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Science and Interpretative Anthropology In this paper I want to examine
Clifford Geertz’s argument that interpretive anthropology is a science
in terms of the history of the philosophy of science and scientific
methodology. Geertz argues that anthropology is a process of interpretation,
which involves examining layers of meaning, that it is a fiction,
and that he has no qualms calling “anthropology a science,” because
it involves “thick description,” a process of recording polysemic
behavior, details and data, often of small scale, human events, which
other ‘scientific methodologies’ might not examine. I want to ask
in this essay what the significance of anthropology is in terms of
science and whether it is or isn’t scientific. I want briefly to examine
how and why anthropology is a science, if, as Clifford
Geertz and U.C. Berkeley Professor Laura Nader (personal communication,
May 2001), among others, claim, anthropology is a science. The question
of whether anthropology is a science or not, and how it intersects
with science is relevant, because, to the degree that scientific methodologies
can examine issues beyond ideologies, power structures or interpretation,
scientific socio-cultural anthropology can offer understanding and
ways of solving problems that are unique, fascinating and useful due
to its methodology, among other reasons. After examining and critiquing
Geertz’s argument that interpretative anthropology is a science, I
want to side with Geertz’s argument and argue that the study of minute,
polysemic, interactive, human phenomena can provide the basis for
understanding and problem solving and that anthropology’s role as
a science is in “development.” Geertz cites Max Weber as his
point of departure to develop an argument that interpretive anthropology
is a science. Believing, with Max Weber,
that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself
has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it
to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an
interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz, p. 5). In doing so Geertz rests his argument on a specific
authority’s work, but neither specifically examines the philosophy
of science concerning the nature of science, nor does he explore other
possible ways or theories that might contribute to a scientific sociocultural
anthropology. He next argues, possibly illogically, that if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first
instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at
what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners
of it do. (Geertz, p. 5) If a science is defined by
a practice, then any field of study, that appeals to “data’ in making
judgments about ‘reality’ and claimed as a science (and there are
many), can arguably be a science, which I think is questionable. Geertz
then cites the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein as
a way to justify his use of language and behavior’s ambiguity or polysemy
and therefore, potentially, of the science of culture. While this
raises an interesting question about how to study polysemic behavior,
or if it is possible, in a methodologically scientific way, it also
obscures questions of anthropological scientific assumptions as well
as possible approaches other than “thick description” (the phrase
Geertz adopts from Ryle). Geertz next argues
that anthropology is a process of second and third order interpretations,
of writing fiction, in the original sense of the word fictio
“of something made,” (Geertz, p. 17) which is also science. He argues
that it is important not to “bleach human behavior of the very properties
that interest us” (Geertz, p. 17), in order to argue that the “the
line between mode of representation and substantive content is as
undrawable in cultural analysis as it is in painting” (Geertz, p.
17) but in so doing he doesn’t take into consideration the relevance
this lack of bleaching has to his assumptions such as the one based
on Weber’s web of significance. Obviously, one’s choice of premiss
influences one’s argument: a potential theory based on an evolutionary
epistemology, or any one of many other premisses, might shape a different
theory of the way sociocultural anthropology relates to science. Specifically in terms of science, Geertz writes that cultural
structures should be as codifiable as any other science: For
a field study which, however timidly (though I, myself, am not timid
about the matter at all), asserts itself to be a science, (emphasis
added) this just will not do….There is no reason why the conceptual
structure of a cultural interpretation should be any less formulable,
and thus less susceptible to explicit canons of appraisal, than that
of, say, a biological observation or a physical experiment – no reason
except that the terms in which such formulations can be cast are,
if not wholly nonexistent, very nearly so. We are reduced to insinuating
theories because we lack the power to state them. (Geertz, p. 23) He then attempts to look at
the ways in which anthropological data should but don’t yield either
generalizable or predictable conclusions: “What generality it [a semiotic approach to culture]
contrives grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep
of its abstractions. And from
this follows a peculiarity in the way, as a simple matter of empirical
fact, our knowledge of culture . . . cultures . . . a culture . .
. grows: in spurts. Rather than following a rising curve of cumulative
findings, cultural analysis breaks up into a disconnected yet coherent
sequence of bolder and bolder sorties. (Geertz, p. 25) Thus we are lead to the second condition of cultural theory: it is not,
at least in the strict meaning of the term, predictive. (Geertz, p.
