Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science

What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? For Kant, these existential concerns ultimately come down to the question: What is the human being? Anthropology as the science of human beings remains hopelessly overburdened by the order to respond meaningfully to these questions. For Hubert Fichte, literary writer and self-taught ethnologist, this burden proved a productive challenge to test the epistemological limits of ethnography. His essay “Heretical Remarks for a New Science of Man” raises broad charges against the academic and literary institutions of knowledge production that will be unfolded in the present article alongside other epistemological remarks of Fichte. Behind his sharp polemics (e.g., against Claude Lévi-Strauss), his passionate identifications (e.g., with Herodotus), and the fuzzy counter-model of “poetic anthropology” looms a fundamental critique of what humans can and cannot know. Fichte derived this critique from his engagement with Afro-diasporic syncretism. This essay investigates how this engagement generated a form of anthropological knowledge as poetic practice, which, though utopian in essence, has epistemological implications beyond Fichte’s work and the specific cultures he studied.