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(2016) Critical anthropological engagements in human alterity and difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Critiquing an "exemplary exemplar" of ontological anthropology—Holbraad's Truth in Motion on Ifá divination, Cuba—Bråten discusses the concept of "truth" in contexts of difference and alterity. He argues that Holbraad's focus on "paradoxical alterity" fails to address the deeper paradoxes that arise when truth is explored qua ontology. Scrutinizing the analytical choices Holbraad makes in arriving at the notion of indubitable truth, and suggesting a re-interpretation of his ethnographic account, Bråten endorses an alternative realist perspective. This theoretical shift entails refocusing from truth to the relation between truth and doubt, from alterity to its embedding in commonalities, and, on the most general level, from "ontology" to the articulation between ontology and epistemology.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_12
Full citation:
Bråten, E. (2016)., Reading Holbraad: truth and doubt in the context of ontological inquiry, in B. Enge bertelsen & S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical anthropological engagements in human alterity and difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 273-294.
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