European Identity and Anthropology

From Kolakowski, a social science that is born from uncertainty of self in the face of cultural plurality and existential threat:

This capacity to doubt herself, to abandon--albeit in the face of strong resistance--her self-assurance and self-satisfaction, lies at the heart of Europe's development as a spiritual force. She made the effort to break out of the closed confines of ethnocentricity, and her ability to do so gave definition to the unique value of her culture. Ultimately we may say that Europe's cultural identity is reinforced by her refusal to accept any kind of closed, finite definition, and thus she can only affirm her identity in uncertainty and anxiety. Ant although it is true that all sciences, social and natural, either were born or reached their maturity (maturity in a relative sense, of course, from the perspective of what they are today) within European culture, there s one among them which, because of its very content, is the European science par excellence: anthropology.

The anthropologist... must suspend his own norms, his judgments, his mental, moral, and aesthetic habits in order to penetrate as far as possible into the viewpoint of another and assimilate his way of perceiving the world. And even though no one, perhaps, would claim to have achieved total success in that effort, even though total success would presuppose an epistemological impossibility--to enter entirely into the mind of the object of inquiry while maintaining the distance and objectivity of a scientist--the effort is not in vain. We cannot completely achieve the position of an observer seeing himself from the outside, but we may do so partially. It seems obvious to us that an anthropologist cannot understand a savage completely unless he himself becomes a savage and thus ceases to be an anthropologist. He may suspend judgment, but the very act of suspending judgment is culturally rooted: it is an act of renunciation, possible only from within a culture which, through learning to question itself, has shown itself capable of the effort of understanding another.

From "Looking for the Barbarians" in Modernity on Endless Trial.