■ I argue that there are cross-cultural grounds for making political and moral judgements, but that they depend on empirical analyses of the situations in which the people concerned live and of the possibilities within them. I argue this despite the possibility of incommensurable concepts and scales of comprehension. We depend on the eliciting of local concepts or we are not anthropologists. But every part of this argument is disturbed by disconnections, or time-lapses in which the situations have changed beyond the terms of the analysis. So this argument is a comedy of aspiration, a story of learning to catch up and changing my own conceptions while never keeping up.
Feuchtwang, Stephan ( 1973) ‘The Discipline and its Sponsors’, pp. 71-100 in Talal Asad (ed.) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press .
2.
Feuchtwang, Stephan ( 1975) ‘Investigating Religion’, pp. 61-82 in Maurice Bloch (ed.) Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology . London: Malaby Press.
3.
Feuchtwang, Stephan ( 2002) ‘Remnants of Revolution’, pp. 196-213 in Chris Hann (ed.) Postsocialism: Ideals, ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London and New York: Routledge.
4.
Laidlaw, James ( 2002) ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’ , Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute8(2): 311-32.
5.
Lambeck, Michael ( 1997) ‘Pinching the Crocodile’s Tongue: Affinity and the Anxieties of Influence in Fieldwork’, Anthropology and Humanism22(1): 31-53.
