P H I L I P P E D E S C O L A

On anthropological knowledge

Among the various social sciences to have emerged in the course of the past twocenturies, anthropology is probably the only one that is still pondering over thedefinition of its subject matter. To proclaim that it deals with mankind as a social speciesis hardly enlightening, since other sciences have the same general object and apply to itmore specialised methods than those we can boast of. True, anthropologists draw theirpublic recognition from the mastery of a specific body of knowledge: using data theyhave gathered the world over, they categorise and compare kinship systems, conceptionsof the person and forms of ritual agency; they analyse myths, dietary prohibitionsand plant taxonomies, and strive to understand the principles underlying exchange,hierarchy or magic causality. But these objects were entrusted to anthropology bydefault when, in the course of colonial expansion, Europeans were confronted overseasby enigmatic customs and bizarre institutions that no other science was prepared toinclude in its own, already well circumscribed, territory. Methods of description hadthen to be improvised, typological criteria had to be invented, incongruous facts had tobe grouped into categories that would grant them an appearance of unity. Furthermore,most anthropologists now vehemently deny – with a temerity that does not alwaysenvision the consequences – that their object should be restricted to the traditionalstudy of the institutions and beliefs of those few faraway peoples that have remained atthe margin of modernity. Airports, warships, street gangs and the European Parliamenthave now fallen within the scope of anthropological inquiry, alongside industrial plants,laboratories of genetic engineering and the Hong Kong stock exchange. This is allvery heartening, no doubt, and bears testimony to the loudly proclaimed capacity forrenewal in a discipline that conquered its autonomy by incorporating the lore of so-called primitive societies into the topics formerly discussed by comparative law andthe history of religions. But this de facto annexation of new fields of empirical researchshould not prevent us from evaluating our claims for expansion: what exactly are theassets that anthropology can avail itself of in order to justify its forays into domains thatseemed way beyond its jurisdiction no so long ago? Except by a process of transpositionthat remains at best very metaphorical, can the lessons drawn from the study over manydecades of Melanesian initiation rituals or Australian aboriginal marriage systems reallyserve to throw light on the construction of gender difference among the staff of a modernhospital or help us understand the evolution of European legal systems in respect offiliation and descent? Except that they all claim to be anthropological, does a monographon the mythology of an Amazonian tribe have something in common with a study ofanorexia among the wealthy young of Madrid or an essay on the symbolism of coloursin the Middle Ages? Is it rather the case that so many different enterprises have nowclustered under the banner of anthropology that the huge extension acquired by thislabel condemns it to mean almost nothing, save the desire of those who employ it tosignal that they favour a qualitative approach to social facts? To put it bluntly, do we stillshare a common language, a common purpose, a common method, now that we haveseen fit to expand anthropology beyond its traditional domain (which at least provided

Social Anthropology (2005), 13, 1, 65–73. © 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists 65DOI: 10.1017/S0964028204000849 Printed in the United Kingdom

us with an empirical object and a technical jargon)? This is not an entirely rhetoricalquestion and we had better resolve it ourselves before other disciplines decide that weare obsolete, as is already happening in the United States with the slow encroachmenton to the territory of social anthropology by so-called cultural studies.

Different answers to this kind of soul-searching are already available on theepistemological market. For instance, one may try to define anthropology by itscontent, that is, by the type of things current anthropological theories deal with. InEurope, at least, especially in the United Kingdom and France, this subject matter seemsto be ‘social relationships’: that is self-explainable relationships between participantsin social systems of various kinds. The problem, of course, is that such a definitionapplies to other social sciences as well, notably sociology, history, social psychology oreven economics, as was already clear in the ambitious Durkheimian programme fromwhich this conception of anthropology derives. One could try to narrow the fielda little and look at what anthropology has been best at doing from the vantagepoint of neighbouring disciplines. This is what the late Alfred Gell did when heproposed that ‘anthropology is . . . considered good at providing close-grained analysesof apparently irrational behaviour, performances, utterances, etc.’ (Gell 1998: 10). Iam in full sympathy with such a definition, since this is precisely what I have beentrying to do myself for the past 25 years. But one has to admit that it excludes itsconverse, that is, close-grained analysis of apparently rational behaviour, such as thestudy conducted by Edwin Hutchins in his remarkable monograph on distributedcognition in a United States Navy training ship, a study which is nevertheless consideredby most anthropologists to fall within the scope of the discipline (Hutchins 1995). Sucha definition could even be said to exclude kinship, that most sacred of anthropologicalheirlooms, since one could argue that there is nothing intrinsically irrational in namingkin in such or such a way, or in prescribing such or such a category of potentialspouse. Specifying anthropology by its content always leads to the little game offinding counter-examples that do not fall within the boundaries of the definition,although they are widely accepted in professional journals as legitimate pieces ofanthropological research; and that is not counting the fact that one would also have toface tricky questions about the great transatlantic divorce between ‘culture’ and ‘socialrelationships’ as the competing subject matters for our discipline.

