On Knowing Humanity

Book excerpt: This volume is intended as a critique of anthropology’s epistemological and ontological assumptions and a demonstration of the value added by an expanded set of parameters for the field. The book’s core argument is that whilst ethnographers have allowed their own perspectives to be positively influenced by the perspectives of their informants, until recently anthropology has done little in the way of adopting these other viewpoints as critical tools for analysis. The book is essential reading for scholars of the anthropology of religion as well as other philosophically-oriented social scientists and theologians.