Is True Anthropology Even Possible?

Perhaps Karl Marx was right in asserting that conflict is the main driving force in the social mechanism. At least the discipline of socio-cultural anthropology has been driven by this quintessential conflict between the self (the anthropologist) and the other (the subjects of anthropological enquiry). Though the distance between the two has gradually declined, and in recent decades more emphasis has been given in dissolving the boundary between the studied and the student, the inherent nature of bias in human beings, including the anthropologist, makes such complete dissolution of the self practically impossible. There are anthropologists who argue against loosing such distinction between the self and the other, and who believe that such a loss would reduce objectivity and scientific understanding of human nature. However, as a foreign student of anthropology raised in the western academic tradition but still an outsider to its cultural biases, I believe that the proper way to do social anthropology is being as subjective as possible.

The social science, with its multiple and irreplaceable variables, cannot be objectively studied like natural sciences, and for this reason, it should not succumb to mechanical approaches of hard core science. Of course, the methods of scientific inquiry will assist in gaining some knowledge, but without fuller understanding and full emersion which can only be personally and subjectively achieved, the sociocultural anthropology will remain devoid of the essence of the culture being studied. Therefore, in an ideal world, I argue that the best way to do the proper ethnography of a culture is when it is done by an anthropologist who belongs to that culture. Given the western dominance in the anthropological academia, this is currently impossible to do and such an idea would perhaps be never viable. However, my point is that as we reach towards more subjectivity, we would be closer towards doing proper anthropology.

The Hegemony of Objectivity

The main problem with the objective analysis of social phenomenon is the very fact that various social phenomena have different meanings in the social and personal context. Social activities as well as social facts, as Durkheim would call them (Durkheim 1895), cannot be studied without comprehending what these activities mean to the people who participate in them. However, as the field of anthropology developed, ethnographers were mostly interested in finding the universal facts and understanding the social structure, and therefore early anthropology lacked humanistic approach. The emphasis on objective and scientific analysis can be dated back to the Scientific Revolution in the 16^th century when scientists and philosophers showed how natural world was governed by simple mathematical relationships. Perhaps the development of Darwinism and evolutionary science was the main impetus that brought scientific enquiry in the analysis of culture. Arguably, culture is the primary mechanism by which human beings adapt to their environment. Since evolutionary biologists were seen as approaching to understand the natural laws that govern biology and evolution, anthropologists were also keen to approach objectively, hoping to find the universal natural laws that govern the social phenomena that drive collective evolution of the society. Herbert Spencer saw the close analogy between the evolution of biological organisms and that of the society. He saw “primitive” people like Bushmen as analogous to primitive animals like Protozoans, and the European society as the epitome of evolution (Spencer 1860:17-18).

Spencer further developed the concept that culture was superorganic, and that it exists independent of the existence of the people who follow it. Therefore, individual perspective was not at all important. The concept of superorganic was later adopted by Kroeber and then revisited by Leslie White. For Kroeber, a student of Boas, there were no cultural laws, but there were trends, and that people were simply the creatures of culture, and that they had no power to change the superorganic culture, but were only implementing changes for which the cultural time is ripe (Kroeber 1915). For other nineteenth century evolutionists, the culture almost had a teleological end, and that cultures, as superorganisms, were running in their own paces towards that end. For many of them, the West was forerunner in that race, and other cultures were far behind. E. B. Tylor believed that one could reconstruct earlier stages of cultural evolution by studying “survivals” (Tylor 1871). Both of them believed that human thinking around the world has the basic similarities and that there was a psychic unity of humandkind (Tylor 1871). It implied that despite some instances of creativity, individuals are basically the same, and the subjective understanding of their circumstances in the society has not much bearing in their unilinear evolutionary views.

Later in twentieth century, when cultural neo-evolutionism emerged, it was free of unilinear view of evolution, but yet anthropologists like Leslie White fully embraced Spencer’s concept of superorganic. For Leslie White, the scientific approach took the radical turn as he argued that he could calculate the cultural product of a society by using his mathematical formula based on his idea that evolution of culture is determined by the amount of the energy expended per capita per unit of time by a society and the technological means of its expenditure (White 1943). In this rigidly mathematical model, individual has very limited role, if any.  For cultural ecologist like Julian Steward and Marvin Harris, the environment and technology determined subsistence pattern, which in turn determined and sustained social structure (Steward 1955). Therefore, an objective study of the environment was more important than the subjective study of the people who adapt to that environment.

