Post-Subjective Anthropology

[Philip Carl SALZMAN]

“[There was] something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly an yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all.” Iris Murdock, The Bell, p. 190.

In the 1980s, after a long affair with objectivity, anthropologists, disappointed with the relationship, fell in love with subjectivity, celebrating it, and revelling in it. And yet, after three decades, our fascination with our own belly buttons has waned. We look at each other, and say, “what now?” Indeed: what now?

Have we shifted toward a post-subjective anthropology? Do we have new answers, or at least answers, to the claims of subjectivity? Are we able to address something beyond ourselves? Can we now move on? And, if so, what would post-subjective anthropology look like?

[John McCreery]

Ryan Anderson said:

One of the difficulties I have with anthropology is that the categories we go around applying all over the place (religion, economics, power) do not always work so well in different social and political contexts. So the tools of description come from a certain perspective, and may not necessarily fit or correlate with the concepts/terms that are used in the communities we study. So it's also a constant process of translation and feedback, I suppose.

Ryan, what you say is true. It is not, however, an insurmountable obstacle to theories that span linguistic and cultural differences. As someone who earns his living as a cultural broker, i.e., translator and copywriter, I can bear witness to the fact that truly untranslatable terms are relatively rare and can usually be explained. Yes, there are subtleties. How do you explain snow to someone who has never seen it, let alone capture the feeling conveyed by "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas"? At the end of the day, however, common features of human anatomy and social organization, and the basics of eating, excreting, sex and other common human behaviors provide the bridges we need to cross barriers to understanding.

[Luka Rejec]

(Ryan): One of the difficulties I have with anthropology is that the categories we go around applying all over the place (religion, economics, power) do not always work so well in different social and political contexts. So the tools of description come from a certain perspective, and may not necessarily fit or correlate with the concepts/terms that are used in the communities we study. So it's also a constant process of translation and feedback, I suppose.


(John): Ryan, what you say is true. It is not, however, an insurmountable obstacle to theories that span linguistic and cultural differences. As someone who earns his living as a cultural broker, i.e., translator and copywriter, I can bear witness to the fact that truly untranslatable terms are relatively rare and can usually be explained. Yes, there are subtleties. How do you explain snow to someone who has never seen it, let alone capture the feeling conveyed by "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas"? At the end of the day, however, common features of human anatomy and social organization, and the basics of eating, excreting, sex and other common human behaviors provide the bridges we need to cross barriers to understanding.

Sorry for taking so long to reply ... it's a hot summer and I'm getting a bit frantic with the thesis I have to write and which keeps collapsing around my ears, metaphorically of course.

I agree with John that the basics of our embodiment do make a majority of experiences translatable, but on the other hand our categories can pigeon hole what we experience. One fascinating possibility is offered by turning the 'others'' terms and categories around and using them to analyze our own cultures. A rather comic example is a faux documentary, "chicken god" or something like that, which features African 'anthropologists' analyzing the Oktoberfest and concluding that it is the celebration of a fecundity god 'chicken', done by falling into a 'vision state' through the communal drinking of beer, etc. etc. -- this faux documentary is a play on Frazerian anthropology, but the idea behind it is not bad. To use other categories to study our society, providing a different insight. Perhaps not objective, but a different kind of subjective. One example is a study of 'ikigai' among Japanese and Americans by Gordon Mathews.

[John McCreery]

Luka writes,

I agree with John that the basics of our embodiment do make a majority of experiences translatable, but on the other hand our categories can pigeon hole what we experience.

Of course our categories can pigeon hole what we experience. As far as my own grasp of the history of anthropological theory goes, this was first noted by Edward Sapir in Language, published in 1921. There Sapir notes that what all words refer to is concepts, a.k.a., abstractions. Even diacritical gestures point to something abstracted from particular realities. There is always something foregrounded and lots left blurred in the background. Allow me to propose that the proper roles of theory and method are not to bemoan these facts or to conclude that understanding is, therefore, impossible but instead to address these facts and how best to deal with them.

