Anthropology in Theory E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This second edition of the widely praised Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, features a variety of updates, revisions, and new readings in its comprehensive presentation of issues in the history of anthropological theory and epistemology over the past century.
- Provides a comprehensive selection of 60 readings and an insightful overview of the evolution of anthropological theory
- Revised and updated to reflect an on-going strength and diversity of the discipline in recent years, with new readings pointing to innovative directions in the development of anthropological research
- Identifies crucial concepts that reflect the practice of engaging with theory, particular ways of thinking, analyzing and reflecting that are unique to anthropology
- Includes excerpts of seminal anthropological works, key classic and contemporary debates in the discipline, and cutting-edge new theorizing
- Reveals broader debates in the social sciences, including the relationship between society and culture; language and cultural meanings; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and trans-locality; and meta-theory, ontology and epistemology
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Seitenzahl: 1868
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Contents
Notes on the Editors
General Introduction
Acknowledgments
Anthropology and Epistemology
PART I
SECTION 1: Culture and Behavior
1 The Aims of Anthropological Research
2 The Concept of Culture in Science
3 Problems and Methods of Approach
Examples of Ethos in English Culture
4 The Individual and the Pattern of Culture
SECTION 2: Structure and System
5 Rules for the Explanation of Social Facts
I
II
6 On Social Structure
7 Introduction to Political Systems of Highland Burma
Social Structure
Unit Societies
Model Systems
Ritual
Interpretation
Social Structure and Culture
8 Social Structure
Definition and Problems of Method
Social Statics or Communication Structures
SECTION 3: Function and Environment
9 The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis
Personality, Organization, and Culture
The Individual Organism under Conditions of Culture
The Instrumental Imperatives of Culture
The Place of the Individual in Organized Groups
The Cultural Definition of Symbolism
The Individual Contributions and Group Activities in Knowledge and Belief
Summary and Conclusions
10 The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology
Culture, History, and Environment
Cultural Ecology
The Method of Cultural Ecology
The Methodological Place of Cultural Ecology
11 Energy and the Evolution of Culture
12 Ecology, Cultural and Noncultural
Determinists and Possibilists
Steward’s Method of Cultural Ecology
Ethno-Ecology
Ecology Rather Than Cultural Ecology
SECTION 4: Methods and Objects
13 Understanding and Explanation in Social Anthropology
I
II
III
14 Anthropological Data and Social Reality
15 Objectification Objectified
PART II
SECTION 5: Meanings as Objects of Study
16 Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
I
II
III
IV
V
17 Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology
III
IV
V
VI
VIII
18 Subjectivity and Cultural Critique
A Brief History of the Debate over the Subject
Another Look at Geertz’s Concept of Culture
The Cultural Construction of Subjectivity
Some Very Brief Conclusions
SECTION 6: Language and Method
19 Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology
20 Ordinary Language and Human Action
Thought, Action and the Nature of Human Studies
21 Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science
II
III
IV
V
VI
SECTION 7: Cognition, Psychology, and Neuroanthropology
22 Towards an Integration of Ethnography, History and the Cognitive Science of Religion
Implicit Cognitive Constraints on Religious Transmission
Cognition and Religious Variation: Where Ethnography, History, and Science Meet
Conclusion
23 Linguistic and Cultural Variables in the Psychology of Numeracy
24 Subjectivity
25 Why the Behavioural Sciences Need the Concept of the Culture-Ready Brain
The Trouble with Anthropology
Culture and Biology
Cultural Distortions of Perception
The Culture-Ready Brain
Closing Remarks
SECTION 8: Bodies of Knowledges
26 Knowledge of the Body
The Language of Representation
Initiations and Imitations
The Environment of a Way of Acting
27 The End of the Body?
The Fordist Body
The Body in Late Capitalism
Sexuality, Family, and Disposable People
28 Hybridity: Hybrid Bodies of the Scientific Imaginary
The Moral Parameters of Embodied Hybridity
The Intimacy of Interspeciality
Conclusion: Hybrids and the Scientific Imaginary
PART III
SECTION 9: Coherence and Contingency
29 Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism
30 Introduction to Europe and the People Without History
The Rise of the Social Sciences
The Uses of Marx
31 Introduction to Of Revelation and Revolution
Culture, Hegemony, Ideology
Consciousness and Representation
32 Epochal Structures I: Reconstructing Historical Materialism
33 Structures and the Habitus
A False Dilemma: Mechanism and Finalism
Structures, Habitus and Practices
SECTION 10: Universalisms and Domain Terms
34 Body and Mind in Mind, Body and Mind in Body: Some Anthropological Interventions in a Long Conversation
Body and Mind in Mind
Body and Mind in Body
35 So Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?
Is Male Dominance Universal?
