Engaging Anthropological Theory

A Social and Political History

Mark Moberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351805193
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This updated second edition of Mark Moberg's lively book offers a fresh look at the history of anthropological theory. Covering key concepts and theorists, Engaging Anthropological Theory examines the historical context of anthropological ideas and the contested nature of anthropology itself. Anthropological ideas regarding human diversity have always been rooted in the sociopolitical conditions in which they arose and exploring them in context helps students understand how and why they evolved, and how theory relates to life and society. Illustrated throughout, this engaging text moves away from the dry recitation of past viewpoints in anthropology and brings the subject matter to life.

1
Of politics and paradigms

Dead white guys and other zombies: a note to students

If you have this text in hand, it is likely that you are embarking upon a course in the history of Anthropological Theory, which is equally likely to be a requirement if you are majoring in anthropology. If my experience in well over 20 years of teaching this course is representative, there is a good chance that you are anxious about the semester that awaits you. I’d like to begin with a word of reassurance: the large majority of students who enroll in history and theory courses manage to complete them and from there go on to graduate with anthropology degrees. Some continue, despite their initial ambivalence about theory, to careers in anthropology. And not a few even emerge with a real love of the ideas and debates that have shaped anthropology over the history of our discipline.

Lest you think that you could have spared yourself this experience by majoring in anthropology at another university, let me quickly disabuse you of this assumption. Courses in the history of theory are required in virtually all anthropology programs; so, if nothing else, you are not alone. Think of it positively, as you are sharing a rite of passage completed by all previous anthropology students, and even your professors in their time! For those of you whose interests are biological anthropology or archeology, this book may seem inexplicably remote from your concerns, as we will focus here on the theory and history of cultural anthropology. Why do you have to take this course? Credit “the father of American anthropology,” Franz Boas (1858–1942), who was responsible for the uniquely North American “four field” emphasis in our discipline. Boas viewed cultural anthropology, linguistics, archeology, and biological anthropology as related fields examining distinct aspects of the human condition, a viewpoint that accounts for the fact that anthropology departments are usually comprised of a more disparate group of scholars than any other academic field. For this reason, the completion of your undergraduate education in anthropology requires some familiarity even with subfields far from your particular interests. During my own training, I was not only required to complete my share of archeology and biological anthropology classes, but found myself having to teach these subjects as a graduate student and newly minted PhD. So trust me: I can empathize.

I have devoted more energy and even considerable apprehension to teaching anthropological theory than to any other course. Early in my career, after becoming dissatisfied with my offerings of the class, I participated in a session at the 1995 American Anthropological Association meetings devoted to “Teaching the History of Anthropology.” I was surprised to find it packed with over 100 participants, all of them wondering how to make their theory courses more interesting and relevant, assuming, of course, that they couldn’t pawn them off on some less fortunate, untenured colleague. I got a kick from a professor on the panel who confessed that she once found herself falling asleep when teaching her own course. She described it as “one dead white guy a week,” and said her students wondered aloud why they were compelled to discuss ideas about human behavior that had been assumed to be safely dead and buried for generations. Yet, she described how each semester, the pale, rotting specters of Tylor, Durkheim, Malinowski, and Benedict rose from the grave in the form of anthropological zombies who strike not terror but torpor into the hearts of their victims. That the dead white guys (and gals) of the past were joined by less musty contemporaries, such as Geertz, Foucault, and Bourdieu, did not translate into greater student interest.

At that conference I benefitted from the experiences of colleagues who have taught this course in other places. From them I learned to avoid the rote memorization of minutiae, little of which would stick with students for more than ten minutes after a midterm exam anyway. As a trivia buff I have occasionally been faulted in my teaching for “missing the forest for the trees,” so following this advice has required great restraint on my part. Now, personally, I find it interesting to know that Karl Marx’s hemorrhoids were inflamed by the hard benches at the British Library, where he compiled his research (leading some to argue that a sore butt literally fueled his resentment at the capitalist system). I was fascinated to learn that Émile Durkheim’s decision to become an agnostic sociologist and not a rabbi broke a seven-generation tradition in his family, greatly disappointing his observant parents in the process. In contrast, E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s field research into African and other nonwestern belief systems contributed to his own religious conversion to Catholicism, a commitment that he retained for the rest of his life. Rather than offering up such tidbits, I hope that this volume will have some appeal beyond the few of you who will go on to my favorite TV game show, Anthropological Jeopardy. To do this, there will be two areas of emphasis in the chapters that follow.

