Teorie nauk społecznych jako wizje świata [Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Latour]. Refleksje antropologiczne
Social Sciences Theories as Visions of the World [Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Latour]. Anthropological Reflections

Summary/Abstract: We are accustomed to describing as beliefs conceptions that we do not believe while preserving the dignity of knowledge for conceptions that we believe without reservations. We are incapable, however, of proving the majority of ideas that we consider to be positive knowledge. Social science theories often belong precisely to this category: they become fashionable dogmas, and their authors – the object of a cult. Anthropology of culture provides us with tools enabling to explain the mechanism of this phenomenon. Taking as an example four known theories of the French social sciences (socio-anthropology by Émil Durkheim, structural anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss, sociology by Pierre Bourdieu, and symmetric anthropology by Bruno Latour) this article attempts to understand them as intellectual constructions endowed with an attraction whose force depends less on the scientific knowledge eventually contained therein, and more on the vision of the world proposed by those theories. The article is a supplemented version of a lecture given at the University of Warsaw in December 2018 as the Eighth Annual Anthropological Lecture in Memory of Professor Wierciński.

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