’ gave rise to some theoretical developments around the analysis of the moral dimension of social life. Finally, I suggest that these procedures are the correlate at the level of methodology of the ‘ethnographic perspective’ -a very general theory about the nature of social life that has been developed throughout the history of the discipline.

Keywords : Social anthropology; Ethnography; Theory; Methodology; Ethnographic perspective.

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