Another approach, which I favour, is to look for methods of investigation thatare shared by all anthropologists independently of the various conceptions they holdof their object of study – methods that go beyond merely paying lip-service to ourprofessed common dedication to ‘participant observation’ (or ‘ongoing conversations’to use a more trendy expression). This not an easy task either, since there seem to belittle relation in terms of method between, say, a study of nicknames in a Sicilian village,a general theory of marriage exchange and a cognitive account of ritual efficacy. Also,one should be careful in such matters to look at what anthropologists really do ratherthan at what they say they do – a lesson that can be drawn from the burgeoning fieldof social studies of science. For anthropologists, like other scientists writing about thegeneral guidelines of their inquiries, tend to adopt a normative discourse that cloudstheir actual practice: they are prone to state the objectified results of their research, todraw epistemological or philosophical lessons from it and to codify their methods in aquasi-axiomatic form, rather than expound with full ingenuity the windings, the doubtsand the accidents that mark out the course of their enquiries and render them possible.

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Radcliffe-Brown, to name one of our most illustrious ancestors, is a good caseat hand. We all know that he defined anthropology as a nomothetic science, thepurpose of which is to elicit laws using the comparative method by contrast withidiographic disciplines such as ethnography and history that strive to produce faithfuldescriptions of contemporary or past societies (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). But such anepistemological decree was more faithful to the distinctions introduced in the latenineteenth century by the controversies of the Methodenstreit than to the complexityof the anthropology that Radcliffe-Brown himself was practising. For, by separatingso starkly anthropology from ethnography, he was forgetting, or rather feigningto forget – since he was himself a competent ethnographer – that anthropology issubservient to the minute process of observation and description of practices andinstitutions that ethnographical monographs render available. It is from these constantlyenriched sources that theoretically minded anthropologists extract the elements oftheir generalisations, and they do so with a practical know-how that is the moredifficult to formalise in that it draws its efficacy from the shared mastery of another,still less formalised, know-how: that which is developed in the course of fieldwork.This expertise renders us familiar with the rarely explicit procedures of objectificationthrough which data are obtained, filtered and presented – procedures that we havedifficulty in describing to non-anthropologists, or even in teaching to our studentswhen we bother to do so, but from which is nevertheless derived the intuitive graspwe have of the material gathered by fellow anthropologists that we put to use when weattempt to organise it in meaningful generalisations.

Radcliffe-Brown was thus deliberately ignoring the fact that, inasmuch as it isdependant upon ethnography as a very particular mode of knowledge, anthropologyalso requires a dose of identification with its object. For ethnography claims thisspecificity of using as a tool of investigation the subjectivity of observers whoexperiment with a way of life different from the one they are accustomed to, so asto provide a kind of experiential guarantee of the coherence and consistency of theirknowledge of the social practices in which they engage in the field. And this subjectiveprocess cannot be kept entirely at bay when it comes to dealing with the objectifiedfacts that result from its operation. Of course, it is hardly surprising that Radcliffe-Brown banned this disposition to experiment upon oneself with the distinct behaviourof others – what we usually call comprehension – from the instruments of our discipline.After all, he saw anthropology as an extension of the natural sciences, the legitimacyof which could only be established by breaking with the hermeneutical tradition, atradition that few European anthropologists were willing to endorse at the time anyway.Finally, Radcliffe-Brown was right in my opinion when he assigned to anthropologya nomothetic objective, but he was wrong when he considered explanation to bea purely inductive process. You will remember that, according to him, explanationhad to abide by the experimental method and follow a procedure in three stages: theobservation of facts, the formulation of hypothesis and the verification of hypothesesby a new observation. Such attempts at comparative generalisation are not unknownin anthropology. It is what ethnologists commonly do when they try to detect amongsocieties neighbouring the one they study a type of belief, of behaviour or of institutionthat seems to present enough consistent properties – in spite of the variability of itsactual manifestations – for it to be taken as a sort of regional invariant. But this kind oftypological induction never led to the formulation of laws such as those of the natural

