Prospects of an Anthropology of Understanding

This essay examines particular ways in which the hermeneutic philosophy of understanding envisaged by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method is useful to approach reflexive modes of understanding of this contemporary moment of countercritique. Questions in the essay arise within an autoethnographic context of repression of critique at a university in Delhi and possibilities of understanding that I relate to my ethnography in Gujarat, a site of horrific violence against Muslims in the past. Different from studies of Hindu nationalist violence that attend to particularities of culture, or culpability, an anthropology of understanding drawing from Gadamer invests in examinations of understanding itself: its histories, locations, modes, reflexivities, and transgressions. Understanding how ordinary people ally with projects of resentment entails attention then not merely to the subjectivated present but to erfahrung—the hermeneutic ways that our interlocutors (and we) come to relate to other persons and cultural pasts. Ordinary ethics provides an approach to the ethnographic doing of Gadamer’s “task” of understanding but also to questions of justice that confront it when the empowered task of countercritique may be to erase the historical trace of ressentiment.