The Challenge of Epistemology

Anthropological Perspectives

Christina Toren, João de Pina-Cabral, Christina Toren, João de Pina-Cabral

• Éditeur: Berghahn Books
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857455161
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Anthropology

Epistemology poses particular problems for anthropologists whose task it is to understand manifold ways of being human. Through their work, anthropologists often encounter people whose ideas concerning the nature and foundations of knowledge are at odds with their own. Going right to the heart of anthropological theory and method, this volume discusses issues that have vexed practicing anthropologists for a long time. The authors are by no means in agreement with one another as to where the answers might lie. Some are primarily concerned with the clarity and theoretical utility of analytical categories across disciplines; others are more inclined to push ethnographic analysis to its limits in an effort to demonstrate what kind of sense it can make. All are aware of the much-wanted differences that good ethnography can make in explaining the human sciences and philosophy. The contributors show a continued commitment to ethnography as a profoundly radical intellectual endeavor that goes to the very roots of inquiry into what it is to be human, and, to anthropology as a comparative project that should be central to any attempt to understand who we are.

Chapter 1

ANSWERING DAIMÃ'S QUESTION

The Ontogeny of an Anthropological Epistemology in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Peter Gow

…since the mountain, which I little thought
would suffer transformation,
has now become a sheep-run,
the world, indeed, has cheated me.

— Duncan Ban MacIntyre, “Final Farewell to the Bens”

In this chapter, I want to do two things. Firstly, I want to explore the ontogenetic trajectories of two interlinked concepts from eighteenth-century Scotland. One of the concepts is duthchas, a notion of hereditary right of access to specific parcels of land, and the other is the ‘four stages of society’, an evolutionary theory of human history and societal differences that is arguably one of the foundational concepts of anthropology as a science. Secondly, and just as importantly, I want to delineate the ontogenetic pathway whereby I came to see these two concepts as intimately related. What holds these two things together is an answer given to an ethnographic question. The ethnographic question was asked by Daimã, a Yudjá woman from the Xingú River in central Brazil, and was answered by her informant from Scotland, who was myself.

To the extent that anthropology actually needs an epistemology of its own, I think that it already has one and has known what it is for a long time. It is ethnography, what Maurice Bloch (1977) called, apropos Malinowski, the “one long conversation” and its ongoing consequences. I believe that this is a more profound definition of ethnography than Malinowski's own “participant observation,” insofar as observation and participation, while valuable in themselves, are simply the preconditions for good conversations. The discovery that good conversations are of central scientific importance is by no means self-evident and, indeed, was hard-won by anthropologists. The concept continues to be regularly contested by non-anthropological scientists, who, committed to their own hard-won knowledge, are mystified that there would be anything much of value to be learned from talking to lay people who do not know what they, the scientists, know. The goal of anthropological knowledge, the object of its science, is to find out precisely what other people think. Engaging in conversations of sufficient openness and subtlety to find this out is its key method and epistemology.

This chapter reflects on what Daimã's question has made me think about my answer and where that answer came from. I have chosen to follow the actual temporal process of my analysis, and I apologize in advance for its necessarily rambling and highly autobiographical style.

Daimã's Question

My main work as an ethnographer and as an anthropologist has been my fieldwork with the Piro (Yine) and Asháninka people of the Bajo Urubamba River in Peruvian Amazonia. As a consequence of that work, I have been drawn deeply into the burgeoning project of Amazonianist ethnography and anthropology, a remarkably fertile project that, in its Brazilian, French, and British forms, to mention only a few of its national sites, can be considered as the Malinowskian realization of Lévi-Strauss's project in the monumental Mythologiques (Gow 2001).

