Paper short abstract:

Anthropology’s unsuccessful performance in delivering social messages beyond the academic walls is due the rejection of its own literary character. Subjectivity, imagination and narrative are overlooked due to the retention of an obsolete notion of social science, as today’s anthropology denies its artistry and stages its rigour.

Paper long abstract:

The article tackles the current state of delusion surrounding social anthropology's effectiveness; it reconsiders its literary potential by analyzing the discipline's repression of narrative; it challenges anthropology's self-advocated re-conceptualism by exposing the paralysis of the academic method. Albeit claimed otherwise, anthropology does not challenge its own frame of reference, academic logics, in order to deliver its sociocultural messages, the content of which ultimately (and ironically) refers to the transgression of so-called 'western categories'. Such concern reinforces the existence of those very categories, as the appeal to academic debates forecloses their departure and dumbs down the power of intuition, empathy and imagination, key to the liberation from rules and mental habits.

Anthropology has not yet come to terms with its narrative and literary legacy. This soft form of schizophrenia prevents the discipline to perform effectively out of the academic fences. Concomitantly, the dominant notion of social science prevents the discipline from treasuring its own subjective character. The preposterous denial of subjectivity decreases the anthropologist's capacity to reach wider audiences, due to the fear of oversimplification.

Eventually, the experience of fieldwork as exaltation of intersubjectivity is wiped out, while fieldwork as academic category is maintained. The retention of scholarly character in the otherwise emphatic content of fieldwork diminishes the anthropologist's credibility before the laymen.

Ultimately, it is claimed that the only literary character that anthropology employs is the fiction through which it denies authorial power, a fiction infinitely less persuasive than the deliberate fictional and factional contents of cinema and literature.