IS ANTHROPOLOGY A SCIENCE?
The aim of anthropology as a scientific discipline was to dispel all the wrong ideas that were held about human beings such as those that regarded some human populations as superior and others as inferior, some humans having characters different from others and cultures being civilised or uncivilised. As a scientific discipline, anthropology was to apply the scientific methodology of being objective, value free, systematic and skeptical; the last one referring to the scientific attitude of accepting something only with proof or evidence.
The most important paradigm shift with respect to humans that made possible the scientific study of humans was to break away from the myth of divine origin of humans. Every culture in the world, no matter where situated and how complex or small scale has one aspect in common, they all have a story of origin of the humans that is located in some other worldly source. To have a science of anthropology was to recognise humans as one of an animal species, part of the biological world and subject to the laws of nature and not of any divinity. The problem was to find out how humans evolved to what they are and to identify the path of their evolution and also diversification. Why do humans look different and why do they have different societies and cultures, even though, and this in the initial stage was the most important statement to make, they are all the same.
The justification of considering anthropology as a science was rooted in an immense discovery and ideological shift; to treat human species as one among other animal species. No longer were humans a special creation of a divine being.They had evolved as all other animals from the original living cell. The methods to study humans was the same as that used to study other animal species.Thus the positivist method of science was to be applied to the study of humans and their evolution and society.
The rules of positivism implied that one approached one’s object of study with scientific detachment, that is impartially and with no preconceived ideas. One had to remain non-judgmental and rational, not influenced by external causes. Proof or evidence and logical thinking were essential to the scientific method.
The aim of science was to classify, make systemic and logical categories, to make sense of diversities by identifying general principles or rules and answer the questions of how and why; that is explain through making causal equations and also to identify basic underlying principles that will explain a wide range of phenomena. Anthropology began its journey as a discipline by doing exactly this.
In classical evolutionism, diffusionism, structural functionalism and structuralism there was an attempt to make generalised laws, classify and make objective categories by the use of the comparative method borrowed from the biological sciences. The comparative method was seen as appropriate to the subject matter of anthropology as it dealt with human beings who could not be treated as experimental objects in a laboratory. Thus while most aspects of a scientific method was adapted for anthropology, the experimental method was an impossibility to be applied on others like one’s self.
To make up for its lack of the possibility of experimentation, anthropology, turned to empiricism and rigour in the collection of data. Fieldwork, recording, making schedules and questionnaires, measuring and weighing, taking photographs and drawing, were all part of the scientific techniques that anthropologists took to the field.
The goal of science was to arrive at objective and irreducible truths. If something was proven by science to be fixed and immutable and if it was refuted by some process or other, it had to be rejected. In other words there is no possibility of flexibility with respect to anything regarded as a scientific truth. Therefore the expectation was that if any anthropologist had written about a particular community, it could be taken as more or less a fixed truth.
But there were two possible avenues of fallacy that were overlooked when it was believed that a scientific approach was possible while dealing with human beings. For one, unlike natural objects, humans have volition and are able to act according to their own wish and can flout norms. This is probably what Radcliffe-Brown meant when he made a difference between social structure and structural form and when Meyer Fortes had advocated for the use of quantitative method in determining structure that actually exists rather than structure that one may expect to exist. Levi-Strauss had also made a distinction between mechanical and statistical models, one that is rule based and one that is action based. However, all of them assumed that some basic rules, norms and principles would operate in an on-going society, especially the kind of ‘cold’ (Levi-Strauss) societies that was the focus of anthropology in its early phase.
The second was that unlike the natural systems (such as the planetary system) societies and cultures changed and sometimes did so rapidly. For example if we try to apply Radcliffe-Brown’s principles of kinship to traditional Indian society, we often find to our delight, that it applies very well. Students are happy to recognise the joking relationships that exist between devar and bhabi in their families or the deference that needs to be shown to one’s mother-in-law. Yet in an urban nuclear family in India, many of these relationships are rapidly changing. A daughter-in-law no longer may observe avoidance from her father-in-law but the duo may happily go on a picnic together wearing jeans. Thus nothing in society need to remain an immutable law like the laws of mechanics.
