"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Anthropology, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Loewen, Gregory Victor"@en . "2009-04-03T00:00:00"@en . "1997"@en . "Doctor of Philosophy - PhD"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "This dissertation is a study of how anthropologists in Canada\r\nover the previous thirty years, have constructed anthropological\r\nknowledge. It reports, examines, and comments upon interviews with\r\nanthropologists trained inside and outside of Canada. Most occupy\r\nsenior academic positions at Canadian universities. Interpretation of\r\nthis material takes place within the discourses of the anthropology of\r\nknowledge and education.\r\nAnthropologists say that ways of thinking about anthropological\r\nknowledge conflict at the theoretical level but do not conflict in\r\npractice. Practice is defined as fieldwork and teaching. Here, theory is\r\nfelt only indirectly. Various tensions follow from this understanding.\r\nThey include those between subject and object, positivism and post-positivism,\r\nvalue and validity, field and archive, and cultural\r\nrelativism versus scientific knowledge.\r\nThe concept which mediates these tensions is that of the field.\r\nFieldwork is seen by anthropologists as an experience with both\r\nepistemological and ethical implications. Ethically, the field supports a\r\ncertain manner of living and outlook on humanity. This outlook\r\nincludes respect for cultural differences. Yet, epistemologically, the field\r\nis divisive because it is cast as the promotional agent for various kinds\r\nof method, theory, and reflective analyses. These analyses include a\r\nbelief in value relativism in concert with a scientific notion of validity.\r\nFor example, if it were not for the fundamental tools of positivism in\r\nanthropology, anthropologists felt that anthropological knowledge\r\nmight be seen as idiosyncratic. In their search for human knowledge,\r\nanthropologists are united by their methods and ethics. They are\r\ndivided, however, by their theories. These divisions and unities are\r\ninherited in the culture of anthropology. Although anthropologists\r\nunderstand different cultures' values to be equal, they suggest that\r\nways of knowing another culture through anthropology are not equally\r\nvalid.\r\nTheoretical conflicts are also produced in institutions. These are\r\nseen as major influences on the 'look' of anthropology at various\r\ntimes and places. Departments, publishers, students and teachers are all\r\ninfluences on anthropological knowledge construction.\r\nAnthropological knowledge is also seen as being constructed at a\r\npersonal level. Anthropologists feel the concept of vocation in the\r\nindividual's life-narrative as an anthropologist is important to this\r\nconstruction. Anthropology is seen as a calling or assignation. As well,\r\nthe purpose of anthropological knowledge is seen as an ethical precept.\r\nThe sanctity of field experiences for these anthropologists brings them\r\ntogether ethically but divides them epistemologically."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/6759?expand=metadata"@en . "22522832 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "UNDERSTANDING THE SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION: INTERVIEWS WITH ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN C A N A D A by GREGORY VICTOR LOEWEN B . A . , University of Victoria, 1988 M.A., University of Victoria, 1990 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Anthropology and Sociology) We accept this dissertation as conforming to the required standard Xbffi-UNIVERSrTY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA October 1997 \u00C2\u00A9 Gregory Victor Loewen, 1997 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. DE-6 (2/88) 11 ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of how anthropologists in Canada over the previous thirty years, have constructed anthropological knowledge. It reports, examines, and comments upon interviews with anthropologists trained inside and outside of Canada. Most occupy senior academic positions at Canadian universities. Interpretation of this material takes place within the discourses of the anthropology of knowledge and education. Anthropologists say that ways of thinking about anthropological knowledge conflict at the theoretical level but do not conflict in practice. Practice is defined as fieldwork and teaching. Here, theory is felt only indirectly. Various tensions follow from this understanding. They include those between subject and object, positivism and post-positivism, value and validity, field and archive, and cultural relativism versus scientific knowledge. The concept which mediates these tensions is that of the field. Fieldwork is seen by anthropologists as an experience with both epistemological and ethical implications. Ethically, the field supports a certain manner of living and outlook on humanity. This outlook includes respect for cultural differences. Yet, epistemologically, the field is divisive because it is cast as the promotional agent for various kinds of method, theory, and reflective analyses. These analyses include a belief in value relativism in concert with a scientific notion of validity. For example, if it were not for the fundamental tools of positivism in anthropology, anthropologists felt that anthropological knowledge might be seen as idiosyncratic. In their search for human knowledge, anthropologists are united by their methods and ethics. They are divided, however, by their theories. These divisions and unities are inherited in the culture of anthropology. Although anthropologists understand different cultures' values to be equal, they suggest that ways of knowing another culture through anthropology are not equally valid. Theoretical conflicts are also produced in institutions. These are seen as major influences on the 'look' of anthropology at various times and places. Departments, publishers, students and teachers are all influences on anthropological knowledge construction. Anthropological knowledge is also seen as being constructed at a personal level. Anthropologists feel the concept of vocation in the individual's life-narrative as an anthropologist is important to this construction. Anthropology is seen as a calling or assignation. As well, the purpose of anthropological knowledge is seen as an ethical precept. The sanctity of field experiences for these anthropologists brings them together ethically but divides them epistemologically. I l l TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iii Acknowledgements v Epigraphs v i Chapter One Introduction 1 Introduction to the Project 1 The Shifting Theoretical Background of the Thinking of the Natives: Some Examples 4 Marxism and Anthropology: a Brief Review 11 Linguistics and Shifting Epistemologies in Anthropology 15 Ethnosemantics, Efhnoscience, and the New Ethnography 26 The Canadian Scene 34 Methods and Profile of the Participants 46 Chapter Two Knowledge, Theory and their Cultural Space 51 Anthropology of Knowledge - Theory and Epistemology 52 Guises of Epistemology in Anthropology 53 The Field as a Leitmotif of Epistemological Identity 60 Epistemology as both a Method and a Methodology for Cross-Cultural Communication 65 Epistemology as a Social Construct: Fuller 74 An Anthropology of Epistemology: Latour 79 Chapter Three Epistemological Differences and their Tensions 88 Epistemological Shifts in Anthropology: Geertz 88 Implications of the Textualist Viewpoint for Method, Institution, and Education in Anthropology 97 The Status of Positivism in Anthropology 102 Positivism, Post-Positivism and Post-Modernism 117 Chapter Four Babel Rejoined: The Culture of Anthropological Knowledge 134 Introduction 134 Personal Influences on Knowledge Construction 136 Looking at History and the Construction of Knowledge 147 How is Anthropological Knowledge Unique? 159 Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge 188 Ethics in Anthropological Knowledge 208 iv Chapter Five Anthropology of Education - Educating Anthropology 218 Aspects of Anthropology in Educational Institutions 219 An Ethnography of the Educational Institution: Bourdieu 234 Chapter Six Institutions and Anthropological Knowledge 243 Institutional Atmospheres: Schools and Departments 244 Personalities and Knowledge Construction 252 Course Media and Curricula 263 The Changing Institution 271 The Changing Knowledge of Anthropologists: What is the Discipline coming to? 277 Chapter Seven Why Anthropology? The Ethical View 294 What Anthropologists say is Important and Why 294 Reasons for Anthropology 308 Chapter Eight Conclusion 328 A Sense of Anthropology 329 References Cited 334 Appendix 1 Formal Interview Questions 360 V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many persons deserve credit for helping to bring this dissertation to fruition. A very special thanks is due the members of my committee. They are Professor Elvi Whittaker, Professor William McKellin, and Professor Andrew Irvine. As well, a thank you to Professors Martin Silverman, Regna Darnell, and Peter Stephenson, and to all of the participants in this project, who really make anthropology what it is today. Thanks to all who made CASCA XXIII a wonderful part of my research. A thank you to my parents for their support and belief. Finally, thank you to Joyce Lem for her patience and her teaching. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my mother. vi It is no more possible to escape the situational immediacies of ethnographical knowing, the thoughts and occasions one is trying to intrude upon, than it is to escape temporal bounds, and it is perhaps even more mischievous to pretend to do so. - Such, such are the facts. Or anyway, so I say (Geertz 1995:17). Metaphysics begins when theory criticizes itself as ontology, as the dogmatism and spontaneity of the same, and when metaphysics, in departing from itself, lets itself be put into question by the other in the movement of ethics (Derrida 1978:96 [1967b]). It was a confession of human ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain. His painful toil had been wasted, his curious ingenuity had been squandered to no purpose. He had been pulling at strings to which nothing was attached; he had been marching as he thought, straight to the goal, while in reality he had been only treading a narrow circle (Frazer 1950:57 [1922]). A thing explained is a thing we have no further concern with. - What did that god mean who counselled: 'Know they self!'? Does that perhaps mean: have no further concern for yourself! become objective!' - And Socrates? - and the 'man of science'? - (Nietzsche 1973:92 [1886:sec.80]). 1 CHAPTER ONE - INTRODUCTION The history of our science can, and should, be approached with the same systematic interpretive methods that we use in the construction of any other ethnography (Darnell 1996:8). You may set out to isolate yourself from cosmopolitan concerns and contain your interests within hermetical contexts. But the concerns follow you. The contexts explode (Geertz 1995:95). Introduction to the Project: This dissertation is a study of how anthropologists in Canada construct anthropological knowledge. It reports, describes, and examines interviews with Canadian anthropologists, both academic and other, trained in and out of Canada. Interpretation of their remarks occurs in the context of a review of anthropological literature from the fields of the anthropology of knowledge, the anthropology of education, and anthropology in Canada. The purpose of this dissertation is to attempt an understanding of the professional culture that influences anthropologists' construction of what knowledge is, and how it is to be considered anthropological. Twenty anthropologists were asked about their understandings of the production and construction of anthropological discourse. What is anthropology? What makes an anthropologist? How is anthropology different today than from the beginning of their respective careers? How do anthropologists see these differences, and why? Anthropology, at least as represented by the participants in this study, was taken as a culture to be constructed by the voices of native anthropologists. Broadly at issue is epistemology. It was something debated amongst anthropologists during the previous three decades - the period this project examines. Major epistemological changes were discussed. It is important to understand what factors of the professional culture of anthropologists were influential in these discussions and others simply because these events still resonate with us today. As professional members of an academic discipline, the anthropologists interviewed suggested two important influences. The first can be called epistemological. That is, the theory of knowledge in which one 2 was trained or undertook fieldwork was an influence on the way in which all one's anthropological knowledge was constructed. Second, the institutional framework in which one was taught and where one teaches was seen as the other major influence in this regard. Both were seen as important aspects of knowledge construction because they represent in turn what knowledge is inherited and where that inheritance occurs. Furthermore, how such an inheritance occurs was seen as personal to the individual anthropologist, and occurred in an ethical relationship. This means that it was considered a good in itself to teach and learn anthropology. Knowledge of anthropology. Knowledge of the anthropologist. The former is akin to a model of anthropology as a subject or discipline. It says, 'this is what anthropology looks like, its theories and its descriptions'. The latter is like a model for doing anthropology as a work or life. It says, 'this is how you do anthropology'. These two vectors are linked by a further concept. It was suggested that the concept of the field, and therefore the experience of fieldwork, galvanized anthropologists' sense of purpose. To a great extent, fieldwork created their understanding of what anthropology does. Although anthropology is seen as a general body of knowledge, how each individual anthropologist participates within it was different. The most important reason for this variability is the notion that anthropologists use a spectrum of theories of knowledge. Anthropological epistemologies conflict at the theoretical level, but provide consistency and congruence in practice. Although the conflict between a theory of knowledge and a way of acting is not the same as that between theory and practice per se, I think that the perceived differences between thought and action overarch both. In discussing theories of culture, for example, this group of anthropologists seemed to be in disagreement over the best way of constructing anthropological knowledge. However, in discussing practical field experiences, there was general agreement on what had to be done to find out about a culture. More importantly, the anthropologists were in broad agreement about the vocational character of their discipline. They also agreed on the ethical purpose for the attempts by anthropology to understand human culture and difference. Ethics is defined as a respect for cultural difference. Even while there is disagreement on what anthropology should look like as a discourse, 3 there is much more agreement on why the discourse should exist in the first place, and how, apart from the institutional structure of anthropological careers, to become a part of it. In sum, the culture of anthropology exists both at the levels of theories of knowledge and as a personal experience. The anthropologists included in the study suggested their culture had 1) a 'higher purpose' - the ethical relationship and communication about humanity cross-culturally, 2) a unique training - cross-cultural or other experiential fieldwork at a locale removed from the academy, and finally 3) a calling - a vocational commitment by anthropologists. The inheritance of these themes by younger students from elder anthropologists occurs remarkably like that of oral cultures. What is known as anthropology is not the same as what is known in anthropology. Nor are either of these the same as what is known about anthropology. This study occupies the last two sites of knowledge. There remain doubts about this knowledge as anthropological knowledge. This is so because many of the speakers are equivocal and ambiguous in their sense of what I was trying to do. To do a study of anthropologists as a sociologist of knowledge or as a philosopher gave me my 'about'. This was agreed upon. To do this study while enrolled in a cultural milieu of academic anthropology, 'inside if, as it were, would give me my 'in'. There was no assured way of getting my 'as'. Only anthropologists can do anthropology. Anthropology cannot study itself by itself and also step outside of itself. To use an older term, there are only 'emics' to be had within this project. This is so due to various native speakers of and in anthropology presenting themselves as believing (or not) in the possibility of a study such as mine. My existence as a scholar was something to be proved. However, my existence as ethnographer was not a matter of evidential argument. It just could not occur as such. I had to content myself with the depiction of a variety of lives within anthropology. My ethnographic potential was clear in only two of three possible discursive forms. One was the positivistic about. The second was the institutionalistic and therefore directly participational in. Within the portion of anthropology I encountered - or almost half of the speakers - would not let me stand unequivocally as anthropologist in their midst. 4 One may expect that this project opens a window on the disparate knowledges of anthropologists and anthropology. In order to do so, it shines the mirror on itself. My thesis is that anthropological knowledge is that tension between epistemology and ethics. Anthropology is neither a social science nor a humanity. In order to be classified as anthropological, a statement must exist as a balance between the science of a disinterested ethnographer and the humanity of a cultural being. Anthropology is demonstrative of diverse attempts at maintaining this balance. Each anthropologist is an agent of this balance. The Shifting Theoretical Background of the Thinking of the Natives: Some Examples This section will provide background to the interviews conducted by introducing some of the theoretical fluxes which the participants in this study have inherited and in which they find themselves working. Anthropologists often see these fluxes as competing schools of thought, theoretical paradigms, heuristic tools, or all three at once. Three discursive milieux can serve as examples of these differing positions. The conflict between what is thought empirically observable about human behaviour and the possible unconscious and unobserved structures which pattern that behaviour resonate in each example. Speakers also demonstrated an avowed interest in, or bias for, observed action or interpreted thought and intent. First, Marxism and anthropology was a theme which was frequently introduced by this particular group of anthropologists. Second, a brief glimpse at ethnosemantics and ethnoscience will recognize one of the contending visions of how anthropologists thought about understanding other cultures. A third example of conflicting theories of knowledge and their study was that surrounding the figure of Clifford Geertz. Underlying many of these debates are the differences between positivism and post-positivism (Alexander 1982:6; D'Andrade 1995:8-9; 248-9). I wanted to see how these reported differences were playing themselves out in anthropology because a rhetoric of discontinuity is extant in the published debate which conflicts with the rhetoric of continuity anthropologists use to create personal narratives. According to interviewed 5 sources and published accounts, certain questions coloured the debates about positivism and post-positivism. What kind of epistemology comes with fieldwork? (Whittaker 1981:446). How do the ethics involved with fieldwork relate to the theory of knowledge in anthropology?1 Alexander defines positivism as having a central postulate. This is \"...that a radical break exists between empirical observations and nonempirical statements...\" (1982:5), meaning that general metaphysical issues have no place in social science discussion. Hence, theoretical questions must be dealt with in reference to empirical fact (1982:7). Post-positivism, on the other hand, is defined as the theory of knowledge that began to displace positivism during the 1960s. Post-positivism has several major characteristics: a) the rejection of the observed as the only reality, b) the understanding of the written word to be a part of reality and not abstracted from it, and c) the rejection of the idea that language consists of definitions of things (Alexander 1982:30; 1990; 1990a). One major tenet of post-positivism is the idea that all scientific data are informed by theory (Whittaker 1981:447). The flux of positivist/post-positivist credos was much in evidence in the published record of anthropology during the period in which most of the participants in this study were trained (D'Andrade 1995:9; Douglas 1995:26-7; Geertz 1983:158[1982], 1984:264). It was also evident in the ethnographic material of this study. A few examples will serve to remind the reader of what were, and in some areas of anthropology perhaps still are, some of the major debates. Most of these debates included the positivist idea that reality is external from our minds. As well, many suggested that such an external reality is the ground of all experience. However, a post-positivist cultural construction of the world was also found in the debates. Following from this, such cultural constructions were seen as relative to a specific worldview. While many other debates could be examined, I think that this particular glance serves to ensconce the interview material in a wider context. Although conflicting methodologies of comprehension subsume topical interests, the important thing to note about all of the following debates 1 If \"Fieldwork can be seen as an evolving dialectic in the negotiation of privacy\" (Whittaker 1981:446), then shared meaning is created through the very act of interviewing, rather than that act representing a conversation about already given ideas. Epistemologically, knowledge becomes performative. Ethically, that performance must be consensual and historically conscious. 6 is that they serve to represent much of the epistemological spectrum in anthropology. Such a spectrum might be seen as having positivist and post-positivist poles. Near the pole of positivism for example, might be cultural items such as observable behaviours, material culture and technology, and subsistence patterns. Clustering near the pole of post-positivism one might find ideology and religion. Where to place kinship was indeed a profound problem for many anthropologists for a long time. As well, the positivist pole might attract base, materialism, etics, and structure. The post-positivist end of the spectrum might feature superstructure, ideology, emics, and sentiment. Without getting deeply into all the debates, one can get a flavour of their vitality and epistemological relevance from the debate between Levi-Strauss versus Geertz (in Geertz (1973:355-8 [1967]), where Levi-Strauss is accused of making actual \"men\" expendable to \"man\", and of creating \"an infernal culture machine\".2 Rather, Geertz argues that it is the actions of 'men' as public performances that constitute culture. 'Man' can be seen as a non-positivist concept because it is not observable nor subject to particular action. 'Men' and their particular observable actions inform a more positivistic notion. This may be ironic, as Geertz is often seen as non-positivist or anti-positivist. As well, Schneider versus L6vi-Strauss was another debate. The social order may be seen as positivist as it can be constructed from observables, whereas the symbolic order remained in an unobservable or ideal realm. Schneider (1965) asks if Levi-Strauss' separation of mind into intellect and emotions is necessary: \"It is conceivable that if Levi-Strauss is concerned with the social order as a symbolic order, with the organization and configuration of that symbolic order, with the relationships between sub-systems of symbols, that the enormous weight, the almost indisputable weight, of 2 This debate echoes the one between Levi-Strauss and Ricoeur, where the former states: \"the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute but to dissolve man... [by] the reintegration of culture in nature and finally of life within the whole of its physico-chemical conditions [ ] As the mind too is a thing, the functioning of this thing teaches us something about the nature of things: even pure reflection is in the last analysis an internalization of the cosmos\" (Levi-Strauss 1966:247-8 [1962]). Ricoeur replied that 'The consciousness of a validity of a method... is inseparable from the consciousness of its limits. These limits appear to me to be of two kinds: on the one hand it seems to me that the passage to the savage mind is made by favour of an example that is already too favourable, one which is perhaps an exception rather than an example. On the other hand, the passage from a structural science to a structuralist philosophy, seems to me to be not very satisfying and not even very coherent\" (Ricoeur 1974:44-5 [1969]). 7 Freud's work on symbolism would serve him well... It is odd, too, that the non-logical and irrational character of the logic of the unconscious as Freud describes it should fail to appeal to Levi-Strauss\" (1965:39). Schneider versus Needham was yet another theoretical debate. Schneider suggested that final cause or outcome cannot account for a cultural system. Instead, an efficient cause of emotion or sentiment directed certain patterns of kinship, notably the famous anthropological idiom of cross-cousin marriage. On the other hand, Needham replied that such sentimental or psychological reasons could not be applied to what was after all a sociological problem. Hence, in fact, an alliance theory was what promoted solidarity in societies with segmentary lineage systems, as well as dealing in that most valuable of 'commodities', women (Honigmann 1976:316ff, 280ff). Yet another example of the professional debate about method and knowledge in anthropology might be Leach's critiques: \"Somehow [Malinowski] has so assimilated himself into the Trobriand situation that he is able to make the Trobriands a microcosm of the whole primitive world. And the same is true for his successors; for Firth, Primitive Man is a Tikopian, for Fortes he is a citizen of Ghana\" (Leach 1961:1). Finally Harris was often cast as seemingly 'against the world': I should like to take this opportunity to apologize for what may appear at times as unnecessarily severe criticism of venerated colleagues, in both present and past generations. Although I have sought to avoid ad hominem discussions, it has seemed to me at this particular moment in the development of anthropological theory that critical judgements deserve priority over polite ones. It has certainly not been my intention to be disrespectful of the men and women who have devoted themselves, frequently with great personal courage and sacrifice, to the ideal of furthering the understanding of the ways of mankind. My interest throughout the writing of this book has been to advance the theoretical standing of anthropology among the social sciences (Harris 1968:7). At least one anthropologist remained unconvinced: \"In the end, cultural materialism in Harris's hands amounts to mechanical determinism. The dynamic and variable interaction of the parts of culture are downplayed, and one is left with a neat but monotonous formula in which ideology and social organization are the puppets of technology\" (Barrett 1984:50). 8 I will now summarize a few of the major themes of recent anthropological debate. Although only three of these will be explored in detail, all of the following themes must be regarded as important to the flux of theories of knowledge. Each of the anthropologists in this study was surrounded by a shifting cloud of interpretive paradigms. This flux is more noticeable at the level of theory as, by the 1970s, the post-positivist discourse was beginning to be accessed by anthropologists in North America. In practice, it is less noticeable. Perhaps this flux occupies a spectrum at opposing ends of which lie doctrinaire positivism and post-positivism. This shifting zone of anthropological debate is reflected in the relationship between ethnography and epistemology (Sperber 1982:32). The epidemiology of ideas' in anthropology permits many diagnoses, and which should be rethought during each prescription (Sperber 1982:30). Just one example is found in the work of Paul Rabinow (1977;1991). His work is related to the explication of discourse in Foucault (1970[1966],1979[1975]) and is ultimately important for anthropological epistemology. This is so because the positivist notion of physical reality is undermined. The way in which we know the world is seen as historical, and not value-free. Prior theories are seen to construct present ethnographies, rather than vice-versa. In more recent anthropology, a shifting milieu of epistemologies is given voice by the critique of functionalism and of structural-functionalism by Jarvie (1964). The fallacy of affirming the consequent is suggested as a logical error of functionalist ethnography, in that the social system, created by the disparate variables of culture, was seen as itself their creator (1964:44-7). Later criticism attacked interpretive ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; McGrane 1989; Tyler 1987). As well, the critiques evoked by feminist theory (Moore 1988; Rosaldo 1986; Strathern 1972) are instrumental. The varying clouds of shifting anthropological debate include structuralism and its major representative, L6vi-Strauss (1969[1949], 1966[1962], 1966[1964]). Structuralism's relationship to the linguistics of de Saussure (1991[1916]) and Jakobson (1962) is well known. Structuralism can be defined as the strategy of explaining parts of discourse by looking, not at the terms which make up discourse, but at the relations between these terms. This amounted to a rejection of positivist inclinations. Although one can observe only terms, it was not their observability that was important but the 9 structural relation between them. Le>i-Strauss' thought has many guises within anthropology. It can be found in studies of language, kinship, myth, social structure, and is encountered in debates with functionalism, hermeneutics, Marxism, and positivism. In general, the notion of structure is non-positivistic. However, the structure which structuralism suggested as being a foundation for reality can also be seen as positivist in that a reality based framework also houses many of the latter's aspirations. Marxism in anthropology is seen to be 'structuralist Marxism' in Godelier (1975[1973],1975), and 'classical Marxism' in Bloch (1975). Here, the positivist understanding of the technological modes of production and the observable lifestyles of actors in capitalism were reconstructed. They were taken to be manifestations of the deeper realities of relations to production and consumption. One finds in Marxism a rejection of some of the positivist conceptions of work, labour, value, production and reproduction. For positivism, these concepts were functions of the reality of the capitalist marketplace. They were also subject to humanly motivated market forces. However, with Marxism, a different understanding altered these conceptions by assuming an entirely different context. In a word, conflict replaced co-operation as a leitmotif of analysis. Feminist anthropology and its dynamic relationship with all other theoretical forms is yet another example of a shifting cloud of debate within which contemporary anthropologists must speak and work. Moore (1988) gives a general history of this work, and texts such as Rosaldo (1986) and Tuana (1989) relate feminist work to theories of social science and science respectively. In Fox (1980), one finds an examination and critique of development planning and its relegation of women to stereotyped roles, some of which are also examined in Sanday and Goodenough (1990). Along with the sociology of knowledge and Marxism, feminist work holds that no knowledge is ideologically free (Cole and Phillips 1995). Past ways of knowing are inextricably bound up in a male-centred epistemological regime. Knowledge is produced for and by a certain audience. This often excludes women. Instead, post-positivist feminism inserts a female viewpoint. It remakes epistemological awareness so that there is a fundamentally recognized female existence in human knowledge. 10 Another area of concern is within the various anthropologies of language. Examples include the ethnography of speaking in Pike (1967[1954]), Hymes (1964; 1974) and Gumperz (1971; 1974). As well, the cognitive linguistics in D'Andrade (1981) are important. Stephen Tyler and his serial relationships with the cognitive (1969), the hermeneutic (1978), and deconstructive (1987), respectively are also of interest to changing theories. The positivistic conception that there was an underlying structure to language in general was partially rejected. Once again there is a movement from observables to deep structure. However, this theme moved beyond the structuralist relations to a post-positivist context. Interpretation, or the art of understanding as opposed to describing, has also been a major theme in anthropology.3 This movement towards post-positivism included the idea that one no longer simply applied a set of prejudged tenets to observed data. This procedure had explained human actions by motives mechanically derived from predefined categories of social systems. Events, however, have a history, and are also in some sense created by the anthropologist (Evans-Pritchard 1951:19; 88). Instead, human interaction and the context of social events were \"local\". Hence, knowledge and experience of them must also be local. One needed to interpret cultural events using local meaning or the \"native's point of view\". One had to transfer allegiance from positivist epistemological assumptions to allegiance to the locals' theory of knowledge. This shift is generally associated with Clifford Geertz (1973;1983,T987). In his work one finds a relationship to 1) local knowledge as the \"stock of knowledge at hand\" and \"multiple realities\" from Schutz (1967:3-47[1953] and 1967:207-256[1945]) and 2) hermeneutics in Ricoeur (1965[1955], 1971[1991], 1981;1993[1992]). Also, there is an influence due to the 3 Interpretation theory may be found in Gadamer (1988[1960],1986[1977]) and Ricoeur (1981;1993[1992]). The discourse analysis of power relations in the academy and the sciences are explored by Bourdieu and Passeron (1992[1970]), Bourdieu (1988[1984j) and Latour (1986). The difference between hermeneutic thinkers and semiotic ones and their analyses can be summed up by Alexander: \"For Dilthey, 'within' means returning to the patterns of subjective experience. For Saussure, it means seeking out the internal relationships of words\" (1990:9). As well, Alexander (1990:10) suggests that \"Marxist, semiotic, and functionalist cultural theories all have their viable contemporary versions. Hermeneutics, by contrast, is a general sensibility that affects most contemporary practice\". It is language which forms a basis for the comparison and contrasting of interview themes. Seidman agrees: \"The routines of daily life are maintained only by achieving mutual understanding. Interpretation is not only a specialized method of social science but a practical accomplishment that makes social life possible\" (1990:217). 11 positivism of Nagel (1949[1944],1961), as well as the Verstehen of Weber (1963[1904], and Abel 1953[1948]). Texts began to take on realities of their own. The positivist tenet that observable events and actions in nature and culture were the essence of reality was rejected (Sahlins 1976:196-7). Instead, the post-positivist understands texts to be reality. During the interviews, few speakers failed to mention Geertz as a major factor at least once in our conversations.4 Geertz (1973;1983) presents cultural meaning of social events in a new way. He puts an important assumption to work in the interpretive realm. Meaning is shared and is public in nature, not just individual. It is the relationship between the socially meant and the individually intended that gives culture its shared meaning. If we are to see things from the native's point of view, we must use what actors say about any particular event in tandem with what they actually do. Alexander remarks, \"Geertz insists that it is the actors and the event that create this structure, not the structure that creates the event\" (1990:15). We have to deal with various arenas of meaning. These include the ethnographer's individual understanding and anthropology's understanding. Obviously, the cultural actor's understanding must be included in any analysis. In sum, much of Geertz's influence in anthropology is due to the gradual introduction of interpretive themes to a scientific or 'reality-based' framework. Some of the recent changes from description to interpretation in anthropological theory are in large part a reflection of this discussion and tension. Marxism and Anthropology: a Brief Review A renaissance in Marxist interpretations applying to anthropological theory and ethnographic works was realized by the early 1970s (Bloch 1975; Godelier 1973). Engel's statement \"According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life\" (1946:5[1884]) sums up this work. This meant each culture must find a way to supply its material needs. The idea that \"...within this structure of society based on kinship groups the 4 I discuss Geertz's influences in detail below. 12 productivity of labour increasingly develops, and with it, private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labour power of others and hence the basis of class antagonisms...\" (1946:6[1884]), is interpreted as being counterproductive to the positive image of a new science. Interest in variants of Marxist theory was regenerated in anthropology in the 1950s. Questioning the ways of knowing in anthropology was a focus of this development: In adopting Marx's materialism as the epistemological horizon of critical work in the social sciences, we must discover and examine, by ways yet to be found, the invisible network of causes linking together forms, functions, modes of articulation and the hierarchy, appearance, and disappearance of [ ] social structures (Godelier 1977:2[1973]). Godelier anticipated no return to Marx. However, any analysis that presumed Marx's texts must be prepared to show how social structures, no matter in what form or society, produced and reproduced forms of inequality. As well, it must show how these social structures were always in conflict with one another (1977:4-5[1973]). It is in conflict and manifestations of such conflict that the investigator can glimpse the deeper structure of human relations: \"Thus, in continuities and ruptures such as these, the unintentional inner properties of social structures are always manifest, and the very contradictions which arise in these structures have their basis in these properties\" (1977:5[1973]). The parallel to Levi-Strauss, in his analysis of the deeper relations hidden and yet revealed by the forms of myth, should be clear: ...for Levi-Strauss, as well as for Marx, structures are not directly visible or observable realities, but levels of reality which exist beyond man's visible relations and whose functioning constitutes the deeper logic of a social system - the underlying order by which the apparent order must be explained (Godelier 1977:45[1973]). The idea is that we have yet to discover that the manner in which the human universe works is common to structuralism and to Marxism in their nascent stages. As both progress, they are endowed with the same confident tendencies we have seen in positivist science - that the natural world will eventually be explained (Railton 1991:763[1984]). In fact, positivist terms like 'explanation', 'cause' and 'effect', and 'answer', 'correctness' and others are 13 often found in the introductions to methodology sections of various Marxist pieces. For instance, commenting on the famous statement to the the effect that \"all history is a history of class struggle\" (Marx and Engels 1965:1 [1844]), Terray suggests that it is an epistemological a priori. Thus \"If all history may be regarded as the history of class confrontation, it is because class is, as it were, the place where the various dimensions of social life... intersect\" (1975:86). Kahn continues the trend: \"Crisis is then the result of rising rice prices. It is interesting to speculate on the possible causes of this\" (1975:150). Friedman (1975:172) tells us that \"The supernature [sic] projection of the lineage structure is not... a simple reflection of a more concrete social reality. It is an integral part of that reality.\" Such examples tend to undermine the differences the Marxist anthropologists are attempting to put forward in the face of positivist hegemony. By using that very language, they posit a hidden reality to be exposed by analysis. These examples seem unfaithful to Marx himself in that he argues: The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, supplant the criticism of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory, too, will become material force as soon as it seizes the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses as soon as its proofs are ad hominem and its proofs are ad hominem as soon as it is radical. To be radical is to grasp the matter by the root. But for man the root is man himself (Marx 1977:69[1842]). Yet the means for a movement from positivism to post-positivist is clearly within the Marxist anthropological texts. Alexander (1982:69) mentions that within all the texts of Marx there is a synthesis of both materialism and praxis. For example, Kahn suggests that the critique of idealism might be overblown. However, Marx and Engels (1973[1845]) demonstrate that a radical shift in ways of knowing the world is part of historical materialism. This shift emphasizes \"...the poverty inherent in empiricism when faced with history\" (Kahn 1975:155). As well, Godelier (1975:14) criticises the positivists when they assume that the visible and the invisible are one and the same. For example, hierarchies in institutions are different from how hierarchies order social relations. The former is what we can observe. The latter is what we must subject to analysis. Such an analysis means we must go beyond what Marx accomplished: 14 Therefore to discover the deep logic of the history of societies it is necessary to go beyond the structural analysis of 'forms' of social relations or of thought, and to try to detect the effects of the various 'structures' on each other, and their hierarchical arrangement and articulation resting on the base of their particular modes of production (Godelier 1975:15). In fact, the ontological premise which Marx outlines is too radical for some analyses to uncover. Since existence is socially constructed (Firth 1975:32[1972]), it calls for a reflexive Marxism. Firth suggests that Marx's \"...notion of the material world around us is a materialization of man's praxis, man's productive activity in history, is not just an assertion that nature is man made; it also implies that man's understanding of the material world is a reflection of his own social world\" (1975:32[1972]). If we are not reflexive, we might commit the same errors as the positivists. Through reflexivity we can understand Marxist anthropology. During this period, Marxist anthropologists stress Marx's liberating force. Many problems once seen as intractable by some students, or accepted as givens by others, are worked out: \"The Marxist approach must transcend the false dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony by making the object of analysis the system of social reproduction, a system whose properties can only be defined with respect to time\" (Friedman 1975:162). Yet controversy remains within Marxist anthropology. One example is particularly telling. Godelier suggests that anthropologists have no theory of modes of production. One must be developed from ethnographic material (Godelier 1975[1973]:3).5 Such schemes are supposed to account for cross-cultural modes of production. These schemes constitute Marxism's major theoretical contributions and ethnographic interpretations. The mode of production as culturally constructed was seen as a \"revolution in the concept of Nature\" in that nature herself became cultural (Engels 1946:32[1894]). This idea underlines the post-positivist aspect of Marxism. In exposing dogmatism, Marxism and anthropology may be seen as having their closest ethical ties. Marxism does this by analysing the inequalities in social relations. Anthropology does it by relativizing the values of different cultures. 5 Other writers on Marxism, however, do not agree. Hindess and Hirst argue there cannot be such a construction as a general theory (1975:320). 15 Dogmatism has its roots in ideology. The manner in which individuals relate their existence to their material conditions may be defined as ideology (Feuchtwang 1975:70). For Marxists, all ideology has explicit reference to a social hierarchy. It is this which must be investigated cross-culturally. However, because \"They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented\" (quoted in Terray 1975:92), non-Europeans might be seen as being incapable of self-representation (Wolf 1982). Linguistics and Shifting Epistemologies in Anthropology: Another aspect of anthropology which participated in the flux of positivist/ post-positivist epistemologies is anthropological linguistics. Along with many defenses of positivist notions, this flux witnesses several different and often conflicting rejections of positivism. They are: a) the rejection of a deeper and foundational level of reality, b) the rejection of the notion that text and language were not real, and c) the rejection of the idea that the role of language was to clarify the definitions of words (see Tyler's (1978:465ff) rejection of nomenclature in this regard). The positivist arena in linguistics and anthropology is well defined by Pike's work (1967[1954]). Linguistic analyses of culture could be made more objective through applying linguistic methodology in doing ethnography. Pike uses apple pie analogies and traditional examples from the American social scene in the 1950s, (a pseudo-evangelical church, a college football game). Pike takes the reader from the surface to the depths and from what we see to what it means to see it within a particular cultural context, he attempts to demonstrate the ways in which culture and language structure our experience. His method has two aspects: the descriptive or 'etic', using analytical distinctions not part of any particular culture or language, and 'emic', or distinctions that are particular to a language or culture. Emic sameness thus can be etic difference. Anthropologically speaking, the native's notions can be labelled 'emic', and the researcher's are called 'etic', suffixes borrowed from the linguistic notions of phonemic and phonetic. As well, sociolinguistics to be seen in Hymes (1964; 1974) and Gumperz (1971) are foreshadowed in Pike (see Gumperz and Hymes 1966; Hammel 1965).6 Hymes (1974) suggests that it is 16 the way ideas are communicated that is the key to understanding them. The social context of communication remains paramount. Perhaps the meanings appropriate to each social situation could be studied ethnographically (1974:76). In studying language this way, the bases of linguistics will also be challenged and changed (Hymes 1974:vii-x). Hymes, along with Gumperz, used an ethnographic focus in renewing anthropological interest in the study of language as used. Performance and linguistic competence could be directly linked through the positivistic observation of the former and the interpolation of the latter (Gumperz and Hymes 1966). Hymes' (1964) large edited volume, pieces are culled from across anthropology. Tyler's (1969) edited volume concentrates on the cognitive aspect from Hymes' work. It was the Chomskian 'revolution' that in part gave impetus to linguistic anthropology during this time, by opposing transformational grammar and deep structure to the text based analyses of Pike. Linguistics was in a period of radical change during this period. 7 It was Chomsky who announced a revolution in epistemology in linguistics. Language was seen as a unique and inherently human capacity, but one which was also universally available to us. This capacity had a structure which manifested itself in oral performance. With Chomsky, grammar thus becomes rules for generating correct sentences, not their particular performance. As well, a type of linguistics became a study of this universal grammar's logic. ^ It is Pike (1967[1954]), and later Hymes (1974), who continue Sapir's vast legacy in linguistic anthropology. It is interesting to note that both referenced monographs are dedicated to Sapir. 7 There was also a taking stock occurring. Many histories of linguistics were appearing. For example, Robins suggests that the study of language follows directly from a growing human self-awareness (1967:2). There were also attempts to create a total history of linguistics as an evolution from the Greeks onward, ending with Chomsky. In Europe, transformational linguistics with its scientific aspirations was more recognizable than in North America (Robins 1967:229-231). Reviews of contemporary linguistics were also extant. For example, Postman and Weingartner (1966) cover documents for teaching in composition and linguistics, speeches, lectures, and exercises, as well as local histories of aspects of the discipline. Of special interest are their epistemological comments. These often have implications beyond linguistics. For example, some reviewers suggest many of science's most curious innovations are the result of changes in semantics (Postman and Weingartner 1966:133). Tyler takes up this theme to critique formal hegemonies in the sciences (Tyler 1978). As well, works on the acquisition of language and psychological and philosophical theories of linguistics were also current (Vygotsky 1962[1934]; Merleau-Ponty 1973[1964]). 17 Chomsky suggested that in spite of the immense diversity of human languages as documented by ethnographic work, there were still deeper structures common to all. Surface structure indeed existed in the multiplicity of tongues. This Babel, however, was not echoed in the forms which underlay different languages, and which allowed humans use of language in general: It is commonly held that modern linguistic and anthropological investigations have conclusively refuted the doctrines of classical universal grammar, but this claim seems to me very much exaggerated. Modern work has, indeed, shown a great diversity in the surface structures of languages. However, since the study of deep structure has not been its concern, it has not attempted to show a corresponding diversity of underlying structures, and, in fact, the evidence that has been accumulated in modern study of language does not appear to suggest anything of this sort. The fact that languages differ from one another quite significantly in surface structure would hardly have come as a surprise to the scholars who developed traditional universal grammar (Chomsky 1965:118). The void of research concerning deep structure is evident to Chomsky as not merely the result of a deficiency in attention paid to the subject. Instead, he suggests that inherent in the epistemology of empiricism there is a lack of ability to understand that which is to be found beneath the surface. Chomsky's structuralism is kindred with seventeenth-century philosophical rationalism.8 It is opposed to empiricism in the sense that rationalism holds that there is a template innate to the human mind which serves as the basis 8 This sentiment is repeated throughout one of Chomsky's most seminal texts, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (1965): 'To say that formal properties of the base will provide the framework for the characterization of universal categories is to assume that much of the structure of the base is common to all languages. This is a way of stating the traditional view, whose origins can be traced back at least to the Grammaire generate et raisonee [1660]\" (Chomsky 1965:117). As well: \"Real progress in linguistics consists in the discovery that certain features of given languages can be reduced to universal properties of language, and explained in terms of these deeper aspects of linguistic form\" (1965:35). Once again: \"A general linguistic theory of the sort roughly described earlier, and elaborated in more detail in the following chapters and in other studies of transformational grammar, must therefore be regarded as a specific hypothesis, of an essentially rationalist cast, as to the the nature of mental structures and processes\" (1965:53). Further, such a theory aims at displacing what Chomsky may feel is an empirical hegemony over the study of language: \"...the empiricist effort to show how the assumptions about a language- acquisition device can be reduced to a conceptual minimum is quite misplaced. The real problem is that of developing a hypothesis about initial structure that is sufficiently rich to account for acquisition of language, yet not so rich to be inconsistent with the known diversity of language\" (1965:58). Chomsky states that if such an hypothesis disagrees with \"...centuries of empiricist doctrine...\" this is a matter of mere historical interest (1965:58). 18 allowing language acquisition can occur, and upon which the performance of language is staged (1965:51). Empiricism in linguistics suggests, however, that \"...language is essentially an adventitious construct, taught... relatively independent in its structure of any innate mental faculties\" (1965:51). The debate is stark if one, on the one hand, sees rationalism as holding to a structure which is fixed in advance and imposes rigid limits on what humans can think or learn, or how they can speak, and on the other, suggests that empiricism writes on the blank slate of the human mind through the scribe of experience only. This historical difference is analogous to the positivist/post-positivist debate. 9 The former suggests, similar to empiricism, that it is sense experience which is important, whereas the latter, as embodied in anthropology through structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology and others, attempts to offer a deeper view. Chomsky cannot himself be characterized as being strictly within either camp, and suggests that neither rationalism nor empiricism need, or can, be completely distinguished (1965:52). As well, he favors a dialogue between sense and mind, perception and acquisition that he sees in rational discussions of language. Innate and latent structures may well be activated by experience and then would become subject to interpretation (1965:51). Portions of Chomsky's linguistic analyses can be seen as rewriting a rationalist epistemology (1965:172). He attempts to incorporate traditional analyses with his own, but always with a view to aid in the exposition of not only deep structures, but to eventually construct a grammar. These incorporations may have minute beginnings, as with a lexical index: \"We see that with a slight extension of conventional notations the systematic use of complex symbols permits a fairly simple and informative statement of one of the basic processes of sub-classification\" (1965:95). Here, symbols which are already extant in other kinds of linguistic analysis may be turned from their previously descriptive tasks to an analysis which sheds light on the limits different permutations of rules set on grammatical correctness. Through 9 Neither positive nor post-positive, numerous hints throughout the text suggest interesting links between Chomsky and post-modernism (see for example 1965:36 where description is devalued, 1965:182 where his analysis of erasure operations verges onto the Derridean concept of supplement, and 1965:184 where the problem of homonymity suggests iterability and the undecidable structure of certain concepts which hold within them their own oppositions (Derrida 1967a:73; 161; 164). See also Chomsky 1965:168; however, where the concepts of arbitrary and nature are still at least hueristically distinguished. 19 continuity of epistemological limits, Chomsky is also able to criticise his previous work (1965:99). Rationalistic overtones, however, pervade his text. In discussing the component of 'base', he suggests its function has a kind of inevitable weight: \"In fact, its role is that of defining the grammatical relations that are expressed in the deep structure and that therefore determine the semantic interpretation of a sentence\" (1965:99). Within a grammar, the syntactic component includes its own theme and variations, the base and transformational components respectively (1965:141). It is the base, however, which ultimately provides the material not only to generate permutations but by which new sentences are recognized. As well, syntax is recursive and self-referencing in a manner very different from empiricist notions of referentiality in terms of words and things (1965:146). Through these limits, it is \"...the grammar which assigns semantic interpretations to signals...\" (1965:141). At the time, the lack of evidence for universal grammar and deep structures was explained by Chomsky as due to scholarly ignorance of \"...relevant psychological and physiological facts...\" (1965:160). Semantics, or what a sentence means, which is subject to the conflict of interpretations, might be in part reduced to syntactics (1965:158), and thus available meaning might be generated by rules imbedded in syntax, even though Chomsky also discusses interpretation as a function of selection by rules manifest in semantics proper. He admits that there remained something unexplained about semantics that lay beyond both surface and deep structures (1965:163). Although at the time mainly concerned with the syntactic component of a generalized grammar, and thereby distancing himself from both hermeneutic and positivistic endeavours, both semantics (the subject of interpretation) and phonetics (amenable to empirical work) were implicated in Chomsky's work: Consequently, the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component (1965:16). 20 What makes Chomsky's grammar transformational is, in essence, that there exist certain innate limitations in and to cognition that allow only a certain amount of the potentially infinitely iterable phrases constructed with a lexicon to become sentences in a 'well-formed surface structure' (1965:143). Following from this, it seemed to Chomsky that the structures of both the semantic and phonetic components functioned analogously with that syntactic.1 0 He proceeds with various other simplifications to his previous theories (1965:144-7). It is also important to recognize that human communication as it is pragmatically and actually realized in speech acts may have little to do with that speaker's knowledge of language. In Chomsky, 'knowledge' means neither knowledge for, nor knowledge of, as the former is like a blueprint and the latter conscious awareness of content and description. Chomskian knowledge is defined through his notion of competence: We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). Only under the idealization set forth... is performance a direct reflection of competence. In actual fact, it obviously could not directly reflect competence (1965:4). Due to the vagaries and inconsistencies involved in speaking and hearing, each one of us through speech occludes the relation between our pragmatic abilities and our innate knowledge1 1, which Chomsky feels is fundamental to linguistic study and language acquisition: The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance, hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior (1965:4). 1 0 'Thus the syntactic component consists of a base that generates deep structures and a transformational part that maps them into surface structures. The deep structure of a sentence is submitted to the semantic component for semantic interpretation, and its surface structure enters the phonological component and undergoes phonetic interpretation. The final effect of a grammar, then, is to relate a semantic interpretation to a phonetic representation - that is, to state how a sentence is interpreted\" (1965:135-6). 1 1 This distinction in structure is similar to Freud's depths and surfaces in that both Chomsky and Freud posited a level below conscious awareness and therefore not subject to empirical analysis. In one, a universal grammar; in the other, a universal unconscious. 21 Chomsky continues by suggesting that the speaker-hearer will most likely be unaware of these rules, and may in many cases remain so. 1 2 As well, ethnographic statements regarding such a system of rules may be inaccurate. Such a sentiment puts Chomsky firmly within the structuralist camp of Freud, Marx, and Levi-Strauss. Freud's psychoanalysis, Marx's alienated consciousness, and L6vi-Strauss' disbelief of local emic interpretations are all examples of what may be the inevitable weight of broaching a theory which purports to attain a deeper level of reality than that empirical or even 'natural'. Yet this is exactly what Chomsky suggested was important: Any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes that are far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness; furthermore, it is quite apparent that a speaker's reports and viewpoints about his behavior and his competence may be in error. Thus a generative grammar attempts to specify what the speaker actually knows, not what he may report about his knowledge (1965:8). This in turn creates methodological problems. In posing a break with empiricist epistemology, Chomsky also necessitates at least a partial rupture with its methods. Although speech as recorded in situations of actuation, rather than direct evidence of the speaker's actual knowledge, will remain important in determining underlying reality, this evidence \"...is neither presented for direct observation nor extractable from data by inductive procedures of any known sort\" (1965:18). The remainder of Chomsky's methodological work may be broadly characterized as addressing these problems, which all rationalist positions face. Performance reflects competence, but indirectly, like behaviour in Freud reflects unconscious desire. Chomsky requires his own traumdeutung, and that is a transformational and generative grammar, which is not merely descriptively adequate, but also provides and explanation for alternative theories (1965:31). 12 \"It would clearly be absurd to suppose that the 'speaker' of such a language, in formulating and 'utterance', first selects the major categories, then the categories into which these are analyzed, and so forth, finally, at the end of the process, selecting the words or symbols he is going to use (deciding what he is going to talk about). To think of a generative grammar in these terms if to take it to be a model of performance rather than competence, thus totally misconstruing its nature\" (1965:140). 22 Chomsky, however, is careful to delineate his project from others that in fact directly involve hermeneutic work 1 3, like Freud's: The existence of deep-seated formal universals, in the sense suggested... implies that all languages are cut to the same pattern, but does not imply that there is any point by point correspondence between particular languages. It does not, for example, imply that there must be some reasonable procedure for translating between languages (1965:30). There is neither totem nor taboo in Chomsky. His grammar justifies itself merely by it being able to state the facts about languages as known empirically correctly, and is predictive, in terms of what a native speaker might understand as a correct sentence given context, and finally, if such a grammar is the ultimate allowed by the general state of linguistic theory and data alike (1965:40). \"Consequently, the main task of of linguistic theory must be to develop an account of linguistic universals that, on the one hand, will not be falsified by the actual diversity of languages and, on the other, will be sufficiently rich and explicit to account for...language learning\" (1965:27-8). Chomsky attempted to find a clear explanation for speaker's ability to somehow know how to speak correctly without their being able, in most cases, to consciously state the rules by which they speak. Bach suggests that such a theory \"...must provide an explicit basis for explaining the native speaker's understanding of the relationship between... sentences\" (Bach 1964:7). As well, such a \"...grammatical theory... must assign a 'structural description' to each sentence\" (1964:6). Chomsky's transformational grammar and notion of deep structure are based on notions of modern logic and formal analysis. These notions now inform much of linguists' theories in spite of the fact that \"...the linguist's idealization is under the empirical constraint that as actual conditions of speech approximate more closely to the ideal, predictions deriving solely and directly from a theory of competence must approximate ^ At the same time, Chomsky admits to a metaphoric aspect of his analyses. For example, certain sentences which are both grammatical and subject to 'deviant' interpretation given the fact their construction has broken selectional rules might be analyzed metaphorically (1965:149). Further such intuitively motivated interpretation is needed in following Chomsky's own examples (see for example 1965:119; 152). Interpretation is still necessary for other reasons delimited by Chomsky such as the lack of self-limiting characteristics of rewriting rules in iterating or generating 'deviant' strings (1965:68). As Chomsky's analysis proceeds in more detail, it reveals weaknesses in grammatical theories which cannot account for the selection process that allows children to learn a language correctly, in that such a child's utterances may come to be interpreted by mature speaker-hearers (1965:80). 23 more closely the structure of actual speech events\" (Katz 1966:118). Chomsky asks about what mental structure exists so that competence is possible. This structure is given theoretical form by recording performances and factoring out empirically knowable variations in context, speaker, and psychological limitations such as size of memory etc (1966:117). Linguistics since Chomsky is sometimes seen as akin to a physical science, which no longer concerns itself with 'meter readings' and in fact provides a theory of language which \"...legitimately may be regarded as falling within the province of epistemology\" and thus also produces an epistemological shift (1966:118). The ideal structure from which the individual speaker departs in particular performance but to which the speaker is betrothed by competence requires that general statements can be made regarding these relationships. Chomsky is said to have provided a number of these, and these rules have universal application: For many features of universal grammar there is justification enough in the fact that without them it would simply not be possible to write grammars that account for the sentences of a language. Particularly in syntax, as Chomsky has pointed out, the typical problem is not choosing the right one among various theories that work but finding even one that will work at all (Kiparsky 1968:171). Given the arbitrary nature of linguistic conventions, however, how can such a syntax, once chosen, be empirically justified? The epistemological problems encountered when one posits a non-empirical deep structure generating competence which is in turn reflected in an empirically knowable surface performance are, once again, similar to those which arise in other theories of structure, such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and transcendental phenomenology. At base, is historical change dependent on structure or is structure completely historical in form? Chomsky initially assumed that the structure of the mind used the same logical criteria as he applied to his analysis. This logic was one of economy and efficacy, because the structure of generative grammar had to be able to produce large numbers of correct sentences in previously unknown cultural contexts. If Gardner (1985: 185) is correct in understanding the history of modern linguistics as indeed a history of the ideas of Chomsky and subsequent 24 reactions to them, then deep structure and transformational grammars must be seen as crucial to the discipline in general. No finite grammar can account for the apparent abilities of native speakers to improvise their way through previously unknown circumstances. How could a speaker, without empirical knowledge of an event stored in memory as experience, be able to know how to speak in a new situation? Chomsky suggested that the only way this could work was if one had as a part of the structure of the mind, a generative and thereby a transformational grammar. What does such a grammar do? A generative grammar, in Chomsky's sense, is a rule system formalized with mathematical precision: without drawing upon any information that is not represented explicitly within it, the system generates the grammatical sentences of the language that it describes or characterizes, and assigns to each sentence a structural description or grammatical analysis (Gardner 1985:187). Although the simplicity of such a formal analysis could be admired, Gardner tempers Chomsky's revolutionary rhetoric by suggesting that the latter's work is not always easy to distinguish amongst his contemporaries such as his own teacher, Zellig Harris (1985:188). The fact that Chomsky is often seen as an epistemologist as well as a linguist is evidenced by the amount of text he devoted to questions concerning the choosing of linguistic models and what kind of formal and logical criteria they might meet in order to be considered viable theories of language (1985:189). Chomsky's work was trumpeted by some of his contemporaries as revolutionary in the Kuhnian sense, enabling \"...linguistics to cross the line from a descriptive pre-science to an axiomatic science...\" and was labelled Copernican' in scope (Gardner 1985:189-190). Ironically, this revolution came at the expense of what was called the 'structural' linguistics of Saussure ((1985:190). Chomsky's introduction of formal rules and his transformational use of distinctive features became part of cognitive anthropology and linguistic anthropology. Along with cognitive linguistics, in part introduced by Pike (1967[1954]), the notions of competence and performance were, for example, continued anthropologically by Hymes (1964) and Tyler (1969). A shift from observables to deep structure to performance and interpretation within the changing landscape of wider anthropological interests is seen in one aspect of anthropological linguistics. The first shift is given its formula by Chomsky: 25 ...we can distinguish the 'deep structure' of a sentence from its 'surface structure'. The former is the underlying abstract nature that determines its semantic interpretation; the latter, the superficial organization of units which determines the phonetic interpretation and which relates to the physical form of the actual utterance, to its perceived or intended form (Chomsky 1966:33). Chomsky also highlights the import of the idea that deep and surface structures are not necessarily identical. This idea opens up a space for anthropologists and linguists alike to pursue the possibility that unobservable and perhaps unconscious structures pattern human thought cross-culturally. For example, in certain cognitive studies, conversation was seen to follow precise rules of structure and form. The use of vocabulary is circumscribed by a deeper structure's rules (Campbell 1982:162-4 on Chomsky's updated version of such a structure). These rules are also inherited as models of learned programs (D'Andrade 1981). These programs are open-ended, unlike computer programs. As well, they are only gradually learned instead of being available all at once. D'Andrade suggests that the inherited models need affirmation through enculturation. The knowledge necessary to live in any particular culture is socialized according to these models. Although researchers are still at odds over the modes by which such information is inherited, there is a base level of rules that must be known. One anthropological example involves the taxonomic categories of Tzeltzal ethnobotanical classification revealed by Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven (1973; 1974:57). A basic range of terms is thought to provide a clue to the structure of that culture's points of reference in the world. This 'focal' range, however, including types of plants, or basic colour terms, demonstrates that a single cross-cultural pattern is present (Berlin 1992:9). Berlin also suggests that this pattern reflects the 'natural' system and recognition of it by humans is likely innate. Whatever the case, such a pattern manifests itself through varying cultural conjugations that, because they reflect a deeper structure, should be decipherable. Within such variants, regularities should be demonstrable. 26 The existence of these regularities themselves, however, as known apart from performative utterances may be questioned. Meaning is fluid. Human behaviour differs vastly. Is there really a shared basis to human behaviour? Meaning might be shared by mutual interpretation of another's intentions. When we talk to one another, we explain what we mean. However, this explanation has to be interpreted. Some parts of anthropological debate were moving away from a concept of a predestined order to language. Instead, they moved towards mutually created dialogues and the interactional construction of shared meaning. There still remains the concept of order. However, it needs to be tended and re-created. We have moved from order to orders. The logical endpoint of this shift questions order again. It does so in order to reject the conception of order itself. Fabian (1983), however, rejects only what the West failed to give to other cultures. This was a failure of coevalness of community and individual agency. Fabian preserves the ethical imperative of doing ethnography (see also Darnell 1995a:10). Yet Tyler's deconstruction of language goes beyond this (1987; 1990). Meaning is no longer shared. Meaning cannot be made shared through pretense. Meaning cannot be shared at all. Is this the end of anthropology? Ethnosemantics and Ethnoscience and the New Ethnography: A n example of how knowledge is debated and constructed in anthropology is contained in the texts about the issues of the new ethnography, ethnosemantics, ethnoscience, and other varieties of cognitive study. I use this as one of the three (along with Marxism above and Geertz's interpretivism below)!4 detailed examples to remind readers that during the period of many of the interviewed speakers' professional training, a certain consciousness existed. That is, there was a published debate about theories of knowledge (Darnell 1995a, Geertz 1983). What theory or model was better for representing other cultures' knowledge systems? For many at the time, semantic analyses held the key to cultural cognition.15 Scholars seemed to be 1 4 Both of these are strongly represented in the interview texts. The ethnosemantic summary which follows is less so, but it represents an epistemological debate about the nature of language. Language is the medium par excellence for this project. The debate also represents what Gadamer (in Ricoeur 1981:60 [1973]) calls part of the 'ongoing scandal' of both philosophy and the social sciences. 27 defining themselves and their work by epistemological differences. Berreman states the fundamental problem of the ethnography in the mid-sixties was \"...how to be scientific and at the same time retain humanistic insights\" (1966:346). This problem has also been expressed as a divergence of interpretations tending towards either forms of relativism or universalism (Ardener 1971:xxi).16 Yet, Gardner states that it is because of an awareness that the essence of human behaviour is indeed symbolic. Hence the reconciliation with a science that might explain this behaviour moved analysis in the direction of the cognitive rather than the practical (Gardner 1985:245). For example, Levi-Strauss' idea of mythic thought as a reflection of this cognitive state in its objective form presents an intimacy with the object to which all science might aspire: \"...when the mind is left to commune with itself and no longer has to come to terms with objects, it is in a sense reduced to imitating itself as object\" (1969:10). Theories which hunted for objectivity during this period became focussed for a short time in ethnoscience. As Edgerton and Langness suggest: \"The goal of an ethnoscientific description is to write a set of rules for a culture which is so complete that any outsider could use them to behave appropriately in that culture\" (1974:38). This goal would be accomplished by the strict attention to method. Hammel iterates: \"What distinguishes these analyses in the methodological sense is their rigor and insistence on internal form, and in the theoretical sense their recognition of a superordinate level of determinants in an analytic domain\" (1965:2). He * 5 D'Andrade explains the heady atmosphere with a backward glance from a very different era in anthropology: \"It is difficult to explain the beauty which a semantic analysis of kinship terms held for some anthropologists in 1960. In the present intellectual milieu this type of analysis seems specialized, arcane, and formalistic. in 1960; the effect was quite different. Then such an analysis was experienced as a nearly magical process of discovery in which elegant simple patterns emerged from an initial jumble of kin term and kin types. The patterns came out of the data, and, once seen, were unforgettable. In present day anthropology the field is less interested in discovery procedures and formalization. What was once generally considered exemplary work is now a matter of interest to only a very small number of kinship specialist[s]\" (1995:30). 16 Furthermore, cognitive science in anthropology can be traced to the seminal influence of not only two papers of 1956 (Wallace's and Goodenough's) but the same year Miller's (1956) paper on the supposed limits of human cognition: \"Miller's 1956 paper is a case of Kuhn's point that certain pieces of research become the prototypical examples in the formation of a new paradigm. This paper, which shows with the most carefully collected experimental data that the number of simultaneous discriminations that individuals can make falls off rapidly at about seven bits of information, became a central facet of the new cognitive models of mind\" (D'Andrade 1995:43). 28 continues by offering the defenders of ethnoscience a converse analogy with the more archaic idea that signs represented things: \"Rather than holding a referential meaning constant and determining which linguistic forms may occur within it, we now also hold a linguistic form constant and determine which elements of referential meaning may occur within it\" (1965:4). Progress in the rigor of such analyses is demonstrated when scholars are reminded that \"The problems of formal analysis center now in improvement of the regularity of analyses, in construction of full parallel analyses using different reference languages, in expansion of the general method of other analytic domains, and most importantly in asking why the phenomena should exhibit particular regularities or indeed any regularity at all\" (Hammel 1965:7). If the structure of the analysis is insufficient to produce these more detailed understandings, like psychologically real descriptions (Wallace 1965:232), then additional techniques should be worked out. These include comparable sorting and explication tasks (1965:245). Wallace and Atkins further this demand for rigour by suggesting that \"...the only way to get definitive knowledge of psychological reality of another cultural tenant would be to study semantics\" (in D'Andrade 1995:51). To do so, ethnoscience needed to distinguish itself from the previous ideologically motivated understandings of social forms such as kinship and language. For example, Ardener suggests in general that local interpreters were considered dispensable: \"We are dealing with a mode of expression: in the ideology of that period, which from that point of view can only now be said to be ending, interpreters were always 'dispensed with' as if sucked dry and banished\" (1971:xv). Genealogy is also critiqued from the standpoint of a more scientifically valid endeavour: \"Because of our own sanguine ideology of kinship, the detail of terminologies has most frequently been specified in genealogical terms, with only scattered information on other matters. Analyses often have tended to base themselves on genealogy for the same ideological reasons, as well as because of the nature of the data reported\" (Hammel 1965:6). The goal of such analyses is summarized by Frake: \"The analysis of a culture's terminological system will not, of course, exhaustively reveal the cognitive world of its members, but it will certainly tap a central portion of it\" (1962 in D'Andrade 1995:34). One could not rely upon oral history to provide a scientific understanding of culture. A n entirely different 29 level of analysis needed to be invoked. Finally, \"The primary virtue of a formal analysis, unlike one which makes vague appeals to theories of relevance, is that it is easily subjected to precise criticism...\" (Hammel 1965:7).17 However, this was what the new ethnoscience was also to encounter. As Ardener suggests, \"...culture and language were conceived by Pike (1954) as combining to produce a 'conceptual grid' through which individuals regard the world... The static implications of these particular analogies are obvious, as is the positivistic assumption of a stable underlying reality\" (Ardener 1971:xxviii). The question was not whether one believed so much in reality per se. Instead, it was whether or not one thought that this reality was beyond language. In this case, it would be part of the physical structure of the brain. Otherwise, reality might be constantly socially constructed. Hymes also hedges in stating that the \"etic grid\" is an initial necessity for ethnographic focus (1964). However, it must then be fleshed out emica lly.18 The appropriateness of such an anthropologically devised grid, compared with how the natives might organize knowledge, was a major issue in the debates concerning viable theories of knowledge at this time. It is also of interest to the more general debate and flux between positivist and post-positivist understandings in anthropology. For example, both Hymes and Geertz cite Kenneth Burke. Burke's works might present a happy medium between the positivist view of treating language as motion, and the post-positivist view of language as action (Hymes 1964:22). Any analysis of language then, \"...must take as context a community, investigating its communicative habits as a whole, so that any given use of channel and code takes its place as but part of the resources upon which the members of the community draw\" (1964:3). As well, the notions of form and function must remain \"...integral to one another\" (1964:5;9). One cannot have the one without the other, as no form is barren of cultural value. Similarly, the notion that \"...human beings speak, but they are also symbolic elements in a communication system\" D'Andrade comments that this 'expanding research agenda' gave scholars the feeling that not only was there something in the air, but that the air itself was now becoming clearer: \"Certainly I found it that way. There was a feeling that things were coming together and making sense\" (D'Andrade 1995:57). 18 Pike (1967[1954]) coined the 'etic' and 'emic', which can be seen more contemporaneously as the anthropological view, and the native view, respectively (Geertz 1983:56[1974]; Harris 1968). 30 (Ardener 1971 :xlv) suggests that any analysis of cultural communication must remain within the human factor. Of course, analysis depended on how the human factor was not only factored into the analysis, but also when it was. Most importantly, of what did the human consist? The problem of validity may be a given if one restricts a study to finding out about someone who happens to be human, but this problem becomes more acute when one poses the question concerning sample size and the cultural generalizability of speakers' data. How to define cultural competence is one issue. This problem, however, is contingent upon reaching a certain level of probability from which one can predict particular responses within a given culture (Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986). Although one may question that the local cultural reality is the same for all speakers, and that there is a conscious and culturally prescribed set of responses for every question, the concept of consensus may be necessary for any kind of human communication to take place.1 9 If domains can be established for cultural competence, it seems that a relatively few speakers may be needed to ensure a high probability that their data is generalizable throughout the culture in question. Further, if these domains are located elsewhere than in speech acts, then one might suggest that a science of cognitive domains is possible. This suggestion, however, might conflict with a positivistic idea of an observable universe. Even in structuralist analyses, which share with ethnoscience the formalism aspiring to scientific rigor, \"...the question of where the structures are located is still raised by 'positivist' social anthropologists... It is the old 'God's Truth or Hocus Pocus' argument raised about the phoneme (Householder 1952), as well as about componential analysis (Burling 1964), and the 'grammatical' rules of household composition (Burling 1969), all over again\" (Ardener 1971:lxxxii). Wallace provides the orientation for componential analyses: \"The methodological promise of componential analysis, and a large part of the reason for its popularity, lay precisely in its claim to be a systematic, reliable 1 9 The problems outlined here fully apply to this project as well. Freeman, Romney and Freeman (1987) develop these ideas for research purposes, suggesting that those speakers who might be regarded as the 'worst' informant' can serve successfully to \"...reveal details of a particular event...\" while those traditionally seen as the 'best', or most culturally competent speakers \"...can be used to reveal long-range stable patterns of events...\" (Freeman, Romney, and Freeman 1987:310-11). 31 technique for revealing what words mean to the people who use them, not merely in the domain of kinship, but in any other lexical domain with a taxonomic structure\" (Wallace 1965:229). Yet, although some analyses have come up with solutions to this promise, \"...none have given consideration to the total number of alternative solutions that are logically possible, and to the implications of that number for the problem of indeterminacy, and to the implications of indeterminacy for semantic analysis\" (Burling 1969:419[1964]). Burling demonstrates that at least 124 permutations are possible for merely four items. Moreover, there are at least five more logically possible factors which could undermine the sense that componential analysis is giving us the true view of the native (1969:422-23): In principle, the number of possible analyses becomes infinite... Anthropologists who have advocated the use of componential analysis and similar formal methods as a way of studying the meaning of sets of terms seem to have two contrasting objectives. Their first and more modest goal has been to specify the conditions under which each term would be used... The more ambitious objective of the method is to use it to lead us to an understanding of the criteria by which speakers of the language themselves decide what term to use for a particular item... (1969:423). Burling suggests that while there may be scientistic assumptions to the first goal, it is the second goal which remains undemonstrated: \"...I cannot help wondering if [it] does not convey an unjustified certainty in the particular analysis...\" (1969:425). He reiterates that this \"large degree of indeterminacy will always remain\" (1969:425). He regards it as gratuitous to impose anthropological analyses on native speakers.20 Yet Hymes (1969:428-9[1964]) replies that \"I do not share the author's pervading skepticism, and should like to stress ways in which the difficulty he raises can be and is being met\" by in fact suggesting that first not all componential analyses have the stated goals of the emic. Neither do all forget that such a goal is a profound one. Such a goal is however difficult to achieve even in the absence of what are merely logically 2 0 \"It is always tempting to attribute something more important to one's work than a tinkering with a rough set of operational devices. It certainly sounds more exciting to say we are 'discovering the cognitive system of the people' than to admit that we are just fiddling with a set of rules which allow us to use terms the way others do\" (Burling 1969:427[1964]). 32 and psychologically potential permutations. Likewise, Frake (1969:432[1964]) drily suggests that programmatic statements are there to give rise to substantive work, and not more of the same.21 The sense that this debate was a microcosm of a larger discussion of competing theories prompts Ardener to comment equivocably that persons \"...are living chessmen. The necessary recognition of this does not lead us into solipsism: the natural order is still 'there' even in society, as the continual source of unprogrammed events, which demand incorporation, or as providing certain basic structural givens\" (Ardener 1971:lxxxii). Hymes also understands the loaded terms of these debates: \"...one is pretty much in the position of wanting to apply a basic science that does not yet exist. The creation of this basic science (whatever its ultimate label and affiliations) I take to be the defining task of sociolinguistics, and the chief warrant for the term\" (Hymes 1971:48). Equally forceful, however, is Hymes rejection of that basic science in the form of componential analysis: \"Formal analysis of kinship... has sometimes forgotten in practice what it honours in theory, the need for an ethnographic approach that treats verbal behaviour as situated, as answers to explicit or implicit questions, whose local status must be determined\" (1971:75)22 Hence, in order ask questions about contexts of language use, one might instead invoke methods which move from what is seen as a social fact, to corresponding theories about it: \"Therefore, a sociology of reification, and especially its basis in the everyday life is a central project for an anthropology of meaning...\" (Dolgin, Kemnitzer, and Schneider 1977:37). As such, \"Contextual, historical, and cultural effects may be of the essence in most of the anthropological terrain\" (Gardner 1985:253). By the end of the decade, D'Andrade suggests that \"The basic task was no longer to find out how particular items are defined, but rather to discover 2 1 Frake replies: \"A person learning to speak and behave in a culturally appropriate manner is 'just fiddling with a set of rules which allow him to use terms (and otherwise behave) the way others do.' If this is hocus pocus, then there is no God's Truth - either for the investigator or his subjects. The important thing is to write ethnographic statements whose implications for behavior are explicit and which can therefore be tested against competing statements\" (Frake 1969:432[1964]). 2 2 Another kick at the can: \"Fundamental to the study of symbolic anthropology is the concern with how people formulate their reality. We must, if we are to understand this and relate it to an understanding of their (and our own) action, examine their culture, not our theories (and if we study our theories, we must study them as 'their culture')\" (Dolgin, Kemnitzer, and Schneider 1977:34). 