In 2000, I spent a few days in the home of my friend Tânia Lima in Rio de Janeiro. I was there to visit and to talk to Tânia about my fieldwork and about her fieldwork among the Yudjá people of the Xingú River in central Brazil. My intended project of comparing notes with another Amazonianist ethnographer did not happen because I had a fellow guest in Daimã, a Yudjá woman, who had come to Tânia's house to talk for her own specific reasons. What these reasons were, I do not really know, but Daimã included me with ease in the one long conversation that she had been having with Tânia. Out of the blue, as far as I could see, Daimã asked me a question that Tânia translated from Yudjá into Portuguese for me and which I here translate into English. Daimã asked me, “You are the white person of the Piro indigenous people, just as Tânia is the white person of the Yudjá indigenous people. I have noticed that most white people do not like us indigenous people very much. So why do you like indigenous people?” The question was so unexpected that Tânia whooped in amazement and told me that I had to answer it as honestly as I could. Unnerved by the question and by Tânia's rider, I was about to blurt out some sentimental nonsense. Then I remembered that indigenous Amazonian people do not expect questions to be answered quickly and do not mind prolonged pauses for reflection. Indeed, they mostly find that those whom they call ‘white people’ think far too little and talk far too much. So I thought for a bit and then told her what I genuinely hold to be true about my own relationship to anthropology. I said, “I don't really know, but I think it is because I believe that you indigenous people have kept something that we have lost. I don't know what this thing is, but I hope that you indigenous people know what it is and can show it to me.” Daimã replied, via Tânia, that she had guessed as much.

My translation here of Daimã's karai and abi as ‘white people’ and ‘indigenous people’, respectively, is not meant to imply that for her these terms have anything to do with whiteness, indigeneity, or even people, as I might understand those words. The elucidation of concepts such as Daimã's is central to the Amazonianist project, and thinking about that conversation in the context of writing this chapter, I recently proposed to Tânia an Amazonianist explanation of Daimã's question. I suggested that her question was classically perspectivist and dealt with her attempt to assimilate what I had told her about Piro people to her own specific Yudjá perspective as a ‘human being’, as a woman belonging to a “people who drink manioc beer” (see Lima 2005). Tânia, who knows Daimã infinitely better than I do, was having none of it and insisted that I address the question Daimã posed to me, rather than the question raised by Daimã's question within current Amazonianist ethnography. I still believe that Daimã's question is explicable from that point of view, but here I bow to Tânia's obvious rightness and explore what that question meant, and means, to me.

The Thing That We Have Lost

Daimã's question, as I reflected on it in the pause before I responded, provoked in me a very specific and intense memory, and it was with this specific recollection in mind that I made my reply. This memory was not unconscious, for I had thought about it fairly often over the years. It was of an event that occurred when I was a child, sometime in the mid-1960s, during a family summer holiday on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It occurred on the west coast of Lewis, which is about as far to the northwest as you can get in Europe. Gazing west into the Atlantic Ocean, you can sometimes see the little archipelago of St Kilda, which had been abandoned by its population in 1930. Beyond that, there is no landfall until you reach North America. Even on a quiet summer's day, it is the ‘wild western ocean’, as the Scottish folk songs describe it—a prospect of awesome expanse. I present this memory as I wrote it down before a recent visit to the isles of Lewis and Harris, which proved that several aspects of it were false. However, the essential core is certainly true (see the Postscript below).

On just such a quiet summer's day, my father was leading us on a walk by the sea, on the machair, the soft, sandy grazing land by the beach. At the end of the machair, there was a rocky outcrop, and in front of this was a taigh dubh (black house), one of the old-fashioned long and low stone-walled cottages thatched with turf that you could see all over Lewis at the time. Some, standing next to their owners' newer houses, were used as barns or storehouses, but the vast majority had been abandoned and were rapidly falling into ruin. This one was inhabited. My father started a conversation with the occupant, a woman dressed in old black clothes, who was a widow and lived in the house with her raggedly attired and tousle-haired children. These children, who were roughly the ages of my siblings and myself, looked at us with interest. I was amazed to see that they wore no shoes. Shoes and shoe-wearing were the bane of my young life, and a shoeless world seemed like paradise to me.

Then something even more amazing happened. My father, a fairly reserved man who was always very polite to strangers, asked the widow if we could look at the inside of her house. To ask to enter a stranger's house was an extremely rude thing to do, something that we children were always warned against. However, the widow happily agreed, and my father almost had to force his shocked children to go inside. We entered the low front door into the byre area, then turned right through an internal door into the single room, about which I can remember little other than that it was smoky from the peat fire and very dark. It seemed an incredibly small house for the widow and her growing children. We did not stay long, and I remember being relieved to be back out in the bright sunshine. I vaguely remember that my father explained his apparent rudeness by telling us that many people used to live like this poor widow and her children, and that it was important for us to know about these things before they disappeared completely.