Picturing the Emergence of Male Dominance
Is Nature/Culture Universal?
36 Global Anxieties: Concept-Metaphors and Pre-theoretical Commitments in Anthropology
History, Methodology and Comparison
Alternative Images of the Global
Imagined Worlds
People in Focus
Getting a Grip
SECTION 11: Perspectives and Their Logics
37 The Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism
Imagination of Wholeness and Rhetorical Necessity
Social Wholes, Social Parts and Classification
Parts and Wholes
Rhetorical Wholes Are Not Social Entities
From Rhetoric to Social Structure
38 Writing Against Culture
Selves and Others
Culture and Difference
Three Modes of Writing Against Culture
39 Cutting the Network
I
II
III
SECTION 12: Objectivity, Morality, and Truth
40 The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology
Moral Accountability and Anthropology in Extreme Situations
The Politics of Representation
Anthropology without Borders: The Postmodern Critique
The Primacy of the Ethical
Witnessing: Toward a Barefoot Anthropology
41 Moral Models in Anthropology
42 Postmodernist Anthropology, Subjectivity, and Science: A Modernist Critique
The Importance of Subjectivity
Culture and Personality
Postmodernist Innovations Regarding Subjectivity
43 Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals
Plea for a Moral Anthropology
Who’s Afraid of Morals?
Portrait of the Anthropologist as a Moralist
The Politics of a Moral Anthropology
Conclusion
PART IV
SECTION 13: The Anthropology of Western Modes of Thought
44 The Invention of Women
Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects
45 Valorizing the Present: Orientalism, Postcoloniality and the Human Sciences
Sketches for a Metatheory of Western Theories
46 Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism
Introduction
Perspectivism
Animism
Ethnocentrism
Multinaturalism
The Spirit’s Many Bodies
SECTION 14: (Re)defining Objects of Inquiry
47 What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies
Introducing Three Limit Biologies
Artificial Life: Life Forms at Limits of Abstraction
Marine Microbiology: Life Forms at Limits of Materiality and Relationality
Astrobiology: Life Forms at Limits of Definition
What Was Life?
48 The Near and the Elsewhere
49 Relativism
The Import–Export System of the Two Great Divides
Anthropology Comes Home from the Tropics
There Are No Cultures
SECTION 15: Subjects, Objects, and Affect
50 How to Read the Future: The Yield Curve, Affect, and Financial Prediction
What Is the Yield Curve?
A New Epistemic Terrain
The Yield Curve Today
Conclusion: Reflexive Troubles
51 Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things
Materiality as a Semiotic Problem
Objects as a Problem for Subjects
Signs in Their Causal Relations
Bundling and the Openness of Objects
Semiotic Ideology
The Openness of Things Is Inherently Historical
Clothing Taken to Be Meaningful
Words and the Objectualization of Things
Objects and the Possibilities of Subjects
52 Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge
Ruination, Abject and Social Theory
Objects of violence
Affective Spaces
Melancholic Objects and Spatial Melancholia
SECTION 16: Imagining Methodologies and Meta-things
53 Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference
Imagined Communities, Imagined Places
Space, Politics, and Anthropological Representation
54 What is at Stake – and is not – in the Idea and Practice of Multi-sited Ethnography
A Non-obvious Paradigm for Multi-sited Ethnography
The Loss and Reclamation of the Social in Recent Ethnography
55 Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination
Anxieties of the Global
The Optics of Globalization
Flows and Disjunctures
Regional Worlds and Area Studies
The Idea of Research
Democracy, Globalization, and Pedagogy
Globalization from Below
56 The End of Anthropology, Again: On the Future of an In/Discipline
Triage: Three Symptomatologies of Crisis
Defying Death, or Vigor Mortis
Anthropological Futures: First Thoughts, Second Guesses
Conclusion
SECTION 17: Anthropologizing Ourselves
57 Participant Objectivation
58 Anthropology of Anthropology? Further Reflections on Reflexivity
The “Objectivity” Conundrum
Arenas of Reflexivity: Textual and Institutional
Etiquette and the Academy as Instituted Fantasy
Lessons from “Reflexive Sociology”
Curmudgeonry as “Paraethnography”
59 World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology
Cosmopolitics
Anthropologies of Empire-Building/Anthropologies of Nation-Building
Asymmetric Ignorance: Metropolitan Provincialism and Provincial Cosmopolitanism
Final Comments
60 Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-functioning of Ethnography
Central Banks
The Anecdotal Amid Other Genres of the Para-ethnographic: A Glimpse at Alan Greenspan’s Practice of the Para-ethnographic
Para-ethnography as Method
The Beige Book
The Warrant for the Postulation of the Para-ethnographic in Cultures of Expertise
Index
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Notes on the Editors
Henrietta L. Moore FBA is the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work on gender has developed a distinctive approach to the analysis of the interrelations of material and symbolic gender systems, embodiment and performance, and identity and sexuality. She has worked extensively in Africa, particularly on livelihood strategies, social transformation, and symbolic systems. Recent research has focused on virtual worlds, new technologies, and the relationship between self-imagining and globalization. Her most recent monograph, Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (Polity, 2011), argues for a reconsideration of globalization based on ordinary people’s capacities for self-making and social transformation.