33 the most general categories people use to understand their world\" (D'Andrade 1995:91). This in turn, might explicate a formerly vague notion of intuition as something grounded in more concrete realms. However, Berreman cautions us to remember that the idea that \"...intuition is invalid is itself an invalid assumption\" (Berreman 1966:349). He frames the debates by suggesting that on the one hand, the scientist is one who knows how to get there but not where she/he is going. On the other hand, the humanists know where they are going but not how to get there. This glance into a slice of a debate which can be seen as one amongst positivisms and post-positivisms in anthropology suggests his caveat - \"beware of substituting formalities designed for rigor with a kind of rigor mortis\" (1966:352). Another key aspect to the cultural construction of such theoretical debates is their institutional context. D'Andrade highlights this as part of his general history of cognitive anthropology (1995:245). Especially during part of the period remembered by participants in this study, certain universities and their tenants were crucial to the development of this new area of human study. 2 3 As well the debates surrounding the novelty of cognitive work and theoretical arguments about where knowledge in fact is located may have worn off in most quarters.24 However, D'Andrade continues, \"this debate is not yet finished, although there does seem to be some general agreement that culture has both a public and private aspect\" (D'Andrade 1995:246). How to ask questions about the non-public was one of cognitive anthropology's major accomplishments (1995:247-8)25 'This [ ] period of research extended from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. This was a time in which anthropology and the social sciences in general were strongly oriented towards method, formalization, and quantification. Most of the development occurred at five major universities - Yale, Pennsylvania, Stanford, Berkeley, and Irvine. A number of contributors received their graduate training at the Harvard Department of Social Relations. By my estimate, nearly a third of the people who have done significant work in cognitive anthropology were trained by or strongly influenced by A. Kimball Romney, who received his degree from Social Relations, then went to Stanford and later Irvine\" (D'Andrade 1995:245). 2 4 'The external debate at this time between cognitive anthropology and other approaches to the study of culture was concerned with issues of method as well as an ontological debate about the locus of culture. Geertz had made clear his disapproval of the formalizing and quantitative aspects of this new approach, and used his formidable persuasive skills to argue the case against the 'cognitive fallacy' that 'culture consists of mental phenomena'... . It is probably the case that the mainstream of anthropology was more or less convinced...\" (D'Andrade 1995:246). 2 5 Epistemologically, one can note that D'Andrade (1995) has some discomfort with the idea that 'interpretivism', or at least Geertz's version, has taken centre stage in anthropology since about 1973. Such criticism is first suggested in terms of validity: 'The metaphor of culture as 34 The Canadian Scene: ...significantly, Canadians had, on the whole, lost touch with the only cultural tradition that has made ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology possible: the European (Burridge 1983:306). Although this project does not purport to study the entire range of anthropology as practiced in Canada, all of those who participated in it have studied or now teach in Canada. As well, the theoretical debates outlined above also took place in Canada, mostly during the 1960s and 1970s. As indicated, the 1960s and 1970s became the chosen focus of most of those interviewed. Therefore, a brief introduction to some of the issues related to the theoretical debates and to the experience of being a Canadian anthropologist. This will provide some historical context for the interviews. Canadian anthropology is neither a national nor a theoretical tradition. Instead, a melange of others' national and theoretical concerns provide for a unique contribution to anthropology as a whole. Speakers in this project rarely referred to anthropology in Canada as particularly 'Canadian'. Instead, speakers suggested that what occurs in Canada up to a certain historical point, is that anthropologists trained far and wide and under very different theoretical and national conditions find themselves pieced together in a mosaic. 2 6 Sometimes pieces are contiguous, but often there are profound gaps amongst anthropologists practicing in this country. The Canadian Ethnology Society (C.E.S. ) was formed in 1973; changing text expressed this constant dualism; one could read from any set of cultural practices a cultural meaning. However, again there was no method of validation; since the meanings were not in anyone's mind, even an unconscious one, no method of verification was possible\" (1995:248). Secondly, such criticism is framed in a more personal manner: \"In my opinion, the interpretative and symbolic anthropologists were most successful, and certainly most interesting, exactly when they were doing cultural psychology - talking about the self, identity, emotions, primordial sentiments, the need for meaning, etc. They denied that they were doing psychology, but what else was it?\" (1995:251). 26 Anthropologists have made both historical and contemporaneous accounts of the Canadian scene (see the contributors to Ames and Preston 1975; Avrith 1986; Breton 1975; Cole 1973; Curtis et al 1970; Darnell 1975; contributors to Freedman 1976; Gold and Tremblay 1983; Inglis 1977; 1978; 1982; McFeat 1980; Mcllwraith 1930; 1949; Price 1982; and Sweet 1976). As well, individual Canadian anthropologists and others influential to the development of anthropology in Canada have been singled out for review or commemoration (Barker 1987 on Mcllwraith, Clark 1964 on Mcllwraith, Hall 1964 on Dawson, McCardle 1980 on Wilson, O'Connell 1990 on Bailey, Preston 1980 on Sapir, Ross 1964 on Dawson, Trigger 1966a and 1966b on Wilson and Dawson respectively. See also Epp and Sponsel 1980). 35 into the Canadian Anthropology Society, or C.A.S.C.A., in 1989; (Barkow, ed. 1973; and also Jones 1990). A glance at the proceedings of the first congress of the Canadian Ethnology Society reveals a motley crew indeed. Papers range from intercultural education (Gagn6 1973:108-13) through comparisons of Meso-American economic systems (Durand 1973:135-41), biosocial anthropology (Barkow and Larsen 1973:115-34), professional ethics (Reynolds 1973:143-56), the native judiciary (Weaver 1973:48-66), and papers on alliance theory (Guemple 1973:173-84) among others. The C.E.S. was formed because many anthropologists felt they were not part of the community attracted to the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, which was formed in 1965 (Jones 1990)27. These were mainly social anthropologists with a British strain of anthropology, and sociologists proper. The fundamental epistemological difference that reflected in the organization of these two societies and contributed to the original split was the the C.S.A.A. understood anthropology to be more akin to Radcliffe-Brown's comparative sociology and the C.E.S. understood anthropology to be like Boas' American cultural anthropology. The Canadian Ethnology Society was meant to be a supplement or complement to the C.S.A.A., and not a competitor, but gradually it drew most of the anthropologists out of the latter and into its own folds (Inglis 1992:63). The C.S.A.A. retains a small number of 'loyal social anthropologists' (1992:63). Anthropologists in Canada have commented upon the possible identities of their discipline (Burridge 1983:306; 307; Howes 1992:155; Lee and Filteau 1983:223-4; Manning 1983:2).28 Like the mystery surrounding 2 7 In his attempts at blocking what was seen by some anthropologists in Canada as this ill-omened rupture of the discipline, Gordon Inglis has referred to himself as a 'condom which failed' (personal communication, C.A.S.C.A. XIV, St. John's, June 13; 1997). 28 For comments on the identity of anthropology as a discourse - and anthropologists as icons of that discourse, or as representative of it - in general see Beals 1982:2; 3; 19; 20; 22; Clark 1979:5; 9; 16; 18; Du Bois 1980:1; 4; 8-11; 13; Eggan 1974:2; 3; 19; Leach 1984: 3; 14; 16; 19; Mead 1959:36; 38; Parkin 1988: 328; 329; 334; 339; Greenberg 1986:6; 8; 11; 13-6; 19; 21; 25; Hannerz 1987:215; 216; 218; 219; Kenny 1987:10; 11; Robbins and De Vita 1985:254; Tax 1988:2-3; 5; 9-10; 16; 18; Washburn 1983:7; 10; 19). One gets an idea of both the ethical and epistemological milieux influencing Canadian anthropology from examples and commentaries both cited above and following . For example, Firth tells Parkin that to characterize anthropology by taking ethnographic writing as the 'determinate product' occludes the complex nature of the choices individual anthropologists made during research (Parkin 1988:340). Eggan stops short of the 36 Canadian identity in general, anthropology in Canada reflects to some extent the cloud of intermingling and conflicting cultures which reside inside our national boundaries. O'Connell suggests that it is foreign dominance that motivates contemporary anthropologists to venerate their ancestors and give them heroic guises: There is an incipient longing among Canadian anthropologists to honour their own heroes. It arises from an altruistic desire to vivify a Canadian perspective on Man and Society and from professional self-interest. For Canadian anthropologists have not failed to note that in Europe and America the totemic veneration of academic ancestors has the effect of distinguishing and promoting what otherwise would be nebulous, national schools of Anthropology. And these foreign schools -especially the American, British, and French - have come to dominate Canadian institutions of Anthropology (O'Connell 1990:1). Does the reification of what may be nebulous anthropological culture create, however, more than the sum of its parts? Howes suggests that Canadian anthropology is a tradition that is not one (Howes 1992:155; see also Hofley 1992 on the Canadianization issue) and that Canadians in general are distrustful of heroes. Perhaps an academic discipline need not have heroes so much as respectable genealogies29, refracted by exogamous training and sentiment that the only way to improve anthropology is to destroy it (Eggan 1974:18). Leach suggests that Malinowskian fieldwork in anthropology has a single defining feature theoretically, that of a mere common-sense empiricism. Other more philosophical values such a positivism's rejection of idealist metaphysics were strictly in the background (Leach 1984:17). Such a concept of fieldwork also has a single defining characteristic pedagogically: it provides the definitive example of what anthropologists do in terms of the official rhetoric given to introductory classes. Beals is appalled at the mentalist constructions of structuralists and the pseudo-philosophers who have invaded anthropology. The former \"...invent only what is in their own minds...\" the latter \"...add little to either field.\" by \"superimposing one another's vocabularies\" (Beals 1982:4). Tax suggests that the idea of science being able to solve the world's problems is an adolescent one, and that action should be more faithfully directed to local problems (Tax 1988:18). Finally, Greenberg states unequivocably that \"I believe that it is always relevant to ask regarding any statement what are the conceivable facts about the world which would decide on its truth or falsity\" (Greenberg 1986:9). 29 For anthropologists' constructions of both the heroic and the ancestral see Beals 1982:2; Eggan 1974:7; 9; 11; Greenberg 1983:2; 3; 6; 17; Kenny 1987:13; Leach 1984:1; 3; 5; 21; Mead 1959:34; 43; Parkin 1988:327; 331; 334-5; Tax 1988:6; Washburn 1987:1-2. Leach (1984:9) practices a form of self-satire, which occasionally lapses into insult: \"If anyone had asked me then or later what I thought of [Max] Gluckman, I would have probably have said that I considered him to be an uncivilized and fundamentally uneducated egocentric whose attempts at theoretical generalization were of quite puerile incompetence. My views of Radcliffe-Brown were not all that different, though perhaps I would have qualified the uneducated\" (Leach 1984:20). Kenny is more oblique: 'The effort was also personal. As a then naively anglophile American student at Oxford, I was present during Evans-Pritchard's last days as Professor of 37 endogamous teaching, emigration and immigration. Manning suggests there is a humorous side to the notion that by building a new tradition which is none of the above, one can take the best from all of the above. Canadian anthropology in some eyes, however, echoes the problem encountered by Canada in general in the following: \"A popular story has it that when Canada was established, there was a plan to build a magnificent nation that would incorporate American technology, British politics, and French culture. But the plan became confused, and we were left with French politics, British technology, and American culture\" (Manning 1983:2). Not only was this confusion problematic, it was given a layer of academic whitewash that provided onlookers with the idea that things here were indeed the same as the other three traditions in terms of the university structure. The evidence for this was the importation of university hierarchies and bureaucracies. The two images, however, do not mix. One cannot have the freedom of movement and idea which may have sprung from a nebulous mix of national traditions, within the context of the modern educational system: \"The amusing self-image of anthropologists in Canada as academe's small-scale, atomistic foragers is absurd in the context of contemporary western education, a meritocracy of Byzantine hierarchy (from pre-K onward and upward!) in terms of rank, class, and eventually titled positions\" (Preston 1983:290). Even this self-image is not really an image coming from a Canadian self. Burridge suggests that the identity of Canadian anthropologists does not rest with those who are in fact Canadians30, and although this is changing Social Anthropology, and by a curious twist of fate on my way back from Africa I attended his funeral service at Blackfriars - a service with mythic qualities of its own\" (Kenny 1987:9). O'Connell recounts that the traditional methods of creating a tradition have not seemed to work in Canada: 'The cultic personification of scholarly tradition is used, then, with qualitatively different emphasis, to define, extend, and preserve 'national tradition'. Whether the heroes of any given school of Anthropology earned their laurels as authors of seminal ideas or as power-brokers in national institutions of research and higher learning, the veneration they received (and sometimes demanded) from their students and colleagues had the effect of entrenching a tradition. And there, for the Canadian anthropologist, is the rub!\" (O'Connell 1990:2). Burridge sums up the tension between personal wishes of anthropology faculty and the cultural consciousness of anthropology in Canada: \"If some of us long for the authority to point students to areas of particular significance, as hard scientists do, at the collective level we tend to allow students to wander where they will, presumably because we think this is more fruitful or because, lacking a consensus on significance, there is no help for it\" (Burridge 1983:308). 3\u00C2\u00B0 Hedican suggests that because of the unethical and unscrupulous use of anthropological 38 slowly, the greater proportion of academic anthropologists in Canada are foreign trained, and many are foreign born and socialized elsewhere than in this country. \"While it is in the hands of those who are or who have recently been students in Canada to define what is to be distinctively Canadian in Canadian ethnology, at the moment only a quarter of the professional practicing anthropologists are Canadian trained, and they were brought up by faculty whose moulds of ideas were cast elsewhere\" (Burridge 1983:312). One of the major reasons why my study cannot be considered to be a history of anthropology in Canada, or a work on identity of Canadian anthropologists yer se, is because of these reasons. What I do have, is a working account of some anthropologists who teach and study in Canada, about half of them also having been trained here. Although Burridge suggests that the American influence is not as great as some would imagine (1983:308), Preston is less equivocal when he says that what came to Canada during the twentieth century period of university expansion was mostly anthropologists from the United States: \"What did the boom bring to Canada? Four-Square Americans\" (Preston 1983:290). It must be borne in mind that almost no Canadian departments of anthropology were granting Ph.D.'s until the 1970s. Some Canadian anthropologists seem defensive when they justify the possibility for the existence of a genuine anthropology in Canada, and this defensiveness can occupy either extreme of self-denigration or attacks aimed at the other traditions. The former can be seen in Burridge's comments about the vague defeatism Canadians might feel when characterizing themselves (Burridge 1983:317). O'Connell on the other hand, does not hold back: \"Between the European and American traditions there is a difference in emphasis. While the Europeans honour Grand Masters of Theory and Ethnography, the Americans celebrate a number of Big Men (and Women) of dubious theoretical creativity, respectable ethnographic achievement and entrenched institutional dominance\" (O'Connell 1990:1). If Canadian anthropologists reject both of these avenues, what is one left with? Burridge states that here lies the material by those posing as anthropologists, anthropology should undergo a formal certification procedure to enforce its identity, not only to protect an unwary public, but also to protect itself (Hedican 1995:227). 39 confusion that Manning satirized. Addicted as Canadians - or perhaps Canadian academics - are to hedging themselves about the multitude of rules and procedures, where one rule or procedure, however idiotic, is thought to be as good as another so long as the vote is there, the suggestion to conform and merge into the background is hard to gainsay, and the confusion between excellence and elitism is complete (Burridge 1983:318). As Bourdieu suggests below, excellence in the academy creates is own elite, and the latter are inevitably regarded to also be the former in quality. Canadian anthropology's great advantage, I believe, is that it is not weighed down by a great tradition or a cult of ancestors which the student might feel she or he had to live up to at the expense of doing more original or creative work. Canadian anthropologists have also commented on the general status of their institutions, discipline, students and teachers both in terms of where they stand in their own debates, and where they are in the academic - or other - marketplace (Armstrong and Armstrong 1992:239; Inglis 1992:58-9; O'Connell 1990:23; Phillips and Pool 1992:8; Davies et al 1992:5-7; Eichler 1992:94-5; Hofley 1992:103; 112; Howes 1992:165; Lee and Filteau 1983:215; 220; 222; 229; Preston 1983:286; Stebbins 1990:1; 4; Tremblay 1988:1-3; Turner 1987:13; 14). Lee and Filteau list seven archetypical traits that characterize the cultural influence on anthropology in Canada. These foci are seen as identificatory for Canadian anthropologists because combined they are unique to our experience in Canada (Lee and Filteau 1983:223-4). Yet any one of them, or even combinations of them seem possible or indeed extant in many other countries, so it remains unclear how they can characterize a Canadian context in particular.3 1 Canadians also appear as having a 'bicentric' imagination (Howes 1992:163-64). Bicentrism suggests that society, while being a melting 3 1 They are: native rights, the two solitudes, immigration and ethnicity, racism, class and capitalism, sex and gender, and Canada's relation to the third world. Only the last may be unique, because it is based tautologically on what is already labelled Canadian. However, these seven also appear as important in Lee and Filteau's survey of Canadian teachers of anthropology, in terms of influences on their pedagogy. Perhaps they say more about anthropology in general than Canadian anthropology in particular. 40 pot in America, is in Canada fashioned as a mosaic, contiguous but not fused. Perhaps anthropologists can thus merely state their differences without ever being in the same position theoretically. Turner expands on this notion: In all this no clear theoretical or substantive direction is discernible. The diversity is indicative of the fragmentation rather than the elaboration of a 'discipline'. The fragmentation - at best, compartmentalization - does, however, serve one positive purpose: it maintains the advocates of competing paradigms in stable accommodation by allowing each to pursue his or her own line of development while still maintaining some connection to 'rival' others if only in a formal institutional setting. This is by no means an insignificant accomplishment (Turner 1987:13). Yet he goes on to suggest that such maintenance and the management mentalities it may produce are often transformed into mere habit (1987:15). The two solitudes of anthropology in Canada are again directly related to those of the two dominant cultural groups: \"In paradigmatic terms it is a convergence of empiricism and dialectics, of materialism and structuralism. The convergence has contributed much to the shift of Anglo-Canadindian Anthropology away from its American leanings\" (Turner 1987:15). The Franco-Anglo divide resonates theoretically in anthropology in Canada. It does not provide solace to anthropology's object, however, any more than other national traditions have done (1987:15). Ironically, Canadian anthropologists seemed to have been very much less aggressive within their own subject, subjecting themselves to outside influences. For example, O'Connell iterates that \"Toronto's post-war social theory was a slavish Parsons and its Anthropology a descriptive composition of a fundamental kind, arbitrarily spiced with morsels of 'theory'. Canada lacks radical and uncompromising theorists. Diffidence and reserve is valued above commitment and eccentricity\" (O'Connell 1990:22). Perhaps this is a left-over from being one of the colonies of the greatest empire in history. I found, however, in pursuing my research, that many anthropologists had aspirations to be uncompromising, and many also evidenced endearing eccentricities. Many speakers were well-versed in others' theory, it is true, but often had put together a tasteful tapestry to call their own. Burridge suggests that theoretical aspirations within ethnology correspond to its attempts at 41 universalism (Burridge 1983:314). Yet interdisciplinarity has been more the result of a growing recognizance that perspectives on the world create worlds apart, rather than being a political promotion of eccentric individuals. Who partakes of Canadian anthropology also has influence here. What is the market, and who is our audience? \"The old curiousity shop has become a department store, an integral part of modern life, communicating to the public at large as well as to the academic community\" (Burridge 1983:315). Preston suggests that the future of Canadian anthropology lies in the applied field (Preston 1983:286). Perhaps not surprisingly, the applied anthropologists with whom I talked agreed with this sentiment, but few others d i d 3 2 . The most powerful argument that Canadian anthropology should rest its identity squarely within the non-academic applied field comes from statistics on the marketability of anthropology graduates, especially those with the B.A. degree only (Davies et al 1992). In terms of academic interest in the applied field however, Phillips and Pool found it to be marginal, especially when related to the third world. They suggest that few dissertations presented in anthropology departments across Canada can be said to be part of the development of policy fields (Phillips and Pool 1992:9). Almost none of the faculty who have an areal interest in the third world list applied interests. The authors declare such interests as those listed (from the 1990-1 Guide to Anthropology Departments in Canada) may be myopic and obsessively 'deconstructive' (1992:11). Research in the traditional sense of the term represents talking with people and trying to understand their interests.33 Only then can knowledge be harnessed to action. Once again the 32 Givens and Jablonski, however, report widespread agreement of the salutary effect of applied training on nascent anthropological careers (1996:317). In Canada, the scope of applied research ranges widely. Wilson (1995:270-1) commits a textual analysis to the pursuit of equal and humane human and political rights for women in Canada, while Hedican has written an entire volume in search of the same for Canada's aboriginal peoples (Hedican 1995). He suggests \"A recasting of anthropology can make it a much more relevant area of study in the future. To achieve this, the directions for research should first come more directly from the people being studied. What are the issues they want researched? What problems do they see as important and needing solutions?\" (1995:232). 3 3 For anthropological commentary on the nature of this research and its rightful place, see Beals 1982:9; Birdsell 1987:9; Eggan 1974:12; Leach 1984:22; Parkin 1988:337-8. Du Bois states, however, that fieldwork also provided a rationalization for romantic visions of young students, their wishes for 'adult autonomy', and excuses for travel and adventure - all of which were paid for in whole or in part (Du Bois 1980:5). 42 tension that is anthropological knowledge comes to the fore. 3 4 It would be ethical if theoretical research is immediately applicable to local problems. Thought is an overture to action. I use overture in the very musical sense in that such a piece has within it themes and melodies of the remainder of the work which is yet to come. Canadian anthropology then might be characterized as potentially applied. Such aspirations according to Phillips and Pool however, seem mere wishful thinking in the light of their research. Anthropologists' actual research seems to stand apart from any kind of moral argument they might make on why such a research design should matter (Phillips and Pool 1992:11-12). If praxis is potentially both the means and the ends of anthropology in Canada, then such a fusion of knowledge and action, epistemology and ethics could characterize Canadian anthropology only as much as anthropology elsewhere. There was no overwhelming evidence in the voices of speakers interviewed which suggested that anthropology here or anywhere was rapidly shedding its academic regalia for 'activewear'. The content of anthropology in Canada seems as diverse as that in any other country, there is simply less of it because there are fewer practitioners. Anthropologists have also commented on the material and institutional conditions of practicing their craft in Canada 3 5 (Armstrong and 3 4 On the nature of all types of anthropological knowledge as serving a more general ethical purpose see Carroll et al 1992:12; Clark 1979:1-4; 6; 10-11; 12-15; 17; and 18; Lee and Filteau 1983:225; 227. Lee and Filteau encountered in their survey of Canadian anthropologists a variety of theoretical stances which were immediately linked to ethical application. Some respondents, however, had presumably given up on changing the world, as a couple of responses to the question 'How would you characterize your basic educational philosophy as it is expressed in [your courses]?' indicated. One replied simply: 'despair' (Lee and Filteau 1983:226). 3 5 For anthropologists' commentaries and criticisms of the institutions which house much of anthropology and employ the majority of Ph.D. accredited anthropologists, see Beals 1982:6; 8; Birdsell 1987:8; Du Bois 1980:2; 3; 6; Eggan 1974:5; 17; Greenberg 1986:1; 5; Leach 1984:2; 6-8; Manning 1983:2; Mead 1959:42; Parkin 1988:330; 333; Preston 1983:291; 293; Tax 1988: 6; 8; Washburn 1983:12; 13; 20. Washburn provides a striking example of the differences in hiring practices over time (Washburn 1983:6). Du Bois recalls that when she put herself back into the academic marketplace c. 1950 \"...one still did not have to waste energy in compiling applications and in concocting often intellectually sterile 'publish or perish' articles. Appointments were fostered by well-wishers through word of mouth and invitation\" (Du Bois 1980:3). She adds \"In those years we all knew each other. Although we had our theoretical differences and even personal hostilities, we stood solidly in mutual support against outside attack. In the years at Harvard I found my immediate colleagues always courteous and supportive, but at best we were an aggregate of isolates, at worst self-seeking careerists\" 43 Armstrong 1992:343-4; Burridge 1983:309; Carroll et al 1992:3-4; 6; Davies et al 1992:1-5; Eichler 1992:72-84; 88; Hofley 1992:103; 110; Inglis 1992:58-9; 60; Lee and Filteau 1983:215; 218; 219; Manning 1983:4; O'Connell 1990:2-3; 13-16; 18; Phillips and Pool 1992;14-5; Preston 1983:287-301; Tremblay 1988:2; 12). Belshaw's Nietzschean overtones suggest that a major problem for the culture of the university in general, and not merely anthropology's place in it, lies in its growth of student population and the lowering or changing of admissions criteria: An open door policy can only be destructive of university values in the community at large, and unless accompanied by a qualitative classification of institutions, as in California, destroys the values of universities themselves. If universities are to deal in large numbers, as they must, their process of admission must be highly selective, and they must balance this by seeking university material from members of the public beyond the age group of the early twenties, who have discovered university values some years after leaving high school. The quality of the student intake is one of the factors influencing the problem of size (Belshaw 1964:21). One of anthropology's roles is to submit the university as an educational institution to ethnographic study. As well, anthropology must in turn submit itself to the values of the university. The ethnographer of academic culture does both at once. The first is accomplished by the empirical study itself, the second by 'going native' through studying the culture intimately. To know the institution in which much of anthropology is communicated and constructed means to some extent knowing how anthropological knowledge is maintained and reproduced. The values of the university, however, have not always been, nor may not always be, salutary to anthropology or anthropologists (Barrett 1979:367-68). Sometimes it took a charismatic individual to change the institutional climate in the direction of anthropology. Not only this, but one had to have connections with the right people already ensconced within the apparently (1980:4). Preston suggests that the 'sacred' phase of institutionalization in anthropology is in fact that part which takes place far from the institution, at least in geography: 'To the extent that this is true, there is no traditional secret passed on, and field research is just another stage in graduate training., in which the discovery of one's profession may amount to only derivative and superficial processes called professionalization. For most of these individuals are not reaching a professional puberty together; they are budding bureaucrats\" (Preston 1983:292). 44 unchanging educational system. O'Connell relates that A . G . Bailey's \"...colleagues were unenthusiastic mainly because they did not know what Anthropology was. The President at the time was N.A.M. MacKenzie (1940-1944), a scholar of International Law. He was so convinced by Bailey's arguments that he not only authorised the establishment of Anthropology at New Brunswick in 1941; but he did the same thing four years later at the University of British Columbia when he was transferred there, appointing Harold Hawthorn to the Chair\" (O'Connell 1990:17-8). The argument was that history was to some extent the handmaiden of anthropology, or at least, that things were reciprocal, would surface from a more famous source later on. \"The fact is that Bailey's uncomplicated recognition of the complementarity of History and Anthropology preceded Evans-Pritchard's declaration by almost twenty years...\" attests to the theoretical potential of anthropology in Canada (O'Connell 1990:20). These early incarnations of anthropology departments in Canada would have little resonance until the post-war period. Preston provides the western counterpoint to O'Connell's accounts: \"The first Ph.D. came in 1934 [Bailey's]... The dissertation was ethnohistorical... and has been assessed as the initiation of a distinctively Canadian approach to anthropology [however] The next Ph.D. came twenty-two years later, in 1956...\" (Preston 1983:290). The origins of the first serious and official documents of Canadian anthropology is worth mentioning because of its cultural influence on the recreation of the tension or fusion of ethics and epistemology that characterizes anthropological knowledge in general. Preston also suggests \"I think that it is fair to generalize on the academic ambience at this time, for the arts faculties, that there was an ideal of the small, cohesive university college, maintaining an uneasy but traditional balance between the moral imperative of Christianity, philosophical idealism, and empirical science\" (Preston 1983:289). Indeed this 'balance' is sometimes reflected in the speakers' transcripts quoted below. A heritage that may be creative but which was created out of strands in some sense fundamentally incompatible with one another provided for a unique fusion of perspectives. This is also reflected in the Boasian program for anthropology, and the 45 ambivalence that anthropologists in Canada have toward it. This \"jerky, uneven, confusing and fragmented impression of a unified discipline\" (from Lee and Filteau 1983:220) is still the dominant view of the work anthropology does in most departments in North America. I have personal experience with both the indoctrination of such a view - I hold it myself - and the privilege such training provides in terms of further graduate training and employment in a market which is also based on such a view. Few speakers were ready to discredit the four-field program. Interestingly, those that did were from my own generation or were slightly older. All others upheld it at least in Lee and Filteau's survey response terms of holism and convenience (1983:220). This may mean that some younger anthropologists are in the process of creating new suitabilities or holisms which borrow from disciplines other than biology, history, and linguistics. As Hofley states \"Our graduate programmes burst onto the scene in the early 1970s and, unfortunately, adopted mostly the American model of graduate training - courses and individualized committees. Students could do a Ph.D. in the same department and after four years of graduate work have almost no common ground 3 6 on which to hold a discourse\" (Hofley 1992:114). While it is optimistic to suggest such a time period for a Ph.D. in anthropology in Canada, the other major possibility for graduate program structure comes from Europe - mentorship. This is, however, just as, or even more, individualizing than committees, where the student at least contacts the talents of three or more individuals. Such a committee structure does lend itself to an approach which is already pre-divided into sub-disciplines. The people that sit on the committees must also be examined. In 1976; 72% of all professors in Canada were citizens, compared with close to 100% in the three countries who have influenced anthropology in Canada the most -Britain, France, and the United States (Hofley 1992:111). These figures, 3*> This lack of a shared discourse is clearly evidenced when one looks at student journals in Canada. For example, Hannerz reports that the journal Nexus (McMaster, Hamilton), and Na Pao (Saskatoon, later the Western Canadian Anthropologist), have within them such a variety of documents and interests that he suggests it is precisely because these are student articles, in the main written for term courses taught by highly differentiated faculty, that one finds such diversity (Hannerz 1987:215 both columns, 216 column one, 217 column 2). Hannerz also suggests that because students are enthralled both to the ideas and persons of their professors, students' journals in general represent a 'false underground', which eventually turns away from radicalism (1987:219). 46 however, are misleading as they lump together recent immigrants with those who studied in Canada. As well, and on the one hand, tenured faculty in Canada in anthropology or combined departments who sit on committees of anthropology students are more often women. This bodes well for wealth of experience. On the other hand, these same anthropologists overwhelmingly have a Ph.D. in anthropology as opposed to some other discipline, or they have a double degree. This may bode ill for breadth of knowledge (from Eichler 1992:88).37 The anthropology Ph.D. is, after all, an arts Ph.D v arguably the highest academic credential one can attain. What does this really mean, however? Anthropology by its very nature has been able to mask certain ignorances under a cloak of omniscient interest. Teaching anthropology in different parts of the academic institution, I find it more suitable and important to spread scholarship as widely as possible. The corresponding damage that may be incurred, of course, is the possession of several shallow ponds rather than one fathomed depth. The teacher of anthropology in Canada must to some extent swim in both. Speakers often manifested the ability to do just that. Methods and Profile of Participants: The methodological relationship involved in this project was a dialogue between a series of professional autobiographies and my own interpretations of them. The former includes an evaluative component. Those interviewed evaluated not only themselves and their work but others and others' works. There was a reflexive auto-critique in the analyses put forth by those interviewed. The latter is practiced within the assumptions of hermeneutics and social phenomenology. Such assumptions include that text is representative of thought, that text is a vehicle of translation amongst persons, and that text is translatable across the barriers of individual historical experience. As well, my experience must be recognizable in some way to those 3 7 Guppy found that although sociologists outnumber anthropologists in Canada by a wide margin, anthropologists hold more senior ranks. Anthropology also reverses other disciplinary trends in that it pays its most senior rank females more than males. Both disciplines are, however, two of the least prestigious in the country (Guppy 1989:14-16). This final sentiment agrees with almost all speakers who addressed these topics. 47 interviewed, and vice-versa. Apart from conflicting existential properties, my interpretation of, and knowledge about, anthropology is assumed to be part of the broader culture of the anthropologist, wherever he or she may be from, and whatever theoretical positions they might hold. Agar (1982) has suggested that the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the social phenomenology of Schutz be used to construct an authentic ethnographic language. Beyond the effect of target markets and diversity of interpretations, Agar agrees with Gadamer that in fact it is necessary to be embedded in a tradition to bring it to consciousness and to reflectively examine it (Agar 1982:781). He uses the concept of 'breakdown', originally from Heidegger, to translate Gadamer's 'negative experiences'. These experiences are not 'bad', but do not conform to the ethnographer's expectations (1982:783). These experiences are necessary both for an exposition of a different culture, but all the more so for a reflection upon our own. I encountered many of these breakdowns during this project, and it may be said that what follows is an attempt to reconstruct part of the professional culture of anthropologists given such breakdowns. Agar sums up: A good question is never purely rhetorical, nor is it in service of egocentric personal games, nor is it respectful of current opinion. Further, there is no method to learn to ask good questions in some mechanical way. Instead, the questions come from the nature of the breakdown within the encounter of different worlds, inspiring a sequence of questions and answers that emerge dialectically until the breakdown is resolved (Agar 1982:785). In initiating such a dialogue, a combination of textual and ethnographic research was used. The written texts consist of quotes from, and commentaries on, what are ostensibly some of the most important works published during this recent flux. Other textual sources directly related to the speakers involved included articles in journals. These sources, for the most part, do not appear in the dissertation to ensure anonymity. As well, each of these documentary sources directed attention to aspects of discourse passed on through education. The work consists of twenty interviews with professors and anthropologists employed outside the academy. Each was interviewed for at least one formal audio-recorded 90 minute session or in more casual 48 conversations. A l l the speakers had something valuable to say about knowledge construction in anthropology.38 In fact, audio-recorded and /or off the record interviews lasted between two and eight hours. Unrecorded informal discussions were too numerous to mention. These occurred at too great a variety of times to be calculated in any systematic fashion. 3 9 Field notes were kept of these spontaneous sessions. Women and men were interviewed in equal number. The speakers originally came from the following categories: a) those who teach theory courses in anthropology, b) those who teach history of anthropology courses, c) those who have published in these genres, d) senior faculty members who seemed to remember most if not all the changes this project catalogues, and e) all persons who showed an interest in participating in the project. To supplement these interviews and the other documentary evidence, I resorted to various other strategies such as a) viewing speaker's libraries, b) looking at their course synopses, c) examining professional societal affiliations and d) following their academic lineages within the period. The contact process followed the guidelines of the University of British Columbia's Ethical Review Committee. Personal contact was initiated by a combination of telephone, letter, or e-mail. One interview was conducted by e-mail, and one over the telephone. The latter was audio-recorded. Eight interviews were conducted in faculty offices on Canadian University campuses and ten were conducted in seminar rooms of Brock University residences in St. Catharines, Ontario. One interview was conducted in French, the remainder in English. The participants can be described in more detail while maintaining their individual anonymity. The twenty speakers fill in a profile which 3 8 I will use the term 'speaker' instead of informant, subject, or actor etc. 'Informant' is too condescending. 'Subject' is accorded too much readily identifiable metaphysical baggage. 'Actor' may suggest insincerity. These anthropological speakers are not coded, in order to preserve in-group anonymity. Instead, the respective decade in which each was trained appears at the end of each quote. The ethnographer's questions or prompts, when included, appear after a 'Q'. Every indented quote appearing without reference is from an anthropologist who participated in this study. 3 9 \"The act of interviewing does not need to sink to the level of mechanicalness. It can be a graceful and joyful act, enjoyed by the two sides and suffered by neither. What is more, my contention is that unless it becomes such an act, it will only fail in its main function.\" (Zweig, quoted in Andreski 1972:111). 49 includes 1. nation and decade of graduate training, 2. culture area specialization and place of fieldwork, 3. theoretical background and specialization, 4. academic rank if employed in the academy, and 5. the region of Canada in which they now practice as well as their nationality, which is not in half of the cases the same as nation of birth. 1. Anthropologists in this study represent graduate training in the following countries: Australia, Canada (including Quebec), Great Britain, Netherlands, France, and the United States. Eighteen of the speakers have attained the highest degree offered by their respective programs, the doctorate, and at the time of the interviews one was completing a master's degree, and one the doctorate. Three of those interviewed completed graduate work in the 1960s, ten in the 1970s, three in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, including those in the process of completion. Hence, all of those interviewed have personal experience of portions of the previous thirty years of anthropology. 2. Three speakers represented field training and traditional culture area specialization in Native North America, two in each of Oceania, Africa, South America, and Middle America, one in the Circumpolar region, and three in South East Asia. Five of those interviewed studied urban and rural minorities in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States. 3. Speakers represented much of the diversity to be found under the general rubric of anthropology. I interviewed anthropologists who claimed one or more of the following sub-specialties: linguistic anthropologists, structural-symbolic anthropologists, applied anthropologists, cognitive anthropologists, medical anthropology, cultural ecology, feminist anthropologists. Many speakers also indicated specialization in the history of anthropology, micro-sociology, urban studies, anthropology of science, phenomenology, and psychology. 4. Twelve of the twenty speakers are at present senior professors of anthropology in Canadian departments of anthropology or combined departments of anthropology and sociology. Three are assistant professors in such institutions, and three are practicing anthropology outside the academy working on contract for various governmental and non-governmental agencies, and two are teaching in sessional positions. 5. Eight of the interviewed anthropologists are now teaching in British Columbia, of these, however, six have spent lengthy stints teaching elsewhere 50 in Canada and the United States. Two are from the prairie region, six from Ontario, two from Quebec, and two from the Atlantic provinces. Ten speakers were born in the United States, seven were born anglo-Canadians, two are by birth francophones from Quebec, and one was born in Europe. Al l speakers are Canadian citizens. In considering the interviews with twenty anthropologists in Canada, this project defined itself as an attempt to understand how and why they constructed their knowledge. How anthropologists construct knowledge was seen as an epistemological problem, and the purpose of such constructions was an ethical question. The relationship between epistemology and ethics was seen to be part of the fundamental nature of the culture of anthropology. Professional debates, part of the consciousness of published discourse, reflect this tension between knowledge and action. In the intimacy of the interviews, the unpublished viewpoint arose. This consciousness stressed that institutions shaped knowledge construction, and the concept of vocation drove ethical aspirations. Anthropologists practicing in Canada encountered the same issues on a personal level, as they attempted to formulate an identity for themselves. The identities of those participating in this project are outlined, imparting some historical and regional context to the material which follows. 51 CHAPTER TWO - KNOWLEDGE, THEORY AND THEIR CULTURAL SPACE What characteristics are exhibited by the anthropological discourse which surrounds this project? The tension between ethics and epistemology seems central. This tension occurs throughout much of the anthropological literature. For present purposes, however, the material in this study is situated in two aspects of that literature. On the one hand, a discussion of epistemology and theory by anthropologists is suited to a review of some of the texts about the anthropology of knowledge. The concept of the field presents anthropologists with problems related to theories of knowledge (see for example Whittaker 1981). Ethics, on the other hand, appears to be most dominant when anthropology is taught and fieldwork is actually done (for dramatic examples see Bowen (Bohannon) 1964:42; 54[1954]). Tension and conflict both amongst anthropologists and within the discourse of anthropology seems to take two major forms. These forms are as follows: the tensions within the anthropology of knowledge and conflicting theories, and the tension between theories of knowledge and ethics. Some theories of knowledge in anthropology are discussed in light of influences such as fieldwork and the institutional setting of knowledge. The anthropology of knowledge asks about the validity and generalizability - scientific or cross-cultural - of the knowledge of anthropologists. The anthropology of education, discussed later, questions its value. Ultimately, it is the difference and perhaps the discrepancy between the sphere of validity and value, episteme and ethics, that characterize the anthropological endeavour as seen through the eyes of those who participated in this project.40 40 Elsewhere, a number of well known anthropologists have been interviewed in depth and the results published. Most of the cases concern famous anthropologists . Examples include Levi-Strauss by Eribon (1991[1988]), Schneider by Handler (1995), and Hogbin by Beckett (1989). This project provides a necessary and broadened perspective to the great names list. Less famous anthropologists often have had to tell their own story through autobiography, not being sought out for book length interviews (e.g. Goldfrank 1978). Related disciplines provide an interesting counterpoint to anthropology in this regard. In sociology, Berger has edited a volume of twenty autobiographical sketches which are quite personal (Berger 1990), and Mullan compiled a similar volume with sociologists speaking about their discipline (Mullan 1996). As well, only very recently have Gay and Lesbian anthropologists begun to tell their 52 Anthropology of Knowledge: Theory and Epistemology I should acknowledge, finally, the different committees on which I have sat beside infinitely eloquent and subtly resourceful colleagues, whose actions set me wondering why? (Bailey 1969:xiv). I would like to see more open avowal by other anthropologists of their personal beliefs, so that our understanding of their positions can be more complete (Firth 1975:12). Then this practice of focussing upon a text may be partly a fashion, with the name of Derrida looming over it all. Is the analysis then pursued for its own sake, almost as a game, or is it for the production of better ethnography? (Firth, in Parkin 1988:340). Our discipline is undergoing a serious crisis that threatens its foundations by calling into question its traditional objectives. This crisis reflects that of science and that of anthropology (Tremblay 1983:332). Perhaps some would argue that anthropology does not have a future, at least not as an autonomous social science, and that anthropologists have gone in so many different directions that the discipline might well be regarded as only an adjunct of development economics, rural sociology, comparative political science or a host of other disciplinary lines of work. I would argue, however, that it is anthropology's eclectic nature that could well provide its most distinctive advantage. Anthropologists have long held that it is fieldwork - long-term familiarity with local people gained through participant observation - that provides the basis for anthropology's claim to a separate scholastic endeavour (Hedican 1995:4-5). If every epistemological choice betrays the textual intent of an anthropological project (Whittaker 1978:428), the time has come for such an exposition. I will discuss a number of works which can be found under the general rubric of the anthropology of knowledge. Following this, a brief discussion of two works which summarize many of the relevant themes and tensions in an anthropological manner will be examined, that is, Fuller (1991) and Latour (1987). Fuller (1991) presents knowledge as culturally and historically produced. For Fuller, epistemology is social. Yet, a theory of knowledge, if believed in, has real implications in that it helps to construct social reality. One of the major aspects of the theories of knowledge in which anthropologists are trained and through which they themselves train others, stories in print (see Lewin and Leap 19%). 53 is a general scientific worldview. Latour (1987) provides an anthropologically oriented discussion of scientific knowledge. He suggests, along with Fuller, that the realities constructed by such epistemologies allow certain kinds of knowledge producing institutions to exist. These include the laboratory and the university. As well, because anthropological knowledge is for the most part officially ensconced in the academy, it has a certain look. 4 1 The manner in which this look is maintained is discussed below in the section on anthropology of education. Before embarking on a detailed commentary of these texts, I want to review what anthropologists themselves, both inside Canada and without, have written that is of import for the way they understand the world. Whether or not the natives themselves always pose such a question, the outsider wants to ask: How does anthropology construct its own internal validity? 4 2 Following how some natives describe, think about, and report on anthropology, one can ask - what is anthropological knowledge? Guises of Epistemology in Anthropology: Although anthropologists tend to use the word 'theory' for theories of knowledge or their study of theory, I will re-instate the term derived from Greek and given a literal meaning - the 'study of knowledge'. Epistemology in this sense makes an appearance in many different areas of anthropology. Epistemology in anthropology has been characterized as the content of anthropological training (Fortes 1978:3; Inglis 1992:58-9; Llobera 1976:28; Narayan 1993:673; O'Connell 1990:17). This training, however, often did not jibe with difficulties and human problems encountered in the field. Tentchoff suggests 4 ^ In this regard, Bourdieu (1988[1984]) is examined in some detail. Both Bourdieu and Latour were also mentioned by a number of participants in this study as being important examples of anthropologically oriented analyses of the spaces of western, and anthropological, knowledge. 4 2 Similar efforts at this daunting task have felt a need for some disclaimer: \"I have been asked to give an ethnology of Canadian ethnology or, more specifically elsewhere, a paper on 'Encountering Ethnologists in Canada', a task for which I am entirely unfitted and requiring more research than I have been able to do. Still, no ethnologist or anthropologist was ever deterred by such considerations. So I will do what I can\" (Burridge 1983:306). I am fully within this tradition of the undeterred. 54 I had been attracted to anthropology because of my feelings of marginality to my own society and culture. Anthropology held out the promise of providing powerful critical understandings of our Western world and suggestive alternative possibilities for a future beyond the West's peculiar miseries. Yet, my graduate training, heavily weighted in the positivist tradition, had stressed disassociating myself from the \"subject matter\", of separating my life experience from the \"science\" I was to practice, and of denying its relevance to that practice. Fieldwork, however, turned out to be a watershed personal experience. (Tentchoff 1985:80). There is still a tension in anthropological knowledge that stretches the anthropologist between the pole of scientific validity and the pole of unique and relative human experience. Traditionally, the latter made up anthropology's data, but the former was charged with giving order and meaning to it. Presently, positivism and relativism are still often opposed. Barth, however, suggests a middle ground: Our relativism should be located in the humility to learn and to engage within the contexts of knowledge and practice that frame our interaction with people - not in bracketing the other's ideas and behavior to remove them from oral, rational, and human judgement, thereby undermining the honesty of our engagement with them (Barth 1995:67). It is the native actor that mediates between the science of ethnography and its human face, and between epistemology and ethics. Manning sees this figure as a trickster, inverting the subject/object relation to drive home a point about the way in which anthropology constructs its knowledge about humanity: \"he then confronts us, through role reversal and exchange, with the 'object' of our study, a comically stereotyped primitive who entertains, perplexes, subverts - and ultimately cleanses - his ethnological audience\" (Manning 1983:3). Manning also suggests that the training of anthropologists demands that a kind of myth needs be inherited (1983:7). In order to teach the content of anthropology, categories which may bear little resemblance to cultural action on the ground are set up. In this sense, pedagogy in anthropology presents to its students a set of myths. If anthropologists are exposed as such by field experience, some may feel they 55 have been duped by a certain epistemological figure. Moore provides a genealogy of this trickster figure. What cultural conditions led to his production? For one thing, the anthropological definition of knowledge remained curiously divided. Anthropologists had always been happy to see local people as producers of local knowledge about for example, agricultural experimentation, cosmological theories, and medical cures, but there was very little question of such knowledge being valorized outside the local domain. This was true both for supporters and detractors of the so-called post-modernist turn. In other words, local people produce local theories and such theories are, almost by definition, not comparative ones. The implicit assumption was therefore that the theories of non-western peoples have no scope outside their context (Moore 1996:2). It was fieldwork in these locales that helped produce a schism between anthropologists' understanding of local knowledge and their knowledge that there were many locales of knowledge. Akin to the Culture / cultures tension, the former buttressed by the notion that general theories of humanity were possible in spite of the latter's empirical evidence for humanity's vast lot of cultural differences, local and comparative knowledge trap each other in their own negation (Moore 1996:6)43. It is the field which remains as the anchor for its own 'field of knowledge'. Givens and Jablonski (1996:306-7) found that in all doctoral dissertations in socio-cultural anthropology completed in North America in the 1990s, four competing and often conflicting theoretical viewpoints were used. These were defined as 'science', or the testing of hypotheses, 'advocacy', or the furthering of a political agenda, 'interpretive', and 'post-modern', or biographical rather than ethnographical. Science dissertations often were anti-subjective, and those post-modern were often anti-objective. Questions, 4 ^ Moore draws attention to the problem of description without impositions when she suggests feminist anthropologists must avoid the temptation to speak for others while making it known that these others exist. This is a political commitment as well as a critique of epistemology (Cole and Phillips 1995:180-81). Cole (1995:196-97) emphasizes these points in contrast with the political 'void' of postmodernism. This point is disputed in various ways, however, by contributors to Ellis and Bochner (1996), who read the postmodern as a way to incorporate non-western narratives into western consciousness through postmodernism's critique of western meta-narratives. 56 however, remain. What is object and subject for anthropologists? Why do anthropologists categorise their work in this four-fold manner? Do not politics enter into every kind of research? It is the kind of fieldwork that the student does which sorts subsequent research into ready-made categories. Fieldwork, however, is an overarching concept in that all four competing theories of knowledge claim the field as a place of evidence for their respective positions. If epistemology is subordinate to fieldwork in the training of anthropologists (Llobera 1976:17), then ethnography within different cultures relies heavily upon the experiential training of the field, rather than through books. Doing ethnography somehow dislocates one theoretically. This allows anthropologists to also train natives, with the hope that \"...better yet, a smart and adequately Westernized native might go so far as to receive the education of a bona fide anthropologist and reveal a particular society to the profession with an insider's eye\" (Narayan 1993:672; and also contributors to Panini 1991). Nebulous and diverse training from texts seems to characterize part of the status of the study of knowledge in anthropology. Thus Mead found that \"...when I asked eighty colleagues, variously selected from many areas and lines of association, to name the five most important books of the last five years, only four books were mentioned more than twice\" (Mead 1973:9).44 Certainly training in the four fields approach - cultural, linguistic, physical, and archaeological anthropology - in anthropology allows both breadth and diversity of interest to come to the fore. Not all anthropologists agree that such training is useful (Lee and Filteau 1983:220). Holism, integration, and system might be the hallmarks of a particular anthropological training 4 5, and thus to a great extent the limits of a kind of anthropological knowledge, but there are always exceptions. Lee and Filteau (1983:220), in their survey of Canadian anthropologists found that almost 4 4 Mead does not list these books. I also asked a similar series of questions of participants during this project and the results were too diverse to be significant. If the apocrypha that anthropologists do not read as much as their more 'bookish' colleagues is true, what they read may well be much more broad. 4 5 Givens and Jablonski (1996:315) report that anthropologists suggested that 'getting a complete education', and 'knowing what science was' were fundamental in the training of the anthropologist. One would have to undertake a study such as mine in order to find out what anthropologists mean by a complete education and what science is. 57 thirty percent disapproved of the Boasian approach, while O'Connell relates that A .G. Bailey, one of the founders of anthropology in this country, was never convinced that culture was the prime determinant of human action (O'Connell 1990:11). The ethnological aspect of the four field approach can in itself be extremely complex. Each sub-field may aspire to an epistemology, manifested in a certain set of theories, in conflict with its sister sub-disciplines, like neo-positivism in new world archaeology and interpretivism in ethnography. How anthropologists train successive generations may involve the cross-referencing of many different theories at once (Preston 1983:298 for a chart of theories in anthropology and an attempted synthesis of them). As well, general training in epistemology in anthropology takes a back seat to interest in the particular theory that will elevate a nascent career. \"According to a dominant approach to the sociology of the intellectual world, anthropologists' careers consist of getting themselves as much as possible into the center of conversation, into the center of arguments\" (Ben-Ari 1987:66). Given this, just what are anthropologists trained in, in reference to theories of knowledge? Epistemology has also been characterized as a manner of disciplinary identification and boundary maintenance (Barrett 1979:368; 370; 374; 379; Ben-Ari 1987:66; Boissevain 1974:212; Fortes 1978:1; Fuller 1993:136-7; Kirsch 1982:37; Narayan 1993:678). Watson (1987:33) suggests that what anthropologists find is in fact an effect of their epistemological training, which is an aspect of discursive practice. One assumption of this practice is that reality and discourse somehow match, that is, the world can be described with certitude by our language. Firth (1975:3) claims that social anthropology was not obsessed with facts and their generalization alone. Controversies over meaningfulness, and the meaning of meaning were rife during the somewhat mythologized heyday of fieldwork. He suggests that theory was not ignored, and rationality was in fact a major issue. Firth accepts the cultural validity of all meaning, but also questions, with Watson, our ability to communicate with the radically other (Firth 1975:9). He comments concerning possible innate structures which might allow for pan-human or cross-cultural understanding: \"Tacit intuition is not enough. Assertion is not enough [to satisfy empirical 58 standards]. Inner structures must be demonstrated, they cannot just be invented\" (1975:11). Whatever positions are taken theoretically, they are often used also for purposes of in-group identification between anthropologists. Stocking provides a summary of differences that such alliances create when juxtaposed with, for example, history: To put the matter another way, anthropologists are more likely to be committed to one side or another, and historians to be (relatively) disinterested observers, and the histories they write are likely to reflect this fact. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. If historians are less likely to be blinkered by theoretical bias, they are also more likely to suffer from a lack of technical sophistication and relevance; and if an anthropologist's commitment may inhibit understanding of the \"losing\" side, it can illuminate issues that remain below the threshold of a more disinterested concern (Stocking 1983:6). Such issues include the genealogies of the partisans of a particular brand of theory. Boissevain (1974:218) gives a number of examples as to how such genealogies are maintained, and with them, particular discursive and disciplinary boundaries. Citing de Bono, Boissevain suggests that the holes dug by specialists in one branch of a theory of knowledge allow deeper and deeper, though less and less disinterested, insights (1974:217). These insights are not necessarily about another culture, but indeed, are about the culture of the anthropologist. Llobera agrees when he states that texts on anthropological theory have as their unstated mandate the providing of the discipline with an acceptable line of ancestors46, particular to certain 'schools' or adherents to particular epistemologies (Llobera 1976:20). \"...these genealogies are not intended to explain history but to justify the structure of the present\" (1976:24). A number of participants in this project agreed with these sentiments, in reflecting on the teaching of undergraduate anthropology. Barrett suggests that teaching theory for reasons of identity maintenance casts a personal tenor on theoretical relations. He exults in 46 For examples of such constructions of ancestry and the debates surrounding them see the contributors to Diamond (1980), Silverman (1981), and Vermeulen and Roblain (1993). Stocking (1992) has commented on the possibility that epistemological authority in ethnography becomes occluded by the wonder of what ethnographies in fact produce, that is, visions of other cultures. 59 anthropologists' humanity, but deplores the intimacy of their ad hominem critiques, most often directed at their anthropological colleagues (1979:382). As well, the fences erected by anthropology against encroachment from other disciplines often fail due to infighting of this nature. Intuition, in spite of Firth's point, plays a large role in the construction of disciplinary difference (1979:380) and comparative work is often limited because of unstated but widely believed in deficits accorded to other discourses (1979:373). Not only are identities associated with, or constructed from, epistemologies between disciplines, but run the gamut from those amongst individual anthropologists, to those between cultures as wholes. Narayan states \"The fact that the profession remains intrigued by the notion of the 'native' anthropologist as carrying a stamp of authenticity is particularly obvious in the ways in which identities are doled out to non-Western, minority, or mixed anthropologists so that exotic difference overshadows commonalities or complexities\" (Narayan 1993:676-77; see also contributors to Huizer and Mannheim 1979).47 Such identities are also often deemed more interesting and even more important than any theory of knowledge that may be associated with them; these associations are almost always secondary, as evidenced by many of the participant's statements regarding theories of knowledge cited below. Ben-Ari, citing Gluckman and Needham as examples, suggests that anthropologists find it more interesting to study and teach about other anthropologists than anthropology as an academic discipline, and that though anthropologists might be bored with analysis, they are never that way with themselves (Ben-Ari 1987:63). Anthropology as a discourse often mirrors its object in its construction of sources for its own theories of knowledge. As Murphy suggests \"The ties between our anthropological teachers and 4 7 As if addressing this project in particular, Narayan later asks: \"Is a middle-class white professional researching aspects of [his] own society also a 'native' anthropologist?\" (Narayan 1993:677). Harries-Jones cautions that a study such as mine would be akin to 'pushing the bus in which one is riding', but that such a study responds to 'crucial' questions of self-reflexivity (Harries-Jones 1996:161). In critiquing Berger and Luckmann (1966), he suggests: 'The problem for Berger and Luckmann lies in their image of the relationship of passengers to their bus. Theirs is an image of a school bus trundling along a country lane, or a bus full of holiday-makers moving along the expressway from town to seaside. But what if the bus was taking prisoners from gaol to the site of a prison labour project? Or what if the bus turned out to be Derrida's bus containing self-imprisoned epistemologists? In the latter instance 'the bus in which one is riding' assumes a very different form\" (Harries-Jones 1996:161). 60 founders and ourselves may not be as primary as those of kinship, but they are commonly modeled on these attachments and share some of their qualities\" (Murphy 1981:174). Anthropologists carry around both a theoretical and a personal identity, and these often become inextricably entwined, with the latter predominating (Narayan 1993:681).48 The Field as a Leitmotif oi Epistemological Identity: Identities in anthropology are also constructed at a personal level. These, however, are not divorced from theoretical consequences. Fieldwork is often cited as the experience that changes, manifests, or solidifies identity (Fortes 1978:6; Wengle 1984:225).49 The value placed on the fieldwork experience is also suggested to be problematic for training related to theoretical work. Llobera states \"I strongly maintain that theoretical skills can only be developed by special training and dedication which are hardly compatible with extended fieldwork\" (Llobera 1976:18). If Kirsch is correct: \"I do not propose that fieldwork as it has developed in the past is likely to disappear. It may lose its central and dominant position, and other strategies and techniques may supplement it\" (Kirsch 1982:47), then theoretical heroics may remain the domain of some other debates, like literary criticism. Fortes: \"In my estimation...fieldwork in 4 o > The way in which anthropologists acknowledge their mentors, friends, and family in texts provides an insightful look at this unsteady balancing act (e.g. Ben-Ari 1987:77). 4 9 National origin may not have anything to do with this (for, however, a series of related examples of the possible 'Polishness' of the noble and/or reflective nature, see Parkin 1988:337; Mead 1973:6; Leach 1984:16). The noble identity of the anthropologist perhaps distinguishes itself in the field, whereas other lesser natures are extinguished. Stocking notes that such an idea contributes to \"At once setting anthropology apart from other such inquiries and linking it to a broader European tradition of participatory cultural exoticism ...is the basis for a most unlikely image of the academic intellectual: \"the anthropologist as hero\"... [The field] is a kind of shared archetypical experience that informs, if it does not generate, a system of generalized methodological values or disciplinary ideology...\" (Stocking 1983:7). Firth states: \"You see, Malinowski's diary was written in Polish, and was never intended for publication, whereas his field notes are written in either Kiriwinian or English. My diary was just part of the general documentation of the field, not intended to be read by other people, but not, I think, as Malinowski's, a method of finding, exploring the self\" (in Parkin 1988:337). It is interesting to note that both Malinowski and Nietzsche claimed that their ancestors were Polish noblemen - in neither case has this been documented. 61 the empirical mode remains the sine qua non both for the testing of theory and, what is more important, for making new discoveries\" (Fortes 1978:24). Firth: \"Formal interview and questionnaire both have their place, but adapted to the conditions of lengthy residence; the direct observation of behavior is not merely a corrective to verbally acquired data but an indispensable complement...\" (Firth 1975:16). Barrett, however, suggests that if fieldwork is quoted by anthropologists themselves as the distinguishing factor for both anthropologists' heroics and their unique epistemological positions, \"...their views can be explained in terms of habit and convention, lack of knowledge of [other] discipline^], failure to appreciate changes in the societies in which they work, and socialization patterns during and following graduate studies - in other words, in terms of extrarational factors\" (Barrett 1979:368). In fact, the concept of the field, which I discuss in light of speakers' comments in this regard below, more recently has been cast as equivocal in some of the anthropological literature, as well as some of the same texts. Fieldwork has been seen as space of deception, rather than one of enlightenment (Firth 1975:10; Fortes 1978:13; Tentchoff 1985:76), Watson implies that if the fieldworker is not forthcoming with accounts of genuinely other realities, questions about the field will arise from the position of credibility before they arise from the direction of reflexivity: \"...it is precisely for news of the world conveyed by an accredited reporter, that the reader consults an ethnographic text; if he suspects that news brought to him is an effect of the writer's discoursive practices, then, as things stand, he will not warrant it as anthropology\" (Watson 1987:36). Barrett humorously alludes to the problem of deception and the field: \"Indeed, an in-joke within the anthropological community is that we go as far away as possible for our research, so that nobody else will ever check what we have done\" (Barrett 1979:371).50 There is also an epistemological point to be made about the study of such 'exotica'. Barrett suggests that the technical vocabulary of anthropologists is not as developed as that of sociologists due to the fact that people outside of the discipline of anthropology generally will not be ready 5 0 Needless to say, this project has no such advantages, and in fact occupies the opposite extreme. 62 to check ethnographic reportage through comparison. \"The layman has felt less competent to judge anthropological work [than that sociological], which has meant less threat to the opinions of the (supposed) experts\" (1979:377). Other challenges to the enlightening aspect of fieldwork have come from sources as diverse as local politics, epistemological doubts and personal role reversals (Tentchoff 1985:78). Mead's comments on the former seem at present naive: The classical position of trust and cooperation between an anthropologist and his informants, no matter how disparate their education, in which both were devoted to recording a vanishing culture and assuring the safety of its artifacts, has now been replaced by a relationship in which the anthropologist must sometimes either espouse the cause of some ethnic group within a revolutionary formula, or be forced to acknowledge that there are no longer such shared values (Mead 1973:16). If Mead sounds a note of auld lang syne, a farewell to a perhaps mythical period when the field was young, Stocking heralds a field where the doubts of the present have not yet become the myths of the future: ...epistemological and ethical doubts have weakened methodological resolution without yet resolving the problematic character of fieldwork method; the questioning of old concepts and the legitimation of new theoretical alternatives has not established the basis for a new integrative orientation; and despite a growing concern with increasing non-academic employment options for its surplus doctorates, the discipline remains essentially an academic one (Stocking 1983:4). Some 'classical' anthropologists share some of these doubts: \"I have always been somewhat skeptical of the view - shared by Evans-Pritchard amongst others - that the social anthropologist 'discovers in a native society what no native can explain to him' \" (Firth 1975:10; see also Pike 1967[1954]). Some 'contemporary' ethnographers were also taken aback by fieldwork encounters, and ended by doubting the entire discursive project of the field: \"...when [a native] challenged my motives for taking his words on tape 'to do a business', I was set apart from all planes of locally available identification, thrown outside a circle of fellowship forged by spiritual concerns, and lumped 63 instead with academics who made it their business to document and theorize about other people's lives (Narayan 1993:674). Not merely are the data from the field precious commodities for the furthering of anthropological careers (see the contributors to Sanjek 1990 for diverse examples), but the field itself, \"...given its central role in the anthropological mystique... was bound eventually to become a marketable commodity\" (Stocking 1983:8). Theories of knowledge owe their fashions to a similar kind of commodotizing for educational and career consumption. Epistemology is inevitably linked to institutions (Ben-Ari 1987:64; Firth 1975:6). Fortes suggests that theoretical issues are persistent in part because of their institutionalization (1978:25). Firth suggests that ideological convictions to certain political institutions also harbor limits to theoretical expression (1975:22). Ben-Ari states that the web of relationships in which anthropologists are enmeshed serves to navigate the course of theoretical problems in cyclical directions (1987:65). Mead is thus highly critical of such fashions and their representatives: As the period of educational expansion slows down, it may well be that one legacy from those years will be a layer of middle management, the members of which reached their positions by a kind of gamesmanship which is no longer as relevant to a world where stringency, frugality, and specific capacities critically appraised are again in vogue (Mead 1973:3). It is again the institution, as many speakers in this project below agree, that is a major force in the shaping of which theories of knowledge get discussed and which do not. Mead does suggest, however, that a new positive feature of the period which begins the professional training period of the most veteran of speakers in this project \"...is the willingness to discuss, analyze, dissect, propound and expound the findings of Levi-Strauss [for example] during the course of his work, where in previous periods, except for book reviews, very little of this was done until a master was dead\" (Mead 1973:11). Mead as well would shortly find herself subject to such critique. In addition, Barth notes that another positive possibility extant within transitive anthropological knowledge is its ability to help break free of institutional 64 constraints or cycles of epistemology: \"Such [transitive] conceptualizations of culture also allow a greater openness between anthropological knowledge and other cultural knowledge, an openness that should work against academic hegemony in our interactions and in our conceptions. This openness allows us to engage more intimately in the field situation with the ideas of other people, not as exemplars of culture, but for their insights into life\" (Barth 1995:66). These comments may be associated with anthropologists' remarks concerning a general shift in epistemology from c.1965-1985 (for example Barrett 1979:379; Firth 1975:9; 15; Kirsch's table of possible anthropological paradigms 1982:36; Llobera 1976:19; and Stocking's summary of theoretical critiques in anthropology 1983:4)51. Manning's trickster can be seen as an agent of a shift from formalism to perspectivism: \"The thrust if this performance is not to dismantle our social and symbolic structures, but to detach us from them and thus show us that we need not be imprisoned by their conventions. The creative opportunities afforded by liminality and bricolage are brought within reach\" (Manning 1983:8-9). Firth suggests that although there are continuities to the discipline of anthropology, those spaces of the same are in fact what allow us to become disciplined, even if we study a similar problem in a different way, or from a different theoretical position (Firth 1975:1). For example, \"a significant facet of modern social anthropology then is its inward-turning disposition. It is inward-turning in the sense that a modern social anthropologist is apt to be concerned not with the behavior of the people he is studying but with their 'models' for perceiving and interpreting experience and generating their behavior\" (1975:8). One might add that increasingly all anthropologists are inward turning to the point that they are concerned with elucidating the models of discourse in which they ensconce their theories of 'the other'. Yet the turn from stop-action empiricism of observable behaviour to either historical or mental pre-5 1 As well, Mead's salutary pass at prospective institutional clearings made available by the decline of funds for expensive empirically based work is of interest: \"It is even possible that the present financial stringency may keep a certain number of graduate students at home, doing book theses and learning how to organize material before they plunge prematurely into an area they may only learn to dislike\" (Mead 1973:12). The subsequent years, evidenced by speakers comments, often bear out this prediction. 65 occupations is more of a myth of a turn, more mental, perhaps, than historical. Hence Firth adds: \"In this sense the stress of Evans-Pritchard and of L6vi-Strauss on the theme that the job of the anthropologist is interpretation not explanation is no more than the restatement of a familiar difficulty\" (1975:17). Interpretation, as the practice of hermeneutics, is directly evidenced by various anthropological authors, although all practice interpretation in some form (see Schrag 1980 on the hermeneutics of the everyday life of cultures as studied by the anthropologist). So much do they do so it may render the proposition that anthropology is hermeneutical to be trivially true (Carroll et al 1992:6-7. Firth 1975:21; Kenny 1987:9; Tremblay 1988:7 on Doutreloux, and Preston's 1983:298 chart). Grindal traverses the margins of anthropological interpretation, extending the empirical witness of his fieldwork into the attempted reading of ethnographically confronted other minds: To go further, I must slide back the screen which separates my person from the immediate reality of these events. I am no longer dealing with detached empirical observations and academically polite interpretations. I am dealing with events which have gotten into my guts and my soul. They are part of my poetry and my fiction (Grindal 1985:60). Even so, if anthropologists tell stories based on their fieldwork experiences, part of the polite language of much theory in anthropology is in fact to base stories on fieldwork experience. In so doing, the anthropologist does not lose that credibility most important to the construction of anthropological knowledge. Epistemology as both a Method and a Methodology for Cross-Cultural Communication: Epistemology has been represented under the guise of methodology or even method in anthropological literature. If epistemology is said to concern theories of knowledge, then methodology is the study of methods, and methods themselves are the nuts and bolts of studying. Methods are strongly associated with the field. Methodology is associated with fields methods 66 courses. In anthropology, if epistemology is directly recognized in its own right, it usually falls under the rubric of a theory course. In course outlines and graduate study precis that I have looked at from a number of Canadian departments of anthropology, the term 'methodology' appears to stand for both epistemology and actual methods, that is, both the theory of knowledge that lies behind potential methods, and the 'how to do it' kinds of things that are necessary in extracting data in the field. Sections entitled methodology in dissertations invariably discuss how the work was done, rather than involve themselves in a theoretical discussion of the kinds of knowledge available in discourses that allow one to think about the world in a certain manner. Anthropologists have commented upon the collapse of epistemology, methodology, and methods into one another (Barrett 1979:378-9; Barth 1995:65; Boissevain 1974:214; 229; Carroll et al 1992:2; Firth 1975:4; 5; Fortes 1978:9; 10; 11; Hofley 1992:109; Kirsch 1982:33; 34; 35; 44; Narayan 1993:673; 679; O'Connell 1990:12; Stocking 1983:10; Watson 1987:31; 37; Williams 1989:87). Firth notes that theory echoes at the paradigmatic level, which is somehow aloof from social action. It is an abstraction that enables prediction, and rests upon analogy. As well, debates which take place at the level of theory seem to him perennial, and are thus removed from the actual scene of anthropological work (Firth 1975:14; 17). He suggests that \"social anthropology is not just an exercise in speculative reasoning. It is about the actions and thoughts of people over a range of societies. So when any statement is made about such actions and thoughts, a very proper question is, what is the nature of the evidence?\" (1975:18). As an theoretical statement, Firth's is very clear. The most important words in the above quote are 'about' and 'evidence'. If a discourse is about something other than itself, as much of anthropology, not merely social anthropology, purports to be, then the notion of evidence takes on a very specific tenor. Evidence for an anthropological statement must then come from the same space as that which anthropology is 'about'. This theory of knowledge is not so much circular as it assumes evidence and our statements using such are in a relation where evidence is independent and statement dependent. 5 2 Field data (emic) may be transposed into 5 2 Addressing the actual content of anthropological knowledge, as part of the general thrust of 67 anthropological statements about field data (etic) (Fortes 1978:22). The collapse of method and theory comes about because both are, as Stocking suggests \"... not only the object of inquiry but may provide also a means by which it is pursued\" (Stocking 1983:7). There are other factors which introduce an intimacy amongst epistemology, methodology, and method. Mead observes ...in the field sciences, the actual conditions of work, bound in as they are with the geography, cultural areal style, conditions of work, politics, logistics, and state of equipment, are so intimately related to the discipline that while the processes of dealing with them provides a basic bond of sympathy between ethnologists a world apart in theory and national origin, they also preserve the extraordinarily idiosyncratic, apprenticeship style of the discipline (Mead 1973:7). Hence, while fieldworkers may be different, the field itself is somehow reified. The concept of the field, on which speakers in this project commented at length, is the archetypical space of the anthropological rite of passage. Heroism and romance aside, however, the actual physical reality of one field animates the cultural construction of the reality of the anthropological field of knowledge like no other concept. Barrett agrees: My view on this is unambiguous: it would be a great mistake to encourage anthropologists to specialize in theory without at the same time doing field work. I suspect that the reason why Leach and Levi-Strauss have been so much more creative than Parsons is that the two anthropologists have done original field work. Without this experience, one does not possess the judgement required to erect theory that is feasibly tested in the empirical world (Barrett 1979:375). the human sciences, Llobera cites a textual critique that was also important to a few of the speakers in this study, Foucault's The Order of Things (Foucault 1970[1966]). Llobera suggests that \"One of the things that social scientists of one denomination or another have accepted uncritically is their own object of knowledge. That there should be, for example, a science of man is seen as unproblematic, but Michel Foucault has been able to show when and how this specific object of science appeared in the Western world, and why this event should be considered an eruption in the realm of knowledge; he also considers the possible disappearance of this object... Whether The Order of Things is for the human sciences what Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was for the natural sciences - as G[eorge] Canguilhem... has suggested - is to be seen, but there is no doubt that Foucault's book, and his work in general, requires a closer attention from social scientists than it has received until now\" (Llobera 1976:29). It is also worth noting that Canguilhem was in fact one of Foucault's mentors, teachers, and friends, and that acknowledgements can work both ways if there is a suitable vested interest. 68 Barrett continues by suggesting that although theory in social science is fractured and discontinuous, detailed ethnographies from all periods of the discipline remain as a testament to the empirical value of field work (1979:375). Only by being there, at the point of origin of the ethnographic event or statement, can one have access to another culture's reality. Firth reiterates this point by saying that although anthropology has artistic or aesthetic elements, \"...it is not just an effort of the constructive imagination. Its generalizations must relate at some point to evidence of what who said and did where, when, and how\" (Firth 1975:18). This method of being there does not preclude generalization or embrace a radical relativism or subjectivity. After all, the natives too speak and act and can at least potentially argue the anthropologists' interpretations (1975:23). As Barth states: \" 'Knowledge' is not characterizable as difference: indeed, the same or similar knowledge is obviously used and reproduced in different local populations as to provide grounds for their thoughts and actions\" (Barth 1995:66). He also argues that anthropologists only become professional through the thoroughgoing awareness of knowledges which are not addressed by the discipline of anthropology, and which are not described in anthropological debates. These 'other ways of knowing' both limit anthropological knowledge and expand that of the anthropologists' (1995:67).53 Even so, such other knowledge will still be communicated along well trod lines of anthropological narrative. Ben-Ari sums up the natural attitude of the 'average' anthropologist's recantation of rite of passage events, on which acknowledgements are one particular window. In so doing, ...the ethnographer communicates her or his mastery of the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus of the profession. In acknowledgements, the absence of professional parlance, along with the personal appeals and individual statements, tales of rapport, confessions of fallibility, and use of fictive kin terms, all serve to create 5 3 Manning, however, cautions us on taking this point too far: \"While cherishing that view, we should also recognize that its credence derives from our professional faith. No one can demonstrate that another culture provides a mirror image, much less an essential comprehension, of our own. To those outside the faith, that is, to the general public and even to most of the academic community, ethnology can be easily dismissed as quaint, arcane, marginal, irrelevant, and narcissistically self-indulgent...