Passing Off Half-Baked Opinions as "Anthropological"

[A. Ashkuff]

Back in anthro school, I remember getting warned that people sometimes pass off their half-baked opinions as “anthropological” fact. Why do they do this? Honestly, I don’t know. Regardless, anthropology has already become obscure enough, and anthropologists need to protect their field from misuse and obscurantism.

 

Here's one example I recently found: Homosexual Unions Versus An Anthropology Informed By The Truth About Man

 

My questions for the OAC forums are: what can anthropologists do, to prevent this kinda misuse of their field? Anything at all? Nothing at all? What do you think these misuses do to anthropology’s (already struggling) reputation?

[Johannes Castner]

As you may know, so called intelligent design theorists have been trying to employ science to meet their own ideological needs, but legitimate biologists have, for the most part, simply ignored these "theories" as a rational discussion with ideologues is simply impossible.  I would strongly advise anthropologists to follow suit.  While the study of ideologies is clearly in the domain of anthropology (and not biology) and while such a study may require serious engagement with religious people, this does not mean that ideologically motivated arguments must be taken seriously from an analytic perspective, aside from what may be required to understand the formation and other aspects of such beliefs itself.  Anthropology must, in my opinion, strive to become more analytic and must stay away from emotionalism.  Arguments, made by Catholics, about "the true nature of man" must be understood as religious and not scientific arguments, regardless of whether they use the word Anthropology in their postulations.  Religious experience is of course legitimate as a human experience, perhaps just as legitimate as science, but science and spirituality are two separate domains and I think that it is simply not legitimate to discuss one in terms of the other.  I think that this is where Anthropology often gets into trouble; it wants to defend the legitimacy of "other forms of knowledge" and it wants to do so by equating all forms of knowledge with all other forms of knowledge.  The difference, at least for me, between true religious experience and true science is that religious experience is not at all analytic in nature while science is only analytic.  Interestingly, it says in many religious texts that one should not strive to make a picture of god or the sacred, which, to me, means that one should not try to analyse the sacred in itself at all, or in other words, these texts are violating their own rule in that they are in essence a picture of the sacred!  This does not mean that one should not analyse what it is that makes humans long for something sacred, because that is an analyses (a science) of humans and not of the sacred itself.  On the flip-side, science should not try to analyse or explain the un-explainable, or the metaphysical.  It is the job of science to explain observed patterns and dynamics, behaviors and structure and metaphysics ("the true nature of man" is part of metaphysics) is strictly outside of the domain of science.  Thus, Anthropologists should only engage with religion in as far as it tries to understand religious behavior, practices, structures etc., but it should not try to engage in an analytic exchange with religious beliefs as true or false statements of reality!    

[Keith Hart]

Thanks so much for this, Johannes. I once proposed the motion for the first in a series of Key Debates in Anthropology: "Social anthropology is a generalizing science or it is nothing".  I knew that the fashion for American cultural anthropology was sweeping Britain at the time, so I pitched the argument in a way that I hoped would bring some of the culturalists over, claiming that democracy and science are the only two values worth defending in modern civilization and that the idea of science has shifted over time, having started out as the negation of myth and religion, but nowadays being more often contrasted with the arts and humanities. Our side lost the debate in any case!

There are problems with Ashkuff's call to defend Anthropology from misappropriation by outsiders and even from your reasoned account of why religion and science must be kept strictly separate. The first is that anthropology is a holding company for people to do what they like and call it anthropology. We are not a trade union or political party or a religious sect with a common agenda. Maybe we are a broad church. I agree with Johannes that anthropology is not religion, but wonder, with Roy Rappaport, whether it could help to make a new one. Second, anthropology is a global phenomenon and the ideological struggles vary from place to place. It is remarkable that the US is so religious, when compared with Europe or China, for example, which makes the eighteenth century struggle between science and religion still highly relevant there. But it is also the world's military power and the militarization of anthropology has gone further there, in the name of science of course. In Scandinavia and Brazil, anthropology is harnessed to the promotion of social democracy, whereas in India and Nigeria it is the battleground for the emancipation of scheduled tribes and castes.