Why did Daimã's question instantly and powerfully evoke that memory in me? This may seem like a slightly self-indulgent biographical question or, worse still, a self-indulgent autobiographical question, but I do not think it is. I think that it is an ethnographic question, albeit of an unfamiliar order, given that here Daimã is the ethnographer and I am the informant. What, I wondered, would happen if I were to follow the lead of Daimã's question and delve into the meaning of that memory. I knew that there had to be a powerful connection between the question and the memory. What might that connection be? And what, exactly, was the thing that we had lost?

Scientific Observation

After reading Marcel Proust, at the urging of Christina Toren, I have known that such intense memories are key aesthetic and indeed scientific problems and that they deserve closer attention. In addition, and again following Proust, rather than scrutinizing them directly, it is better to leave them be, to let them do their own slow and steady work (see Lévi-Strauss 1997). So I had Daimã's question, my reply, a childhood memory, and the certainty that they were all in some way connected, but I had nothing concrete yet. I knew I could feel something, but I did not know what it was. I was not yet aware of what my reply to Daimã's question meant.

In 2006, in a bookshop in Edinburgh, I bought a slim volume entitled James Hutton: The Founder of Modern Geology (McIntyre and McKirdy 2001). Motivated by this book, I found on the Internet the following quotation from the second volume of Hutton's Theory of the Earth:

It is not to common observation that it belongs to see the effects of time, and the operation of physical causes, in what is to be perceived upon the surface of this earth; the shepherd thinks the mountain, on which he feeds his flock, to have been always there, or since the beginning of things; the inhabitant of the valley cultivates the soil as his father had done, and thinks that this soil is coeval with the valley or the mountain. But the man of scientific observation, who looks into the chain of physical events connected with the present state of things, sees great changes that have been made, and foresees a different state that must follow in time, from the continued operation of that which actually is in nature.¹

I had long been interested in geology and in Hutton, but as soon as I read this passage, I felt that here was an intimation of the missing link between Daimã's question and the memory it had triggered in me.

The scene invoked by Hutton in the cited passage is clearly intended as generic, but his use of the word ‘mountain’ suggests that its source image is in the Highlands (a Borders image would, I think, have placed the shepherd on a hill). One of the classic places of Hutton's observations was the valley of Glen Tilt in Atholl in northern Perthshire, in the Southern Highlands of Scotland. You can read interesting things about this place in geology books, for it was here that Hutton found granite intruded into sedimentary rock. This confirmed his view that granite was not the original, primal rock, generated by currently unobservable processes, but was instead the product of ordinary vulcanism in events that succeeded processes of erosion and deposition (see, among many others, Gould 1990). This meant that the observable present could function as a reliable guide to the past, and so, as the story goes, the science of geology was born.

What you will not find in such books is what Glen Tilt meant to my great-grandfather, to my grandfather, to my father and his siblings, and hence, of course, to myself. My grandfather was born in Glen Tilt on the croft, or small rented house, held by his father at Allt Craoinidh. His father, my great-grandfather, was evicted from this croft at some point in the nineteenth century by the landowner, the Duke of Atholl, as part of the process of removing all the residents of the upper end of the glen in order to extend the deer forest and commercial stalking possibilities. This was, in the eyes of some of my great-grandfather's descendants, an example of the habitual high-handedness and disloyalty to their workers that was shown by successive dukes of Atholl. Admittedly, my great-grandfather and his family did not actually move very far and were resettled in the lower part of the valley.

Some years after the summer holiday on Lewis, my father's older sister, my Aunt Janet, who was a schoolteacher in her home village of Blair Atholl, which lies in the mouth of Glen Tilt, took us to see the birthplace of her father, my grandfather. We walked up through the rich farmland and forests of the lower end of the valley into the increasingly bleak moorlands and mountainscapes of the upper valley. Crossing the River Tilt at the evocatively named Gow's Bridge, we soon came to Allt Craoinidh, a little group of ruined stone structures, slowly sinking into the turf. These ruins were all that remained of the house where my grandfather was born. They looked exactly like the ruins that covered Lewis and, when inhabited, must have looked pretty much like the widow's black house. This shocked me.