\" (Manning 1983:3). Anthropology, and especially ethnography, can indeed be all these things. 69 the impression of a human, concrete, intimate - and therefore believable and genuine - experience (Ben-Ari 1987:75). The metaphysics of presence, the physical actuation of experience, the material reality of the field - along with picking the correct terms of address to situate these notions (1987:67) - are the criteria for authenticity in anthropological narrative.54 However universal in anthropological training, and however general in anthropological practice, the metaphysics of presence has of late been subject to critique. Boissevain (1974:223) suggests that \"...the dulling of critical faculties by oversocialization within the dominant paradigm..\" is responsible for the belated nature of such a critique. The source of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, that is, British anthropologists themselves, have also been slower to reflect upon their own assumptions than Americans (1974:212). Be this as it may, there is no dearth of 'post-positivist' critique in the anthropological literature. Narayan states that \"Objectivity\" must be replaced by an involvement that is unabashedly subjective as it interacts with and invites other subjectivities to take a place in anthropological productions. Knowledge, in this scheme, is not transcendental, but situated, negotiated and part of an ongoing process. This process spans personal, professional, and cultural domains (Narayan 1993:682). 54 Llobera has provided a technical (and critical) summary of the theory of knowledge which seems to lie behind the construction of such criteria: \"Empiricism is another of the obstacles which has pervaded anthropology from the beginning, specially in the Anglo-Saxon world. There are two dimensions that I would like to refer to briefly. Firstly, empiricism equates science with collection of facts; secondly, and more importantly, it contains an ontological assumption according to which universals or laws are to be found at the empirical (behavioural) level. No distinction is made between nature as sensed and nature as perceived by science. Both dimensions of empiricism are widely shared by anthropologists and their deleterious effects have been duly substantiated... (Llobera 1976:37). Looking at other options, however, Howes argues that in spite of these deficits of empiricism that, \"Surely, there is no intrinsic reason why American pragmatism should replace British empiricism and/or French rationalism (not to mention Canadi>n bicentrism) as a global research methodology and strategy (Howes 1992:168). Furthermore, O'Connell asserts that in fact American anthropology participates more so in the problematic areas of empiricism than do the British, and certainly, many Canadians: \"Bailey was at even greater distance from Boas and his regiment of quartermaster sergeants zealously organising an exhaustive inventory of brute cultural facts\" (O'Connell 1990:19). 70 The problematic ethical nature of a pretense at objectivity was already well-recognized within some aspects of anthropological debate. Mead relates that \"Boas did not believe that objectivity was possible or even desirable within one's own culture, where the responsible anthropologist, like any responsible citizen, had to take sides on matters of social justice\" (Mead 1973:13). Mead herself, however, is cited by Goldfrank as substituting politics for ethics in pushing through a motion declaring American anthropologists in support of the war effort at the expense of the black population of the United States at the American Anthropological Association meetings in late 1941; thirty years before another crucial meeting of the A .A .A . which divided anthropologists over issues surrounding the Vietnam war (Goldfrank 1978:197-98). At issue may be the possible unethical nature of claiming objectivity for our knowledge of other cultures. Yet Preston enjoins: \"I am also urging that we recognize the perversity of extreme relativism, and recognize the necessity of regarding thinking as a moral act... and regarding societies as moral systems...\" (Preston 1983:296). There is some irony here, as Ben-Ari suggests: \"Paradoxically then, as anthropology's self-reflexivity brings up issues which strike closer to home, the greater the need will become to go outside the discipline for critical approaches and viewpoints\" (Ben-Ari 1987:80). In a more particularly epistemological vein, Burridge agrees: \"Ethnography of itself, like a mule, is useful but sterile. It bears new fruit as ethnology when enlivened with ideas and insights from elsewhere\" (Burridge 1983:310). One can remain suspicious of any purported general shift in thinking about knowledge in anthropology. If epistemological issues are cyclical or otherwise perennial, and the metaphysics of presence is as fully ensconced in social anthropology as it is in feminist ethnography, theories of knowledge may once again be serving political identities and alliances. One can agree with Watson when he cautions The popularity of interpretive analysis may owe something to the fact that it permits the practitioner to pay lip service to relativism while clinging for dear life to realism. It enables the practitioner to 71 subvert other's accounts of the world by demonstrating that they are socially contingent; at the same time but enables him to ground his own accounts securely in \"reality\" (Watson 1987:32). Epistemology is not so much argued by patient philosophical analysis5 5 as by fashionable political identities and boundary maintenance.56 In this way, the collapse of methodology, method and theories of knowledge provide anthropology with a unique, if problematic, space of knowledge construction. Anthropologists have often suggested that knowledge has a binary structure. Even what anthropological knowledge purports to describe may have this structure (Allen 1990:279-281; Burridge 1983:311-2; 314-5; Carroll et al 1992:5; Firth 1975:11; Greenberg 1986:10; Howes 1992:156-8; Llobera 1976:33; Manning 1983:5; Narayan 1993:671; 682; Stocking 1983:5). Preston (1983:297) lists six major binary oppositions said to structure all facets of anthropology. Specialism versus generalism, scientism versus humanism, epistemology versus ethics are important in this structure.57 These oppositions exist in uneasy repose, sometimes in open conflict. Preston suggests, perhaps unfairly that, anthropologists in Canada who tend to be scientistic, also tend to be right wing politically (1983:297). Those more ethically responsible, humanistic (and more humane?) have left wing tendencies. 55 In Canada, the relative paucity of literature on this level has been remarked upon: \"Mental operations, the ways in which human beings construct their semantic universes and ontologies, are the key because they are logically prior, because the strange event - or any event - must be transformed by a mental operation before it can be appreciated and become relevant. Essays on epistemological problems are invited. Unless we are aware of what goes into our knowing we cannot know what we think we know\" (Burridge 1983:313). 56 Anthropologists in this study were quite frank regarding their feelings about the future of anthropology, and there was a distinct 'conservative' theme running through their thoughts. Many speakers either said exactly what they felt - comments not always reproduced here - or else told me that they had things to say that they felt they could not. For an innovative manner of dealing with this disjunction, see Schneider's (1995:8-10) snide remarks concerning the interpretive and post-modern American anthropologists in his 'fantasy interview' with Handler. 5 7 Strathern evokes these tensions in the practice of anthropologists: \"So if anthropologists are committed to a kind of humanism, they will not necessarily endorse it by focussing their descriptive efforts on it - the problem is that that is also the route to racism, terrorism and ethnic violence, to purifying populations into greater and lesser exemplars of it, to including some and excluding others\" (1995:170). Cultural determinism can be seen as a replacement for nature, with all of the former's dogmatic inclinations and implications. 72 Burridge provides additional binarisms, such as matter and mind, structure (base) and superstructure (Burridge 1983:311). He also notes that sectarian political alliances develop amongst Canadian anthropologists that are quick to condemn \"...flirtatious advances toward the other\" side (1983:311). Narayan also sees such dichotomies played out in a dualism of their own in the actual texts of anthropology: \"As I see it, there are currently two poles to anthropological writing: at one end stand accessible ethnographies laden with stories, and at the other end stand refereed journal articles, dense with theoretical analyses\" (Narayan 1993:310-1). This dualism also has pedagogic implications: \"We routinely assign narrative ethnographies in intro to anthro' classes... because it is through narratives lively with people, places, and events that we know recalcitrant undergraduates are likely to be seduced by the discipline\" (1993:311). These kinds of texts also help anthropologists forget that they also must write the second kind. It is the second kind of text, endogamous in language, upon which careers are improved. This factor brings to light yet another dualism, that between the life of a stranger intimate with another culture and people, and an academic ingratiated within a strict disciplinary hierarchy (for example in the review of Bourdieu 1988[1984]).58 Perhaps the most dangerous dualism of anthropology lies between its theoretical rhetoric and its ethnographic practice. Srivastava relates that Theoretically, the anthropological work rests on both assumed and real equality between those 'who are studied' and those 'who study them'. It is the great humanism, to remember Claude Levi-Strauss... that lies at the base of anthropological work. It is also said that the anthropologist is an humble learner of other cultures. In actual practice, 5 8 Bourdieu explicates the complexities of academic and educational discourse in terms of its reproductive capacity. The institution's real genius is in its ability to take the raw material of public education and transform it. This transformation is based not upon a meritocracy but on a subtle facade of intellectual merit indebted to class, power, ethnicity, gender and other variables. These are revealed by Bourdieu's use of statistics on institutional documents. As well, interpretation of instructors' comments on students' work is provided (Bourdieu 1988[1984], Bourdieu and Passeron 1992[1970]). One is transformed into the academic or the professional through the learning of codes. Such codes, says Alexander \"...form the cultural wealth of any society, a wealth that can be possessed only by those who have acquired the symbolic means to appropriate it\" (Alexander 1990:25). Latour's (1986) ethnographic treatment of scientists and science is an understanding of the reaction to the theoretical demise of positivism. However, it still continues to be important in practice. This also seems to be reflected in anthropology. 73 however, a great assymetry is established between anthropologists and the people they study. In their efforts to study other cultures, anthropologists demolish the fortifications of a closed society. That State machinery, the officials, the police and school teachers are there to help them in this task. At every juncture, anthropologists stand on pedestals higher than the local people (Srivastava 1993:86-7). Even if each anthropologist is many-selved and belongs to many communities at once (Narayan 1993:676), most or all of these communities have higher status and more power than those of the locals (see also Harries-Jones' review of the A.S.A. decennial in 1996:156). In fact, this fractured sense of being, often outlined by speakers in this project in reference to their 'many lives', may also serve to undermine the possible holism that a local person may feel about living. Anthropologists participate in a rhetoric of caring, but such a concept is inevitably Western, and may not be recognizable to local peoples. Even so, Cesara suggests that anthropologists first priority is to affirm that they are caring beings even if they cannot be recognized by others as such: \"...anthropologists face constant difficulties in finding an 'existential unification', a relief from constant contradiction and ambiguity... only possible for an authentic self, which is to say, a self that cares\" (Cesara 1982:226). The contradiction may come from the structure of the binarisms of anthropological knowledge, the ambiguity from the tensions between them. The former is the space of theory or thinking, the latter the space of method or doing. The former is thought and epistemological, the latter is action, or ethical. If thoughts are free, then they cannot be considered to be in an ethical relation with another human being. No matter how much ink is spilled discussing method or structure, anthropologists, have not been rendered immune to epistemological auto-critique, that is, critique coming from themselves directed at themselves (Fortes 1978:19; 20; Mead 1973:14; and Watson's 1987:34 critique of Leach's 1984:22 claims, among many). Llobera's (1976:20; 27; 28; 30; 37) intermittent but consistent use of the terms 'proper' and 'authentic' as qualifiers for the type of history of anthropology he wishes to promote render his argument against the political hegemony of other such texts hollow. Armstrong and Armstrong's (1992:341) rapid attribution of theoretical criticism only to recent 74 aspects of anthropological work is perhaps facile. Ben-Ari (1987:79) seems not to recognize that his own argument concerning acknowledgements as pieces of discourse precludes him giving such texts an authenticity which allows insight into the persons who wrote them. He also must acknowledge debts, and he does so with more candour than the remainder of his article suggests was possible (1987:81). Finally, his use of positive adverbs to qualify the assertions of cited colleagues leaves the reader suspicious of his more radical claims (1987:73). In sum, this brief review of some anthropological texts on the subject of the anthropology of knowledge suggests that epistemology in anthropology is a vehicle for identity politics, boundary maintenance, and is the site of potential shifts and cycles of critique and fashion. Epistemology is taught under the guise of what really is methodology or even method, and is often seen as being structured in a binary form. Many of these themes will be seen again in speaker's extracts cited below, as anthropologists participating in this project echo or counter their colleagues' written claims. Epistemology as a Social Construct: Fuller I turn now to two more detailed analyses of anthropological knowledge in order to further place the argument of this dissertation alongside previous work dealing with similar domains. In his 1991 book, Social Epistemology, Fuller notes that classical methods of describing the way knowledge is produced were naive. The sociologists and anthropologists of knowledge (see for e.g. Collins 1985; contributions to Douglas 1973; Gilbert and Mulkay 1984; Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1977; and Zviglyanich 1993) however, through their critique of literalist externalist worldview represented by the logical positivists commit a naivety of their own: they overestimate the control of the gatekeepers of debate and the influence of the language of debate itself. For example: 75 Why should it be presumed that an account of knowledge production, as might appear in a book or a journal article, represents how knowledge is actually produced? After all, the diagnostic tools available to manuscript referees are fairly limited and rarely extend to a comprehensive testing of the knowledge claim under review. Not surprisingly, then, knowledge producers tend to take care in gathering evidence and testing claims only in proportion to the likelihood that the referees will check them. Moreover, an essential part of what makes an account of knowledge production something more than a report of the author's beliefs is that it describes what ought to have happened, given the avowed norms of the discipline. Even mistakes and accidents must be accounted for in the right way. Thus, the process by which knowledge is typically disseminated and integrated serves to insure a uniformity and in the activities leading up to these moments of textualization (Fuller 1991:13). Experiments or discussion may stray from traditional paths of scientific investigation. These paths are not stable. Both paradigm shifts and the need for editors and edited journals account for some variance. Errors of method or in fact, however, can and must be evidenced as if they were errors. Fuller expects that a study of the differences between what scientists say they do outside of the textual realm and what is said by the texts of the disciplinary discourse to reveal much more than an exposition of the naivety of the anthropologists of knowledge and their theories of discursive conspiracy. In other words, says Fuller, the production of knowledge is much more chaotic. This complexity of knowledge production and cultural construction is relative to the particular culture under study. Anthropologists routinely invoke the relativity of human knowledge upon returning to their 'own' culture, or even a more familiar one. That is, the 'way things really are' is itself relative to the culture under study, and to the student studying that culture. Fuller mentions that another possibility - that of authority as a mouthpiece for the scientists who set up their metaphysical schemes - occurs when the anthropologist reinterprets the unfamiliar cultural scheme into a fusion of their own and the native actors. This represents for the epistemologist an attempt to provide the natives with some sort of recognizable rationality. This imparts the gift of competence to be incompetent in a reasonable way! For the reflexive or dialogical 76 anthropologists (see for example Crapanzano 1986; 1990; Maranhao 1990; Tyler 1986; 1990), however, this is naive. Important in these kinds of dialogues are all the assumptions that actors need to share in order to communicate. They are self-evident, as Fuller mentions (ibid:110), and \"...they remain unsaid as the speaker addresses his argument; hence, they are the ones most likely to elude the historian and distort his understanding\" (Fuller 1991:110). This is so unless one uses the ethnographic interpretations applied to subjects. Here one looks expressly for the unsaid. This envelops the traditional realm of hermeneutic investigation. It is also the motivation for one anthropological understanding of interpretation or Verstehen (Rabinow 1977; Tyler 1978). Another source of 'distortion' present in the process of accounting for cultural activity is the lack of emphasis on rhetoric (1991:112). Instead, \"Philosophers of science could simply take what their favourite scientist had to say about scientific practice as an adequate synopsis of that practice, without studying how a scientific community actually did their work\" (1991:112). Anthropologists seem to have been ahead of their cross-disciplinary compatriots in this regard. Most traditional ethnography attempts to account for cultural practices which overshadow those of individuals. However, many ethnographies are written with one or two major informants and friends. Boas's Hunt is only the most famous example. Thus we have a tension between what is in general believed to be practiced by the 'more than one' by 'the one'. How can one tell the difference between these? In fact, Fuller reminds us, when we study scholars, the difference on the ground is masked. A comparative study between a subject's speech about themselves and their discipline and the texts they read and write can be attempted. Speech might be eliciting the individual differences regarding disciplinary research and text might be explicating what have now become disciplinary and serious 'speech acts'. The ethnographer is thus self-fashioned into a kind of interlocutor between disagreeing language games. In this case one has the dialogue of individual actors, and the text of a disciplinary body. Yet another language game is involved, however. An ethnographic interpreter is usually not 77 necessarily a native actor. He or she may be charged with negotiating conflicting interpretations in the texts. Fuller is also suggestive in these terms: If we alter the situation so that the historian or the philosopher is himself [sic] one of the incommensurable parties ... the historian or philosopher would then be playing the part of an anthropologist trying to reconstruct the language of a tribe (of scientists) about which he knows little (except how they designate the logical connectives) but which nevertheless is cooperative enough to provide them with a native speaker who will name objects as the anthropologist points to them and correct the anthropologist whenever he misnames objects in the tribal language (Fuller 1991:119). So the question remains, how is translation possible? Fuller remarks that the important issue here is one of agreement in the creation of new language games in which we can communicate as if we know what we are saying. 'Truthful' is a qualification applied to statements which occur within a regime of truth. Imagine, Fuller says, a would-be anthropologist who once asked two cultural groups, one of philosophers and the other of engineers, the following question 'Do you believe that chairs exist?'. Both groups say yes, but their reasons for doing so are markedly different (Fuller 1991:156). The problem here is that the difference, which is the most important thing for a cultural investigator of types of linguistic utterances, will most likely be missed by the anthropologist: The philosophers treat the question as quite natural, since most philosophers as a rule treat every denial of a proposition as unmarked. In other words, the skeptic is presumed correct, and it is up to the constructive philosopher to shoulder the burden of proof in refuting him. And from the standpoint of pragmatics to pose a question such as the one posed by the anthropologist, is to grant the audience the license to doubt that proposition. Thus, the philosophers may well be fooled into thinking that the anthropologist is one of their own. However, the engineers are not so easily fooled. As with most commonsensical folks, there is normally no reason to grant one's audience the license to doubt propositions concerning 'medium-sized dry goods', such as chairs. In that case, the engineers would take the assertion 'chairs exist' as unmarked, with the burden of proof shifted to those who wish to deny the assertion. And so, the anthropologist's question, while certainly comprehensible and answerable, seems unwarranted by the engineers, 78 suggesting to them that a stranger is in their midst (Fuller 1991:156-7). The important implication here is that the anthropological reporting of what seemed to be the same belief held by two different groups of people would be a failure in respect to how these differing groups held that belief. After all, they are supposed to be different. Obviously, on the one hand, Fuller notes that the anthropologist was not aware of the implicit assumptions in the philosophers' language game, and missed the mark. But more interestingly, \"...the anthropologist's virtually successful attempt at 'going native' proved to be his [sic] main obstacle in trying to discover the marking systems\" (1991:157). It thus would have been more helpful ethnographically speaking if the engineers had not been so tactful in their responses. If they had reacted by telling the anthropologist off, this latter would have had the knowledge necessary for understanding the different marking systems prevalent in different language games. Is there a different marking system in force between the dialogues about anthropological theory and the written testaments of the disciplinary debates of theoretical anthropology? If so, another facet of the process of conversion of speech to text, and an important but often obscured and mysterious aspect of the manner in which knowledge is produced in general, might be reported. There are many examples of both interdisciplinary transgression and defection. It is obvious that if boundaries are maintained, they are not stable and not invulnerable to change (1991:196). The idea of 'orthogonality' is important in this regard, for Fuller suggests that indeed the concept of 'man' is one which can be placed in any number of disciplines, at an angle oblique to all others. But does this mean that there are different, even incommensurable ideas of 'man' walking around? What are the orthogonal entities that the anthropology 'shares' with other disciplines? And how does it share them? Or does it share? And does anthropology or do anthropologists admit to any necessity for this type of knowledge structure? A number of illuminating comments were made on these topics and those related by participants in this study. The anthropological construction of man seems to bear a close 79 resemblance to that christian at once as that mechanical. The maelstrom of epistemological thought surrounding the construction of the scientific language game is not be pinned down by mere exegesis. We must also turn to oral dialogue and history in order to flesh out the aspects of a hypothesized mode of being in serious disciplinary discourse. One question that might be asked is as follows: How do members of a cultural community maintain their status, and thereby the status of the culture during their lives of professional practice? (Barrett 1979; Ben-Ari 1987; Fuller 1993). Once again, scientific scholars in general can be taken as one example. They are related not only to the inheritance of serious discourse, but also to the political production of debate as a language game. An Anthropology of Epistemology: Latour Bruno Latour's (1987) ethnographic look at the professional practice of scientists provides a detailed examination of a type of disciplinary discourse (see also Latour 1981; and Latour and Woolgar 1977). In Science in Action, Latour recommends we start from the simplest action and follow it through to events more complex, to understand how praxis functions in professional investigative arenas. Thus the statement - its utterance, whether or not someone believes in such a statement, and their response to it depending on their beliefs - is a good starting point (Latour 1987:21). In order to disbelieve a statement made in scientific contexts, one must bring into play an enormous amount of knowledge and resources. If one does not have access to these resources, through training and enculturation into the scientific emic, one is forced to either accept the speech act at face value - presuming some context -or to drop out of the discipline entirely. Hence, on its own, any particular statement is neither true nor false. Al l depends upon the reaction of others to it later on as publication precedes critical commentaries (1987:25). The fate of what is said, says Latour (1987:29) lies in what others make of it'. The construction of a disciplinary discourse is a collective process. It is akin to the construction of any other kind of cultural expression. Text and statement - and one may take them to mean quite 80 similar things whether oral or written, professional practice and customs grouped together as a 'praxis' - undergo a labelling and categorising process. This process takes place apart from the statement's enunciative origin. Also, text and statement act on the reader or listener in a particular manner, to aid in the construction of what may be considered 'serious': The adjective 'scientific' is not attributed to isolated texts that are able to oppose the opinion of the multitude by virtue of some mysterious faculty. A document becomes scientific when its claims stop being isolated and when the number of people engaged in publishing it are many and explicitly indicated in the text. When reading it, it is on the contrary the reader who becomes isolated. The careful marking of the allies' presence is the first sign that the controversy if now heated enough to generate technical documents (Latour 1987:33). In other words, when scientific papers are published on a particular topic, we can now say that this topic is scientific. However, it is also striving to be serious enough so that it falls once again 'out of science'. Scientists wish their statements to become more like what has been traditionally called metaphysical. Examples might include the presence or absence of atomic decay for physical scientists, or the double helical structure of D N A for biologists. When something rises to a level not normally questioned, and therefore not really questionable, it retreats from the scene of science in action, and becomes 'nature' (see also Latour and Woolgar 1977; pages 77-84 on 'modalities' and statement types). The possibility of creating yet more nature, or 'human nature', is what makes the sciences such an interesting and entertaining prospect for ethnographic study. In one case for example, 'what culture is' is the driving force that motivates much social science and historical study. The ability to create collectively versions of the past through science is a powerful tool. How does it happen? One way in which it does not happen, says Latour, is if your paper, now matter how stunning and revelatory, does not induce a reaction. It does not embark upon the process of the 'making serious' of the the text and the speech event. Most papers are never read at all, providing mere fodder for curriculum vitae and promotional tracks. Latour suggests a paper might as well not have existed if there is no response to it (1987:40). 81 One may find that the supporting evidence to render the text or speech understandable, to give it cultural context, no matter how bizarre at first, is not itself included speaker's actions or particular stories: \"A text is like a bank; it lends more money than it has in its vault! The metaphor is a good one since texts, like banks, may go bankrupt if all their depositors simultaneously withdraw their confidence\" (1987:50-1). Of course this also happens. One need only think of the greatest tragedies of human history as recounted and recanted in contemporary debates, when believers in the stories of others suddenly decide to write their own stories for others, with often deadly results. The growth and spread of anthropological lives and texts and their ability to lead lives as or in 'science' within the milieu of a changing disciplinary praxis is due solely to the ability to mobilise discursive resources (1987:61). It is not that the theories are better, closer to 'nature', or more passionately argued, they are merely more powerful weapons in a discursive battleground where the only thing that gets respect is force of reference. This may be accomplished by citations, experiments, and other rhetorical devices to sway the uncommitted. Once swayed, these delegates to and of the convention of scientific praxis become valuable allies. They vote and work for a person's ideas, hoping that these too will become metaphysical over time. Such ideas must literally be forgotten as ideas and assumed as verities. This is the only way in which they can ever transcend the 'conflict of interpretations'. Yet these statements are still immensely social, in that they can and should be studied ethnographically: The distinction between the technical literature and the rest is not a natural boundary; it is a border created by the disproportionate amount of linkages, resources, and allies locally available. This literature is so hard to read and analyse not because it escapes from all normal social links, but because it is more social than so-called normal social ties (Latour 1987:62). Lives bound up within scientific praxes also are more complex than those which we tend to treat on the surface (Fine 1984). Even so, any other life 82 once it becomes more intimately known, also has this quality for the ethnographer. To study the anthropologist, or any other producer of scientific knowledge at work, one faces a task which is as alienating as any other cultural voyage. It has its own set of rituals and proofs, deities and sacred soils. For example: \"Going from the paper to the laboratory is going from an array of rhetorical resources to a set of new resources devised in such a way as to provide the literature with its most powerful tool: the visual display\" (1987:67). Here, seeing is believing. For Latour, a discipline is really much more scientific when it does not attempt to bolster itself with the scientism of positive designs. Rather, the more socially oriented scientists become in their explanation and practice, the more scientific these statements also become. This is because an appeal to the construction of a hasty metaphysics of physical necessities rapidly goes out of reach of most practicing researchers, and thence really loses claim to being called scientific. It just is not where the action is. Reading between the lines, the anthropologist of knowledge might understand more readily how the disciplinary experts of ethnography - the anthropologists - allowed themselves to create and propound a discourse Such processes, says Latour, can now be catalogued. As speakers often mentioned, political alliances are alive and well as one of the guiding threads of professional practice in anthropological culture itself: The same luring of allies away from their spokesperson occurred among the Samoans. As mobilised in the 1930's by Margaret Mead to act on North American ideals of education and sexual behaviour, Samoan girls were more liberated than Western ones and free from the crises of adolescence. This well-established fact was attributed not to Mead - acting as the anthropologist mouthpiece of the Samoans - but to the Samoans. Recently another anthropologist, Derek Freeman, attacked Mead, severing all links between the Samoan girls and Margaret Mead. She was turned into an isolated liberal American lady without any serious contact with Samoa and writing a 'noble savage' fiction off the top of her head. Freeman, the new spokesman of the Samoans, said the girls there were sexually repressed, assaulted and often raped and that they went through a terrible adolescence. Naturally, this 'kidnapping', so to speak, of Samoan teenagers by a 83 new representative does not bring the controversy to an end... The question is now to decide if Freeman is a boorish and insensitive male influenced by sociobiology, and if he has more Samoan allies on his side that Margaret Mead, a highly thought of female anthropologist, sensitive to all the subtle cues of her Samoan informants (Latour 1987:84-5). The point is that cutting support out from under an established theory makes for a dramatic reversal of the theory's fortunes, and perhaps also for the adherents of that theory or even discipline. Later on, Latour returns to this same example and adds another twist. The second quote below reminds the reader to look further. There may be no end in sight to a cultural discussion that may be alien to the anthropologist of knowledge: Suppose...that Boas, the American anthropologist, is engaged in a fierce controversy against eugenicists, who have so convinced the United States Congress of biological determinism that it has cut off the immigration of those with 'defective' genes. Suppose, now, that a young anthropologist demonstrates that, at least in one Samoan island, biology cannot be the cause of crisis in adolescent girls because cultural determinism is too strong. Is not Boas going to be 'interested' in Mead's report - all the more so since he sent her there? Every time eugenicists criticise his cultural determinism, Boas will fasten his threatened position to Mead's counter-example. But every time Boas and other anthropologists do so, they turn Mead's story into more of a fact. You may imagine Mead's report interesting nobody, being picked up by no one, and remaining for ever in the (Pacific) limbo. By linking her thesis to Boas's struggle, Mead forces all the other cultural determinists to become her fellow builders: they all willingly turn her claims into one of the hardest facts of anthropology for many decades. When Freeman...wished to undermine Mead's fact, he also had to link his struggle to a wider one, that of the sociobiologists. Until then, every time the sociobiologists fought against cultural determinism, they stumbled against this fact of Mead's, which had been made formidable by the collective action of successive generations of anthropologists. Sociobiologists eagerly jumped at Freeman's thesis since it allowed them to get rid of this irritating counter-example, and lent him their formidable forces (their publishing firms, their links with the media). With their help what could have been a 'ludicrous attack' became 'a courageous revolution' that threatened to destroy Mead's reputation (Latour 1987:108). 84 This process may be applied to many other anthropological examples. These mixtures and additions create new theoretical alloys, as well as helping to construct new allies. These alloys might become what Latour calls new objects' (1987:91). These items are rapidly on their way to becoming things in themselves. Other things may vanish with their name, because science is but a process of naming and recognizing, classifying - no object (or life) may exist in a vacuum - and ordering; objects (and lives) need to be kept track of as allies ready for mustering. Only after some facts are forgotten do they escape science, because science is constantly engaged in the pursuit of new facts. Following this action in an ethnographic context is what allows Latour to opine in this manner. He predicts that we will find similar processes at work in all realms of science, including anthropology (1987:103). In fact, it does not really matter whether or not actor and allies are even human. This is not important, says Latour, because \"...the only question that really matters is the following: is this new association weaker or stronger than that one?\" (1987:127). Science has its own charter myths that the prospective interpreter must take into account. Here are some of them. When nature is discovered, revealed, or constructed, ...facts now have a vis inertia of their own. They seem to move even without people. More fantastic, it seems they would have existed even without people at all. ... Facts are supposed to reproduce one another! Forgotten are the many people who carry them from hand to hand, the crowds of acting entities that shape the facts and are shaped by them, the complex negotiations to decide which association is stronger or weaker... (Latour 1987:133). Only when something upsets the mythology of the scientist, are 'social factors' invoked. Humanity is a taint to the positivist's conception of science in general. \"This has been called the principle of asymmetry; there is appeal to social factors only when the true path of reason has been 'distorted' but not when it goes straight\" (1987:136). Why is it seemingly straight so often? Like fictive kinship - an idea itself based in relation to an anthropological view of the empirical reality of things like 'kin ties' in the real world - gaps of knowledge or intimacy are quickly filled with supporting alliances of the kind 85 mentioned above. These are worked out ahead of time to make sure all goes well. Experiments concur with one another. Bridges do not collapse when we drive across them. Anthropology students believe in the efficacy and necessity of 'fieldwork'. Such a concept is what Latour calls a 'black box'. They have their residence in culture just as culture is carried by and communicated to people. \"The more automatic and the blacker the black box is, the more it has to be accompanied by people\" (1987:137). The 'black box' is part of a cultural ideology that stresses a sacred quality while at the same time allowing pre-limited options, and reminding one of different alliances and their respective roles: ...it concentrates in itself the largest number of hardest associations, especially if it has been turned into an automaton. This is why we call such black boxes 'hard facts', or 'highly sophisticated machines' or 'powerful theories', or 'indisputable evidence'. All these adjectives that alluded to strength and power rightly point out the disproportionate number of associations gathered in these black boxes, so disproportionate indeed that they are what keep the multitude of allies in place (Latour 1987:139). Which are weaker when juxtaposed with others, and which are stronger by the same account, is the only thing that matters in the realm of fact construction (1987:140). Part of the message scientists bring with them to the 'outside' is that science represents the rational and reasonable choice to be made amongst conflicting cultural perspectives. Science sells itself as a vehicle for the resolution of cultural ambiguities. This is done by virtue of four narrative functions. For example, science demonstrates its power of explanation to our culture at large by confronting the exotic. Anthropology is a classic discipline in this regard, as it enables a reconciliation to take place between the 'natural attitude' prevalent in the European/ American society and other belief systems that seem to, on the face of it, markedly conflict (McGrane 1989). Anthropology in part asks 'Why do people hold 'strange beliefs'?' It might reverse the ethnocentric sentiment by first positing a dummy irrationality and then explaining it away, making us feel yet more secure in the realms of 86 our own belief systems. At the same time, this adds to the scope and power of science as a whole, as an omnisciently aspiring system of explanation. How does anthropology rationalise its new-found ethnographic knowledge with knowledge of its own discursive rationalism? Once again, four major modes are important to this process, and they work by the following: 1. By making familiar through analogy: \"Tell another story built around the same structure, but one that applies instead to the society of the story teller\" (1987:190). 2. By making familiar through added context: \"Retell the same story but invoke context every time there seems to be a hole in the reasoning and show what sort of unfamiliar topics the reasoning applies to\" (1987:190). 3. By making familiar using the 'happy ending' device: \"Retell the same story but frame it differently by letting it go on longer. This reframing usually renders most of the explanations unusable because, given the right time scale, these explanations are offered for contrary examples as well\" (1987:190), and 4. By making familiar via 'structuralism': 'Tell another story in which the rules of logic are broken as well, but this story is not about beliefs but about knowledge held by the story teller. The audience then realizes that their judgement was not based on the breaking of the rules, but on the strangeness of the beliefs\" (1987:190). This is how science in general, and also anthropology, according to Latour, 'straightens up distorted beliefs'. These four modes also explain why science has become immensely popular amongst the common-sense' crowd of scientific amateurs and hangers-on. \"After having peopled the world with irrational minds because we naively wondered why there were so many people who were not scientists, we now understand that it was our wondering that created the problem\" (1987:195). Latour concludes with this fundamental point: The point I wish to make with these 'free associations' is that they are in no way limited to certain kinds of people - that would limit anthropology to 'savage minds, to certain periods - that would limit anthropology to the study of our past - or to certain kinds of associations - that would limit anthropology to the study of world-views or 87 ideology. The same questions about causes, effects, links, and spokespersons may be raised everywhere, thus opening an unlimited field of study for anthropology... (Latour 1987:204). However, to follow up and use this great vista of anthropological possibilities one must be concerned with both the trails statements leave and those they help create. The anthropologist must not claim either the rational or the irrational as exclusive properties of the student or the studied. Ethnographically, \"...what is called 'knowledge' cannot be defined without understanding what gaining knowledge means\" (1987:220). In this study, I asked participants to speak about their training, and the spaces in which knowledge became anthropological. These were the spaces in which anthropological knowledge could be created, and thus were also seen as the spaces where one must go in order to become an anthropologist. In framing the problem of what constitutes anthropological knowledge, the tension between epistemology and ethics was seen as central, as well as being well-documented in the debates surrounding positivism and post-positivism. The field is seen in anthropological discourse to be a fundamental force in shaping anthropological knowledge and transforming human experience anthropologically. Philosophical ideas which have influenced anthropology during the last thirty years also reflect the tensions involved when human beings study themselves. Among these ideas, epistemology in anthropology seems to have various guises, including those of method, methodology, and professional identity. Questioning this, the sociology of science and social epistemology are consulted by a review of two major sources which have been cited by speakers as influencing some anthropological theory and ethnographic practice. The anthropology of knowledge is then defined as an attempt to understand the cultural construction of knowledge and theories of knowledge, as well as, and including, comments on their value for ethical human relations. 88 CHAPTER THREE - EPISTEMOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES A N D THEIR TENSIONS I thought so little, they rewarded me, and now I am the ruler of the Queen's navy. (Gilbert and Sullivan) God save the Queen: we mean it, man! (The Sex Pistols) This chapter will outline some of the arguments concerning the differences in theories of knowledge used in anthropology. Unlike the introductory survey of some of the literature presented in the previous chapter, both speakers' comments and published texts will be included. This discussion, amongst other things, will suggest that there is no clear demarcation between positivist understandings of what anthropology is and those post-positivist. The culture of anthropology represented by speakers may reflect wider tensions in epistemology current in anthropological knowledge. As well, the written discourse of anthropology presents a schemata of possibilities for the existential projects of the various anthropologists' lives and voices in this project. The whole story of different theories of knowledge, however, cannot be addressed from the inside. The ethnographer can only attempt to treat Culture in its entirety. This complex whole contains the culture's truths and lies. With this Tylorean definition in hand, not really altered by Boas (1940:268-9 [1930]) in any essential sense, it was inevitable that a certain kind of anthropology could relativize science as well. One theme suggested by speakers aiding this relativization is the shift from positivism to post-positivism in anthropology. The question for this chapter then is 'What does this shift look like?' Epistemological Shifts in Anthropology: Geertz Geertz (1995) responds to the relativization of scientific validity. Geertz was the name most mentioned by anthropologists with whom I spoke. However, Geertz was also often seen as deleterious to anthropology. 'Geertz' as a label is generally associated with an apparent shift away from positivism to something else. This association is made especially by those who believe 89 that such a shift has begun. The ethnographer of anthropology is likely to turn to Geertz to find out what such a label is labelling: To state this mere observation about what actually takes place when someone tries to 'make sense' out of something known about from assorted materials encountered while poking about in the accidental dramas of the common world is to bring on a train of worrying questions. What has become of objectivity? What assures us we have things right? Where has all the science gone? It may just be, however, that all understanding (and indeed, if distributive, bottom-up models of the brain are right, consciousness as such) trails life in just this way... If objectivity Tightness and science are to be had it is not by pretending they run free of the exertions which make or unmake them (Geertz 1995:2-3). What characteristics of epistemology are in tension, if theories in anthropology are said to conflict? There seem to be some tensions in this quote between objectivity and subjectivity. Why do we need an appeal to the objectivity of cognitive science to back up an appeal for the subjectivity of social science? Here is the type of clue I am looking for. It is clear that some speakers do indeed care about \"where all the objectivity has gone\". Even so, none of them were manic about this concern. In fact, many suggested that objectivity was \"still here for those who choose it\". Rather mystically, 'objectivity' is a path to enlightenment to which many are called but few are chosen. Other speakers suggested that objectivity was never present in anthropology. Hence, there was no need to mourn its loss. Finally, it was also stated that objectivity and subjectivity are the same thing. This idea suggested Geertz's juxtaposition of the two as irrelevant. However, concerns about getting things right were raised by speakers: \"Yes, we need to feel more than the feeling that we are doing rightful things, we need a concept of right which extends from the moral sphere to the epistemological.\" In the very definitions speakers suggest for object and subject one can find many clues to the puzzle of shifting and conflicting aspects of debates. I felt, in listening to their variety, that one could benefit from not imposing a definition on them. Instead, I tried to parse out themes which kept appearing in similar guises in various definitions. I decided to accept ethnographically what anthropologists said anthropology was and was not. I marked anthropologists 90 down as living in an essential tension that gave them something to think about and research. Another tension that exists is that between theory and practice. These concepts are also rivals in a similar manner as subject and object. Geertz satirically comments on the supposed sources of these tensions in anthropology. These sources may also be seen as counterproductive to the critique of positivism in anthropology and to anthropology itself: When I began my work in the early fifties, the 'they have a culture out there and your job is to come back to tell us what it is' conception of the anthropological enterprise was only beginning to be questioned, and then largely from outside the field. By the time I had moved on to North Africa, about a decade later, doubts had grown somewhat stronger, and a good deal more interior, but nothing really drastic had happened to the general mind-set of the field. ... And it took only a little while longer to realize that a conception of culture as a massive causal force shaping belief and behavior to an abstractable pattern - what has been called the cookie-cutter view - was not very useful either for investigating such matters or for conveying what one claimed to have come up with from having investigated them. Something a good deal less muscular is needed, something a good deal more reactive; quizzical, watchful, better attuned to hints, uncertainties, contingencies, and incompletions (Geertz 1995:43-4). There remains some doubt as to the difference between investigation and claims made due to investigation. The latter, in positivist language, certainly presumes the former in terms of its occurrence. One does not simply make up the data. Instead, since one \"has been there, and done that\", whatever one may now say has added prestige, authority and relevancy. In the post-positivist language, one might say being there is still important. Equally important is critical commentary on textuality. This is based on reading and writing and not necessarily going anywhere (Geertz 1988). Observed and present action may be possible only as a function of discourse. As Ricoeur suggests, \"Meaningful action is an object for science only under the condition of a kind of objectification that is equivalent to the fixation of a discourse by writing\" (Ricoeur 1991:150 [1971]). Direct observable experience may have been paramount in the positivist genre. Experience, however, now shares with textuality the pinnacle in post-positivist anthropology. What concept, in a word, mediates these tensions. The word Geertz may be looking for, but mentions only once in his latest book, is 91 hermeneutics. \"Hermeneutics\", as I was told by an avowed opponent to Geertz's views, \"is great if you are a theologist, but anthropology is not theology.\" Even so, hermeneutics seems to fulfill all the characteristics deemed vital to anthropological understanding by Geertz. Such characteristics may include being intuitive, open, elliptical, historical, and particularising. However, Geertz's epistemology is ultimately equivocal. It partakes of both positivist and post-positivist themes. In light of this, another detailed example of the flux of epistemologies follows. As mentioned, both Schutz and Ricoeur have been important in developing Geertz's understandings of phenomenology and epistemology, respectively. At least two pieces of Ricoeur's seem of great importance to Geertz's epistemological stance. Both scholars worked for a time, and were in personal contact with one another, at the University of Chicago. Ricoeur's work on epistemology concentrated on refining the ability of hermeneutics to participate as a viable method of the human sciences.59 This work was later published in the early 1970s, and collected in a later volume (Ricoeur 1981). The differences and relationships between interpretation and explanation were problematic. This was so because interpretation was seen especially by the positivist schools as secondary to explanation (Ricoeur 1981:145 [1970]). In order to understand how positivism could be supplanted by a new concept of experience, Ricoeur asks, how did the concept of text start? The \"emancipation\" of writing, which \"puts the latter at the site of speech\", is the beginning of text. The ability of a sign to refer to a thing is transformed. Yet Ricoeur still speaks of an extra-linguistic world. Instead, one could suggest a language is both word and world. With this suggestion, ideality and reality tend to merge. In text this relationship changes. Dialogue in this sense is interrupted and the text is referenced to reading it. The world is bracketed in a suspension to the text. However, ultimately for Ricoeur the text must return to referencing the reader's own experience (1981:148-9 [1970]). For Geertz then, the world as text metaphor is one laden with the reader's meaning. The 5 9 Perhaps the most influential piece of Ricoeur's for Geertz and interpretivist ethnography was The Model of the Text' (1971) which discusses the movement from a definition of a shared discourse as textuality to that of performance and discourse in and as action. Most importantly, \"...what we understand first in a discourse is not another person but a project, that is, the outline of a new being-in-the-world. Only writing, in freeing itself not only from its author but from the narrowness of the dialogical situation, reveals this destination of discourse as projecting a world\" (Ricoeur 1991:149 [1971]). 92 native's point of view may occur authentically within the ethnographic text. There will, however, be yet another translation coming from the experience the reader brings to the text. Ethnographers are also readers. They go into the field with their own cultural experience as their \"stock of knowledge at hand\" (Schutz 1967 [1953]). This inevitably prejudices their understanding of the native voice. For Geertz as a post-positivist, this is not merely inevitable but necessary. For Geertz as positivist, another cultural world exists \"out there\" to be understood. The ethnographer's job is to relate that world in a convincing manner. The sudden incommensurability of multiple realities assures ethnographers only that they will be alienated from both locales of knowledge. That is, they will be distanced from the one that exists from their socialization. They will also be distanced from the one into which they have dropped in the field. Instead of treating distance as impairing communication, these distances can be seen as processes of communication. Such communication takes place both in the mind of the ethnographer and in some world external to him/her. Schutz introduces this experience of the vividness of the present moment: Briefly, the communicator experiences the ongoing process of communicating as a working in his vivid present. And I, the listener, experience for my part actions also as happening in my vivid present, although this interpreting is not working, but merely a performing within the meaning of our definitions. On the one hand, I experience the occurrences of the Other's speaking in outer time; on the other hand, I experience my interpreting as a series of retentions and anticipations happening in my inner time interconnected by my aim to understand the Other's thought as a unit. (Schutz 1967:219 [1945]). There is a sense that there is already more than one reality present between two members of ostensibly the same culture. This implies that the influences on cross-cultural communication will be very complex. Geertz uses the metaphors of theatre and performance as vehicles for persons' representations across these mingling realities. The idea that reality is multiple goes beyond the positivistic notion that the true reality is the one observed by the more than one. Schutz does, however, maintain the notion that the world of work is the \"wide-awake\" world of the everyday. This world is common to all (1967:216ff [1945]). There is ample fuel for the flux of paradigms in both Schutz and Ricoeur, and this is reflected in Geertz's work. 6 0 93 One other example may be had from Ricoeur (1981 [1972]). Sense and reference are important to the analytic stage of interpretation. Sense of what is said, and to what that speech refers, are co-eval. Discourse as such has at least two references. One is the world or the extra-linguistic reality of semantics. The other is to the speaker or the author (1981:167-8 [1972]). Hermeneutics is essential to both references. The world is interpreted through language. Language can take at least part of its meaning from the world which it represents and to which it refers. Yet words have many meanings. Some of these do not refer to the extra-linguistic. Thus \"the theory of polysemy is good preparation for the theory of metaphor\" (1981:169). Our own cultural tradition provides the non-referential meanings. Alongside Schutz, Ricoeur suggests that this tradition needs to enact itself in a living and ongoing manner. It must intervene in any conception of culture we may have or confront. Geertz is well aware of the constrictions this places on any anthropological endeavour (Geertz 1995). There are, however, other types of cultural conflict which influence the construction of knowledge in anthropology. These do not seem to have a direct focus on theories of knowledge themselves. Geertz does not seem to mind the constricting processes that go along with factionalism in any particular discipline. Inevitably, as I was told, \"...real persons fall in with their own labels.\" For example, anthropology was sometimes cast by speakers as nonexistent in any meaningful sense. It was seen as \"...a political collection based on convenience for the publishing industry.\" Instead, Geertz gives us a parable with a live-and-let-live ending. This belies his texts' often frank denouncement of positivistic studies in anthropology. Yet along with this there is praise for those equally positivistic pieces of research which might be used in concert with his own work: Once upon a time, not so very long ago, when the West was a good deal more sure of itself, of what it was, and what it wasn't, the concept of culture had a firm design and a definite edge. At first, global and evolutionary, it simply marked the West, rational, historical, progressive, devotional, off from the Non-West, superstitious, static, archaic, magical. Later, when, for a host of reasons, ethical political, and wistfully scientific, this seemed too crude, and too candid, the need for a more exact, more celebratory representation of the world 60 See for example the Schutzian discussion of social relationships in Geertz (1973:365-7 [1966b]). 94 elsewhere came into being, and the concept shifted to the life-way-of-a-people form familiar to us now... Anthropology, or anyway the sort that studies cultures, proceeds amid charges of irrelevance, bias, illusion, and impracticability. But it proceeds (Geertz 1995:42; my emphasis). Perhaps this is indeed how some anthropology keeps going. Themes in interview which addressed some of the quote's concerns suggested related questions. Is anthropology a discipline bent on controversy, on infighting, on puritanisms or relativisms? Is it obsessed with cultures, or rather, its own concept of culture? When does anthropology say what it really thinks? Can one assume a reality to thoughts about this culture? When some anthropologists are interviewed by another anthropologist, is this really anthropology? \"All politics is quarrel, and power is the ordering such quarrel sorts out: that much is general. What is not general is the nature of the quarrel of the shape of the ordering\" (Geertz 1995:39). Speakers may agree that the aim is to keep the debate going. Even so, there is disagreement on how to do this. It is also not clear what kind of anthropology does not concern itself with cultures. Perhaps this alludes to some of those interviewed who suggested that I was not a 'real' anthropologist (\"I can understand your project in terms of sociology of knowledge, or philosophy of social science, but not really, truly, ethnography. I guess I just do not feel quite exotic enough!\"). Or perhaps anthropology did not have a culture in any anthropological sense? If not that, then what else? Geertz seemed to do a lot of work at undermining positivism in ethnology. Yet he did not study culture outside of what much of anthropology has traditionally nominated as being cultural -Morocco, Bali, Indonesia etc. These cultures have similarities with those European. However, they are not near enough to be European. Another series of texts has a direct influence on Geertz's views. They also ask similar questions as does Geertz. How does one recognize apparently changing epistemologies in anthropologists' statements? In the sense that anthropologists are in direct competition with themselves, they are also in indirect competition with tradition. Tradition can work for anthropologists if manipulated. However, tradition can work against them if they cannot re-write anthropological history to become a part of the weight of tradition. 95 Hermeneutics negotiates with tradition. The social, or human sciences have a different relationship to history and tradition than do the sciences. The latter are in more direct competition with past discoveries, in order to go beyond them. As well, they are in an open-ended alliance with them, in order to do the same thing. These ideas are two commonly held views of whiggish scientific history. Instead, to understand Geertz's basic disagreement with science and history, one can turn to the human sciences and culture, respectively. Grondin summarizes Gadamer's reworking of part of a human sciences method: Gadamer's rehabilitation of the humanistic tradition thus enables him to account for the specific truth claim of the humanities. In this regard, Gadamer states: \"What makes the human sciences into sciences can be understood more easily from the tradition of the concept of Bildung than from the modern idea of scientific method. It is to the humanistic tradition ... that we must turn. In its resistance to the claims of modern science it gains a new significance.\" While Heidegger advocates a 'resistance' against humanism, Gadamer unearths in the forgotten tradition of humanism an instance that can fuel a resistance against the illegitimate claims of modern science to encompass all there is to know (Gadamer, in Grondin 1995:120 italics the texts). Science does not always make claims to omniscience. However, hermeneutics recognizes in its own ancestry the necessity for a dialogue between past and present. Classical history of science in a more positivist mode suggests discoveries are superceded by newer data and better technology. Unlike this, historical studies, which include much of anthropology, work in a flux of ongoing process of creation and rewriting of history. In order to recognize a tradition of historical and cultural exegeses, one can return to that same tradition. These are our own histories. They become fundamental to present day study not merely of history, but of ourselves. The problem of subjective history and objective history does not arise. Both are parallaxes of one another. Subjects are living in an object. They are subject to it. Anthropologists are living in anthropology. They are also objecting to it in confrontation with tradition. Gadamer maintains this confrontation must also occur. We must not become conservative. These are some of the fundamental processes of the historical life. Becoming familiar with them is part of the ongoing project of becoming historically conscious. 96 During this life-process, one speaks with more and more authenticity. Yet there remains an indirect relation between subject/object and authentic/inauthentic. This is so because dissimulation and truth have within them their anathema. The former exhibits a kind of role-play. The latter is what we feel when we are living our own lives. However, neither of these is distinct for modern social science. Lingis explains: The distinction between authentic and inauthentic speech is thus nowise the same as the classical distinction between the subjective and the objective, which is based on, and required by, the ontological assumption that being for its part is in itself definite, distinct, and phosphorescent in the clarity of its ostentation. If we did not succeed in constituting a representation adequate to this being, the real, this was taken to be due to the proper nature of our subjectivity - to the opaqueness of sensuous intuition and confused sentiments, to the blind passions, the weighted discursive moves. Due, finally, to the receptive character, the weakness, the finitude of our being. There would be ways to compensate for this finitude; we must supply ourselves with method, apparatus to control our observations, rules to fix the mind on the straight line of right thinking. Intersubjective concord would compensate for the perspective finitude of subjectivity. The suspicion that being itself is fragwurdig, that being itself is in a questionable mode, does not arise; being is taken to be in itself wholly positive, to be position or auto-affirmation. If it does not achieve its high noon truth in the space of our subjectivity, it is our being that would have to be indicted (Lingis 1989:121). Those \"degrees of being\" which Nietzsche (1968 [1882-7]) suggested as enabling us to interact within a society are both creative and dangerous. They are especially dangerous to community. However, they are creative enough for intersubjectivity to occur. A certain kind of anthropology studies this intersubjectivity. It uses the pliability of being to change the ethnographer into one who can more closely understand another culture. Through Schutz's conception of \"multiple realities\" (Schutz 1967 [1945]), this fractured sense of being is given an ethnographic slant in Geertz. The notion of mood becomes much more ontological in the following: ...when we say that a man is religious, that is, motivated by religion, this is at least part - though only part - of what we mean. Another part of what we mean is that he has, when properly stimulated, a susceptibility to fall into certain moods, moods we sometimes lump together under such covering terms as 'reverential', 'solemn', or 'worshipful'. Such generalized rubrics conceal, however, the enormous empirical variousness of the dispositions 97 involved, and, in fact, tend to assimilate them to the unusually grave tone of most of our own religious life. The moods that sacred symbols induce, at different times and in different places, range from exultation to melancholy, from self-confidence to pity, from an incorrigible playfulness to a bland listlessness - to say nothing of the erogenous power of so many of the world's myths and rituals. No more than there is a single sort of mood one can call piety is there a single sort of mood one can call worshipful (Geertz 1973:93 [1966a]). Yet even if such affects change being profoundly, these affections can be studied. They are empirical. For Geertz, the window into different realities is available to a certain kind of observation. This empiricism, which is not completely prejudiced in favour of the directly observable according to our custom, travels cross-culturally. It does so to get the native's point of view on what is observable to and for them. Hence there is a world to which interpretation is subject, as much as the converse holds. Implications of the Textualist Viewpoint for Method, Institution, and Education in Anthropology. The key to comprehending this world was the rendering of Verstehen as the equal cousin of explanation. Understanding was how human beings knew themselves. However, understanding was also used as the descriptive term when the methodology of hermeneutical human science contacts natural science. There was something lost in translation. Scientific or positivistic claims in the social sciences could be seen as fraudulent: Touchy about being unable to substantiate their claims, the worshippers of methodology turn like a vicious hunting pack upon anybody branded as impressionistic, particularly if he writes well and can make his books interesting. Often enough their motive is sheer envy, as the ability to unearth something really interesting and to present it in a lively style demands a special gift that cannot be acquired by mechanical cramming, whereas anybody who is not a mental defective can learn to churn out the tedious door-to-door surveys which pass for sociology. Furthermore, as the producers of any commodity can enlarge their profits if they can dilute their wares with impunity, the social scientists have a vested interest in padding (since they can get away with it), and regard anybody who can pack a lot of information into a small space as a pernicious norm buster who undermines their livelihood (Andreski 1972:110). 98 Jealousy and other base motives can be found in all realms of human activity. There was much evidence of such vulgar politics in the interviews conducted for this project. When pressed, many anthropologists admitted that they merely did not like such and such kind of work because it was different from their own. As well, they had certain loyalties to persons, training, theories, and the like. Any system that rewards publication in bulk while at the same time insists on a certain kind of work, is ripe for the excesses described in the previous quote. In fact, at least one anthropologist refused to be interviewed because of a perception that this person's thoughts would be recognized even in anonymity. They then could be targetted for political manipulation by competitors. The following quote's comments are important because they are echoed in many of the speakers' understandings of anthropology's place in the social sciences. This place's is the Non-West'. Anthropology could not be seen as a culture in the same way. Hence, some anthropologists in this project were content to understand me as a sociologist of knowledge. I quote it here because it is relevant to the distinction between these other cultures' existence and our imagination of them. The hypothetical anthropologists described below bore similarities with some of my speakers. However, these same speakers expressed similar opinions as in the following. Hence, On the whole anthropology has been much less plagued by triviality than sociology because, until the recent half-baked ventures into the study of industrial societies, it has made it its business to supply information which was exotic to the readers and could never boil down to a restatement of the obvious. On account of their strangeness, the cultures studied by the anthropologists demanded from him a mental effort needed for an understanding of a totally new language and way of behaving, not to speak of the discomfort (and often danger) involved in visiting outlying places - all of which acted as a deterrent to the most unimaginative stick-in-the-mud types. True, many anthropologists never succeeded in learning the language of the people studied, while others lacked the traits of character needed for winning the trust and friendship of total aliens, which shortcomings condemned their work to superficiality. Others, having done their stint in a remote place for a year or two, never bothered to revisit the area or even attempt to find out indirectly what was going on there; never read anything, and kept talking for twenty or forty years about what they saw in their youth. Even such lukewarm scholars, however, could pride themselves on knowing what nobody else knew - namely 'their' tribe -99 and so did not have to resort to bluff to justify their claims to academic respectability. Like that of the historians, the anthropologists' knowledge might be regarded by hard-headed practical men as only fit for a museum, but not as non-existent (Andreski 1972:205). In fact, many anthropologists seemed somewhat ashamed of their own genealogies. They freely admitted to often not being able to do what they wanted to because of their academic careers. Ironically, these careers were pursued by doing their original anthropological research. Some mentioned retirement as a golden opportunity to continue \"real work\". What is more pernicious is the mythology that some anthropology tells its own students. It contains many of the same slogans and ideals as in the above quoted critique. If presented with such a quote, however, most anthropologists would reject it out of hand or see it as self-satire. This rejection would occur because of the final reference to their knowledge being fit only for the old curiousity shop. However, unbecoming and unintended self-satire is by no means the monopoly of a positivist anthropology. What is ironic in much post-positivist textuality is the lack of any working position or ongoing stance relative to positivism. Beyond the critique and destruction of positivist methodological tenets, it is not clear what post-positivism hopes to achieve. There is an apparent void surrounding the ability of younger students to actually do what they say they are wanting to do. For example, can post-positivists actually do some post-positivist ethnography instead of merely talking about it? Perhaps this is how one does ethnography in more contemporary epistemological frameworks. The distinction between talking and doing may be a positivist one as well. Even so, such discussions have directed the leading edges of what is popularly understood as post-positivism to exhort a return to ethical concerns. Ethics, or at least a certain type of politics, must encourage us to resume perennial philosophical concerns about the way in which we treat and represent one another. However, can ethics be an epistemological stopgap? Needless to spell it out here, therefore, still less to insist on it too heavily, it is not a taste for the void or for destruction that leads anyone to recognize the right of this necessity to 'empty out' increasingly and to deconstruct the philosophical responses that consist in totalizing, in filling in the space of the question, or denying its possibility, in fleeing from the very thing it will have allowed one to 100 glimpse. On the contrary, it is a matter there of an ethical and political imperative, an appeal as unconditional as the appeal of thinking from which it is not separated. It is a matter of the injunction itself - if there is one (Derrida 1994:30 [1993]). For at least one seen representative of what is generally seen as post-positivism, the motivations guiding interpretation are wholly positive. Any text which seeks closure as its goal, must hinder understanding. Dialogue is ended. By shutting up, by refusing to go further, go back, or go out, we can only harm our ability to think in general. Even education, for example, can only attack this content-wise. Hence, speakers sometimes suggested that pedagogy should not be too closely held by disciplinarity. The positivist/post-positivist debates are also about the authority of a discipline. However, this only leads us into further problems. \"Who says 'the author', who is dead, has any authority over his' text?\", claim the post-positivists. We should be able to take what we like from the text when we like. The positivists suggest in turn that because of the previous idea, no text from such a position can be taken seriously. The post-positivist authors are double-crossing their own credo and practicing the time-worn culture trait of saying one thing and doing another. If a person, however, says something about a text which they in fact wrote, is that not some kind of authority?61 The difference between author as reader and as authority allows a kind of reflexivity. Partially because the publishing industry knows a good sale when it sees one, saleable texts which are seen by speakers as post-positivist and reflexive must become ever more vigilant. Anthropologists involved in this project often voiced hesitancy regarding a possible publication if its sole purpose was to generate sales. As a cultural object, a post-positivist text might wish to criticise itself as a commodity, since such texts are very popular in bookstores, and constitute a sales item for publishers. The 'mysteriousness' of the commodity-form as presumed reflection of the social form is the incredible manner in which this mirror sends back the image [ ] when one thinks it is reflecting for men 6 1 Hermeneutics originated the prejudice against authorial intent in Dilthey. Earlier, it celebrating intent as the highest form of spiritual communion with the text in Schliermacher. Hermeneutics now suggests that the author is another reader. Some readers are better placed than others to examine different texts. This depends on their discursive relationship with that aspect of historical consciousness which created the text and its hinterlands (for example, in Ricoeur). 101 the image of the 'social characteristics of men's own labor': such an 'image' objectivizes by naturalizing (Derrida 1994:156 [1993]). The mirror in this case is that which assumes a relation between the writer and reader. This relationship might occur through the reading of the text in question. However, post-positivism thinks this is dubious. The question presented is how to read such texts and understand them as being relevant to cultural criticism or anthropology. In fact we all read from, as, and with a text. We read 'from' a text because that assumes there is an object from which an interpretation is derived. We read 'with' a text because that assumes we and the text have a dialogue. We read 'as' a text because that assumes we are also part of the text and the text part of us in the act of reading. Why cannot all these get along together? In hermeneutics, we seem to find the closest community of these potentially conflicting concepts of reading. This 'being able to be read' is the combination of our socialization, professional training, inclinations, and opportunities. These combine to make any particular text meaningful to us. Even so, this is not as open as it might appear. Bourdieu and Passeron (1992:162 [1970]) have outlined the possible vectors of differing socializations. For example, what is real is not beyond human knowledge. What is real is myth. Nietzsche mentions in his study of ancient rhetoric that \"[it is] These concepts, which owe their origin only to our experiences, are proposed a priori to be the intrinsic essences of the things: we attribute to the appearances as their cause that which is still only an effect\" (Nietzsche 1989:59 [1872]). Epistemological and pedagogical concerns are questioned radically. A total social analysis of the reproductive genius of an educational system permits this questioning. Even rhetoric may not be able to escape the conspiracy of \"naturalization\" that mythologizes cultural reality. Such a text closes its doors to dialogue. Furthermore, dialogue may also be a naturalized myth. Even worse, it may be part of the naturalization process itself (Bourdieu and Passeron 1992:62; 218 [1970]). Klee's hopeful conviction may be premature when applied to professionalization in education: Already at the very beginning of the productive act, shortly after the initial motion to create, occurs the first counter motion, the 102 initial movement of receptivity. This means: the creator controls whether what he has produced so far is good (Klee 1953:33 [1925]). Instead, shortly before the first motion, the first counter motion delimits the possibility of any kind of motion. The producer then controls whether what has been created is systemically sound. The critical post-positivist voice cannot escape this kind of critique either. This is ironic because in post-positivism the individual case is seen as undermining generalizations. At the same time, it is the positivist genre which provides the logic, data analysis, and statistics for Bourdieu and Passeron's texts. The tools of the 'queen's navy' are still extant, even if the 'queen' is not. Clearly, we live in the interesting times of a flux in anthropology. The Status of Positivism in Anthropology: This section will discuss the concept of positivism in relation to powerful kinds of ethnographic experiences. How are experiences of anthropologists influenced by positivism? How do these anthropologists contact other cultures by being positivist? Why do many speakers seem to feel that positivism is important for anthropology? Stent (1977:192-3) suggests that David Hume's anti-metaphysical work during the 18th century set the stage for Comte's development of positivist philosophy. Human knowledge should be based on direct experience. This idea had interesting implications. For example, atomism as a physical theory of knowledge was rejected because no one had ever seen an atom. This philosophical rejection, however, had little impact on the physical sciences. Scientists did not need philosophy to justify, correct, or prove their research. Stent suggests logical empiricist science was a self-motivating vehicle. However, in the human sciences, particularly in psychology and sociology, the situation was quite different. Here positivism was to have a most profound effect... In contrast to the clearly definable research aims of physical science, it is often impossible to state explicitly just what it really is about human behavior that one wants to explain. This then, makes it quite difficult to set forth clearly the conditions under which any postulated causal nexus linking the observed facts could be verified. Nevertheless, positivism helped to bring the human sciences into being in the first place, by insisting that 103 any eventual understanding of man must be based on the observation of facts, rather than on armchair speculations (Stent 1977:192-3). Comte may not have been a great observer of human behaviour in a modern empirical sense. However, the ideas of direct observation and sense experience eventually enveloped the social sciences. These ideas are still important for anthropology. The tools of positivism had a common sense validity. Observing, recording, speaking, listening and describing, are the social sciences' bread and butter. Positivism also colours epistemologies which have attempted to be different from it. Structuralism for example, may represent a return to Cartesianism. It may be a return to the idea that there are universal structures to human experience. These structures underlie how we perceive the world. I argue that structuralism does not present a valid ontological alternative to positivism. It is based on the same set of positivist metaphysics. The kinds of theories of knowledge that shape anthropology may appear in cycles. Speakers tended to be cautious about the cyclical possibility of theories of knowledge. Do they come and go out of style? I do not see it as a kind of prime dialectic. Which does not mean that you cannot write an interesting story by doing it that way. And I am not being flip. I am sure you can. But I have thought of it, and we use the language of anti-positivism and positivism or non-positivism as a way of functionalist accounting. Of ordering ourselves in terms of certain changes in organizing the field and of the world. But how and where the directionality is, and how intimate that directionality is to where the discipline might be going or something, is a little unclear to me... Because the time period is so short that my sense of it is that these things are all there at the same time. A sense of simultaneity rather than directionality. And that would be the only, I mean that would be one element in which I would one aspect of how I would want to think about it in a slightly different way... And so these various tendencies, these various alternatives for how we interpret what we are trying to do I think are constitutive of the field, and have been (1960s). The sense of history one gets from ethnography is telescoped. What occurs in one part of anthropology may not be known to other of its practitioners. The methodology of a certain theory of knowledge may continue to be used even if relevant changes have occurred at a theoretical level. Positivist ordering of human experience is unique. This is so because it 104 was the first theory of knowledge to adopt common sense empiricism. Direct observation without an a priori bias was its ideal. The rejection of transcendentals with a Cartesian or Platonic pedigree was its goal. The investigation of the world of nature and the human's place in it was its mandate. Debates about the validity of positivism in anthropology tended to be about what anthropology thought it itself was. These debates changed over time. Was anthropology a science? Was it historical? Was it an historical science? Al l of this took place at once. It continues to do so. Other speakers observed similar things. What is science? Who does it better? I do not know. But I think those two things are connected in some way. And this I guess is the idea that everything has to be measured. There is a tremendous inconsistency here, you know. As I talk about rigor and ground edness and I see it my work. But most sociologists see anything that has to do with culture as being entirely impressionistic. Sociologists seem to think that you cannot make a verifiable statement about culture. And I have given lectures where I have shown 200 slides, say, of paintings from the three different countries and I look at the differences in the use of perspective and that kind of thing, and these are empirical facts! You know, and empirical things. And you give a lecture like that to a bunch of sociologists and always you get somebody saying 'But that is only your interpretation of the paintings'! Anyone can get whatever they want out of these paintings, and for them it is entirely subjective, and I say, no! This is something measurable! They are empirical facts... Just the fact that they have set these walls up and they refuse to admit that there might be something outside it. I am afraid of getting into arguments. Arguments about the kinds of things people will not believe in! Just because like there is something about people who are 'so damn right'! That they know how things are that makes me take on the most extreme position out of sheer perverseness. But it is an interesting question. I find that for most of what goes under the name of sociology to be almost offensively banal and dogmatic. And I think a lot of that reaction tends to get written off as the reaction against positivism. But positivism or the form that has been made out of it, is only a very small part of it (1980s). A debate occurred within the framework of theories of knowledge in the effort to be more objective. This was also couched in terms of positivist metaphysics. It ignored the cultural and historical contexts of the \"breeding of positivist personalities\", as the speaker suggests. As well, anthropology never seems to stay for long in a strictly abstract debate about epistemologies. What mattered more was how a particular epistemology would work in an ethical 105 situation. What was positivism's theoretical relationship to ethics? Well, what it does is it very clearly privileges the western perspective. Okay, other cultures do not have the same kind of positivist tradition, and anthropologists were supposed to trying to understand other cultures within their own context. But unfortunately we constantly fall back to the idea of positivism which privileges science which privileges western thought. So it has the effect of taking other people's ideas and translating them into western categories of thought. And it becomes so pervasive that it begins to distort how the people think about their own cultures. Okay I have given you an example of this in aboriginal peoples in Canada. For example we have aboriginal peoples running around and saying \"Yes, we have a tradition of science, we had science', right, they are privileging science! Right, so my reaction in my classes and my students is 'No you did not have science!'