Download or read book The Possibility of Anthropological Fideism written by Da Zhi Zhong and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2004 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, D. Z. Zhong establishes a methodological principle for cross-cultural research, called anthropological fideism. While anthropologists take for granted that natives don't really believe the unintelligible or inexplicable things they say, and what they say should express a deeper social meaning, Zhong contends that if we have a translation manual that can interpret a foreign language, and if natives are asserting honestly, then what natives say still express natives' belief, no matter how absurd it seems. His anthropological fideism entails that in fact we can, and indeed we should, happily live with others' differences while taking them literal.