In another thread, I just suggested that instead of framing approaches as either subjective or objective, we ask, instead, if they are sloppy or serious. In my own case, I take some work that is labeled "subjective" as serious stuff. I have mentioned before Ruth Behar's The Vulnerable Observer and Robert Dejarlais' Shelter Blues as examples. I also see some work that is labeled "objective" in a similar light. Phil Salzman's hypothesis that nomads are more likely to engage in gift exchanges in the absence of a state that ensures their security is, in my view, a notable instance. Rooted in serious research it is also highly productive, suggesting a wealth of hypotheses to explore in other contexts. If I say that a high proportion of writing by anthropologists strikes me as pretentious, hack work at best and absolute crap at worst, I am saying nothing that doesn't apply to other forms of writing as well. The majority of work in any field is bound to be mediocre; blame the bell curve.

End of rant. I look forward to continuing our discussion.

[Philip Carl SALZMAN]

One of the things that anthropologists have done from the beginning is to compare our concepts and categories with the divergent ones of other cultures. The difference between our concepts and categories and theirs is not a block to research and understanding, but an entree into other cultures. This is why many ethnographies use "native" terms; those terms denote conceptualizations and categories different from ours. Spelling out these has been the bread and butter of cultural analysis for fifty years.

The problem of subjectivity is not with the study of subjectivity among the people we study. Rather, it is the problem arising from a subjectivist epistemology among anthropologists, a rejection of the objectivity sought in "naturalism," "positivism," and "science." Subjectivist epistemology says, hey, no researcher can be objective, so there can be no objective knowledge. Once again, from a truism to a false inference.

Science, as most anthropologists do not seem to understand, is not based on the assumption that researchers are obective, but rather on the understanding that individual researchers are not only subjective, but inaccurate, self-deluding, mendacious, and outright crooks. That is why no scientific conclusion is based on what one scientist or scientific team says. Findings have to be replicated to be validated. As in the case set out at the beginning of the discussion topic "Can anthropologists cheat?": Concerns emerged last summer when a team of researchers from New Zealand couldn’t replicate Mr. Razem’s work — a red flag that there could be serious problems with the original findings. In other words, findings are tested independently of the initial researchers, and this is how "science" knows whether findings are sound or not.

Such independent tests of findings do not exist in anthropology. Instead, we have opted for navel-gazing, called "reflexivity." But as Ralf Dahrendorf said, truth is not a result of morning expercises in objectivity; rather it is a function of the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately, in the absence of any independent testing, our "marketplace" will apparently buy any rubbish.

[Filippo Bertoni]

You say tomato, I say tomahto... I think up to now almost everyone agrees on the fact that "culture" (or the "patterned learned behavior") is processual and complex. The difference between the (more or less) two distinct takes on it is the level of generalization that is considered acceptable. I personally believe it is acceptable as long as it is actually general and considered so, i.e. when there is the constant awareness that this "general" concept refers to some processual and complex reality that includes several differences, and even many opposites, that it is actually constantly changing and there is no way for it to be in a single way, finally, that it is relative (not in the swollen meaning that the term took nowadays but in the more innocent literal sense). The reflexivity someone took up is what helps us to always consider that (instead of needing always someone to prove our "laws" wrong as scientists do, we have simply to always be aware that what we say is fine but also its opposite might be fine, it depends on the particular case). Anyhow... As it seems to me that discussing on the "to culture or not to culture" issue usually doesn't help, as everyone has his own position that is defined in the opposition with the other's position, even if post after post everyone finds out how close the two positions are, I would like to turn back to the main topic of the thread (I don't want to be rude, just like to be constructive :D): post-subjectivism!
[I thought of quoting here the first post by Philip, but then realized that you can recall it yourself just reading on the top of the page]

I believe it is a most interesting issue: the problems with subjectivity, and the hyper-relativism that it seems to necessarily attract, is surrounding us since the '80s (meybe even before). And, indeed, in younger generations of anthropologists (there is an interesting debate on the changes in anthropologist generations between Warnier and Sokefeld on Social Anthropology 16: 2, 2008) the subjectivist dilemma is becoming stronger and deeper, as we never really experienced those certainties that, I suppose, existed and still exist for many that met the '80s literature only later on their career. We grew up with those uncertainties from post-modern crisis. We have no authorities, we have no sacred readings, we hold no absolutes. And I personally think that this is good, as I will hardly ever accept that absolutes exist outside the conceptual sphere.
But, from being aware of the relativity of every event to being unable to say anything but the obvious or the critique (and often not even that) there are some differences. Thus I turned to literary citicism to seek a way out from this empasse, as it seemed to me that it all started there, with the "post-modern" turn (to my view, an attempt to renew the discipline that has been widely misunderstood and threw away from the historiography of anthropology for superficial fears) that looked at literary criticism itself (as the Comaroffs ironically note in their Of Revelation and Revolution).
And I was surprised; there was someone in literature that tryed to escape from the same dungeons. Eventually I found an affascinating attempt to understand a hard-to-spot, blurred and still-to-be-defined passage beyond post-modernism. Wu Ming, an Italian "band of writers", analysing recent Italian literature, spot some trends, still uncertain, still not completely formed, but yet stemming (a "nebulosa" of works, as they call it), moving in a new direction. Their analysis of this, that they call New Italian Epic, is worth reading (and can be found for free in several languages on their web site www.wumingfoundation.com).