. Okay, 'Science came with colonialism, and all you are doing is that you are buying into this. You are buying into this idea that there is one tradition of thought above all else and this is science, and you are not seeing that science is a cultural system of understanding in the world. By your saying you have science, okay, you are privileging the western view. Instead, what you should be saying is that you have an intellectual tradition, which is every bit as good as science, okay?' Which is parallel with science and that should be allowed to exist as an independent intellectual tradition. This [type of] reference does believe in witchcraft as a real thing! Not as a creation of the mind but as something which is very real. And why is this a problem? Why is it necessary to have witchcraft seen from a positive perspective? And why do these anthropologists feel a need to do this? To take what you think or believe and take it back to our offices and tell you well, you do not really have it right. See that contributes to the globalization of culture, which as a discipline I think anthropology should be resisting and responsible for. Although obviously it is a snowball we cannot stop. We can certainly slow it down and allow individual cultures some breathing space? To get their act together. So that they can figure out how they are going to respond to globalization. Rather than just having it roll over them (1980s). The limits of positivism within socio-cultural anthropology could not be divorced from the cultural context. What could a theory of knowledge contribute to the way a people saw themselves? In the above case, not much, says this speaker. The doctrines of truth based on empirical experience of human action may have been discarded. This was possible due to cultural value relativism becoming epistemological relativism. The use of positivist tools and some of 106 the broader goals, however, continued. The debate concerning science was given an anthropological tone: The problem was relativism and its limits. I mean if there was any sort of issue that was there it was not positivism and its limits at the undergraduate level but relativism and its limits. Because this was... not long after the second world war. So when the question of relativism and its limits was invented, you might say. And the cold war was at its height. So I think, that if there was a frame, it was something like that. And I do not think the discussion on positivism was a part of that. It was a separate discussion at that point. Whereas Chicago a few years later, not that that may be as insignificant. The encounter between Parsons and the critique of functionalism was sort of edging into the question of positivism and its limitations. It was a different universe of talk (1960s). North American anthropology could not question the validity of what were its own foundations of experience. Instead, speakers often suggested that theories of knowledge came from the nature of anthropology. This meant that the understanding of human behavior came from being with other humans. This allowed one to understand some other culture's values. For example, one type of conflict positivist science could generate when it studied human relations is recounted: As it turned out, although I was in a linguistic relationships project [the] language I went to study was not interested in having me. They the previous year had had a visitor from a... university who was a physical anthropologist who talked the whole reserve into giving blood groups and was going to a blood type study or whatever and drove off with the very life-blood of that community back in his trunk. And they had not heard from him. Nor had he answered their letters, or whatever. And finally sent them a four or five page gobbledygook polysyllabic description of themselves and it made them mad. It distressed them that they had been drawn into something that gave them nothing back. And so when I arrived full of good intentions, and eager to apply my own skills in a way that would make sense but without a clear sense of one's obligations to the people that you study, a member of the tribal council came out and said 'We are just not interested, sorry'. Well I got in my car and drove... and slept in the back seat of the car like a pilgrim on a bed of nails doing a penance for the rest of my social science colleagues and their insensitivities (1960s). 107 Positivism, if it was linked to such occurrences through the methodology or epistemological assumptions of the 'perpetrator', might suffer a loss of status in anthropology. The anthropologist might feel humiliation and guilt in such a circumstance. Some social scientists trained in value relativism and humanism might be appalled. However, the conflict between measurement and understanding is internal to the structure of western knowledge systems. These have varying assumptions, goals, and even personalities. It is less a cross-cultural conflict. For example, in this case the anthropologist and the indigenous group agreed that the other anthropologist was problematic. The following reaction was typical when anthropologists discussed the doctrines of methodological positivism. These doctrines were seen as engendering problems discussed in the previous quote. Oh, well I do not think we need it...! I came to anthropology through literature, so cross-cultural epistemology can be really pompous! Seemed to me to be very much like the suspension of disbelief with which one reads a novel. At least the first time. Then you go back and see how it is constructed. And I would of course also want to argue that there is a difference between an ethnography and a novel. And it is the concern for that world that you believe to be out there will help you to assess whether one is better than another. But that is all. I have never had a sense that it is necessary to have a truth that stands outside everything. And it never seemed to me that such a truth would be very interesting. The things that are facts in that sense are just facts to which my response is 'so what?' I am not interested in facts. I am interested in ideas. And ideas are not things in that sense. And so the good stuff for me has always been on the relativist side of truth. Or at least the situated side of truth. As an historian and philosopher of science I would want to argue that is true of the hard sciences too. That is the good scientists, the really good ones, are people who know perfectly well that things are theoretical, and indeterminate, and that today's 'facts' will turn out to be, if not wrong, at least trivial... (1970s). There is the sense amongst speakers that mere sense data is true but trivial. To get beyond this, the positivist/post-positivist distinction may have to be broken down: I wonder if there are not people who do not think that there is such a thing as positivism, or post-positivism in anthropology. I really do think there are anthropologists of extreme naivety who may use the 108 words but have never really thought about it. I do not think that there is anyone who does not know what those words mean, or those that wonder if post-positivist anthropology is even possible. I think it is possible, and I have seen it happen. I do not think anthropologists on the whole, except within the emic-etic stage that we went through, were very much concerned [and] aware of those differences as have some of the aspects of sociology. Or even psychology sort of works it out every day of its life. With all those people who do experiments and blah blah blah! Or the people who do clinical work. Which is purely, or should be post-positivist. What a difference!... I mean now it is just called 'hearing people's voices'. We have come to it more lightly. In terms of the logic of hearing people's voices. Other disciplines have talked about hearing other people's voices but do they? So we are a latter day arrival. Maybe because these issues have not been as integral to the thinking of anthropology as they could be... Except of course you might argue that they are in the same department as anthropologists who I think made it most so. Well a good anthropologist in my view has always been a positivist and a post-positivist from the beginning. Right from Malinowski and the native's point of view, and that is no surprise (1960s). \"Hearing people's voices\" may involve a post-positivist anthropology. However, it does not involve an epistemological break. Such a break would disallow the positivist inclinations of some anthropological work. Instead, post-positivism seems to mean that the motivation for using positivist tools has changed. This seems to be an ethical change. Ideally, the tools of positivism are used at the convenience of other cultures. The ethics of asking someone to speak to you or help you out are brought into play. In this manner, guilt may be occluded and humiliation may be avoided. Even so, the construction of knowledge in socio-cultural anthropology seems to involve a number of fundamental positivist understandings. One has to do with the relationship between author and text. The direct experience of the author of a text is seen to give relevance to the text. It also enhances one's interpretation of it. For example, a particular anthropologist may know the author of a particular text. Better yet, he or she may be the actual author of the text. If so, there is an increase in authority and validity: I know the people who write them. The other thing I like to do, is I like to use books where I know the authors. I know [this person], and I used [this other person's] books on [them]. I have used two of them in those courses, and I know [him]. He works [there]. Because I can then answer more questions about the material and give a better account of 109 both the content and how it all came to be. Why this person wrote that book at that particular time. Should that be relevant. And having worked in a number of institutions, I feel for a while I can do that. Because there are enough works by enough people whom I know. It is not necessarily that they are the most wonderful people, but I think it makes the pedagogy a little bit more alive. Sort of, more alive... it gives you leverage into the discussion of conduct, of what people were talking about at the time the book was written. And as to what the institution was like in which the person was working who wrote the book. And what the world was like that the person was studying. If you have access to that information, because I have... (1960s). The positivist metaphysic of authorial relevancy cannot be easily shed. One first must ask what would replace it. There have been only a few post-positivist responses. The most illuminating for the human sciences is perhaps hermeneutics' rejection of authorial intent in Dilthey. he suggested that a text could be understood as an ethnographic document from another time, rather than a representation of a particular person who lived in that period. Another candidate is that of the textual play of signifiers suggested by Derrida. In Derrida, \"...there is nothing outside of the text\". Yet the previous speaker is already well on the way to Dilthey's work. This speaker suggested that knowledge of the historical and institutional milieu in which certain texts were written can be very important. A second major positivist tenet which some anthropology continually evokes has to do with the logistics of research. For example, I guess through some detours. I have some interest in history, philosophy. Initially, I guess, well I had a interest in history as well as those questions of [G.H.] Mead's. I guess at university I started out as a history major, but got a little frustrated with the fact that you are relying heavily on the serendipity of available texts. And with anthropology you could always go to the source, as it were, rather than wait for it to be discovered some place in some archive! (1970s). People do not go out of print, but they do die. Yet positivism privileges living experience. Other humans are seen as the original and best source for material about human relations. In a post-positivist anthropology, there might be no sense of originary or best source. The positivist knowledge of history is written in a similar manner to that of anthropology. In the former, texts are rediscovered, 110 translated, or dug up out of the ground. In the latter, people are born, die, move, and acculturate. A third major positivist concern of speakers suggests that source data is best obtained first hand. It should be described in low level non-theoretical texts. Description is also seen as best for the teaching of anthropological work: We used Joseph Campbell's stuff at one point. He has a sequence of four books on folklore, plus the one on the hero, as he calls it. We used that for a while. I do not know! You know he sort of has a theme and it seems to me he bends the data to fit his theme. And he is very selective. So I think it better if people read more generally descriptive things... Whereas Joseph Campbell's stuff is someone trying to build a picture by picking. And then there is his four volume series... and we used that a couple of times but it did not work out! Well, it did! It did work out. But I think he is selective, and not descriptive enough for me. And I think that the theme that he is trying to develop of the hero and what not it becomes too much of a bracket around the material. I like students to see it all, rather than just see bits and pieces of it (1960s). Sins against positivism include theorizing before collection of data. As well, collecting data to fit a theory is considered unhealthy.62 Such empirical and descriptive ethnographies as are extolled in the preceding quote, however, are not always seen as the ultimate anthropological representation. Compare the following with the preceding extract: It is interesting, but a lot of the ethnographies left me flat except The Hobo... I think I was more inspired by things in literature, rather than the programmatic ethnography. You start by locating the geographic area, and then you tell us something about the language group, and then you tell us something about prehistory if you have anything about prehistory, and then you go into social organization and then you go on to kinship as part of social organization and then you end up with religion! I mean come on now, that is a real bore these days! I was never really grabbed by that. And I was also never really grabbed much by classifications: hunters and gatherers, shifting cultivation. I did teach that stuff... I realized how many other things you could explain by using that little formula from cultural evolution (1960s). Description can be extended. Explanatory powers of certain theories of 6 2 Yet it would also be unfair to suggest that theoretical books should be studied in an ethnography course. Perhaps it would be best to investigate all texts in terms of their theoretical boundaries. The descriptive ethnographies are also representatives of kinds of theory. Ill knowledge may be included in ethnographies. This suggests one may not merely go out and observe something. Yet a positivist doctrine suggests that the researcher can explain culture by just such descriptive criteria. In anthropology, these would include participant observation. The post-positivist might ask 'What are we participating in? What does it mean to participate? What are we observing? How is observation possible?'. As well, transcripted dialogue might be a positivist criterion. The post-positivist could ask 'Why read it this way? Why not another? Did we really hear anything at all of the other?'. A positivist toolbox without the doctrines of positivist metaphysics seems important in anthropology. That is, being able to trust observation without claiming that it is the most true of all methods is important. Positivist tools are combined with a post-positivist metaphysics without post-positivist methods. Using both, another speaker seemed to have found a home: I think, and I still think, that the interesting stuff in science is not positivist in the sense of being objective either... So I do not think we ever needed it for doing anything. I think it is a mistake. A category error if you will! This goes over like a lead balloon in some circles of course! I think there is a really fundamental division in anthropology between people who want to be scientists and the people who cannot imagine why one would want to be one! And I am certainly on one side in that. I do not think that that leads to a position of not being able to say anything. I have always found plenty to say. And I have some sense that I can justify what I said as well. Now many of my more scientifically minded colleagues want to know what on earth my evidence is for that. And why is there not any analysis in this stuff. And simply, this is not what is interesting. Or at least that is interesting to me... And believe me when I am doing that, I am simply not making the argument that the people who do this stuff would see as essential. And I know that. I just cannot explain that in any sensible manner that makes any sense to many. Except in the manner in which I think things work. And how they are constructed. They are minds being communicated to beings with different minds. More or less successfully (1970s). A n amalgam of positivism and post-positivism is often cited by speakers as important for doing anthropology. There are, however, yet more clues to the positivist foundation of socio-cultural anthropology. These concern what speakers felt about their own work in anthropology. Did it meet 112 the perceived standards of what anthropology was? These standards for the most part were positivistic: In the two years there I found out I was a competent and capable fieldworker, but not outstanding. Obviously there are both technical and psychological demands in order to do cultural ecology in a well-rounded manner. I found that one person was not enough. One needed a congenial team with similar goals in mind. So that is why I never undertook that type of fieldwork again... The held methods course was not much help at all. Barnett was a superb ethnographer, but the solution for all those guys at the time was you have to do it to really learn it.63 Very much so then and perhaps less so now. One thing I examined during this time was the problem of how can one be sure of the veracity or veridity of ethnographic statements (1970s). Questioning the validity and value of direct experience brings up problems like the ones this speaker mentioned. How can one raise the level of certitude of \"ethnographic statements\"? There is also an idea in the above quote that there is too much data for one fieldworker. The efficacy of a set of researchers is based on congeniality. They must get along as persons. More importantly, they must have similar theoretical understandings.64 Objections can be raised with regard to such a set of positivist tenets as seen in the above quotes. However, what tended to come under attack from speakers were not the details of science, but a vague concept of 'Science'. Furthermore, the validity of scientific understanding was not as problematic as the value human beings placed on scientific knowledge. For example: Whereas [in the 1950s] you would have needed a year of mathematics at a university at the very beginning of that period, you 6 3 Another speaker agreed about the prevailing attitude towards field work and method: \"At McGill I had a fieldwork field methodology course with Frances Henry. But there was very little in it about taking actual fieldnotes. So I had a lot of different experiences with these actually in the field itself. And I was sort of thrown into, not the field per se, but into systematic collection of field data. And [it was] also different from anthropology because I was more into studying the political economy approach. I had a very singular hypothesis to test, very much pre-defined, which is different from most anthropology. I even used a chi-square in the data analysis, which because I was also in sociology you had to do more of this kind of thing... Qualitative data collection, which I only learned how to do later, had much less prestige.\" (1970s). 6 4 But all was not without violence within this milieu of understanding science and hoping for the scientific: \"Well, they are themselves in power in science, and they benefit from the power of science! There is no question about that. Even if they are not completely conscious about this. They are within this system and it is symbolically beneficial for them to be defenders of science. They police each other in this, and this is a cultural realm as such!\" (1980s). 113 did not by the end of it. And the phenomenon of mass education was generating sort of 'science for the masses' courses which did not have very much content. But sort of solved the questions of the politics of the science departments of having to crowd in the universities to sustain the requirement. But it could not bring that by doing something that was all that serious. People I think were then able to feel more negative about science in some ways paradoxically, by knowing less. And incarnate science with a capital 'S', or sciency, or positivistically, or as positivisms being the same. Which I think people did. And it was a mistake through as much lack of knowledge. But also through a kind of voyeurism. With a kind of scientific voyeurism that you can bash the scientists without having taken the calculus. Or, I think the feel of it was different for people who knew more about how scientists... [and] people who identified themselves as natural scientists worked (1960s). It would take a positivist inclination to criticise shallow critiques of science. To criticise science, one would need the tools of science. However, could any internal critique of science accomplish what an ideological critique wished to attain? Science could only be rejected as a whole from without. However, in doing so, one could not be a scientist. This is in part why non-scientists could \"bash\" with relative impunity. On the other hand, science has continued to work in spite of such attacks. The validity of science has not been undermined nearly as much as its value. Any educated person can make a comment on the value of science. Weber's (1963 [1904]) distinction between value and validity is important here. The demands of science are met when experience holds under certain conditions and replicates itself experimentally. The demands of society are met when we say that what a culture values is what cultural actions fulfill. What are the demands of the culture of anthropology? The anthropologist needs to be both an ethnographer and a positivist. As well, the anthropologist must be an ethnographer of the positivist: Well okay, I do not know that I am as opposed to positivism as an approach or a theory or a mindset as much as much as I am to the attitudes of people who live under that umbrella. You know what I mean? It seems to bring out the worst in people!... I know the influence of positivism is still very strong in some sociology. It seems to have really shut down a lot of the things and aspects that I find most valuable for carrying out social research. A kind of eclecticism, an open-mindedness, a willingness to entertain different kinds of evidence, different kinds of endeavours, a kind of collective smugness, perhaps. 114 So I think what I am, my knee-jerk response about positivism is more based on the way the discipline has constructed itself under that influence than the philosophy or the theories behind it (1980s). This \"worst in people\" would presumably be the content of an ethnography of native positivists. This would include how they acted within their cultural \"umbrella\". The native positivist might not question the methods used in such a study. However, she or he could not help but question the motive for doing such research. Analogically, when one speaker's local interlocutor criticised an anthropologist's theory of the world, he was right. I had approached this as a positivist with the assumption that if there were any answers I was as close to them as social science will allow us to get. And I was committing the unforgivable anthropological sin. I really had approached this from the position that I had the answers, and that I was objectively going to understand and formulate their culture using language as a base. I was going to be able to get it all down using some discovered procedures and analytical approaches. And I went home and thought that over. And I realized that I was missing one of the most excruciating parts of the adventure. And that is the sense of stopping being the observer from the outside, and starting to become the intimate. You know, the intimate stranger. As much of an insider as one could be. And I never presumed that there is truth, and there is absolute truth, or positivist truth to ethnographic reality. But I have ever since approached it as a possibility. That difference has consistently taught me to consider my most basic assumptions (1960s). Both intimacy and distance are necessary for doing valid ethnography, or so anthropologists here seem to have agreed. On the one hand, distance may be needed because of the metaphysical necessity which privileges a physical understanding of the world. Human action takes place in the world. On the other hand, intimacy may provide a better chance of obtaining cross-cultural experiences of truth. The possibility of cultural truth is what many speakers suggested as inspiring their anthropological work. This work has its own relative validity and value. A positivist account of ethnography seems to include both disinterestedness and intimacy. Given this, a post-positivist account of ethnography would be difficult to understand. One may have experienced a different metaphysical reality. Along with this, the physical world would be 115 seen differently. However, one would presumably recognize such a difference by recording it in ethnographic terms, thus recording the experience of an anthropologist. The record of a different reality could also be a transcription of ethnographic statements. This is precisely what anthropology already does.6 5 These speakers seem to practice anthropology with a set of empirical methods. It seems irrelevant whether or not these methods are considered positivist or postpositivist. By applying empirical methods, ethnographic texts can become powerful possibilities of hearing other voices. Yet, this can be carried to an extreme. Speakers asked, \"How far is too far? When does our work stop being anthropology and become something else?\" There is still a positivist sense with speakers that what one can know two might know, but what two cannot know one should not know. Some speakers suggested that one amongst anthropologists subject to this tension was Mauss. A number of speakers referred to him as writing one of the most brilliant and intimate anthropological texts. This was The Gift. Yet, these anthropologists did not suggest that a science be built out of one man's commentary. Levi-Strauss, however, thought that the science of anthropology was prefaced by Mauss: Why did Mauss halt at the edge of those immense possibilities, like Moses conducting his people all the way to the 6 5 Any attempt to exorcise these fundamental spirits of anthropology may be mere pretense, as Derrida suggests for the historical boundedness of knowledge in general: \"But effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death. As a coroner might do, it certifies the death but here it is in order to inflict it. This is a familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is effective. It wants to be and it must be in effect. It is effectively a performative. But here effectivity phantomalizes itself... It seeks to convince (itself) there where it makes (itself) afraid: now, it says (to itself), what used to be living is no longer alive, it does not remain effective in death itself, don't worry. (What is going on here is a way of not wanting to know what everyone alive knows without learning and without knowing, namely, that the dead can often be more powerful than the living and that is why to interpret a philosophy as philosophy or ontology of life is never a simple matter, which means that it is always too simple, incontestable, like what goes without saying, but finally so unconvincing, as unconvincing as a tautology, a rather heterological tauto-ontology, that of Marx or whomever, which relates everything back to life only on the condition of including there, death and the alterity of its other without which it would not be what it is.) In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution\" (Derrida 1994:48[1993]). Anthropology's acts, whether the unknowing use of positivist tools, methods, or spirits, or the hasty and fearful critique and attempted exorcism of these by possible post-positivist students, are both performatives. These performatives speak not merely of certain anthropological commitments to a form of life and death, but also to haunting resonance of what is anthropologically necessary to perform. 116 promised land whose splendor he would never behold? I am impelled to seek the reason, not from any wish to criticize, but out of a duty not to let the most fruitful aspect of his thinking be lost or vitiated. Mauss might have been expected to produce the twentieth century's Novum Organum; he held all the guidelines for it, but it has only come to be revealed in fragmented form. There must be some crucial move, somewhere, that Mauss missed out (Levi-Strauss, Introduction to The Gift, page 45; quoted in Derrida 1992:74[1991]). Speakers thought that Mauss could never make that so crucial a movement. This is the movement from context to structure. This would be a very anti-positivist move epistemologically. One moves away from observables. However, this movement is still a positivist one structurally. The movement is towards the unconscious mental structures which manifest themselves in myth, linguistic signifiers, and kin terms. Ethnography and its positivist character has produced both cultural relativism and the empiricism of fieldwork. With those offspring, it is all the more difficult to conceive of a wholly non-positivist anthropological discipline. Positivism, for example, is not opposed to structuralism. It has also given socio-cultural anthropology a vast array of descriptive content. Most comparative and generalizing work comes from positivist epistemology. Hence, what does it mean to be positivist in anthropology? Oh, I think it is the whole package of well, 'Let us make sure we capture cultural diversity before it dies out'. And it is an odd kind of noblesse oblige patronizing. Putting something in a cage rather than acknowledging it as contemporary and living and ongoing in the same way as we think of tradition. It is an ethical position internally. That as a coherent position helped us to define anthropologists of their times. But I do not think it works anymore. I think we have found the world to be much more complicated than that. And you probably had to have a data-base that tries to say how many knowledges and cultures are out there and what are they like? I cannot doubt you have to map the diversity before you can even begin to think about its construction. But I grew up in a generation where it became possible to ask the more interesting questions. Now I can probably use that to try to understand my more behavioristically inclined colleagues, who are driven by this more positive approach. But there we are (1970s). 117 Positivism, Post-Positivism and Post-Modernism: The post-Christian era, in which divine law is no longer heard, is also a post-political and post-positivist era. The concept of law that makes mastery imperative has to be derived out of the destiny that rules artists (Lingis 1989:106). And in general, this irony is akin to ignorance and hypocrisy. It is less politically meaningfully engaged with the times than what it writes off as, and all the time maintaining that it is is more politically aware. It is getting near criminal and it is certainly galling. I am speaking now of all the interpretive 'post-modern' work in anthropology in general. Though not all practitioners are of course at fault in these manners. To be influential in this sense, to find out how this discourse got its start and became an hegemony, one must look at the careers of those who were properly ensconced at the big American grad schools and churned out students there, not on the margins (1970s). I would like to continue with the discussion of theories of knowledge in anthropology with special attention to the concept of the 'field'. It is this concept, speakers suggest, that decides whether work and knowledge is anthropological or not. The field is also seen as a positivist metaphor. However, the ways in which one theorizes about field investigations do not take on any particular epistemological formula. With participants, there is little evidence suggesting that a post-positivism has taken over debate and practice in anthropology. In addition, post-positivism in anthropology almost always excludes post-modernism. There are speakers who are sympathetic to the newer ideas, including post-modernism. They are, however, still well equipped with the tools of positivism. These tools may be qualitative or quantitative. They enable anthropologists to practice what is generally considered to be anthropology. The largest single marked concept in the armory of positivist tools is 'the field' concept. This is related to 'fieldwork'. The latter is set up often in opposition to archival research. It seems that ethnography occurs when one gets into the field. Ethnology begins when one can reflect critically or theoretically on one's 'field experience'. Comparative cross-cultural work can also begin. Anthropology needs the concept of the field. It does so in order to be both ethnographic and ethnological. This much is clear from my own encounters. Ironically, I subtravened the field to support it. This is so because 118 I did not travel to a traditional 'field site'. However, does anthropology need the field as the working concept in order to support itself anthropologically? This question is somewhat different than asking the more radical one of disembodying ethnography from its existential space. What are we up against? The Field' itself is, or at least it was in these two cases, a powerful disciplinary force: assertive, demanding, even coercive. Like any such force, it can be underestimated or otherwise occluded, and by some individuals in either case was. But it cannot, at least if one is not going to disengage altogether, as in both cases individuals did, be simply evaded. It is too insistent a foe for that (Geertz 1995:119). Few students of anthropology will deny that this mythic presence of the field concept is often overpowering, but why? Partly, it has to do with anthropology's own sense of self, even of health. For example, ...I think to me, what anthropological knowledge is, is it gives a sense of experience... it is the validation of the written word. I have been there. I have lived it. It gives you a deeper way of knowing. You can know something at an intellectual level, and think about it in a theoretical sense, and say that his idea makes sense to me. But to really know something, you have to experience it emotionally. I think, it makes a much bigger imprint.... so I think anthropology is unique in that way... and I am really concerned with some of the current trends in anthropology... When we have to give a voice to everybody, and representation, okay, that is fine... Well what it says to me, we need that and statistics and everything. Okay, statistics can be manipulated and it is one discourse, sure! But so is telling stories! So I guess what I want to say here is anthropological knowledge and other knowledge that comes from social sciences I think are equally valid. But anthropology has this unique way of knowing, this unique thing to contribute to this... (1990s). The aspect of western discourse which studies the other must study that otherness in a place that is also other. This is anthropology's unique way of knowing of such a place. This place may be necessary epistemologically in order to experience another culture. Or, it may have been pure escapism from civilization and its discontents.66 What is more important is what the 6 6 Malinowski's junket from the European apocalypse cannot be ignored, and may have resonance in more recent times. One anthropologist suggested: \"...fieldwork was not the voyage of inner discovery for me that it may be for many people. It was invaluable for the early part of 119 concept of the field means today. Why is the field still hanging around? Why are we still hanging around in the field? There is a wealth of opinion on this subject from interviews. It is generally assumed that anthropology without the field would not be anthropology. It would become something else. This something else was characterized as either sociologies of knowledge or microsociology or even \"navel-gazing\". Students of anthropology are up against almost a century of proselytory discourse which imbued them with either the fear, or the thrill, of doing something different than their peers from other disciplines: In this maze or maelstrom, or vanity fair, the anthropologist had one thing going for him in keeping himself reasonably on course: the realization, immediately instilled in him (or - there were a few women - in her) and continuously reinforced, that he was going to have to do fieldwork. Unlike the others, mere academicians, we had a testing ahead, a place we had to go to and a rite we had to go through. The prospect of this moment of truth (though in my case it turned out to be two and a half years) wonderfully concentrated our minds, gave us a powerful sense of moving towards something, or anyway somewhere (Geertz 1995:101). Before actually going to the field, the anticipation of doing fieldwork sets an anthropology student apart from other prospective scholars. Al l disciplines however, are also 'fields'. Only anthropology seems to be both subject and object in the dual sense of the concept. Speakers said that anthropology is not merely a field of knowledge. It uses another field in the construction of that knowledge. As well, anthropology is extant due to the field. Anthropology created this notion in order to create itself. However, this construction is often hidden to present another story. One speaker suggested that my restoration of ideas about human dignity, the people I worked with gave me, but I did not discover myself there. I probably figured out more or less what I was about somewhere in high school when one of my friends did not come back from Nam. He was dead as a doornail and he was only eighteen years old. He could not deal with anything that was happening. He found it easier to go along, to not disappoint parents, to give in to peer pressure, to not think, despite the fact that he was intelligent, interesting, funny, kindly, kind person. All those things. He still did something that he did not want to do and which got him killed too. So that was kind of an important lesson about human beings. They are very vulnerable. They are very much, despite the ethos of individualism in our culture, ...collective beings, and so you have to work with people. But it also means you have to be careful about yourself, so you do not lose it! Anyways, I guess that is what I think about it.\" (1970s). 120 Anthropology is almost an apologetic for its own history. Its biggest mistakes are the ethnographies. And by the ethnographers who worked in the field at a particular time. They did so in a very ambiguous but unfortunately still archetypical manner. I do not really see any other way in which it constructs itself. I do not really know at all. Yet our theory classes. It was as if theory stopped with Julian Steward! Positivism as a concept was not taught but present. On the other hand Marxism was and is alive and well in the particular department in which I studied. Hegemony was taught as 'the control through persuasion as opposed to through force'. Ironic! For example, there as a course on popular memory within popular culture, so many hegemonies, post-modern meant a movement away from the old power relations of the classic ethnographies. More than any theoretical sense of the type of knowledge representation, the concern was for practical things like ethical problems and how the new ethnographies got around them or dealt with them differently because they saw power relations differently (1990s). The point is that epistemological origin myths were seen as controlling certain anthropological ideas. Today, this cosmogony of the discipline reads like a chicken and egg problem. One might suggest that anthropology in the Kantian sense came first. Ethnography, ethnology, and the field followed. 6 7 The history of the concept of the field is highly problematic. This is not least due to current reflection which is critical of unreflective fieldwork. Some speakers suggested that the domestication of the concept of the field occurred in anthropological methodology: Q: Does that imply that the concept of field was somewhat taken for granted? Oh yes, I am sure of it. Even forgotten because Malinowski set us a fine example. He thought about it and reflected on it in terms that could be considered contemporary even now. And that we let this pass into thinking that going into the field did not present anything problematic? That is a very naive view of things. I do not mean just in terms of ethical and moral. I mean in terms of knowledge construction. 6 7 Regarding the historical blinkers many genres of anthropology effectively use against each other, Darnell writes \"One might almost believe that anthropologists, like members of cultures, can function in a vacuum, outside history. If this is so, then there is no need for the history of anthropology.\" (Darnell 1995b:9). Spencer, however (1910:106 where Morgan is quoted, and 114; where ethnographic examples no different from Tylor or Frazer are presented, and 118ff.[1885]) for further examples, calls what could be seen as anthropology, sociology. Spencer is also the source of the concept 'super-organic', (Spencer 1910:3ff [1885]) which Kroeber (1987:22ff [1917]) later borrowed and made famous in American anthropology. 121 You just go out there and look at people running around?! I mean come on, how naive can you be? That was very, very, very problematic. I do not think sociology had the greatest handle on it either (1960s). Anthropology may not necessarily have come before the concept of the field. Anthropology, at least in its nineteenth century theoretical guises, did not appear before the concept of 'the other' appeared. Logically the 'space of the other' was a post hoc necessity for there to be new concept of the other (but see McGrane 1989). This later became 'the field' proper. Today, we recognize the field as a working concept in anthropological knowledge production appearing from about 1914.68 But what of the field's real power? What is its staying power in the face of assaults from post-positivist epistemologies or 'post-modern' ontologies?69 There were few self-proclaimed post-positivist anthropologists encountered in this study. However, even those there were declaimed any responsibility for the more extreme views of a perhaps popularized post-modernism. The following was typical: I pretty much see the shift towards the humanities, towards a more humanistic approach in anthropology as beneficial. And as a more realistic acknowledgement of what we are doing in cultural anthropology. But I do not think it is anywhere near as successful as 6 8 However one dates the epistemic importance of fieldwork, the anthropological literature abounds with examples that tend to stress the ethical imperative of the field experience and its ultimate purpose: \"After Malinowski, the anthropologists based their methods upon participant-observation, which required intimate and free contact with the peoples they studied. They therefore had to break down the the barriers of the colour bar, which existed in most colonies, and they had to challenge the basic, unspoken assumptions of all colonial regimes, Their individual examples of how sophisticated Europeans could happily adopt many tribal habits and live on a basis of friendship with illiterate and poor peoples constituted a constant irritation to settlers and many colonial officers. Their example still has its point (Kuper 1983:120 italics mine). Another example which stresses the rite of passage metaphor in a novel context, and from the near end of the fieldwork chronology, may be had in Head (1992). 6 9 And from legal and political concerns: \"Well the way it went at Arizona, there was a field methods course which we really have not done here because of course the concern for the political setting, and things got changed somewhat. Spicer did it, and he gave us some general outlines on notetaking. [He] talked about what he had done and then everyone had to have a project and go out and do something. Which is something you cannot really do very well now, because you have to get permission from the human subjects and all the committees and so on. All that sort of stuff. Which makes life much much more complicated for something like this. I am sure that people would not want to do it as much. But with Spicer, I am sure we had to do very little of this. As long as you were not obnoxious... But nevertheless, I guess that some people in the past have been, so much that universities today are afraid that they are going to get sued, more than anything else!\" (1960s). 122 most people think. I see it as caught up in genres, and pseudodebates. And post-modernism... that movement particularly in literary criticism as a kind of auto-didactic egotistical and heavily involved in building reputations on kind of shifting sand. Instead of doing really a lot of the hard work in ethnography. And a lot of the debates have been about what a new ethnography would look like. But very few people have sat down and actually tried to write one, or to co-publish, or do anything really collaborative... (1970s). In the eyes of some anthropologists, the hard work of ethnography can obviously occur in a post-positivist phase of anthropology. However, it cannot occur in the post-modern. Writing and actually doing new ethnography rather than merely talking about it are key. Clues to the tension between positivist and post-positivist overtones abound in the previous quote. In anthropology, there is still a difference between action and thought. There is still a difference between the object and its discourse. Success is still measured by what are essentially positivist standards. These include doing the ethnography. It must be revealing. It must inspire in us a feeling for another way of life. Finally, it must instill within us a respect for it. Part of it is that you have to have it at the micro and the macro, the inductive and the deductive and so on... Social research has to be theoretically informed but it cannot lose sight of the object that it is about. I mean the post-modern. Especially in cultural studies there is a lot of stuff that purports to be research into culture but in fact it has nothing to do with culture. It is just research into cultural theory. You know, so you get these sort of theoretical fifth generation papers where it is John Smith's analysis of, well foe Blow's analysis of someone else's critique of Derrida's whatever, you know! And this is cultural studies. And I say, where is the culture?! So! (1980s). Q: It reminds me of citations in references cited where if you follow it back the original context is so trivial or is such a name-dropping reference that it is ridiculous. Yeah! Well, I guess the thing that gets me the most is a lot of the people who are working and see themselves as post-modernists or post-structuralists. Especially post-structuralists, they know all the latest buzz-theories but they know nothing about the more classical work. Where those theories have developed out of, you know, you cannot really do post-structuralist theory without say having read Levi-Strauss. [M]any of their developments were a reaction against or an incorporation of [him]. But they see post-structuralism as being a kind of anti-structuralism without realizing how there is a continuity 123 there. And without realizing that the more distant roots of the whole thing. I mean you could trace it back at least to Durkheim. Perhaps beyond. I am a little fuzzy once you get before Durkheim, so! (1980s). There is a lack of historical consciousness in some of the discussions surrounding post-modernity. This creates a telescoping of the very history which post-modernists might wish to deny. Hence the respect for other cultures must be seen in terms not of genuine otherness, but through a poetic or rhetorical convincing of the reader. This may be why the \"pseudo-debates\" of the post-modern cannot lead to the same type of ethnography as previously practiced. According to a consistent yet positivist standard, these post-modern genres are not really in touch with their own subjects. They have not made the leap to asking their subjects what they actually think about the world. Yet \"humanistic\" influences, rather than those \"scientistic\", make things more realistic. These examples, give us a fair idea of what post-positivism in anthropology looks like on the ground. It does not look so much 'post' nor positivist, but positive. It does not seem 'post-modern'.70 For example: ...actually, [a] research group, and that included psychologists and anthropologists. And the paradoxes, ironies, metalevels, and so on of communication. Once you really get into that, you automatically become dialogical. I think discourse oriented; seeing conversations as whole, and analysable in some sense that way. You start to see fieldwork as interpretive, an interpretive activity. Because that is what human beings are engaged in simultaneously when they are communicating... (1970s). The hermeneutics of a possible post-positivism include a sense of negotiation. Joining this sense are dialogue, conversation, and interpretation. Interpretation and communication are one and the same. Again, a balance is called for amongst epistemological forces seen as possibly being in conflict with one another: ...my reaction to post-modernism is more like, well okay, but let us find some balance. The value of post-modernism is in its thinking about issues of power and representation. And ways of knowing. But the 7 0 Similarly for the notion of narrative life-history, which is one dominant theme in this set of interviews, Darnell suggests that \"In a surprisingly discordant rhetoric of discontinuity, life history has been rehabilitated in recent post-modernist reflections on ethnography as writing; yet there is no acknowledgement of the roots of this methodology in Americanist studies of personality and culture.\" (Darnell 1995b:ll). 124 danger is getting lost in the sense of despair that we can never know anything. And that is a real, I think, a real shame. I regret it too. I mean that all of our voices are equally valid. And all forms of knowledge are equally valid. If this is so, what is the point of getting an education? And undermining the 'discourse' of science. Sure, let us be aware of the limitations inherent in any way of knowing, and post-modernism is good that way (1990s). The more extreme rhetorics of post-modernity often get in the way of certain anthropologists' understanding of more recent trends in theory. This makes such trends easier to reject in favor of a 'classic' model. One such model is that of fieldwork. One can return to the space of the field. However, returning does involve a renegotiation of the concept of the field. It is fieldwork that is the object and subject of all these transformations. Because of this, one cannot really suggest that anthropology as a whole has undergone a radical shift to some other space beyond positivist knowledge production. This space still includes the field. The field is a physicalist, observationalist, positivist concept par excellence. Yet something is happening to anthropology - something which may have occurred before: The names of the 'isms' were different, and some of their content, but the form of it was fairly or would have been fairly similar. It would have been the argument between lulian Steward and Kroeber, say, over the nature of science which is a variant of the same thing. Or Evans-Pritchard and Fortes over the same thing actually. In that period, is anthropology history, is it science, is it art and so on! They were young people on the make and this is how you go about doing it. They were. And I think that is the way it happens. I think it is the same in the other social sciences. And I do not know the humanities well enough to know whether it happens that way or not. Though I have seen sitting on university committees where you get applications from people in diverse fields. These are applying for post-docs, and things like that but, the speed at which the new lexicons diffuse over a wide number of field is extraordinary. There was one set of [fellowship] applications, it was the post-modern era of [fellowship] applications about three years ago. Some of the people who were reading these signs were totally amazed. Because some of them had been on the committee the year before and there were none! ... It is an issue of which of the disciplines are being linked by those languages. How does one see the kinds of linkages between anthropology and other fields and what might the experimentation, or the theoretical experimentation that is going on tell us about other fields. Between anthropology and other disciplines, which is another and extremely important issue (1960s). 125 Whether anthropology is an observational science or an historical one has been supplanted by another debate. This new debate questions anthropology's ability to produce knowledge in the first place. How can anthropology produce any kind of knowledge without a working field concept? The political gains by younger generations motivated or in the form of social movements may change the discipline.7 1 However, the weight of the history of the discipline of anthropology itself is heavy. It might smother a more radical reflection on the nature of anthropological knowledge. It might preclude such knowledge in terms other than that finding derivation in the concept of the field. The concept of reflexivity itself may be too shallow for real change: I think certainly post-modernism, is one that is not explained very well by advocates for it within our cohort. I am not sure why. And I am not sure that if it is explained that it is not more interesting for literary criticism. And here when I see people doing post-modernism it is fascinating and I can see where it comes in but I do not really understand it in anthropology. That is why I would say, it is not explained very well. What other things are not? Well I think reflexivity is not. I mean, taken to that further step, and again I wonder if that has to with people's personal interests... (1990s). Anthropology has long been a reflective discipline. Perhaps reflexivity in anthropology is new wine in an old bottle. As well, other aspects of theoretical debate which had been too easily rejected by post-modernists find new modes of expression in a dialogue with their former enemies: I use a lot of different techniques of analysis but some of the projects are similar in that it is looking at cultural expression in its broadest sense. And deriving from that a sense of the basic cultural structures. I subscribe to... the notion that there is a commonality between communal structures and individual structures. So you can read from one to the other. Really, this is where the work departs from the Levi-Strauss and goes more post-modernist in view. To which Levi-Strauss and structuralism in general are totally inimical because it is a 7 1 Another example comes from Darnell (1995b:4): \"Virtually all of the self-styled post-modernists acknowledge Clifford Geertz as teacher and mentor. But they make no move to include him in their ranks. Indeed, these anthropologists claim that their experimental position in the North American discipline is generationally based. The graduate students of the politically self-conscious 1960s have now attained sufficient maturity and seniority to experiment with inherited forms of ethnographic representation.\" 126 master narrative. And it wants to homogenize everything and so on and so forth. But when you get rid of that one element, the insistence that cognitive structures are universally there, if you look at it more as a specific set of structures it is actually, constructed, I am not sure if that is very good usage! Constructed structures! But anyway, that they are constructed through experience and interchange between the subject and the world at large. And this is the whole idea, the post-structuralist idea that the subject may be discursively constructed is this association... (1980s). Speakers often suggested that what is considered to be new in anthropological theory was always present. If not, it had been present and was rejected before for good reasons. However, it was admitted that all too often the rejections were apocalyptic rather than judicious. For example, Positivism. Well, not too popular these days! [Q: Why is that?] Well, I think for a long time anthropologists were very naive and were trying to make maybe anthropology into a science like the natural sciences. And that was based on a positivistic notion. And the idea there were laws of human behavior. And how do we discover the laws of human behavior? So I think that anthropology and anthropologists suddenly realized that this was a dream, and what could they do except despair! If they continued to follow that philosophy. So what happened? As I see it there was an extreme about face and this jump into post-modernist questioning of positivistic notions of science. And like I said before, well okay, lets get some balance! Well, it did put a man on the moon! Like I say, positivistic science is valuable, but so is fieldwork. Ethnography. They are also valuable ways of knowing, and valid ways (1990s). There are also the different cultural milieux to be taken into consideration. One which is especially important is that which exists between Europe and North America: In Europe, it seems that there is more of an intellectual climate per se, that allows these jeux des mots, for example. Whereas here in North America it is very difficult. We tend to feel personally insulted if an article which we have written is criticized. We take it more personally than a mere game of words denotes. There is irony here, obviously. At the same time, these texts which imply the death of the author or such-like, are very difficult to understand anyway. They are dense and require serious work to read. Certainly Derrida is like this, and many times also Bourdieu as well. They seem to have a style which might in fact be equated with some kind of literary voice. I 127 really do not think the post-modernists can be anthropologists. (1970s). Hence, anthropology, under its weight of disciplinary history, cannot afford to spend too much time with what is defined as external to it. As well, post-modern texts are often seen as obfuscatory and incomprehensible to North American trained social scientists. One can easily generate a situation where speakers suggested that \"Foucault is over-rated\" and \"Derrida is a great opportunist\" (both 1960s). Another example of the informal critique of both post-positivism and postmodernism in anthropology accuses them of \"...producing auto-biography and calling it ethnography, the absurd self-importance of this stuff, the literalist interpretation and it is true, I say, they are all very vulnerable on the grounds of never having done ethnography or very little, or also on your ground of not even doing what they say they are doing\" (1970s).72 The possibility of a post-positivist ethnography or anthropology is at least granted by some. However, the impossibility of a post-modern anthropology is almost universally declaimed. This is suggested by critiquing such a concept and its texts as non-anthropological. They are seen as such because they come out of social or media movements external to anthropology proper. They are not motivated by the prime anthropological agent, the field: \"Fieldwork will alter one's experience, the sense that it is real, in North America we are too self-absorbed... the post-modern, I mean. North American society has also become self-absorbed. Hence one has neo-platonic wannabees versus Aristotelian tendencies. Yet I do not buy the value-free science stuff either, it is just that the pendulum is over so much one way, has swung too far\" (1970s). Post-modernism may be uninteresting for these reasons as well as those empirical: There is the post-modernist stuff which does not interest me too awfully much. Because I am more interested in truly what [others] think not what I think [others] may think. More interested in the data and the grassroots sort of ethnographic descriptive sort of material. So 7 2 On the other hand: \"I was at the applied anthropology conference and you should hear them go on about the postmoderns and they are so ignorant about it! They think it is completely irrelevant and they say some really stupid things. I think they are afraid of it, personally, because it is difficult reading, as you know. And I think that they find it so difficult to read they do not give it fair attention. Whereas I find the links between applied anthropology and postmodernism as so logical and easy to make. But you know applied anthropology in general... the problem with it is that it pretends to be atheoretical.\" (1980s). 128 I like the orientations that try to take a clear body of descriptive data and work it into sort of more general theoretical kinds of statements. And these digressions into soul agonizing and soul seeking do not seem to me to be too enduring, I think that is sort of counter to what anthropology is all about. That I think we are supposed to look out, in a way, but of course each of us are ultimately the ones that synthesize... So I guess you have to recognize that point of view (1960s). The most important clue in the above is the distinction made between another culture's thoughts and the ethnographer's ideas. How are we to tell the difference? The manner in which such a distinction is made is itself based fundamentally on a positivist metaphysic. Al l anthropologists in the study seemed to share this idea. This includes the idea that the presence of an 'other' and the ethnographer is sufficient to understand that there is another speaking and thinking. Thoughts about the other are of prime importance to anthropology. They may also be a charter myth. In this sense, perhaps they are akin to the field. However, it is in anthropological texts that the belief in such charters by anthropologists is most profound. Ethnographic and ethnological texts could not function without the assumption that there is a difference between auto-biography and ethnography. Whether or not an ethics can be built upon these myths could be questioned. The mythic architecture of anthropological ethics, however, was not so important for these anthropologists. What is more important is being true to the knowledge of the other. Anthropology might be a local knowledge, ...but there is not anything that is not anthropological. I guess for a while I sort of felt out of step with main anthropology when it went into this writing anthropology phase... for two reasons. One: working with people in [ethnographic context], I think we sort of lost sense, particularly in the deconstruction kinds of stuff, lost sense of the naive realism that people have... And so I felt rather removed from a lot of that. I mean people did construct things in metaphorical senses. They did have a good sense of fiction and allegory. A real sense of what was real. And we were really denying that. And I think that both phenomenologically having had the experience in [ethnographic context], where people were both realistically naive in a metaphysical sense. Not in just being naive in an unsophisticated sense! I think that we were denying them something, ... I think that really made me question whether all the epistemological constructs that we had coming out of that period were even worth thinking about. And they 129 were very self-indulgent and introspective. Rather than looking out in the ways anthropology has to do to even be ethnographic, much less ethnological. So I guess I did not feel comfortable with those kinds of things (1970s). This quote points to many of the substantive issues regarding theoretical contributions to the practice of anthropology. One reads a text. However, one discovers thoughts and feelings which are not commensurate with what a text suggested. What is one to do with this tension? The choice made by anthropologists in this study is uniformly to go with the \"...real experience of otherness in the field\". Another example dealing with the same aspect of recent anthropological theory concurs: Q: What about some of the things that have given you frustration? That have spurred you on in a different way? Well I would say at the top of my list, would be Writing Culture. It is always cited, and every time I turn around people are saying it. And I do not know, you know, if this just has to do with the department itself. So I find that book quite offensive actually. Not only because it excluded women. But that in fact the one discussion of women in anthropology was done by a man! I think if we have learned anything in anthropology hopefully, it is that it is impossible to provide a complete picture when you neglect or do not include women or other cultures. I think that... And I find generally that I have a problem with this whole notion of these new texts. Like the work of Rabinow. I have a problem that there is no authority ... that you do not have to work to get at informants. Like it was all gone too far over from the early days where the ethnography sort of looked like the absolute truth to go into this very casual sloppy, irresponsible, 'well it does not really matter anyway'. This sort of casual fragmented way of looking at anthropology. And I realize that I am probably behind the times on that! (1990s). One might expect the erstwhile allies of feminism and post-modernism to connect within anthropology. However, some speakers who partake of both most often reject the post-modernist side in favor of another side. The side privileged is where something \"happens\". 'Action' is possible in certain aspects of discourse. You can say something, or make a statement. These are all positivistic inclinations which are not easily disposed. In fact, speakers never suggested that we should dispose of them. 130 That being so, what is special about the post-modernists in that they can see more than the positivists? There must be special vision of the post-modern. This being so in the sense that there cannot be consistency between what hypothetical post-modernists say about others, and what they say about themselves. If not, then post-modernists would only see themselves in and as anthropologists. By their own standards, they would become mediocre. There was much resentment against a type of arrogance seen as being post-modern in its origins. Intellectualism was seen by speakers as arrogance due to lack of the very self-reflection the post-modern tries to pin on its discursive competitors. For example, I have felt a lot of hostility towards... Again not even because of the substance of [this person's] work, which I find kind of shoddy. But it is billed as leading the charge of sort of the leading edge of Canadian post-modern work, and cultural studies... The kind of stuff [this person] does is, like you were suggesting earlier, is to take the buzz-words and the buzz-names and produce what to me is only one step up from a kind of 'Coles-notes' to post-modern theory! Simplified, homogenized, beyond the point of similar language. And stuff so it sounds sort of impressive. And this is what a whole generation of students [is getting]... I guess what bothers me the most is the imposition of this transnational vision. Yeah, transnationalism that totally obscures all the differences and that delegitimizes the whole notion of looking for local differences. I mean once you get into the micro level. And I do not know what it is but, people working under this umbrella, they talk a lot about everyday life and the actor and the importance of looking at the way people use culture and context and so on. They talk as if their real concern is with the micro level. How we interact and usage and reception and all these kinds of things. And people making a difference. And restoring agency to the individual, and all this kind of stuff. But at the same time they accept without question the validity of these grand forces... (1980s). Arrogance can also preclude the detailed scholarly work necessary for the creation of a world-vision. There is a difference between construction and proclamation. In anthropology, it is the field concept which aids in the construction of culture. Yet, self-reflection in anthropology can also be applied to fieldwork. Perhaps one of the manifestations of this reflection was the setting up of fieldwork courses. Most speakers said they did not have such courses when they were students. For example: 131 Here of course we started at a time when, within three or four years of our starting it, it was a thing people were debating on the front covers... So it has followed us every year and we get students from all over. Students from education. Ph.D. students and others. And since then we have even had people from forestry. It has become a very acceptable form. I do not know how you would date this period. Maybe from the cognitive, and the interest in the cognitive theories is certainly I think part of that. And the interpretive theories. And the amount of books that are out on the topic per year in social theory. So it is that reflexivity... (1960s). Reflective or interpretive theories have gained some anthropological ground. However, they are turned to certain anthropological usages. It is the field that acts as the deus ex machina for all anthropologists. This was so at least according these native speakers. The field is where personal character is tested. However, it is also where theories and epistemological constructs meet their fate or shrine as well. 7 3 This has the effect of weeding out a type of person. It also distinguishes types of theories which seem to hold no relevance to anthropology. However this relevancy is defined by the standards of relevance previously constructed and thereby tested by the field. Regression and self-fulfilling prophecy are dangers here. One can avoid these dangers. Gadamer (for an historical example 1988:239-40[1960]) suggests that it is our previous prejudices which account for all true experience being of a negative sort. This does not mean experience is bad. In order to have an experience, one must confront and shatter a previous prejudice. Hence, there is a negative effect on prejudice. This in the sense that a prejudice is replaced by a new one through an experience. Later, this recent experience also becomes a prejudice. It serves as an historical backdrop for new experiences. Anthropological fieldwork represents itself as an excellent manner of confronting and negating previous cultural prejudice. However, it may not be as history-making in terms of its confrontation with theory. Instead, the field seems rather to negate the possibility of new 7 3 On the other hand, the field is not always salutary to the person. Theory is not necessarily beholden to the field, if one reverses the position of the field in epistemology and 'goes out there' armed with a theory and comes back thrice armed with the same: 'Tieldwork did not change my received views of the discipline, mainly because of my advisors at Harvard always tempered theory with 'data', as well as the Dutch having conscious respect for data and the empirical. On the other hand fieldwork really screws some people up. But theory is not a virtue in itself (useful vs. not useful) and not good or bad in a moral sense. It is used to point out where to follow up.\" (1970s). 132 theoretical experience. It does so by holding on to previous theoretical prejudices. This sort of tension points to the idea of the impossibility of doing post-modern ethnography. Experience itself may be left to a particular physical construct - that of the field. However, this means theory as an experience will not have the same kind of authoritative weight as experience of the field. The experience of the self will not have the same potential for life-changing of previous prejudice as that of the other. Is this the only way anthropology occurs? I see anthropology as something that emerges out of the contact with different peoples who have intellectual interests. And our intellectual interest in that field are located in universities, in other communities. Those intellectual interests which are not in universities are located elsewhere. They are located with singers, chiefs, whoever, and its not random people either. There is a kind of conspiracy of intellectuals across the world who talk to each other. Which I think is fine. And I would hesitate to see the field change to where it was only dead intellectuals or whatever. So I would be preparing people. I would be encouraging people to continue thinking along those lines. Because I think we lose a lot of our strength if we let that feature of it go. Not that every student has to do it. I mean its not that kind of thing. But a structural component of it is human beings in quite different situations and communities trying to find out about each other in a serious disciplined way. I have a very cumulative notion of knowledge so that the outcome of that does build up into something greater than that of any one or two or three individuals can do. Whether it is a science or not is another issue. Which I do not find that interesting. But there is a cumulative body of knowledge (1960s). Anthropological knowledge itself assumes, and comes from, the existence of a set of anthropological concepts. Such concepts include community, field, even \"elsewhere\". As well, more general concepts like cumulation, individual, and structure are important for anthropology. A heritage of cultural beliefs as the subject of anthropology is passed on. The tensions within epistemology are more detailed than a mere summary of contrasting positions divulges. Rather than those between epistemology and ethics, tensions interior to the manner in which knowledge is constructed in anthropology aid in understanding the debated consciousness of anthropologists in this study. Phenomenology and hermeneutics, two philosophical traditions which have been reflected in 133 anthropology over the previous three decades, are juxtaposed in an exegetical relationship with those anthropological writers upon whom these discourses have this influence, particularly Clifford Geertz. As well, current opinions on the value and validity of positivism in anthropology are important in understanding the rise of Geertz's hegemony in interpretive work in anthropology. The subtle and overlapping themes and differences of positivism, post-positivism, and post-modernism betray the fact that none of them lies squarely outside each other. These examinations take place with reference to what speakers said about such ideas, and thus they also introduce the ethnographic component of this project. 134 CHAPTER FOUR - BABEL REJOINED: THE CULTURE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE I might even carry this further: I said that every sign is perfect for whomever invents it, but this is only really true at the precise instant when he invents the sign, for when he uses the same sign in another moment in his life, or when his mind is in another disposition, he can no longer be entirely sure that he has gathered up under this sign the same collection of ideas as he had the first time he used it (Destutt de Tracy, in Eco 1995:291[1993]). Speakers' thoughts on anthropological knowledge run a wide gamut. There is equivocity in terms of how these anthropologists feel knowledge is constructed, both within their discipline, and in general. The themes that are positivist and post-positivist are given equal treatment. This suggests that an historical shift moving from one to the other has not occurred in any final sense. I want to present the bulk of speakers' voices in as direct a manner as possible. However, each bit of narrative requires its own re-contextualisation. Therefore ethnographic voices will be heard in tandem with each other. As well, other texts presented comment on the interview material. The following sections will look like textual conference calls. Finally, voices of anthropologists are not necessarily the same even within a single transcription. Interviews were sometimes conducted over days or weeks. Introduction: I tend to see rigid systems at a personal or collective level as a kind of fascism (1970s). If there is no access to the world unmediated by language (or anyway by sign systems) it rather matters what sort of language that is (Geertz 1995:130). If God created the world by uttering sounds or by combining written letters, it must follow that these semiotic elements were not representations of pre-existing things, but the very forms by which the elements of the universe are moulded. The significance of this argument in our own story must be plain: the language of creation was perfect not because it merely happened to reflect the structure of the universe in some exemplary fashion; it created the universe. Consequently it stands 135 to the universe as the cast stands to the object cast from it (Eco 1995[1993]:31-2). The epistemology of the way in which knowledge is produced is always much more interesting than the knowledge itself of course, because you know it is a deeper level of understanding. Not everyone finds it good, but I have always said it (1960s). At the moment when the fundamental conceptual system produced by the Greco-European adventure is in the process of taking over all humanity, these three motifs would predetermine the totality of the logos and of the worldwide historicb-philosophico situation. No philosophy could possibly dislodge them without first succumbing to them, or without finally destroying itself as a philosophical language (Derrida 1978:82[1967b]). The motifs of which Derrida speaks are the Greek sources of our language. They include the reduction of classical or \"onto-theological\" metaphysics. As well, the special place of ethics became distinct from metaphysics. This distinction, however, is blurred in anthropology. Each anthropologist deals with this blurring in their own way. The following will outline the themes pursued in this chapter as suggested by speakers' own categorizations of what anthropological knowledge is. The set of epigraphs above serves to direct the reader towards the chapter's themes. These concern knowledge and epistemology. These themes resonate in each of the five sections which comprise this chapter. Themes include a) a kind of relativism or perspectivism, b) a concern for an ethical language, c) the possibility of self-fulfilling theories of knowledge, d) the possible spurious distinction between language and culture, and finally, e) the omniscience of an anthropological language. The five remaining sections of this chapter comprise the most important part of the project. They are concerned with speakers' comments about personal influences on constructions of anthropological knowledge. They are also specifically concerned with the history of anthropological knowledge and its construction, and the uniqueness of anthropological knowledge. Comments on the nature of human knowledge in general are included, and finally, comments contrasting and concerning ethics and epistemology. 136 All of these observations must be thought of as being part of what it is to be an anthropologist. Professional training, charter myths, and institutionality are three agents for this consciousness. This requires a reflective lens. This material resonates with two perspectives. One is the culture of the discipline as a form of discursive knowledge. The other is the culture of the individual speaker and his or her way of professional knowledge. These anthropologists have played a part in constructing these perspectives even as they have been constructed by them. Personal Influences on Knowledge Construction: Comments concerning personal influences with regard to the construction of anthropological language follow. These reference seminal figures, texts, or mentors and teachers. Such are referenced in the context of the production or reproduction of anthropological knowledge. The uniqueness of anthropology as seen by the participants included the idea that there was a place to learn theory. There was also a place in which theory might be put to the test. Did the world really work in the manner theories said it did? I do not think anybody was really convinced that the world really worked like that. Which is interesting to reflect on because the attitude towards theory, in quotes, that one is taking is sort of strange. You know in a sense I should not say strange, it is alienated, immediately alienated. It is a convenience. You know like a public convenience. It is said the most interesting way around putting things together that we all agree that are supposed to be put together in a coherent fashion. You know that if one went some other route, you leave out something you were not supposed to leave out... Simultaneously the critique of functionalism was something we were learning about and this happening at the same time as we are learning the integrated power of Parsonian type of thinking. Also, learning the limitations of functionalism, so those two do not quite mesh! (1960s). There was a difference between reading anthropology and doing fieldwork. This was also seen as a difference between understanding what something was about in theory and doing the work by which theories were constructed. What was anthropological knowledge? Was it only knowledge if 137 cast in a theoretical form? Was it the experience of doing the work of anthropology in the field? Or, was it coming to know anthropology as an intimate personal endeavour? Did anthropological knowledge partake of both? Was it objective? Okay, it is not purely objective, because I do not think that anything is purely objective. But I think anthropology kind of takes into account the individual researcher's quirks and habits, and treats it more as a human thing. I do not know if humanistic is the right word. It may be more local than that. It treats it as a more human social science, as opposed to a more statistical work. And I kind of believe it is this rather than a religious, well at the time in... the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church were starting [research] programs there with a more fundamentalist group who wanted to save the street kids. You know, and trying to get them converted. And I did at the time. [This] as opposed to knowing anything about anthropology! But then they wanted me to send these street kids off to this bible camp!! And I sort of said what!? So I sat down and thought about it. And yes they get some people to preach at. But again they got a week off the street. They got food and some place to play and swim and so on. It was great for them so I thought okay. But I thought this is definitely not the way such research should be focussed! (1990s). A dialogue between anthropology and the rest of the world was built up through the claims of fieldwork. However, an important dialogue between these forms of knowledge was often already present before such an experience: My encounter is with the sense of what I was doing then with what I was finding out as I was doing it. That was extremely important to me. I did go back with that kind of [idea]. I must have written a thesis proposal which had that. The reasons why ... are interesting... This is what I know about this place... This is the sort of social organization these people have. This is what I want to find out how they make work. What is not supposed to be workable and that was very exciting. Discovering the literature that helped me make sense of what I was doing in being told it was important for reasons other than my own engagement with myself and that... community... (1960s). Discovering field data and theory have some relation to one another was important. The neophyte may think that anthropology is indeed holistic. 138 The construction of anthropological knowledge may also be scientific. This is so in the sense that it observes, interprets, and generalizes. This is in part how speakers think anthropology works. As well, this is how an ethnography of anthropology must in turn work in order to be authentically ethnographic. This position is not without its problems: To me, today this business of the theory of another culture, we cannot continue as anthropologists today to imply that we are experts of specific cultures. This is why a few of my colleagues are opposed to area studies courses. They do not believe in the ethnology of the Pacific. The ethnology of North America. Because that promotes the idea that we are cultural experts. We are experts of culture, okay, but not experts of cultures. You see? And it is outrageous of us to imply that you know, I am an expert in some native Canadian cultures. That is ridiculous! ... And why I am also opposed to cultural area studies. I think we should eliminate them entirely, and go to more thematic courses in which you have ethnographic examples which come into play. Just because it looks too colonial to be talking about teaching a course on some other culture. And students take this, and they actually think this is the way the culture is like! I mean, in a three credit one semester course! It is the recipe approach to culture, right? You cannot even scratch the surface of the dynamics of another culture. But people walk out of that class thinking they know something about that other culture. They do not know anything about it. And of course as you know we get pressed into situations of talking about cultures we know nothing about personally. We have read somebody else's ethnographies on it, right? I have been in courses on Inuit culture by people who had never even been in the Arctic, and that is a problem. We should not be doing that (1980s). This epistemologically ambiguous position gets created and presented by courses, textbooks, teachers, and disciplinary icons. However, for most of these speakers at least, such media do not carry the same kind of weight as personal and professional narratives. The speakers' thoughts as a part of who they saw themselves to be are more important. However, there were a few typical examples: I guess the one of the more memorable courses, at the time I really did not appreciate what I was going through, but one of my more memorable courses was... a kinship course. But we worked through Tyler's book, Cognitive Anthropology. I think it had just come out, around that time. And we did, collected genealogies, you know! I think the person I interviewed was a Yoruba speaker and I had to produce componential analyses and all of that language stuff. And I found that 139 rather difficult going. Looking back it probably should have been difficult going! But it was not the most inspiring exercise. But I guess it made me think about a lot of it. And it was nice to be on, at the time, pretty close to the cutting edge (1970s). Whatever the particular course, certain texts kept showing up. Sometimes these frequencies confirmed or denied the published textual narrative. Another speaker had a similar introduction to some similar anthropological concepts: Probably the thing that most opened my eyes to alternatives, to a straight linguistic worldview, that is language as a technical issue are two books. One that was edited by Dell Hymes in the mid 1960s, called Language, Culture, and Society.lt was a big red book... and it had everything that had really been done about language and its cultural setting, and social setting, and it was bugger all! You know we are talking about an entire disciplinary history and what we had were a thick volume of articles about language from all over the world as it reflected cultural understandings. And another book that probably focalized was this Cognitive Anthropology by Tyler. What it was was a first compilation of what has now become ethnosemantics. Really one of the two basic approaches of linguistic applications in ethnographic anthropology. And ethnosemantics arose... out of the old ethnoscience approach of looking for cultural categorisations. And I looked at that and I realized it captured for me something about what I had always presumed about the way humans thought. And I went back in my second year besides doing straight linguistics looking for cultural domains in the world (1960s). Once again, the interface between the written and the field comes to the fore. For some anthropologists reading has the major purpose of informing what one is doing \"out there\" in the field. Reflectivity on what one is doing as a part of anthropology as a historical or disciplinary force recedes. Speakers who were being trained professionally at similar times often read the same books. However, these were not read in the same manner. Some speakers arrived on the theoretical scene too late. One humorous example follows: In the process of my Ph.D. work I used without distinction both sociology and anthropology authors. And they were the same for me. My advisor and I technically agreed on this. So I remember considering a more theoretical aspect. I was confronted with the debate between structuralism and Marxism in the baccalaureate. And at this time I was 140 an activist in a Marxist Leninist organization. So evidently I was anti-structuralist! It was not a problem for me! I have no interest here. But! I automatically rejected it. But after this, years later, it was a very big problem for me! I had to go through this. And I had to go back in time. Whereas everyone else had seemingly already resolved for themselves! And that is what I did. I went to my advisor and said, you know, I have a problem! With structuralism and Marxism. And it had been resolved for many people. But I had to get through this. And he told me that Bourdieu could probably help me through this problem, and it worked! And that is why Bourdieu became very important, and Bourdieu allowed me to re-read the structuralism with a new eye. Considering it as having contributed to the social sciences with a relational thought. That is how Bourdieu talked about the contribution to it not as a structuralism but as relational thought, and this was new to me. It helped me a lot to reconcile myself towards it with profit, with benefit. And helped me to realize that my conception of Marxism and all that stuff, you know, social classes and that. So this was more important to me than being aware of the history of anthropology in any detail. I have read some other authors in anthropology, like Geertz... like Durkheim. But is Durkheim a founding father of anthropology or sociology? It is not so important. So for me, the distinction between sociology and anthropology and even history is a matter of management of universities. A matter of defending departments in their integrity with the territory as departments (1980s). There is a freedom associated with being on the outside of a particular academic debate. One might renegotiate some of the disciplinary boundaries. These boundaries delimit the space of reading in anthropology and other fields. Just as importantly however, was the interplay between disciplines. For some speakers, this helped inform fieldwork. As well, some aspects of anthropological text were re-interpreted. Such texts might have given the insider more problems: Because I had to take linguistics, my introduction to anthropology was through linguistic concepts. And you know most of these people were quite familiar with Pike. And one of them was an anthropologist who had been connected with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and Pike was the head of it at the time. So you sort of had that ethos of doing fieldwork in languages and seeing things in quite linguistic, emic kinds of ways. So I guess, I am not quite sure how I got introduced to Levi-Strauss, but it seemed... almost easy to understand. I know that sounds silly! But coming from a linguistics background it seemed that some of what he was doing was almost simple. Well, and I remember trying to figure out why so many American readers of it at the time just - well he claimed that they did not understand what he was 141 after. And if you'take it from a linguistic point of view it was really quite easy to see what he was doing. But I know that sounds awfully presumptuous on my part, given the history of Levi-Strauss! (1970s). The history of a particular disciplinary icon is not necessarily the same when one travels outside anthropology. There is an interesting parallel here. It lies between this type of interior/exterior disjunction. The manner in which knowledge is seen and constructed is one side. The disjunction between what anthropology looks like before and after fieldwork is the other. Yet there is even more to this complex dialogue. Networks not only of disciplinary interstices but of teachers and their friends are joined by student groups. These are akin to the age-grades of many anthropologically studied societies. As well, departments and their corridors echoing with past tenants are relevant: The pull of Chicago was to identify yourself theoretically. If you can only identify yourself ethnographically you were considered a reactionary. Stupid, and you had to identify yourself theoretically... though a lot that was going on was not only what was going on in the offical program. I mean students were reading things that were not assigned, and there was a very vital student network which introduced this. Interestingly enough because the varied background of the students' academic background. Both more of British anthropology than what was coming out of faculty and also some reforming work and Marxism. That really surfaces a little bit later than my time there. More the late 60s early 1970s where that explosion occurred and the explosions that were earlier where more internal to anthropology, you know, and the explosions started appearing in sort of more external to anthropology, as the explosions were happening in a sort of literal sense! In other parts of the world. And for me it occurred after I started teaching and the networks of students. Some of them became networks of colleagues. So those things. Those have been very important people. Giving each other things to read. That is the major function of colleagues, and people to talk to (1960s). The atmosphere of certain departments during certain times either encouraged or discouraged theoretical identification. Identity is based on more than description or cultural classification. For these anthropologists, it is also a persona, a pedigree, a certification, and a spot in a genealogy. Through this identity one's relationship with the discipline is filtered. Colleagues become those with whom one speaks, writes and speaks in 142 dialogue. The limitations this puts on students may be for the most part unknown to them (Geertz 1983:162-3 [1982]). Importantly, most of these limitations came with regard to theories of knowledge. However, there were some timely exceptions to this: So the three of us went with Dreyfus. And I always think of this seminar as something important for my career. To recognize that we have a right to think these things. Because people are so much conditioned by the culture of the department. It is very, very hard to break out of . Even if they wanted to. And anyway even there [someone else] wanted to teach symbolic interactionism as a course. He did a graduate seminar in anthropological interaction. I do not know what it was called. But people did not see the kinds of specialties his students specialised in. They did not understand them. And mostly the students were ahead... from where he was. I certainly was. But he had enough meaning in this area to understand or to appreciate what was happening to support their goals. So that is the experience (1960s). The many intellectual sub-cultures of anthropology are in part reflected in the many narrative histories of the discipline. More importantly, they are reflected by the manner that such histories are almost inevitably written. Such histories may represent the discipline of anthropology as a space of different ideas and theories. These ideas contend or debate in chronological or logical order. Many histories of anthropology do not utilise reflexive ethnographic data. This is ironic, because anthropology has constructed itself at least in part by employing ethnographic work. This was done in order to have a discourse in the first place. Instead, it seems that much of anthropology seeks the other in place of itself. Two ways in which this is done follow. The first is taken from teaching. The second is taken from research. I teach by telling a lot of stories. Anecdotes about fieldwork. Take the generalization down to the level of this person doing this on this occasion. Then there was the time when 'Gramma' and I were talking about this...', and this and that happened. I spend a lot of time talking about the construction of ethical positions, and how one might do fieldwork which is a respectful conversation between two or more persons. I like to play with ethnographic form... I think that there are two sources of theory in anthropology. Theory from anthropology and theory from people we work with who have interesting ideas that do not seem to have made our theory yet! ... I really have some sense that the things we do and places give us a way of constructing, processing 143 information, maybe, cultural style. I mean we can come at it from a number of different perspectives. But it really is something about where we study in the world where there are quite different sets of premises which we seem to glue on to. Thinking: defined somewhat more broadly than cognitively. I think, for me, anyway (1970s). This \"respectful conversation\" as fieldwork is also contained in the following dialogue. It comments about what happened when parts of anthropology ignored such respect for its \"others\": What I do is send all my transcripts that have been made after the interview. They go back to the elders. And the elders who have been involved in the study all have opportunities to view the manuscripts. And some of them read them and get back to me with comments, right? And they have final control of the manuscript at that stage. They can delete anything they want. They can add in stuff. They can change their own words. The stuff like you are doing here. They have the power to do that. They rarely do it. But the fact that they have that kind of control is crucial to being able to get this kind of work done. You could not do it without having that kind of level of accountability. Which makes the research much more expensive and time consuming. But it is the only way you can do that. And I mean this is the right way to do it. When you think about it, so... (1980s). Q: Why was it not the right way for so long in anthropology? Because anthropologists kind of believed that the cultural world existed at our leisure. And it was our property. That we could just go out and pick. Pick from here and pick from there. The universal survey approach... (1980s). Q: A sort of garden of eden metaphor. All plants and animals are there for your use and so on, is this part of it...? Kind of, yeah, it is kind of like that! Like we are the scientists of culture. And so, you as a cultural being have to tell me all about your culture! There are lots of stories, and they still exist, of very arrogant anthropologists. I think when you get to the point where anthropologists consider themselves experts in culture are not worrying about the culture itself and whether or not they are doing it in the right way! Yeah, anthropology just believed that the cultural world existed for us to exploit! It was ours. We owned it as scientists of culture. And we could go in and do anything we want and demand that people tell us what they were really doing. And then we could write it all up and put our names on it and present ourselves as experts! (1980s). 