Volume 36

This year’s program theme, “New Forms of Communication and Commu-

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Number 7 October 1995

expanded into an extra session on Sun- day afternoon.

American Anthropological Association

Science in Anthropology There was always a certain amount of

divisiveness [in anrhropology], but now if’s like Yugoslavia. -Clifford R Barnett. 1993 (“Anthropology: Nature-Culture Battle- ground,” Science. September 24, p 1798)

At the annual AAA gathering of the tribes in 1989, Ed Bruner witnessed “tough scientific types” bashing the humanists, where “science, explana- tion, causality and truth were being advocated at the expense of the hunian- istic” (“The Scientists vs the Human- ists,” February 1990 A N , p 28) . He warned that this is no backyard squab- ble; at stake is the very survival of anthropology as a discipline. In the 6 years since Bruner’s experience, the current congressional mood to fund only “basic science” has challenged both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation-two primary sources of funding for anthropologists; major uni- versities across the nation tightening their fiscal belts have had to make decisions worthy of King Solomon regarding social science budgets: and e v e n anthropology departments have faced cutbacks, changes in focus and fragmentation along subdisciplinary fault lines.

Much of the current discipline-wide angst has focused on the very meaning and interpretation of “science.” To help anthropologists better define the disci- pline and their work in anthropology. the A n t h r o p o l o g y Newslerrer’s 7th annual theme. “Science in Anthropolo- gy,” will consider why the issue of sci- ence in anthropology has become so contentious. Articles featured between October 1995 and May 1996 will grap- ple with such issues as whether anthro- pologists investigate human behavior in the way that other scientists study the rest of the world, if the discipline is seeking new paradigms and in what ways its various methodologies are comparable. As President Jim Peacock has urged, once we can determine what holds anthropology together as a disci-

See Science on page 5

What Do You Think You’re Doing?

By Roy G D’Andrade (University of California. Sun Diego)

The word “science” is in bad repute in anthropology. Some of the problem may be the “science as physics” stereo- type, in which doing science is thought of as writing universal laws in the form of mathematical equations, making exact predictions and performing experiments-description that clearly does not apply to anthropology. But “science as physics” is an anachronistic stereotype even among the natural sci- ences; no serious student of the social sciences thinks anthropology, as a sci- ence. should look like physics.

Doing Science

What then i s sc ience if it isn’t physics? There is general agreement that doing science is ( 1 ) trying to find out about the world by making obser- vations, ( 2 ) checking to see if these observations are reliable, (3) develop- ing ii general model or account that explains these observations. (4) chcck- ing this model or account against new observations and ( 5 ) comparing i t to other models and accounts to see which model fits the observations best. Sci- ence is simply a systematic way of try- ing to find out about the world. A tradi- tional ethnography IS a good example of doing science.

Of course, doing science does not guarantee correct answers. It is easy to get one ’ s observa t ions o r models wrong. The most important thing about science is that i t involves continuous checking. This is important because people want to believe all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Testing and checking are required to keep from falling prey to the great weakness of the human mind-believing that one’s beliefs are true.

The current bad reputation of science in anthropology is due not just to con-

See Doing Science on page 4

Science in Anthropology

Berner Chronik by Diebold Schilling, 1483. Photo courtesy of E T Archive

Gearing Up for DC To accommodate these and other inter- I ests, the scientific program has been

By Jon W Anderson ( 1 995 AAA Program Chair)

nity,” has mobilized professional strengths across all the subfields and their characteristic interdisciplinarity. This year 2584 abstracts were submitted representing a broad spectrum, covering topics such as policy and social issues including AIDS and other epidemic dis- eases; gendered violence; family values; schooling and public culture; human ori- gins and evolution; new directions in archaeology; the restructuring of com- munity, science and government; educa- tion and social theory; and finally, tran- scultural issues that are extending anthropology in new directions today.

Information Age

A number of panels deal with “infor- mation age” phenomena fostered by electronic information technologies from scientific communities and education to cyberspace neighborhoods and virtual reality. Area studies are turning to exten- sions of existing forms of communica- tion and community that accompany rapidly changing-in some cases newly emerging-world contexts. Recognizing this restructuring, the Executive Program

See AAA Annual Meeting on page 4

4 A’nthropology Newsletter/October 1995 I

Doing Science Continued from page I I

fusions about science and physics. Many anthropologists think that science is impossible because humans cannot be objective, especially about other humans. When anthropologists speak of the impossibility of being objective, they have in mind the secondary mean- ing of the term, which is “to be unbi- ased.” (The primary meaning of the term “objective” is “pertaining to the object’’-that is, about something exter- nal to oneself, rather than about one’s feelings about something.) And it is true that people doing science, like people everywhere, are often biased. But “bias” does not destroy science. On the con- trary, because of the constant checking on other’s accounts, it is doing science that destroys bias. Science is a public activity in which people check on each other’s observations and reasoning, and it is this that gives science a chance at the truth. Science is the best bias destroyer we have.