I will try to resume briefly some features of these NIE works that can be useful in seeking a way out also for anthropology, but a closer look at their work should surely better inspire the discussion on this hypothesis.

# First of all they consider the work, instead of the author, suggesting a "work-ship" (I try to give the sense of their neologisms) instead of a (worshipped) authorship. In this sense it might help to focus more on the single works, instead of synthetising (as they do in Italian universities) the authors. But this is quite obvious and not so fundamental...

# They start from considering that many of these works are set in a "ucrony" that usually answers to the questions "what if?" or "what else?". These questions suggest a focus on alternative possibilities; a focus that once was also central to our discipline. So, it might push us to consider alternatives, what ifs and see the precious power that they have:

# The process through which the text often work is that of "defamiliarization", another common duty of an ethnography, that comes from the view of alternatives.

# They then rely on a particular reflection stemmed from the Luther Blisset Project experience of Wu Ming themselves: subject and object, as we all know, are related concepts. The subject goes towards the generalisation and the objectivity through its relationing with other subjects, and the objectivity depends on the relations of many subjects. Therefore these relations among subjects are the in-between we are interested in. In a sense, these relations, are always, in some way, sharing. That's why they come up with the term "condividuo" a mix of condividere, share and individuo, individual. We can try to reproduce the neologism as "shalf", share and self. This new conceptual framework, is also an actual framework, as it is the network of relationships, in which "culture" lives. And it also offers a methodological suggestion:

# As sharing is the in-between we were looking for, sharing and involving and participating are central to the methodology. Transmediality, with the new technologies we have, is now way easier. And in this sense, including the "other" is much easier; so that it is possible to include the other not only in the "sampling" moment of the fieldwork, excluding the participation from the "experimental-laboratorial" moment of the writing, but in the whole process, passing from a participant method to a participant-participated method, crossing also the last border between subject and objets that lied in the division between ethnographer and subjects.

# In this sense our writing becomes contagious, acting on the imagineries, shaping them, and therefore shaping reality.

# Finally, this power that comes from its pressure on reality, requires a responsability, that is also the starting point of a post-subjective writing, as it needs a will to take responsability on what we chose, as "losing the fact, and finding it once again later, its renewal is enriched by the intrinsic condition of potentiality". It is to say that, as we know that more or less every reality might be considered in some way true it is up to us the responsibility to chose, and therefore to express ourselves.

I feel like so much is missing from this too brief summary... Anyhow, this is a general idea of this possibility. And it seems not to be an isolated case: I find day after day new contexts that can be included in this attempt to overcome subjectivity, for example in the many works that are now focusing on hope.

What do you think of this hypothesis? Could it be a sort of new direction (even if it is not new in anything it says, it seems to me that the way it merges together different things is new)? [Sorry if I was too long...]

[John McCreery]

Ryan Anderson writes,

But when it comes to cultural and social anthropology I am not sure how valid the search for repeatability is. And this is something that I wonder about a lot--especially after reading about cases in which more recent anthropologist go back and try to verify earlier ethnographic work, as happened with Mead's work. I think it was pretty strange to assume that returning to Mead's field site would yield the same conclusions. Since social situations and context change so often and so rapidly, why should anthropologists even think that data from one year to the next is going to be comparable? Maybe some kinds of data will fall into that territory, but certainly not all of it.