144 Both of these extracts aid in the understanding of what some anthropology does. However, they cannot provide an ultimate response to what anthropology is. A reflexive ethnography might respond to this second problem. Even so, the possibility of such a reflexivity lies with the speakers' interpretations of themselves. Some speakers did have inclination towards a more interpretive professionalization. This may not be any better ethically. Neither does it seem any less positivist. However, reflexivity was seen as a valid and valuable manner of doing ethnography: I was more interested in ecology of mind, a la Bateson. But his practice was very intensive, and very empirical. In the best sense of that. Not meaning numbers, but meaning experience. Rich description. And trying not to explain, but just comprehend. He did not use the word understand, because that is a leap of faith. But just to comprehend. To get some idea of what was going on. To understand jokes, music, wit, dining and wining. All these kinds of human activities. And in order to try to comprehend what is happening in a place, and then finding ways of illustrating that. For me, that was pretty much the way he set the task of ethnography. Which meant it was slippery stuff... There were no methods, a la cookbook recipes. Where you put stuff together and spit something out the other end. It is supposed to be an exercise in discovery. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I think I still do (1970s). The intimacies of experience and the richness of descriptive texts are still evoked as empirical. Yet this evocation is different from a doctrinaire positivism. As one speaker explains: Positivism has many connotations, and the main one today (especially in sociology and anthropology) is that it is mindless empiricism, with an overemphasis on quantification. Positivism also seems to imply all that is wrong with \"science\" (the natural sciences) as deconstructed by critical theory. Although I think that people who criticize \"science\" often have a highly stereotypical image of how \"science\" works. I usually explain to students (in theory classes, for example) that positivism also has other connotations. [It has] an emphasis on rigour, as something equated with empiricism (collecting of data) and logical deduction... I personally prefer Bourdieu's definitions of a positivist as \"as empiricist without imagination\" (in his Craft of Sociology) to label social scientists who are not aware enough of the importance of looking at how theory colours even the most empirical work (1980s). 145 The social sciences are both social and scientific. However, they need not be scientistic. As some anthropologists suggest, positivism is a contextualised concept. It is a term loaded with different situated knowledges. It has ceased to be a convenient general label for a single purpose. What the most recent quote attempts is kind of pedagogical ethnography. The concept of positivism is contextualised for the classroom. In and out of class, scientists use various means of understanding one another. These means are sometime in conflict as praxis. Certain methodological forms are adopted and adapted to local fields by various practitioners of science. For example, many speakers referred to particular mentors. As voiced in the above quotes, they often manifested a list of vocational tenets in their work and then passed these on to their students. There is a relationship between the content of epistemological knowledge and the theories of the practice of such knowledge. This is known through method and procedure. However, for these anthropologists, knowledge of theory is intimately linked with the personalities associated with such theory. It is almost as if theory itself has a personality. Various versions of the positivist spirit of anthropology carry with them very personal memories. These act as powerful limitations on, and motivations for, the pursuit of anthropological knowledge. For example, one may teach a course offering for long periods. One's teaching of it and reading for it can change radically. Sometimes, when new theories gain vogue, whole courses have to be revamped. Sometimes such courses actually stop. This was the case in the following: Q: What kind of things did you do for the sociology of knowledge? Well it was just before Foucault had sort of hit the scene. So I began with the sort of sociology of everyday knowledge. They had, of course, a lot of phenomenology. I tried to make them think about how knowledge was constructed in various areas, in various fields. So we looked at the news, and we looked at arts.... And we looked at various ethnographic things and also geography and other things like history. How history is put together. I was using Said as soon as he was available. And they read the usual Marx, Mannheim, in the theoretical part of the course... I enjoyed the sociology of knowledge in particular. It was always sort of a fieldwork and ethnographic kind of 146 thing (1960s). Personalizations of epistemology and theories of knowledge occur. However, they sometimes involve opposite opinions of relevant texts. Sometimes an intimate presence with a personality had not been established. If this occurs in tandem with one that had, there may be surprising implications: [Foucault] that is one of the other people whom you read and just say 'woops! have to rewire this part and think about it a little differently!' You put it in that category. Yeah, well around the same time I suppose as reading the Marxists. Because of course it was just the same time that those things were being published... The first thing I read was Madness and Civilization. And I did not think about it philosophically... I put it in a sort of context where it really did not sort of belong. So I was not really reading it very intelligently. That sort of thing. But when I read The Order of Things I realized that it was different, you know... Yeah that was probably a big one. You see for the moment I was not thinking of him as a philosopher, but in terms of the sort of things I have read. The 'wow', sort of 'geewhizwow' type. He is certainly in that category... (1960s). Q: As [important] as what Kuhn turned out to be...or? More! Oh much more so! Yeah, I mean its hard to make the [comparison] you know, because one takes it so differently... Of course, it is not only Foucault but all the stuff sort of percolating through Foucault. And versus Kuhn. They are eruptions from very different places! Each is faithful to itself! The Kuhn eruption could not have happened where Foucault was and vice-versa! I feel more at home with the Foucault one, in some ways, than with the Kuhn one. But on the other hand I knew Kuhn, so stodgy and boring, I put a face to it. I ended up reading him but when this task is this sort of slow boring, every word! It took a long time and if you ran into him at faculty meetings people would say 'Oh no, there goes Tom Kuhn', and 'When is he going to get to the point'! I do not have a voice literally for Foucault. I have not heard a recording, or seen him on TV. So I can imagine him as being more interesting and exciting than I could imagine Kuhn! (1960s). One cannot underrate non-theoretical factors in the production of theory. Anthropology suggests scientific knowledge gets constructed through a social milieu. These contexts are cultural and sometimes personal. Anthropology as well may be seen to participate in its own critique of those 147 sciences. This very critique has made all sciences into siblings. Looking at History and the Construction of Knowledge: The third section concerns knowledge which includes groups of speakers' thoughts about the history of the discipline. This is recounted as personal culture memory. It is a part of individual narratives. The play by play of the previous thirty years of anthropology is given a variety of guises. Each speaker had a different way of remembering and representing their own disciplinary locus. Their own place in history was unique. So too was their consciousness of such a history. Some did not mention it at all. Others were extremely interested in this facet of the organization and construction of anthropological knowledge. Comments ranged from describing the ways things were to the way things are going in anthropology. These movements took place both in and out of the university. World events were also seen as a force of change for anthropology. Institutions are here seen as spaces of knowledge. Atmospheres in which certain types of knowledge were real, and others not, are important. This is slightly different from saying that \"I went to such a place and learned this because that was what anthropology was doing at the time there, and it was recognized that other places did other things.\" Instead of this relative and epistemological frame, there is more of an ontological flavour to the following. That is, institutions in the history of anthropology had a reality of their own. Chicago was on the quarter system where there were three quarters. Most of the courses in the last quarter did not really exist and Parsons' was perfectly set up for that. They had to do required courses in sequence in Chicago. One on physical anthropology and sociology. The other in social cultural anthropology. In cultural social anthropology, three-quarters were more or less social systems, cultural systems, personality systems. The pedagogy and theory was all together and it was wonderful and the term 'systems' was the core concept, you know. And people said it a lot. You uttered the word long enough and it made you feel good! The Parsonian framework was the overarching one that they were organizing the courses around. And the faculty which were relatively new. So they were defining themselves as bright young men. They were young then, youngish men. They were 148 hitching themselves to a Parsonian frame. As much to switch the metaphor as an umbrella, as a dogma. This was not a dogmatic following through of Parson's work. It was a sort of A) an integrated attempt that some of them were trained in at Harvard and B) that they saw it as enabling you to place the divergent bits of anthropology in some kind of coherent relation to each other. Because you had to be able to do that. You had to find a system and as far as they could figure out the only one in town was Parsons (1960s). Here, metaphors had a funny way of becoming what was real. The concept of interdisciplinary work was variously defined. One extreme was that of an overarching system. This could contain a place for all of the social science disciplines. The other extreme might be a sense of disciplines as different. By pure juxtaposition and interpretation one might be able to find some common ground: They had this junior symposium, which was a quarter course. And what they did, they got faculty. And since I was new in the department they assigned someone... from all the three or four departments across campus. And then you had to put together a set of lectures on a topic plus discussion sections. And we did ours on evolution or something. We had a biologist, there was someone from English someone from music, myself from anthropology, and I forget but we probably had someone else. And so it was very interdisciplinary and each of us had to take a lecture and so on. And I do not think we had much in the way of textbooks. But I do recall one we had was Lord Jim. We read Conrad's book for English. But I do not remember what we read for anthropology to be honest with you. And we did a little lecture and I talked about culture change as far as evolution was concerned and that was fascinating and interesting because we were so interdisciplinary (1960s). Sometimes a system of learning was imported from a particular discipline. This system usually had academic prestige. This was the case for the Chicago example. On the one hand, the department's prestige was a major factor. On the other hand, the second example takes place at a relatively small college. It had little prestige or name recognition. Early experiences with the structure of knowledge carry these other variables. Here is an anthropologist's suggestions for learning anthropology in general: It is kind of sad when someone starts and does 100 their first year and 200; all of 200 their second year and then all of 300 and by the 149 time they graduate they have not done much but anthropology! Which is broad in a sense, but it is sort of nice to see people having opportunities to work in other areas. I think, anyway (1960s). Even so, the previous speaker made no mention of the dangers of inbreeding. This anthropologist states that one must teach as if anthropology could embrace the world of knowledge. One may be trained in an overarching metaphoric structure. This can be fleshed out by a variety of contents. Structure itself could be a root metaphor. At the time, structuralism itself was also significant. Perhaps one might also see structure in disciplines themselves. However, at some institutions these ideas took a while to get off the ground: They were defining anthropological theory closer to the way it was being defined in the 1920s and 1930s rather the way it was being defined by in the 1960s, which was quite different. The Harvard model of theory was more like one of Sapir's chronological laws. I suppose you could consider from the other side very low level theory. Whereas the Chicago gang was doing Talcott Parsons and Weber and structuralism and all that stuff. No one at Harvard was doing structuralism yet. One of Clyde Kluckhohn's last lectures in the history of anthropology course was There is this really important Frenchman'! (1960s). Structuralism had a varied reception and ambivalent acceptance in Americanist anthropology. It could be taken as a critique of functionalism. It could be seen as a set of simple linguistic analogies. It took a number of years, according to many of these speakers, for structuralism to be self-defining. This as opposed to being defined over against some other root metaphor. As well, structure had to compete with other texts appearing around the same time: Chicago had a great deal of self importance to the new things that were happening and I think I mentioned last time, thinking back on it was a functionalism/ anti-functionalism issue that was... it was one. I should not say the because it was also the archeologists whom cultural anthropology ignored and the physical anthropologists who were complete non-entities. But in the social sort of cultural circle people were reading things on functionalism and critiques on functionalism. And [some] of the books that began surfacing around that time. I mean the handful of native critiques were what everybody read. There was a book by Bob Brown you may or may not have seen called Explanation in Social Science that just appeared around that period. A 150 little later, I am not that sure. His wife was an anthropologist. So his examples of anthropology were more real. He knew what anthropology was all about than some of the other people writing about anthropology (1960s). These internal critiques are important. They are read because other anthropologists consider them to be relevant. They are relevant because their authors are also anthropologists. They have been there. They have worked in the field. They write in a positivist manner. This is so because they have the authority which comes with field experience. A post-positivist metaphysic would have to reject this authority by contagion model. As well, the sense that there is an in-group and out-group ordering presence is problematic. Such texts inevitably are studied by a passive audience. Readers are already half-converted by the meanings of what are already present in themselves. Structuralism's unofficial history in interview is somewhat different from official versions in histories. For example, anthropologists who knew more about linguistics found it wanting: I guess I had always been interested in the way people manipulated symbols, and [this is] one of my frustrations with Levi-Straussian kinds of analyses, and even Geertzian kinds of things. There is no real attention to what people actually did with these things... Did they treat them as symbols? And these people were using what Levi-Strauss could easily have seen as a myth. Almost, many of the allegories had structures and topics very similar to those of myth. And here they were manipulating and interpreting them in ways that anthropologists had not been paying much attention to (1970s). Some speakers were able to see in structuralism some holes which suggested further and innovative research. Others with a different schooling took it less positively: The first big splash of L\u00C2\u00A3vi-Strauss was then too of course. I read Elementary Structures of Kinship in French for my French exam. Also the ethno-science and componential analysis stuff coming out at the time. It did not seem that they could tie it to anything. I had a materialist slant or understanding at the time, I would have been much better off with a pair of scales than a first class tape recorder in the field. As it was I had a second class recorder and no scales! And oh yeah, Levi-Strauss was out there floating, I persuaded Aberle to read some. The hardcover of the first volume of Structural Anthropology. 151 God help us, there is less to Levi-Strauss than meets the eye. And if I were to look for inspiration in that tradition, I would always return to Mauss. I read and reread The Gift over and over again (1970s). Structuralism had an inside-outside ambivalence with anthropology, Marxism also came to the fore during the training of many of this study's speakers. Marxism provided another set of concepts of value and validity for anthropologists to ponder and assimilate: One of the things that was interesting about the concept of the colonial situation which I think that as a concept Balladeur did invent was that it was outside that vocabulary. Outside the American, I think the American hegemonic vocabulary of culture and society. Norms and values and this, that and the other thing. It was historical. It was not always going to exist and it would not always exist. It was holistic and historical and that was something else that this bilingualism and perhaps misidentified as representing some wing of neo-Marxism literature that anybody French was. In the United States, if you were French you were either structuralist or Marxist or... (1960s). Q: Or both. Or both. Yeah. Most people said they were not both but you are reading them from the outside. That was quite important because most of us as students were studying people in colonial situations. And the fact that was the case and that there was a name for it, you know! One could chose a name or operate with a name for it. It was a name that did not fit the the lexicon of the moment and it seemed to fit the Marxist lexicon but not quite, because it was not really out of that matrix (1960s). Coming to terms with world-historical events like decolonialization prompted some anthropologists to continue to look outside of themselves. In other words, they looked once again to the other. They did this in order to make sense of what was going on and to once again make the world anthropological. In addition, linguistics made its mark on certain aspects of anthropology. This was due in part because of the Boasian program of not discriminating too finely between language and culture. Yet for speakers involved in this study, such influences tended to be expressed individually. They were not seen in disciplinary terms. Bits and pieces of other disciplines 152 were picked up on an individual basis. One could eschew such linguistic overtones. Some speakers did just that. Others waded in and constructed for themselves parts of the disciplinary history of anthropology: In a way, Bible translators were the first anthropological linguists... It was they that started looking at ways to apply linguistics in a way that would allow western religious concepts to be communicated in an understandable way to people with a very different world view. And lots and lots of the literature of cognitive materials, the cognitive linguistic and culture communication started out in ways to attempt this sort of thing... These languages were looked at by some of the early anthropologists who did not recognize a distinction between language and culture. Boas and Sapir, and Swadesh and some of those. Up until the 1940s had preserved the lore about many of these languages in their early work, which is wonderful stuff (1960s). The positivist intent of a liberal or rational history of ideas is present in most of these personal narratives. How speakers suggested they themsielves fit into the larger picture of anthropology was presented whiggishly. This type of historical narrative is considered positivist because of a particular metaphysical notion. This notion states that ideas are related through an historical genesis. Also, their inheritance through the actual kinship of author, writer, teacher and student, was an important factor. A post-positivist understanding of parts of anthropological history might be different. Knowledge construction and epistemological positions might look more akin to a Nietzschean genealogy of ideas as moralities. Such a history would directly re-evaluate these ideas. Their tacit validation through reproduction might be overcome. One example of this was suggested in the following. Reflection on the concept of the field actually spurred on the general advent of fieldwork courses. The following also intimates previous work in the field was flawed. Less idiosyncratic standards needed to be inculcated in students. The genealogy of this course content is of interest because most speakers said they never had a fieldwork course: Q: You said, and many people have also said, that at their time of training there were no fieldwork courses. I just wondered what you think of the advent of the fieldwork course as a program of study in 153 anthropology and why that happened and how it happened, and why it was not there before? It is a good question. I am not sure that I can understand it. Of course I should be able to because I teach it...! I think because we had... sociology, let us say that, they were always very heavily methodological in sociology. One of those was of course statistical and survey research. But they also had an ethnographic field orientation. And at least for sociologists that I was working with this was the kind of field they were teaching. I think it was the increasing sophistication of anthropology and the recognition that it was not just something that you see. There was something called interpretation that happened too. So if you like you can sort of tie it up to the rise of interpretive anthropology... So if I had to write a paper on 'Why?', I think that I would have to include a lot of these things. The philosophical emphasis may have come through interpretive anthropology had something to do with it. Something important to do with it instead of just getting it down flatly as many anthropologists may have done it before. Some of the more sophisticated writing can be derived from Geertz, and even Levi-Strauss. Although he never did any fieldwork! In anthropology most us feel that way anyway. In a department like this being linked up with sociology. And so there are many, many factors. One might have to look at each department separately to be able to see how it occurred (1960s). Each anthropologist, as a locus of disciplinarity and pedagogy, has adapted to the demands of a greater discourse. In turn, these are shaped by local knowledges. There is a reciprocity here. One might also use the very concept of reproduction as a root metaphor to examine the weight of certain aspects of discourse as in Bourdieu and Passeron (1992[1970]).74 The themes reviewed above are all famous in anthropology. However, there were also aspects of an anthropological debate which did not seem to fit 7 4 Another speaker suggested that this was possible but needed to be fleshed out ethnographically Was the purpose of this to make it more 'real'?: \"I have of late really gotten seriously into Pierre Bourdieu's work. Especially the Outline of a Theory of Practice, for example. And I tried to understand the tensions in the field by using such things as that. The different fields of practice and discourse that could be constructed and juxtaposed from sociological theory in particular aided me in looking at the social. In teaching such theories though, one has to break down these orders, these fields of authority which promote self-misrecognition. And there are always some students who do not like it, who want the straight ahead lecture instead of a more open-ended context. Teaching Bourdieu undermines your own position pedagogically. In a similar kind of circumstance, while I was teaching English in Mexico - which I thought ridiculous, as these peasant children had barely picked up Spanish, but anyway - the authorities saw me as too democratic. Both they and the parents expected a more traditional 'put things on the board and have children memorize them' approach.\" (1980s). 154 in as well. They were seen either as being outside and different, or seen grudgingly as inside but more different! Perhaps the most magnanimous statement on for example, the status of applied anthropology, follows: They always separate applied anthropology out. If you are lucky, it is a chapter at the end and it is separate. Despite the fact it has actually been a part of anthropology from its inception... It is at least a fifth branch. It is certainly more influential than linguistic anthropology has been for a long time. It accounts for a huge amount of time and energy, large numbers of practitioners now. But it has always been something we have been doing. And a large amount of theory and method has been connected to it. Not just to pure ethnographic research. Especially any theoretical stuff that is interested relative to change. All kinds of techniques that are now employed by other people, like rapid ethnographic assessment, all that stuff. It has all developed out of here. As well, minority and majority relations, race relations, policy stuff, in complex countries which are what first nations peoples and other indigenous peoples have to confront. They are all the meat of what goes on there (1980s). One can compare the underlined phrase as an opinion not shared by other speakers in this study! Yet some of these others also considered themselves to be applied anthropologists. Some even suggested that anthropology itself was basically an applied discipline. This was so no matter the content of one's research. There is a particular understanding of change in the discipline in the previous quote. It brings us to a set of examples which chart what speakers feel is the near future fate of various ideas and themes in anthropology.7 5 Such opinions are of the widest possible variety. They predict the demise of anthropological knowledge in general. They suggest the rise of the 7 5 The sense of constant flux in some anthropological theory and epistemology is underlined by the way in which speakers talked about their favorite texts. Some of these texts they described as having great disciplinary importance: \"For me it is really a question of stuff which in its time was important and now no longer is, or as much so. You can pick out almost every piece I could mention probably has that kind of a quality to it. For me personally, the ones that I have thought were important was one by Michael Moerman called Who are the hue?, one by -well you know 'God's Truth or Hocus Pocus', you can see what side of the line I am on! I actually liked Berreman's Behind Many Masks. I also like his critique of the emic and etic, which has a really crazy title like the anemic and something else! It makes you think 'anemia', and other things like that. I think Marvin Harris is one of the great positivist pundits of our time. I have always thought he was overrated. Now people think he is both macho and overrated. But he had been very successful and he still has a large following. I think there will come a time when we think that post-modernism has been overrated. But I am not sure where it is going to lead us...\" (1960s). 155 empirically based theories.76 This rise may be cyclical. They also suggest the continued rise of a text-based form of research. The greater importance of applied anthropology is also implied. One example gives many responses to questions about what the history of anthropological production of theories of knowledge might look like: I have always thought of it as having three major turning points in anthropological history. These are not articles but books. The first one is Anthropology Today, something like the early 1950s? Somewhere in there. And it was the state of the art of anthropology. Edited by Kroeber at that time. [It] is kind of a summary of everything which had been done before that. When you read it today you think it is pathetic! In terms of what we know. But in its day I think it was an important gathering and turning point. These are not personal favorites, by the way. The next turning point I think was, and this was one of my favorites, was the Reinvention of Anthropology edited by Dell Hymes. [This] came out of the Kroeber Society... I think it is important not only because it came out of the Kroeber Society which had its centre at the University of California at Berkeley, but it had in it all of the critical theory and the critical thinking and the critiques of anthropology that had not been there before. It had Laura Nader's stuff on 'studying up' which I think is a super paper. It personally influenced me quite a bit. Almost every one of the papers was good. It was a very, I think, critical piece. And the last one I suppose, was Writing Culture, and we are still too close to it to appreciate its impact as the case may be (1960s). Narratives such as this one are used to characterize a discipline. From within this discipline one's useful knowledge must be extracted. Anthropological knowledge as a whole is akin to a culture. Individual natives know only so much of it. These histories are replete with cycles, breaks or constant states of flux. It all depended on who was speaking. Predictions about the future of anthropological knowledge were idiosyncratic. Yet all of these predictions are positivist. They utilise an empirical and rational division of the discipline. The \"metaphysics of presence\" and authority/ authorship relations are fundamental. By this I mean that applied 7 6 Another speaker exemplified the flux of ideas: \"But in general there is a resurgence of empiricism. I have no real heros at this stage. Why? Also history comes in as well, but not in conflict with ethnography because it merely means adding a time frame, not privileging the synchronic over the diachronic. This was a misinterpretation of Saussure by the semioticists. It was that he was looking at successive states of the whole game of chess, and not a geneaology of any particular piece.\" (1970s). 156 is often seen as different from theoretical. Text is different from field. Empirical differs from interpretive. However, each of these can occur at once with the other. Such binarisms may themselves be figments. They may be culture traits of a doing of anthropology. Not many anthropologists may be doing this kind now, however, as classic native speakers, they still say they are doing it. The ethnographer has to take both such statements culturally. That is, I must take them at face value. However, they are also to be taken as another kind of cultural knowledge. This might be the flux being mutually constructed within this project. This flux suggests the toolbox of positivism is alive and well. Its goals and spirit are known. However, positivist doctrines are on the decline in many areas of anthropology. A few examples of such a change of scene as seen by speakers are in order. The first suggests that the concept of field may be changing. Or, it may be that the field is the same. However, the concept of anthropological work may be shifting: Which seems to be getting more sort of historical and text oriented in some way than the ['Jclassical model of fieldwork['] -quotes! - which may or may not be mythic. I do not know. Because I have not done research in the history of fieldwork. Where, rather than going to work with a person, or to a people or whatever, that the definition of the activity is that there is a community of some substantial size that you are trying to figure out something. As opposed to a smaller scale. I get the impression that the prototypical piece of fieldwork among graduate students is not what the prototypical piece of fieldwork was - I am not saying that is a bad thing - than when I was, say, a graduate student (1960s). These \"impressions\" are difficult to define. This is due to the transitory nature of anthropology. This nature was unanimously suggested by speakers. Yet there is also plenty of the \"more things change - plus le mime chose\" type of sentiment as well. There may be a tension here. It may have to do with these anthropologists' beliefs that there are aspects of their knowledge which are transcendent to history. These somehow escape history by being constantly reproduced by it. One of these anthropological concepts is the concept of otherness: I do not think there is some kooky ethnographic thing going on here at all. But what I do believe is that it is a function of what I have 157 learned as a committed ethnographer in situations of otherness... I am really open to the possibility that there are all kind of physical -Well no, not physical. Spiritual forces that we do not know the first thing about. And that in another five hundred years our science will look like a pretty half-assed power for an explanatory paradigm. And one of the things that I have been really privileged to do working with all these people is to get close to the last people who had proficiency in those old explanatory paradigms, and I love it! (1960s). It seems that anthropology needs this sense of continual confrontation and rapprochement with otherness. This is so because it also seems anthropology is so other to itself. These anthropologists are much different when seen intimately than anthropology is as a published debate. No wonder the concept of the radically other is historically interwoven into the discipline. It almost constitutes the discipline itself (McGrane 1989:125). Another example details the change in another major anthropological concept. The concept of culture is seen as an explanatory tool, but this entailed Q: Just the absolute surprise that diversity has to have some kind of slogan for it. It is almost a convenience 'culture' is almost a convenient catch-all for 'Oh, you know its 'cultural'. It is almost like explaining things by a genetic thing! Culture has that same kind of element of irresponsibility! Yes, yes, that is right! Well I guess that is more or less what I have said. Certainly tending in that direction. I think the fact that this diversity and immigration issue like if you think of a homogenous society who have lived with the communications of the western world, lets say, it would be a lot more difficult for them to assume their own nature of culture. And after all, anthropologists created 'culture'. It is our creation I think. And I know I could try and do a history of it. I think we created it to solve our problems with the rest of the world. The diversity of humanity. The life-modes that faced us. And it is a convenient explanation. We use it as an explanation... Well, you began to see it a lot in the 1970s. I think when the French situation was so severe, with French culture, and they have always used that. So maybe Canadians had a better understanding of that then maybe some people in the United States or elsewhere. Because those differences have been in our face, as they say, for so long. And the French would say this is our culture, and this is your culture, and they are not same thing as cultures go... (1960s). Culture is seen not a mere epistemological concept. It is the very being 158 of anthropological knowledge. One speaker suggested that this essentiality of culture provokes its \"overdetermination\". This suggestion was placed in the comparative context of positivism: In teaching, I always try to make students aware of the connotation and history of different words/terms and how they are actually used. Another example is the use of the term 'culture' in anthropology. The term now implies a timeless, essentialism, homogeneity which excludes contentation, culture as process etc. That is why so many anthropologists now use terms like 'discourse' or 'hegemony' (or 'habitus'). In fact at one point (in an obscure footnote of an earlier publication) Bourdieu pointed out that he could have used the term culture if the term had not become so worn out or 'overdetermined'. In the last issue of the cultural anthropology journal of the AAA, shows how the term culture has become a parody or caricature of much more nuanced and subtle (and open) ways of using the concept in the past (including Malinowski, Kroeber etc.). I think the same thing is true for the term positivism. 'Everyone is post-positivist' these days because almost by definition positivism is inherently 'bad' or 'incorrect'. The danger of course, is that people using new terms and language might end up making the same mistakes (or become just as one-sided) as the people they criticize or people who use the 'old-fashioned' terms (1970s). Culture may be a powerful concept. However, its use makes another concept even stronger. When actual events take place that go beyond one's imagination of their possibility, then it is to an ethics which one turns. This is seen as superior in value to any epistemological concept: ...because the Parsonian umbrella inclines one in a direction, in a kind of idealist direction, that the events one is living through do not validate. Unless you really try to make it happen really hard. I mean you could believe anything! To return to when prophecy fails, you can experience cognitive dissonance and make it come out sort of looking like that. But things like the hydrogen bomb, things of that sort, had a reality that was not exhausted by one's idea of them. Or so it seemed to people at the time. So that is shaking a lot of things up (1960s). It seems that anthropology's great gift to its own history of knowledge is the sense that there is mystery. There is the unimaginable. There is the unknown. These spur epistemology towards an ethics both of humility and of wisdom. The unknown of positivism is due to the activity suggested in the verb 'to know'. The unimaginable of idealism is due to its continual confrontation with another's mind. The mystery of hermeneutics is due to 159 the search for hidden meaning. Al l simultaneously play a role in the construction of anthropological knowledge. How is Anthropological Knowledge Unique? This section will discuss speakers' comments regarding the nature of anthropological knowledge. How this gets constructed is discussed without direct reference to the history of the discipline. These comments concern personal experiences. These experiences deal with what was seen as the uniqueness of anthropological understanding. Within each extract, there is a dialogue between the memory of the experience itself and a reflection on what it means. Most of the extracts have to do with experiences deemed as other to the anthropologists' own culture. However, some reflected on culture differently, juxtaposing it with other disciplinary concepts of 'culture'. Speakers gave theoretical credit to their personal experiences. As well, they helped speakers construct an ethics. The training needed for such experiences to occur was anthropological. However, such training might not have been had within anthropology: \"Admittedly I was an untrained ethnographer but all of us that had been schooled in Boasian linguistic relativity were absolutely delighted to take a relative position in the community and start becoming insiders in the same way that someone even with an immense anthropological background would be involved in.\" This type of beginning was typical for speakers who had little or no direct anthropological training before they entered the field. Such beginnings often allowed speakers to see anthropology with some critical distance: Anyway, during that period in terms of my own work I allowed myself a moving back more to the anthropological side of the fence. There is in some ways the area, the piece of turf that I am basically related to in terms of subject matter is cultural studies. And I feel somewhat comfortable under that umbrella. But I have some problems with it in its overtheorization and lack of empirical substance. And I told myself... I am in a position counter to that aspect of cultural studies which in a way brought me closer to what I had started to construct as the anthropological mindset. Where you are dealing with culture but grounding work very much in the specific of the materials and the experience and so on. But quite obviously there are strong differences in what I do in anthropology as well. Because it was politic to say you 160 were not interested in western cultures. To a very great extent... I think there is a kind of Rousseauistic strain in the field. And there still is. Even when you try to do western cultures it comes out as an infatuation with the exotic. And so the idea of studying ourselves has never gotten that much emphasis in the field. And you can see that by looking at the programs at conferences and things. There is still very much a bias even if it is not non-western cultures. We are doing subgroups within western cultures which can be construed as exotic. For some reason. And there is also - and this is a commonality between ethnography as practiced in sociology and ethnography as practiced in anthropology - the bias in favour of let us say face to face understandings. So research relies very heavily on interviews, participant observation, first person testimony, and so on. It is as if the only really reliable way to get at common understandings and common knowledge is through face to face interaction (1980s). Most of the epistemologies of the anthropological style of working are identified in the above summary. These remain important throughout this project. They are clues to what these anthropologists are doing when they do field research. Of course there were those well into their third degree by the time mandatory fieldwork arrived. They thought little differently from sentiments in the next to last quote above. In fact, there was sometimes voiced more hesitancy amongst professionally trained anthropologists about cultural difference discovered through fieldwork. Perhaps this was due to an increased reflection on these differences. This may have begun through expectations raised in that very training. Anthropological understandings could be used to facilitate the understanding of difference. This was seen as their purpose. Sometimes, however, such understandings got in the way of this facilitation: Of course it is fascinating and I go back. So much so that I have gotten to know [them] almost as well as I know my own family. My brother and sister. I see them as much as [them]. So it is nice. So you can then follow along and see what is going on. I do not think there were major changes. I went in with an interest in how other people view the world and initially I saw it as very exotic. You know, these strange [people]! Their wild rituals! And now I do not see it as exotic at all. I guess because you understand things more. It becomes more a part of you or something like that. It seems that this is just what people should do at [that] time! And not strange and not weird (1960s). There is a gradual intercultural dialogue in the lives and thoughts of 161 anthropologists. This can only lend credence to the suppositions that drive anthropology. In this case one has a sense of diverse culturally motivated lives. This is coupled with a humanistic outlook. Such an outlook states that beyond all differences, human beings have something allowing them to live differently. Some anthropologists see themselves as examples of the human ability to understand difference by living in it. It is a powerful kind of experience which resonates throughout an anthropologist's life: Well, I think that it is the hallmark of the discipline. It is personally revitalizing. I mean, I cannot get some of the things that are happening in sociology. Especially quantitative sociology. In some respects sociology has moved away from appreciating that the basic unit of society is the human being... So it is still the case that the fieldwork concept is at the core of what makes an anthropologist. And I mean there is an elitism about that. Because if you do a degree that does not involve cross-cultural fieldwork experience, then you are not in quotes, a 'real anthropologist'. I think there are some of the unnecessary boundaries put around this concept of what is anthropology, and you know. That being said, personally, myself, and with any student I have had contact with, I would really be insisting that you need [this], in order to understand culture in the general sense which is what we are supposed to be doing. You need to get out of home for a while. You do not have to do it through anthropological research. It could just be travelling. If you leave the situation where things around you are familiar, then you can begin to understand how culture works, okay, it is all there, in order to really become an anthropologist. As opposed to a more general social scientist. [You] are beginning to understand how culture works by defamiliarizing it for yourself. And that is really what fieldwork is about (1980s). Anthropologists are living proof that cross-cultural understanding can actually take place. This is evidenced by their ability to transport themselves between cultures. As well, it proves that human beings can adapt themselves to cultural difference. This may suggest a universal human substrate which is somehow different from culture. At least a cultural template that is shareable worldwide is intimated. Reading ethnographies 'about' other cultures where one had not 'actually' been might be aided by fieldwork in general, if that fieldwork itself was not too structured by 'theoretical' anticipation: Fieldwork has had a big impact on my view of anthropology and on my knowledge of the discipline \u00E2\u0080\u0094 indeed, of knowledge in general. I have always found fieldwork (at least, in Social 162 Anthropology, from the time of my doctoral research to the present) to be both daunting and exhilarating, and always a source of great satisfaction to me. Doing fieldwork has made anthropology more \"real\" for me, and helps me better understand the ethnographies I read, the fieldwork experiences of my colleagues, etc. Doing fieldwork has made me realize that being an anthropologist is absolutely the right choice for me \u00E2\u0080\u0094 I am fascinated by people. I value the stories about themselves that they are willing to share. And I have learned the value of qualitative knowledge about the world (1980s). There were many other examples containing similar sentiment: First of all it gives you a sense of, a real sense of, okay, this is what I read. And this is what I have experienced. And almost in an intuitive sense. Okay, what this person wrote is bang on. Or what this person wrote obviously they have never been there or had not spent a lot of time there. So fieldwork for me gives that confirmation of, say, theory. Or what has been written in ethnographies or texts. Fieldwork gives it something, a confirmation. [It is] a validating experience. And I do not understand this trend these days. Where people go to the field for six months, and say, well I was there, I put in my six months. I did my time. And I do not think that is what anthropology really is. It has to become a part of you. I think to really understand. To really get at the deeper meanings and the deeper culture, for lack of a better word! (1990s). How are some anthropologists convinced that anthropology is a real and viable worldview? It is most often through the occurrence of the epiphany of field experience. This is sometimes overladen with political indignation on behalf of the studied. Such emotion can only add to the reality of the field context as \"another world\". Once again Well, it is the research experience that does it to you. The act of taking yourself out of the familiar, and placing yourself into a situation which is culturally very different. A different way of life. You get there and you do not understand the local culture at all. You show up, like I did in an airplane. Got off the airplane in classic anthropological style, without having a clue as to where I was going to stay or anything. lust putting yourself at the mercy of a bunch of local people who do not even know you. I mean that is the epitome of a style of anthropology. And there is something to be said for it in some respects. But it is the kind of field research that I began to realize that I was now thinking the way I figured an anthropologist must be thinking about the world in general. And also it came with a suitable 163 amount of moral outrage, which is in many ways a privilege of the young. To be morally outraged at the system. It is very hard to do field research with any kind of indigenous group in that area without ending up on the left wing of things. When you see what has happened to people and you learn how these people have been screwed by the system. It mobilizes you to become very political. And I had been politicized by the anthropological experience. I mean if you work with those kinds of groups. Not everybody works with those kinds of groups. But we still, as a discipline, tend to work with marginalized cultural groups. Even if we are not crossing major cultural boundaries we are still tending to work with those kinds of groups (1980s). Fieldwork could also be seen epistemologically. One speaker discussed difficulties encountered in the field. These were not due to a romantic space of otherness and cultural shock. They could have more to do with the assumptions accorded to certain methods of data collection. What should \"good data\" look like? I found fieldwork very time consuming and frustrating. There was so much complexity coupled with a general lack of trust. Especially on the losing side. I felt like there was still information which I could not get at. People had lists of those who were to be disposed of, for example! And of course people were hard at work in the fields all the time, so I was something of a nuisance to them I think once in a while. But I was very lucky in a way. I was directed to a village which at the time was by far the most peaceful. And a few years later after I left, it just completely exploded! This least radical village had all of a sudden become the most radical of all. But I do not think this had anything to do with me being there! But in general, fieldwork was so difficult in terms of content and data. And took a lot longer than I had thought. It really became an obsession. More in terms of certain things just not clicking. And I wanted to figure them out in terms of networks. I kept feeling that I did not know enough about certain factions and people. I felt like I had a better chance at objectivity in the data through a long term study. Obviously it was also subjective as I was doing it as a person (1970s). A whole series of problems in the field might occur. These may be cast on the epistemological level. They may have to do with the interfacing between strictly defined theories of knowledge. How things should be and ethnographic realities of how things may be are often different. Perhaps this is also a kind of culture shock. What is perhaps unique about the ethnographic 164 experience is this tension. Another speaker addressed this issue in terms of how a different discipline defines culture: ...Sodologists tend to think that culture is something separable from the rest of cultural life. It is not that it is epiphenomenal in the Marxist sense but one of the many things, almost like it has its own little lot over here. Like you have got culture as the production of things like art and films and so on, and you go and treat it as this. As the most common approach outside of people doing cultural studies. As kind of looking at it like the art-worlds approach. Where you are analyzing the production of this stuff. And the circulation of it or how it gets valued. But the thing itself does not matter. It is just a product. It could be studied as a manufactured refrigerator or something! So there is no sense of culture as carrying meaning or having some significance. More being something that signifies some kind of interaction or exchange or product or the focus of some kind of social activity. So there is this great big blank spot in the sociological study of culture. The anthropologists, on the other hand, tend not to articulate this necessarily. I think it is so sort of self-evident to them that they do not realize that sociologists do not have the same understanding. But for anthropologists culture is kind of the glue that holds everything together, and culture is omnipresent. And it is the meaningful aspect of social life. And the idea that there could be some kind of separating out is fairly bizarre... because for one culture is easily rather trivialized and for the other it is omnipresent and you do not really focus on it. But in fact both views for opposite reasons have tended to, I think, aggravate this tendency to dissociate the theory and the research from the object. I think the anthropologists assume an empirical grounding that in fact is not there. When you look at the work coming out of cultural studies, it is because culture is grounded in your life, and for sociologists, it never occurs to them that it should be. Because they are only interested in what people supposedly 'do with it'. Culture in itself just kind of disappears from the whole enterprise (1980s). Culture may be fundamental to an anthropological life. These anthropologists' personal lives are also enculturated by anthropology. This includes their daily lived experiences. One would equate these experiences with the idea that other cultural tenants must also live similarly. These others might experience the world more or less empirically. Hence, 'we' can understand 'them'. There are clues to this in the following passage. Personality and cultural background aid in prompting some anthropologists to think the other exists ontologically. As well, it drives anthropologists to seek others out. It make others a part of their own experience. These experiences mostly occurred during the first lengthy stints of fieldwork. They 165 are most often recalled as powerful. They have a poetic narrative. This exemplifies their hold over some anthropologists: I arrived in the morning and it was foggy, and it was OTHER! And it was a real, you know. There was nobody in the village. When I drove down the streets there were dogs hunching in the streets. But there were no people. And you know I still get butterflies thinking about this encounter with otherness. And there was a roadside diner, with its sign winking and I went in. Three very large First Nations people were sitting along the 'u' of the bar. And I sat down and no waitress came. So I decided to get up and get myself a cup a coffee. And I thought well, as long I was up I might as well say something. So I said 'Does anybody around here still talk the old language?' They all just looked at me! And I realized that I am an alien. You know not an alien in the sense of six fingers on each hand. But I am here in the true sense of 1960s American alienation. The best example I can think of of alienation was the United States during the Vietnam war. When half the people hoped their country would lose the war. They were operating with a different set of values. But I was in this community obviously with a very different set of behaviours and values and so on. Anyway, I drank my coffee about this fast!... I went and got back in my car, and sat there and realized that here I am, just full of my skills and good intentions and nobody really wants them... And about that time one of the guys came out, and he stood looking down at the car. And he came up. I had all the windows rolled up. I rolled it down, and he said 'You want to go for a ride in an Indian canoe?' And after I jumped out of the car and kissed him. I mean! That was a turning point in my life. Although I had not formulated it yet. I realized that there was an otherness there that... I could not wait to understand! (1960s). The wealth of these kinds of memories cannot but have an historical weight. This weight lends credence to the idea that there is something ontological about intercultural experience. It is more than the mere confrontation of historical traditions. It transcends the use of different languages. Anthropologists often explained theoretical points with lengthy references to their own experience. These experiences were most often had within another culture. 7 7 Speakers understood debates about theories of 7 7 Another speaker also commented on this, as disciplinary languages are also cultural: \"Here I think from both sides of the fence it has to do with that Rousseauistic strain. Both in sociologists, qualitative sociologists - they have a tendency of something of the infatuation with the exotic. You know what I mean. If you look at the annals of symbolic interaction, interaction tends to be in groups which are marginalized in some way exotic in certain ways. So it is not so much that maybe like anthropologists have looked for the exotic other. They are looking for the exotic among ourselves! But there is the same kind of bias there... just talking about the theory of knowledge that valorizes or privileges the face to face. I think that is a 166 knowledge in a very concrete manner. What may be occurring concerns the shared assumptions that these anthropologists take with them to the field. These assumptions include that space and time are vehicles for difference. Such difference can be understood based on a concept of thereness and temporality. This is a kind of metaphysics of presence. As well, the idea that another's experience must be different from, but not alien to, their own is important. This comes from the idea of a universal humanity. The understanding of difference, however, was seen as a keystone for the uniqueness of anthropological knowledge. This can be related to epistemology through interview. This is ironic because one is doing the self-same exercise to try to understand just what that exercise does: Q: What do you think are some of the implications for a theory of knowledge which has a necessity for the face to face? Why is there something more real about that, rather than some other way of doing research? Well, we are all interested in human behaviour. Which we are as anthropologists, looking at human behaviour. And you cannot do that any other way. I think the face to face is absolutely essential. I mean, as one of the components of the research that is required. I am certainly one who is a firm believer in the understanding of the historical dimension of the current situation. We cannot just walk in. We do have to get away from the ethnographic present concept. The frozen in time, no past no future but just the now. And we have to understand, and that means in the archives if necessary, to do that kind of stuff. But that is still almost a preparatory dimension to the face to face. [This is] I think is essential for human behavior. It has to exist. I do not see any other way around it... You know the method of rapid ethnographic assessment can do that. But you know it is a crisis method. Some people have taken it now to mean a quick and dirty method. Why spend a year, you know, 'We have methods'!... We can tear the heart out of this culture in six weeks! (1980s). Anthropological knowledge can be had via \"the face to face\". This can also occur within western culture. However, applying an ethnographic lens also creates cultural difference. Such differences flesh out the concept of culture. Culture is seen by speakers as the universal explanatory vehicle for common strain, and an unfortunate one, on both sides of the fence. Then again, it is not either/or, like you need that, the face to face. But I do not think face to face makes any sense unless you have got that background niap to tell you where it is coming from.\" (1980s). 167 human difference. It can even be used in this manner in what may seem as some of the least likely fieldwork circumstances: I really could not sleep for some months after I knew I was to be the one in this team who was sent to psychiatry. [They] thought I could do it the best which was a nice pat on the back in one way, but a terror on the other. Mixed blessings to say the very very least... I had to get up at five o'clock in order to meet the seven o'clock [shift] that I was supposed to meet to go into psychiatry. Because that was the changing of the shift. When the day people came in. So it was decided that was the time I would have to go there. I was given these huge bunch of keys, and went into a large, a very very large room... like a huge open room. And in the middle of this huge open room there was a caged area. A cage which was made of wire mesh all the way around, and inside this mesh were the staff! The patients were on the outside! The staff was in there. The nurses kept their books there and so on. Completely accessible but also behind this wire, which was not really wire. It was really heavy duty. Thick mesh. You could not smash into it. I was on the outside with the patients! So that was an experience like no other, I think! (1960s). Ethical difficulties are seen as the purpose of understanding cultural differences. Such difficulties are seen by speakers as profound. They are more important than abstract arguments about the possibility of other worlds. As well, they transcend the dangers of overemphasizing difference.78 There is an intimacy invoked in the following passage. It might give some anthropologists the idea that difference can gradually be overcome. Difference is overcome through anthropological work. However, the destruction of received knowledge in anthropological training might result. Some of the less fundamental charter myths of anthropology get exposed: 7 8 And yet difference as the giver of meaning to other worlds cannot be overlooked, even within 'our own' culture. As well, personal meaning given to the study by the ethnographer helps to create an epistemological difference when compared with some previous field research. It may be that the shock effect of some fieldwork is enough to make concerns about researcher 'bias' seem petty, as one speaker continues: \"I had had so many distractions to the study and but [he] was fascinated by my research and he would ask me what I was doing. And what I thought and this was a stage where in research you were not supposed to say what you thought. This would muddy the waters it was thought. But of course things have changed. I got to be with the patients in the washrooms and other places where they decided on what kinds of fronts they would put up to the doctors in order that they could manipulate a weekend pass! So, that was a new way of looking at it. To mix all these different worlds of manipulation. And this of course involved a large amount of theorizing about the other... now that was a scary and very, very difficult piece of fieldwork. I do not think anybody I know has done one more difficult as I had there, as difficult as this.\" (1960s). 168 Well, I guess as I said, I think that you come to realize it. And of course cross-cultural communication is very important. And as I gradually learnt the language better and better, I guess one could talk abut things which I could not talk about initially. But gradually I came to realize that. Well, initially I suppose I had ideas about sitting down with [those] who would reveal all the secrets of the universe and that sort of thing! And of course those hopes get dashed pretty quickly. When you discover that those secrets are embodied in a way of life. And acted through behaviour and ritual as much as anyone is going to be able to sit down and help you analyze the whole thing, That is more the sort of realization that you come to. Once you go into the field people are not going to come up to you and say come and sit down, I am going to reveal to you all the secrets of [their] way of life. Because I suppose they see that as part of the world in which they live. And I guess we anthropologists like to separate these out or something like that. So I do not think there is any great insight or flash of light that converts... When I pursued that I discovered if anything the realization that this is going to be more difficult than simply sitting down with people and saying 'Hey, tell me about your philosophy'. I guess that is very naive. That someone going into the field is going to, or you are going to have these kinds of informants, but! In the literature you read about so and so. This one informant. And he or she told me everything about this that and the other. No way! I did not find any [one] like that! You have to eke it out of their knowledge and so on and so forth, until finally it makes sense. So I gradually came to the conclusion after years of fieldwork amongst [them]... First you see it, but you do not understand it. You see it all, but it does not make sense to you. And what [they] say is come and see the ceremony and eventually you will learn these things. Which is in a way true. But you have to see it with it your eyes first. But then once you begin to analyze it and understand more about what is going on. It takes on a more detailed sort of dimension. So I guess this is a sort of gradual realization that I came to, which is not a tremendous rite of passage in that sense I guess... (1960s). The preceding quote addresses the question of how difference becomes understood. As well, otherness seems to present anthropologists with the difficulty of trying to become enough like the indigenous people. To do this means to be accepted as an interested onlooker. Far more importantly for the peoples involved, one must be accepted as a human being. Anthropologists are judged by the people they are with. They are also judged by their anthropological peers. However, this feeling anthropologists have about being judged may come from a familiar place. It may come from our humanistic and enlightenment backgrounds.79 The gradual increase in local 169 knowledge of the anthropologists must occur. As well, the anthropologist must be accepted as a part of another culture. Both of these enlightenment missions are difficult to distinguish from the processes undergone by students of anthropology. As well, it is difficult to extract this process from anthropologists' own personal memories. These are in dialogue with their belief systems. One belief of anthropologists is the universality of humanity. The picture is complicated by anthropological experience insisted as being both subjective and objective. They are objective because they occur in the real world. This world is experienced by the more than one. Why is there such an insistence? Let us examine one detailed example first: I also see sort of an interweaving of personal and professional. Both personal as me as part of my family, but also me as in my personal relations with people I have done research with... I see myself as having a personal relationship with the people I study. There is both subjective and objective. Intersubjective is too easy a coin! (1970s). Q: How is it subjective and how is it objective? Are these obverses of another type of coin? Well, I think a lot of the things that I studied... I appreciate having been through similar circumstances, and often that has twigged my notion... and a lot of things that I often say in starting my interviews with people is, you know I understand the position you are in with the [person]. Because I have been in the same position. Sometimes with the same [person]! I think that is something that I bring to the research professionally. And I think it is something that I bring to it personally as well. It provides me with a perspective in analysis. But I think it also provides me with a perspective in doing the interviews, in terms of what things are important to get that other people might not have gotten. But also in sort of doing the personal bounds that people would want to put down. Well I have been the subject of studies, and I know how things should be done! Having been an object! In some cases object more than subject of study!... If you are dealing with people that feel the condition that you know you are 7 9 Or to assuage what is sometimes seen as the fragile ego, either of the discipline or its members: \"I think it is a more personal. I think it is an ego thing, actually. Because I think if someone questions it I think we have people saying that this stuff is out here. It is directed towards the discipline, but it is quite something else when it is directed towards the anthropologist! So if you sort of critique the discipline and deconstruct it and look, you know, sort of do a mirror image of what is going on, the fundamental part of it is how people do their own anthropology. I think that is where you learn. So to have people coming and not critiquing themselves... In essence they are the product of these feelings as well, you know the functionalist and the structuralist and so. Yeah, I think it is reflexive, but it stops at a very important place.\" (1990s). 170 apart of that, or through a society that you are a member of, then it provides you with a little bit of analytical escape. Analytical distance as well as personal distance. It is too easy to get involved in lives of people you are studying anyway, much less to share different kinds of problems with them (1970s). Anthropological knowledge is seen as experiential. At the same time, it is scientific. The subjectivity of both sides of a research paradigm is linked to the ability to be objective. One can become objective by doing research. As well, one can be an object of research. Research is done in some senses to you. Furthermore, to be subject to research is to be an object of research. The anthropologist is a disciplined being. It is a kind of being that is forced on the ethnographer. It often takes place in spite of our cultural bias. This cultural bias is our originary socialization. Perhaps due to the nature of this bias, some anthropologists wish to become more intimate in another culture. They understand cultural intimacy in a very personal and empirical manner. However, they may also be prevented from doing so by their previous biases: At that level it is a very personal experience. I mean, any anthropologist who goes into the field develops some very, very strong connections. Often friendships that last for a lifetime, they become. I do not know, it is not so much a real native but maybe it is like a pseudo-cultural member. But they are not culture members... Well the classic one is the anthropologist is adopted! That does not make you whatever, just because you are adopted. Just because the people say you are does not mean you really are! Okay, you can learn how to function in another culture. Okay, but I think anthropologists play around too much with this standard of legitimacy about how much the people in the community like them and accept them, and adopt them, and they have ... 'names'. I mean I think that is just really hokey shit! So absolutely, my view is, and I have written about this, that anthropologists have to understand that no matter what they do in the field, this is not their community, this is not their culture, not their people! And if they think they are they are naive. Okay, so we should not be pretending to be a part of them. Well we all know that you do this stuff. You become part of a network, part of a family. I have got kin terms, and people came up with a fictive kin term for me so that they could relate to me better. That does not mean I am really that! Okay? That just means that they are putting me in the context of their world. So that they can understand me. And there is nothing wrong with that. But I am not going to walk away deluding myself that I am a real... because you know, someone has a... name for me, and I have been adopted by some... family or in some... manner. And anthropologists are pathetic with parading that sort of stuff around with them! I just 171 think it is horribly embarassing and hokey. It is all part of the 'my people, my village' syndrome that just makes me gag. It is not your people, it is not your culture. And I think that you have crossed the boundary by pretending that we are members of those cultures. We are not. We are always outsiders (1980s). The rhetoric which this speaker sees as driving the going pseudo-native scene is something to be avoided. This is so because it clouds our epistemological understanding of the culture concept. It may also be unethical. There is a gap between experiential understanding and disciplinary discursivity. This gap must be bridged by a particular kind of language. The character of such a language makes anthropology a unique form of western knowledge. Anthropology in general seems to have a language all its own. It explicitly helps neophytes understand their cross-cultural experiences. It helps to put such experiences into a discursive mode: But that I think, was an initiation... fieldwork is a shattering encounter. And I thought of that when I was writing about it, it really is a shattering encounter. You never see anything the same way again. I am sure that yours has been a very pleasant task for you to do. Although I even feel that you have changed through doing it... Because it is much more fun. It is just a lot of fun to talk to people regardless of who they are, to find out how they work (1960s). Anthropological discourse includes the psychological self of subjectivity. The anthropologist must have the requisite professional knowledge to apply these to another and to oneself. This involves objecting to oneself as a subject. One must also subject oneself to objectification. By doing so, some anthropologists reconstruct what it means to be objective. Becoming objective means not so much being scientific in a techno-empirical sense. It means experiencing a kind of cultural difference unavailable within one's own culture. For example, Q: So you saw it as a kind of self-fulfilling-prophecy the way in which some research is done? How does anthropology help here? I think so, and also anthropologies can fall into that trap. Quite easily. We read a lot of ethnography. These courses were required at ... and one sort of taught the classic ethnography like Malinowski. So we read Malinowski, and then we read his diaries, and 172 I thought, 'Oh my god, this man is a pig!' You know! And I think that Malinowski is probably the cause of both [traps] in ethnography. And I am sure at some level you do find what you want to find. Social science is not perfect, but then neither is empirical science. I have friends in biology, and though we also have empirical science, I think we try to do a bit better. And I think anthropology has a sense that we can do it better. Anthropology has a human aspect. As opposed to those in biology who do not acknowledge that they have a human aspect (1990s). This \"human aspect\" seems to be necessary for socio-cultural anthropology to understand cultural difference. Although humans are everywhere, home may be better studied after being away. Near may be known more intimately from afar. Familiarity breeds contempt. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Cultural distance is conceived of in terms of near and far. Temporal distance recalled through cultural memory also has similar effects: I sat there for four days, and I did not do anything. And I did not eat anything. And I just drank water and wrote in my field notebook, and it was a frustrating four days. I did not see any faces in the clouds, or see any hallucinations, or hear voices or have dreams or anything. But on the fourth afternoon a very interesting thing happened. One thing. A whole bunch of [them] came into the bay... and the played for a while in the kelp... I am not a kook, no kidding, [they] crawled up on the beach in front me about fifteen yards away. I was sitting on the driftwood. And I sat there for awhile and they did not do anything. And they were sunning themselves. And I said 'What the hell'. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled out there and I was with them for a while. Looked them in the eye, and I rubbed up against some of them. I was with them. And after a while, they got up and left, and so did I. I got up and walked back around midnight and old... was up singing, so... I told him, 'Here is what happened'. 'Did anything really happen?' And he said 'Sure! Those... are real [and] they were not supernatural, these were real... and they said they were real... and they came to welcome you. They are a conduit between you and your guardian spirit' (1960s). Such ethnographic experiences differ widely in their content. However, their themes are similar. These anthropologists connect with a different culture. They do so in some manner other than what they have known. Yet this manner of otherness must in turn be explicated by the locals. The natives 173 understand experience differently. However, the realism of such connecting experiences does not come from an alternative explanation of such experience. It also does not come from the experience itself. Instead, it occurs in the interface or confrontation between speakers' own experiences before and after locals' interpretation. This gives anthropologists a different sense of life. This cultural dialogue is the anthropological experience of another culture. Fundamental metaphysical assumptions may be challenged by fieldwork. The effects of this can be long-lasting. Sometimes these effects may be pragmatic: I guess at the time one of the things I did not appreciate, particularly coming back, was their sense of the moral universe. You know how we put things down to accident and all that, and when I came back, you know there, nothing happens by accident. Everything happens for a reason. You have not done something. You made some ancestor angry. All that! Things just do not 'happen'. And I remember coming back and learning to drive again on the 401 in Toronto, and thinking that accidents do not happen, those people are out to get you! I am actually a much more meek driver than I ever was before going to [that place]! (1960s). These anthropologists have sometimes been confronted with a different interpretation of causality. Reason, happenstance, accident, and correlation have all succumbed to cross-cultural relativization. For anthropology, metaphysics are culturally constructed.8 0 Hence, these anthropologists may be immune to some of the implied manifestations of cultural difference. The following example deals with the relevancy of these metaphysical differences to one's own personal safety: Well, I mean it is one of those rules of thumb that guides the discipline. It is an unattainable goal. Okay, which to me I am quite satisfied if it simply translates into a recognition of the values that inform the inquiry. I mean, put them up front, and maybe that is the 8 0 Which also allows the following reflection: Q: What about the time that you mentioned that somebody was having a party or whatever, and you were all waiting around, and someone who the whole village was angry at made it rain, and you agreed too... \"Yeah!, I was also angry at the guy for having made it rain. Then I realized that after I said that I thought 'I think I may have been here too long!' But you know, you end up functioning with many of their [ideas]. You are acting with them, and you have to work with their assumptions in order to act with them. So it is very easy to fall into something like that!\" (1970s). 174 best we can hope for, okay? We should try not to pass judgement on those things. Whether or not I believe witchcraft really exists I do not think is relevant. Okay, and therefore I do not offer an opinion on it (1980s). Q: Unless someone puts a curse on you! And then it becomes relevant in its irrelevance! Yes! I have had a number of aboriginal people tell me... I have nothing to worry about, 'You are a white guy, and you do not believe in this. And if you do not believe in this it cannot affect you'. Well, that is a pretty interesting anthropological statement in and of itself, right? About the nature of belief and faith and how these cultural phenomena work. That it is always a question of not believing in it, that is kind of interesting. Well, with things like that, you know I have no offical line on that. I have my own beliefs. And I hold my own counsel on these things. But I have no offical position on it. Some of my colleagues have an official position. But in my work I do not address the question of whether or not it exists. I do address the question of whether or not science can see it. As separate, and the implications of that question. In terms of minority work, I do not actually ask the question, does it exist? And when I talk about 'explanations' I always give the explanations as they are given to me (1980s). It seems that some of anthropology reveals part of its positivist praxis in subsuming metaphysics to culture. As well, metaphysical cultural differences can evoke very confrontational interpretations. These may be seemingly (and perhaps dangerously) incommensurable. The anthropologist is left holding the interpretive bag. Sometimes this occurs for a long time, as the following quote mentions. Making sense of why there is this difference is an anthropological problem. What does it mean for humans to have such differing explanations of historical or physical events? I think When I think of the word 'explain', I see it as a process. I see it as a something that I have been taken through. In the same way that you have been taken through the narrative, or the creation myths of anthropology. To be taken through the process of fieldwork, and to be told quite openly what the problems were. And how it might taint your work. And how it might be perceived as different, and to be very honest about what you can do. All you can explain, again there is that word explain, is to get that small little piece. So I see it as not something that you do in your first paragraph, but as something done of which you are always conscious, aware of your assumptions... I do not think it is enough to say in the first paragraph, say in the newer ethnographies, well here are my biases, I have my assumptions, I am a feminist, I am 175 this and that, and now I will proceed to do whatever I want for the next 200 pages! Because I have already told you my prejudice! So I see that and that is a response. I say, yes, as opposed to me explaining. I would want to go from the intellectual process to in fact the physical process of publishing. Because I am always amazed when I look at ethnographies that the fieldwork, say took place in 1976 and the ethnography is published in 1992.1 would like to know what happened between 1976 and 1992 and how that might impact their work (1990s). What normally occurs during this lag-time concerns the logistics of publishing and career opportunities. As the speaker suggests, there is seldom an explanation for these processes. Yet they seem crucial to a disciplinary discourse. They also seem mysterious to the doer. A n exposition of these processes might expose the politics and policies that help construct a scientific discipline. With this may come an implication that these processes are wholly unscientific and even unanthropological. This limitation of one's own culture has a parallel. This exists in a limitation sometimes associated with fieldwork itself. Anthropological hubris aside, there may be a point of diminishing return for ethnographers. What they have to go through for what they get out of it may not jibe. This limitation may be a clue to a post-positivist understanding of ethnography. The folkloric stiff upper lip style of positivist and British social anthropology suggests doing whatever it takes to get whatever there is. The fieldwork part, I do not know if I ever want to do participant observation fieldwork again because of the hospital. It loomed large, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday. And I thought it was always much more interesting sitting talking to people. More intimate. Rather than watching. I do not know. But I accept that I learned something of the process of becoming by watching things happen in the operating room, scrubbing up in the operating room, putting those things on my shoes, all of that. I am not sure, but I think I learned something about what we call 'life' occasionally (1960s). Some research situations exhibit diminishing returns in terms of particular disciplines. Even so, something might be learned which falls outside of a particular investigative framework. Speakers often suggested living through the ethnographic experience was more important than the 176 content data. This may be the origin for the distinctions made between ethics and epistemology. There may be at least two different experiences in the field. The anthropologist must attempt a personal understanding of them both. It is not merely the anthropologist that must confront a different experience and explain it. The indigenous people must also interpret. They must try to comprehend what occurs when cultures are in contact: They just wanted to tell you things. The second summer I was there, in 1969; was the year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. And there was no T.V. on the reservation that I was on, way down nestled on the coast etc. So the old man I was working with said to me the day before 'Let us go to town!' So we went into town and got a hotel room, and of course everyone on the reservation] heard that we had this and we had a T.V.. And they all came in so we spent the whole night listening to this and the next morning the old man said 'Do you have your tape recorder?' 