First, we will examine the historical context of anthropological ideas. Theories of culture must not be seen as simply novel ideas that randomly popped into the heads of scholars seeking to understand human behavior and thought. If you regard them this way, it becomes not only more difficult to grasp them, but much less interesting as well. In an engaging and encyclopedic volume, Moore (2012) describes how the biographical details of many anthropologists’ lives influenced their ideas; what I want to show in addition is that anthropological theories are situated in a social and historical context. Simply put, ideas about people and the reasons they do things cannot be understood apart from the broader economic, cultural, and political currents of their time. Why, for example, did scholars in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries embrace the then-revolutionary idea that human behavior is learned from a social environment, abandoning the longstanding belief that behaviors are fundamentally innate? How is it that evolutionary perspectives on culture gained such wide acceptance in Britain and the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century? Why did anthropologists of the twentieth century who worked in the colonized parts of the world adopt a perspective emphasizing social solidarity and equilibrium, rather than conflict and change? How do we account for the fact that Marxist ideas, after decades of banishment from the social sciences, suddenly reappeared in the late 1960s and 70s? Finally, why have a distrust of all such generalizing theories, and close attention to questions of identity and place, become a hallmark of anthropological thought ever since? As we’ll see, the answers to these questions lie in the nature of the societies in which anthropologists (and others who reflect on human behavior) have done their work, the dominant political forces at work in those societies, and the political forces impinging on such scholarship. And the identities and personal circumstances of anthropologists themselves played no small part as well.

The feminist historian of science Donna Haraway expresses the relationship between ideas and culture in this way: knowledge, she writes, “is always an engaged material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas. Knowledge is embedded in projects; knowledge is always for, in many senses, some things and not others, and knowers are always formed by their projects, just as they shape what they can know” (2004: 199–200). We may like to believe that our beliefs spring with absolute originality from our minds, but anthropological ideas are very much the product of the broader culture in which they occur. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why similar “novel” ideas often occur to different people at about the same time. When social, political, and economic circumstances are appropriate, certain ideas will take hold and diffuse into the broader culture when they might have perished without mention at another time.¹ Looking at the historical context of anthropological ideas involves some excursion into the philosophy of knowledge, particularly with regard to the paradigmatic nature of scientific knowledge (don’t worry about this term now … there’s plenty of time to panic about it later on!).

Second, we will examine the contested nature of anthropology itself. Students are often perplexed when they see that different anthropologists analyze culture differently, often leading to acrimonious debates about the reasons for cultural practices. For more than five decades, a debate has raged among anthropologists about the reasons that India’s Hindus do not eat beef. As you probably know, devout Hindus regard cattle as sacred animals, never to be eaten or slaughtered, notwithstanding how many people in India face systemic hunger. Hindus say this is because each cow is of almost inestimable spiritual worth; it is home to literally millions of gods and goddesses (I believe the actual number is 334 million, give or take a few). Traditionally, anthropologists accepted the reasons for this at face value, arguing that the Hindu beef taboo cannot be seen apart from a powerful sacred motivation, known as ahimsa. In the past the taboo was often seen as an illustration of how religious belief could lead people to act in ways contrary to their material interests or physical well-being. Imagine a scene of cattle wandering around unmolested – indeed, pampered – even as people go hungry in their midst. What could better illustrate the power of our beliefs over our immediate economic and material concerns?

In 1966, the American anthropologist Marvin Harris published a modest article in the journal Current Anthropology asserting that the taboo should be explained not in terms of Hindu beliefs but the critical ecological and economic role that cattle occupy in rural India. Far from being a case in which religion causes people to act irrationally, as many then argued, the Hindu taboo on eating cattle, Harris claimed, enhances the well-being of rural Indians by ensuring that cattle would always be available to meet both dietary needs (in the form of dairy products) and agricultural requirements (in the form of traction for plowing). His assumption was that human behavior is fundamentally practical in solving the problems of survival in a particular place, even if, at face value, it doesn’t appear to make sense or even seems to compromise human welfare. Since he published his article, the debate has outlived its original participants: for his part, Harris died in 2001, but some of his former students have sustained the argument, against the continuing vociferous opposition of other anthropologists. If the original debate is not surprising, many students are discouraged that it is no closer to resolution today than it was a half century ago. Why can’t anthropologists agree among themselves when they study culture? If we’re all reasonable people, shouldn’t we approach a common understanding after such a protracted period of data collection and debate? Yet it rarely works that way. Debates in anthropology seem to go on forever, neither side conceding to the other. They are far more likely to die out from mutual exhaustion and a loss of interest than from actual resolution.

Such disagreements are not just conflicts of personality among scholars; they reflect a deep disagreement about what anthropology should be and how it should obtain knowledge. Since the early 1980s there has been a widening rift within anthropology about the essential nature of the field (Is it a science? Or something else? And if something else, what?). The result has been profound distrust and antagonism between anthropologists on either side of this divide. Some academic departments have even fractured over this question. In such places faculty on the two sides of the debate scarcely talk to each other, a pattern that often repeats itself in departments that have remained nominally intact. To understand where these tensions come from, before we begin to examine anthropological ideas themselves we will consider anthropology’s traditional claims to be a science, the critiques that have been offered of such claims in recent decades, and the implications of those critiques for how we understand society. While this rift has grown within recent decades, the debates that have occurred during this time reference the entire history of anthropological research and ideas.