The Ideologist’s Critique In my experience, the strongest

attacks on science in anthropology come from those who want anthropology to be, first and foremost, an ideology. By “ideology” I mean a moral doctrine that identities what is good and what is bad; an example is the “oppression model” in anthropology. The oppression model says that certain sociocultural institu- tions such as “the state” are oppressive. Within the framework of the oppression model, the primary task for anthropolo- gy is to denounce and resist the harmful actions of these lhstitutions and to unmask the mystifications that provide these institutions with false legitimacy.

I refer to claims like “the state is oppressive” as “quasi-truth claims”- statements that sound as if they could be true or false, but when examined closely turn out to be based on subjective judg- ments, typically of the form “X is bad.” To say that something is oppressive without specifying the kinds and fre- quency of harm being done does not tell us much about the world-it tells us pri- marily how someone wants us to respond to the world. “The state is oppressive. Resist !.he state!” “Science is hegemonic. Throw out science!”

This is not to say there is no place in anthropology for ideology or morality. Every discipline needs to work out its own ethics. Since anthropology deals with people, i t clearly has moral respon- sibilities, just as do psychology and medicine. But our moral models about the anthropologist’s responsibilities should be kept separate from our models about the world. Otherwise the result will be very bad science and very con- fused morality.

Despite the antiscience rhetoric, anthropologists generally agree that it is necessary to get some kinds of facts right. From the most postmodern to the most activist anthropologist, there is agreement that some things-like how many people in a given population are i l l and what they are i l l from-are incontestably factual and need to be studied empirically. The difference between proscience and antiscience is not about getting empirical matters

right, it is about what one does with these facts.

For the scientist, facts are to be used to support or challenge some explicitly stated model or theory. Moralists, on the other hand, rarely consider challenging the moral framework they espouse. For example, i n my article in Current Anthropology (1995). I argue as force- fully as I can that the current oppression model is an inadequate representation of what is going on today in the world, that this model lacks any theory of “good” power or “good” inequality, that the model is so negative in character that it does not lead to doing anything positive about human problems, that it is not reflexive about matters of moral belief, that it does not give reasonable explana- tions of why people do not revolt and that i t is ethnocentric. Not one of the commentators-including those who are strong believers in the oppression model--contested any of these points. The response of the moralists was sim- ply to reassert that anthropology is a moral discipline and that I was wrong to say that it wasn’t. The challenge to the model was ignored. To see how strange this is, imagine what would have hap- pened if I had written an article chd- lenging the model of social evolution.

Nonscience Genres Some anthropologists justify an anti-

science stance by claiming that anthro- pology should be one of the humanities. The humanities-generally defined as the study of arts and philosophical tradi- tions-are a venerable and important part of anthropology. Work in mytholo- gy, folklore and ethnomusicology, along with the collection, display and scholar- ly analysis of crafts and artifacts, has great value, not as science, but as a form of scholarship that preserves and expli- cates the wonderfully wide range of human cultural achievements. But in my experience those anthropologists who argue for the humanities and against sci- ence are usually not interested in this kind of humanistic scholarship. Instead, they use the term “humanistic” to refer to a highly subjective orientation in which what is observed is, as a matter of principle, not distinguished from the observer’s feelings and in which the ethnographic encounter is made into a first-person narrative with a strong polit- ical message. Such work is really a kind of activist art.

Like the humanist scholar, the anthro- pologist who writes thick description about particular events but who does not develop a general model or account to explain these events is, by definition, not doing science, although he or she may be doing fine scholarship. On the other hand, what is described is said to happen repeatedly and treated as an event that can be understood as the result of some general cultural process. In such cases the descriptionist is doing science-however well or badly-again by definition.

Mention should be made of an inter- pretative genre in anthropology that has a special and notorious epistemological problem. This epistemological problem occurs when an interpretation of some- thing is proposed-say a story of some sort-along with the claim that this meaning is not in anyone’s mind, but is somehow, perhaps on some transcen- dental plane, to be found “in” the story. As is well known, the problem is that such claims are untestable until some-

one works out a method to determine right interpretations from wrong inter- pretations. To date, no reliable method to ascertain transcendental meanings has been found. However, if one believes that the postulated interpretation, of the story is to be found in people’s minds, then various interviewing techniques could be used to validate the interpreta- tion. Unfortunately, too often in cultural anthropology, whether the researcher believes meanings are transcendent or in the mind. no verification is attempted and the reliability of the interpretation remains unknown. The result is a con- tinuous rise and fall of interpretative vir- tuosos including LCvi-Strauss, Turner, Schneider, Geertz and Taussig.

