approach to anthropology would keep us open in this way. It can
be counterpoised creatively to approaches that steer practitioners into
frames that are in vogue and are supposedly the hallmarks of a modern
or contemporary version of theory. It is important to keep up with these
frames of course, while bracketing them as provisional. It is even more
important to realize that every time we adopt a particular frame we are
excluding some other approaches or frames that might provide an insight
of their own.
A mindful anthropology, therefore, enables us to adopt a particular
viewpoint while remaining aware that other viewpoints may suit aspects of
the analysis more fruitfully. A related point is that when we are discussing a
particular ethnographic area of the world we can helpfully keep in mind
comparison with other areas, unrestricted by region or timescale. A further
point is that we need to keep the conceptual boundaries of our discipline
open, while retaining its central insights into the materials we study.
Philosophy can always be a useful aid to mindfulness, especially if we
extend our consciousness to the stances inherent in, for example, doctrines
that explicitly address mindfulness itself as‘being aware’. In our own
studies of ‘landscape’, memory, history, ecology, and ritual/religion,
inherently enter the analysis, leading to a holistic, but open-ended, view
that remains rooted in practice and experience.
Anthropology has also to be open to a changing world. We cannot
always talk about the same things because things change, and it is our job
to track and understand these, as we also are a part of them. If one practices
anthropology for half a century, say, changes both in the world and in
fashions of anthropological analysis become very evident. Some topics fall
out of fashion, putatively because they are‘out of date’. This was the fate, at
one stage, of‘kinship studies’as a central category of study, partly as a result
of the applications of rigid modes of analysis of‘kinship terms’, and partly
as a result of deconstructionist efforts to shatter the concept of kinship itself
as cross-culturally applicable. A moment’s mindfulness can serve to dissi-
pate this mirage of something like kinship being out of date. People around
the world continue to practice kinship ties on a daily basis, whether anthro-
pologists say so or not. A new and expanded generation of kinship studies
has sprung up within the overall context of‘globalization’. Globalization
itself is a loose descriptive term for a conglomerate of diverse processes. As a
linguistic usage it may givefixity to a highlyfluid set of phenomena. It may
reify into a frame of analysis that substitutes itself for more in depth or local
analysis. A mindful approach, like that of a far-seer pilot in an interspace
20 BREAKING THE FRAMES