So it seems unlikely to me that anthropologists could ever unite even around as worthy a cause as the use of scientific method against religious bigotry. Certainly the OAC opens its doors to many kinds of interest in anthropology, including those of people who have not signed up for the profession as such. And we must beware of falling into American parochialism which represents local disputes as the world. But above all, we should open up the question of what art, science and religion do, so that anthropology might find its place in exploring their interaction. At one point Kant summarized “philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word” as four questions:

What can I know?

What should I do?

What may I hope for?

What is a human being?

The first question is answered in metaphysics, the second in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in anthropology. But the first three questions “relate to anthropology”, he said, and might be subsumed under it. Kant conceived of anthropology as an empirical discipline, but also as a means of moral and cultural improvement. It was thus both an investigation into human nature and, more especially, into how to modify it, as a way of providing his students with practical guidance and knowledge of the world.

I can't help feeling now, whatever I said in that earlier debate, that to nail our flag to the mast of science would be a retrograde move.

[Johannes Castner]

Thank you, Keith, your reply is ever so thoughtful! 

It is, of course, impossible to reach a profound scientific understanding about human beings without thereby influencing the course of human history.  Thus, Anthropology, whether we like it or not, is not just a science but also a form of analytic activism.  But what I don't find productive is to push back or resist religious bigotry.  Resistance always meets with more resistance.  I think that this may well be one of the few social laws that we can be almost certain of.  Engaging in mud fights with unreasonable mudslingers is hardly useful.  

Keith Hart said:

Thanks so much for this, Johannes. I once proposed the motion for the first in a series of Key Debates in Anthropology: "Social anthropology is a generalizing science or it is nothing".  I knew that the fashion for American cultural anthropology was sweeping Britain at the time, so I pitched the argument in a way that I hoped would bring some of the culturalists over, claiming that democracy and science are the only two values worth defending in modern civilization and that the idea of science has shifted over time, having started out as the negation of myth and religion, but nowadays being more often contrasted with the arts and humanities. Our side lost the debate in any case!

There are problems with Ashkuff's call to defend Anthropology from misappropriation by outsiders and even from your reasoned account of why religion and science must be kept strictly separate. The first is that anthropology is a holding company for people to do what they like and call it anthropology. We are not a trade union or political party or a religious sect with a common agenda. Maybe we are a broad church. I agree with Johannes that anthropology is not religion, but wonder, with Roy Rappaport, whether it could help to make a new one. Second, anthropology is a global phenomenon and the ideological struggles vary from place to place. It is remarkable that the US is so religious, when compared with Europe or China, for example, which makes the eighteenth century struggle between science and religion still highly relevant there. But it is also the world's military power and the militarization of anthropology has gone further there, in the name of science of course. In Scandinavia and Brazil, anthropology is harnessed to the promotion of social democracy, whereas in India and Nigeria it is the battleground for the emancipation of scheduled tribes and castes.

So it seems unlikely to me that anthropologists could ever unite even around as worthy a cause as the use of scientific method against religious bigotry. Certainly the OAC opens its doors to many kinds of interest in anthropology, including those of people who have not signed up for the profession as such. And we must beware of falling into American parochialism which represents local disputes as the world. But above all, we should open up the question of what art, science and religion do, so that anthropology might find its place in exploring their interaction. At one point Kant summarized “philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word” as four questions:

What can I know?

What should I do?

What may I hope for?

What is a human being?

The first question is answered in metaphysics, the second in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in anthropology. But the first three questions “relate to anthropology”, he said, and might be subsumed under it. Kant conceived of anthropology as an empirical discipline, but also as a means of moral and cultural improvement. It was thus both an investigation into human nature and, more especially, into how to modify it, as a way of providing his students with practical guidance and knowledge of the world.

I can't help feeling now, whatever I said in that earlier debate, that to nail our flag to the mast of science would be a retrograde move.

[A. Ashkuff]

Hmm. Okay, for the most part, I agree "that anthropology is a holding company for people to do what they like and call it anthropology. We are not a trade union or political party or a religious sect with a common agenda." In fact, that's something that I usually like about anthropology.

 

However, in the example I provided, somebody's presenting sheer untruth, actively hiding the facts, and calling it all "anthropological" in a popular public forum. Even if anthropologists aren't as organized as a trade union, is there no threshold of absurdity we can agree to avoid?

