Reflections in and on the Hall of Mirrors • 173
thropologist’s descriptions and analyses of “reality” are affected by her own cultural presuppositions should therefore never be allowed to stop at a mention of some socially constructed label. It needs to depart from the understandings that the researcher so far has gained in her own life as a social and cultural being, situated in a dynamic flow of information and frames of interpretation, rather than in a static position. Perhaps the main task of anthropology is to undermine common sense. Yet to be reflexive at the level of our own common sense is much more difficult than just labeling ourselves with stereotyped identity tags in order to demonstrate our positioning (“I am sorry, I am a rich, white woman”). It involves dealing with meaning, not just with interest or function. If radical rejection of taken-for-granted notions is what anthropologists have often spontaneously been forced to do in confrontation with other cultures, the question is if we do it systematically and rigidly enough when it comes to looking at our own backgrounds and how they influence our notions, concepts, and paradigms of interpretation. Many anthropologists are not very preoccupied with careful definitions of terminology, partly because they know that concepts are culturally varied, perhaps also because of the uneasy relation that many anthropologists have to theory. As Henrietta Moore wrote, in the preface to Anthropological Theory Today (1999: 1), “anthropologists are often very unclear about the distinction between a generalization and a theory, and thus confusions arise about degrees of abstraction, or more precisely, about the relationship between observations, normative assumptions and theoretical propositions.” Metaphors, paradigms, and concepts are the most significant tools of the anthropologist. Their function is to lead our attention in particular ways, to make us observe and systematize aspects of reality and allow us to formulate interesting questions. There are no ultimately correct, single definitions of scientific concepts. Still, no stringent analysis can do without a stringent use of terms: the author should make her own usage clear. Analytical concepts are represented by terms often given a particular meaning in a particular epistemic community and with the purpose of solving some particular analytical task. Therefore, their meaning varies like that of other terms. Unlike the idealized scientific concept, the concepts we think with in everyday life are not joined with or set apart from each other by clear boundaries and conditions of necessity and sufficiency, but relate to each other in ways based on the presence or absence of family similarity (Lakoff 1987). The revolution of information technology, the opening of communication borders, and the internationalization of science have all resulted in many of the terms of social