Back to Front Thinking
I said I was going to say more about that Washington Post article and skepticism. So here’s some more.
It has to do with the first three paragraphs, which set up some of the recurring ideas in the article.
The Native Americans were not making her job any easier. “This is a very discouraging job, ethnologically speaking,” she began a letter to a friend. She went on to paint a picture that is almost a parody of bad anthropology: The natives just aren’t very interesting, or reliable, or trustworthy…there is “no way of checking whether they are telling the truth”…She cross-examines, bullies and all but calls her “informants” liars…
There. What on earth is he talking about? I would really like to know. I’m not an anthropologist, but I know a few, and I’ve read some anthropology (as who hasn’t), and I would have thought – I could have sworn – that the difficulties Mead cites are just utter commonplaces in the field. There is no way of checking whether one’s subjects and informants are telling the truth. Duh! That’s what makes anthropology difficult, isn’t it, that’s why anthropologists have to learn unfamiliar languages and spend years in the field and why even then they aren’t necessarily sure or even very confident that they’ve got everything right. Is that not both obvious and well-known? (And as I mentioned, isn’t that, amusingly enough, the very problem with Mead’s first field work that Derek Freeman wrote a [much contested] book about? Yes, it is. She didn’t check her informants, she didn’t learn the language at all thoroughly, and she lived with non-Samoans because she [understandably, but unfortunately for her work] didn’t want to live in crowded quarters and eat unappealing food. And she didn’t treat her own findings with nearly enough caution and skepticism in the light of all these limitations.) So why does Kennicott call Mead’s utterly unsurprising comments in a letter to a friend ‘almost a parody of bad anthropology’? Unless he’s claiming that anthropology is itself inherently bad, precisely because of these epistemic issues – in which case it should be all one word: badanthropology. That is a claim that gets made, of course, and anthropologists and the discipline as a whole do notoriously have bad consciences about the whole thing, for understandable reasons. (I don’t particularly want an anthropologist to come wandering in here and stand making notes on the way I type and the way I drink coffee and the way I emit a barely-audible whine when I’m trying to think.) But if his claim is that anthropology that takes such problems as unreliable sources into account is bad while anthropology that ignores them is good – that’s a different kind of claim. He’d need to define bad and good, for a start. Perhaps by ‘bad’ he means disrespectful, colonialist, unkind. It seems pretty clear that he does. But the trouble is, bad anthropology really ought to mean something more like anthropology that doesn’t do its job properly – anthropology that’s bad at doing anthropology, that’s bad as anthropology, as bad carpentry means carpentry that falls apart as opposed to carpentry that is unkind or impolite. Any branch of inquiry – history, biology, forensics – that does an inept job of finding out what it’s trying to find out is thus bad at its job. Other kinds of bad need to be specified and spelled out.
Kennicott didn’t bother to do that. Why. Because he assumes it’s self-evident? Yes, probably, judging by the way he assumes it’s self-evident that the National Gallery ought not to talk about an artist’s way of painting instead of his opinions on race. And if so, that’s one place more skepticism and careful thinking is needed: in awareness that what one takes to be self-evident may not be.
But another and perhaps more important place is in the basic idea behind what he says – that skepticism about what people tell other people about themselves is reprehensible. That idea seems to me to be a blueprint for the very woolliest of wooly thinking. I mean to say – does the poor guy really think that people never tell other people lies about themselves? Or that they never shade the truth a little, or that they never hold anything back, or that they are never wrong about themselves? If so – well. His life must be one long series of big surprises. (And he really ought to read some Goffman and Trivers, among other people.)
But maybe he doesn’t actually believe it, maybe it’s just that he has made a principled decision to believe it, or to try to believe it, or to behave as if he believes it. For moral and political reasons. What he says does seem to imply that.
Once any outsider starts thinking like an anthropologist, it’s hard not to start asking those bullying Margaret Mead questions. How do you know the natives are telling the truth? Is something sacred just because they say it’s sacred? How do you know that they’re not snowing you with all that talk of the Creator and the power of place and all the happy animism that runs through the general discourse of native life? If you believe that only native voices can get at the truth of native people, you must take it all in at face value. Truth is what individual people say about themselves, beyond refute and suspicion — which is perhaps the most powerful, and radical, challenge that Postmodern thought has proposed.