'Go get it'. So I went and got it and he said, 'I found a song about the moon'. Those people feel that all the songs that ever were, were created at the beginning of the world and are floating around out there and you find them, you do not compose them. So he found this song about the moon. And then he started talking in the language, I just saw the most incredible thing, I saw a... which is a staged theatrical ceremonial performance... and he said 'I just saw an incredibly persuasive staging of a man walking on the moon - and the white people are really going for this. But I know, my grandmother told me that the moon is not a thing, you know, in the sky. It is a hole in the top of the world where the light shines through and so on! I know that this is some sort of bogus thing!'And you know that is the kind of understandings that they were sitting on the edge of their souls trying to get down to anybody that would listen to them (1960s). Some anthropologists are sitting on the edge of their epistemological seats. They do so to convince other disciplines and people outside of anthropology that their experiences have an ontological reality to them. Students of anthropology must also be convinced of this. However, this is epistemologically problematic. It is so in two respective ways: 1. This anthropology privileges ontological difference as an effect of differing cultures. Hence it may be seen as a discourse cursed to subjectivity by its own \"going native\", and 2. These anthropologists may not be able to be taken seriously as western scholars. This may be so because they are not involved in the traditional explication of history, science, and metaphysics.81 ^ Furthermore, an entire history of anthropology may be written on the ongoing attempt of rationalizing the concept of the other to the concept of history (see McGrane 1989 for another 177 Another important sense of the uniqueness of anthropological knowledge is that it brings 'the West' out of itself: I think there has to be a fundamental recognition that anthropology can be taught. I think what blocks it is: \"You cannot teach anthropology'. 'Anthropology is something you do. You don't know what anthropology is until you are out in the field'. And I think if people were required to teach anthropology, we might actually look at some of the tensions within the... discipline and its engagement with the discipline. So I think that might make them [do that], and it is not only a question that I have addressed. I have heard people talk about it in terms of a reflexive discourse. I mean, anthropology has real impact on people's lives, it does not just stop in the ivory tower, right? It extends beyond that. So there has to be an active application of a critique of methodology, you know? About understanding other cultures. About our position as westerners within these power structures which we operate in. So I would want to ask what is the practical application? That to me is what is lacking. As a result of it, the reflexive discourse is impotent, and it is almost a token gesture. From what I have seen (1990s). A post-positivist might suggest that a text-centred ontology regards the west as the world. Anthropology is merely the latest and most subtle writing of the west under the guise of otherness. Some anthropologists take such an idea as an interesting theoretical problem. None of those with whom I spoke took it seriously in terms of the practice of anthropology, or at least it did not come up. Personal experience and attendant reflection allows the construction of certain kinds of anthropological knowledge as unique. It suggests that the use of language in general creates fundamental differences in cultural behaviour. These kinds of differences may have potential to go beyond the argument of logocentrism: I realized that there was an otherness there that... I could not wait to understand and get into. And I did not at that point realize that that tribe at least... whom I have worked with now for almost thirty years, returning every years to live with them. [They] do not speak widely to people they do not know, because they do not know where they are coming from... You never tell your ideas or offer your ideas or even speak volubly beyond monosyllables with someone you did not know for fear they would contradict you. Which causes immense loss of possible narrative). 178 status in the community. And yet when you do get to know someone and reach an intimacy, it is almost physically painful not to be talking all the time. And not to be communicating making sure the relationship is on firm ground or whatever . Which is exactly the opposite of what we are socialized to do. You know, first dates when you get to know someone one of the worst things that can happen is that conversation stops! Like a first date silence is the kiss of death. And the nicest thing that you can say after a first date is 'My we talked as if we had known each other forever and it was wonderful'. And yet people who are intimate can sit and work together for long periods of time without saying anything. So instead all these expectations are totally flip-flop in this community. I had experienced the discomfort of a socio-linguistic reality that immediately without having the background to make sense of it. I realized that there was something going on there that was treatable, and that might be understandable (1960s). The basis of cultural difference may be the different use of language. One might be able to understand it as such. A \"treatment\" might be therapeutic. It might be so by changing the cultural behaviour of another or oneself. More so, one could find out how to switch between one code and the other. These types of experience are often transported from ethnographies to theories of knowledge in anthropology. They take their part in the ongoing re-writing of the manner in which socio-cultural anthropology can see another. However, they also expose how anthropology can avoid seeing itself by looking 'the other' way. Part of the problem, said some speakers, was the lack of attention paid to methods of analysis of ethnographic material. The concept of analysis has not yet been given an anthropological territory. Anthropology suggests itself as both a philosophy and a psychology. Both of these disciplines have dealt with analysis extensively: I have come to the stage I think where anthropology is a philosophy. It stands for me in that way. So I mean to be... teaching theoretical courses. I enjoyed my courses. I enjoy my fieldwork course. But with the students who are very different from where my theoretical interests lie. [In] that analysis is a very deep and critical problem that people do not understand, and nobody has written about it. It sort of has one or two lines in that it is something that we all do. But what is it that we do? It has an epistemic facet to it, and a political facet to it and obviously a philosophical facet to it (1960s). The anthropological excitement of an analytical discovery cannot be 179 underestimated. It is akin to scientific discovery. However, the influence of such a discovery grows if it can be shown to be in relation to a theory: I find myself in this interesting position in giving me these things to read and I am looking at these things saying \"Hey, my god, this really helps me to understand something that I could not put into a pigeon hole. It was an interesting pigeon hole and other people seemed to be interested in it just what was going on [here]. There is something about anthropological theory that is at stake here. I figured I was on a good thing and I wanted to go back and do research there anyway because I liked the place and I had a very engaging time. But it was with that shifted emphasis. There were shifts that occurred in the process of a long period of fieldwork. My encounter with the sense of what I was doing then with what I was finding out as I was doing it. That was extremely important to me (1960s). The practice of theory and the theory of practice were often cited as in close dialogue for some anthropologists. Their quest to understand knowledge systems used both. Anthropological objects and anthropology as a subject of its own debates could be analysed. Why are such things found in the field interesting for anthropology? Why is anthropology interested in certain things? These are obviously an important tandem of questions. They are asked and thought about during the entire course of an anthropologist's career. The first time one encounters such a relation is often the most difficult. Another speaker suggested it has implications for the concept of anthropology itself: I sensed that in a way there was a kind of gap in some of things you read. Some of the theoretical statements and what in fact you actually observe when you go and talk to people and so on and so forth. Most [of them] are not highly theoretical in their interests. I guess you would learn that they were more concerned with finding enough to eat, and dealing with sickness, and dealing with commonplace human problems, I guess. In a way than they are sitting down philosophizing about the structure of culture and why you do this and why you do that. So I guess with that you sort of feel that there is a gap between some of the more kinds of theoretical statements that anthropologists make and what you actually see going on in the field. Because of course you cannot say to [them] what do you think culture is? Or how do you think culture affects your life!? Clearly, [they] are not going to relate to that unless you make them into anthropologists, I suppose. And then you can dialogue on this level. But most [of them] are not really that interested in doing that. That is kind of my experience. So, but some [of them] like 180 to chat, to talk about things. But it is not analytical philosophy that they lean towards (1960s). Within ethnography, the descriptive positivisms of the day to day are recorded as data and content. However, the quotidean world of the ethnographer must be transposed into the philosophical realm of the theoretician. One person might wear both hats simultaneously. A n example from teaching betrays the crisis that can develop if one does not wear both. This confusion can be inherited: This old man, who sort of had ethnography a certain way, not just because he is an older man, but he is an older white male, who did not know anything about feminism etc. His last bout of fieldwork was in the sixties... It is just not a good situation. And he usually did the stats methods. That was the kind of man. Can ethnography be taught? I do not know. The different people in the class took very different things out of the class... [someone I know] studies English literature, and he always laughs at me when I say 'Oh my methodology is not right'? He says 'What is methodology?' How do you go about figuring out what methodology is and whether or not it is correct?! I think in some ways this also hampered me in what I was doing for my thesis which was kind of a content analysis. But I did not call it a content analysis because that has a very statistical view to it. So I called it 'reading', which was kind of odd too! So in some ways I kind of lost. Yes, I had a section on methodology but I lost that idea of having a set way of doing something. On the other hand, I figured out what I had to do and I did it, and then I did not get so obsessed with whether or not I was doing it 'the right way'! (1990s). The folklore of socio-cultural anthropology reflects such positivist/post-positivist dichotomies. The structure of course curricula also reflects them. Some speakers felt these were only now beginning to change. Amongst speakers, there was fear of such change. There was also relief. These binarisms included 'abstract and concrete'. As well, 'theory and practice' was mentioned. 'Ethnography and ethnology' are also marked. These signifiers have gatekeeping utility within disciplinary anthropology. They also have use as diplomatic currency amongst social science disciplines in terms of communicating just enough understanding about respective disciplines to one another to enforce their territories. These differences reflect intercultural attitudes towards abstract or 181 theoretical thought. The concreteness of practicing ethnography is juxtaposed with such thoughts. This dichotomy is mimicked in the \"switching of codes\" associated with living in differing cultures: There is this switching of codes. Now I never agonized too much about it. That way of life seemed to have its setting, and our own way of life seems to have its setting, and I do not sit down and say are our lives better, is their way of life better? I remember when I first brought people up [here]. I think Erasmus brought, Charles Erasmus brought some to Tuscon or wherever, I cannot remember, and took them back. And he went back after a couple of months. And this guy was very depressed because he got used to ice-cream sundaes and the Tuscon way of life! And then he went back in a year or so and he said that his guy was recovered, and that was fine. But I was sort of worried. Am I going to destroy [them] when I bring them up here? (1960s). Similarly famous examples can be found in introductory ethnographic literature. These include Turnbull showing his Ituri friends the Serengeti. As well, Chagnon brought his key Yanomamo informant to Caracas. Such a temptation must be strong for some anthropologists. Anthropologists are enculturated into a different lifestyle or mode of language and thought. What would it be like to return the favour? However, there is a problem. A strong asymmetry exists. The knowledge of cultural difference which benefits anthropology and anthropologists is not equal to the possible harms that such situations could bring to others. Fortunately, the subjects of these anthropological experiments like their own culture better. There is an implication here for the construction of anthropological knowledge. It is the growing conviction anthropologists are not the only ones who see cultural difference. Their subjects can also see it. Merely seeing this interaction does not convince these anthropologists that cultural differences are real. Alongside anthropological explanations of difference lie those of the anthropologists' friends. The latter concern their new experiences. It is as if the anthropologist came to the village in order to spread his own myths and interpretations. Perhaps the anthropologist is interested not so much in being a missionary abroad but in being missionized by the other at home. To come home alone is one anthropological experience. To have the other with you as a physical presence lends weight to the idea that the 182 anthropologist has indeed had this othering experience. They can prove it. This is done so by presenting the other in the anthropologist's own terms. Ironically, the other is an other self. The anthropologist may return home alone. She or he may be hard put to sort out what was different. How can it become more recognizable through analogy? ...some of it I think is simply the difference between, you try[ing] to move from having personal relations with your informants to having an academic relationship with the data you have collected. And it is sort of an immediacy of the people and the ethnographic that is hard to get away from. I kept up correspondence with people there. And there is still a sense of obligation when I went back. But I do not know. It is not as if I felt that what I was analyzing was no longer as real. I know, I think I worked hard not to simply objectify. I know that is a topic of discourse! But I guess more in teaching I felt that the people that I knew, I knew as being very much like me. And it was easy in one way to think of them being like you but a little different. But in other things it is much easier to highlight the differences than the similarities. And I think you really do it more in teaching than in writing. You do not want people to be thinking, you do not want your students, or even just people you are talking to about having been there, that these people are 'just like us'. Only they dress differently or something like that. And at the same time, you do not want people to think that everyone is just like them so they can act the way they do! As if everybody was very North American centric kind of way. So it depends on who your audience is which side of the coin you want to present. But there was always a question of presenting it to other people rather than an understanding of myself and who they are and - what my understanding of them was (1970s). The cultural context of what one can say is the way in which it is said. There is a distribution of cultural knowledge. Events mean something different to different people. These people may be from the 'same' culture. The anthropologist must figure out how this works. Some speakers suggested that there was a positivist handicap on socio-cultural anthropology. This undermined understanding of how another culture functions. Functioning might be understood in terms of a culture's use of language, or linguistic items such as kin terms. This prompted some speakers to invert the logical relation between signifier and signified. The latter might become more symbolic and the former more real. Would this get us closer to the native viewpoint? 183 [one] approach to the study of kinship was basically that most of the things that seem difficult to understand to kinship follow one premise that kinship is real. And if you let the premise go that kinship is real and disregard it in the way of any part of culture you will, culture in the symbolic idealistic sense of culture, you know, then all will become clear. Then things you will not understand you will understand. And so my return to the community which I had been living with for a while before was living under that rubric. I have those concepts very clearly in my mind, social systems, cultural systems you know, and the things that tied in to that which were very useful, and more of a revelation when seen in retrospect. Why should it be such a revelation that there was a difference between norms and what people did on the ground? It was a revelation because people who worked in those areas used those terms. On the other hand, in trying to implement that vocabulary, you encounter the same problems... (1960s). The idea of studying normative behaviour as a way into the cultural mindset of another people is famous, and is also what helps anthropological knowledge to be unique. As famous are the problems this idea confronted in being implemented by some anthropologists. The problem was that people, including anthropologists, do not always, or seldom, or never do what they say they do. One might not marry your heterosexual cross cousin when there are no eligible members of that kin category - or even when there are. Cultural tenants' manifest annoyingly erratic actions when compared with stated rules and norms of cultural action. They are annoying to certain anthropologists. Yet this seeming contradiction can be rationalized by these anthropologists. Norms are taken as symbolic. They are not necessarily validated pragmatically. It is the traditional introductory anthropological example of doing and saying. Here, it is not that laws are made to be broken. As with all laws, there are interpretations. It is left to the anthropologist to interpret indigenous actions and statements.82 Interestingly, anthropology as a culture participates directly in the tension between what they say and what they do. This occurs mainly through introductory anthropology courses: 8 2 More than one speaker retreated in a sense, when confronted by the ethnographic experience of different norms, values, and actions. In this case, when Levi-Strauss was confronted by a North West Coast person who upbraided him on his interpretation of the Way of the Masks, one speaker replied: \"I still think Levi-Strauss was right. Native peoples do not really know their own culture. Much of it has been lost, in any case, and what you are hearing is as much an interpretation as the structuralist one, and perhaps with lesser validity.\" (1970s). This may be so, but presumably of greater emic value. 184 ...if you have thirteen weeks, and you have a sense that you are preparing students to take more complex courses where there is a certain set of things that they ought to know. The thirteen weeks disappear. I mean it is an incredibly short period! And this is without the archaeology and the physical anthropology. This is just the social stuff. That is a very, very short period of time. And to do something serious you either have to have a set of themes that you are playing on all the time. You know I try to deal with some things that I think are very important. Some sort of critical things. There is no 'unit' on that, that informs everything that one does. And I first have objections to treating some things as units, because then they are also producing the problem that you are trying to deal with. That is why [this] book was so useful as the ethnography. It is not the 'woman's week', or the 'matriliny week', or the 'reflexive week', its just the ethnography. And if you construct the ethnography as an important category, then that carries. That is the ethnography for the whole term, and you can use that ethnography for the discussion of gender, and the construction of whatever. But not sort of put it in its neat little pigeonhole that you can then forget. But to do its the time period and what you can accomplish in what is really a very short term. This is a tremendous constraint. And as well as the unavailability of the books and so forth. So we are strangely operated on before we even step into the classroom, before the students ever step into the classroom. [This] is really quite strong. At least I have a sense of that. I have a heavy sense of being limited by time and money and my own knowledge of things, and the knowledge of students (1960s). There is a net effect of this representation of anthropological culture as a particular set of norms. The farther the student moves on in the enculturating process, the more janus-like his or her situation becomes. This duplicity is cultural. One learns the manifold differences between the said and done. As well, the differences between what is left unsaid and undone are glimpsed. Yet one must agree that there are logistical and institutional limits in teaching. The introduction of anthropology to novice students (and not merely novice anthropology students) is limited by other cultural variables. The media used in such introductions is also curiously unresponsive when pressed about the differences between the said and done: When you look at the map at the front 'people described in this book', you know it situates them all in geographical, or ethnogeographical areas of space. And there are huge areas that are empty, like China! The Middle East. The USA. In fact the places that are empty are all of the places where Holt's publishing headquarters 185 are listed: New York, Sydney, San Francisco, and others, Paris. There is nothing for Western Europe. There is nothing for North America, other than a couple of aboriginal groups pinpointed here and there. And despite the protestations of anthropologists that they study humanity, and they do dick in terms of studying industrial societies! They do not really understand them. There is some very good urban anthropology out there that has been done. It never finds its way into textbooks. There is a lot of useable sociology and urban studies, and urban geography in particular that is really useful for talking about this stuff, you know. It is to the pre-industrial city and then it ends. And I find that that from my point of view, genre is more than voice. It has to do with what is depicted as well as what you are depicting. And what is depicted in much of anthropology at the moment is kind of this homunculus masquerading as human nature! You know, which is somehow still glued on to primitive peoples. To use the word everyone would like to use but is not now polite. So, that is probably all I can really say about that (1970s). Much of anthropology cannot seem to look at itself too closely. For example, the larger culture from which anthropology comes does not fall within the official introductory purview of anthropology. This is problematic from an epistemological standpoint. There is nothing within any anthropological method which cannot be used to study the people down the block. There may be some ideological motivation for the relative exclusion of certain ethnographic studies from the canons of the discipline. Such a motivation has persisted until recently in anthropology. Such introductory materials have the effect of producing an anthropology to which no one can take exception. However, the actual anthropologists know better through their enculturation. This includes local knowledge of the said and the done. What is said and done in certain anthropological self-representations may even mimic western myths: I think that textbooks not only depict a very narrow band of human experience, and ignore the rest, they also choose to ignore a lot of what has informed anthropology in its discourse. As a professional discourse. In terms of ethics, social change, minority groups in state societies and so on, which we have had at our fingertips for a long time. But if you ignore it, in writing and introductory textbook, because you choose to see it as a separate thing, then you lose it. That is the kind of [the way] gender has been crafted into the textbooks in the last few years. And that is good. But they have missed all the rest of the stuff. I mean, I am still using a textbook, and I looked at every single one, you 186 know, that I could get my hands on to see if any of them defined marriage including same sex couples. Because those are legitimated marriages in some states now, and they have been socially legitimated arrangements in many other societies. No! In every single textbook, 'marriage is a union between a man and a woman', and it is a way of controlling fertility, da-da, da-da... (1970s). Q: It is almost biblical. Yeah it is! That is exactly right. That is a good phrase for it. It is like reading Genesis all over again. In fact many introductory textbooks sort of are alternative geneses kind of things... (1970s). Eventually such representations are questioned. This to the extent that some professional anthropologists come to think about the world differently. This difference is most obtrusive when it is compared with what they tell their junior undergraduate students. Along with this, speakers discussed anthropology's pedagogical and theoretical shortcomings. These were mostly framed according to the content interest of the speaker - but not always: Oh! Anthropology is so tiresome! And in some ways I find myself going back to Levi-Strauss, who was always a keen student of this issue. But I am always reminiscent in this regard of his basic theories of structuralism and so on, and that is that you do not need to go out to bongo-bongo land, you can do it all here. And this assumption of universality that what is true of one male is true of the world! ... I actually think that is part of the worst of it. One of the others is the idea that we can understand the whole world and pretty soon will have ethnographers studying every single thing. [This] is very naive and unexamined and unrecognized assumption among anthropologists. It is still really salvage. There is still a lot of that amongst some anthropologists which I find really quite tiresome (1960s). Anthropology's self-representation can be narrow. In the above quote, there is a positivist critique of a particular theorist as \"...having thought culture out in his head\". This can also be taken in an ethical sense. It is unfair to diversity. Yet this is coupled with a more post-positivist criticism. The ethnographers who do go outside of their heads collect diversity as specimens. These are akin to Leach's butterfly hunters. It seems that both knowledge construction and destruction in socio-cultural anthropology can 187 come from either a positivist or post-positivist positioning. Anthropology is a difficult culture to self-represent. It is like a sprawling city full of overzealous developers and equally overwrought conservationists. Finally, anthropology as a whole also has to represent itself as a coherent body of knowledge. It must represent itself as a discourse to other aspects of western consciousness. This involves a much more complex dialogue between the said and done. This occurs at an epistemological level. What can anthropology actually do? Do we do what we say we are doing? Why do we say what we say we are doing? How does this effect what we do? These more complex and interesting questions are touched upon by speakers. They do so, however, in a normative manner derived mainly from a positivistic social science model. The language used in such intercourse need not go beyond itself. Its meanings are knowable. It can convince others that the anthropological project is valid and valuable. Anthropology needs to justify itself epistemologically. This influences the amount of space allotted for discussion amongst anthropologists about theory and theories of knowledge: One of the important ways in which it remains the same is I think from the critiques from the philosophy of science. That is one of the things that carries along a bit of the directionality. Because anthropology and anthropologists who are even not thinking of themselves as scientists tend to take the work of philosophers of science seriously. So if somebody points to a logical or methodological flaw you do not have to say 'ho hum', because our legitimacy is gone. There may be costs, because your legitimacy is gone! And we have to justify what we do both to ourselves and to the people who pay us. That legitimacy is as a academic discipline, which is the only legitimacy we have really. And there are certain things that go along with it, being an academic, being an academic discipline. And one of them is being subject to criticism from those fields in the academic world that are regarded as having the legitimacy to do that. So even if we wanted to ignore them, we really could not. And there has always been this tendency in anthropology... But the institutional structure does not allow that to happen. The structure that includes anthropology as a discipline among disciplines in a university setting does not allow a discipline to capture its own critical apparatus entirely. (1960s). Hence anthropology cannot exist in a vacuum. It is not a cultural system on a tropical island. It cannot function as if this were so. Does it want 188 to? There is a gravity to the ethnographic experience. Perhaps this is so because of the manner of socio-cultural anthropology's self-representation. However, most anthropologists in this study did not think themselves immune from outside critiques. Anthropology in general may have been open to theoretical critiques from other disciplines. Has it been as open to ethical or political critiques from other cultures? Recently, anthropology has opened itself in this other direction. However, this recent trend may have an effect of reducing the ability to speak about complex theoretical issues in socio-cultural anthropology. This may be producing part of the flux of positivist tools in an interpretive garden. Anthropology as a unique form of western knowledge exists not apart from that knowledge but as an intimate part of it. Yet some anthropology sees itself as having the power to detach itself from this body. It does so through powerfully existential experiences of the non-west. These are themselves expected and at least partially created by the manner in which professional ethnographers are trained. Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge: This section concerns comments from anthropologists regarding the nature of human knowledge in general. It is a bridge between anthropologists' speaking about knowledge and thinking about ethics, because it is part of human knowledge to become humane action. There were two kinds of commentaries given by speakers regarding the nature of human knowledge. One had to do with how such knowledge was formed. How do different cultures come into being? The second discussed how such knowledge should be investigated, communicated, or analyzed. Both are intimately related with each other. The construction of human knowledge is seen as cultural and how culture is transmitted and interpreted is part of the process of constructing such knowledge. I begin by citing some general comments about how the nature of human knowledge looks to these anthropologists. For some, knowledge and culture are identical. They have a certain structure limited by various cultural and contextual factors, which combine to limit knowledge. Some of the problems involved with thinking about these factors are illuminated in the following: 189 I had a very funny experience a couple of years ago. I was at a... conference and it was specifically on the idea... of using not just native writing, but writing as a research tool... I was in the session where there is a person quite well known for doing this sort of thing... [who] read a story about a childhood experience. And then a whole number of the session broke up into groups... At my table something came to me that I would never have even thought of or realized, because I was reading it with a certain mindset. Someone brought up the issue that if they found out that the facts of her story were not true it would change their attitude towards it! And this was a story that elicited something about racist attitudes and so on and so forth. And someone actually brought this up that if this was not quote, a true story, then it would no longer have the validity that it had when they took it as true! ...this may show how much I resisted... the whole idea that true and real are the same things! That it seemed to me totally bizarre! That something certainly can be totally made up and be more true than something that seemed real. So the idea that the story has to be vouched for. It has to be guaranteed as personally real by a first person respondent struck me as well, strange to say the least. But then in the more general discussion I realized that almost all of them felt that way! That these stories were only useful as long as they were factually historically real! And I felt that kind of went along with that notion of the face to face. As having a kind of authenticity that detached culture does not. Now this is really problematic, as far as I am concerned, since we live in a society in which the main vehicles, you know most transpersonal, most knowledge is conveyed through transpersonal vehicles. We do not have a face to face culture... (1980s) Anthropologists in this study made no claims to certainty about their knowledge. Why would one want to make such claims? Well, I think there is a curve of development, and this is almost an empirean position. You know where something appears and there is a great interest and it seems that there is almost redemptive or salvationary of that nature. The problems that we have encountered by thinking in some other way will be solved... There is a period in the literature of anthropology where you see people experimenting, to use the polite term, with making these 'isms' work in a very self-conscious way... If then there is some kind of process where aspects become parts of generalized anthropological knowledge and occur to us, and I think it is a continuous phenomenon. That it is one of the ways anthropology expands its ways of doing things. Which is the simple old Kuhn prophecy. Or more cynically, it is a new generation in a tight market trying to show its stuff. Which you find not only in anthropology. But you know Marx said that every new ideology is the banner of the class on the rise, or along the way! Something like that! ...I think it is a continuing process. I do not see it as directional (1960s). 190 The construction of anthropological knowledge develops along institutional and social lines. It does not have access to The Truth. For speakers, all knowledge was constructed in this manner. However, such bounded knowledge also makes truth claims beyond history. Such 'truth' is part of what anthropology has researched cross-culturally and is not constituted by cultural universals. Sometimes it is seen as the actual structure of human intelligence. There were many comments on this question of reality and truth. The following sees the question in terms of the concept of 'experiential' reality. This type of reality is seen as a vehicle for understanding other belief systems: This is where experiential reality comes into play, I think. But in the end we have to realize that we are constrained by our intellectual tradition and our language and it is a problem. And as anthropologists I think one of our first tasks is to try to understand the extent to which we are bound to our own intellectual tradition and language and how we see and translate the rest of the world. And I do not think we do that enough. So I mean, the concept of experiential reality, we are still talking about something called 'reality' which implies that here may be something else... we will never get around that problem. But I think there is a difference when you talk about experiential reality which does not question whether you are experiencing what you are experiencing. It accepts that you are experiencing and tries to understand it. That is different, I think, than saying that what you are experiencing is not 'real' as I understand it. And that is what the notion of experiential reality gets at. There can be a scientific reality. The idea of spiritual healing for instance, from a scientific perspective does not exist. Okay, from an experiential perspective, it does exist. We must ask how we are bounded by our own thought system when we try to understand others'. And at the very least reflect that in our work. Do not pretend to be unbiased and do not pretend that there is some kind of absolute cultural truth and that even a science of culture can learn and write about it (1980s). 'Relative' truth is also seen as a balance between local realities and larger realities: Well, what I basically think about it is that I think it is a mistake to see it in terms of either/or. I think it needs both. I am doing this in my research looking more at the macro level of the construction of meaning. But a lot of the data I use comes from the people who have 191 done work more at the micro level. And it is impossible to do a macro study without being very conscious of that micro level and making use of it. The kind of face to face research and the kinds of understandings that come out of it. But alternately, arid I find this to be a fault of both anthropology and in sociological ethnography, I do not think it is possible to do valid micro research without having one's eyes on what comes out of macro studies. But I think in the last decade that analysis has been supplied. And I am talking specifically about American and western societies. But that horizon has come quite a lot from critical theory where the background is filled in with the notions of international capital and globalism and western society and those things. You know that set of notions about the 'way things are'. And the power relations that make up the broader reality. And there is not much interrogation of that. It is just an assumed backdrop to the micro studies (1980s). Some research into human knowledge does not find an allegiance within anthropology. It also cannot become part of a generalized knowledge system. It is not considered to be within the truth. Such aspects of knowledge might not seem to exist.83 However, there were many different cultural ways to enjoin debate. For some speakers, variability of research helped them get a broader idea about human truths. For example, intercultural relations provide a less ethnocentric manner of speaking to the idea of truth and knowledge: In Israel for the first time that happened... The maunderings of that liminal edge where philosophy and the disciplines come together really happened in Israel, with Eastern European minds. And people who switched from one language to another in the middle of a sentence, you know. Talking along in one language. And they were all there, Spanish and French and German and Yiddish and Russian and Hebrew, and everyone knew them all! I mean you would talk along in one language, and when you stopped to look for exactly the right word and you found it in a another language you would just take off in that language! Incredible! And the ideas happened in a way that is probably more of an east coast phenomena in North America. But it was 8 3 Another speaker commented on this quality of human knowledge: \"I really do not know about that because to me knowledge is kind of empty. It is kind of an empty space until it is placed somewhere. lust in this giant space called knowledge. It is just like a library that no one ever uses. I think this is the way I think about it. To go off to the library and see this huge body of knowledge and investigation. But until you take the book off the shelf, it is almost non-existent. So I am not really sure. I mean I think of anthropology in terms of its obligation to knowledge. One of them is in terms of how it is reported, perhaps. But other than that I do not really know how that engagement takes place because I see knowledge as kind of a sad thing. Which can only be taken apart when examined and I do not know if we do that.\" (1990s). 192 difficult to find outside this big city of ideas called the university (1960s). Language might express the most intimate feelings and thoughts of human beings. This is also a sense of a kind of truth. As Aristotle suggested, the sounds of utterances are the reflections of the human soul. If languages vary, linguistic anthropology might follow these differences. It could thereby reconstruct the human condition. One speaker suggested a methodology that might be useful for such an exploration: So I think you need to have grounded work at that level as well as a the micro level. And in fact I think that for me this is one of the biggest flaws on both sides of the fence is the tendency in the last couple of decades to create an almost complete split between the macro and the micro. So people who do macro work on both sides assume the micro. They do not really look at it. At what is going on at the micro level. Or people working at the micro level just assume the macro and do not really question that. I think there has to be a fairly systematic referencing back and forth between those two levels. One of the reasons that I deal primarily with national cultures, is that I think at that kind of 'meso' level that you get the most useful coming together of the micro and the macro. Because it is at the meso-level of national cultures in which general ideas and general ideologies are translated into concrete social realities. We are talking institutions or things like cities, laws, all these kinds of things, which in turn... are the direct influences on the individual experience in terms of shaping subjectivities as well as constraining everyday life. So I think it is at that level where the ideology becomes concrete that it is most useful (1980s). However, anthropology could also set up its own patterns in place of those \"out there\". The history of the constructions of human knowledge as seen anthropologically includes two main ideas. One is that cross-cultural knowledges of diverse peoples are important. The other is that science's own organized categories are just as important. It is not clear which comes first. One speaker offered an entire encapsulation of the history of science, seeing it as a genealogy of the origins of science. The end result for this anthropologist is the hardening of epistemological positions, seen as bastions of contending claims to truth: Science as an institution, more than even modem science, 193 because I do not believe in the origins of science in general, historians of science, official historians of science! One could say that modern science begins this year or that. If you can say that Egyptians did not do science because they did not know this or that theorem or whatever. I do not know. But I think that science as a general notion began with humanity. For me. But modern science is something special and specific that we can trace more easily I think. It is useful to identify some patterns to represent what is modern science, and what people do as modern scientists, in order to deflect these ideas. Scientists have to look for support for themselves in new sectors of society. They refer to themselves versus polity or church power, and in the 16th and 17th century they had to look for new kinds of support. When scientists began to write in the vernacular languages, like French. Italian, etc. There is a process of optimization of science, and science optimizes itself progressively maybe until a summit maybe at the end of 19th century. And in our century science became more and more criticized because of some evidence that everyone knows! ...The stage of the power and ability of modern science was at its height at the fin de siecle. The most important scientific mannerism was that of the positivists. It was very profound, for example, that science be able to prove itself by its own works. And again, the science at this time, the end of the 19th century, relied heavily upon this growing positivism. But with the emergence of the social sciences, and the borrowing of these ideas, with the hope that they would work effectively for them, they put themselves into a positivist stage (1980s). Could natural science method work for the social sciences? The question was partly about the latter achieving the prestige the former had. Part of the prestige of the sciences is its ability to make truth claims. What kinds of claims could anthropology make? The Parsonian mode was sort of presented to us as not as truth but interesting and as comprehensive. At least and as many other things as a model of the division of labour of the academic world as well as a model of reality. Because the Parsons chart had a place for anthropology and a place for sociology and a place for psychology and each was identified with a central concept. You know, culture for anthropology, society for sociology and personality for psychology. And the anthropological legitimacy for that came from not only Parsons own incredible significance on the Harvard scene but the fact that he and Kroeber had together written this really ridiculous paper on the concepts of culture and society. It was a sort of summit conference. I do not know whether you have seen the paper where they are sorting out the concepts of culture and society. So the analytic universe... was being set up (1960s). 194 The social science root metaphors not only provided a division of labour for students, they divided up academic territories. These territories could be mined in support of their institutional structures. Once divided, each social science needed to affirm its own truths to reserve itself a place in the academy. The \"analytic universe\" was being ordered. However, what were the criteria for this ordering? Another speaker had a suggestion as to the origins of such orderings: I wonder if it does come from people who want to become specialists. It is different than being a social scientist. When I think of the social sciences, I think you have to explain something pretty major in order to be taken seriously. So I think there is a real push for knowledge because knowledge is credited. Knowledge is acceptability and knowledge gives you credibility. You have become an expert. So I think a lot of that push for huge theories, grand theories, and other theories that we are obviously still learning about now, comes from the need to legitimize the discipline. I think I actually believe that a lot of what goes on in anthropology is a very emotional response to the environment that anthropology has grown up in, you know? ... I think big theories and knowledge and huge explanations come from a certain position of intellectual arrogance. I think it is quite arrogant actually, to explain a culture in such sweeping terms. And not let one know, for instance, how you collected your data. I find that problematic. Interesting, but problematic. And I do not know in what other discipline you could get away with that? (1990s). Sometimes theories are presented as truth, that is, they were true in terms of their institutional context. They delineated how research got done. Yet, whether or not they were true in a more general sense remained to be seen. This general truth would be thought of in terms of understanding what it is to be human cross-culturally. Such conflicting senses of truth and reality within cultural knowledge never tired speakers in this study. Another example attempts an organization of these problems: Is there a sense of reality? In a sense it is real for the people who believe in it. That does not mean that their sense of reality is the same as our sense of reality. Reality is a uniquely cultural thing. Each cultural reality is different... Look at the concept of rational thought. Rationality, that is a uniquely western construct which is a euphemism for being western. And not just western but a positivist western, okay? And there are not other intellectual traditions, to my knowledge, that are defined so much by what they are not than science. Than the 195 western intellectual tradition. The concern with things which are pseudo-scientific or unscientific is what drives science, in some respects. So the absolute fear of the so-called unscientific is creeping in. If you want, I have a magazine which is just hilarious. It is called The Skeptical Inquirer. It is a magazine that looks at paranormal phenomena from a scientific point of view! And it has got people like Carl Sagan writing for it and so on. It is really good for looking at how science thinks about things, about the so-called paranormal. It is really a great magazine to read. And the other thing is that every culture has its own sense of what is rational. Okay, what makes sense to it, and as anthropologists it is your job to try to understand that without trashing it. I know that sounds like a cliche, but it should be value-free. To see what is rational for them. Rational, like the existence of witchcraft and so on, which is an entirely rational thing to believe in from their point of view. And so again I do not believe in concepts of irrationality. I think that is just a euphemism for western and scientific [usage]... (1980s). Along with rational organization, the root metaphors for truth become defined more precisely. The ability to abstain from judgements on the rational and the irrational within a culture may come from positivism. Positivism allows another culture to have relative value but not validity. This positivist validity was seen by most speakers as unnecessarily restrictive. Positivism did not allow the anthropologist to treat all cultural categories equally. This was because the category of truth could only be defined scientifically. Some speakers reacted against this \"hardening of the categories\": A lot of people wind up resentful, saying 'Oh, the culture of the institution, well that is a bastardization of the concept of culture, it is really this!' And that is silly. These are just people struggling to comprehend, to understand human affairs closer to home. A different trick and work... It is a really anally retentive attitude! ... I mean, success kills everything eventually. I mean that is just the nature of human knowledge systems! It becomes more and more popular, and it covers more and more sins! It becomes less and less useful, less and less specified. Then it starts to ramify in several directions. Then it becomes problematized. Then new things come into play ...So going against it seems to me to be a fool's activity. To swim in it and to say well, 'Yeah this is a new meaning for this, maybe there is value in it and maybe there is not'. And to debate and try to define value for it. There is nothing wrong with those things. But many things get bent out of shape by people adopting something that seems to me to be a kind of intellectual hardening of the categories... (1970s). 196 The diversities of human interest are culturally constructed and anthropology reflects these interests and their diversities. However, differing concepts of culture exist in anthropology, many of these concepts being borrowed from other disciplines. Such borrowing of concepts and giving them new contexts is also seen by some in anthropology as trendy. The rush to grab the latest social or literary theory out of Europe was a perennial example. Yet these theoretical issues may have always been a part of anthropology. The fashion for making them seem to be new was rejected by most speakers: I think anthropology has been on the forefront of bringing up these issues. How one gets our epistemologies, our ways of where we come from. These are questions that perhaps more scientists and social scientists should think about. But at the same time, let us gain some balance. I have real trouble with anthropologists who see for example science as just another discourse. Yeah sure, numbers can be manipulated, but like I said before, so can voices. I do not think we have to define ourselves because we approach the research process from a qualitative perspective. I think that is one of our main strengths. But I do not think we have to take down quantitative approaches in doing so, just to be one up! Both approaches have something to contribute. Okay let us be aware of the limitations of both approaches in the construction of anthropology. Basically showing, for example in medical anthropology in decentring the assumptions of scientists. But at the same time, it is not undermining the whole. I think that these people do [that]... (1990s). Some anthropologists studied the cultural action of the borrowing of concepts and the dissemination and translation of ideas. They found that there may be important reasons for their fashionable reception: It seems to be mainly in North America that has what some people think of as faddism. Which I think is a mistake, it is not faddism... It is in a way. It is a generational phenomenon. A phenomenon which I think links certain people in positions in the discipline with the construction of banners of approaches and isms which would be different from other people's and that is just the way it is. Whether that changes in the future I do not know. It may or may not, I am not quite sure (1960s). 197 There is an institutionalized necessity for young scholars to claim new political territory. How they do so in anthropology varies greatly. Examples would include positivism with it's own naissance, growth and hegemony. It has it's own history of acculturation. It was never an originary monolithic structure that some post-positivists rail against. Theories of knowledge for some anthropologists can only be understood in terms of the kinds of ideas theories control. Only certain questions can be asked within a disciplinary discourse. The politics of managing theoretical debate can be powerful forces of obfuscation. Their application to policy making is also problematic. One example concerns political policy-makers' ideas of science: I have come into science literacy, and in order to learn about scientific literacy you have to learn science! In my mind there are infinite kinds of scientific literacy. It really is infinite, as science can be so many things. We could decide to orient the thought towards science in use. But those people do not think like that. They think that the world we are in is the only one possible! So, when we talk with them about the skeptics for example, they think the solution would be to reinforce the educational programs. Do more popularization and things like that, and I am not sure that is a good solution. I am not sure that people need more of the kind of science they had when they were younger. And maybe they are not even interested in that. I think the future is not merely based on scientific knowledge. Although the future is maybe more based on politics. So in a certain sense it has nothing to do with knowledge. It has something to do with it! But a more specific way to share the main idea is that the control of our own destiny relies mostly on politics... the decisions are made in a political realm (1980s). Some important factors influencing the processes outlined in the previous quote are stated in the following. Akin to the ignorance of the sources of scientific knowledge, other forms of cultural knowledge may be distributed unevenly. This uneven distribution of cultural content may be a characteristic of human knowledge. In the same way people did not know names of ancestors, somebody else would know, because they had a right to know. And even though they were not descendants. The descendent could not claim a right to know because they had not seen that person. They did not have a legitimate basis for getting that information. So you ended up having knowledge distributed in ways that, well, sometimes peculiar ways. 198 Ways that reflected the mortality pattern in the village, adoption practices. I had a real sense that people had information that they might have known, but did not. And as a result, people operating with different understandings of what other people's understandings were about assumptions of people's knowledge. And so there is a real sense... that this knowledge is not quite shared. [It] is sort of distributed amongst people and they had enough understanding of things that they overlapped. But there is no assumption that things were shared, or a limited assumption that things were shared. And I guess that is one of the things that I have been working on since then (1970s). These observations have at least two implications. First, not everyone knows everything about a culture. Because of this, the validity of any one knowledge is questionable. However, the personal value of such knowledge may be heightened. Second, the manner in which anthropology studies culture is implicated. The concept of culture itself may be on the verge of fragmentation and may become more ambiguous due to the variety of ways in which anthropological culture is distributed. One of the reasons for this fragmentation is that \"...it prevents any kind of understanding or any kind of idea becomes codified in some transpersonal form. It loses some sort of authenticity. So unless you get the message right from, whatever, the horse's mouth, then it is not true!\" (1980s). This ambiguity in ethnographic work puzzled a number of speakers in this study. They suggested that knowledge of one's culture was not uniform. On the one hand, perhaps such knowledge could be better described as the assumption that cultural assumptions could be shared. They might not necessarily be shared. On the other hand, one could look for another social theory to work with. Such a theory might have more room for the ambiguities of different realities: It seemed difficult. [It was] very useful to me to be able to differentiate ideas and actions, cultural systems, social systems, whatever. But not as a set of ultimate analytical distinctions because they were very difficult to operationalize. To separate the parts out. You know because people were not talking about spirits. They were talking about something to which they gave a kind of reality. A common sense kind of reality and that created problems for me in the sense that I found the vocabulary useful and understanding to the sense system... Marx was dealing with the same dilemma and that was: how you deal with the kind of internality between material and non-199 material things. Either giving up those concepts entirely or violating the integrity of what it is that you are trying to understand (1960s). What social theory says about human knowledge may give trouble in interpeting what other cultures do. What people say they can or cannot talk about poses an interpretive problem. With reference to Marx, as suggested above, the problem is about natives' thoughts. Their commentaries about the ideals of their particular culture are important. Any analysis of them must maintain an ethnographic integrity. However, analysis also inherits a conceptual apparatus. In this case, it is Marxism which is used in anthropological analysis. How does one maintain an inherited theoretical integrity while dealing with other cultures? This inheritance can become an imposing task, as Derrida suggests: Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs to Marxism, even before wanting to be or refusing to be and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning. In mourning in particular for what is called Marxism.... That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not (1994:54[1993]). We have a history with which we must come to grips. We do so in order to become historically conscious. Any theory of knowledge has active inheritors, as one anthropologist detailed in the following about a general inheritance of disciplinary construction: Okay, we never build from scratch. Architecture is built upon foundations... I think that really is important. When it comes to a set of ideas and says \"Yes, that is reasonable' but you simply cannot just start constructing from scratch and get very far. You know you read science fiction about people's minds and trying to control them, and then how do you rebuild their world? And the answer is it is really tough!! So you in some sense have to re-invent the knowledge that a culture would bring through socialization. And that is not reasonable... [for anthropologists to do]... I think we also need to feel a sense of identification with something larger than ourselves. In the sense that, again, you do not construct from scratch. I mean, I would not want to write or teach in a vacuum. So you have to have some sense that there are other people out there in the world who care about these matters as 200 well. So, and that one's thinking is in some sense a part of a larger discourse (1960s). Ethnographic work is a process of inheritance of anthropological knowledge. However, the purpose of this knowledge is to gain a second inheritance, namely the knowledge of another culture. These other knowledges seem to have ambiguous and unequally distributed cultural contexts. To continue the analogy with Marx, individuals or even classes of individuals have different relations to the modes of production of knowledge. Yet these relations could work both ways: That there was a lot of cultural insight into things that I was hearing and seeing in my fieldwork and a number of people had that kind of experience. It was very strange. Not so much Marx's analysis of capitalism which was interesting and at least provided a way of understanding what was going on in part of the world. That was one thing [that fit] even though not too well. But it was Marx's analysis on pre-capitalism which seemed to catch not only the material side but the ideological in describing the world of that period. The mindset or the worldview of that period. He had deductively got it right in some sort of way. [He] put it in a language that was appealing and useful. So many people were inspired to find out more on in this neo-Marxist literature (1960s). Q: Did the insight work both ways, did the ethnographic work inform the text of Marx as well, the textuality... Very much so, it did for me. One or two people I knew who had a roughly similar experience... Yeah, very much so and that is a very provocative thing to think because it takes several years of reading and research. I sort of invented a couple of little research projects to try to fill out that a bit, sort of playing the Marxist texts and my ethnographic experience against each other and I did find it very useful as a matter of fact (1960s). Western texts could be interpreted with the aid of cross-cultural inheritance. There were many suggestions as to why socio-cultural anthropology had this particular relationship with knowledge. The following series of quotes was typical of an entire theme of the interviews where anthropology is seen as not being distanced from human action and thought: I think knowledge for its own sake is important. I do not think 201 it should be solitary though. I think it should involve other things. Some kind of practical application. To be useful too. But I think anthropology in terms of cross-cultural and in terms of developing our understanding, to just our general understanding of the world we live in. I think anthropology is able to provide useful information. I think anthropological approaches, like in economic anthropology, [are] very fascinating in the way things are explained that could be very similar to certain approaches of economics. But the way in which it is delivered is unique. Because it has been involved and is always connected to human beings. And I think that is what is very important about anthropology. Anthropology never forgets the human engagement. I think even bad anthropology never forgets the human engagement. And other disciplines, they have these bodies of knowledge which appear to almost disengage... I think knowledge is important... But sometimes it can start in one place and nothing useful is done with it. Because we do ask for people's lives, and what goes back. I guess that is what I am concerned about (1990s). Anthropology was also seen by speakers as being respectful of knowledge because of its ability to take other forms of knowledge seriously. However, not all anthropologists were seen to do so: [They are] not prepared to entertain the idea that witchcraft really could exist. You say to someone like that, prove to me, using your own scientific methods and apparatus that witchcraft does not exist, they cannot do it. They cannot prove that it does not exist. But as it is a positive tradition, where the response is no, you have to prove that it does! You see, this is the problem of positivism. The positive tradition is probably... one of the major stumbling blocks, one of the contradictions of anthropology. Okay, as a discipline anthropology has craved to be thought of as a science, you know? And in doing that it has adopted somewhat pseudo-scientific approaches into research and theory to make it look sort of scientific so it can be accepted into the academy as a real science. But in doing that all it really has done is that it has compressed the intellectual heritages of the people with which it has worked by taking how they view the world and translating it into scientific terminology. By setting up these kinds of dichotomies, by not asking the question, is it real...? And then positivism does that. And I mean science is an intellectual tradition as much as it is an ethic of inquiry. It comes with a lot of cultural baggage, and anthropologists have perpetuated that rather than eschewing that, rather than getting away from it. Anthropology should be at the forefront of critiquing science as a form of culture (1980s). Many speakers seemed to understand the human as being ontologically diverse. This particular understanding gave these anthropologists the 202 distance a scientist needs to produce knowledge: ...as a socio-cultural anthropologist it establishes this distance to what one does and what one is. And you can never become the 'other'. These subjects, these people who we write about and do research about. So the balance I think is one is identifying with the people we study, but at the same time, realizing that stepping back and gaining a credible distance (1970s). Stepping back to gain credible distance was the focus of many speakers' commentaries. One methodological suggestion included both positivist notions and post-positivist dialogue: When you go into a situation where the theory is set, it predetermines what you are going to say... On the other hand, you cannot go in innocently, because then you do not even know what to look for. So I think you have to step back all the time. And in fact the theory which you are using will affect that stepping back as well (1970s). Anthropological knowledge may be born out of a particular methodological spin given to any theory. For example, mind-based theories of knowledge could be given new scope according to the ethnographic lens: ...I really believed that this was a theoretical model that was founded in some assumptions about cognitive reality. That in fact we did think in terms of hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that poodles and spaniels are kinds of dogs, and that dogs, are kinds of animals, etc. And that because we find those in thought patterns in every society we have looked for them. There must be something to do with this left lobe up here and the way we cognitively structure our understandings. For a full ten years I was a very committed ethnoscientist and may have been one of the last ones on earth! (1960s). Anthropologists in this study were epistemological relativists. It was not difficult for them to step back from their own positions. They suggested their place in the discipline could be understood by what they did not do. Theories in anthropology, just as in anthropologized societies, were distributed \"unevenly\". Some distribution was almost idiosyncratic. If it were not for the fundamental tools of positivism in anthropology, such knowledge would be even more idiosyncratic. In their search for human knowledge, 203 anthropologists are united by their methods and ethics. They are divided, however, by their theories. These divisions and unities are inherited in the culture of anthropology. Another inheritance was seen as important to the understanding of the nature of human knowledge. This was the idea that such knowledge changed over time. Often this change occurred in a more radical manner than a continuous history of western thought might suggest. Boas saw radical difference between cultural meanings from culture to culture. With Foucault, we are able to relativize the epistemologies of different times. Knowing something was very different within the history of the same culture. Such cultural difference which informs our own inheritance makes the task of the anthropologist all the more difficult: The book that did it for me from Foucault was The Order of Things. Because it was the question and the reason that I remember sort of thinking to myself trying to think to myself in what I was doing. [It] was the question of boundaries. You know if you take with utter seriousness the notion that a boundary is a construction, that is what you do, or something like that. And I had never seen anybody do that. And the question of the nature of boundaries and where their constructed nature and so forth was certainly a major issue in that entire field of discussion in the 60s and 70s. I had not encountered a writing on that which said 'OK, let us really try to make the assumption!', that we have to account for the boundaries, any boundaries, not take it for granted and sort of go on. So as I was reading The Order of Things, that is what occurred to me as what he was trying to do. Or one of the things that I thought he was trying to do. And I found that very exciting. And once you sort of deconstruct the notion of boundary you are at the edge of whatever it is the epistemology you are working with. So those are very interesting thoughts. Very provocative thoughts. And I had a lot of fun with that... But that particular dimension, the knowledge and the boundaries of knowledge is the part of it which at the time simply resonated with me. The anthropological questions that I was interested in... and the notion that you could do sort of what Foucault is doing and that one almost trivial interdisciplinary question could be seen in that light! This was a very, very powerful kind of image to have. So that was good (1960s). It seems that anthropology was more comfortable than any other western discipline with the idea of co-existing yet different epistemologies. 204 Even so, anthropology itself became a very different object in the light of this idea. One speaker suggested that 'Man' might be ending for Foucault. However, 'men' were just beginning to be understood for anthropologists. This ...would sum up the relation as culture creates subjects creates culture. I think this structuration begins in earliest infancy. I am not quite sure about the process to offer any sort of a theory about how it actually works. But I suspect it may even because of the extent to which there is a certain level of hardwiring of the brain after a child is born. But some of the sort of site-specific structuring may actually be hardwired in which is why people tend to carry these structures along with them, even through very different changing life situations. And transplantation can be very painful. And I remember the cases of some immigrants from different cultures to different cultures respond when you get them having certain aspects of the structuration from the original cultures. Especially the way the relationship between self and other is constructed and the way that power is translated into that. When they are transplanted into a culture that has a lot of different construction of that relationship. It can give problems in relating. Whereas if I am going into one similar structure to another re-adaptation is much easier... I think these structures are replicated over and over again and I see structural similarities through all of these cultures... (1980s). Phrased in these terms, there could be no ex nihilo statements from western discourse. As well, there could be no more originary acts which set the epistemological or cultural ball rolling. Anthropological context came home to roost in western philosophical consciousness. Al l knowledge was cultural. Therefore, all knowledge was relative. There could be no one site or maker of knowledge. As Derrida suggests, A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it 'out of nothing', 'out of whole cloth', would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself. The notion of the engineer who supposedly breaks with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Levi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur. As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks 205 down(1978285[1967b]). This quote discusses the very \"menace\" my project presented to some anthropologists. This project must be seen by them as coming from the sociology of science, philosophy, or something other than ethnography or anthropology. However, this study is also finitely bound by positivism. It cannot unwind itself from the \"whole cloth\" of anthropological discourse. It is also a species of bricolage. These points are not usually reflected upon by speakers. However, anthropologists as a culture may share with other cultures a general lack of self-reflection: People normally do not reflect upon their culture, as culture in particular. You find the odd person who is concerned about their tradition, but they are the odd person. And anthropologists write about their special informants who are, you know, proto-anthropologists in their own right. I had somebody who was like that! I guess a guy who was a little bit older than I who had taken all this stuff quite seriously, and he was interested in learning all the stories. But most people when asked 'Why are you doing that' they say 'Oh, my father taught me to do it that way', 'Why did he teach you to did it that way', 'Well, because his father taught him', and you easily come to those roadblocks. Well it is obvious people do not think beyond that most of the time. That does not mean that they do not understand it. They do not think sort of objectively about it. They are also, well, culture is distributed by age, and in any number of ways, and even people's assumptions of what can be shared. That is something that anthropologists have not paid very much attention to. Something I have been working on but! You know we make grand assumptions, and for a long time people talked about culture as being shared assumptions about this that and the other thing. We do not have a vocabulary to talk about it in other ways. And you could say culture is something distributed in a society in such a way as people think that we share it (1970s). Hence, anthropology is itself bounded by the meanings of its principle terms. The anthropologists in this study were sometimes unreflective. They were so concerning their ability to question the official explicit meaning of anthropology's principle terms or root metaphors.8 4 The above quote is 8 4 Hence Stent adds: 'Thus the distinction between explicit and implicit meaning is relative rather than absolute, with a meaning being the less explicit and the more implicit the more dependant it is on context. Furthermore, because of the high degree of dependance on the 206 exceptional in its questioning. However, if such questioning did take place more often, it might still use the toolbox of positivism to investigate its own meanings. In order to do so, another speaker suggested that an anthropological take on human knowledge ...should always be exploratory. It should always be ready to be surprised, and that is kind of a step beyond simple falsifiability. And which is always being able to be wrong. Which assumes you have the potential to be right. And I do not think anthropology is engaged in that kind of enterprise very much, the wrong and Tightness, falsifiability, truth potential, all that kind of Popperian stuff. Hypothesis testing, hypothetical deductive logic. It is a very important thing if you are doing drug trials or trying to do electrical engineering, atmospheric physics, and things like that, and I do not mean just in terms of control. I mean in terms of clarity. But in intercultural negotiations of meaning, it is baggage. It is a big anchor that anthropology dragged around for a long time (1970s). The level of doctrine in positivism is divorced from the level of dialogue in ethnography. However, the latter was motivated by the former. This was so due to the premium put by positivism on direct experience. Hence, it seems that most of anthropology will continue to sail with positivist canvas. However, speakers suggested anthropology needs to cut the cable on positivist doctrine. 8 5 A way of doing this was presented by a number of context, the implicit meaning is open-ended, in that it can become ever more remote from the explicit meaning as the context is widened\" (1977:176). 8 5 But not to carry this too far, as another speaker suggested Latour does in his latest work, where the culture/nature binarism is again deconstructed irrevocably: Q: So there may be a naturalization of the human? \"Yes, I think so. I agree with this so far as it goes. But eventually it is a regression to an old kind of naturalism. I think it is giving up the task of taking a position as human. It is the same when you give up the task of being as a social scientist in society. It is the same with giving up of human lives! They had to identify certain boundaries and like Bourdieu said, if you know them, you can begin to see through them.\" Q: This must be part of his project then as well. What about pseudo-social science? Should we be defending ourselves against that, should we care? \"No, I think it is not a problem. Why? Because people are not victims of this. They are not without judgement here. This is what the skepticals usually say, 'Oh these poor people, they are not trained and do not have tools to protect themselves against mountebanks and quack doctors, and charlatans'. Whatever! But I do not believe it. People are not victims. They try something, and if they do not like it, if it does not work, they do not believe... The skeptics are themselves more believers in this. They are the believers. The people do not believe in anything! They [also] do not... believe in social scientists who believe in social science! But I prefer this belief to the scientific one. In this debate you choose, and I have chosen. And I have chosen to be a human, and I - and I guess I have no choice in a sense -but in another sense, I choose it! I accept it and choose it. In addition to accepting it there is a 207 speakers. The following suggests that the politics of decision making about knowledge were most important. What was to become anthropological and what was not? The way this question was dealt with by anthropologists was for some speakers the key to what knowledge was in general. This was often seen as unhealthy. Hence, Q: To 'take away the judgement from the political sphere'... What did you mean by that? This is a difficult question, because that is what I am trying to figure out now. A manner in which I could describe the way they are situated towards this or that position, and their attitudes and representations which take a certain form, and various factors which could influence their judgements. And at what positions some groups or some people could be more reflexive about their actions and results, and what is the general dynamic of this. When I said that people did not believe in anything, I was sort of over-exaggerating! But I mean that these beliefs are not the same all through the social realm. There are all kinds of beliefs. [This] was studied by anthropologists and sociologists for many cases. But in contemporary societies these take new forms, I think. And we have to describe them as well. And I think that in our contemporary society common sense and the distinction between common sense and science is not the same as in the 19th century. We have to describe this particular relation between common sense and science nowadays (1980s). Q: How do you think it is different? I think that science has penetrated into common sense, and in return, common sense contributed very much to the identification of science. There is really an exchange process. It is very complex. I do not know if I can describe all the mechanics of it. I do not know, I am not sure, but I try to identify some of the signs of this process (1980s). There is also a \"common-sense\" knowledge for anthropologists. It includes what anthropology is, and how it works. Anthropology must still use the methods originally designed for a positivist universe. Because of this, however, anthropology will also continue to be a part of the western choice here. So when we come to environmental issues it is important. If you want to give rights to trees and to rocks, I think it is where we need some distance from the thoughts of Latour. If there is no boundary between it! If we have to, as he says, to promote general symmetry. In his language general symmetry is to break down the boundary between nature and culture. Should we accept and advocate these rights to a forest or a rock or a mountain!?\" (1980s). Once again it is the ethical implications of ontological movements which seem of greatest of concern to these anthropologists. 208 metaphysical universe to which, ironically, positivism sought to put an end. Ethics in Anthropological Knowledge: This final section presents a few examples of speakers' comments regarding ethics. Anthropologists in this study felt that anthropology occupies a unique ethical place, and this was an area of concern for them. What is the point of having knowledge? Speakers answered this question fairly uniformly. They used their own experiences as evidence for their conclusions about what made knowledge ethical. Their particular experiences occur because they are studying anthropology. They include concerns about the presentation of anthropology to its students. The structure of anthropology programs was also questioned as were the ethical implications of intensely personal confrontations with other realities. These experiences are ultimately understood in an ethical sense. This sense is thought to be somehow transcendental to the differences cultures themselves produce. It is an ethical stance that cultures extend to one another. This must also occur in the classroom. ...it can almost have an adversarial structure in it, coming out of the structure of the program. Not out of anybody's presence or absence of goodwill. So, it is on the thesis that in this sort of society people do not want to be required to do anything! And that is faculty or students, and teaching a required course and taking a required course, are not necessarily the most fun. And we do share the notion that the subject should be interesting and even fun. Which is, I think, a very positive thing. And being a required course already sort of challenges that. And there are the different interests subdisciplinary and otherwise amongst both the students and the faculty of the courses... Or at least I will try to do it in some other way, to catch the interests of those students. The dilemma in doing that [is that] there is also a conflict. I mean one of the contradictions of teaching in this kind of way is I also shifted (1960s). There is an ethical thing to do in the case of a conflict of student interests. One must be responsible to the discipline as one knows it. As well, one must attend to giving students an education that they themselves understand to be good for them. These cultural perceptions of what is good change over time. There is the good of the discipline. There is the good of a 209 certain type or style of teaching. There is the good of the students. This speaker also includes the idea of change itself as a good. The ethics of an interdisciplinary classroom are problematic. The ethics of an intercultural society may be more complex: Unfortunately... [this person] just got sicker and sicker and sicker! A very frustrating disease because you really cannot do anything about it. And so after a month... was still getting worse and could not eat and could not keep things down, and literally could not get up and go downstairs. And one day I was walking across the village and the healer and old Indian shaker... when I got back, she went upstairs and said... you must get up and... got up and sat on a straight chair and was about it, it was a big motel, so I sat on the bed and I was looking at the two of them. They were reflected in the sunlight, and she sat down and started chanting - almost an hour, and chanted and tears came running down her face, and finally she got up and walked over and started brushing [the soul] on... and...said 'I remember that tears were flowing out of me like rain'. And I had often heard of that phrase but I had never seen it. And all of a sudden... just fell flat out on the floor! The classic coming to scene, 'Where am I', you know, and when... [the person] woke up, that minute... started getting better! And I mean by that night... wanted to go out and have supper. And I talked to my doctor about this and he is just loaded with hypotheses! Simultaneous remission, he said it was a hypnotic experience with a post-hypnotic suggestion, self-fulfilling hypothesis or the placebo effect on expectations. And then when I went to the healer and she said.:.'That was a close one! You know that when people get ill. What is happening is that your soul has left the body. And then it is magnetically drawn towards the entrance to the land of the dead. Across the... river, and you know, you can pursue it into that tunnel but if it crosses the river, it can never come back and they will die. And I travelled to that place and I found that soul and it was a close one. I talked to it, and I talked to it, and I finally just had to strong arm it back and brushed it on...!' Now, who knows!? (1960s). Respect for another cultural tradition can occur through these kinds of intimacies. Gratitude for a beneficial effect that an aspect of another culture produced cross-culturally may engender an ethics. In this example, one person's return of the soul from the tunnel to the land of the dead is another person's \"placebo effect of expectations\". This type of conflict of interpretations will not get anthropology very far in terms of understanding cultural diversity. Anthropology attempts to say more about cultures than the brute fact that they are diverse. If anthropology can say more it may have to 210 recognize an ethical understanding of the other. Some speakers suggested that ethics was not in fact separable from epistemology: I think that one's ethic follows from one's epistemology. My definition of ethics is that when two things are either desirable or undesirable and you cannot have them both, or not have them both, you have to decide what to do. So when presented with an issue and you must make a decision. And the criteria with which one makes a decision... I was going to say that it is situated knowledge. That is one cannot say or do anything without thinking about the point of view from which it arises. I am a realist in ontology. I believe there is a world out there. I do not believe that we can know that world in any unitary or fully demonstrable way. We can look at consensus and overlap amongst positions of various knowers but we cannot have a closed set of knowers. So it is never going to have any closure. Therefore truth is in relation to where that knowledge came from. Which one can of course also judge from one's own position. I think that one does from a situated point of view take things to be true after consideration, and act politically on the basis of them... Perhaps the most interesting question we face in anthropological theory is how you come up with good reasons for being able to take a political position, and one must. Feminism does that better than post-modernism in general, I think (1960s). Perhaps the greatest gift of anthropology is the knowledge that such giving never stops. Anthropology as a discourse may have this kind of ethics built into it. Many speakers claimed that ethics was paramount in their work. Ethics might substitute for a lack of theory if the ultimate purpose of anthropological knowledge is said to be an ethics. The following was fairly typical: I have a tremendous interest in ethics which has always been there. And what at that time was called radical anthropology which was marginal to what everyone else was doing then... And my interest in theoretical things which I have always found a great loss in anthropology. I do not know whether I came to it from sociology, which had a very heavy theoretical tradition, you know, Comte, Weber, Durkheim and talked about a huge range of people, and even went back to some of the philosophers. People who teach sociology begin with Locke and Hume and some even before that. Aquinas! So I thought anthropology was a very superficial subject. And a really empirical one, but still superficial. And it was not until I engaged Levi-Strauss that I began to give anthropology a more theoretical scope. But the fact that there are no theory courses in anthropology...This was to me a great disappointment (1960s). 