Social anthropology's defining methodological stance is the reciprocal move of "making the familiar strange and the strange familiar": suspending the taken-for-granted status of one's own cultural common sense so that it becomes an object of inquiry, while rendering unfamiliar practices intelligible on their own terms. The principle establishes that what a community treats as self-evident is a contingent social construction rather than a natural fact, so anthropological knowledge is produced by interrogating assumptions and the narratives groups tell about themselves and others. Within the discipline this defamiliarization stance is the epistemological premise underlying ethnographic practice, and it locates anthropology alongside sociology as a critical, comparative social science applied to domains such as migration, medicine and mind, human rights, food security, gender and racial inequality, and climate change. Note: the source is largely departmental promotional material; the abstract theoretical content it carries is limited to the defamiliarization principle summarized above.
Social anthropology's defining methodological stance is the reciprocal move of "making the familiar strange and the strange familiar": suspending the taken-for-granted status of one's own cultural co…