‘If you believe that only native voices can get at the truth of native people, you must take it all in at face value.’ No. The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise – he’s talking about two different things there. Come on, dude, pull yourself together. It can be perfectly true that only I can get at the truth about me, that only X can get at the truth about X, and still not be at all true that I am going to tell you or anyone else that truth. Look, I’ll demonstrate. I’m thinking about a piece of fruit. Only I can know what piece of fruit it is. And I’m not going to tell you. See how easy that is? It was an orange. No it wasn’t, I lied – it was a mango. But was it? There again, see how easy that is?
But even if the conclusion did follow, other questions would remain – such as whether one should decide such questions on moral and political grounds rather than epistemic ones. It is B&W’s position that moral and political grounds are the wrong ones for deciding factual claims. Kennicott is a pretty good object lesson in why – in what happens when one decides factual questions in advance of investigation and evidence. He simply decided that Mead was somehow bad and bullying to say that her informants might not be telling her the truth, while offering not so much as a breath of evidence to show us that they were. He obviously has no idea whether they were or not (how would he?), and yet he tells us it’s bad to think and say that they might not be. Thus he rules out caution and skepticism in advance. And that’s where that kind of a priori thinking gets you.
Only someone besotted by the implicitly racist ideology of Enlightenment Project would demand consistency from an obviously well-meaning critic like Kennicott. Consistency and clarity and rigor are overrated qualities anyway, and you are obviously using them as a weapon against radical change. With your small-minded insistence on archaic ways of thought, you are unkowingly enabling the Powers That Be to perpetuate the racist-imperialist mindset. Think with the blood, my dear, not with the brain.
Yes, I’m being sarcastic.
I know, I know, I’m a disgrace. I’ve just got this thing for that implicitly racist ideology of the Enlightenment. I’ve tried to kick it; I’ve chewed the gum, I’ve worn the patch, but nothing seems to work. Sad.
Aha! So you admit that so-called reason is just a habit, a biological response like nicotine addiction, with no independent validity whatsoever! And therefore any “reasonable” thing you say is just the excuse-making of an addict trying to justify whatever conduces to satisfying your cravings!
Aha! I say.
Given the difficulties inherent in testing theses and verifying them, shouldn’t cultural anthropology be called anthrodoxy?
It is hard enough to make a science of one’s own cultural past much less someone else’s.
The proper study of mankind is man, as the poet wrote, and we may reach correct conclusions, but knowing whether or not we have seems beyond the capabilities of cultural anthropology. Because “scientia” is impossible, maybe we had better stick to stiving for wisdom about man rather than unproveable “knowledge.”
A related point is that the last way to achieve understanding about what a human activity means to participants is to study the “structure” of it.
A rape, a honeymoon rendezvous, and an adulterous liason all have the same sexual “structure” but, unless one understands them from the inside one can’t grasp their meanings to the participants. To a man from Mars–or to Andrea Dworkin–they might appear to be the same.
Yes, I admit it, I admit everything! I give up – the insight of these Theorists is too much for me. I’ll go quietly.
*********
Well, but logos means study as well as knowledge. It isn’t really a word that claims certainty in itself.
And then, anthropology and similar disciplines do gather, evaluate, and offer evidence; they don’t just make stuff up, and they are subject to peer review and contradiction; so they’re not flatly un- or anti-scientific, they’re not poetry, they’re just a lot more subject to interpretation than, say, physics.
I think you have some misconceptions about anthropology, George. No one has ever claimed to be able to learn ever truth about an alien culture–quite the opposite–but we can find out a hell of a lot. Even informant’s lies tell a decent researcher a great deal, and provide more context in which other aspects of a custure can be understood. It’s not perfect, but it works.
“No one has ever claimed to be able to learn ever truth about an alien culture–quite the opposite–but we can find out a hell of a lot.”
There you go. Just what I said. Kennicott has some misconceptions himself. (Sheer typical strawmanism, this stuff. Invent a caricature of ‘anthropology’ [or science or positivism or etc] then triumphantly say how all wrong it is then enjoy group hug. Bleah!)
Herodotus, long before the advent of “anthropology as a science” traveled extensively, gathered information about wildly different and strange cultures, and reported it. He is considered a historian and, perhaps, a geographer.
He “studied” “anthropoi”, so to speak, but he never thought of himself as scientist in the way modern people do. He simply presented, without making judgments of value, the ways of life of foreigners.