But even more important are the questions of subjectivity that arises not just with respect to the informants but also with respect to the fieldworker or the researcher. In fact this subjectivity has now been extended to not only the social sciences and humanities but to the hard sciences as well, an issue to which we shall return later in this unit. But let us first see what shook the foundations of regarding anthropology as a science.
CRITIQUING THE STATUS OF ANTHROPOLOGY AS A SCIENCE
The initial doubts about the status of anthropological observations and data as having the status of science came about with the re-studies that were carried out in the same field areas as the works of famous scholars like Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski and Robert Redfield, to name some of the major debates. Derek Freeman, a middle aged male anthropologist who visited the same field area as Margret Mead in Samoa, came out with the startling disclosure that his informants told him that they had deliberately misinformed the ‘young girl’ who came asking “silly” questions. They had also added, according to Freeman, that since he (Freeman) was a man as well as more mature, they were giving him more reliable data. This debate issued when Freeman began to write about his criticism of Mead after his own fieldwork in the early sixties, where he disagreed with Mead’s proposition of cultural determinism of adolescence trauma and sexuality among the Samoans.
Freeman supported psychological and biological unity of all human populations and therefore disagreed with Mead’s more cultural explanation that emphasised difference rather than unity. But what clearly emerged was the fact that the same field can be analysed differently by two or more different scholars, if they hold different theoretical positions. What also emerged during this debate was the question of gender and other characters of the researcher herself or himself; a question that precipitated with the publication of Annette Weiner’s (1976) restudy of the Trobriand Islands that disclosed that the master fieldworker and great scholar, Malinowski had erred in one respect: he never paid any attention to the contribution of women to the economy of the society. Published in the seventies, Weiner’s book followed up on earlier controversies like that between Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis on Tepoztlan and between Marshall Sahlins and Gananatha Obeysekere on Captain Cook and the rationality of non-western people (Sahlins 1995).
If anthropology had to defend its position as a science in the truly positivist sense then it could not afford to have different scholars come up with different analysis of the same data, even if it was done after a period of time. During the Mead-Freeman controversy, one major pointer was to the time lapse between the two studies, Mead’s in the thirties and Freeman’s in the sixties that may have led to significant changes in the society, as the Samoans had also undergone considerable culture change because of the influence of Christianity. It is possible that over time they had become closer to the western people in outlook as they were introduced to a conservative religion. But then it opened up the issue of temporality or the role of time in the study of societies and cultures.
Thus to be defined as a science, anthropology had to look for some core principles, that would not be changed by either time lapse or by the subjectivity of the researcher, Freeman tried to do that by emphasising on biology and psychology and Levi-Strauss by his focus on the universal structure of the human mind based on dichotomies or oppositions. Yet one aspect of anthropology always remained that set it apart from hard core science, the writing of anthropological texts.
From Malinowski to Clifford Geertz, from the earliest anthropological texts to the most recent, one dimension that sets anthropology apart from other sciences like Physics and Biology is that all anthropological data and analysis has to be written out as a text. Even the positivists like Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss have written beautiful texts. In fact one criteria of becoming a successful anthropologist is to be able to write well. The anthropologists have to present their field to the reader in a way that they visit it vicariously. Even if there is quantitative or statistical data, such data rarely makes sense without a description to accompany it. As far as human societies are concerned, the mere description of behaviour or the statistical occurrence of any kind is incomplete or even not understandable, if one does not know the reason behind such an occurrence or action. For example, if one comes to know that the sex ratio in a particular population, this information is not of sufficient anthropological interest, unless one is able to decipher the reasons that lie behind such a situation. As all social and cultural anthropologists, and even biological anthropologists, understand, human behavior cannot be analysed in an essentialist manner. In other words, there is likely to be complex and multiple reasons that underlie any social phenomenon. Thus to explain the reasons for any social phenomenon one cannot just write a formula, although anthropologist Leslie White, who also belonged to the positivist school, had come up with a formula to indicate the evolution of and culture in relationship to each other. But Leslie White (1939) too had supported his equations with descriptive text and examples.
