In the previous week's readings, we visited Derrida's notion of the center, which with regard to knowledge, is constantly shifting. In creating new understandings of how systems function, there is a preoccupation with the center, it's function, and how it comes to define the whole. For centuries across cultures of medicine, for example, the heart was viewed as the center of the body–the pump that gives life to the limbs and organs that enable life. Only in the modern world did the study of psychology seek to revise the center of the body as the brain.
This week we had a casual graze with the fields of anthropology and sociology. As a study of human cultures, anthropologists have historically been concerned with the center of culture–the point from which society extends. But seeking the center to define relationships of the whole often results in rudimentary thinking about how cultures operate. Throughout his career, Clifford Geertz, the American anthropologist known for his ethnographic studies of Islam, favored a view that I find more useful–what he calls a view from the edge.
As a frame of mind, I see the edge as the best place to approach research, or structured study of something, somewhere. I see it as the most objective vantage point–a stance from which you're more likely to see your biases, as you've already acknowledged you are on nearly the outside.