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sciences, neither by Radcliffe-Brown nor by those who use it empirically for morelimited purposes.

There is another standard way to explain, which Radcliffe-Brown leaves out: thedeductive method. The omission is all the more paradoxical as it was Durkheim, ofwhom he claimed to be a follower, who gave this approach its legitimacy (Durkheim,1960 [1897]; 1973 [1897]). It is the method that Levi-Strauss uses, for instance, whenhe studies the laws of marriage operating in elementary systems of kinship: as theselaws can be represented in models where individuals are distributed in marriage classes,one can posit that an element constitutive of the system of social relations (the relationof exchange between two marriage classes, for instance) corresponds to an elementconstitutive of the model (a relation of permutation between units represented bysymbols). The deductive character of the model derives from the fact that it providesa structure that is reputedly isomorphous with the objective process studied, thedeductive transformations operated within the model being conceived as homologousto the transformations of the real phenomena.

In their everyday practice, by contrast with their normative claims, anthropologiststhus resort to very diverse methods and paradigms, the results of which are neverthelesscommonly ratified as belonging to the discipline by the professional community thatsustains its existence. It becomes clear from my preceding remarks that three proceduresstand out in this common know-how deployed by anthropologists: description,comprehension and various forms of explanation. One could see in these operationsan alternative way of presenting the three stages traditionally distinguished in theconstruction of anthropological knowledge: ethnography, as an acquisition of dataon a particular social group described as a totality; ethnology, as a first attempt at ageneralising synthesis dealing with a set of societies at the scale of a cultural area, orwith a supposedly homogeneous class of phenomena; anthropology proper, finally, asthe study of the formal properties of social life in general (Levi-Strauss 1958: 386–9). But this analogy is misleading for, if the three stages refer in principle to objectsand methods that are clearly compartmentalised and that may even be incompatible,as authors like Dan Sperber argue (Sperber 1982: ch. 1), by contrast, the trilogydescription/comprehension/explanation takes the form of a continuum that cannotbe segmented easily.

Let us go back to these three procedures to see in what way they blend into oneanother. Description, it would seem, requires no description: for lack of appropriatemeasuring instruments, ethnographers only need to be attentive and curious abouteverything; they must be able to render in writing sometimes complex interactions andsequences of actions, and to transcribe adequately utterances spoken in languages thatthey seldom master perfectly. However, in a science where the observer and the observedshare common properties, description is never that simple. True, one must eschew one’sown prejudices and avoid moral judgements, but it is impossible to attain a positionof perfect axiological neutrality and to extricate oneself completely from the schemesof objectification through which one has learned to decipher reality. Furthermore,ethnographic knowledge is predicated upon the personal and continuous relation of aspecific individual with other specific individuals, a knowledge which thus proceedsfrom a set of circumstances that are never identical, and the result of which is notstrictly comparable with any other knowledge, not even the one acquired by precedingethnographers in the same population. As has been remarked, the ethnographers’workshop is their own self and the relations that they have managed to establish

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between this self and some members of a society. Therefore, the data that they gathercannot be fully dissociated from the situations in which they find themselves immersed –often by chance, from the role they are led to play – sometimes unknowingly – in localpolitics, and from their dependency upon various persons who become their mainproviders of information. And what ethnographers make of this information, in turn,bears testimony to their education, to their character, to their personal history: allelements that contribute to channelling their attention and defining their preferences.All this is a commonplace for anthropologists; but it also implies that ethnographicdata differ from experimental data in that they result in a knowledge that is, strictlyspeaking, not replicable, since it derives from an intersubjective exchange the conditionsfor which are never identical.1