The attempt by some anthropologists to reduce human behaviour to simple and direct equations of causality, did not work out. To understand even if partially, why humans behave as they do, one has to locate multiple causality of such behaviour as well as go into complex analysis that moves beyond the immediate situation and relationships.
Any science is largely confined to its own subject matter, although for some particular events one has to broaden the boundaries and look at things from an interdisciplinary platform. But by and large, if one is working in Physics, then one keeps to the confines of Physics and if one is studying plant behaviour, then one is confined to the science of Botany. In conformation with this principle of defining a science, Emile Durkheim, often referred to as the father of Sociology or of social sciences, had posited that a social fact can only be explained through other social facts. This principle was adopted by the British School of social anthropologists headed by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown who also drew the boundaries of the discipline exclusively in the manner of a scientific discipline.
But the American School headed by Boas, expanded to include psychological, historical and environmental variables to explain cultural phenomena. In contemporary anthropology we find extensive use of historical and cultural data, like literature, performing arts and poetry. The anthropological text is also increasingly viewed as a product of a subjective interaction of the scholar with the field. This subjective interaction is also situated within a cognitive framework and not an objective backdrop. Let us now examine more minutely the cognitive and subjective dimensions of anthropology as a discipline and how it affects its status as a science.
PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL SCIENCE
By the mid twentieth century, the scientific method, established by the likes of Renee Decartes and Francis Bacon, in the European Renaissance were being widely questioned (Leaf, 1979). Bacon had put forth the essence of the scientific method as comprising of close observation, exact recording and the framing of generalities that cover the observed facts without recourse to any external source like theology and mythology was being questioned by raising questions such as ‘what constitutes a fact?’, ‘How reliable is observation?’ and what is meant by exact recording? The aspects of human subjectivity, the fallacy of human sight and human technique were already raised but the phenomenologists and interpretative theories of cognition raised further issues pertaining to human understanding of any phenomenon. The main underlying premise being that humans occupy a cognitively constructed world that is a symbolic abstraction from the objective reality, if at all there is any such thing.
Thus as historian Barzun observes (2000: 194) that for science to exist as formulated , there has to exist a pure body, a body free from all subjectivity and purely physical to be able to see and record purely quantitatively. But the human beings do not possess such a body. The dichotomy of mind and matter, or of human mind and human body as speculated by Decartes, does not exist. Peter Winch (1958), writes in his seminal book, The Idea of a Social Science, that humans can understand anything they perceive to belong to reality only in terms of the language that they use. Everything comes to us filtered through the language that we use. Without language the world does not exist, for it will lie beyond our comprehension. There is for example no colour that can possibly exist if we do not have a name for it.
Thus when we describe a society, it is in terms of our understanding of it spoken internally in the language that we know. For example on entering a field area, an anthropologist will tell herself, “Well it seems those men are sowing seeds in the field”. But this simple statement is not only spoken, even if internally, in a language, it also presupposes many concepts, again in a speech. One recognises a certain being as sentient, alive, a human and a man, we recognise something as a seed, a piece of land as an agricultural field as so on. One must recognise that all these words refer to a concept, an abstraction from reality, a reality that we can never grasp for we have no word for it.
Thus we live in a world both cognitively constructed and shared by the use of a common language and cosmology. There is no possibility of an understanding beyond or away from this lifeworld. As an anthropologist, one’s efforts at understanding another culture is to enter into this cognitive world, to try to comprehend it by translating it into one’s own language and then to communicate to others in the scholarly community in the language of the discipline. As a simple exercise try to understand the various levels of abstraction that has undergone for a concept such as the ‘joking relationship’ to emerge in the anthropological vocabulary.