Todd Sanders is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and has worked in Africa for two decades. His projects have had varied foci and share a common theoretical concern with social and scientific knowledge practices. His books include Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa (with Henrietta L. Moore and Bwire Kaare; Athlone/Berg, 1999), Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (with Henrietta L. Moore; Routledge, 2001), Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (with Harry West; Duke University Press, 2003), and Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania (University of Toronto Press, 2008).
General Introduction
Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders
Theory as Practice
This collection attests to the strength and diversity of anthropological theorizing in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We use the term “theorizing” rather than the more usual noun form “theory” because the pieces collected here are intended to reflect the practice of engaging with theory, particular ways of thinking, analyzing, and reflecting that have emerged in the context of writings over this period. Anthropology as a discipline has a number of subdivisions or “traditions.” These may be broadly cast as national – as in British, American, Japanese, Brazilian anthropology – and regional – as in the particular theoretical concerns of specific regions, such as “persons,” “cross-cousin marriage,” “gift exchange,” and so on. The boundaries between these different “traditions” are far from fixed, and indeed are being constantly transcended. The writings collected here draw on a variety of perspectives. Our aim is not to provide a representative sample of any – and certainly not all – traditions, but to make available a flavor of the intellectual conversations and debates on specific epistemological issues that formed the practice of theorizing in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century anthropology.
No one collection could ever hope to be representative of anthropological theories per se. The question “What is anthropological theory?” is inextricably tied to the question “What is anthropology?” (Moore 1999: 2; Moore and Sanders, this volume). Anthropology has been variously defined as the study of “other cultures,” “cultural difference,” “social systems,” “world views,” “ways of life,” and “forms of knowledge.” Sometimes these abstractions are given more concrete referents, such as political systems, livelihoods, kinship systems, family structures, and religious beliefs. The only difficulty is that neither the more abstract conceptual categories nor the empirical entities are the exclusive domain of anthropology, which immediately raises the issue of how we would delineate specifically anthropological theories. This is obvious in the practice of anthropology, since most anthropology courses begin by teaching students about Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, whose writings have been formative for the discipline. Contemporary anthropological theorizing also engages in extensive theoretical borrowing, and recent examples would include the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, Bakhtin, Agamben, and many others. We make no attempt in this collection – it would in any case be impossible – to provide examples of all the theories from the humanities, social sciences, and sciences that have influenced anthropological theorizing. Rather, we have integrated extracts from writers outside anthropology where their thinking contributes to particular debates or discussion points within a specific set of epistemological difficulties under discussion within the volume. For example, in section 2 on structure and system, we have included an extract from Durkheim (5), not only because his writings had a profound influence, albeit in different ways, on the work of Radcliffe-Brown (6) and Lévi-Strauss (8), but also because it discusses the relationship between the individual and society, which is one of the concerns of section 1. The extract from Durkheim thus provides both a context for readers engaging with the work of Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss and an indirect commentary on the vexed question of what distinguishes social structures from social relations. Our intention throughout has been to portray anthropological theorizing as a set of dialogues – dialogues that are not only internal to the discipline, but also engage with writings outside the discipline from which anthropology has often sought inspiration. Thus we have included extracts that not only reflect a writer’s theoretical position – or at least one of her or his positions – but can also be maintained in a productive relation with positions taken by other writers elsewhere in the volume. Consequently, individual extracts should not be taken as necessarily representative of an individual’s entire oeuvre.