Shrewdly observed. Allow me to add, however, that the notion of a different anthropologist going back to the same place is not the only possible model for independent confirmation. An alternative is cross-checking the results of multiple studies in different times and places. Thus, for example, anthropologists who study China now have a small library of ethnographic research conducted over a span of more than a half century in various parts of the country, to which we can add the work of historians who have explored the relevance of anthropological ideas to historical records going back for more than a thousand years. As a result it is possible to map variations in customs, values and attitudes, and to assess whether outliers are due to special local conditions or may represent an error.

[John McCreery]

Filippo Bertoni said:

What do you think of this hypothesis? Could it be a sort of new direction (even if it is not new in anything it says, it seems to me that the way it merges together different things is new)?>

Not too long at all. Fascinating. What I seem to see here is the rediscovery of truths about the centrality of co-creation to all forms of human knowledge that were the stock in trade of phenomenologists like Alfred Schutz and his American disciples Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, not to mention social psychologists like George Herbert Mead.

[John McCreery]

An addition to my reply to Filippo; the following is quoted from Alfred Schutz (1972) The Phenomenology of the Social World, pp 3-4.

p. 3-4 The systematic study of the relationship of the individual to society has, from its very beginning, been marked by acrimonious contention over both its proper procedure and its goal. The debate has not been confined, as in other fields, to questions of the truth of this or that theory or the correctness of this or that method. Rather, the whole subject matter of the social sciences as something unique in its own right and having prior existence in prescientific experience has itself been put in question. In one camp, for instance, we find social phenomena treated exactly as if they were natural phenomena, that is, as causally determined physical events. In another camp, however, we find the sharpest contrast drawn between the two classes of phenomena. Social phenomena are here treated as belonging to a world of objective mind, a world which is, to be sure, intelligible, but not under the form of scientific laws. Often enough the attitude of the social scientist toward his subject matter is determined by his own presuppositions, metaphysical, ethical, or political, or by value judgments of whatever kind. These presuppositions may be tacitly assumed or openly stated. As he pursues his reseaerch, he finds himself entangled in problems whose solution seems necessary if his work is to have any sense at all. Is social science concerned with the very being of man or only with his different modes of social behavior? Is society prior to the individual, so that apart from the social whole the individual does not exist at all? Or should we put it quite the other way and say that the individual alone exists and that social organizations, including society itself, are mere abstractions—"functions" of the behavior of separate individuals? Does man's social being determine his consciousness, or does his consciousness determine his social being? Can the history of man and his culture be reduced to laws such as those of economics? Or, on the contrary, can we not say that so-called economic and sociological "laws" merely express the historical perspectives of the age in which they were formulated? Faced with all these dilemmas, it is hardly surprising that many social scientists try to deal with them prematurely by naive pseudo-solutions generated from subjective biases which may be temperamental, political, or at best metaphysical.

Except for the anachronisms of non-PC "man" for "human" and the assumption that social scientists are interested in being scientists, this passage, originally published in German in 1932, seems to capture our current predicament pretty well. Anyone disagree?

[Luka Rejec]

John McCreery said:

Except for the anachronisms of non-PC "man" for "human" and the assumption that social scientists are interested in being scientists, this passage, originally published in German in 1932, seems to capture our current predicament pretty well. Anyone disagree?

I agree, it does. Well, in part. The social scientists known as economists often still hold the view that theirs is a natural science, somehow close to mathematics. As do many evolutionary psychologists, who seem to correlate pencil-and-paper questionnaires with objective facts of human behaviour, even tho' they have more in common with dungeons-and-dragons than science.

On the other hand, there is something dispiriting about a 75-year (app.) predicament. Have we gotten nowhere in all this time? Oftentimes I find myself wondering, do we truly contribute anything with our studies of different cultures and societies, or are we merely hacks, wannabe writers using the cover of academia to avoid comparison with Stephen King? In many ways I find myself drawn to the conclusion that the best we can do is give a warning along the lines of, "all these human things are transient and changing, we cannot say what is best for whom and when, we cannot prescribe nor proscribe most things, we may describe, but it is akin to describe drawings in the sand with the tide coming in." Then if somebody asks to specify a course of action, we conclude along the lines of, "let people do what they will, so long as they do not harm others."

Is that it? Is that truly all? :S

[Philip Carl SALZMAN]

We need to keep in mind the difference between subjectivity and behaviour in our subjects, the folks we study, on the one hand, and our own subjectivity and activity, on the other hand. No one is suggesting that humans are not subjective, or that human subjectivity is not a legitimate, indeed necessary, subject of our study.

