Anthropology and the Human Imagination

Summary:

This paper argues that not only “evidence” or “observation” is essential for the discipline of Anthropology. More fundamentally still, it is imagination that is indispensable. Inasmuch as this is so, there are epistemological consequences to such a position. The author turns to the distinction made by Giambattista Vico between “il vero’ and “il certo” to point up epistemological divides between the Humanities and Social Sciences, on the one hand, and the Natural Sciences, on the other.