With some considerable delay, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was, in 1986, declared the ‘new anthropological ancestor’ (Bruner 1986, 4). Although he had been acknowledged as having exerted some influence on major figures of anthropology, like Boas and Benedict well before, the recent turn to Dilthey was meant to go far beyond the historical concern. This move contrasts sharply with the result of an examination of the indexes of relevant textbooks on basic anthropological theory, where Dilthey's name hardly ever appears. What then are the common points of contact between late twentieth-century anthropology and turn-of-the-century German philosophy? In what manner could Diltheyean ideas be useful in overcoming the conceptual shortcomings of contemporary anthropological theories of knowledge, relating back to structuralism or (eventually) Kantian origin? In answering these questions I will, first, resort to some historical-theoretical lines of argumentation, thereby reconstructing the motives of the pioneers of the ‘interpretive’ and ‘reflexive’ turn in anthropology (Geertz, Turner). In a second step I will go further in reconstructing the main angles of Dilthey's theory of knowledge and propose it as an adequate model of knowledge acquisition in the social sciences. On that basis, my final reflections shall be devoted to sketching out some family resemblances between Dilthey's concepts and some recently voiced postulations of anthropological theory.

1. Dilthey in Modern Anthropology

Not only among anthropologists, but also among sociologists Dilthey figures, first and foremost, as a co-founder of modern philosophical hermeneutics and, consequently, a paragon of verstehende social science (Brown 2005).