In spite of these personal variations, however, there is a striking, even uncanny,homogeneity in the way ethnographers build up their knowledge in the course of theirinvestigations. And this homogeneity has to do with the sheer rhythm of fieldwork,with the fact that the process of understanding a foreign culture requires a series of stagesthat appear almost identical in their duration for all observers. This point was broughthome to me in Cambridge many years ago by Meyer Fortes as he was recounting aconversation with his mentor Malinowski, just before leaving for his own fieldworkwith the Tallensi. Malinowski had told him that he expected to receive a first disgruntledletter in about two months, in which Fortes would complain about the food, the climate,the lack of privacy and the general impossibility of making sense of what the natives,as they were called at that time, were doing or saying. Another letter would followapproximately four months later in a more optimistic tone, reporting steady progresswith fieldwork and the dawning of a few working hypothesis about what was going on.Then, after almost a year in the field, Fortes would write again to Malinowski tellinghim that the job was almost done, with only a few remaining details to clear up. Andthis would be the critical moment. For a few weeks later a new letter would follow inwhich Fortes would explain that he had got it all wrong, and that he required moretime in order to weigh new information that had modified his previous understandingof the social system.

I had myself just come back from almost three years in Amazonia when I metFortes, and I was both pleased and taken aback by this piece of ethnographic wisdombecause that was exactly the path that my own fieldwork had taken. True, Levi-Strausswho was my thesis supervisor had been less explicit than Malinowski during our lastconversation before I left for South America: as I was explaining in tedious detail howI intended to proceed in my investigations, he just said ‘Laissez-vous porter par leterrain’ (Let the field decide for you), which I now take as a very laconic equivalentof Malinowski’s advice to Fortes. But the remarkable thing about the anecdote is thatall my own students also sent me the same types of letter at the same stages in theirfieldwork, independently of their personal temperaments and abilities. This is why Ihave come to the rustic conclusion that, where fieldwork is concerned, rhythm andduration are the methods that matter.

There are other methods, though, but they are so intuitive that they seldom receivea reflexive treatment. For obvious reasons, ethnographers cannot possibly deliver afaithful copy of the reality observed; rather, they offer as it were a scale-model, a

1 This point has been argued especially clearly by J. Fabian in his Time and the other (1983).

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likeness of the salient features of the prototype that may never be fully described. Theyare thus led to use two contrivances: composition, which selects in the continuity oftheir experience pieces of action or utterances reputedly more significant than others,and generalisation, which invests these episodes with a meaning that can be expandedto the whole group under study. For all that, the resulting descriptions are not false orbiased, at least not deliberately, inasmuch as the multiplication of ethnographies of thesame society – a common situation nowadays – allows for a form of verification byconvergence. But to describe, for ethnographers, is not only to give an account of whatthey observe; it also means organising for their own use, according to ordered sequencesand patterns of behaviour, the flux of what they see and of what they are told. Thisalmost unconscious filtering results from an aspiration to understand acts or utterancesthat are often enigmatic, by confronting them with responses that we, as ethnographers,would have brought ourselves to the circumstances that fostered these reactions. Thisamounts to a spontaneous movement of identification with the motives that one maydetect behind the action of others, rather than an identification with the culturallycodified responses that these motives generate, a distinction that marks the dividing linebetween methodological relativism and moral relativism. Yet these inchoate attempts atinterpretation are not purely speculative, especially during the first months in the field.They also have a very pragmatic function for the ethnographer. For fieldwork is anaccepted process of socialisation and enskilment that shapes the bodies, the judgmentsand the behaviour of observers immersed in an unfamiliar community of practice. Byinferring among their hosts coherent schemes of behaviour, ethnographers build up asort of idiosyncratic precis de savoir-vivre governing the relations that they establishwith them, and they are thus able to compare constantly the degree of coincidence of theactions they observe and participate in with the interpretations they have constructedof them.