211 The lack of theorizing about epistemology, for reasons which have been evidenced above, shapes discussions about ethics. There was an apparent lack of theoretical argument in some of anthropology. This lack may prompt some renegotiation of epistemology. Some speakers' invitations included Levi-Strauss' renegotiation of Mauss' gift to anthropology: Few have managed to read The Gift without feeling the whole gamut of emotions that Malebranche described so well when recalling his first reading of Descartes: the pounding heart, the throbbing head, the mind flooded with the imperious, though not yet definable, certainty of being present at a decisive event in the evolution of science. What happened in that essay, for the first time in the history of ethnological thinking, was that an effort was made to transcend empirical observation and to reach deeper realities (Levi-Strauss, Introduction to The Gift, pp. 37-8; in Derrida 1992:73[i991]). Such emotions cited in the quote can move the reader and commentator in various directions. Not all of them are true to an ethics per se, although they may lead to one. Some of them are more true to a science. The movement towards a new epistemology is the one Levi-Strauss makes. Yet there is another focus in parts of anthropological debate. Hence The second focus, around 'moralizing' because the first question always gets complicated, precisely in Mauss and contrary to what Levi-Strauss suggests, by a moralization that it is impossible to separate... from the 'scientific' concern. We would not be tempted to see in this only a residue of non-scientificity left over after some 'epistemological break', but precisely, and this is what interests us here in the most consistent fashion, another co-implication between the possibilities of the event, of discourse (scientific or not), of invention, and of the gift (Derrida 1992:73-4[1991]). It is events such as those in the last transcript quotation above which present this nexus of epistemology and ethics to these anthropologists. This nexus includes differing realities or epistemologies. It also includes different inventions of self and other. Most importantly, it includes the gift. This gift might be one of otherness. In the preceding case, it was of life itself. Anthropological experience might be turned into a science. This 212 suggests, however, that theory in anthropology can rationalize the epistemology of the other culture. To take anthropological experience as a gift from the other can only better ourselves. However, this was also seen as being taken too far in some cases: ...that is why I tell you that I make sure when I do research, I work in that kind of collaborative way. Not in that kind of false collaborative way that some anthropologists who parade around community members at conferences as their collaborators. I mean, that kind of stuff, that is exoticism. This is silly to bring them in and let everyone stare at them. I am against that. Putting their names on articles and stuff like that. That is, I am against that. That is wrong. That is absolutely wrong. I do not believe that those people fully know what is in some of those articles. You do not look at collaborators, your informants, if you want to call them that, your respondents, as authors. That is wrong. Authorship is a statement of responsibility. As much as it is a statement of creativity. And anyone whose name goes on that front is in theory responsible. And I tell you those elders are often written by people as co-authors I know. That [is] what is going on in these. They have been told by anthropologists what is in these articles. That is unethical if you ask me, because they are now in theory responsible. And what if a literate member of their community reads that, and they disagree. There is something wrong... (1980s). Here is another implication to the positivist understanding of authorial intent. Ethically, it is the author that assumes responsibility. Positivism asks \"who is the author?\". Post-positivism asks \"what is an author?\". Who or what has authority over the text in this next case? No one knows. Hence Maybe if you focussed more on the ethics of the situation . How do you deal with the kind of stuff in graffiti, for example, especially coming from the guys' bathroom. This stuff was really pathetic and sexist and racist. And it is sort of like well, how do you relate to this in a social science sense? I am not going to pretend that majority of... students write on the bathroom walls, I have no idea. I have no way of recording this right?! Nor do I have or know how correctly these attitudes reflect the community... though we were not nervous about it. It was like let us try not to be biased in case for example, the guy does not like gay people. I do not know. That is kind of going far, I realize (1990s). 213 There are some gifts that these anthropologists are uncomfortable with. However, these gifts are always many and personal. Another speaker suggested that what was given by the other was done so with recognizable intent. The anthropologist could question the gift as a form of appropriation. The ethics of giving, however, is perhaps endangered by its politicization: ...that had to do with questions of appropriation and ownership. Because you know that has also been a big thing lately. And particularly when I went back finding people treating me as some kind of authority without my going out to claim authority. But part of it is [that] you know somebody. Even if you know somebody, you know their name, you can say it. And if they taught you their geneaology you have that knowledge legitimately... And I remember when I had the oral traditions course, and I started it up having native students, and feeling like I had to explain this. Because people were questioning kind of knowledge that anthropologists had. Claiming they had the right to talk about this. And usually implicit in the information that people give anthropologists is the right to share this. And also claim that you have some authority to share it. It is not just the right to share but some authority to share it. And you know I felt that particularly after going back and being treated sort of unwittingly as sort of an authority. And I think in that phase is a good reflective phase. I guess I was never too hung up on it, because I knew the people who were giving me the information thought that I had a right to it. I mean, they were giving me the right to it because there is information which they did not give me! (1970s). Anthropology, through its reception of cultural gifts, can also become a giver. Sometimes anthropology can give back gifts. They can return something to the very cultures from which gifts had originally been given. Cultural tenants have different ideas of what a gift is. The notions concerning how one gives and how one receives, as well as who is allowed to give and receive, are understood differently. The ability to understand these differences in anthropology is due to a particular manner of understanding another ethical term. This term is 'value'. One example can suffice: We should not be privileging a certain perspective. Value-free is not the same as evaluation. Evaluation could be something as simple as inquiring into something, like what is going on. That is a kind of evaluation. Values is when you begin to imply good, better, best, or 214 fuller or lesser, higher or lower. When you really begin to put those kinds of judgements which are uniquely culturally based judgements. Normal and abnormal and that kind of thing. When you start to do that, that is a value-judgement. And that is something anthropology should not be doing (1980s). Q: Has it ever done that? Oh yeah!! Constantly! Absolutely, oh yeah. Anthropology is always wanting to break some of the tenets of the discipline like 'objectivity', 'value-free' research and so on. What we have to appreciate is that we should try to avoid projecting our own values. And on the other hand we should also recognize that that is an impossible thing to do. There is no such thing as a value-free method of inquiry. No one anywhere can do that. I do not believe it is possible (1980s). Speakers are increasingly aware of this impossibility of evaluation. It echoes their awareness of the inability to be certain. Epistemology has become relative. Ethics too, undergoes a re-evaluation: I feel a lot less able to be morally righteous now than I used to be. The arena of activity of ethical clarity is very narrow. Most people are partial to... information. Most of us lack the imagination to make these judgements. Not that I am not prepared to judge. But anthropology has no unique claims or 'Special Knowledge' that can help us do so in general. But it requires more imagination than most people have to understand ethnography. Cultural differences 'are real', and misunderstandings related to these as well as those also at individual levels are not the root cause of our human condition and problem but always accompany all these problems. Anthropology can perhaps sort these things out. Misunderstandings need to be cleared up. Maybe this is anthropology's unique contribution. Yet these insights can be shed even by trained anthropologists with alarming rapidity. Look at the Quebec example. And I would suggest that objective knowledge of human relations is possible insofar as this knowledge can be manipulated. The knowledge of ad marketeers for example (1970s). Partiality, bias, and prejudice are necessary to judgement, value, and knowledge. However, the former may cloud understanding of the latter. This would occur from the point of view of an epistemological positivism. Yet within the ethical realm, both prejudice and knowledge exist side by side. Anthropological knowledge may be unique. It is not better. Anthropological knowledge can press towards dialogue. It alone cannot make us understand. 215 The ethics of such a stance are two-fold. First, anthropology can try to understand the reasons for cross-cultural misunderstanding. Second, such an understanding is itself what these anthropologists call anthropological knowledge. Ethics also must inform research. Very difficult fieldwork methodologically might exist in tandem with its questionable value. Such a combination makes such work all the more difficult ethically. Problematic fieldwork forced some speakers to rethink anthropological hubris: He was very demanding of especially what he called my schizophrenic qualities. Because he thought that I had a special insight into the field which helped me to develop myself in the area. Because he was very, very demanding... and I did not have the same education he did, or as...we were the ones who did fieldwork. So it was three years of day by day by every bloody day of fieldwork. I learned a lot about fieldwork. More than I ever needed to know. But it also instilled in me a sort of epistemic, or epistemological, I suppose, interest in what was this thing called fieldwork. I have never really let go of that... Well this was difficult, difficult difficult fieldwork. No New Guinea Highlands could be as difficult as this! I have to tell you. We were continually in bunches of doctors and nurses looking at terrible wounds, seeing children born, which is wonderful in one sense, but pretty horrible in another... and now I know I can actually deliver one if I had to! But the first time I went into a delivery room, as a fieldworker. I would never put people through this kind of fieldwork. I do not think ethnography justifies some of the most severe kinds of fieldwork people go through. I honestly do not believe we have rights to do these things. Because what comes out of it is miniscule in my opinion (1960s). The lack of valuable ethnographic data or text may be a reasonable complaint to make of an unethical undertaking. However, it betrays the positivist goal to actually do research to get data or text. The intercultural situation which occurs in the field produces a unique fusion of ideas. For some anthropologists, validity and value may be one and the same. One final quotation exemplifies a Euro-American yet intercultural situation: ...the significance of studying that was part of, I think, a good liberal, progressive modality. In that, and the values research as a sort of field was invented by people like Clyde Kluckhohn, who actually had a project called the Harvard Values Project. The first one of its 216 kind, at some point in the 1950s. Where they were doing a comparative study of the value orientations of five communities in the American southwest, including whites. Including two white communities. It was very innovative, one Mormon community and one I guess 'unmarked'. I am not quite sure, and it was not stupid. I mean it was weird in retrospect, but it was not stupid... I mean this is what made the replay of the Geisteswissenschaften happen around that time. That you are studying things for which you need tools which are not going to come directly out of quote 'scientific tradition'. Though interestingly enough what Kluckhohn and company did in the study was have lots of statistics, which did not make any sense at all, half of them. But they are there. But their solution to that was to keep that legitimacy. And that was probably deliberate at that time, was to quantify. Not that they did that much quantification... In my own mind one dimension at least for American anthropology of the normative... [and] symbolic interpretive end of things during that period was a move toward a kind of very loose idealism. This was seen as a way of avoiding nuclear holocaust. Which was a real alternative at the time (1960s). On the one hand, there was the ideological motivation of world peace. On the other hand, there was a scientific motivation to study human difference. These motivations are intimately related. Weber (1963 [1904]) warned against mixing these differently motivated spheres. Both science and ideology can claim to know what is right. Only the sphere of ideology, however, can decide the value of this claim for society. Data may be scientifically valid. These data may also be culturally valuable. However, such validity cannot take the place of value. Validity cannot produce value. Conversely, values cannot be scientifically validated. In terms of policy, therefore, it is instructive to see socio-cultural anthropology concerned with an ethics of survival not only for another set of values, but for its own. With the Values Project, Americanist anthropology came perhaps uncomfortably close to cultural relativism. Different cultures seem to be able to value similar, if not the same, forms of validity. This notion drives these anthropologists towards greater intimacy with other cultures. Yet this intimacy is also a form of domestication of the other. Epistemologically, anthropology may be subjecting what is unrecognizably other to that with which we are familiar. Ethically, anthropology may be the manner in which otherness is allowed to give gifts. These gifts are made recognizable by their representation in anthropologists' lives. 217 The following famous statement is an example of a particular epistemological and ethical debate in anthropology. It also sums up what makes that debate possible. I include it as an ethnographic statement. It emphasizes the importance held by speakers for ethics over epistemology. Geertz may be suggesting that the relativism of anthropological theory has a value. However, it is valuable only insofar as our ethics remain a valued relation within anthropology itself: The objection to anti-relativism is not that it rejects an its-all-how-you-look-at-it approach to knowledge, or a when-in-Rome approach to morality, but that it imagines that they can only be defeated by placing morality beyond culture and knowledge beyond both. This speaking of things which must needs be so, is no longer possible. If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home (Geertz 1984:276). This project takes Geertz's invitation seriously. Speakers thoughts about a the general construction of anthropological knowledge often find themselves ensconced with comments and ideas that hold an ethical purport. The culture of anthropological knowledge can be juxtaposed with the knowledge of anthropological culture. Themes that speakers addressed included personal and historical influences on anthropological knowledge construction, the uniqueness of anthropology, and the nature of human knowledge in general. Speakers suggested that anthropological knowledge served an ethical purpose rather than being either description or explanation. 218 CHAPTER FIVE - ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION -EDUCATING ANTHROPOLOGY All of these persons may be regarded by those in the Ph.D. rank as having been competitively selected out during the professional certification process. Some of these persons share this view as a self-image, and may reactively express to their peers a negative evaluation of the specialized standards of excellence that the professional 'elite' represent (Preston 1983:292). In this chapter, some of the literature organized within anthropology and education is discussed as the major ethical space for the dissemination of anthropological knowledge. This literature addresses ethical problems of teaching anthropology in institutions and as discourse and ethics. If knowledge in anthropology is shaped by its production in and for institutions, by those who are thoroughly institutionalized as holders of discourse, then how is this process reproduced and maintained? What are the ethics of such maintenance? Do ethics transcend the cultural boundedness of institutional and scientific knowledge? Before looking at one detailed example of an anthropological study of the academy, I want once again to review what some anthropologists themselves have said about the teaching of anthropology and anthropological knowledge as an ethical discourse, or having an ethical purpose. What is the value of anthropology and how is it constructed? Spindler (1974:279-310) provides a cross-cultural synopsis of both formal and informal inheritance practices of culture. Nash (1974:5-25) details the connections between education and anthropology. Carspecken (1996) has applied ethnographic fieldwork methods to the study of educational institutions. 8 6 It is not so much these general overviews which are of 86 For particular case studies of anthropological teaching within a variety of post-secondary institutions in North America see Breitborde 1989a:13; Mabe 1989:54; 59; Lee and Filteau 1983:215; 216; 217; Kemper 1989:19; 21-2; 24; 27; Reck and Keefe 1989:72; Sibley 1989:36; 38). Sutlive suggests that \"...the social sciences are problematic disciplines 'out-of-place to paraphrase Mary Douglas. Non-social scientists are never quite sure what we do, how we do it, or more important, why we do it\" (Sutlive 1989:102). He adds that this is reflected in the hierarchy of disciplines within institutions, and the more we assume an understanding of a discipline, the greater its status. Many case studies reflect the ambiguous character of anthropology within the university setting. O'Connell provides an interesting Canadian 219 interest, however, as actual case studies by, or personal accounts of, anthropologists inside and outside of Canada which present a discourse into which this dissertation fits. Aspects of Anthropology in Educational Institutions Anthropologists have commented upon education as first and foremost a process of training, whether in the professional and/or the disciplinary sense (Barrett 1979:381; Brown 1989:79; Kemper 1989:31; Polster 1992:269; Reck and Keefe 1989:75; Sutlive 1989:10). The concept of anthropology as a vocation in a kind of Calvinistic sense seems also to be well-known (Burridge 1983:311; Preston 1983:292; Tax 1988:2). Vocation gives the character of a calling or assignation to anthropology, and calls anthropologists to it as to a faith. A personal journey is what occurs for the student, even if the concept of vocation is sometimes masked by its technical sense: \"It seems that, even for the most vocationally oriented student, the questions they want anthropology to answer are the personal ones\" (Brown 1989:82). Wengle has commented on the extreme nature of some anthropologist's acceptances of their work (Wengle 1984:236).Wengle suggests that the concept of vocation is broad and nebulous enough to permit many versions of the life-project to find a home within it, and thus, within anthropology. He asks \"Where are the cultural symbols denoting renewal for the not quite yet certified anthropologist? Note that exactly the same question can be asked in different terminology: Where is the anchorage in which the initiate-anthropologist will embed his new sense of identity?\" (1984:228). Wengle suggests that vocation is a common response to these questions.87 example based upon the relative obscurity and assumed unimportance of anthropology for a higher education: \"Lord Beaverbrook was the Chancellor of the University and principle benefactor of the library. Even while resident in Britain, he demanded detailed and explicit justification for every volume purchased. His driving will was matched by Bailey's dogged independence which frequently led him to spend days writing learned and impassioned arguments for the inclusion of this or that volume\" (O'Connell 1990:21). &7 The individual nature of vocation is well reflected in publishing within the discipline. Rogge (1976) found that through an analysis of multiple authorship, or lack thereof, that anthropologists seem to be 'loners'. \"Fully 80% of the articles published in American 220 The divine quality of such an assignation is entirely lost in the realm of the social sciences. Kenny quotes Evans-Pritchard as saying: \"I have always taken it for granted that any contribution I have made to knowledge is not mine but God's through me\" (Kenny 1987:14). Leach satirically suggests that the Calvinist concept of the assignation may itself be assigned to certain anthropological schools of thought or of certain academic communities in general: ...while all sects of Calvinist origin assume that God has ordained a predestined distinction between the Elect and the Damned, the Unitarians are so certain that they themselves belong to the Elect that they never bother about the Damned. And that has been, very broadly, the position of the academic inhabitants of Oxford and Cambridge Universities throughout my lifetime. We know we are the Elect. What happens elsewhere is of no importance whatsoever (Leach 1984:10). It must be admitted that all university trained persons have something of the 'elect' about them, especially in those rare periods when it was both difficult to enter the institution and relatively easy to find employment upon successful completion of a university program. Firth adds to this elected feeling by describing his own genealogy: \"My father was a Methodist. The Firths go right back to John Wesley - my father's first name was Wesley. So I had this general church environment and behavioural ethos...\" (Firth, in Parkin 1988:329). Givens and Jablonski, in their 1995 survey of anthropology Ph.D's for the American Anthropology Association summarize a striking set of comments directed at students from professionals in the discipline. These comments surround the notion of vocation and explicate it from the native anthropologists point of view. They come as part of a series of points advising those who are considering a career in anthropology: Ultimately. Are you sure? be very sure that this is what you want to do. Know why you're doing it. Go for it only if you have a passion for anthropology and adventure. Do not enter it for the sake of a career - only for love of anthropology itself. Don't do this unless you are obsessed with the field and are willing to work for very little money. Weigh carefully your love for the profession versus your desire fo Anthropologist continue to be authored by individuals...\" (1976:837). 221 economic stability. Accept that a career in anthropology is more like and artist's career than a lawyer's. Study what you love and care about, and don't worry about the future... (Givens and Jablonski 1996:316). In spite of the romantic qualities of anthropologists' rhetoric, recent Ph.D's surveyed said that mentoring in the discipline, usually thought of as a key quality of the vocational journey was described as either poor or non-existent (1996:316-7). Given that the age of average completion for the Ph.D. in anthropology in North America is 40 years old, and the average elapsed time to completion is 8.4 years, students must be willing to donate a large part of their lives to the discipline without any guarantee of financial or other rewards once completed (1996:306). There is also a sense of idealism to be heard in voices surveyed by Givens and Jablonski which mixes well with the romance of anthropological rhetoric. Advice under the heading of tactics such as \"...do not go into debt to finance your graduate studies.\" and even \"Have fun and enjoy what you're doing\" might seem ridiculously naive. The Calvinist ethic and a form of communitarianism are also stressed in all aspects of advice: \"Work hard, focus early. Choose a program that encourages rapid progress. Establish social networks early. Get through the program quickly\" (1996:315). The vocational quality of anthropology as witnessed by many anthropologists in text and interview is not without its dangers. Robbins and De Vita warn that, because of its proselytory tack in pedagogy, \"we may vastly overstate the accomplishments of the discipline, and the arrangement, orchestration, and performance of the introductory course becomes more a theological exercise than an intellectually exciting encounter with human problems\" (Robbins and De Vita 1985:252; and see also Becker 1963 on 'crusades' in Stoddart 1979:87; 89). Effects egregious to the scientific and scholarly aspects of anthropology may follow. Two examples can serve. Reck and Keefe caution: \"Being the enthusiastic proselytizers that we are, we have rarely stopped to ask the question, 'What if some of the natives are actually converted and begin to practice, as converted natives are wont to do, a distorted version of our sacred belief system?' \" (Reck and Keefe 1989:68). Their example is as follows: 222 One of these faculty, who had a Ph.D. in English and who had taught with the anthropologist in one of the earlier core courses, told this anthropologists that he believed he had \"become an anthropologist\". When asked how this transition had occurred, the English professor referred to two books he had read, added to his experience in teaching a course with the anthropologist. This faculty member conceived of anthropology as a way of thinking and the posing of certain questions, a perspective with which many of us would agree. However, the fact that one must have something of substance to think about seemed of lesser importance (1989:71). Sutlive provides an account of another English faculty and administrator who became attracted by the anthropological 'message': \"From the beginning discussions, representatives of the social sciences have insisted that the students be taught social science methods. Who will teach them, we inquired. I will, the Director replied. Knowing him to be a Professor of 19th century English literature, we pressed on. How many course have you had in anthropology or sociology, or in social science methods? None, he responded, but I'll read up on them\" (Sutlive 1989:97). He later states, however, that the missionizing aspect of having a discipline with unique methods is a double edged sword when it comes to pedagogy.8 8 Sutlive intones somewhat sarcastically, \" 'What we have seen and felt and touched, declare we unto you', might be the description of our insistence upon participant-observation and intensive interviewing\" (1989:99). Indeed, it is fieldwork that not only shapes the kind of knowledge that anthropology boasts, but also the way in which it is taught. Fieldwork, as a prelude to both knowledge and pedagogy, constructs for anthropologists a kind of ethics (Beals 1982:16; Mead 1973:1; 15; Narayan 1993:675; Tax 1988:18; Wengle 1984:224; 230; 235; 238). Part of the constitution of anthropology is the field concept, and as such, what is good in anthropology, or good for it, can only be judged in relation to aspects of its constitution (Howes 1992:161). If the form of anthropological society partakes of the field, then how anthropologists think must at least be mediated by that form. Dissemination of that form can easily become formulaic if the anthropologist as teacher is 88 Tentchoff sums up: \"I turn a jaundiced eye to an anthropology that has produced its middle management missionaries\" (Tentchoff 1985:80). 223 forced by institutional restraints to shed intimacy with individual students (see Polster 1992:275 for a Canadian example). Mediation and balance seem essential to understand the necessary tension between, and fusion of, ethics and epistemology with which I have characterized anthropological knowledge (see also contributors to Huizer and Mannheim 1979). In the context of intercultural education, Mabe states that The basic problem for the anthropologist is to strike a balance between the role of teacher and the role of field anthropologist. This is a constant challenge. It would seem that anthropology is the discipline which can most effectively teach such an intercultural course. Our field training gives us the skills to mediate the cultural perceptions represented and the debates which come out of different cultural experiences. Our ethnographic knowledge enables us to draw the cross-cultural perspective when needed, even in cultures far outside our area specialties (Mabe 1989:57). These sentiments may be overbold for other anthropologists, struck more with the vast gulf of differences and implicit incommensurabilities that various cultures present to one another. Tentchoff suggests that such cross-cultural comparison may mask a rhetoric of control. Her fieldwork prompted a shedding of methods in the search for an ethics: \"I began to slough off the accumulated constraints of graduate training, the years of painful initiation into data gathering, the pretentious notions about objectivity and neutrality -the whole manual of professionalism. I struggled to emerge from the chrysalis fabricated by the world of the conquerors whose need to control everyone had given rise to institutions dedicated to 'studying others' \" (Tentchoff 1985:80). It seems that anthropological knowledge in its epistemological aspect might make an arrogant anthropologist, while within its ethical facet, the anthropologist is forced to remain humble. Tax: In concluding this account of my relations to North American Indians, I must say that I am always embarrassed to be thought knowledgeable of their ethnology and history. True, for four or five years as a student, I absorbed a great deal of specific knowledge about many groups on some topics and always tried to \"keep up\", but since I did not teach courses in the subject and did so many other things, this was a losing battle. What I do have is a sense of what Indian people feel about themselves and about us. I find that I cannot treat them, as once I could, as subjects of study (Tax 1988:15). 224 The movement from epistemological attributes to those ethical, without ever wholly negating the former, is perhaps a unique trait of anthropological knowledge.89 For many anthropologists, the ethical purpose of the existence of knowledge seems to become apparent for the first time in the field. Hence, the ethnographic lense may be turned toward any aspect of any culture in the hopes that it may reveal there too, a local ethics and a humane manner of understanding certain peoples. Given that the source culture of anthropology has a myriad of complex human problems, \"It becomes increasingly relevant to stay home and do our work on a different 'field'; in the process we can expose the cultural obliteration and underdevelopment which emanates from the developed world and affects people there and in the underdeveloped world\" (Brown 1985:137). Projects such as this one have examined part of the field of possibilities for some anthropologists in Canada, with a view to contributing to our self-knowledge. As with any fieldwork, \"Fieldworkers live as members of 'their' studied cultures; they react as humans, not as scholars. The securing of the anthropological identity accents the observation, the detached half of the dichotomy. It is in this combination of experiential richness with detached observation that the best anthropology is produced\" (Wengle 1984:240).The richness of experience and detached observation combine to produce a reflective quality which is the ground of ethics. Knowledge cannot act in and of itself. Only within the anthropologically rendered context of how knowledge is used, taught, and acted out can there be an 'authentic' anthropology. Given this, how do anthropologists characterize their own pedagogy? Comments directed at the ethnographic description of pedagogical routines ^ 9 Tax suggests that anthropological knowledge is not so much dependent on observations and explanations allied to scientific methods, but on a nebulous but somehow very 'human' intuition: \"What I learned that day about the Peyotists' view of their ceremony, about the nature of group discussion in an Indian assembly faced with a real issue, and about the sensitivity of Indians to a situation of aggression against an individual could come in other ways. But never I believe so convincingly. In anthropology we can't prove interpretations of behavior we see, but in this incident I was so overwhelmingly convinced... as to remove the doubt to quite another level\" (Tax 1988:15). 225 and institutions allow for both knowledge content and ethical purpose in ethnographic courses (Breitborde 1989a:7; 1989b:47; Brown :1989:78; 81; Mabe 1989:53; 56; Reck and Keefe 1989:75; Reich 1989:124; Robbins and DeVita 1985:251; Washburn 1983:5; 22). Mead's accounts of Boas' lecture material suggest that the general Boasian pedagogy which indirectly infused most of North American anthropology in the classroom already had the dual aspect of knowledge of and knowledge for, in the general enlightenment tradition (Mead 1959:35). Beals agrees epistemologically in stating that \"...I was and still am convinced that the main function of most undergraduate courses in anthropology is to serve other departments and contribute to general education. I have lately been appalled at the increasing number of undergraduate majors and the tendency toward professionalization of the undergraduate curriculum\" (Beals 1982:11-12). Breitborde suggests that this heritage of broad humanistic interdisciplinary pedagogy can fare well in the academic marketplace as both an idea and as a student-placement: This is, in a sense, an \"open market\" system for general eduction, often referred to as \"cafeteria approach\" in informal educational discourse. As intellectually unsatisfying as this may be for many of my colleagues (and for me), this is the larger educational context in which we function and against which we must balance our departmental requirements and program (Breitborde 1989b:46). As individual faculty members, anthropologists with whom I spoke were of one voice in airing their distress concerning lack of time. While Burridge suggests that more intimacy and greater variety may be the keys to a better pedagogy in anthropology in general, and in particular in advanced stages of professionalization, it is ironically the institutional constraints which both demand a liberal pedagogy in the first place and then harness its practice that give speakers in this project the most problems: \"We need to be able to visit students in the field; departmental duties might be organized more flexibly: teaching to a specified curriculum rather than an allocation of courses, for example, combined with flexible alternations of instructional and research tasks\" (Burridge 1983:316). Murphy also states that the amount of faculty time is the chief constraint, but it does not necessarily follow that more time would equal better teaching. Quantity does not mean 226 corresponding quality. \"As we are called upon to do more with less while at the same time increasing the quality of our interaction with students, we should - to adapt an old adage - teach smarter, not harder\" (Murphy 1994:324). The methods of smarter pedagogy are also addressed by adequate reflection by anthropologists in their pedagogic roles. Breitborde exhorts us to not so much go forth and multiply as to act as conscientious and skeptical memory for others prone to move too fast or without adequate reflection: \"...the future health of the profession is served not necessarily by the production of increasing numbers of anthropologists, but by the spread of an understanding and appreciation of anthropology among the non-anthropological public\" (Breitborde 1989b:52). This task must first begin with anthropology's students, who are both non-anthropological public and nascently aware of anthropology as a discourse. Breitborde poses some difficult but necessary questions for every pedagogue in anthropology. First, our students. We may surrender to a rising pre-professional concern and careerist orientation among our students by allowing ourselves to enjoy their lack of questioning about our programs and requirements, their submission to our \"gatekeeper\" roles. How many of our students understand the special position and tradition of anthropology relative to the sciences and humanities? How many of them can even begin to articulate definitions which distinguish the sciences from the humanities in general - or even identify the source of difficulties inherent in such a task? How reflective have we taught our students to be about the organization of their own field of study - this, the most reflective of the social sciences? (Breitborde 1989a:14). We may add that these same questions can just as readily be asked of ourselves. Akin to the parent-child bond, the teacher-student (and vice-versa) relationship is mutually obligatory but also implicatory. One of the ways in which this relationship can come alive is through dialogue. Reich suggests in an hermeneutic vein that \"Genuine dialogue requires that students be empowered in the authentic use of language: that is, the speaking and writing that not only tells their stories, but changes the world\" (Reich 1989:122). One action-oriented purpose of a kind of dialogue is to change the social structure of Western society. With a Freirean flavour, Reich continues: 227 I have decided that what I do is not \"value-centred\" education at all, but rather, \"meaning-centred\" education. And I have tried to make more explicit my goals in teaching in accord with this. I can, at best, give students glimpses of meaningful human life in context, in the contexts of nature, culture, and community. I have the advantage over my colleagues who do not use cross-cultural perspectives (though I do not claim only anthropologists do this) in that I can talk about cultures where communal life is still explicit and visible (Reich 1989:126). Applied or action anthropology often begins in the classroom, with a relatively captive audience. One must be cautious in mixing politics and science, ideology and epistemology. Some anthropologists, however, allow the vocational quality of their personal journeys to slide into their ideas of the ethical nature of their knowledge. This is not so much a tension, although it creates such, but, once again, what anthropological knowledge itself is. Tax clarifies some of the history of the understanding that anthropological knowledge might have this active or even activist component: \"Hitler, the war, and the Bomb had all played a part in turning me back to my earlier interest in social action and in the philosophical issues involved in the use of anthropological theory to benefit the people among whom we worked. Thus began what we have since called 'action anthropology' (Tax 1988:8). Brown suggests that in addition to being wary of the threats of ideological doxa, we can counter the strengths of competing ideologies by 'brokering' their sources: \"Since culture is the stuff of which anthropology is made, we as anthropologists are privileged in our ability to affect the current ideology of culture. By getting at the root of the causes of this ideology, we may even be privileged enough at rare moments to transform culture itself\" (Brown 1985:133). The danger here is of course the production of anthropologists who are themselves ideologues. Anthropology seems to rely heavily on its own version of relativism to prevent this from occurring. Is this, however, a facile reliance? The soft relativism of cultural anthropology, in both values and in knowledge, both ethics and epistemology, may have contributed to their fusion in such anthropological knowledge. The problematic relation between science and human action, between models of and models for, seems perennial for many anthropologists. How to teach these tensions within their 228 self-same discourse is also a major problem. \"I am wary of absolutist solutions. I remain convinced of the importance of the concept of cultural relativism, and, in fact, find it increasingly useful in deconstructing the voices of authority within American culture. So I am left wondering about the role of anthropology in a value-centred education\" (Reich 1989:122). The questioning of one's own values in the light of others' lifeways and cultural constructions of the world may, or may not, be enough to prevent monologue from filtering out voices of cultural difference in the classroom (Robbins and DeVita 1985:252). However, this does not mean that the soft relativism of the anthropological classroom gestates into an anarchic nexus of any and all ideologies at once: Neither I nor most of my colleagues tell students that \"anything goes\" but we try to understand the internal \"rationality\" of systems and why from the actors' point of view their actions make sense. Neither we nor our students view the burning of widows, or slavery, as just another quaint custom. Students ask why Mundurucu men gang-rape women, why the Sudanese practice such cruel female circumcision, and they also pass judgement. We make distinctions between knowing about other people and being faithful to our own ethical standards (Gabriel 1989:118). The differences between knowledge about something and knowledge transformed by acting upon it are not strictly anthropological. Anthropology, however, is perhaps most radically faced with the difference between truly knowing another cultural worldview and clinging to some understanding of Western ethics. At base, I think the problem may lie with anthropologists' relative lack of consciousness of the varieties of ethics within European experience, rather than the apparently shocking practices of those not in 'the West'. In teaching towards an ethics, anthropologists have been highly critical of various pedagogical strategies practiced both within and outside their discipline (Breitborde 1989a:9; Brown 1989:83; Daniels 1974:213; 216; Gabriel 1989:115; 116; Murphy 1994:323; Polster 1992:262; 275; Robbins and DeVita 1985:251; Sibley 1989:34; Sutlive 1989:99; 103; Srivastava 1993:87; Williams 1989:89). Srivastava claims that although anthropology is often thought to be, 229 or is performed as, a romantic pedagogy, it is not: \"Some anthropologists fancy exoticism. They achieve academic immortality by describing in romantic and not-so-easy-to-swallow expressions the strangeness (or bizarrerie) of a human community. Ironically, it is because of these anthropological writings that some societies have an unparalleled popularity\" (Srivastava 1993:85). The romance of anthropology is also caught between the notions of science and ethics. Reck and Keefe explain at length the problems that anthropologists feel when their science is perverted, and Reich speaks more generally about student's reactions to claims which are directly ethical in nature. First, the knowledge of anthropology is rewritten not merely by romantically inclined anthropologists, but by non-anthropologists who, it must be admitted, had to get their ideas from somewhere. That somewhere, of course, is our own work in our own discipline. The following discusses a likely result: Yet, the faculty providing this general education possessed no formal training in anthropology. Indeed, this was a situation which the Anthropology Department could both love and hate: some of the natives had been converted to the value of our discipline, something for which we had all long worked, but rather than remain as members of the congregation, they had put on the robes of the priest and priestess. The robes were ill-fitting. Ample informal evidence accumulated through casual discussions with Watauga College faculty and students that the anthropology that they were teaching and learning was frequently shallow, incomplete and, often, just simply wrong... The interdisciplinary faculty found it difficult to understand our concerns since they thought that we should be overjoyed that they were spreading the gospel, even if it was a bit watered-down. They also found it surprising that anthropologists, who were in so many ways the paragons of an interdisciplinary mentality, could be offended at their attempts to emulate us. Equally surprising to us was their view that they had acquired the essence of anthropology in their spare time (Reck and Keefe 1989:72-3). Anthropology, like any other academic discipline, becomes one's profession through years of intensive work, including more often than not, a particular kind of fieldwork. As was discussed in the section above, however, epistemology becomes equated with identity and academic territory, both of which anthropologists in this example may have seen as being infringed upon by relative outsiders. 230 There is also an implicit sense that the non-professional student of anthropology must indeed remain just that, unless officially sanctioned by terminal degrees from accredited departments. As well, ethical claims, when attached to pedagogic statements in anthropology can be seen as irrelevant or subversive. Reich recounts that it is students, this time, who reject infringements upon their personal worldviews that anthropology is likely to make. Students often think that moral judgements are individual and relativistic. This may be an ironic residue of anthropology's own teaching of cultural relativism. Reich states that \"...the majority of my students who will sit quietly listening to anything that is the Truth, and to most things that are clearly marked as Just My Opinion, but who will balk at moral assertions\" (Reich 1989:123). such students evidently misunderstand the relationship between ideology, morality, and knowledge. The polarity between scientific knowledge and individual opinion leaves out two important facets. One is the anthropological idea that it is belief systems, shared values that are communicated amongst individuals to form a community, exist as a major portion of anthropologists call 'culture. Two is that scientific knowledge also presents a certain moral order, and may also be used to inform ethical claims and action. Anthropology does not always go very far in enlightening students regarding these areas of grey in human culture and knowledge. Williams suggests that introductory textbooks are villains in this arena, in that they present both a clinical view of other cultures, and a 'great man' view of the history of the discipline (Williams 1989:89-90). In their partial survey of Canadian anthropologists Lee and Filteau discovered much disappointment which hinged on problematic and potentially shallow pedagogic involvement with the ethical aspect of anthropological knowledge. This hands-off approach threatened the anthropological nature of that knowledge: \"The survey of attitudes towards the teaching of anthropology in Canada has merely scratched the surface and much work remains to be done. In searching the literature for this paper we found a profound lack of self-examination and self-reflection on the part of Canadian anthropologists compared to their colleagues in most other 231 disciplines. We hope more and better work of this kind will be carried out\" (Lee and Filteau 1983:229). They also suggest that education in general must be a space of critical thought directed at one's own society. Anthropology is seen as being the perennial gadfly of education practices: \"We believe that the classroom is an appropriate forum for the discussion of these issues and would like to see more in the future. To do otherwise, to remain silent, and to hide behind the impartiality of the 'objective scientist' is in our view, a cop-out. The increasingly difficult times we live in require an aware, educated citizenry\" (1983:230). Once again, the dynamic nexus of epistemology and ethics promotes a pedagogy which both informs intellectually and exhorts to action. Scientific professionalism and knowledge of a particular subject area may be cloaks for either closet ideologies or, in the language of Lee and Filteau, cloaks for facile protection against the problems of ideology. Daniels argues that the claims of professional rhetoric that underlie pedagogy must not be taken for granted, and can also be subject to research (Daniels 1974:212). Preston goes further when he states: Specialization is structurally expedient, and to be bluntly contentious about it, this encourages a characteristic of ego-serving careerism, at the cost of a more open and effective engagement with empirically informed problems and goals... Why should professional relativists have so much trouble tolerating each other? becoming a bureaucratic elite with a traditional ethos of relativism seems to have aroused an unbecoming and somewhat defensive self-righteousness, a thinly pretentious view of the profession,, and of one's own deserved place in it.... Personally I regard this as a pernicious, least-common-denominator view that is real only to the extent that we cynically give up one ourselves and our discipline (Preston 1983:293). A number of speakers in this project agreed with these claims. It may be possible that one of the differences between what the natives say and what they do in the academy in general falls along these lines. Radical education is sometimes defined by the mere taking seriously one;s rhetorical claims of the critical nature of an educated mind. If faculty are caught in an institutional milieu partially of their own making, then students will experience manifestations of this in their own education: \"Today's majors are not so much experiences in depth as they are bureaucratic conveniences: they allow 232 the professors to indulge in their professional preoccupations and they allow the Dean to control the flow of student traffic\" (Breitborde 1989a:8). Mabe outlines some of the confines anthropology undergoes within an institutional structure: \"Small budgets and FTE's [full-time-equivalents] necessitate redefining the role of anthropology courses on campus. We must either become generalists and interdisciplinary or see courses cut from the curriculum\" (Mabe 1989:58). This is especially true of smaller campuses. Polster suggests that faculty have less power to operate at the administratorial level, in order to further the changes they wish to see take place. In an atmosphere charged with market relevance', liberal studies which include anthropology will and have suffered. \"Finally, the general disempowerment of the professoriate in North American universities also works to the advantage of administrations as many academics become intimidated and are less willing to take up an assertive stance\" (Polster 1992:267). Drops or increase in enrollment cause problems for programs. Budget conscious universities often take a short term view, basing hiring and part-time employment on current class sizes, without reviewing the history of such, or the present demographic trends. A review of the literature finds cycles of plaintiffs from anthropologists going in both directions, depending on whether or not class sizes are increasing or decreasing. Murphy adds that class sizes can increase even if enrollment decreases, but the opposite almost never occurs: \"If increased teaching duties and larger classes are in store for many of us, and if we also continue to be evaluated principally on our research productivity, then it is unrealistic to expect that methods which substantially add to the travail of professors are very likely to be widely adopted\" (Murphy 1994:326). The problematic relationship between teaching and research attests to the fact that within the institution, anthropological knowledge is not a fusion of pedagogy and field, as it is one of epistemology an ethics. Polster argues: Consequently, professors have less time to spend with a growing number of of students and less time to devise innovative strategies to overcome the barriers to radical education. Those professors who take the time by neglecting their own research risk jeopardizing their promotions if they are tenured and possibly their careers if they are not (Polster 1992:266). 233 Sibley agrees when he states that \"While what I call 'pietistic' calls are made for excellence in teaching and in service, it is widely believed that the principal financial rewards are provided for those with the longest publication lists...\" (Sibley 1989:40). Speakers in this project generally agreed with these sentiments, yet were often forced to practice against their wishes in the 'publish or perish' environment of the North American university system. Critiques directed at teaching in particular are inevitably linked to critiques directed by anthropologists against the institution, where most of the teaching of anthropology takes place (Burridge 1983:319; Carroll et al 1992:10; Lee and Filteau 1983:218; Kemper 1989:31; 32; O'Connell 1990:6; 9; Polster 1992:263; 271; Preston 1983:291; Sibley 1989:40). Criticisms run the gamut of taking to task corporate and capitalist intrusions into the university (Polster 1992:264), to the tensions between anthropology departmental level decisions and those of the administration and other departments: \"...the department must teach enough to keep the administration from being preoccupied with 'low' enrollments (with the consequent possibility of cutting faculty slots or graduate student support funds), while not teaching so many students as to upset other departments...\" (Kemper 1989:30). The very existence of an institution creates both in-groups and out-groups in anthropology. Preston suggests that both vertical and horizontal conflicts divide anthropologists and create petty political debates within the discourse: Many individuals are drawn into relations of structural competition, within specialties or within academic ranks, and also between contrasting views of anthropology that appear to constitute a major, assymetric dual division, roughly along the lines of \"pure\" vs. \"applied\" orientations. This major opposition is psychologically real for some, but not for others, and its structural reality is certainly in question, or disputation (Preston 1983:293). There are many pedagogical implications for the stoking of political feuds within anthropology. In Canada, Preston suggests that \"If God forbid, we persist in the direction of greater value on specialization in research and 234 especially in graduate training, we run the real risk of throwing the coming two decades of new graduates away\" (Preston 1983:294). In the course of my own research, I saw no evidence that this direction had significantly changed. New niches which may be obscure now but would be unthinkable decades ago are created almost with the induction of each new doctoral student. Canadian universities do have, however, a history of radicalizing their institutions just enough to be different from their American and British and French influences. Preston quotes A.G. Bailey on the latter's own initiatives to rid Canadian universities in general of some sources for petty and personal power politics: And once when a C.A.U.T. [Canadian Association of University Teachers] deputation came to me with the suggestion of abolishing deans, I said certainly, if you will also abolish heads of departments. Some of them were Heads (as I was also, as well as being Dean) but they looked at me in astonishment. But I meant it. Deans could only suggest, but Heads had the power of life and death over the members of their respective departments. I suggested doing away with all academic distinctions, while retaining salary differentials based on length of service and merit (Bailey, in Preston 1983:295). These radical suggestions serve to highlight other possible sources for division and distraction within anthropology departments. If much of disciplinary and publishable anthropological debate gets constructed within such institutions, then such debate will suffer constraints which have little direct import on the nature of anthropological knowledge either as epistemology or ethics. In fact, a lack of both knowledge and action in certain realms may promote the general demise of the power of anthropological thought, which is often cast as being radical to other enlightenment projects. An Ethnography of the Educational Institution: Bourdieu My project witnessed an anthropology replete with these conflicts, which are also alluded to or confronted in some of the literature. Speakers, however, were often more candid about personal problems and narrated actual events with themselves as actors to emphasize problematic relations 235 within theoretical debates, and between anthropologists. For reasons of anonymity none of these are reproduced below in identifiable form. That they exist, however, points to a culture fraught with unresolved political tension. Such tension and its sources are similar enough to the structures of academic life in other disciplines and in other countries, that, for the purposes of breadth of analysis, I include a synopsis of some of Bourdieu's work on the university. Pierre Bourdieu's (1988 [1984]) ethnography of French academic culture is the third text I will examine and review in some detail. In it, he attempts to categorise the ultimate culture of classification, that of the academy, which gives him his title Homo Academicus. As an anthropology of professional practice and custom of some anthropologists takes place within the academic system, it is germane to discuss a number of points from Bourdieu's work. \"... my sociological analysis of the academic world aims to trap Homo Academicus, supreme classifier among classifiers, in the net of his [sic] own classifications.\" (Bourdieu 1988:xi [1984]). There are many problems peculiar to such a reflexive analysis. Bourdieu aims to confront not only those epistemological but also those personal with his study. Such a study is at once ethnology, using direct observation, interviews, and of course participant observation, but it also strives to be 'objective', through the use of statistical measures, analysis of correspondences and media, and formal questionnaires. Bourdieu runs the gamut of current social science techniques90, and this is necessary here above all other places, because the place is such a familiar one: Only a sociological analysis of this kind, which owes and concedes nothing to self-indulgent narcissism, can really help to place the scholar in a position where he is able to bring to bear on his familiar world the detached scrutiny which, with no special vigilance, the ethnologist brings to bear on any world to which he is not linked by the inherent complicity of being involved in its social game, its illusio, which creates the very value of the objectives of the game, as it does the value of the game itself (Bourdieu 1988:xii [1984]). One must beware of underestimating the enculturation of the 9 0 Bourdieu also thus figures as an archetype for the kind of epistemological tension that is reflected in much current anthropological work, and in the statements by participating anthropologists on theories of knowledge and their validity in anthropology, as shown below. 236 anthropologist in the social sciences if one undertakes to study that very process of becoming a professional and thence maintaining that professionalism. Rabinow (1977) perhaps goes further than Bourdieu with his collection of cautionary tales whose moral underlined the idea that fieldwork itself could also be a subject for study. Bourdieu (1988 [1984]), however, describes in part the process in which ideas like fieldwork get invented, who shares their value, and why of course they are valuable at all. Bourdieu agrees with Latour (1987) in his analysis of how value is produced in the academy and in the sciences in general: The margin of autonomy which ultimately devolves to the specifically political sources of the production of opinions then varies according to the degree to which the interests directly associated with their position in the academic field are directly concerned or, in the case of the dominant agents, threatened (Bourdieu 1988:xviii [1984]). Since he feels that such a study of oneself and others like one could be seen as a threat to, an expose of, or other unwanted irritation within the academy and by scholars, Bourdieu must be careful to keep himself aloof from charges of 'sour grapes' and the like. Why would one be motivated to take on such a project? What enmities may lie under the guise of scientific research? Bourdieu is quick to respond in an anthropological tone - this is a culture like any other. The book is not entirely convincing in this respect, however, and its reliance on the statistical suggestions of sociological analysis make one suspect that Bourdieu also knows in some sense too much' about why he is studying what he is. In fact, he comes to see this study as a resonance of the 1968 'revolution' which shook the French academic world, and changed it at least a little bit: A crisis affecting an institution which has the function of inculcating and imposing forms of thought must weaken or ruin the social foundations of thought, bringing in its wake a crisis of faith, a veritable, practical epoche of doxa, which encourages and facilitates the appearance of a reflexive awareness of these foundations (Bourdieu 1988:xxv [1984]). 237 In other words, Bourdieu's study is allowable, in the Foucauldian (1970 [1966]) sense, by the epistemological rupture in the political and academic system that occurred in post-war France, manifesting itself dramatically in a particular year. The book suggests that regions of political classification built upon the foundations of social and economic conditions of a particular period, are mimicked by their appearance in and as levels of knowledge. If one breaks the former, the latter will also be subject to change: ...the 'classification' produced by the scientific work through the delineation of regions in the space of positions is the objective ground of the classificatory strategies through which the agents aim to preserve or modify the space. ...the scholarly construction of 'objective' space of agents and of operative properties tends to replace a global and confused perception of the population of the 'powerful' with an analytic and reflexive perception... (Bourdieu 1988:18 [1984]). The background to academic regionalism is not what is found by scientific study of it, but how science works for the academicians so that they can fill up the space created, like selling condos and then building them. Bourdieu risks the objective in order to find out why the idea of the objective is necessary to later constructions of academic 'elites' and why it allows such a powerful playing of power relations game. One of the major modes of making such movements work in the academic milieu is through the enculturation process of the trainee. Bourdieu studies this process in depth and offers the following conclusion. Any student will immediately recognize it as also part of his or her situation: In all the situations where power is hardly or not at all institutionalized, the establishment of durable relations of authority and dependency is based on waiting, that is , the selfish expectation of a future goal, which lastingly modifies, that is, for the whole period that the expectation lasts - the behaviour of the person who counts on the thing expected; and it is based also on the art of making someone wait, in the dual sense of stimulating, encouraging or maintaining hope, through promises or skill in not disappointing, denying or discouraging expectations, at the same time as through an ability to inhibit and restrain impatience, to get people to put up with and accept the delay, the continuing frustration of hopes, of anticipated satisfactions intrinsically suggested behind the promises or encouraging 238 words of the guarantor, but indefinitely postponed, deferred, suspended (Bourdieu 1988:89 [1984]). The degree, the job, the position etc., are the common 'things expected' and wanted, and the Derridean words at the end of the quote suggest that this waiting game is really the academic version of la differance. This includes the use of language in its ambiguous role which is a role tailor made for the ambiguity that is necessary to keep some people dependant on others. Other findings are perhaps more unfamiliar to the student, and kept so by their status as either 'unmentionables' or as statements which, if they are so mentioned, are counted as irrelevant to academic procedure and scientific investigation. Bourdieu instead finds them to be quite relevant, more so than intellectual ties: \"In short, the intellectual affinities between the major heads and their clients are much less evident than the social affinities which unite them.\" (1988:93 [1984]). It does not matter what the dissertation is about, according to the academic liberal, because the 'client' has already shown the supervisor that they are of the right stuff to continue. This can be a function of their past upbringing - Bourdieu cites type of schooling, Paris Postal Districts, parental friends and other professional contacts - to go on to matriculate and find a job. This discussion leads to the process of promotion. This process has a similar structure as does the lower levels of the hierarchy in which the student is ensconced and within which the candidate must be delimited in her or his intellectual pursuits. In fact, such a circumscription of the intellect is not only encouraged by the indoctrination of a certain systemic or bureaucratic ideology, Bourdieu forcefully argues that it is a necessity if the academy as we know it is to survive. Thus, ...the surest guarantee of academic order, inextricably social and scientific, doubtless lies in the complex mechanisms whereby promotion towards the summit of the temporally dominant institutions goes hand in hand with progress in academic initiation, marked, in the case of the medical faculties, by successive competitive examinations (which, as one observers notes, postpone until very late true initiation into the scientific methods of the laboratory), or, in the case of the arts faculties, by the long wait for the doctorate, that is, in both cases, by an 239 enforced prolongation of the dispositions which have been acknowledged through the primitive procedures of co-optation, and which hardly encourage heretical breaks with the artfully intertwined knowledge and power of academic orthodoxy (Bourdieu 1988:105 [1984]). Hence safety in numbers and in-group ideologies are at work in making boundaries, sometimes called 'gatekeeping', that prevent not only the wrong social class (this situation is ameliorated to some extent in North America when compared with France) from becoming 'one of us'. As well, and perhaps more importantly here and less so in France, the wrong intellectual element must be weeded out. This is so, Bourdieu says, because the particular ideology of this 'in-group' wishes to conserve a special set of emotions relating to the security they feel they have in a larger society. Although they seem more unhappy, as Bourdieu notes below, with their place in society than that society might guess, society at large nonetheless tolerates and abets the building of this secular advantage over the remainder of the cultural tenants91. The academy is of course a culture within a culture, while being an ethnic and gender enclave as well. But more importantly, the academy is where in a great degree culture is produced for its own consumption. Hence, the academic institution has a great deal of control over its tenants and their actions, even more so than the 'average capitalist worker' or market consumer. Academic culture is marked by its own culture; one in which producers work to be reproducers, training replacements like cogs in an ambiguous machine. Ambiguous, because it does not need to mass produce on the intellectual front - despite the solidarities of journal article publishing - quite as much as it is necessary to mass produce intellectuals themselves. Bourdieu discovers that what they do afterword is not always set in stone. He examines thousands of peoples curriculum vitae and their student's theses topics. He finds that academy has a place for eccentrics. It is, however, a 9 1 Signs that this tolerance has reached its apogee provide many speakers with their ability to critique the academy, as shown below, in terms of its relevance to society or more general and less 'theoretical' problems. In other words, the construction of a different ethics is now seen to be at stake. 240 marginalized place, like the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, 6th section, where the likes of Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, and Bourdieu himself have been ensconced, safely away from the Sorbonne's academic professors of philosophy and the arts. In Canada, the college system may serve a similar role. Here, most speakers felt that the teaching quality was better and the mind more open. Both of these factors were deemed due to the lack of pressure to publish disciplined knowledge in a disciplined manner; to reproduce discursive wisdom in discursively sanctioned media like 'flagship journals'. Bourdieu describes these 'feelings' and 'emotions' that encourage one to fall into the academic safety net at length,, interpreting from interview responses. He sums up: Academics (and, more generally, the members of the dominant class) have always been able to afford to be at once infinitely more satisfied (especially with themselves) that we would expect from an analysis of their position in their specific field and in the field of power and infinitely more dissatisfied (especially with the social world) that we would expect from their relatively privileged positions (Bourdieu 1988:114 [1984]). So Homo Academicus has been trained to takes what s/he can get in the system and even accept this. Regarding the outside world, however, there is no barrier to will and want. Perhaps, although Bourdieu does not go this far, this difference in standards is also systemically inculcated to provide an outlet for revolutionary motives and emotions, which might otherwise bring down the system of enculturation. In other words, complain to the government, to the parents, to the public education system, to the corporation, but never at least directly, bite the hand that feeds you. This hand guarantees a place for what otherwise, looking at society as a whole, might be a person with little redeeming social value or useful skills. Bourdieu does suggest that many people are in the academy because they are not very good for anything else. In the meantime, one must ask with Bourdieu for greater detail in how this process occurs. What allows for the 'transference' of dissatisfaction, if it is 241 so? Homo Academicus gives many examples, but I will examine just four which can take the form of definitions of what the institutional ideology is looking for, and what it hopes to construct if it is not there in the first place: The good pupil is the one who, adapting to the rhythms of the system, knows when he is late or early, and acts in consequence to keep his distance or reduce it; similarly, the proper professor is the one who, having entered at the right age, always knows when he is too young or too old to apply or claim a post, a favour or a privilege (Bourdieu 1988:144 [1984]). [This] establishes simultaneously the right of succession and the duties of the successor; it inspires aspirations and assigns them limits; it offers the young an insurance which, being of the same order as the assurances offered, implies patience, recognition of the distance [to] and therefore the security of the elders (Bourdieu 1988:153 [1984]). In addition, the agents themselves have a psychological stake in becoming party to the very mystification of which they are the victims - according to a very common mechanism which persuades people (no doubt all the more so, the less privileged they are) to work at being satisfied with what they have and with what they are, to love their fate, however mediocre it may be (Bourdieu 1988:167 [1984]). It is the same system of classification which continues to function throughout an academic career, which is a strange obstacle race where everyone classifies and everyone is classified, the best classified becoming the best classifiers of those who enter the race (Bourdieu 1988:217 [1984]). If one conforms to the process, one is marked for advancement only in so far as the system itself needs replacement parts. Yet this is the only method of advancement, to be at the right place at the right time as defined by who you know and who knows of you. All of the anthropologists participating in this study underwent a similar process. There is small leeway for deviations to this course, even if one may come back and try it again some other day. There are, however, only so many chances given. The context of the socialization of these particular cultural actors as one finds in the academy is above all accomplished by communication of certain values. These values only have meaning within the selfsame context that created them, and is continued by their re-creation. Hence, We only ever preach to the converted. The power of academic euphemism is absolute only when it works on agents selected in such a 242 way that the social and academic conditions of their production dispose them to recognize it absolutely (Bourdieu 1988:208 [1984]). Once again, any statement cannot exist in a vacuum, and is transformed and is transforming depending on what happens to it after it is stated. If the context of a statement's existence is gradually prepared on a global scale by the building up of a network of supporting statements, then belief in them will easily follow. Yet anthropologists in this study did not evidence a complete indoctrination into the effects of the academic system. A major ethical stance which many took was based in the recognition that anthropology, as an academic discipline, perhaps had a unique ability to disturb the complacency of the educational institution in which itself is ensconced. Some of the participants, as can be seen below, work and teach towards such a displacement. In doing so, the tension between the validity of anthropological knowledge and the value of that knowledge for a way of life or mode of being is brought forward to its greatest extent. The juxtaposition between education and anthropology is detailed throughout published discourse in Canada and elsewhere. Speakers' comments are used to elicit the problematic relationships amongst teaching, doing fieldwork, and writing about anthropology. A n ethnography of the educational institution in which all speakers were ensconced may provide insight into the professionalization practices inculcated in the culture of the academic institution. Within this institution, factors influence the construction of anthropological knowledge in such a manner as to help create and reproduce a tension between epistemology and ethics, as well as an ambiguity between what knowledge is considered valid and generalizable, and what kind of knowledge is valuable for an ethical life. 243 CHAPTER SIX - INSTITUTIONS AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE Of course, going to meetings gives you a chance to see people and to identify real people with some of the writings and theories behind them (1960s). Students have too much of their own agendas these days, not caring too much either for knowledge or the university (1970s). This chapter will focus on speakers' comments about institutions and their effect on knowledge construction in anthropology. What kinds of constraints were imposed on scholars who worked in institutions? Speakers said the institutional context is a major factor in the production of anthropological knowledge. This may be ironic because of the traditionally defined space of anthropology as being away from home, in the field. Here, I will suppress my voice to its most minimal. This chapter presents cultural memory of which I have no direct experience. Darnell suggests that a brief introduction to any ethnohistory of anthropology might use a great-person idiom. However, a study that involved \"...institutional and research emphases would produce a more balanced view of the emergence of Canadian anthropology\" would be more welcome (Darnell 1996:6).92 The horizon of this history is still relatively shallow. Academic teaching of anthropology did not begin until 1925. This occurred at the University of Toronto. Yet speakers often portrayed themselves as cut from the whole cloth of history. Anthropologists identified with both their discipline and the cultures it studies. With that in mind, five major areas can, however, be identified. They will be dealt with in the following order: 1) These comments dealt with the general atmosphere of famous anthropological institutions. These include departments or schools which speakers felt were important to mention. 2) These comments were directed at or describing particular personalities or individuals. Such persons inhabited institutions at various times. They were either personally formidable in some manner, or else were 9 2 At its broadest demographically, this horizon may be very shallow historically, as one speaker suggested simply: \"I see myself as being part of the first and last generation of Canadian anthropologists.\" (1980s). 244 represented not by themselves as people, but as discursive personae. They were an important influence for speakers' opinions on the content and place of anthropology. 3) These comments concerned textbooks and other course content. Speakers' felt that institutions circumscribed and defined some intellectual content for them. Such institutions were not necessarily academic. These limits left speakers with less space to teach or work in anthropology. 4) These comments have to do with a general history of anthropology. This was seen as a changing space of institutional knowledge and debate. Finally, 5) Speakers' thoughts on the changes they identified as being important over the course of their journeys in anthropology and as anthropologists are noted. Many of these changes are related to both theory and epistemology. Speakers suggested that they had only local knowledge of a larger discourse. Each speaker occupies a certain locus of anthropology. These loci are defined by institutions. Such a definition includes the academic employment market, particular departments of anthropology, and publishing houses. Such concerns are dominant in the day to day construction of anthropological knowledge. They seem to outweigh concerns about theory and epistemology in anthropology. Institutional Atmospheres: Schools and Departments I will begin with some examples regarding the structure of famous anthropology departments. Speakers did not recite a history of anthropology. Instead, the comments are personal and casual. They have a larger than life tone because the places discussed are important to anthropology. Not all speakers began in anthropology. In fact, more than half of these speakers did not. Chemistry, physics, art, music, philosophy, history, literature, linguistics, archaeology and economics are all disciplines more or less forsaken in the quest for something different. The following examples are fairly typical: I did not start out to be an anthropologist, and I think it is fair to say that I never had an anthropology course. I do not mention that very often! I would classify myself as an anthropologist through what I 245 have been through at this point after being for 25 years in a department of anthropology. A department that hired me... and then forgot that I was not an anthropologist and started me off teaching first year courses and the ethnography of the... which I felt very comfortable teaching. But it has been a process of 25 years of becoming what I was supposed to be. Admittedly that is probably not resulted in the things I might have thought it would. But one would presume that there would be a real sense of impostor syndrome there. And the fact is that I feel very much like an anthropologist who has risen through the ranks in the same way that other students do and I am now delighted to be deeply into all of the kinds of intellectual and personal issues that anthropologists are into (1960s). Perhaps more typically such changes may start earlier in one's professional career: Q: Did philosophy give you any kind of leg up on other disciplines do you feel, or was there a particular event or moment that gave you the hint that there must be other world views than that western, or a fundamental western one? Things like that? Well I suppose as you do philosophy courses and wonder about Greek thought and thought in general... you sort of start to wonder, just what kind of line are you being fed by these philosophers. Surely there must be other people in the world besides the Greeks who can think! And I read a book at that time by a philosopher. Sort of a popular book discussing Greek art and so forth, and indicating that Greek art was the finest in the world, and Greek painting was excellent. And then this author indicated that it was really a tragedy that we do not have any examples of Greek painting! So, one gets a little skeptical about how great it is if one cannot actually see it. She [said] the Greeks told us how great it was. Well! (1960s). Anthropology was seen as being more critical and open-ended than philosophy. Anthropology could question better what we accepted at face-value about our own culture. However, questioning the native's point of view regarding 'western' culture allowed some anthropologists not to question the native point of view about the non-west. Many speakers found anthropology only available as a graduate degree. However, today these mere courses also seem larger than life: A few of us in the anthropology program took Clyde Kluckhohn's social anthropology course, which was another wonderful 246 thing to do. It was he who was the head of the department then and defined as a great man... One of the books I had read informally was one of his because he wrote popular books. And here was the great man himself in the flesh you know, and I was taking his graduate course yet! With a couple of friends... who were undergraduates. So we reinforced each other because that environment was a very highly competitive, highly charged graduate students. It was a very large class... and they were trying to out do each other and would argue with each other and show how wonderful they were. And there were three or four of us who were undergraduates so we were just doing it for fun, really, and so we were playing sort of ethnographer to the graduate students and Kluckhohn loved it. I mean, he sort of favored the undergraduates. The fact that we were there was something of a surprise. But one of the things that made that course interesting was that you had to read a work in a foreign language every week and write an essay on it that you presented to him... So you learned a lot in the field of anthropology and parts of anthropology you never knew existed very quickly or you failed the course! (1960s). Speakers came into anthropology from other disciplines. However, they also entered the discipline in vastly different institutional structures. This meant that they could be outsiders to anthropological knowledge. They could do so in a manner made more rare by contemporary programs. Hence even those mildly interested in anthropology could feel a kind of ethnographic experience. They watched, learned, and asked, \"What is this culture about?\". They discovered that the flavour of anthropology was constructed in part by disciplinary reproduction. As well, competition amongst students created a certain kind of atmosphere. Later, one speaker was directed on a certain course due in part to the rhetoric of great institutions: There was a general agreement that Chicago was the place to go for graduate education because one... specialist who had worked in... the community I studied at was... a Harvard graduate who was part of the same mafia. And that was what developed the connection with Chicago. And again lots of people were applying to graduate institutions in those days. But there were a lot of openings in graduate institutions and there was funding for graduate institutions. Not everybody got funding, but there was a lot of it going around (1960s). As well, the structure of personal connections with those on the inside is important. The inside track was even more important if available graduate spaces were rare. For example: 247 Well, I went into anthropology with a book and several publications already... and as I said I was very grateful to get in. And you did not get in only because of your academic record. I guess mine was good enough. But you got in if you had money to support you. They did not want to take anybody who did not have money. And the year I got in, twenty-three people got in and 500 and something applied! Many of these must have fallen off because they did not have the background or the money or fell off because they did not have support. Berkeley wanted to make sure that they did not let anyone in who was not going to be supported financially. Luckily I did not have that problem... And we had to list whom we wanted to work with on our application form and I put down... and he seemed quite interesting. And I felt that this was the only person that I wanted to work with no one else was as important (1960s). The old adage about many being picked and few chosen applies well to famous graduate schools. On the other hand, some speakers were chased away from famous schools. They attended those less prestigious because of what this very fame did to some of the universities' tenants. One particularly detailed example is cited here: I had a really bad experience in Canadian anthropology, unfortunately. I was accepted at the two biggest, then anyways, doctoral programs, Toronto and McGill and they were jerks. Absolute complete jerks! Toronto sent me a form letter, kind of like this, except very faded, in which it said, 'Dear'. And then there was a line and someone had scrawled in my name, and then it went on da-da da-da, and said I was accepted. Then it said 'your advisor will be', and there was a line again and someone had scrawled a name of one of the faculty there, and did not offer me a cent or anything. McGill sent me a letter that said you know I was accepted but they did not have any funding for me. And that they would probably never have any funding for me! I did not even respond to Toronto, because I thought that this was just really insulting, a dirty little form letter. Well, that is Toronto arrogance for you, right? Well at McGill I wrote back and I told them that you know, you did not offer me any money and I am broke. I just finished my M.A. I cannot afford to do a Ph.D. without funding. So things like that. And the chair of the department phoned me up at home, and said 'Well, do not be so hasty, because what we do here is we look at our incoming class and we get our acceptances and we do not offer money to anybody, and we see who will come without funding, and those who said they will come without funding then we offer them the money'! And I said, and I got really angry with this guy and said 'You are fucking with people's lives here!' 'I have already made a decision and made some other commitments based on this stupid letter'! (1980s). 