 

--- Ashkuff | http://www.ashkuff.com | Bored with reading about others' adventures? Burning to venture out yourself? Let this applied anthropologist remind you how.

[Keith Hart]

A. Ashkuff said:

 

However, in the example I provided, somebody's presenting sheer untruth, actively hiding the facts, and calling it all "anthropological" in a popular public forum. Even if anthropologists aren't as organized as a trade union, is there no threshold of absurdity we can agree to avoid?

 

If you and Johannes want to campaign against religious bigotry representing itself as anthropology, that's fine with me. The problem comes from wanting to do so in the name of anthropologists as a collective and possibly also if the dispute hinges on anthropology as a science.

I alluded to a similar and in some ways more disturbing case, the militarization of anthropology in the contemporary US. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists has done a great job in exposing the contradictions of making "anthropology" complict in war crimes. I support that endeavour, but I back off from any claim that anthropologists everywhere share a class interest in this issue.

The question of science is more complicated, since I believe (and have said so on the OAC's pages in many different ways) that anthropology's actual methods were obscured by our profession's drive to win an established place as a science in twentieth-century academia. More to the point, our chance for self-reinvention in the twenty-first century is impeded by reversion to an earlier ideological struggle between science and religion that has moved on in most places, but not apparently in the United States. The division between social science and the humanities and that between research, teaching and public education need to be healed and anthropology is in prime position to do something about it, if we engage in some forward thinking rather than just react to the latest idiocy in the news.

But that is my campaign and I would not want to get in the way of yours.

[John McCreery]

 The division between social science and the humanities and that between research, teaching and public education need to be healed and anthropology is in prime position to do something about it, if we engage in some forward thinking

I'll second that and add that a prime possibility is in collaboration with historians, whose linguistic competence and spatial and temporal breadth of coverage nicely complement our occasional flashes of insight based on participant-observation. See my most recent effusion on the Asian Studies Japan Conference for some examples.

[Johannes Castner]

My point was that we should NOT campaign, but that we should engage in good science instead; I still see Anthropology as a science.  There are some people who work very hard in being serious Anthropologists and instead of arguing and bickering about what Anthropology should or should not be, they just do good science (maybe they secretly hope that others will follow suit, but they don't demand that or make any moralistic statements about that).  This is the kind of Anthropologist I strive to be.

 

Keith Hart said:

A. Ashkuff said:

 

However, in the example I provided, somebody's presenting sheer untruth, actively hiding the facts, and calling it all "anthropological" in a popular public forum. Even if anthropologists aren't as organized as a trade union, is there no threshold of absurdity we can agree to avoid?

 

If you and Johannes want to campaign against religious bigotry representing itself as anthropology, that's fine with me. The problem comes from wanting to do so in the name of anthropologists as a collective and possibly also if the dispute hinges on anthropology as a science.

I alluded to a similar and in some ways more disturbing case, the militarization of anthropology in the contemporary US. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists has done a great job in exposing the contradictions of making "anthropology" complict in war crimes. I support that endeavour, but I back off from any claim that anthropologists everywhere share a class interest in this issue.

The question of science is more complicated, since I believe (and have said so on the OAC's pages in many different ways) that anthropology's actual methods were obscured by our profession's drive to win an established place as a science in twentieth-century academia. More to the point, our chance for self-reinvention in the twenty-first century is impeded by reversion to an earlier ideological struggle between science and religion that has moved on in most places, but not apparently in the United States. The division between social science and the humanities and that between research, teaching and public education need to be healed and anthropology is in prime position to do something about it, if we engage in some forward thinking rather than just react to the latest idiocy in the news.

But that is my campaign and I would not want to get in the way of yours.

[Alice C. Linsley]

Secular, humanist, religious, and political ideologies abound. Anthropologists are not immune to them. We cling to the ones that support our own worldviews and interests.  Its called being human.  That said, scholarship and academic integrity should not be sacrificed for any ideology.

[A. Ashkuff]

"academic integrity should not be sacrificed for any ideology"

 

Couldn't agree more, Alice. I could stomach Catholic Online trying to use anthro to support its religious ideologies. The thing that really grates on me is the way they're actively hiding the facts.

 

--- Ashkuff | http://www.ashkuff.com | Bored with reading about others' adventures? Burning to venture out yourself? Let this applied anthropologist remind you how.