Joseph Henrich: belief

Transcript context

…Now, what I would call narrative, or more subjective or interpretive anthropology, does that have a future in a world where everyone has access to audiences? People post anthropological accounts on the Internet every day. Some of them are quite wonderful. They’re typically by people with little or no training in anthropology. The world pays more attention to those on average than to the writings of narrative anthropologists. Is there some kind of disconnect here that the profession, due to tenure, is in one stage of its cultural evolution and the rest of culture already has moved somewhere else? That’s possible. Although in my work, I’ve always tried to say that there’s — and make the case and do — that there’s real value to ethnographic work. That you really learn a lot and you get lots of ideas when you’re in a village and you’re living with the people, you’re working with them, you’re eating their food, and you’re just watching village life go on. Some of my best ideas come when I’m in that situation. I think there’s great value to doing this rich, deep ethnography. But we should combine it with the full set of tools that the rest of the social sciences has to offer: behavioral experiments, biometric measures, fMRI, all these kinds of stuff. If you had to name two or three thinkers and/or books that were your main intellectual inspirations, what would they be?…

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