In designing a collection of this kind, it is evident that a plethora of organizational principles proffer themselves, all with strengths and weaknesses. It might have been feasible – if somewhat constraining – to have divided anthropological theorizing into anthropological theories of “kinship,” “politics,” “economics,” and so on. Equally, it might have been appropriate to divide disciplinary endeavor into “schools of thought,” such as functionalism, structural-functionalism, and structuralism. Another possible set of categorizations might have been suggested by reference to specialist sub-fields, such as the anthropology of cognition, art, nationalism, psychology, development, gender, the body, medical anthropology, and so on. All these sub-fields borrow extensively from other disciplines and many of them require specialist theoretical knowledge. Every one of these ways of organizing the collection was considered. They were ultimately abandoned not just because as categorizations and principles of organization they can be readily contested, but because we wanted to emphasize what might be distinctive about anthropological theorizing, that is, the practice of it.
How This Book is Organized
Anthropology is not anthropology because it studies kinship or cognition or politics or art, or because it has had practitioners who are structuralists or post-structuralists. What is distinctive about anthropology is the way it has created and constructed itself, the particular history of the formation of ideas that have given rise to a distinctive discipline and a set of associated practices. It is this process of theorizing that this volume seeks to capture. Today’s conversations are clearly different from those of the past, and while it is difficult to understand contemporary concerns without some knowledge of the origins of the debates, the volume is not organized on a purely historical basis. The aim has been to show the recursive and enduring nature of key questions, principally the lasting search for a more complete understanding of the anthropological object of inquiry; in other words, the extent to which anthropological theorizing has always been driven by the question “What is anthropology?” The volume thus aims to demonstrate both the variations and the continuities in the key questions anthropologists have asked: “what is the relationship between the individual and society”; “what is the difference between society and culture”; “what makes us distinctively human”; “how are we to comprehend cultural difference in the context of a universal humanity”; “what is the relationship between models and reality”; “what is the relationship between the models of the observer and those of the observed”?
The collection as a whole provides an introduction to these questions for readers inside and outside anthropology. It also builds up a dialogue about specific sets of assumptions on which theorizing in anthropology is based, the methods appropriate to address certain questions, and the theoretical frameworks through which they are received. So, for example, in section 2, structure and system, we have included extracts from different writers discussing the term “structure” and what it encompasses and entails. A concept such as “structure” not only defines the kinds of questions that can be asked of data, but also determines the methods used to collect data. The aim of each section is to provide a kind of minor “genealogy of knowledge” where the extracts explore through dialogue with each other not only what certain concepts and the pre-theoretical assumptions on which they are based reveal, but also what they remain silent on, the questions that do not get asked. The overall structure of the book is, as we have said, not historically oriented, but is, rather, based on a series of counterpoints or questions, so that issues on which certain sections are silent get picked up later in subsequent sections. The contributions can, of course, be read in any order, but the volume’s layout is intended to provide a pathway through a series of interlinked debates for readers less familiar with anthropology. We provide an overview of the theoretical development of anthropology in the twentieth and early twenty-first century and its epistemological concerns in the next chapter (Moore and Sanders, this volume).
In part I, the debates are animated by the question of the relationship between society and culture, and indeed the issue which divided British and American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century: whether it was culture or society that formed the object of anthropological inquiry. Different writers in the sections in part I discuss the definition of these terms and how they relate to the individuals who comprise them. One major difficulty here is the fact of cultural difference and how it relates to our common humanity, to the environment in which we live, and to our individual natures. What is crucial is the way that cultural determinism and cultural relativism interact in the thinking of individual authors. While one could characterize the basic trend through the twentieth century as a move from strong forms of cultural determinism (humans are the products of their culture/society and its environment) to a view that emphasizes individual agency in the context of intersubjective relations with others (humans are biologically cultural beings who develop within a cultural world) (see Moore and Sanders, this volume), this would be to ignore the recursive nature of epistemological postulates in anthropological thinking. The extracts in this part demonstrate the differences between writers of similar historical periods, and the continuities and discontinuities between contemporary writers and those at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the mechanisms that link forms of abstraction – concepts such as “structure,” for instance – to forms of explanation. A perennial complication in anthropology is that since abstractions are created by the analyst, and they provide the building blocks for anthropological models, there is considerable debate about how such abstractions relate to the empirical data from which they are abstracted, and beyond that, how anthropological models qua models relate to those of informants (see Moore and Sanders, this volume).