Take Your Choice So, anthropologist, if you don’t think

you’re doing science, what do you think you’re doing? Ideology? Humanistic scholarship? Activist art? Purely descriptive thick description? Interpreta- tion of transcendental meanings? Given the alternatives, isn’t it time to pause and r e f l e c t d o we really want to get rid of science? In my view, anthropology without science is not much: a small but interesting sampling of the humanities; embarrassing stories about the “real great political‘ adventures of me”; some heartfelt moral denunciations and a

I 1 AAA Meeting

Continued from page I

Committee is sponsoring AAA sessions with distinctly interdisciplinary dimen- sions appropfiate to this broad theme. Beginning with the Paleolithic, a session on social learning and cognitive evolu- tion brings together human biologists, paleontologists, cognitive psychologists and linguists. Other sessions address archaeology’s multiple communities, invite sociologists to discuss current developments in social theory on the emerging new world order and revisit the concept of speech community in a multilingual and increasingly creolized world. We are pleased to host philoso- pher Nancy Frazer for a critical appraisal of theorizing public culture and public space.

Presidential Panels Presidential panels this year focus on

professional and institutional changes that we study elsewhere: anthropologists who have risen to positions of institu- tional leadership, including the AAA’s own incoming president, Yolanda Moses, who will discuss the restructuring of uni- versities and colleges. Others will look at the discipline’s professional and institu- tional prospects in the restructuring academy and beyond, where members now outnumber the tenured professorate.

Plenary Events Our communication with other com-

munities in a changing world is high- lighted in the meeting’s plenary events. On Wednesday evening, November IS, Sheldon Hackney, chairman of NEH, will discuss the “Conversations with Americans” that he has put on the agen- da of the NEH. On Friday evening, Ernest Gellner, past president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, will give the AAA plenary speech on restruc-

large corpus of evocative but unverifi- able interpretations.

In contrast, doing science has pro- duced a substantial body of good anthropology, including a great corpus of ethnography, an extensive account of prehistory and a detailed record of human evolution and physical variation. Even today the most cited articles in the American Anthropologist tend to be sci- ence oriented-for example, 2 of the 3 most cited papers in the American Anthropologist in the last 10 years (Romney, Weller and Batchelder on consensus, Shipman on scavenging) are clearly science oriented. Anthropolo- gists know a great deal about what hap- pens in the ordinary lives of diverse peoples, and they have interesting mod- els that combine historical, economic, social, political, biological and psycho- logical factors to explain why people construct the worlds they do. The loss of tribal cultures has been traumatic, but it has also resulted in new fieldwork in a variety of complex, state-organized societies. With some attention to theory and concern for what counts as evi- dence, anthropology could begin again to take itself seriously as a field of sys- tematic knowledge.

[D’Andrade refers interested readers to his recent article, “Moral Models in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36:399-408, 19951

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turing society and theory at century’s end. Anthropology, which professional- ized and developed strong research tradi- tions in this century, is not over, accord- ing to AAA President James Peacock, who will make his presidential address, “The Future of Anthropology,” on Satur- day evening, November 18.

Special Events Special eventq;qn this year’s scientific

program will focus on race and multicul- t u r a 1 ism- w h i c h , according t,o , one reporter from last year’s meeting, occu- pied anthropologists before they were “cool”-as well as issues from immigra- tion restrictions to the bell curve contro- versy and issues raised at the United Nation’s 1995 conference on women in Beijing. AAA select panels, a new fea- ture this year, address the extensibility of anthropological research. One panel compares “virtual” communities built on electronic communication to face-to-face and institutional communities that once went by names such as Gemeinschaft! Gesellschaft or mechanicaVorganic. Another takes stock of recent medical anthropology for changing conceptions of “health” and its care. A third presents anthropological research applied to the ethnic categorizations for the census, which is the point of departure for gov- ernment programs from regulation to welfare. Exciting sessions are to be found on myriad aspects of the human condition-here and abroad, past and present, throughout a packed program on everything from ceramics and recent Mayan archaeology to memory cultures. the security state and Washington, DC, itself-that mark the accomplishments and current directions of our profession. The Executive Program Committee extends its thanks-including the thanks of the Association-to program editors of the Association’s sections and to indi- vidual members who have composed, and will present, this public face of the profession.