Gathering data does not a scientist make. If it did, Army scouts would be scientists. Anyone who recorded new information would be a scientist, but there is more to science than that.
It seems to me that cultural anthropologists today replicate basically what Herodotus did, but do present themselves as scientists, and I question the legitimacy of that.
Are they not better called historians? Why not? A fellow who studied medieval records of what humans planted in the month of May and what significance it held would be called a medieval historian. But if the same fellow studied what humans plant today and its significance he becomes a scientist, an anthropologist.
The OED gives the following etymology for the word “History”: ” A narrative of past events, account, tale, story; A learning or knowing by inquiry; An account of one’s inquiries”
Two or twenty chemists who disagree may all be wrong, but there exists the possibility of proving that they are all wrong. If two or twenty “anthropologists” disagree about the meaning of a rattle from long, long ago, I cannot see how it is possible to discover what the truth is about the rattle’s meaning and to know that the truth has been discovered. How would one test one’s thesis? How would one demonstrate that it is correct?
The Greeks used “doxa” to refer to opinions. Hence my suggestion of something like “anthrodoxists” to apply to what has been called “anthropology” for the last hundred or so years.
There was a famous Princeton literary historian/critic named D. W. Robertson who concluded that every single reference in every single medieval poem was a religious reference, no matter how secular the poem seemed at first glance. A lyric mentioning a daisy in springtime was placed against the backdrop of all Patristic references to the spiritual significance of daisies, themselves usually deriving from references to daisies, or daisy-like flowers, in the bible.
The “evidence” he produced was voluminous for every minor detail in every medieval poem. At least, as far as he was concerned it was “evidence.” God knows he had done a lot of research!
Yet nobody today believes he was right about his thesis–not because they disproved it or because they considered it unproveable. Legions of his fellow scholars just decided it was unwarranted. Rightly, none of those involved made claims to be scientists.
They were just people disagreeing about artifacts that they were greatly separated from in space and time.
Hmm. One, anthropologists don’t really call themselves scientists, I don’t think; they’re more likely to call themselves social scientists (if they call themselves anything other than anthropologists). Two, there are many branches of science, some much less ‘hard’ than others. Three, many historians point out that history has a scientific side, especially a social scientific side. So – aren’t you arguing with non-existent opponents? Surely anthropologists and historians don’t disagree that their fields have a lot of overlap.
Naturally Herodotus didn’t call himself a scientist; the word didn’t exist; he had enough to do inventing the word history (which means inquiry). But he did offer some evidence. And Thucydides did suggest that some of his evidence was Not Good Enough. Point being that questions about evidence go back a long way – go back all the way to the beginning really. As soon as people claim to be presenting facts rather than telling a story, well, other people are going to start asking how they know. And they have to say how they know.
Herodotus was indeed a social scientist, though it’s hard for any one of us social sciences to claim him (historians try the hardest, and have a good case, but like so many good historians, Herodotus was not sufficiently pure in his methods or subject matters to be easily classifiable). His gather of data included consideration of source reliability, balancing conflicting sources, balancing different kinds of sources (written, oral, architectural, etc) and, most importantly, presenting the end result as an argument about human society and its development.
No, gathering data does not make a scientist. Even gathering data in response to a specific question is not science, in a strict sense. Gathering data from which you form hypotheses which you test by gathering more data, now that’s science. And, though a single rattle might well be historically and anthropologically inscrutable, what anthropologists do is try to examine the context in which it is found, other objects found with it, look for other examples of similar rattles, often very specifically choosing sites and societies to study in order to test hypotheses with appropriately specific data.
I’m sorry, but if you’re going to carp at a field, the least you can do is to understand it.
That last was directed at George Lee, by the way, in case there was any doubt.
I also wanted to comment, briefly, on the lovely use of language in the quotation: “those bullying …. questions”. Aside from the gross misunderstanding of postmodernism in that paragraph, to take ‘cultural sensitivity’ the extent that basic questions of consistency and value are ‘bullying’ is just untenable.
People aren’t arguing over whether anthropology is science? Maybe not in your world! Not only do people engage in lengthy disputes about “anthropology” they also scratch their heads over “psychology” and “sociology” and other disciplines whose concerns fell for centuries under the rubric–“The Humanities”.