Part II takes up these questions in a different guise and focuses on language, meanings, and interpretations, particularly with regard to the relationship of cultural meanings to actors’ models. The pre-theoretical assumptions under interrogation in this part are those based on the idea that language is central to social life, that it is what defines us as human, and thus we must analyze social life as the creation and negotiation of meaning within which actors interpret their experience and order their actions. A focus on meaning inevitably raises queries about the degree to which individuals within a culture share meanings, how knowledge may be differentially distributed as a result of power, and how meanings and values get transferred from one generation or group to another. This connects work in this area to older debates about the relationship between culture and thought, not only with regard to the beliefs and thoughts of individuals, but also in relation to the pre-theoretical assumption that language is necessary for thought. Work on bodies, praxis, and phenomenology emphasizes that there are forms of knowledge that are non-linguistic, that the human body, for example, knows the world through its engagement with the world and with others in that world. However, if practical knowledge of the world is the result of engagement with that world, then what scope is there for individual creativity or for social change; how can we negotiate the apparent impasse between objective structures and subjective experience? Thus, part II takes up once again, albeit from a very different angle, the question of how to transcend the division between the individual and culture, what might be intended or encompassed by the term “structures” (as in linguistic structures/structures of meaning), and how the models of both observer and observed relate to knowledge and to power (see Moore and Sanders, this volume).
Part III addresses issues of scale and comparison, but more than this, it provides a sustained reflection on a series of models for knowing the world. These models are all derived in one way or another from western philosophical traditions, and the question is the degree to which they are appropriate for knowing the worlds of other people, in other times and places. Underlying this question is a broader concern about whether it is possible to know the world. Is anthropology an objective science or a subjective form of interpretation? What kind of instrument of knowledge is the anthropologist? Anthropology has developed a very clear critique of the relations between power and knowledge that have constituted the domain of anthropology itself and its associated practices. This debate acknowledges that knowledge is always a matter of ethics. Anthropology, like all disciplines, creates a world full of specific kinds of entities – societies, cultures – which is inhabited by particular kinds of agents – persons, individuals, etc. Much critical anthropology has served to work against the power relations that constitute the anthropological field of knowledge, and has criticized the comparative models of anthropology for occluding the perspectives, voices, and lived realities of the people being studied. This raises once again – but in the context of unequal power relations – how adequately anthropological models represent the lived reality of people’s lives. However, debates in this area go further than earlier debates because they question the nature of the theoretical itself, including the very project of western knowledge as it underpins anthropology (see Moore 1999; Moore and Sanders, this volume). Hence, the discussion focuses on whether and under what circumstances comparison is possible, appropriate, and powerful. Can we do without models? Can we have objective knowledge of other people’s worlds? What do we relinquish – and at what cost to ourselves and others – if we give up on the notion of anthropology as science?
Part IV discusses the shifts in the conditions of production of anthropological research and therefore of anthropological knowledge. Cultures – however they might have been represented in the past – have never been fixed, bounded, or unitary. In the context of globalization, migration, and transnational flows, anthropology has been forced to rethink not only the major concepts of anthropology – society, culture, kinship, and others – but also the very notion of cultural difference itself. This is in part because anthropology has “come home”; “other cultures” are no longer in “other places,” and anthropology is much less able to distance itself from the communities it studies. The nature of the academy has also changed profoundly, and it is not just the communities and cultures studied by anthropologists that are transnational and transcultural, but anthropologists themselves. This has had a major impact on both knowledge construction and critical politics within the discipline. Issues of perspective, power, positionality, and hybridity have been largely forced onto the agenda of the discipline by those scholars who most forcefully live hybridity and multiple positionality. Anthropology, like the world itself, is becoming simultaneously globalized and localized. One powerful irony here is that at the very moment anthropology appeared to want to abandon the organizing trope of culture, the rest of the world started to adopt it. International agencies, local civil society groups, management consultants, consumer researchers, and a host of other groups and institutions embraced it as the lens through which to understand difference in a globalized world. It has become a mobilizing concept for many indigenous and civil society groups around the world, and in some cases the explanation for power differentials, exclusions, and even hatreds and acts of violence. The result is that not only have the contexts for anthropological research shifted, but so has the nature of the relationship between observer and observed. Anthropology and anthropologists no longer command the high ground of representation – if indeed they ever did – and have had to recognize that their view on cultural difference is only one among many. New ways of imaging the anthropological object of inquiry have emerged: new images, metaphors, and concepts. This gives rise to new practices, new ways of doing field research, of combining advocacy and research, of imagining the very nature of the social itself (see Moore 1996, 1999; and Moore and Sanders, this volume).