Therefore, Winch among others disagrees with J.P. Mills that social and natural sciences follow the same logical structure. A student of social behaviour, even while evolving their own (so called scientific vocabulary), has to draw upon existing concepts. A scholar in the field actually observes things like people making movements and sounds, but to communicate these to make them Anthropology as a Science intelligible, she will have to convert them to the language of shared concepts. Thus what constitutes for the anthropologist even raw data is derived only from a cognitive field, mediated by the symbolic world of culture and language.
Therefore as Winch puts it (1990: 115), when we understand something in the social sciences, it is in terms of a discourse always and never in terms of an equation. In this sense it involves the subjective self, which also engages in an internal dialogue even as it engages in a dialogue with the informants. What emerges as an understanding is how the subjectively constituted researcher, absorbs and filters the information, through his or her own cognitive screen, to make sense of it in the form of an internal dialogue before it is communicated through a commonly accepted language.
Thus all information that is put out as information in a social science study is filtered through the subjective self. Since no human is only body, this mediation of the self is evident in all that is presented as data. This subjectivity expresses itself in the subject positions expressed as gender, class, ethnicity, political ideology, theoretical stand point and so on; and each one of them enter into the understanding that a scholar has about the field and the data. What is observed and thought fit to be observed is also mediated by these criteria. For example the reason why Malinowski did not observe the women’s contribution to Trobriand economy, was not that the women were invisible and that during the long course of his living on those islands he never saw them weaving grass skirts or making ornaments, but it was Annette Weiner who discovered this, and pointed out that women played important social and economic role in Trobriand society. Malinowski must have seen this but he did not observe it because as an early twentieth century European male, he was socialised to understand women as dependent and not capable of making any significant contribution to economy. He must have interpreted their activity as household work and therefore not important enough for his observation and analysis.
More importantly, the anthropological field consists of humans like one’s self and therefore, as all fieldworker’s experience, there is an expectation that they also are like one’s self in the matter of emotions and sentiments as well as needs. It is thus near impossible to maintain the kind of emotional detachment in observing human behaviour that a physicist can maintain while observing the behaviour of atoms in a laboratory or observing the movements of distant heavenly bodies. As fellow human beings it is natural and also normal to be emotionally involved in one’s field and in one’s informants. In the past, when there was still an illusion or at least an attempt to treat anthropology as a pure science, the matters of emotion were confined to the personal (not field) diary and as the publication of Malinowski’s diary, long after his death, indicated, he had an intersubjective relationship with this field, which was far from the objective observer, he projected himself to be.
In contemporary anthropology, especially after the publication of books like Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Cultures, there is the recognition that if at all one still defends the status of anthropology as a science, then there is a need to foreground the subjective involvement of the researcher, and make clear the kind of intersubjective relations one has with one’s informants in the field. Von FurerHaimendorf, had done so in his book, The Naked Nagas, but not with obvious intention, but later ethnographers such as Trawick (1996: xix) views herself as “co-constructors of culture at culture’s boundaries” and striving for a symmetrical relationship between the anthropologist on one side of this boundary and the informants on the other.
The present ethnographies and anthropological texts are likely to include more narratives than explanations, as the anthropologists believe that what people actually said, is a more powerful conveyor of meaning than what has been abstracted by the scholar. Science especially the hard sciences do not have the subject matter of study who can speak for themselves or with one feels a common emotional and subjective bond of identity.
Having said that it is increasingly becoming evident, even as far as hard sciences are concerned that there is now a changing perception regarding them as far as objectivity and ethics are concerned. In the next section we shall examine the changing perception with respect to science and then reconsider anthropology’s status as a science.
IS SCIENCE WHAT WE THINK IT IS?
