Anthropology is defined as a field science whose timescale is the human day and whose principal instrument is the researcher's own being, and as a documentary art whose task is to translate one life world into terms intelligible within another. Its method is organised around two generative questions — "how can this be?" and "what would the world have to be in order for this to be so?" — which suspend judgements of irrationality and instead reconstruct the internal logic of a life world, the perceptually and practically inhabited world of a living being. Applied to witchcraft, the discipline's canonical test case, the approach shows both that apparently irrational belief is a coherent explanatory system for the coincidence of otherwise-understood causes, and that the researcher's own interpretive frame drifts through immersion, marking a shift from the analyst's position of superiority over informants toward a reflexive, embodied account of the ethnographer's own transformation.
Anthropology is defined as a field science whose timescale is the human day and whose principal instrument is the researcher's own being, and as a documentary art whose task is to translate one life …