Locating Anthropology
It has often been said that there is no single anthropology, but only a series of anthropologies. The perspective developed in this collection would see that statement as a question of scale, as a matter of position, of what one chooses to foreground, on the one hand, and consign to the background, on the other. The variety, diversity, and richness of contemporary anthropological theorizing are indisputable, as is the existence of the vigorous debates which are its origin. However, when we speak of anthropology we should not lose sight of the fact that it is an intellectual endeavor, a discipline and a profession. In other words, it is not only about ways of thinking, but also about ways of doing in the context of specific institutions and power relations. All ideas are generated and communicated within particular historical, material, social, and political relations and processes. Styles of reasoning, as Hacking argues, create the possibility of truth and falsehood precisely because they are historically situated (Hacking 1982: 56–7). This is not to claim that truth is not the object of our inquiries or that the refinements and careful calibrations of thought, reasoning, and method that make anthropology a social science are unimportant. It is, rather, to draw attention to the circumstances, contexts, and practices within which the effects of truth are produced.
Contemporary anthropology as a discipline and as a set of practices is engaged in multiple ways with the world it reflects upon. This engagement is complex, frequently vexed, but always productive. Theorizing is not only about the nature, limits, and sources of knowledge. It is also about the process of self-reflection that constitutes the practice of theorizing on the grounds and contexts of knowledge production in a way that acknowledges their material and historical constraints and ambitions. This leads to contestation about the very nature of theory and the theoretical. In contemporary anthropology, this has been evident not only in the debate about objects, the question of what constitutes the objects of anthropological inquiry, but also in the parallel discussion about subjects and subject positions – that is to say, who speaks for other cultures, but more than that, who speaks for anthropology itself. These subject positions are geographically and institutionally framed, but they are also epistemological. It seems indisputable that, being a product of western culture and philosophy, anthropology has been constituted historically as much by its subject positions as by its objects of inquiry, as much by who speaks in its name and in what voice as by the question “What is anthropology?” The gaze of the anthropological observer has never been an unmarked one, but the question for the future is whether that gaze can be effectively unmoored not only from the traditions that gave rise to it, but also from the broader imaginary of the west and its relations to others.
References
Hacking, I. 1982 Language, Truth and Reason. In Rationality and Relativism. M. Hollis, and S. Lukes, eds. Oxford: Blackwell.
Moore, H. L. 1996 The Changing Nature of Anthropological Knowledge: An Introduction. In The Future of Anthropological Knowledge. H. L. Moore, ed. London: Routledge.
Moore, H. L. 1999 Anthropological Theory at the Turn of the Century. In Anthropological Theory Today. H. L. Moore, ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Acknowledgments
The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Anthropology and Epistemology
Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders
There are two kinds of question that guide social science inquiry: “What can I know about the world?” and “How can I know the world?” The first is properly the domain of metaphysics – philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality, existence, and being – while the second is the terrain of method. In general terms, however, they are both the stuff of what we term theory in anthropology because they cannot be easily or profitably separated. Anthropological difficulties with knowing the world rest on what we can know about other people, and this is a problem that has several dimensions.
Sameness and Difference
The first issue is whether and to what degree human beings share characteristics and capacities. In anthropology, these reflections on the nature of being have at different times been profoundly influenced by work in biology, psychology, and cognition. At the root of these reflections lies an important question: “Do all humans think in the same way?” This question underlies and forms the presuppositions for two others: “Is it possible to understand other worlds, how other people think?” and if the answer to this is affirmative, then “What is the relationship between culture and thought?” To a very significant extent the answer to these questions depends on the characteristics we assume human beings and indeed cultures to have. One of the factors that has driven change in anthropological theorizing has been variation in our pre-theoretical assumptions about the nature of being human and of being a culture-bearing human.
Twentieth-century anthropology explicitly set itself against nineteenth-century evolutionism, against the idea that all cultures were ranged along a line towards Progress and Civilization set by western values and understandings (Herskovits 1972; Sapir 1985 [1949]). Franz Boas and his students explicitly espoused the notion that cultures had to be understood in their own terms and as wholes (Boas, 1). Their presupposition was that human beings shared a common human condition, but one which expressed itself in diverse forms: underlying cultural difference was an essential human sameness. Boas was interested in using the science of culture to combat racism, but he was also passionately committed to ethnographic particularism, to the idea that cultures could not be understood according to universal standards and values (Boas, 1). In short, Boas was a cultural relativist and he was categorically opposed to the analysis of cultural elements outside of their historical and cultural context (Boas 1982 [1940]). Each culture had to be treated as a unique way of life. Each culture had its own “genius” and there was no way that they could be ranked or valued against or in comparison with each other (Bateson, 3; Sapir 1924; Stocking 1968, 1974).1 The result was that any judgement relating to behavior and behavior patterns must be made relative to the standards of the cultures producing them (Sapir 1985 [1949]). Hence, while the Kwakiutl, for example, may exhibit a constellation of characteristics which appear abnormal by western standards, this judgement is invalid since the behavior is normal by Kwakiutl standards (Benedict, 4).