The question is how we go about studying people. But it is not necessary to argue that only one approach is valuable. Surely it is established now that scientific and humanistic approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. For example, we can study conflict resolution in a society scientifically, striving for an “objective” account, and, placing it in comparative context, argue that that mode of conflict resolution–such as witchcraft–is characteristic of face-to-face village societies, but not feudal, royal, mercantile, or industrial states. At the same time, we can record–in interviews or life histories–testimonies of people’s experiences with this mode of conflict resolution, what they believe, what they felt, and what happened to them. Anthropologists often study both “objective facts” of events, and “subjective experiences” of the participants. These two approaches are not only not contradictory, but are mutually supporting and enriching.

What is it that we are trying to know? Let’s rule out a number of things. First, on the scientific side, the search is for general characteristics, processes, and interrelations. Science does not focus on the unique; botanists do not focus on a single blade of grass, an individual trees, or a particular bush, nor do biologists emphasize single worms, an individual fox, or a particular giraffe. Rather, science abstracts from many cases in order to generalize about categories of facts. Second, science does not prophesize that this landscape or animal will develop this way or that way in the future. Rather, scientific propositions about change or development are conditional: “given phenomenon X with characteristics A, B, & C, the presence or intrusion of factor Y will lead to characteristic C becoming characteristic D.” This is sometimes called an “if, then” formulation. Science tries to specify the relationship between variables, not prophesize when such variables will turn up. Third, science does not try to tell people what they should or should not do. All it can say it, if you do this, that will be the likely, or probable, or certain consequence. In sum, science is not able to focus on unique individuals, prophesize the future, or tell people what is good and bad. Therefore, not doing those things does not mean we have failed as a science. The question is, can we do, along with the other things we do, what science does.

There is a great, long, revered tradition that argues that human beings and their doings, including society and culture, are not part of nature. This is because, it is alleged in various discourses, humans partake of the divine, have souls, are rational, make symbols, etc. etc. This human exceptionalism argues that studying people scientifically is futile, because humans follow divine or human inspiration, not the laws of nature. To believe the opposite, that people, society, and culture are part of nature and governed by its laws, is called “naturalism,” and many anthropologists have spoken out against it in the last decades. And implicitly or explicitly condemned the Enlightenment as the source of naturalism, science, etc. So I suppose our choice is between pre-Enlightenment views and Enlightenment views. (Restating pre-Enlightenment views and labelling them with a post- this or that doesn’t make them any less pre-Enlightenment.) It is a matter of record (no multivocality here) that post-theological Enlightenment views have led to an unparalleled explosion of knowledge, and to technology, longevity, and standard of living unimagined even by kings in pre-Enlightenment times. So there has been a pretty impressive test of naturalist heuristics. I think it would be smart to take up a view that has proven itself, rather than views that recommend as sources of knowledge holy texts, faith, subjective interpretation, or solidarity with gender, race, class, or nationality.

Certainly Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, and Margaret Mead, if not Franz Boas, believed in naturalist heuristics, and that it was possible to study people, society, and culture scientifically. But since the 1980s, anthropologists have converted to subjectivism, celebrating it as wonderful expression, and rejecting science, naturalism, positivism, and objectivism. “Knowledge” has become anything anyone says, and any belief, account, or report is as valid as any other. There is no Truth, just many truths arising from different positionality. And so on. Anthropological research, as a result, has become a quest, not to discover something about human life, society, and culture, but to find out whose side one should take in ideological struggles. The quest for knowledge is replaced by the quest for political slogans.

How did we come to this? I wonder if part of the slippery slope was not our famous research strategy: the long stranger immersing him or herself in local life. (Full disclosure: I have already discussed this at some length in print: “The Lone Stranger in the Heart of Darkness,” in Assessing Cultural Anthropology, edited by Robert Borofsky, 1993.) With the best will in the world, a solitary researcher in a new culture, limited to a year or so, living in unfamiliar and sometimes stressful conditions, working in a new language, is hard pressed to grasp what is going on, never mind plumb the depths of psychology and meaning, cover all aspects of life and culture, and collect systematic information about everything. This is a totally impossible task. And it is exacerbated by the poor or non-existent training in research methods and techniques in almost all graduate programs. It is no wonder anthropologists–faced with their limitations and inadequacies in the field–have given up on scientific study and fallen back on impressions, interpretations, and moralism.