Explanation versus interpretation

At the risk of some oversimplification, let me summarily identify these divisions before we go on to examine their assumptions. On the one hand, there are those who contend that the goals of cultural anthropologists are little different from those of natural and physical scientists (for want of a better term, we will call the members of this anthropological camp the “scientists”). As with their rivals mentioned below, there are numerous differences among those subscribing to this outlook. But all affirm that the task of anthropology is to produce generalizations (sometimes called “metanarratives”) capable of explaining human behavior and thought in various places. The method of inquiry to be employed is explicitly scientific, as will be defined in the coming pages. While this orientation predominated in anthropology from World War II until the 1980s, there have always been coexisting scientific and humanistic approaches to knowledge within the discipline, with humanists much less interested in generalizing about the human condition and much more likely to emphasize the unique character of specific cultures. In 1964, Eric Wolf observed that most anthropologists of the time regarded scientific and humanistic approaches as complementary.² What makes today’s divisions distinctive is that the former coexistence and accommodation has all but disappeared. Practitioners on each side of the divide seem emphatically convinced that their rivals are at the very least misguided if not wholly destructive. Within the discipline there are many (perhaps a majority) who now reject the very validity of scientific approaches in cultural anthropology, quite unlike the more humanistically oriented scholars of the past. They claim that the assumptions of scientific knowledge are not attainable when we seek to describe human action and thought; indeed, even if the scientific method could be applied in a fashion identical to the laboratory or physical sciences, it would still be undesirable in understanding human culture. Generalizations about the causes of human behavior are either misleading or so broad as to be meaningless. Rather, individual cultures can only be interpreted (not explained) as unique systems of meanings, symbols, and power. Further, these meanings and forces are understood in very different ways depending on the social position of both the cultural participant and anthropological observer. These anthropologists reject traditional conceptions of culture as being uniformly shared by a given human society, or the idea that cultural realities admit of a single authoritative interpretation by all observers. This camp we will call the “postmodernists.” I employ this term very advisedly, as it embraces many contemporary and even contradictory trends in the social sciences and philosophy. Some anthropologists who I include in this camp may reject this designation or prefer another (“poststructuralist” being one such variant), and some argue that the term itself has become outmoded since the advent of the twenty-first century. I’ll revisit this claim in our final chapter. But a shared assumption among scholars in this framework is a profound distrust of the traditional claims and capabilities of scientific inquiry, especially as applied to human thought and action.

At this point, you might be asking, what is the difference between “explaining” and “interpreting”? Writing at a time when these divisions were becoming increasingly pronounced, James Lett (1987) discussed the notion of scientific explanation at some length. A scientific explanation identifies some kind of relationship between separate phenomenon; in its purest form, “x causes y” or at least “x and y are interrelated.” A good example would be Boyle’s Law: “A rise in the temperature of a gas causes a proportionate increase in its pressure within a closed container.” In science, explanations are provisionally accepted among most researchers after many repeated observations of this relationship. Interpretation, on the other hand, involves the projection of an observer’s meanings and emotions onto a phenomenon. It is what we do when we study a piece of art or literature and attribute a meaning to it. When I read a symbolically laden book like Melville’s Moby Dick and I interpret it not at its surface level as a “fish story” but as an allegory of humanity’s ultimately tragic efforts to overcome evil, I am engaged in interpretation. Interpretation, by its very nature, is highly personal, not subject to the consensus of observers, and therefore not subject to refutation or proof. My interpretation of Moby Dick may be entirely different from yours, but there is no way that I can “prove” mine to be correct. Nor would it be sensible to try, as interpretation is necessarily rooted in the values, experience, and emotional needs of the person doing the interpreting. Maybe now you’re starting to see why the notion of “interpreting” culture – as if it were a text full of symbolic meanings, as Clifford Geertz argued – proves troubling to those who adopt an explanatory model of anthropology based on the scientific method. If our attempts to understand culture amount to no more than an interpretation, how can we claim that any one description of a culture is more truthful than another? This poses a huge concern for “scientists,” but the ambiguity posed by interpretation is embraced by postmodernists. Indeed, they would argue that reality admits no other option.

In this volume, I want to examine these claims to knowledge, and how they lead to a contested status for anthropology as either an interpretive endeavor or as a science. We’re going to see that there are very different assumptions about how we understand the social world around us that underlie most of the conflicts among anthropologists. To know why there are conflicting perspectives in anthropology, we have to understand these assumptions about knowledge. This requires us to make an excursion into the philosophy of knowledge as we examine theory in anthropology.

Empiricism and its discontents

Before we can discuss to what extent anthropology is (or should be) a science, we want to look at how scientific knowledge is produced. It may not seem initially that there is any direct relationship between philosophy and anthropology. The fundamental goal of many areas of philosophy is to develop methods of reasoning that help us discern truth. Since debates within anthropology concern what is a “truthful” account of a culture – what are the causes of cultural practices, or indeed whether those practices can be explained in terms of causes – you can see that anthropology’s objectives and those of philosophy actually converge. The area of philosophy most relevant for us as anthropologists ...