The notion of “genius” was connected in other writings in the early twentieth century to the concept of zeitgeist, or, as it is sometimes glossed, “ethos” or “configuration”: the view that cultures had or were to be conceptualized as integrated “systems of thought” or “scales of value” (Bateson, 3). Edward Sapir distinguished between what he termed genuine and spurious culture and in so doing expunged the last of Boas’s historicism in favor of the notion of culture as an integrated whole. A genuine culture is one that is both consistent and harmonious; it is not a spiritual hybrid of contradictory patches, made up of a mere accretion of traits (Sapir 1924, 1985 [1949]). However, it was recognized that all thinking and feeling in a culture must be done by individuals, and it followed from this that there must be some way to specify how culture influenced the psychology of individuals, how it affected their thinking. The actual mechanisms through which culture affected individuals were not known, but general propositions were advanced that it “standardized” the potentialities and capacities of the individual, favoring some and suppressing others. The result was a series of behavior patterns characteristic of each society which conditioned the thoughts and emotions of that society’s members (Sapir 1985 [1949]). This process was recognized as a fundamentally circular one, since systems of values and thoughts influence not only individuals, but also cultural institutions, and these institutions in their turn shape individuals (Bateson, 3; Benedict, 4). The circularity of argument here depended on a particular pre-theoretical assumption: the idea that while human actions produced culture, human beings are always culturalized. In short, the human beings who make culture are themselves already the product of culture – hence Durkheim’s view that society is the origin of social facts (Durkheim, 5).
Different scholars gave different emphases to this process, but a widely accepted view involved a hierarchy of levels based on the assumption that culture presupposes society, society is based on individuals, and individuals have both minds and bodies (Kroeber, 2). The result was a four-“level” approach to the study of human beings based on body, psyche, society, and culture. A biological “level” existing before the operation of culture was assumed, but because of the all-powerful nature of cultural construction it was deemed “remote” from the point of view of the emerging discipline of anthropology. Biopsychological structures were given particular cultural form or content, but in the context of an assumption of the “psychic unity” of humankind, the idea was that culture is itself the product of a uniquely human set of psychological characteristics, and that each culture is a variant upon them. Thus the biological and the psychological were seen as setting constraints or limits on culture (Steward, 10; White, 11). Culture became understood as humanity’s unique form of adaptation, a way to meet needs that were simultaneously social and biological (Kroeber, 2; Malinowski, 9).
Among anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century, there was much debate about the exact emphasis to be given to the relationship between culture and the individual, the social and the psychological. Sapir, for example, was critical of Benedict’s treatment of cultures as collective personalities (Benedict, 4). He remained committed to the idea that individuals could exercise independent creative autonomy and thus complete cultural determinism was an impossibility (Bateson, 3; Irvine 1994). These attempts to unravel what linked the development of individuals to the distinctive nature of the culture in which they lived gave rise to what became known as the “culture and personality school” in American anthropology. Nonetheless, while discussion focused on individuals and their psychology, the specific focus on cultures as integrated wholes tended to downplay differences between individuals within the same culture as a consequence of emphasizing the individual distinctiveness of cultures. Theorists were not always consistent in their positions, and circularity of thought was common in the strenuous effort to unravel complex issues. The overall position, however, was a strong form of cultural determinism allied to cultural relativism, but one which was premised on a certain degree of cultural universality. The aim, then, was to understand what specific cultures in their particularity are able to tell us about themselves, but also about universal human capacities.
The question of how values shape lives in the context of the biological and psychic unity of humankind invites a particular rhetorical form. If all humans share certain biological and psychological characteristics, then we should be able to specify what they are. One way to attempt this is to ask what differentiates humans from animals. The standard reply, at least in anthropology, has historically been that it is culture that makes human beings distinctively human, that “the creation of meaning is the distinguishing quality of men” (Sahlins 1976: 102). Humans are ranked over animals by virtue of their culture, and, by extension, their minds (including various arguments about the capacity for language and symbolism that are contentiously debated). Indeed, this ranking is subsumed within the more general hierarchy of mind over body, individual over organism (Ingold 1991). The result is a view of the relation of culture to individuals that depends upon the imposition of cultural meanings on an undifferentiated and underlying biological organism (Malinowski, 9; Ingold 1991; Toren 1999). Culture, in this view, is learnt as a consequence of socialization. Meaning is “dumped into the minds of children” (see Robertson 1996). The idea of humans as clever learners accounts both for the view of cultural diversity as characteristically human, and for the notion of humans as “plastic,” infinitely adaptive and innovative (Kroeber, 2; Gibson 2002).
