Ritual as a participatory affair

Victor Turner in his Forest of Symbols (1967) suggested to interpret ritual on three levels. Firstly, the exegetical level: "how they explain it", in other words, how the "locals". The there's the operational meaning: "what we can see", the minutiae of the observable "bells and whistles" that most anthropologists record in their ethnographies. And finally, there is the positional level: "how we, the educated, explain it", i.e., how the meaning of the ritual fits into the overall structure of the society. This last privileges understanding can only be achieved by  anthropologists trained in the high art of seeing structure, agency, liminality, and such in daily events. 

Despite such a analytical finery, all the three levels remain belong to the same domain, of rationalising the visible to the naked eye. The observer remains confused as to what is actually happening with the participants. The participant observation thus remains an observation, the participation part meaning "standing nearby": just like Bakhtin's carnival, which when observed loses its meaning and becomes a mere spectator sport. Thing with rituals is that once you've "gone local", it changes your forever, so the "fourth wall" between the scientific observer and the observed object of study is broken down. The subject and the object merge and that's how the illusion of separation collapses and empirical wisdom is gained.

Quantitative mehods are a big fat lie

Quantitative methods are a lie. The devil is always in operationalisation, the stage where you decide how to turn observable world into numbers, which is always inevitably based on unselfconscious ideological choices, beliefs and affects. Besides, there's the sheer imbecility of trying to reduce the entire complexity of reality to a relation between two variables. Hence, all quant-based sciences are pseudo-sciences or simply mouthpieces of power dressed up as a science.

Social sciences and the culturalist bias

The assumption that enculturation rationally responds to/replicates social structure is itself a product of rationality and is thus only self-referential at best, and most of times very misguiding. It bypasses any awareness of psychological processes and how responses are produced and internalised. This lack of self-knowledge/reflexivity (from the famous "know thyself" maxim) is the main obstacle in the modernist scientific method, the blindfold that keeps the blind men from seeing the entire elephant.

One keep getting reminded of that beautiful Dostoevsky's question (to the effect of): "So what happens once we've fed everyone?" Is it going to be a better society once wealth is redistributed more evenly? Not that I'm against it, by the way. It's just that the effects will be mostly limited to welfare and economy, more purchase power and people engaging in ever new consumerist frenzies, inventing new hierarchies and guarding their wealth from outsiders. Same ole, same ole...

Whatever logical reasoning is brought froward to justify social policies, the underlying divide is always the pre-conscious choice of "the deserving vs. the undeserving". It rests upon denying humanity to other humans, stereotyped as an arbitrarily chosen group.  To do that, an easily recognisable attribute (race, gender, disability, religion, sexuality, employment status) is picked to turn into catchy replicable soundbites and headlines. Although superficially "rational", such catchy slogans appeal directly to pre-rational, non-verbal affects, usually something very powerful and negative like envy, fear of the Other, anger, neurotic frustration, etc. That way, such slogans provide a channel for pent-up, unprocessed affects to surface on the verbal level accessible to the "rational" mind (aka, the secondary thinking process). The link between the slogan and the affect stays very powerful, strengthened further by media exposure and confirmation bias.

In the parlance of Russian spin doctors, such couplings are called "schizo-blocks", false dilemmas cooked up with the help of focus groups and brain-storming sessions.

Cultural, post-colonial, gender, etc. Studies

Anyone can say anything as long as it's wrapped in appropriately appropriated terminology, mostly leftist, Liberal, feminist or any latest flavour of the day marketed to possible discontents to keep them on the leash. Since no evidence based on empirical data is required, anything one says is unfalsifiable, can't be proved either right, or wrong. Argument exhausts at 'I say A, you say B." Educated guess is king.

The secret of London life

In an urban cosmopolitan setting, commitment is to events, not to people. Atomised individuals busy with their Selves seek out activity partners for events that constitute each respective life. So it's not events but self-events, a strain of YouTube clips, chosen with an ever-increasing finesse, to compile into the full-feature film of one's life. It is one's self-events that one needs to lay allegiance to, in order to avoid disappointment and wasting time.

It might be right, it might be wrong in the bigger scheme of things, but it's the art d'existence in a world city.

The ultimate conspiracy theory

That people do not conspire is itself a conspiracy theory.