Kant's Lectures on Anthropology and the Rise of World Society

This paper returns to Immanuel Kant's Lectures on Anthropology [1776-1800] in orderto investigate Kant's moral imperative in relation to the history and relevance ofanthropology in the creation of our world society. The paper critically reproaches theuniversal ethics invested in Kantian philosophy in relation ethnographic writing. Ithighlights the paradox in Kant's anthropological project, which he ambiguously definedas a philosophical project placed in-between pragmatism and idealism, non-fiction andfiction, sense and silence. The chapter then argues that the inherited paradox in Kant'sidealism enables the space for creativity invested in the potentiality for imagining andworking towards a better world. Despite the recent rapid development of networktechnologies that has contributed to the creation of a world society, Kant's idealisttransgression is undermined by the historical and everyday reality of the brutal processof globalization. The recent call in the study of Humanities for a revised return to Kant'steleological and moral imperative in relation to our increasingly unified, and yet, unequal world, demands a historical appropriation of anthropological discourse and theethnographic practice, by raising historical self-awareness through the simultaneousdevelopment of personal aesthetics and universal poetics. By returning to the notion ofauthorship, the essay then argues that it is in this grey area, in-between history andimagination that anthropology could find its voice again.