Common Sense, Anthropology of

Abstract

Common sense is not uniform across all sociocultural groups. Anthropologists typically confront the differences among "common senses" at the very start of ethnographic fieldwork; their informants treat as self-evident actions and other phenomena that to the anthropologists are opaque and sometimes even absurd. From anthropology's relativist and empirical perspective, claims to a universal rationality are themselves a parochial form of common sense. Western-inspired theoretical models such as rational choice theory thus actually resemble everyday habits of reasoning and rest on culturally parochial and historically shallow assumptions of universal validity. Still earlier claims to a higher fo..