Can we do anything about this? We can begin by getting rid of unrealistic expectations about what solitary anthropologists can do in a short time. And we might want to recognise, and try to implement, the basic principles of organization followed in every successful venture: specialization and division of labour. As well, maybe we should build in a bit of that “market place of ideas,” of mutual critique, of sharing of insight, that leads to improvement of understanding, or at least refinement of various positions. How can we do this? By following the example of archaeologists, geologists, physicists, biologists, etc. and working in research teams, each member with specific specialized tasks, but with sufficient overlap so as to facilitate mutual sharing and criticism. Here is one type of “replication” feasible for anthropologists, contemporaneous and continuous, rather than separate and sequential. Of course, it would help if we actually trained students in research methods and techniques, rather than forcing each of them to try–with greatly varying success–to invent wheel yet again.

One thing is for sure: if we start out saying that serious, systematic research to discover patterns of human life, society, and culture is impossible, we will certainly fail. And anthropology will have little worthwhile to say.

[Denice Szafran]

Philip Carl SALZMAN said:

Can we do anything about this? We can begin by getting rid of unrealistic expectations about what solitary anthropologists can do in a short time. And we might want to recognise, and try to implement, the basic principles of organization followed in every successful venture: specialization and division of labour. As well, maybe we should build in a bit of that “market place of ideas,” of mutual critique, of sharing of insight, that leads to improvement of understanding, or at least refinement of various positions. How can we do this? By following the example of archaeologists, geologists, physicists, biologists, etc. and working in research teams, each member with specific specialized tasks, but with sufficient overlap so as to facilitate mutual sharing and criticism. Here is one type of “replication” feasible for anthropologists, contemporaneous and continuous, rather than separate and sequential. Of course, it would help if we actually trained students in research methods and techniques, rather than forcing each of them to try–with greatly varying success–to invent wheel yet again.

Thank you for this. I have been following this discussion closely, as a grad student who wonders what the heck I am supposed to be doing, who doesn't understand why working alone is the pinnacle of our discipline, and who despairs of ever knowing enough of current theory and practice to be able to intelligently address my areas of "expertise".

Everyone who has contributed to this discussion has given me much to think about, and there is still so much to learn.

[John McCreery]

Denice Szafran said:

Thank you for this. I have been following this discussion closely, as a grad student who wonders what the heck I am supposed to be doing, who doesn't understand why working alone is the pinnacle of our discipline, and who despairs of ever knowing enough of current theory and practice to be able to intelligently address my areas of "expertise". Everyone who has contributed to this discussion has given me much to think about, and there is still so much to learn.

Denice, have you had a look at the discussion on alternate ethnographies in the Ethnography group? You might find that thread helpful as well. For the moment, allow me to repeat something I posted there a couple of days ago.

But seriously, I do suggest that several of our different groups and discussion threads could benefit from a serious joint reading of Andrew Abbott (2004) Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. In this book Abbott eschews essentializing debates and moralizing critique aimed at establishing the superiority of one method over another. Instead, he argues for seeing both classic methods and classic debates as opportunities to pivot in search of fresh ideas. Thus, for example, people working on topics currently dominated by hardcore statistical analysis (survey research, cluster analysis, that sort of thing) or formal modeling (economics, for example) might pivot toward ethnography to see their problems in a new light. Ethnographers mired in thick description might pivot in the opposite direction, looking for things to count as a basis for statistical analysis or computer simulation. Moving in either direction will lead to fresh insights. After laying out three different senses in which social scientists "explain" things: syntatically--by embedding them in stories that describe series of events; semantically -- by translating the unfamiliar into the common sense of their discipline; or pragmatically -- by identifying key bottlenecks at which intervention will be effective, Abbot goes on to look in detail at five methods: ethnography, history, standard causal (a.k.a., statistical) analysis, small-n comparison, and formal modeling (including computer simulation), noting the strengths of each and pointing to paths along which shifting from one to another has been intellectually productive. To me his approach seems both eminently sensible and highly provocative.

Abbott is great for the big, bird's eye view of where anthropologists might fit in the social science enterprise. Then, when you're ready to plunge in, treat yourself to Howard Becker's Tricks of the Trade. Boy do I wish I'd read that book before I went off to do research.