26) He concludes that the role
of theory in anthropology is problematic and that there isn’t such
a thing as a general theory in anthropology, seeming not to examine
in depth the implications – because science usually employs processes
of induction - this has for it as a science: In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which
what symbolic action has to say about itself – that is, about the
role of culture in human life – can be expressed. (Geertz, p. 27) Finally, he tells a well-known
story associated with him,[1] where meanings are
ambiguous because they rest on other meanings, which one could argue
is Geertz’s humorous way of suggesting that sociocultural anthropology
as a science is problematic. While the historical and theoretical
development of science is not completely understood and while not
wanting to engage in scientism, I want to side with Geertz to suggest
that the engagement of other approaches to understanding and problem-solving
in conjunction with scientific method is a fertile research direction.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy entry on the ‘history of
the philosophy of science’ identifies Newton’s understanding of science
which postulates “a hierarchy reaching from observations, measurements,
low-level generalizations, and theories to entire sciences and overarching
theoretical schemes.” (Honderich, p. 807) The issue of cause is also
central to a key body of science: “An important body of scientific
claims are causal, meaning that in some sense they tell us why things
work. Newton set the modern agenda for discussion about *cause, arguing
that the best causes are verae causae.” (Honderich, p. 813-14)
While interpretative anthropology, as Geertz points, neither generalizes,
nor prognosticates, it also doesn’t readily approach questions of
causality. Later, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy entry on the ‘history of the philosophy of science’ concludes,[2] however, that Kuhn and the work of many others reframed questions of science in such a way that “[s]ummarizing their results, we can say that the problem is no longer how to articulate the monolith SCIENCE, but what to do with the scattered collection of efforts that has replaced it.” (Honderich, p. 808) Geertz’s explication of interpretive anthropology as science seems to reflect one of many of these scattered collections of efforts. In conclusion I want to observe that science
is an open process and benefits from the introduction of a variety
of ideas. Epistemologically, interpretive anthropology, like many
historical scientific approaches, seems to focus on phenomena without
theory, as a practice in search of a scientifically based theory.[3] Geertz’s observation
that interpretative anthropology is a science because it employs a
method of observation and focuses on phenomenological details seems
to provide at least a base to begin to look at it as a science. References Basso.
“Semantic Aspects of Linguistic Acculturation.” Bynum,
Caroline Walker. “…And Woman His Humanity.” Clover,
Carol J. 1993. “Regardless of Sex.” Representations. No. 44:1-28. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E.
“God.” Chapter 1 in Nuer Religion. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, pp.
1-27. Frake,
Charles O. “Cultural Ecology and Ethnology.” Frake, Charles O. 1963. “The
Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems.” In Gladwin, Thomas and William
C. Sturtevant (eds.), Anthropology and Human Behavior. Geertz, “Thick Description:
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation
of Cultures. N.Y., Basic Books, pp. 3-30. Hatch, Elvin. 1997. “A Humanistic Theory of Theory.” In Cultural Dynamics, XX. Honderich,
Ted, ed. 1995. Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford. Leach,
Edmund. “Claude Levi-Strauss
– Anthropology and Philosopher.” [1] Geertz, pp. 28-29. “There is an Indian story – at least I heard it as an Indian story – about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.” [2] Honderich, pp. 808-809. “science, history of the philosophy of.”
Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was
the last major attempt so far to subject a complex practice, science,
to abstract thought. It clashed with important ingredients of *rationalism.
After 1962 philosophers tried either to reinforce these ingredients
or to show that they were not in danger, or they introduced less
binding rules, or else they concentrated on problems apparently
untouched by Kuhn. Older approaches are still producing interesting
results (example: Achinstein’s Bayesian reconstruction of nineteenth-century
debates about light and matter, which seemed to call for a less
orderly account). The issue between *realism and *empiricism, which
changed with the arrival of *quantum mechanics and was sharpened
by the interventions of G. Maxwell, Richard Boyd, Ernan McMullin,
Putnam, van Fraassen, Cartwright, and others, is as alive as ever.
Already before Kuhn some writers had opted for cognitive models
of scientific knowledge which are naturalistic – they do not distinguish
between logical and empirical *’laws of thought’ – and based on
only partly rational patterns of adaptation. Others had emphasized
details and objected to premature generalizations. These researchers
appreciate what Kuhn did, but think that his approach is still far
too abstract. They study particular events, conduct interviews,
invade laboratories, challenge scientists, examine their technologies,
images, conceptions, and explore the often glaring antagonisms between
disciplines, schools, and individual research groups. Summarizing
their results, we can say that the problem is no longer how to articulate
the monolith SCIENCE, but what to do with the scattered collection
of efforts that has replaced it. A topic that was often neglected or dealt with in a dogmatic way is the authority of science. Is science the best type of knowledge we possess, or is it just the most influential? This way of putting the question has by now become obsolete. Science is not one thing, it is many; it is not closed, but open to new approaches. Objections to novelty and to alternatives come from particular groups with vested interests, not from science as a whole. It is therefore possible to gain understanding and to solve problems by combining bits and pieces of ‘science’ with prima facie ‘unscientific’ opinions and procedures. Architecture, technology, work in *artificial intelligence, management science, public health, and community development are examples. Purely theoretical subjects have profited from foreign invasions. One can even succeed by altogether staying outside ‘science’. Numerous non-scientific cultures supported their members materially and spiritually. True, they ran into difficulties – but so did our science-based Western civilization. The old antagonism between practice and theory and the related antagonism between ‘scientific’ and ‘unscientific’ approaches may still survive in practice, or in some archaic slogans; however, it has lost much of its philosophical bite. [3] See Hatch
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