The End of the Anthropological Self: Foucault in the Trobriand Islands

"The End of the Anthropological Self" is a constructive attempt to combine philosophical and anthropological concerns. Applying Foucault's theory of epistemes to the Trobriand ethnography, 'Primitive' mentality is specified in terms of epistemological configurations. Subjectivity and agency are discarded as tools of an­thropological analysis derived from our 'modern' episteme and thus inappropriate for the recognition and comprehension of a 'primitive' one. It is argued that writing has no possibility of emerging in the primitive episteme which has important consequences for the type of knowledge that can be maintained and propagated in it. Several methodological problems are formulated in the description of the episteme. The most important of these problems is the view that the notion of the Self - one of the favourite objects of contemporary anthropological investigation - is part of our modem episteme and the search for it among primitive cultures is yet another form of a limited ethnocentric understanding of the Other.