Anthropology has been deeply influenced by the sociological ideas of Emile Durkheim and other students of this school of thought including Marcel Mauss and Max Weber. Their ideas also influenced more objective approach towards ethnography. Durkeheim believed that social solidarity was the result of the force, lame collective, arising from the shared beliefs and values, which he termed collective representations. The collective consciousness thus originated in communal interactions and was superorganic since it was not contained within any individual organism. He believed that to study such non-material entity like collective consciousness, one has to study social facts, which he defined as the rules and principles that exist before the individual is born into a society, and which a person learns and observes as a member of the society (Durkheim 1895). Therefore, ethnography is supposed to be the objective analysis of social facts, which shape helpless individuals as they are raised in the society.

For Marcel Mauss, the allure to study what Durkheim called Total Social Phenomena, was very strong. He studied the nature of gifts in cultures and argued that studying something like potlatch would increase our knowledge based on realism, because these social facts are real and not abstract (Mauss 1925). These material expressions of Durkheim’s social facts, however, were interpreted not from the glasses of the people who participated in them but from the biased interpretations of an anthropologist alien to that culture.

            The hegemony of objectivity was further strengthened by the rise of French structuralism and the seminal works of structuralists, particularly Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi Strauss believed that social facts can only be properly understood by trying to find out the common structure in them. He believed that such analysis is the key in understanding the unconscious structure of the human mind and thought process. He argued that various social phenomena, for example, visibly disparate myths of a society, are always similar in deep unconscious level (Levi-Strauss 1952). The theoretical basis of such analysis was based on binary oppositions that exist everywhere in the culture. Every social structure could thus be reduced to the conflict between two binary extremes, and that many social facts were in fact an attempt to solidify and consolidate various social structures. Thus the objective analysis of structure was more important than subjective study of human beings who are mere place holders of that structure.

Challenging the Hegemony

Structuralism, however, was different than the previous theories prevalent in the society, because it gave some space for human capacity to shape the social structures. Michel Foucault argued that there is no universal truth, and that each society chooses and establishes its own set of episteme, and decides what is true and what is false, and what is reasonable and what is in the realm of unreason (Foucault, 1976 ). Since there was no universal truth, there was more focus on study of individual society than in finding universals. The structuralists put more emphasis on the influence of language in the understanding of social structure and in creating various worldviews. Derrida argued that since the words are not univocal, the language does not always have the same meaning. Since language acts as a filter through which absolute reality makes impression on human mind to create a twisted sense of reality, man is simply a creature of language. The subjective nature of language, first developed in the work of Whorf, implies that objective understanding of society is impossible because language creates reality as well as influences social structures. Benjamin Whorf, had already attempted to make the connection between language and behavior, and believed that individual psychology and not history was the key to anthropological study. For him linguistics was the bridge between the realms of psychology and anthropology (Whorf 1939).

This challenge to the hegemony of the objectivity in anthropological analysis, however, had started long before the advent of French Structuralism. Psychological functionalists like Bronslaw Malinowski, in the early twentieth century, had already argued that cultural institutions in fact functioned to meet the basic physical and psychological needs of people in a society (Malinowski 1922). His method involved extensive fieldwork, where he tried to dissect those functions of the institutions. Thus the focus now shifted from the social facts, to the functions they serve to individuals. Clearly, the same institution can provide different functions to different individuals. However, by basing his theory on physiological and psychological needs, Malinowski still implied that cultures perform universally similar functions.

            Even before Functionalism took hold of anthropological thinking, Franz Boas and the school of Historical Particularism he helped to create, already argued that social sciences were domains of our experience in which the concepts of quantity are not applicable (Boas 1920). He believed that to explain culture, one must examine it from three different perspectives: the environmental conditions under which they developed, psychological factors and historical connections. The social traits that are observed are the result of that culture’s historical and environmental circumstances which are unique and definitely subjective. He argued that though the activities of the individual are determined to a great extent by his social environment, individuals in turn influence the society in which he lives (Boas 1920:125).  His approach was thus more inductive than deductive and thus was closer to that ultimate subjective goal of anthropology.

This idea of subjective analysis was further developed by symbolic and interpretive anthropologists, particularly Clifford Geertz. Clifford saw culture as sets of texts to be read by anthropologists, but not as hidden stories to be explored (Geertz 1973). He believed that local people are as good at interpreting rituals and symbols as anyone. For him, culture exists between people, created by their social actions, and thus culture is a shared code of meanings that are publicly acted out in activities like the Balinese cockfight (Geertz 1973). His emphasis was documenting the social phenomenon in an emic way, and for him etic interpretations are secondary. His view is well documented in his style of writing, where he presents ethnography as a very personal story of understanding (and not the knowledge) of the society that he studies.