Barzun (2000:217) puts forward a very succinct criticism of the weightage given to science or Western science (in the terms of feminists like Harraway). He says that all truths cannot be arrived at by the so-called scientific method, “to know and to know about express the difference between intimate awareness and things learned”. The role of intuitive understanding , the sudden flash of understanding that made Newton formulate the Laws of Motion by seeing an apple fall, or the accidental discovery that made Marie Curie discover radium, were not just the products of systematic, logical thinking; they were guided by some inner revelation, some inward mechanism that cannot be explained by mere outward rationality. Thus as Barzun has pointed out we may know about something but still never know it. For example one who is an orphan will know about mother’s love but will never actually know it. Decartes considered geometry to be a pure science based on pure logic, but geometry could not have existed if there was not the real world for the human mind to draw upon, even to make abstract equations. The mere possibility of a line or a triangle is in the last analysis drawn from human observations of the natural world. No one for example can conceptualise a shape that one has never seen or think even in abstract about something never experienced, like a sound, a colour or a smell. The criticism levelled by the feminists was to target the historicity of science, to examine it not as a universal truth but what Harraway refers to as ‘situated knowledge’; a knowledge that is the product not only of a time and place but also of a particular historical situation of power. Western science was privileged (including the initial period of anthropology) not because it was actually the only truth, but because it was accompanied by political colonisation, a brute assertion of power, that tried to prove that its ways were the only way to live in this world.
A true objectivity from the feminist point of view was to highlight the specific situation and context of epistemology as pointed out by Harraway (1988:583) and not about creating a false sense of objectivity by splitting of object and subject but to be “answerable for what we see”. What this means is that there is no absolute reality that is outside of the subjective self of the researcher that any human being can access. Whatever we can know is mediated through us as socialised cognitive beings, who are continuously translating the world around in terms of our learned concepts. Harraway, Harding and other scholars both feminist and post-colonial, have shown how science has been influenced by concepts of race, class and gender and the knowledge that is produced often reinforces the conditions under which it is produced. In other words the knowledge that is produced under conditions of patriarchy will reinforce it and that produced under racism will reinforce it.
The absolute objectivity of science is now being critiqued from within science itself. The quantum theory of physics visualises a world far more abstract and difficult to grasp than was believed earlier. The fallibility of sensory perceptions and the vast expanse of the unknowable that is today recognised as the dark universe have reduced the weight of scientific claims as capable of knowing anything and everything. Expanding frontiers of science are actually creating more doubts and questions than confidence in the pervasive knowledge claims that science had made earlier. Today’s scientists are far more liberal and ready to accept alternate forms of knowledge and epistemology and ready to recognise the fallibility of western science.
ANTHROPOLOGY AS A SCIENCE
If we recognise anthropology as subjective and situated then instead of rejecting its claim to be a science we can compare it to the hard sciences, even like physics and chemistry to show that even those are not free from subjectivity and are products of the cognitive and cultural world from which they arise.
What then makes a science? Science as is now clear in anthropological methodology is not only to describe what is seen (observations) but to make clear, honestly and elaborately, the conditions under which such data is collected and by whom. The subjectivity of the situation can only be dealt with if it is known and made a part of the observations. The absent anthropologist is now very much within the ethnography as an integral part of it, sometimes even as an actor (Trawick, 1996; Pandian, 2014). This is not to say that there is nothing factual. A lot of data is factual, for example demographic and census data. But the sense that is made of the data, the classification and analysis are guided by scholarly and lingering personal biases. What cannot be overcome must come out in the open. The consciously self-conscious way of writing has been adopted into ethnographic writing (see Price, 1983, Shoshtak, 1981 as a much cited example). Anthropology’s claim to credibility lies in its rigour of description and of situating of the self of the analyst within the framework of explanation and not outside of it. Reality is also understood as polysemic and not just one unified body. For example the experiential world is experienced differently through the location of different bodies, socially constructed through variables like sexuality, gender, ethnicity and disability. Even the laws of gravity are different on the moon than they are on the earth, and perhaps mean nothing in much of the universe. Importantly, therefore what we understand as reality is the reality permeated through the person, located in a particular context, because that is the only reality that is capable of being comprehended. What cannot be comprehended is of no consequence.
At the same time the question of being useful is important. If knowledge that is Anthropology as a Science gained is useful then it is true knowledge for the ultimate goal of science is to answer questions about humans living and make such living better. If anthropological knowledge can be harnessed for human betterment then that is good science