Understanding, however, is not only understanding for one’s own sake. It alsorequires making others understand – others being here the community from whichthe ethnographer proceeds. By becoming public, usually in writing, interpretationresorts to other procedures and its very nature thus changes. The most common ofthese procedures, typical of the standard monograph, is contextualisation: a custom, aninstitution or a belief that appears quite bizarre at first sight is replaced in its local contextso as to dispel its oddness by illuminating the field of meaning in which it is embedded.Paradoxically, the internal coherence of social life as it was daily experienced by theethnographer becomes here a kind of proof that the phenomenon under study is indeeda legitimate scientific object, since it becomes functionally and semantically compatiblewith other phenomena that have undergone a similar test of autonomisation. Onemay also contextualise on a wider scale by inductive generalisation. The phenomenonformerly apprehended within the context in which it was observed will be takenas a variation within a wider set of similar phenomena that may be recognized inneighbouring societies of the same cultural area. Thanks to this process, these societieswill thus render manifest a regional style that will help dilute the seeming exceptionalityof the original phenomenon, a standard method developed many years ago by the Dutchschool under the name of ethnologisch studieveld.

It is finally possible, but more risky, to widen even more the field of generalisationand to detect a great number of occurrences of a phenomenon beyond the regionin which it was described for the first time, a process that allows one to gain byextension what one loses in comprehension, but which may strip the said phenomenon

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of the last shreds of objective reality that it still retained in the previous stage ofgeneralisation. Shamanism, totemism and many other anthropological fetishes wereborn in this manner. Radcliffe-Brown notwithstanding, inductive generalisation doesnot explain, save in the very restricted sense where a phenomenon is determined bybeing ascribed to a class, the predicates of which are condemned to remain arbitrarysince they amount to no more than the addition of the properties retained in each objectso as to allow it to be subsumed in the class. The only possible analogy with the naturalsciences that comes to mind is taxonomy, perhaps a more charitable way of defininginductive generalisation than its assimilation to the collecting of butterflies.

Is there a methodological specificity to this stage of ethnological comprehension, astyle of discovery that anthropology could claim as being properly its own? The partialidentification of observers with those that they observe is a movement of adequacy ofthe self to others which cannot be said to be the privilege of ethnographers and whichcorresponds quite well to the definition that Diderot gave of truth when he wrote that itis la conformite de nos jugements avec les etres [‘the conformity between our judgmentsand beings’], that is, not the delusive aspiration to a perfect coincidence between theveritas cognoscendi and the veritas essendi, but, more simply, an expression of the hope –often disappointed but always blooming – that one may recognise in others somethingthat one knows about oneself. Understanding by contextualisation and generalisationalso amounts to a process of truth by adequacy, although not directly an adequacy ofthe self to others. It is rather a correspondence between a type of reality observed byone and a type of reality observed by others, and thus an adequacy between a singularityestablished by subjective experience on the one hand, and an addition of particularsforming a more encompassing singularity on the other. It can then be decreed truthfulinasmuch as it becomes fruitful for the intelligibility of the varieties of human experienceat the same time as it answers to the criteria of consistency that have been assignedto it.

To explain deductively, finally, is usually portrayed in anthropology as a three-step procedure: isolating a certain class of reputedly recurring phenomena; makinghypotheses as to the relations existing between these phenomena; and elaborating amodel of these relations in order to study their formal properties. However, by contrastwith the models of Newtonian physics, the deductive nature of which was guaranteedby a logical-mathematical system of connections between laws, anthropological modelsare seldom deductive in a literal sense. No rigorous procedure, save the use of the mostelementary tropes and logical connectors, allows one to validate the legitimacy of thedeductive transformations performed by the models, since the latter are only materialarrangements – graphs, tables, diagrams – intuitively constructed in order to figure outin space the structure of repetitive processes. They may be efficient when they accountfor all the observable facts; they may be predictive if they permit to anticipate thevariations of the elements that compose them; they may even be formalised a posteriori,with topological tools for instance; but they never attain the deductive exactness thata mathematical codification warrants. The truthfulness of the model thus lies in thepostulated adequacy between, on the one hand, its internal structure (that is the elementsretained in its composition and the relations linking them) and, on the other hand, thehypothetical structure of the phenomena that the model aims at accounting for. It issometimes said that this adequacy may be verifiable if the model is able to accommodateunexpected facts. But this only means that a relevant class of phenomena has beencorrectly identified and that their properties have been correctly deduced (certainly an