I have no idea when my ancestors first moved to Allt Craoinidh, and it is not clear to me that they were ever shepherds. The nature of family tradition means that I actually know more about my father's maternal grandparents from the Loch Ness area than about his paternal grandparents from Glen Tilt. One fragment of family tradition, told to me by my mother, suggests some connection between my father's paternal ancestors and shepherding. Bemused by my father's and his younger brother Ian's love of hill walking, their parents reportedly berated them as follows: “Why go up those mountains? Have you lost sheep up there?” This suggests a familiarity with my grandparents that shepherding on a mountain was onerous, unpleasant, and best to be avoided.

So when I came upon the passage from Hutton, it carried me from the memory of the black house on Lewis to much more complex, inchoate, and emotionally powerful memories. These new memories have potent meanings for me, as well as potential ongoing consequences, one of which is this chapter. Hutton's image and his opposition between scientific and common observation have implications for me in two ways: firstly, as a scientist, and, secondly, as an aggrieved descendant of those shepherds and cultivators. What would happen if I tried to put these two back together in that place and at that time?

The Scottish Enlightenment

Hutton was a thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment, like the European Enlightenment in general, was, at heart, based on an epistemology that rejected the acquisition of knowledge through authority in favor of its acquisition through reason. But the Scottish Enlightenment had certain characteristics that distinguished it from its cousin projects elsewhere in Europe. Rather than being based solely on pure reason, the Scottish Enlightenment was specifically scientific and contributed to the Age of Improvement. Rather than being pursued for its own sake, reason was to be applied to the world and to the improvement of human life. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had a marked tendency to originate what we would now consider academic disciplines as by-products of schemes for improvement. Illustrative examples include Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which invented economics as a by-product of thinking about how to generate prosperity in Scotland, and Hutton's own Theory of the Earth, which invented geology as a by-product of thinking about how landowners could improve the soil of their properties.

Hutton's evocation of the views of the shepherd, of the cultivator of the valley, and of the man of scientific observation was not fortuitous, for these three figures formed part of a series of evolutionary stages of human history in Scottish Enlightenment thought. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Adam Smith wrote: “There are four distinct stages that mankind pass thro: first, the Age of Hunters; secondly the Age of Shepherds; thirdly, the Age of Agriculture; and fourthly, the Age of Commerce” (quoted in Broadie 1997: 475). Hutton's image is thus doubly historical, for not only is his argument against the common view that mountains and valley soils have always been there and for the scientific view that such earth features have histories, but he further makes this point by evoking a history of humanity in the figures of the shepherd, the cultivator of the valley, and the man of scientific observation—a history that would have been familiar to his intended audience.

Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had a key technique for reasoning in what they called conjectural history, which has had a bad name in social anthropology since Radcliffe-Brown (1952),² but without which, arguably, anthropology as it exists today would be impossible. Based on the principle that like causes lead to like effects, the technique of conjectural history allowed Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to explore the history of phenomena where no documentary history existed. For Hutton, this meant that processes in the present state of the world, such as erosion and volcanic uplift, could be read as the perpetual movements of a world machine that was constantly changing, but that, in changing, was remaining constant to itself (see Gould 1990). In terms of what we would now refer to as the social sciences, the assumption that human nature was everywhere and at all times uniform provided a key to unlocking the secrets of the otherwise unknowable histories of human laws, wealth creation, aesthetics, religion, and so on. If anthropology today might be very queasy about its legacy of social and cultural evolutionism, it would probably be impossible for it to exist as a science at all without the Scottish Enlightenment's legacy of an ethnographically concrete argument for the uniformity of human nature, what Boas later called “the psychic unity of mankind.”

Hutton's image occurs in a specific rhetorical context, for he appeals to the distinction between ‘men of common observation’ and ‘men of scientific observation’ at the beginning of an important argument about experience. The sorts of geological processes that Hutton was arguing for occur at such a slow rate relative to human lives that nobody could ever observe (i.e., experience) them. In the view of Scottish Enlightenment thought, Hutton's a...