Yet many symbolist anthropologists continued to give their own biased interpretations of symbols. Victor Turner even argues that a more thorough insight is impossible without a contextual analysis by anthropologists, and the local people are unable to see the bigger picture that anthropologists are able to (Turner 1967). However, anthropologists like other people are shaped by their own culture, and I doubt they are well suited to give a neutral, insightful meaning free of biases. The final push to do the bias free anthropology acknowledging the subjective nature of culture and free of attempting to create objective universally understandable picture of society finally came with the radical ideas of Post-Modernism.

The End of the Hegemony

            The post-modernism not only brought new radical perspective in anthropology that was extremely skeptical of science, but also brought in new personal way of writing ethnography which bordered in the sphere of literary writing with its poignant style of story-telling from a very personal narrative. For example, the post-modernist ethnography of Bedouin women of Egypt has been written by Lila Abu-Lughod in a very subjective way, which involves the reader more than any other anthropological writing written in the previous era (Abu-Lughod 1995). Her study implies that cultural understanding can only be gained by personal emersion in the culture facilitated not only by the comprehension of language but also by emotional involvement in the subject. Renato Rosaldo’s ethnographical writing on the headhunting in Ilongot, for instance, is an emotional tour de force when considering the emotion his writing evokes (Rosaldo 1989).

The postmodernist view is unique because it tries to take away the anthropological obsession from “others” to the gaze on the “self”. Michel Foucault’s piece titled “The Incitement to Discourse”, in many aspects is his attempt to do an anthropological observation of the social phenomenon of his own society (Foucault 1976), which I have argued in the beginning as the only sure method to create absolute subjectivity on the subject.

The problem in dissolving the boundary between the self and the other

            Subjectivity in anthropology has the ultimate goal of dissolving the boundary between the self and the other. The goal is thus to observe social phenomenon from the native’s perspective. However, even within the society, what a social phenomenon like a ritual means to a person participating in it is certainly never the same. Thus it raises question ultimately of observing it in which native’s perspective. I would suggest that the answer ultimately should be the perspective of the anthropologist who is also native.

 In a more radical term, it implies that an anthropologist can do a proper study of no other culture but that of his own. Pushed to further extreme, it further implies that even if anthropology is done by the native, the native ethnographer will be unable to separate self and the other when he studies phenomenon in which he does not participate fully. If an ethnographer can only empathize and actually learn about culture only after going through and thus gaining understanding (not knowledge), then ethnography is not accessible to all anthropologists. That means, for example, a male native ethnographer is unable to study anything consequential about women and their rituals even in his own society. Also, what is the value of studying ethnography, if every ethnographer, even if he belongs to the same culture, each year can have different stories about the same people? Won’t it then be much like literature?  

I would argue, instead, that anthropology is literature. Literature and anthropology are both the mirrors of the society, and anthropology should be done in a way so that a more personal and accurate image of the social phenomenon can be produced.

Another issue that comes up with the above argument is what the role of history in anthropology is if anthropology is only about self. Certainly, a person is the product of the society in which he is raised, and the society itself is the product of the unique environment and history. Thus, although such personal approach to sociocultural anthropology would suggest a more synchronic study, it does not discount the value of diachronic approach. Thus while I believe that ethnography should more focus on synchrony, the diachronic approach will only help to enrich the proper understanding of the culture.

Conclusion

Through the essay, I argue that sociocultural anthropology should take more personal, synchronic and emic perspective in contrast to a detached, scientific, etic and diachronic approach. I am not saying that the other approaches are useless. The etic and historical observations certainly help in enriching our understanding of the culture. However, I believe that the thick and the crust of the anthropological study should involve the dissolution of the self into the others. Achieving that ultimate goal is only possible when all anthropology is done by the people who are the part of the culture that they study. Of course, this is a far-fetched, almost utopian goal (Marx's Communist Utopia, anyone?), which might never happen. 

Karl Marx was possibly right about the power of conflict. History of anthropological theory has been driven by the conflict between the binary opposites of the self and the others. However, it is time that we put that conflict into rest, and reconcile the anthropologist with his subjects, and thus the self with the others. I don’t think even Karl Marx would have minded that.

References

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