Anthropology as an Emerging Global Discipline: A New Research Ethic

Abstract

This article contributes toward the recalibration of the human science disciplines within an emerging historical conjuncture increasingly free of Western hegemony enabling an “epochal shift†with the re-emergence of Tricontinental nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America, thus necessitating the reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production. The article argues for the delinking of disciplinary practice from the prevailing Euro-American epistemological hegemony currently in the throes of an epistemic panic induced by the inextricable nexus between Western power’s post-imperial detumescence and the discipline’s institutional senescence. The discipline’s adoption of neo-liberalism as its default paradigm has consolidated its surrender to the philosophical purview of “racial liberalism†and its derivative “epistemology of ignorance.†The latter’s epistemic legacy is the hegemony of metropolitan travelling theories and their credo of interpretivism that generate knowledge claims as imported theory-mediated mystifications of cultural others. The article seeks to redeem disciplinary practice from the resulting cognitive dysfunctions and moral liabilities, by proposing an alternative conception of the practice of anthropology as a field science of the human condition based on mesography as a new research ethic. Mesography is an integrative research framework for the human/social sciences in quest of historically embedded and empirically-grounded explanations of human predicaments in an axial era heralding new vectors of societal transformation. As such, it represents a “paradigmatic leap†that offers a methodological alternative to the tyranny of an anachronistic ethnography and an epistemological exit from the hegemony of an exhausted West-stream anthropology.