The famous “neural plasticity” of humans which predisposes them to cultural creativity and diversity also shapes and is shaped by a particular notion of culture. There has been a long debate in anthropology about whether culture should be understood as socially patterned behaviors and/or as symbolic systems, values, and meanings. Socially patterned behaviors are common both in non-human primates and in non-primate mammals and depend upon the existence of certain sensorimotor and learning capacities (Gibson 2002). They are certainly not restricted to humans, and thus we cannot simply say that humans are programmed for culture in a way that non-humans are not and/or that culture depends on “neural plasticity” which is also common in non-human mammals. While there are divergent opinions as to whether non-human primates have the capacity for language and symbolism, what is clear is that culture understood as symbolic systems, values, and meanings is not widespread in non-human primates (Gibson 2002). Thus the question of whether or not humanity is premised on culture rather depends on the definition of culture. More crucially, our mental capacities, and those of other mammals, are developed in the context of social interaction and intense sociality. We actually know very little about the evolution of sociality in our own species – it must have taken place long before the evidence for culture in the archaeological record – but what is clear is that sociality and social relations can exist before language and collective representations as they do in non-primate mammals and non-human primates. It logically follows that language and related communicative and symbolic capacities must have evolved in a context of intense sociality, and that sociality is the likely bridge between the non-human primate and human worlds. Thus culture, understood both as social behavior and as symbolic systems involving communication and meanings, is a consequence of our humanity – our sociality – rather than a precondition for it (Ingold 1991; Toren 1999; Gibson 2002).
What this means is that humans are not, strictly speaking, socially constructed in the sense of culture acting upon a pre-given biological entity. But the problem of how culture relates to individuals still needs to be addressed. How does our understanding of our group history, of how we became human, relate to our understanding of individuals, of how we all individually become culture-bearing human beings? Anthropology has traditionally dealt with this by defining human beings as having “capacities.” These capacities have not always been very well defined, and have sometimes depended more on linguistic analogy than on empirical facts. Referring to culture as something “hardwired into the brain” is one example (Robertson 1996). The principal difficulty, however, with imagining culture as something “added” to a biological entity and/or imaging that entity as having pre-given modular (often neural) properties is that biology and culture are divorced from their mutual history (Robertson 1996; Toren 1999). For this reason a number of anthropologists are now arguing for a view of the relation between the individual and culture which sees them as ontogenetically related.2 From this perspective, humans are not biological entities with the capacity to acquire culture, but biologically cultural beings who develop as individuals through intersubjective relations with cultural others (Whitehead, 25; Robertson 1996; Toren 1999). This is a view that not only conceptualizes how the individual human mind develops as a product of ontogenetic growth in a specific cultural context, and signals how culture is reproduced across generations as a consequence of the reproduction of human individuals. It also provides an account of how individual agency – a life lived – is fulfilled within the context of a shared cultural and symbolic world.
Recent work in cognition and psychology has returned to the question of what humans share and what makes them distinctively human. Current thinking emphasizes that these are questions that cannot be answered by anthropology alone, but require interdisciplinary collaboration (Luhrmann, 24; Whitehead, 25). However, psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience construct their objects of inquiry in different ways and seek very different kinds of explanation of the same phenomena (Stafford, 23). Part of the predicament here concerns scale and another concerns method. Anthropology’s restless search for context – contexts in which behaviors, values, beliefs, etc., find meaning – drives data collection, analysis and interpretation towards the ideal of wholistic completeness. This is the “we must know everything before we can make sense of it” approach. Psychologists and neuroscientists, by contrast, tend to focus down, concentrating on specific functions and competences. Experimentation and falsifiability are key to the latter approaches, and impossible to apply to the former (Stafford, 23; Whitehead, 25). The key questions here are how do humans think and what drives the way they think? Is it culture or is it the biological structures of the brain? The relationship of culture to the individual mind – and the individual brain – is a contentious one, but psychologists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists alike believe that there are commonalities, universals, in the way humans think, and that these are likely connected to the manner in which we have evolved as biologically social and cultural beings (Whitehouse, 22; Whitehead, 25).