Simply simply sticking an “ology” on to a preceding noun is no guarantee of a science. Phrenology flourished around the time that modern “anthropology” got off the ground. People did indeed find bumps on human heads, they counted them, measured them, chronicled how far they were from one another, reached all sorts of tentative conclusions, argued about them, etc. The data collected were real. The work was peer reviewed. Some people were considered brilliant phrenologists, others mediocre, and lousy phrenologists got gossiped about by those in the first two categories.
The whole thing was in a sense a harmless diversion, but it did shade into some subsequent murderous “social” “science” that was contaminated by notions of racial superiority.
Pseudo-science can arise in different forms. A field in which one cannot know if one’s thesis is correct–even if it is– cannot qualify as a science.
Cultural anthropology is bound up with divining human intentionality. What did all these rattles mean? But we cannot know if we have answered the question correctly. That doesn’t make pondering such rattles worthless, it just makes such pondering non-scientific. Perhaps rational, or semi-rational, or partially rational, but not scientific.
Or, take Marx. He considered himself a scientist of the “social” sort. Other (and later) Marxist “social” “scientists” were always peer reviewing his work favorably, not to mention that of their contemporaries.
Where both phrenology and Marxist “science” finally floundered was in the testing of their theses and the predictability factor. Neither turned out to be able to predict well, but at least these ghostly similacra of science offered predictions, as chemists and physicists do.
Lysenko, in the Soviet Union, stands as the paradigmatic example of a guy who thought he was doing science, as did enthusiastic supporters all over the world, but especially in the S.U. But he wasn’t. He may as well have been an alchemist.
The anthropologist that I know almost seem to go out of their way not to make predictions. Think of a wonderful anthropological work like “Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden” (first published as the doctoral dissertation, “Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians.” It succeeds not particularly as as science but as history. You could just as easily title it ” A History of Hidatsa Agriculture between 1845 and 1917.” It simply describes, in the manner of Herodotus, what people told him when he visited them and stayed to ask questions.
It is often published today, not as a work of science, but as a book on gardening.
.Technological success– applied science– has given so much cache to real science that pseudo-science has attached itself to it. Human beings thought about their species for quite some time under the rubric of “the humanities” but prestige and accompanying renumeration has fled those departments.
Eric Voegelin was the most thoughtful man I ever came across and he didn’t think that much 19th or 20th century “social” “science” was science at all. He wrote rather a lot about it and those who denied he was right were never from the physics department. They were outraged “social” “scientists” or even humanities people.
(BTW, I wish I had a nickel for every physicist who had complained, in wonder, about the misinterpretation and misapplication of the uncertainty principle by…non-scientists.)
Hmm. George Lee, you still seem to be working up a terrible sweat wrestling with a dreadful combination of dead horses and straw men. You’re vehemently disagreeing with things no one here has said or else things everyone gave up on long ago. Seems like a waste of energy.
Did I invoke Heisenberg and not realize it? Could I? Never mind….
History was once described as “the science of things which happen only once.” Any and every social science must struggle with the fundamentally inaccessible nature of human thought processes and the subtle challenge of studying not individuals but interactions in complex, uncontrolled circumstances. I’ve always envied the psychologists who could devise experiments, and the economists who could assume away inconveniences, the sociologists who do surveys….
What historians do best (when we’re in a predictive mood) is reason by analogy:
Ptolemy described the motions of the stars and planets, but his explanation was too schematic and allowed for all kinds of exceptions. Copernicus refined the theories somewhat. Tycho Brahe rejected Copernicus’ theories, but collected fantastic data, which Kepler used to refine the mathematical models. Galileo did some theoretical work, and refined the telescope to collect new kinds of data. Newton, not much of a data collector, created a mathematical framework which brought almost all of the data into line. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that substantial revisions were necessary.
At what point did astronomy or physics become a science? That it did not yet have the right answers does not preclude it from being scientific; that it had not yet articulated a scientific method is not even a rational dividing line. Somewhere between Copernicus and Newton, though….
I would argue that History as a social science is still at the Ptolemaic stage: we have lots of data, but our theories are too simplistic and our data not sufficiently refined. History is still very much a literary exercise, even in its more quantitative forms. Sociology and Anthropology, though, are somewhere in that transition, but they face a challenge much greater than those early astronomer/physicists: human behavior, unlike celestial mechanics, is not a simple cyclic function, or even reliably repeatable. Nonetheless, unless you wish to argue that humans are fundamentally inscrutable and incomprehensible, the social sciences are going to, someday, produce some fundamental truths, probably in the form of complex mathematical formulae.