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achievement in itself), not that the knowledge produced in such a way would unveil theessential truthfulness of the object in the manner of the ancient ideal of an adaequatiorei et intellectus. This is not to say that such an object is entirely immaterial – as hasbeen objected to structuralism, for instance – since its traces or effects can be detectedin institutions, discourses and practices. But its reality can only be verified within themodel that specifies its conditions of existence, not by an empirical observation of itsactual working in social life.

It is no wonder, then, that when we look at what anthropologists really do, whetherin the field or in the seclusion of their studies, it becomes difficult to separate neatlyand according to epistemological dicta the combination of description, comprehensionand explanations our trade uses as tools. Although there is a certain likeness betweenthese procedures and the classical three stages of anthropological research, the latterare in fact a purified definition of operations that are most often intertwined. For theethnographic moment is descriptive, but also implies a good measure of comprehensionthrough a partial identification with others, while the ethnological moment subordinatesinductive explanation to a comprehensive approach, and if the anthropological momenttheoretically falls under the jurisdiction of hypothetico-deductive explanations, it isnevertheless not independent of the previous procedures that have rendered it possibleby providing autonomy and substance to certain classes of phenomena used in thebuilding of models. This is why anthropology, in the wider sense of the term, is not anendeavour that could be characterised by a clearly circumscribed domain of inquiry,or even by a type of method answering to the logical requirements set forth by thephilosophy of science. It should be seen, rather, as a certain style of knowledge – thatis, as a pattern of discovery and a mode of systematisation that are supported by aset of skills progressively acquired through practice, both a turn of mind and a tour demain, a particular knack picked up through experience and acknowledged among otherswho have gained the same proficiency in dealing with social facts in our own specialway. This is why, also, the procedures followed for the assessment of anthropologicalresearch by peers sometimes appear opaque to fellow scientists in other disciplines: forjudgments are passed not only by reference to sheer results, but also according to theircompliance with the specifications of a largely implicit modus operandi.

It is time now to return to my initial question: do we, as anthropologists, haveanything specific to offer to help humankind understand the varieties of its experience ofthe world? Can the style of knowledge that we have developed over time be transposedbeyond the particular circumstances that have presided over its birth and the culture-specific concepts that we have inherited from this historical genesis? Are we reluctantimperialists riding the waves of globalisation and trying to peddle half-heartedly ourused wares to people who have no real need for them, or do we still have a contributionto make to a non-ethnocentric understanding of the human condition? I think we do.For if the concepts we use – abstract templates such as society, culture or representation –were indeed born in a specific place at a specific time, and are not necessarily the preciousexportable assets that we deem them to be, the style of knowledge that we have devisedis undoubtedly an original bequest to our fellow denizens of the planet. Although aChinese or an African anthropologist may have – indeed should have – misgivingsabout the adequacy of the intellectual tools that we have forged in the west to accountfor our own perspective on their world, they nevertheless adapt with a remarkable easeto the combination of investigative methods, guided intuitions and self-taught skillsthat form the basis of our trade. In that sense, the universality of anthropology is very

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different from the universality of, say, the laws of physical reality; it does not proceedso much from a metalanguage that is but the codex of our own cosmology, but froma novel form of understanding the otherness of others, an extension of the universalworking of intersubjectivity into a kind of knowledge that everyone can master andrender fruitful without paying an unnecessary tribute to the dogmatic wrapping withwhich we try to justify its legitimacy.

Philippe DescolaEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales52, rue du Cardinal-LemoineF-75005 Paris, Francedescola@ehess.fr

ReferencesDurkheim, E. 1960 [1897]. Le suicide. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

1973 [1897]. Les regles de la methode sociologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the other. How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University

Press.Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency. An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Levi-Strauss, C. 1958. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon.Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. ‘Introduction’, in Structure and function in primitive society. Essays and

addresses. London: Cohen and West.Sperber, D. 1982. Le savoir des anthropologues. Paris: Hermann.

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