Truth and sight: Generalizing without universalizing

This paper examines the link between truth and sight, and the implications of this link for our understandings of the concept of evidence. I propose to give an example of precisely how we might attempt to generalize about a phenomenon such as the recurrence of the association between truth and sight without ignoring important anti-universalist points. In doing this, I hope to give one example of how anthropology, in the original sense of the term, is a still possible enterprise, in spite of the criticisms such an approach has had to face in the last thirty years. © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008.