248 The politics of various departments always contributed to the construction of anthropological knowledge. What kinds of theories could be discussed? Would epistemology be an issue? Basic disciplinary knowledge might even be lacking at some famous institutions: ...a few years ago anyway I [went] to Houston, to Rice University. I was always looking to go along to some place that would be intellectually interesting but would be a departure from the kinds of things I had been doing. I knew about Marcus and Fisher being at Rice and they were at that time there was a lot of talk about post-modern anthropology and so on and so forth. So I thought it would be kind of fun to hang out with those guys. I knew the department was very interdisciplinary, so I did that and went down there for a year. It is a peculiar department. I felt that they had become so interdisciplinary, you know, getting [graduate] students from a lot of different fields. And they did not have undergraduate degrees in anthropology. I felt, and a lot of the students felt this way too... that they were not getting the basic knowledge of the field to build on. It is one thing to take an anthropology student at an undergraduate level and opening up the discipline, but when you do not give them a basis in the discipline to start with it becomes more problematic (1980s). Theory was often not so important as who was known and how they were known. Hence: ...it was not the theoretical connection that sort of got me hooked up with Chicago but it was the regional ethnographic connection and the fact that the department was defined as one of the best two or three in the Harvard definition of the universe. I mean the best places to be if you were not in Harvard and they did not like you coming back there very much if you had taken an undergraduate degree. So I thought of staying and working there. Because I sort of knew the people there and it was easy but they did not like that idea very much. They took the exogamy, the marry out or die out tradition. So they thought Chicago was okay and it was not populated much by Harvard graduates. Berkeley was almost okay, but there was nobody there doing [my] sort of work (1960s). Once at graduate school, memories of the way in which knowledge was constructed differ widely. The common thread is the sense that who was present would be influential. The figure of the great anthropologist was more important than theories from books. The tools of the trade inevitably seemed 249 to be inherited from elders who were actually present. Five different examples suffice as evidence for this: Toronto had this history of looking at communication, with Mcluhan and Innis, and one of the people I had a graduate course with was Tom McFeat. In fact it was one of the first course I took and I could not make sense of the course. It was a course on communications, and we did some work in groups on gesture and the like. Actually some of the things I do in... are the result of this! But not so much a product of the course, but of a book he published looking at the ways we communicate in groups. I mean he taught some of this in class. I had not realized it at the time but our group projects were actually to see how we used communication in these group projects! But yeah, he did talk about this kind of work, and that is the stuff that I have been doing ever since. When I was aware of the significance of what he had done. When I was first there seeing the way this information was distributed, seeing very much like what he described in some of his experiments. And when I went back I tried explicitly to repeat some of his experiments in the [ethnographic] context. You know it worked with varying degrees of success. It is hard to construct artificial situations with people who do not understand experiments. But I was able to use a lot of the arguments that were there. In many ways I guess I feel more tutored, more in his line, although I only really had the one formal course with him (1970s). The influence here is the presence of an elder. The speaker felt intellectual kinship with him. Sometimes entire departments acted as a council of elders: At Hawaii... there were no classes on Thursday afternoon. Every Thursday afternoon... the students and faculty would all get together at a pizza parlor and drink lots of beer. It required an excuse if you were not going to be there. I mean you literally were not comfortable the next day if you did not start out not having been there the day before, explaining why you had not made it. And that was true for faculty and students alike. And these kinds of conversations were not all that rare in that kind of setting. Students and faculty would sit around and give a life story, and give a kind of apologetic for their particular brand of theory and as you say, it is really rare for students and faculty to sit around and do this anymore... (1960s). This type of transmission, however, worked in many ways. For example, the following kinship was created mainly because of the way the 250 university building itself was constructed: Those at Michigan, where offices were arranged in little almost autonomous anterooms. With four offices each off a main corridor. So influences had to do with banal geography. In the set of offices I was in, there was Frank Livingstone and Eric Wolf. He and I talked a lot with one another, as well as Joe Jorgensen. The place was so huge. It seemed to have a very, or at least fairly, diffuse social organization (1970s). Or, at the other extreme, the department itself had a general ethos which commanded respect. This set the course for what knowledge would be inherited. As well, how such knowledge should be represented as fitting into a general discourse was mapped out: It was the Chicago milieu which was certainly very important in setting influences intellectually in what I was doing more concretely. In that my work as an undergraduate produced negligible, no, I should say generalized interest. Nothing wrong with that. Then in graduate school you did what you were supposed to do. Which was to focus in on something rather than everything. But you know I was caught up in the theoretical and methodological whirlwind that was happening at Chicago at that time which I was unaware when I got there... The people at Chicago took themselves very seriously as intellectual entities and that they were doing something new and exciting and different. You were either part of it or not part of it. And it took a while to find out what that meant because they were reading things I had never seen, nor in a way I should have expected to. Coming as a callow undergraduate and even though I was on the ground there for about a year and a quarter. We read a lot very fast and it was defined as theoretical stuff (1960s). Another quite different example highlights a more casual interface amongst faculty and students: I went in and told him what I was going to do, and I remember his saying that, well we did not have to pass a proposal defence stage... And we had a long, long session one day in which he told me the story of Kroeber and what he said to students many many times. The ghost of Kroeber was very strong there, and Theodora was still alive at that time and would occasionally show up in the halls. But he said 'Well you know Kroeber, when a student went in to ask him what to do in the field, what do you take with you' - there were no fieldwork courses and he opened the door and the student asks 'All right what am 251 I going to need?' He said, Take a pad and a sharpened pencil!' (1960s). Speakers suggested that they were always conscious of political divisions or alliances. This consciousness existed no matter what kind of institutional atmosphere was present. Such politicised atmospheres required many speakers to exercise strength of character. This later becomes associated with the ability to do fieldwork. As well, it becomes important for working with colleagues of differing viewpoints. The following was the most direct statement of these personal matters: Some aboriginal groups, people with whom I have talked about it, simply say that it is courage or that its your strong spirit. And not that you are an old one. I do not know. I do not have any explanation for it. Part of it is a lot of trying to explain it sounds a lot like self-aggrandizing. Other people are ready to do battle in anyone's profession about why they do things ... (1970s). Q: Even if they are so oriented themselves? Yeah! To a large degree. There is a lot of turf war in anthropology and academia is pretty much a blood sport. It is very disturbing, I mean, I keep meeting academics who do not make anything except refashion ideas out of words. I found that was the biggest disappointment in my life as a academic and an anthropologist, was that the people I did fieldwork with were a hell of a lot nicer than those I worked with for the most part over the years. And I have had quite a long route of involvement at the national level (1970s). The inheritance of anthropological knowledge is tempered by personal and political forces. These might include factionalism and careerism. As well, political in-fighting and outgroups are important. It seems that anthropology as a discourse cannot be thought of as independent from such motives and organizations. For example, schools might have a casual atmosphere in the corridors and offices. In the examination rooms, however, things could be quite different: I know what it is like, what some people go through here. It is hard here of course to get through... I mean some people at... must have gone through in just that kind of way... I was just very lucky. That I did a thesis that was extraordinarily different than what you think of as normal. That was what was good about it. And I also had had a lot of 252 fieldwork experience so I did not have to prove myself. And also writing experience. So maybe they were somewhat conditioned by that and were just glad to have someone go through without huge, huge problems, and we did not have the horrible defence thing. We had something else. But maybe [the defense] is a good thing. Because you do need something to be advanced to candidacy. We actually had a harsh, harsh, harsh advancement to candidacy: two languages, several days of exams and orals. So it was a very harsh thing and you went into training for it! Like boot camp... If anyone saw you at a party [even] three months before your orals were due, people would say 'What are doing here! You should be at home studying.' (1960s). The professionalization of these anthropologists often seems largely dependant upon such events and atmospheres. Yet, it is probably unfair to suggest that anthropology as a discipline is entirely dependant upon such experiences.93 Personalities and Knowledge Construction: The reality of being at an institution could be considered positivist. Direct experience lends authority to speakers' thoughts. There is another positivist-like idea. This idea associates education with the presence of individual teachers and mentors.94 These teachers did not have the same effect on their students. This might be explained away by personality differences. A more radical option is degrees of beingness. For example, the reality of a single being in the positivist mode would be fractured. These parts would be mutually incommensurable. This would be more consistent with a 9 3 Indeed, some much more trivial instances of institutional influence on a person's career can be counted as well: T wrote off to Harvard and M.I.T., which had the prestige departments at the time. They both sent me catalogues with snow scenes on the cover. I put them right in the wastebasket and went to Hawaii. I was never more happy about anything. It was a wonderful thing to do. It turned out at the time that Hawaii had one of the biggest linguistic departments in the world. It was one of the few linguistics departments that believed that anthropology exists, and existed. And it was rigorously working on sending students out to work in other cultures.\" (1980s). 9 4 This association goes back to the earliest organized universities in the west: \"Marcus Aurelius establishes two public schools, a philosophical one and a rhetorical one, the first with four departments, ... each with two main representatives, and the second with two thronoi - sophistic and political disciplines. The professors received 10,000 drachmas per year. Later the number of teachers was raised to six. By the Emperor's will the name sophist was returned to honor. An extraordinary competition ensues. The main effort of the great rhetors, besides their schoolteaching, was to gain a reputation for brilliant extemporizing, in order to move their pupils to stormy applause, for instance in competition with outside visitors.\" (Nietzsche 1989:239[1872-3]. 253 post-positivist agenda. However, such fracturing is apparently not a viable option for speakers. Witness for example two accounts of what is ostensibly the same department (Chicago) at the same time: At Chicago were Harvard students or people who got their Ph.D. at Harvard. A couple of them had gone from Harvard to Berkeley. The Chicago folklore in that situation was that Fred Eggan, who among other things had been Radcliffe-Brown's student, one of Radcliffe-Brown's American students, who was chairman of Chicago had had a great deal of authority and power. Power over money when the department was expanding. He raided the Berkeley department and hired within two years three people to start afresh. It was the idea that anthropology was changing. He had a sense of that and saw some of the directions that might be going in. One can talk to him about that but he's dead so he does not count and I do not think he wrote any memoirs on it. He hired Clifford Geertz and David Schnieder, two Harvard Ph.D.s at Berkeley and Lloyd Fallers, who was a British Ph.D., but identified as a Weberian, as did Geertz... They were the three new hot, bright, young men. So it differentiated them from the older generation like Eggan, Sol Tax and Robert Braidwood and some of the others who had been there in a more archaic phase. And Chicago's taking itself very seriously... everybody mentioned the new anthropology and that was their new anthropology and there was a strong Harvard connection through the Parsonian sort of thing (1960s). Another memory, however, emphasizes different understandings of the \"hot, bright young men\". As well, of some of the older ones are remembered: Yeah, well I took... two courses at Chicago, and they were really, really excellent. When I arrived at Chicago Fred Eggan was the chair of the department and of course he and Spicer were buddies so I had a fellowship or whatever grant or something. I do not remember now how much it was for but at the time it seemed like an amazingly large sum of money. But by the time the tuition was paid there was hardly anything left because its quite high at Chicago. But anyway I went in and talked to Fred Eggan who was chair of the department, and said well I am new graduate student... He said 'Well, in our department we like to see all our new graduate students do our basic courses'... Schneider was there, David Schneider. And he was talking about kinship, that section of the course. He put a huge diagram on the board. And then he got mixed up, and he tried to figure it out, and then he would give up and say 'come back tomorrow'. So we all left and came back tomorrow, and he put a huge diagram on the board, got mixed up, and could not figure it out, and said 'well forget about it'. So we all left. 254 But Schneider was there, and Sol Tax, as I said, the others. The major orientation of the course. I did not pick up too much of that. Geertz did not stay there very long, I think. And Sol Tax of course had worked in Mesoamerica. He had done Penny Capitalism. He was more of an economic anthropologist, and he taught a couple of course that I did some of. Just on Middle America. And he had the students give presentations and so on, and talk, and there was no major theme or this kind of thing. Mainly descriptive, and of course I sat in on a course with Fred Eggan on North American social organization, which was extremely interesting because he started very, very carefully. God! He drew a map of North America on the board, and for the first week he would do the eastern seaboard, and analyze the social organizations there. Then next week, he moved over a chunk, and gradually in chunks we moved right across North America and talked about all the social organization. So with all the detail of the unique parts of each different social system. So that was sort of what he was into. It was a bit more of a structural-functionalist kind of approach I think. Radcliffe-Brown was not there by the time I got there. He was long gone. And Redfield of course was gone and Linton, and some of the other people who were gone from Chicago. But it still had some of that interest in social organization (1960s). Being there can mean many different things. However, there is always a sense of presence as giving authority. This authority exists beyond the memories of personalities and their effectiveness in the classroom. This 'there-ness' is indissociable from positivist assumptions of experience. Such authority from direct experience in the institution carries on when students go to the field. For knowledge to be inherited, its construction must take place in an institutionally bounded space. Within such a space, institutionally defined characters are placed so that a particular kind of learning occurs. Yet there are individual variants on this social role. These variants are often what speakers remembered. Persons were recalled rather than the structure of a certain official pattern of legitimate production and reproduction of knowledge. Sometimes, however, it was often outside this structure that the most important learning took place: During my undergraduate years my fellow students were, I think, my greatest educational influences. I was on the periphery of a group of \"intellectual activist\" students who were being exposed to leftist ideas in several Anthropology courses. We met informally for discussions as well as more regularly in a reading group at a local radical bookstore in Winnipeg. It was especially during the last two 255 years of my undergraduate schooling that I was exposed to the work of Marx and Engels, as well as the work of anthropologists such as Dell Hymes and Asad. In some respects, more important to me in the longer-term was the impact on me of my relationship to my peers in graduate school. During several of the latter years of my doctoral work I belonged to a group called the \"Feminist Caucus\"; here not only did I meet congenial colleagues and make solid friendships, but I was also introduced, for the first time in any systematic way, to feminist ideas and politics. We read feminist books and articles together, wrote articles for the department journal which we established, and together dealt with the often androcentric and sexist practical and more intellectually-based politics we confronted within the anthropology department at the University of Toronto (1970s). Some speakers combatted some aspects of the symbolic violence of a particular institution. In recalling this, other memories become privileged. 9 5 Whatever their content, speakers always remembered key events of their schooling. These influences are reinforced by the manner in which they are recalled. For example: My greatest influences in education were people as opposed to theories. There were as I said certain teaching styles. Whereas I have come to students... trying to excite people stimulating, a bit of a showman perhaps... Tom McFeat... treated graduate students as colleagues rather than as clients, in the patron-client kind of relation, who was kind. Whose nickname was 'Sunshine' at the time! I still remember that. He was a sweet, gentle person. He supervised a lot of people. He rescued a lot of people from the more politicized [arenas]. He was very broad. He was also interested in a kind of culture and communication. Kind of Bateson-like ideas, and I explored a lot of that with him. Through him, Richard Lee became very friendly with me there, I took one course. I audited it. Theory, not contemporary, but history, sort of pre-19th century theoretical stuff, because I wanted a better grounding in that, and got to know him pretty well I think. He was quite accessible to Ph.D. students. Much more so that many other people and he would have people over to his house... (1970s). On the other hand, the affects of people within a disciplinary discourse could effect a student in a negative manner: [It was] even worse at the big American meetings, where you see the big attitudes marking out the hierarchies of institutions. And 9 5 Yet, Bourdieu and Passeron suggest such memories of our schooling are part of a necessary masking process. The purpose of this masking is to further misrecognizance. As well, this occurs by the naturalization of symbolic violence (1992:section 1[1970]). 256 [we]... always ranked very low in the hierarchy, because we were really laid back. And we go to the AAA and we wear jeans and T-shirt, right? That is, we were from a really proletarian program, very, very laid back, and proletarian. And then you run into some guy from Columbia, where the grad students are reproducing the culture of this. You know, they are wearing tweeds and sweaters with the patches on the elbows, and smoking pipes, and all these kinds of things. And we used to just make fun of our status by crashing these very prestigious university's parties! Stuff like that, getting them really pissed off that we were contaminating their parties! Columbia guys especially were fairly arrogant bastards! Really bad news as people. I mean Columbia, what has Columbia done for anthropology in the last quarter century? Zero, absolutely zilch. But the attitude that comes out of those places! So there is a real old style collegial thing with those programs... (1980s). Q: We had Boas, we had Aberle, we had Steward and all the rest of them... Yeah! The operative word was 'we had'! If Boas were alive today nobody would be paying any attention to him! (1980s). The prestige of an institution can be manipulated in an arrogant and violent manner. This may further boundary maintenance. It serves to keep those on the inside assured of their relative privilege. However, one might already be on the inside. The insider constructed one's discursive circle differently: It was nice to be picked. And of course I did not know the kinds of problems other students had. [This university] was a big place, a hard place to get into. [It] had a great reputation. I did not know. I thought I was going to a place with a bunch of huge superstars! So I went in a bit timidly. But it turned out that there were not too many people... There were some with a really excellent background... my colleagues and he came in with quite a good background from Harvard. He had been in the Department of Social Relations, or whatever that department was called and knew Parsons as well as I knew Parsons, so! We hit it off from early on... And Don Johanson, who discovered 'Lucy' was there at the same time as me. There were quite a few sort of interesting characters. But not all of them went on to interesting academic jobs though, which is a bit of a pity (1960s). Finally, important influences can be had from a strategic re-interpretation. Some speakers reconstructed an intellectual milieu somewhat 257 outside the institution proper, which became important spaces of knowledge construction for them: By the way, a lot of my exposure to these [post-modern] guys comes from an interdiscipline called 'composition and rhetoric'. Not rhetoric in a shallow political sense, but in terms of English literature. So not rhetoric in the bad sense! But it goes right back to ancient rhetorical concepts for example, but is very much aware of interdisciplinarity. We started a reading circle with some of these people from composition and rhetoric, reading through Bourdieu. Most of those people are very concerned with education and hence the differing disciplinary affiliations centred around Bourdieu's analyses of the system they are in. But logistical things must be considered of course, in terms of who shows up and who does not. I do not think you can make too much of the fact that not too many social scientists made it to this particular forum. Sometimes though, it really is a bunch of us oddballs! You know we make photocopies and leave them in places people might pick them up - not too much work is involved - but we never got to the stage where we all would talk about how we could use the stuff we read and learned. I have done that work on my own, but that would have been the next stage. You also have to beware of such things becoming too institutionalized, given that one of their advantages from the start was to be in some sense outside the institution (1970s). A rhetoric of continuity was employed by speakers, no matter what kinds of events or persons they remembered. The cultural memory of these anthropologists serves to reinforce narrative and to work against the concept of fractured being. Speakers tended to remember the continuous. Speakers assumed that I would understand them as speaking of the past first. By using a linear chronology, speakers may be re-affirming their presence as an anthropologists today. For example, When I was first a graduate student, that was when a lot of the cognitive anthropology work was being done. I guess I found it a little mechanical. I was more interested in sociolinguistics, but having done some of that as an undergraduate it made a lot of sense. I understood what they were after, and it felt more alive there than in many other places, like cultural ecology! I also was a student of Richard Lee's I think for one course. But it was the theory course! And we got a fairly heavy dose of cultural ecology and Marxism. I remember at one point., after we had these sort of beginning of the year interviews, and I said that I was interested in language and religion. And he said something to the effect of 'Well, language is the epiphenomenon of experience'! 258 And I sort of felt rather put down! And I think that... there was quite a distance between us. I also wrote a term paper on comparing Geertz and Turner and their approach to phenomenology, and he was not the person to write that for! (1970s). Not all accounts of professors were as intimate. This was so because speakers felt the awesome majesty of reputation surrounding some elders. This kept them at a distance, blurring the distinction between the physical presence of the elders and their discursive labels. Meetings with famous elders tended to take on the following appearance: I met Claude Levi-Strauss at Leiden, and he lectured to graduate students. Or rather, took questions. He stressed fieldwork not only as salvage ethnography but as the fundamental work of anthropological work and experience. He also mentions this in an interview with [Didier] Eribon here. It seems that Boas had less of an influence for Levi-Strauss than Lowie, who also got him out of France. After The Way of the Masks, just the leftovers kept coming out (1970s). Thus, one of the most famous names in anthropology was recalled as one who felt that the field was fundamental to disciplinary anthropology. Yet at the same time, Levi-Strauss had been critiqued for his lack of field experience. However, for speakers, the medium usurps the message. It is status enhancing to have met and been in some close contact with the sheer weight of discursive presence of a famous icon. This icon is assumed to have some kind of equally weighty content to impart. In this case, such content was the fundamental ontological bearing of the concept of the field. Not all icons encountered were in fact anthropologists. Their discursive weight as labels for aspects of discourse, however, acted similarly: Hubert Dreyfus, you know him... he set up actually... a course in phenomenology and existentialism. When he came there... and he asked to teach this course, a third year course in the philosophy department. And he ordered several hundred books! The department said 'What?! You are not going to get several hundred people in that course!' Even though phenomenology at that point was, and existentialism was... becoming quite big partly because of the [student] revolution and partly because of what was happening in philosophy. And he went on and on, 'Well maybe I am being too presumptuous', and it turned out that he had 600 students registered in that course!!... [another person] was teaching a course in introductory and he was never 259 a very famous figure but he was important in the revolution, and he taught a thousand students! Which means that he had T.A.'s [teaching assistants] like a small fourth year class (1960s). Such encounters, especially if the course topic is fashionable, might continue the sense that soon-to-be icons are in fact already great. \"If someone gets six-hundred students, they must be good\". Even so, when speakers recalled lesser names, intimacy correspondingly increases: Harry Getty was a nice little man who worked in the Southwest. And he has a book on cattle, on Apache cattle. And so on. And [he] taught an introductory course and I happened to sit in on that. And it was just a general anthropology course with the old Keesing book... The first day he came in and he would read the first sentence in the Keesing textbook. And in that sentence Keesing said something to the effect that well Tylor has a definition of anthropology or culture or something like that or whatever, and then Harry Getty read that sentence and said, well this may be true, and this might not be true, and then he would talk about the second sentence, by the first week we might be finished the first paragraph! And by the end of the term we might be finished the first chapter of the textbook or something like that! So this was kind of Getty's level. He was a lovely old guy. But what the department ended up doing was putting him at the head of graduate studies. So he helped all the students organize their theses and helped get together all the committee work and so on. But he was one of the major anthropologists in the department (1960s). Another example suffices to suggest that it is not only very famous people who are great: I remember some very good courses. I especially remember a course with John Rowe, whom you may or may not know, who was mainly an archaeologist who works in Cuzco I think every summer. But a true scholar, I guess, the only truly true, true, true scholar I have ever met. In that he always insisted [this when] he taught a course, a graduate seminar, called the history of anthropology. And the first session in that was to remake all of us in terms of what he thought was proper citations and footnotes and the like... And he could draw from Spanish literature, he could draw from French literature. He could draw from all of these literatures... Well, he was one with two Ph.D.s. One was in archaeology and the other was in philosophy, so he was very, very well prepared (1960s). 260 Some famous people were, perhaps, not all that great after all. The following example implies that discursive weight may not always travel into the classroom: The qualitative course unfortunately, [was involved in] this major shift in the department, and I sort of got caught in the middle of it. By this error I ended up taking two social statistics courses, as I said. And they had always been teaching this stuff. But until then they had never had a qualitative class before! And they were thinking, okay, how do we get into this. So they put this guy in charge of it, who was an old man. An old American anthropologist from Chicago, the old school! And so basically the class was him discussing his fieldwork! I mean, sure, I learned a lot by the fact that we did assignments. We would do the assignments and one of the ones we did [was with] me and two friends. The whole thing was to pick a method and do a project with this method that shows the use of the method. So we did 'unobtrusive methods'. We studied graffiti on bathroom walls on campus! (1990s). As well, the less famous individuals have less famous texts to their credit. These texts are read differently. They may be read less often. More speakers read texts of authors of great reknown. The presumed import of the canonical texts of anthropology prohibit intimacy with their authorial labels. This lack of intimacy was sometimes seen as violent. This violence may be rife within the discipline. This may have a deleterious influence on scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge. However, a post-positivist might suggest that such violence is how scholarship takes place. Some speakers did not dispute this: Anyway one of the most disturbing things of the [time], for I served as editor... was to read how nasty and how personal, and how egotistical some of the reviews were. Some were kind, some were well intentioned, good critiques, helpful. But too often people were taking really cheap, cheap shots at other people. And it got to the point where it seemed that half of the articles that I would get re-reviewed and put the person on a blacklist of my own and never ask them for another review because he had taken some Ph.D. student for whom English was their third language and was trying to come to terms with something and pasted them all over the map. Some fifty year old social anthropologist. It was like shooting fish in a barrel... they would go overboard. I mean it was like, gleeful, almost, for some individuals, and I found that really, really disturbing (1970s). Q: Some kind of weakness of character, or something.., 261 Yeah, or something, The more I think about what I know from psychology, the people who are insecure in some way prop themselves up by putting other people down. To find this going on in anthropology I find it disturbing. In a discipline which purports to go much further and deeper. And then moralizing the psychology of the people in the discipline and not just the manifestations of it in writing and research in general. I found this particularly disturbing when I worked out there because it also applies to the way some professors treat students. You have the power and the right and the responsibility so called of not only creating people, but to evaluate them. And it is perfectly possible, for someone who has not done much research, does not write very much, to use the coursework to try to make students feel stupid. As opposed to teaching them anything. And this is an occupational hazard of academia... (1970s). We are getting closer to an intimacy which would take into account more than a textual survey could. This also provides more information than merely asking anthropologists what they do. The ethnographer must ask speakers about what they have done in becoming an anthropologist. These responses are very different from the ones associated with the rhetorics of official historical accounts, curriculum vitae, and book and article reviews. The opinions of anthropologists carry important ethnographic data. To use the concept of 'opinion' in interview is to use a powerful expository tool. Anthropologists may feel more at ease. Their responses can and will be considered to be unofficial, individual, and idiosyncratic. However, there may be patterns of opinions. Anthropology is transformed into something other than its face value. Here is a different kind of example of what is seen by some as institutional violence: For twenty-five, for thirty years now, I have been doing that with ethnographic community after community. I will probably never be promoted to full professor because largely what I have produced on the basis of that - with some exceptions that include articles in American Anthropologist and in the Handbook of North American Indians and so on, other publications - but largely what I have produced are things they asked me to do. Going back to that first commitment that I made, and what they want are ways to keep their own culture going. To maintain and revitalize their culture, and in their own schools. They want someone who will listen to them and write in engaging kinds of ways what they have produced... [Now] here is the time line in an academic research project! You wait until the deadline 262 for the grant application, and then you do some in triplicate or quadruplicate or whatever, an application, that takes months to produce, and is sniped at by, or agreed with, whatever, by your peers and this is a process which I validate. Nonetheless it is a very time consuming process, and there is at least a year lagtime between conceptualization of the project and the arrival of the funds. The funds then come to you. And you as a ethnographer have funds to go out and create your own project. That is, walk into the community and say 'I am here with the money!' And even if you have the best intentions you are hiring them to do what you want to do. Now any ethnographic community that I know of considers that a very selfish way of approaching things (1960s). A n implicit rebuke is directed at anthropology in these comments. The anthropology which sees itself as an academic enterprise is critiqued. Some ideals in anthropology do not always get along with one another. The ideal of community is broken into that academic and that indigenous. Anthropological knowledge is often evaluated academically. This evaluation effects the manner in which anthropological ideas are relevant to indigenous peoples. Another example is: A lot of this kind of stuff I have been introduced to through cultural geography. The cultural conception of nature and such. I have been exposed to all this due in part because I am in a joint department. I am not well known nor well regarded within anthropology. I am an anthropological outsider. But unbeknownst to me I have over time developed an international reputation in history. Especially amongst those who concern themselves with history of 19th century Mexico. But right now I have no credibility in anthropology, and that may be ironic to some extent. The implication for me of course is, that faculty appointments and promotions have come later rather than sooner. They have come slower for me. Because I am not in a wholly anthropological department, it is quite minor here. And I do not have contact with many fieldworkers, nor have any graduate students in the field. But people can become too career-oriented. I had a long term dream of getting hired into a big well established anthropology department and I was very bitter about not having had that chance. And I still sometimes am so. But it is really a question of circumstances perhaps more than other things, albeit political circumstances (1970s). These political circumstance are part of the unofficial saga of academic anthropology and they constitute the secret knowledge of this society. Anthropology, however, is not itself a secret society. Hence everyone knows 263 about this saga. Decisions are made which effect lives and works, and some speakers see these decisions as violent. The following example paints a dim view of the \"publish or perish\" context of North American universities: Social scientists ought to give communities they study a sense that they are in charge. And that the understandings that come out of them are ones in which they have participated in! And that they will end up with products that they can use. Of course the ethnographer will take away other notes and things that may have a broader application. But as I say, I will never make full professor because this was produced with communities with their goals and objectives and desires in mind are just toilet paper. In the academic world, you know. There was no grant, no juried procedure that sponsored the research. Even though the university people were involved, and we went through the ethics committee and whatnot before we got going on it. Nonetheless, they were privately published by the community, the community's copyright, and in no way do they satisfy the kind of constipated evaluative metric that academics use! Now frankly, that is an extremely useful evaluative metric. I am not debunking the values of the academic world. But I want to make it really clear that I operate with a different set of priorities, ones which do not relieve me of rigor or responsibility! But based on the assumptions that there has to be some room on the academic world for people who are committed to providing native people with the things they want, and they are the people we study... (1960s). Within institutions, there is a tension between departmental goals and purposes and disciplinary roles. As well, the anthropologist as a person is fully implicated in both. It seems that anthropology as a discourse is not just constructed at the theoretical level. Often what gets created in theory never makes it as an aspect of the anthropological role, which is, for the most part, institutionally defined. Course Media and Curricula: The institutional aspects of textbooks and course content influence the way in which anthropological knowledge is inherited. Along with this, however, the rhetoric of scholarship as a free and reasonable debate of ideas continues. How is one to reconcile material and political constraints with the freedom anthropologists ideally enjoy as members of the community of scholars? 264 One idea of the ideal of the teacher and rhetorician follows. This may be contrasted with those unnamed examples in the recent quotes. Such persons are seen by some speakers as the general case in anthropology. Cicero's summary of fair and reasonable scholarly debate follows. His ideas contain, however, the germs of scholarly violence and acrimony. These seem to be as old as the academy: For what remains that is subject to the rules of art, except to begin the speech in such a manner as to win the favor of the audience or to arouse them or to put them in a receptive mood; to set forth the facts briefly, clearly, and reasonably, so that the subject under dispute may be understood; to prove one's case and demolish the adversary's, and to do this not confusedly, but with arguments so conclusive as to prove what is the natural consequence of the principles laid down to prove each point; finally to pronounce a peroration either to inflame or to quench the passion of the audience (Cicero, cited in Nietzsche 1989:107-9[1872-3]). The naturalization of what Bourdieu and Passeron (1992 [1970]) call a \"cultural arbitrary\" is important here. It convinces the realist minded audience that what one is saying is actually a truth. Truth is defined as being about something other than one's speech. It seems that anthropology uses this form of classical rhetoric in the classroom. It also uses it at conferences, in journal debates, and in textbooks. Even so, this classical ideal of rhetorical argument is accompanied by political violence. Recently, this violence had the effect of denigrating the concept of rhetoric.96 'Rhetoric', in the sense of empty politicizing, has become opposed to statement of 'fact', or statements of substance. For anthropologists in this study, the rhetorical devices of the teacher must be evidenced by their research. Such research must be seen as having a basis in what anthropology traditionally defines as the world. Hence, anthropological knowledge can be validly performed only in reference to an object other than itself. Teachers of anthropology cannot remain relativists about their own rhetorical strategy. This is so precisely because the teaching 9 6 One of the manifestations of this bias may have been identified by some speakers, for example: 'Teaching is a funny position in the academic world, in that you cannot prosper without at least mediocre teaching, or better than average teaching. But you can never totally prosper with it! No one is ever promoted to full professor just on the basis of good teaching.\" (1960s). 265 takes place in an accredited institution. This institution has the ability to produce and reproduce disciplinary knowledge. For example, one speaker remembered this process, and was also in the process of rejecting it: I think the things that were highlighted were, looking back now, were whatever that person was interested in. So if someone's fieldwork was in Papua New Guinea then they would talk about Malinowski. If it were somewhere else, then [someone else]. You see there did not seem to be a sort of schedule to it. There it was more of a local knowledge thing. I was not taught about feminist anthropology. I was not taught about post-modern anthropology. And when it was sort of from the perspective of 'Oh, this is a really great thing', and no challenge or detail to it. And so I think basically we are taught all this old stuff, which was quite useful. But there was no discussion of the impact on cultures, or indigenous anthropologists, you know, like advocacy anthropology. So it just sort of seemed to me to be, like I said, a 'pass-over', right? That had been carried on from generation to generation. Sort of sitting there and hearing about someone's experience, with Evans-Pritchard!... This is what anthropology is right now. So I do not think I have been taught anthropology (1990s). Hence both teachers and their tools of the trade must be regulated. However, such regulations carry the ethnographer far from Cicero's ideals. For example, there was at least one case of the students regulating course and lecture material. This occurred as a reaction to the institutional view: I took a seminar in sociology, with Smelser... and Arthur Stinchcombe. Which was very interesting because it was the first one that I had seen where the students essentially decided that they would make their own seminar. That is all right to say these days! Where seminars are essentially set up that way. But in those days they certainly were not! And Stinchcombe and Smelser came in, because it was one term, and had a whole bunch of readings and assignments and the students thought no, this is bunk. I was just auditing this course so I did not have to write any papers. They had set the course up in terms of the great thinkers, Durkheim... Simmel and others... and this was the time of the student revolution and they said 'to hell with you'! Because Stinchcombe in particular was a very poor lecturer... Anyway, how it all happened I do not know because I was away in anthropology and it happened somewhere in the bowels of... where sociology resided. And the students demanded Oscar Lewis, and Lee Rainwater, who wrote a book on the working man's wife. They wanted down to earth kinds of things. It is an earlier version of 'dead white men'! ...They wanted the living white man who had done things like Lewis. So that change was 266 actually made! (1960s). Introducing students to the discipline most often occurs in the context where students do not know enough to question it. Hence this sort of change cannot come from competing discursive knowledge. Introductory pedagogy may be seen as a gradually constricting set of table manners. This manner of teaching is seen as especially important for introductory courses where anthropology perhaps wants to present what it believes to be its best and brightest image. Introductory textbooks are also part of this culture contact: Basic textbooks were a very different thing than they are now of course, where we have all the coloured photos that are the big thing now. I was just thinking a week or so ago that the basic textbooks that we used, you were lucky if you got a drawing. A neat drawing or two and that was it! Now they are all fancy... (1960s). Q: Why do you think that has changed so much? Well, I think it is kind of a popularization of anthropology in a way. Probably this is true in many disciplines as well. I think textbooks have become glossy things here and there, and a lot more photos. And I guess it is a lot cheaper to publish now. Black and white photos are really really reasonable to publish now... colour is a bit more expensive. But I think probably the price has come down somewhat. I think really with the evolution of the technology it comes about. The evolution of slides are easier to make, and films and that, with tv and the video. I think there is a lot more in the way of illustrative material which I think is attractive to people... In the past for show-and-tell all you could bring in were a few things that you might have collected (1960s). Not everyone agrees with this positive account of introductory anthropology textbooks. Nor is it agreed that much has changed in their content. What has changed is their presentation, or performance. In other words, their rhetoric has changed. More interesting is why there has been such a change. There were a number of illuminating comments in this regard: My understanding of that is that it is a product of the American tax law. That when... companies started taking inventories, that is when they started putting things out of print. One thing that means is one cannot keep on using the reading list year after year. Not that one 267 would anyway. But it is combination of things going out of print and many books becoming very, very expensive. And another thing which is, I do not know whether this is sort of crabby old person talk, but you cannot count on many students having a library anymore. Whereas you used to be able to count on that. So, the assumption I make with a course would be first and second year undergraduate course is that I have to produce pieces of paper. I have to make pieces of paper accessible to that student to take home. For ever, and ever (1960s). Such non-academic institutional constraints limit freedom of scholarly activity and dissemination. In turn, this creates a market for a certain type of debate. Publishers would rather have something that will sell hundreds of copies rather than dozens: I do not really think too much about basic textbooks. But I think they have been more and more watered down gradually, in a way, and more and more popularized... But I think they are keen to impart a visual appeal, which I think is good, as I said. Material culture is interesting and exciting, and can get students really really involved. It is fun to look at and it does give you a better feeling as to the images of the people you are talking about. But as we move further along into a seminar we talk less and less about the basic textbooks. But the problem is that there are so many out there, and all the publishers! This is a kind of gripe I have. All the publishers want you to do is write a basic textbook. Because for the publishers that is where they make the big bucks, and the book salesman do not care. They go 'who cares' what I use in [that course] because I only have thirty students. [T]he book salesman as he asked me, 'Oh you are writing a book'. And I said 'Yeah I am writing a book on [an ethnographic area]'. They walk out the door! But if I had said, 'Oh, I am writing an introductory one', they get all excited because they think here come the big bucks! So, there is so much of this kind of thing. Well of course, because if you get a basic textbook every class is a 100 students then you can make a killing on those. So, that is what they are all after. So I think that is why a lot of the money and a lot of the effort and a lot of the design effort has gone into these books which are only appropriate for really big classes, you see. And that may have driven the market as much as whether we want all these illustrations in our basic textbooks or not9 7 (1960s). The motives for the production of basic textbooks are questioned by these anthropologists. As well, the strategies involving copyright and 9 7 Others had similar experiences: \"I met with his publisher and decided that we would edit a Canadian version of their book. And after a couple of weeks I got a letter from them saying that they had looked at the Canadian market and just did not feel that the market was big enough to merit putting out another whole version of their book.\" (1960s). 268 printing of standard anthropological works used as texts in advanced courses is critiqued: I figured that a reading list, that a course outline and a reading list is the core... artifact, really. That you produce it the previous spring, the previous term, usually. And then in a way... you have done your major piece of pedagogical work until almost the course starts. But by the time you do that, you have tried to find out how available the materials are. And it is harder to do that in Canada than in the U.S.. Much, much harder once you are dealing with Canadian books. Books going out of print makes it difficult. Books having become a lot more expensive. So that... is one of the things that has changed. A fat ethnography book used to be assignable in a class for which each student would pay 12 dollars. You know, a 300 page long thing. And now you cannot do that. That would be 40 dollars or something like that. And if you are operating on the principle that students will not spend that much time in the library, at least in an anthropology course, you cannot assign that book. So if it were cheaper you could assign it. And if it were available anywhere in the country you could assign it. But the fact that a lot of the sort of substantive stuff, the stuff which is not textbooks, is difficult to get a hold of and expensive, is the first, in my mind, restriction on what you can do (1960s). Texts and their availability constrain the reproduction of anthropological knowledge and narrow the horizons of that knowledge. Introductory textbooks are often deemed unimportant for these speakers' construction of both themselves and their discipline. Rather it is texts which never appear in basic textbooks that enable the scholar to think about theories of knowledge reflectively. In introductory textbooks, one is passively presented with watered down versions of theories. For example, I tend to read things and discover theorists and then start a synthesis, and move on. And I sometimes find I go back to things that I see myself as still using. But my own reconstruction of that has already moved into a synthesis which has taken me a long way away from it. So I guess I can talk about people who I have found very influential. And I guess within anthropology it would be the culture and personality school. And the structuralists. Especially Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. In sociology I would be very hard pressed to think of any! And I have a lot of the more recent stuff. Oh, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, that whole recent trendy bibliography. I have read all this stuff and I found a lot of it interesting. And some of it useful. But I kind of came to that at a later stage. You see what happened to me, I cannot claim to have had a normal academic 269 development! I was away from it for ten years and I was reading entirely independently. And it was during that period that it really formed my vision. I wrote my first two books during that period... this was why I found [that] I cannot quite identify with the canons of any of the disciplines, although I can see them perhaps in a way perhaps which people inside the discipline cannot see... (1980s). The Ciceronian resonance can ring hollow in the ideals of some anthropologists. This may be so because the process of educating their students is limited in so many ways. Compare the high ideals of the following with the unfortunate realities of the successive quote: You know the longer I have been at this the more I am convinced that you cannot be a great teacher for long. You might be a great performer, but you cannot be a really significant teacher if you do not do some research. And I do not mean just a little bit, you have to have an interest that makes you think. That makes you get surprised. That makes you discover because that is what you are trying to breed in students! And to inspire them in such a way that they find that the way they look at the material will expose them to. Or when you show them a new reading of it or new interpretations of it. And guide them towards other things. They will continue to be surprised, occasionally shocked, pleased. But just essentially astonished, over and over and over again by what you are setting up for them. Instead of becoming cynical or predictable or any of those things. And social science can have a teaching attitude that stresses ability and control, [that] eventually lead to cynicism about human beings and the world. Conveying that to students and making them feel stupid and limited at the same time is in my view really destructive human activity! And too many people in academia do that. I think that that attitude gets translated into reviewing papers, research grants. It does not mean that you have to think it is great, or even that it is particularly good. It is just that your criticism should be constructively framed! It is 'No, you should not do this, these are perhaps the reasons why you should not. But here is what is valuable in your point of view. Maybe you should expand this. These are places where you can look'. Use your experience that way. Instead of being negative (1970s). The generalizing spirit of this quote is put in daily confrontation with the formal aspects of institutional settings: Speaking of constraints, what I was able to do by persuading enough people that they should, was to get the course schedule to one and a half hours long. For [advanced and introductory] so that I could show movies. Because most of the courses are one hour or three fifty 270 minute slots, and you are constantly fighting the fact that you are giving them 58 minute pieces of T.V.. And then you never start on time, finish on time, and people are shuffling out. So the only way I can make that work is with the one and a half hour. Fit them into the 90 minute slots... If students sense that you are spending a lot of time on something they see as marginal, especially at the beginning of the course, they figure you are wasting time and they lose interest in it. So the placing of the films and the use of that is a little delicate. And if you have done it, it is very time consuming because you have to get all the material, see it yourself. Sort of think about it (1960s). Students must already be rhetorically convinced that the professional discussions are worthwhile. As well, they must believe professors are a good representation of it. It often takes a long time to accomplish both of these ends. Finally, speakers suggest the graduating student is left with a certain kind of knowledge of the discipline. Perhaps some feel this may be little more than what the marketed publishing limitations allow. Some anthropologists, it seems, can be unwitting victims of their own ideals. For example, certain epistemological ideals are kept continually in print. These are also excerpted and summarized for introductory textbooks. They are presented as givens in ethnographic films and videos. They are cited as evidential arguments in lectures. Students may also be unwitting victims of their professors' ideals. These might include an idea of the best way to learn and teach. Some speakers remembered these events as influencing their own pedagogy. As well, these ideals influenced how they would, or would not, construct anthropological knowledge in their terms: We had a course here that was a methodology course... and in that course we had to deal with different societies... Oh, what a nasty character! Well, he was not a nasty character. He was a very fine man, and I considered him one of my mentors and indeed dedicated part of my [first] book to him... But what he decided he would do in having us interview... was we had to construct an interview... And he got us someone to interview. And he was going to sit over this barrier, double sided, and listen to the interview! Horrible, horrible. And he had given us a woman whom he had coached to just be horrible to us! She reversed the interview and [interviewed] us. She was not going to answer questions. She was going to be offhand and nasty. All of that was an awful way to teach us... (1960s). 271 However, the teaching of anthropology does change over time. Students react in various ways to how they themselves have been schooled. This thread is part of a larger tapestry that connects the pedagogy and knowledge construction of anthropology to its own disciplinary history. The Changing Institution: As well, the general commentary by speakers on the history of anthropological institutions limits the knowledge available concerning pedagogy, as one speaker suggested, For example, Steward was at Columbia for three years, and it was the centre of everything at the time. Hence the career of cultural ecology got a huge boost. So the institutional position is at least as important as the intellectual position. How some changes may have been manifested were like at the AAA meetings even until 1960. There were no separate meetings. So everyone went to everything and kept up with the four areas. But now that is just not viable because perhaps less so of intellectual quality of anthropologists. But just the sheer amount of work. The incredible growth of the discipline and the academy in general during this period is the big influence (1970s). Boas was perhaps both the first and last omniscient scholar in North American anthropology. His legacy of study, however, resonates through most of the major graduate schools on the continent. As well, a host of minor schools are indebted to it. Boasianism represents an ideal of what anthropology might be. Anthropology has an official history of great schools and persons. This history has seen a rapid expansion of the discipline. However, most speakers preferred their own experience of that institutional growth. Because things are so big now, what appears as a much larger discipline, is in practice and in individual intellect much smaller: It is networks of people who are in contact with each other who are chiefly thinking they are bringing about some kind of change. They define a world of good guys and bad guys. They are the good guys. They try to form alliances with some other people slightly more powerful. There is a dynamic to it which is, I imagine, the dynamic of relations in academic disciplines in relatively prosperous countries which at least pretend to a relatively democratic organization (1960s). 272 These more intimate contacts seem to result not in an openness but something more inbred. The nuances of violence associated with the prestige hierarchies in the academy are important to its reproduction. As well, sources of potential prestige have reproductive influence. Funding agencies,98 or journal committees are both examples of reproductive sources as well as sites of gatekeeping: It is the conservatism, you know, our discipline is no different than anything else. You know there are the elders who will be fairly conservative, and they also tend to be fairly influential in power. So you know you end up having to buck the system, I guess. And they will take swipes at you because they will be on the boards of journals and they will be the ones on the boards of granting agencies and stuff like that. I mean that is how individualism in the discipline is homogenized, right? I mean you try to write an article and submit it to a journal and try to do something different, right? And you get slammed for it. So what do you do? You need a job so you need some publications. Or you want a promotion so you need more publications. So you often give in. Change your article to put it back into the mainstream. That is how it works. That is how the system works, unfortunately. It is not easy to buck it (1980s). Q: Anthropology does though seem to have the rhetoric of a liberal discipline. How does that relate to its systemic context which you just talked about? There seems to be a kind of tension there between the way anthropology advertises itself and the way anthropology works in an institution? Oh yeah! Sure! That is to be found in all disciplines. We have a certain public image that we do not really go out of our way to correct. We have the idea that we can get into the exotic. That ties into the idea of the year of fieldwork, crossing cultural boundaries, the anthropologist as hero, the adventurer in the pith helmet in deepest darkest Africa! That image is still part of the romantic view of anthropology, okay? This is contradicted with the manner in which anthropology really does work. And yet for some reason we are walking in the stereotypes of the discipline. Anyway, even while we criticize them. It is insidious... (1980s). 9 8 One speaker commented specifically on this: \"One of the research grants officers at SHHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) told me that she found anthropologists were, to her dismay, given much of their writing, were more territorial and negative in their assessments there than any other discipline she had dealt with. In her experience. This was a woman of long experience in research funding at SHHRC. And I would say that I would agree with her, in my experience in the SHHRC research grants committee...\" (1970s). 273 It was also suggested a few institutions have monopolies on the production of scholars who would in turn occupy the positions in all other accredited institutions. This also led to problems in terms of inbreeding. Both knowledge and the scope of the discipline are affected. The Canadianization issue was important for many anthropologists interviewed. In the 1970s, many anthropologists became passionately involved in addressing the issue of acknowledging Canadian training in hiring practices, as well as Canadian content in textbooks and other anthropological publications. Of course, this made it both legally, as well as morally, difficult to hire non-Canadians when a posting in an anthropology department became available. Like many other countries, Canadian born anthropologists now have a virtual monopoly on positions within their own nation. Universities in Canada that produce Canadian Ph.D.s also have a monopoly. One speaker suggested such monopolies looked like this: I do not know what it is. I know what it is associated with in personality terms. It is also often associated with British training in social anthropology in the sense that they are schooled very much, and more traditionally they are an older generation than what you get here, in the cut and thrust of debate. Some of the more American trained people are superficially pleasant, but behind the scenes they are not... [This may be worse] because you do not know where it is coming from! Exactly. It does not leave much. Because the people went to Toronto or McGill or U.B.C., the big training grounds, to a lesser extent the numbers in McGill or Alberta, and in English-speaking Canada. And almost exclusively at the University of Montreal for the Francophonie (1970s). How anthropology within the North American university system created its major alliances and monopolies is of great interest. The inbreeding and monopolization of teaching positions must have an influence on knowledge construction in anthropology. Such culture traits were also of interest to some of the speakers in this study: You know I have done a fair bit of reading on the 19th century in the the U.S.A.... in the period of American university reform. In the 1880s and the 1890s and around the turn of the century when the modern university as we know it was being invented. The format of regarding the profession as having a research component as well as a teaching component, the beginning of stressing research over teaching, having 274 separate graduate programs, the professional training of graduate students, having facilities for graduate students, to back their research, all of that was new in North America. And even relatively new in Britain. It was a German and French invention... The Prussian bureaucracy did say to von Humboldt, Do it!' Right, and he did. And not only to von Humboldt. And even in the United States, even in Canada... the significant deans in the East at the time of university expansion they had very strong sort of evolutionist connections. Or were doing amateur anthropology or something. So we are sort of there as an emergence and this relationship between North Americans seeming to go their own way and then being defined by others as sort of benighted... (1960s). Historically, there is a very deep seated sense of monopolization. Just as importantly, speakers discussed the mundane aspects of the institutional context of anthropological knowledge, tending not to emphasize general theoretical positions. Speakers also did not emphasize epistemological ideas. Instead, personalist accounts of particular events are seen as paradigmatic. First person accounts are possible because so much of anthropological knowledge is itself based on story-telling. The idea that anthropology is an oral culture maintains certain forms and formulae of how one becomes an anthropologist. One speaker regarded the mass of differentiating oral memories of anthropological history as grounds to discuss anthropologies, in the plural: Well there is not a single anthropology, so that is a hard [question]. For me, well I work in what I call the Americanist tradition. This is based primarily on studying the native peoples of this continent by people who have done it in a kind of way that has a lot to do with language and symbolic form. And [it] is less behaviourist than say British social anthropology. More textual and more emphasis on the words of speakers and on this stuff called interaction with people. And it is very different too. It seems that national traditions are not [so important]. And so within that tradition I think there is what... calls a 'rhetoric of continuity' that is we all say that,this is something upon which one builds. That has a history. And although we surely do not do some of the things that your predecessors did, you also do do some of the things that they did. A sort of clearing the way for investigating the same matters now. So in that sense there is this continuity. Now in others, the climate is very different. I was a student through the sixties... and that was just in the states... so I was involved in the... pacifist response to Vietnam. Deeply. So politics and poetics were part of that long before Marcus dreamed it up! That experimental moment 275 was no moment. It has a history! We really thought we could change the world by our politics. I do not have the sense that things have ever been quite so optimistic since... (1960s). Some of the passions in the preceding quote can be linked with the concept of vocation. Vocation may, however, wax and wane in anthropology according to opportunity. Perhaps the more romantic idea that it is suffering that produces culture and art has an influence as well. However, the following was also typical in a differing way. A different kind of cycle or break is recounted. This particular example was commented on by many of the interviewed group: There is another kind of rupture there between the inside and the outside. And a lot of this came to a head in 1971 in the AAA debate on the role of anthropologists in the Vietnam war. And people were crying and shouting because there were accusations being made about friends, and whatever. And there are scars and wounds, whatever, to this day for the people who were there and remember it... That was not the way anthropology to me looked as an undergraduate! In the late 1950s, when the the things of the world we were talking about were distant. They were not in the classroom. We were talking in the the classroom of things that were far away. And they seemed less far away in the late 60s, and really less far away during the sit ins and the strikes and whatever which were led by anthropologists. There was the gang at the University of Michigan, Eric Wolf, Marshall Sahlins. Some of those people were very instrumental in organizing the resistance movements to the Vietnam war (1960s). In retrospect, these events have a larger than life ring to them. Privileging the experience of one's own generation seems inevitable. Being enamoured with one's own experiences may be universal. The manner in which historical narrative is set up by these anthropologists is part of the very institution of anthropological history. Another speaker agreed that this historical narrative may expose and highlight the boundaries of post-positivist terms such as 'auto-affection' and 'auto-privilege'. There is, however, a positivistic caveat to this. A n example may be seen at the end of this quote: I think internal fieldwork is a reflection of the increasing reality of economics and logistical factors. Decreased funding and such. In a sense, there is a tension here of which I am aware too of 276 anthropology expecting itself not to change within its own changing institutional context. In terms of construction of anthropological knowledge there is both science, if you will, and political accruing of prestige and cultural and social capital. The limitations of the discourse might be working both ways. Any disciplinary endeavour must have these boundaries, and also perhaps must overcome them if such endeavours are to continue. They are a part of a field in Bourdieu's sense, a discursive field. These are gradually institutionalized by in fact becoming seemingly more autonomous and discursively bounded. Some have thought about this in anthropology, for example Stan Barrett. The notion or just the fact that these are different is very important in the consciousness that politics and science are ongoing and in tension. I like very much the idea of breaking down the barriers between for example sociology and anthropology. Another local example here of this cross-fertilization of ideas is in cultural studies. But I find that if we get a group of those who are not well grounded in any one particular discipline we tend to get into a very mushy soup! (1970s). Generations of anthropologists may telescope historical memory. Some events seem larger than life and not part of the present from the vantage point of students. This may in turn create problems for the teaching of anthropology. I have, for example, no memory of events which are of extreme importance for many speakers. However, there were other kinds of perennial events that might be more familiar to contemporary students: Almost all my friends wound up swimming in the tenuous stream as opposed to the tenure stream... If they were lucky, or maybe they were not even lucky if they did this, moving from one partial appointment to another where they taught their brains out, and had no access to research, or graduate students or anything else. Some of the fortunate ones, and some of the ones with a little more talent who were also fortunate, got three year post-docs with the Canada post-doctoral fellow program. Where you know a university would cover one of the three years of your employment of the dollar amount and SSHRC would cover the other two. And they wrote books if they were good at it, and articles and did a little teaching. The problem they had... was [in] get[ting] promoted. And so fiscally minded persons, or small minded ones [had an influence]. Well let me pause here. A lot of universities do their hiring, if you do this on a scale of ten, it is threes hiring fives at best. And when they run into an eight or a nine, man they head for a hole... They are scared as to what is going to happen. They feel inadequate. And they invent all kinds of reasons, spurious ones, to not hire the person (1970s). 277 Hiring procedures also have a direct effect on what aspects of debate get inherited, produced or reproduced. These effects are not generally documented (Givens and Jablonski 1996:310-12). Their influence is all the more direct when economic constraints are more forceful. The Changing Knowledge of Anthropologists: What is the Discipline coming to? Finally, to end this chapter I want to turn to what speakers said concerning changes in the discipline. The institution is a major influence on the receding of positivist doctrine in anthropology. There seems to have been a gradual loss of faith in the goodness and beneficent progress of science. This occurred after the end of the Second World War. It was due in large part to atomic weaponry. Later on environmental devastation was noted as a factor. This degradation of science was thought by some speakers to be part of the story of a critical anti-positivism. This critique may have transformed itself into a post-positivist epistemological movement. Yet within these movements, there could be a characteristic lack of knowledge about the manner in which science works. As well, the practice of science was not well explored. Latour and Woolgar (1977) attempted the first ethnography of scientists. They provide such an understanding by an ethnographic account of the laboratory. Scientists in their cultural context are described. This context, however, is not divorced from knowledge about the content of science. One cannot simply write an ideological critique of science. One anthropologist suggested there was a distinct lack of ideological will to propose science as a viable form of knowledge. This atmosphere was aided and abetted by the decrease in public school education in the sciences. It was fashionable to critique positivisms of all kinds. This critique occurred without realising that many scientists (and social scientists) did not necessarily ascribe to the doctrines of positivism. Few critics made a distinction between scientism and positivism. Confusion and ignorance could be the only result. For example, ...what happened to science and scientists in that period which would be part of the story. I mean part of the story if you are looking at the change of something moving through the 60s and 70s... right up to 278 the present, [was] the overwhelming significance of the fear of nuclear destruction. Something that you are aware of. And that became a sort of metaphor for what happens when you rely on science too much. Science is scary not only in its content but in its future and its self-delusionary quality. And anthropology has always been critical. And certainly people in these elites saw themselves as being critical people, [good] at making better interpretations of what other people do than they do themselves. Very arrogant. Extremely arrogant. That is one part of it I do not like very much. And as scientists they were doing that to people. Telling them that their thinking was wrong, immoral, and whatever. And then they shifted a little bit into the anti-scientists and the anti-nuclear movement... So the position of science and scientists in the post second world war world was changing quite rapidly... In the so-called cold war, and nuclear holocausts. And the other side of it I think is that people knew less about science the people in our field. That the educational systems... that we ourselves during that period had been brought up in in some cases had less direct scientific knowledge. So people were talking about science without really having [it]. They found that you could talk about science and almost get a little of the legitimacy of science by being against it (1960s). It is possible that this cultural milieu shunned positivism. Anything that looked like positivism might be critiqued. Theories of knowledge do not collapse on their own. Perhaps they do not ever collapse. For example, some speakers identified themselves as interpretive or post-positive. However, they continued to believe in the positivistic method. The gradual denigration of science education seems important in the demise of positivism. As well, anthropologists in this study suggested another important and unfortunate change during this same period. This was felt to be the general lack of basic scholarly ability to learn in their students. Year in and year out, faculty found that they had to work harder to get students to learn. They had to start slower. The also started at what was called a \"lower level\". As well, fewer and fewer students were so-called \"self-starters\": \"The biggest single problem is that students cannot really read. They have a low reading ability. They do not read very much anyway. Language of many texts is too difficult. So by the process of elimination, we come up with more and more shallow booklists. We also have to watch out for stuff not 'pc' ['politically correct'].\" For some speakers, the more shallow the course outline and its readings meant that students learnt less and less over time. The course 279 outline was referred to by most as the biggest single piece of pedagogic work before entering the classroom. This trend also has something to do with the format of textbooks. Perhaps what publishers keep in print is also an influence. This cultural swirl is not necessarily conscious. It can be, however, self-supporting. In the meantime speakers suggest a process of impoverishment. This occurs in the education and inheritance of anthropological constructions of knowledge. As well, market pressures and political ideologies may not suit the traditional concept of a liberal arts education. These pressures force students to listen to certain ideas. These ideas are also heard in certain structures: [Our] acting Dean for a while... said it was just unbelievable the kinds of complaints people are bringing to Deans and to Chairmen and so on and so forth. So the course outline has to be even more so of a contract. And we protect it at all costs against any kind of anxieties that the students feel. It has to be very, very clear as to how students will be graded and how they will be tested. And the chair of the department has to have a copy of all course outlines. Or at least have them available to them. So the university as an institution has been gradually, I guess, more receptive to student anxiety. And student complaints and student concerns. And it is certainly good in a way. I mean it is excellent that students initially know just exactly what is going on and what is wrong. I mean people used to come in and ask, and we were very flippant. You know you will get a grade sometime, but let us forget about all these things. That is not fair, I think, for students (1960s). I have personally encountered this with my own students. The contractual nature of a documented agreement is not, as this speaker agrees, really the problem. The problems begin when students are pressured by institutional contexts both inside and outside the academy to learn in a certain manner. These manners of learning tend towards certain, and perhaps constricting, goals. Exam learning is an instance of this. Speakers suggested one must try to ameliorate this pedagogically. Yet this cannot be taken too far. One speaker was critical of the \"disingenuous\" attempt at democratization in the classroom, because In a sense it takes away from this air of expertise that people like to parade around with, that is why! You know the whole idea of reflexivity is important in this kind of thing. But even reflexivity when you look at it is not as self-critical as it could be or as it should be. 280 Right now reflexivity in anthropology suggests that you should situate yourself within your research. Within the ethnography you are a human being. How did you feel when you were being told this? How did you feel being told that? I think that it has to go much further than that. That you have to have a good discussion on bias and interpretation as part of the process of reflexivity. We tend not to do that because it does effect our ability to establish ourselves as authority figures. In fact, it is saying I am not an authority. And this becomes a problem because anthropologically if you are not an authority than why are you writing this, and why should I read this?! And why should we pay attention to you? (1960s). Authority can be ameliorated by downplaying the purely descriptive historical or statement character of the discourse. Grading students on different media can also help. For example: ...tell the students that it does not really matter if they have not read all of them because I have not either. And they are not reading for examinations. They should read it not for that point of view. They do not have to read it from the point of view of well 'I am going to be tested on this'. They are reading it from the point of view of 'I am writing an essay' on a little part of this and in another couple of weeks I will be writing another one, and so on. As you know. And they have to know enough to be able to do that. By reading the stuff and talking to me. And talking to each other hopefully. But they are not being examined on, even like 'Who was E.B. Tylor'? Even though I would expect them to know this when we talk about him in the classroom. Or like, 'When was the university reform act in Britain?' I do not really expect them to memorize that (1960s). One must also make various pedagogical and institutionally constrained assumptions about students' motives. Why is this student taking anthropology? What do they want to know? How is anthropology relevant to this life? Al l of this is a far cry from the atmosphere of most speakers' experiences as students. Ironically, many speakers saw the devaluation of the teacher-student relationship to knowledge begin at a time when: ...faculty were actually frightened of student demands. Students would demand something. You had better see to it. Otherwise you would have demonstrations. They would have sit ins. This was during the time when you would have women come to class and breast feed their babies! So it was a very, very different scene from what was happening now. And people went to class without shoes. And I can tell 281 you I never ever did this!... But it was the usual thing. Especially in large undergraduate classes. Graduate students were a bit better, I think! (1960s). The student may not be at an educational institution merely to quest after knowledge for its own sake. Nor, on the other extreme, is the student always there to get a job. Speakers felt somewhat at a loss to explain student rationale. However, they all agreed that such rationales for most students seemed to have changed radically. Compare once again this milieu with the present: I applied at that point to anthropology, instead of sociology. Because anthropology at Berkeley had a lot more interesting people. Especially Berreman. And I liked the way in which Berreman worked in Behind Many Masks. I always thought that was quite an interesting piece and this was done at a time when no one was writing about fieldwork. And as you know fieldwork is kind of my specialty. So I went into anthropology and was lucky enough because this was in the years of the student revolution. This was in the years of Vietnam in its final days. And this was in the years when everyone wanted to be an anthropologist. People were going around wearing feathers in their hair, and living in tipis in our back yard (1960s). At that time it was the students themselves who were radical. Now the radical economic constraints upon students have prompted them to toe the most conservative line. Along with this, one's expectations of what students know and do not know have changed. This occurred against the will of certain anthropologists. Some surprises await both beginning and veteran faculty in the give and take of classroom dialogue: The reason why people take a particular course in a particular time or a particular place is not a function of my sense of the time line of going to the first through the fourth year. Some take the first year course after they take the fourth year course! So one of the differences in the teaching between the early time of my teaching and now, though I think the same thing would be true now in any large institution, is that the sense of accumulation in a course program is difficult to presuppose. We could do it if we wanted to. We could do what some of the languages do and make extremely rigid requirements. But we also choose not to do that. On the assumption that we would be cutting our own throats. And whatever it is we do it is not just creating anthropology majors. We want to make courses accessible to those who 282 did not decide when they entered university that they wanted to be an anthropology major. But that is the dilemma. On the one hand there is an accumulation model to be worked with. And then there is also a democratic populist model to work with. And they do not work together to well... But we also operate on the assumption that it is the student's problem and not ours! But the difference in thinking is that you are, in my sense when I am teaching in fourth year or when I am teaching anthropology [in fourth year], I am teaching students who have made a conscious, rational, a 'personal decision for Christ, you know!' That they have made a decision to be majors, for whatever reason. So I do not have to legitimize anthropology as a field for them. Maybe I do, but I can work under the assumption that I do not! (1960s). This structural dilemma is only part of the problem. What was seen as necessary to cultivate a sense of disciplinary knowledge in anthropology students was also critiqued. A lot of courses interconnected and graduated on an accumulative assumption might make an anthropology major. However, others things must be sacrificed. One of the more important sacrifices was the notion of breadth of knowledge. This in turn effects content knowledge. It also effects the awareness of epistemological concerns. This is so because most of these concerns developed outside of anthropology. Lack of theoretical awareness seems to lessen the potential for students passion for learning in general: Of course they bring diverse backgrounds. That is what I always sort of liked about anthropology and what I feel we have lost. You know just with the kind of structured program. A student comes along and wants to be a graduate student. They have to do at least two years or more to get the kind of background that we want to accept them into the program. Which means it gets quite inbred. The only people that are accepted are those that have done nothing but anthropology! Which I really do not approve of. But that is the way things are in this particular area. You know that is the way things have gone (1960s). This structured institutional approach to learning continues in graduate school. It becomes even more competitive. However, speakers thought that this had changed over time. Perhaps it was not always the case. Some speakers disagreed with these changes. The intimacy of former incarnations of famous (and now much larger) anthropological institutions was seen as sacrificed. This difference was also a change that was often mentioned. It was seen as having a direct effect on the specialization of 283 learning. This was also seen as the irony of learning more and at the same time, knowing less: Q: It seems that at that time you could move around graduate schools more than you can now? Yeah, oh yeah. And when I was there they had, I cannot remember how many staff, but there must have been only seven or eight or so. And that was a big Ph.D. program! They had a physical anthropologist and a linguist and a couple of archaeologists and a couple of cultural anthropologists who taught undergraduate and graduate courses. For students who wanted to do a graduate course you added on an extra paper or something like that. And you were working on a lot of archaeology and that sort of thing. And that was a big program! And as you know of course, and as I am sure other people have told you, things have changed quite a bit in that sense, I suspect (1960s). The second period of university expansion in North America saw the availability of employment correspondingly grow. How did this effect the relationship of anthropologists to their knowledge? Q: I wanted you to maybe comment on the old idea that anthropology is more than the sum of its parts? How it might be more than that? Oh my! Well, we certainly have the notion that a department in North America should do a little of this and a little of that. And if you get one more job most departments will look for someone who does something they do not have yet! Well, and I certainly lived through a period of one of those wild expansions. There were five people already hired the year I arrived and I think nineteen when I left...! Most of that happened in the first seven years. So you are thinking about this and well 'Okay, one more position, well what are we going shopping for this time!' You know and I spent... years in a department where I was the only person who did what I did and I had very few people to talk to. Except my students and native people over at... and I tend to find that increasingly debilitating I guess... [Yet] my identification with the discipline has always been broader than the department I am teaching in. And if I had thought anything else I would have ended up in a straightjacket years ago!... I think the strongest thing about anthropology is that you can change your mind about what it is you do. Even five years ago... although people may say they are not interested in it, they almost never say 'that is not anthropology' (1960s). 284 There were tradeoffs involved in expansion. However, these would not necessarily be felt by individuals as they pursued careers at various institutions. Some speakers suggested this was due to the feeling that anthropology had a great opportunity to expand the scope of human knowledge. There were more of its practitioners about. There must in turn be more knowledge about culture. Instead, for some, what occurred was a specialization of knowledge. This created in and outgroups of scholars. These groups did not have the time to communicate with one another. Such communication would have been about more general issues. Amongst these issues would be epistemology and theories of knowledge. Other disciplines have groups of scholars devoted to these issues. Anglo-analytic philosophy is one example. Anthropology has never had this advantage. The flux of positivism and post-positivism in anthropology may in part be due to this. No single group has authority or is the source of epistemology. This lack of epistemological awareness is only noticed later in one's career. It is noticed in a form not necessarily of theoretical reflection. Nor does it force attendant pedagogical action. It tends to be recounted as a narrative history of changes in institutional contexts: There was never any question looking back from the vantage point of the present of getting a job. It was not an issue at that time. Of course there were jobs. This was the period of the great American university expansion as it was in Britain and in Canada. Except a little later. And, of course you will get a job. So, maybe not a well paying job, you know, but, well at least there was a path to employment and that was not an issue. And research funds. That was never an issue. That there was not a great amount of research funds. But that there would at least be some research funds because the funding of the National Institutes of Health was becoming into line as well as the National Science Foundation. So this was the beginning of the flush period in American anthropology, right, when hopeful students could enter the discipline. They can bet a relatively comfortable and interesting academic based career could lay in the other end (1960s). It was also easier to market oneself in the period of university expansion. The assumptions of one's employers could be quite different. Speakers often paused in their recapitulation of their time looking for a job. They also included in their reflections memories about when they 285 themselves hired others. These reflections occurred especially when these anthropologists thought about changing characteristics of job applicants over time. Institutionally wrought changes also have had another effect. The way anthropology reflects on its own theoretical changes has changed. One could argue, however, that there has been a basic lack of reflection on epistemology and its potential shifts. This might mean that in the culture of certain anthropologists there has not been a shift. Shifts or fluxes in theories of knowledge construction cannot occur in a cultural vacuum. The employment market in anthropology in part reflects disciplinary interest or lack thereof in epistemological or theoretical issues. Yet the teaching of anthropology must continue. How it does so is the subject in the back of every employer's and candidate's minds: I think things were more general at the time, if somebody studied here in North America who can focus on ethnography. And someone who is ambivalent is good too, because they can teach sort of a general introductory course. And I started teaching at... There was an introductory course I was doing and it was an interdisciplinary kind of course that everyone had to contribute to. This was kind of interesting. And I guess I saw myself as a general anthropologist. So I did it. When I came up here I did [first year]. I was teaching physical anthropology and archaeology and so on. It was fascinating. I loved getting all the slides out of all the fossil men and that sort of thing! So I think the market was such for a more general anthropologist. Only recently have students begun graduating with degrees and specialising, and saying 'Well I cannot really teach an introductory course, I only teach these certain courses in the syllabus'. And we scratch our heads and say 'Well, what do these people know after all'. Really! But earlier on, if there was a job, you sort of tailored what you could do to it. And of course in the meantime we taught it. So of course as we have already said, the programs were not so highly structured as they are now. And what you could teach was more varied... Usually it was just people who could do a general course. And not near as specialized as they are now. The discipline increased in size of course. And with this increase in size came more bodies, more anthropologists. So there were more people looking for things to study and got fascinated with specific areas I suppose. And with more people and more time to commit, you know, it just increased its levels of specialisation. As with the evolution of society as the communities become larger and larger they get differentiated, you know! (1960s). 286 The anthropological analogy comes precisely from this self-same period of university expansion. One might speculate if the neo-evolutionists were speaking more about their own culture than of small to medium scale societies. Some speakers suggested discomfort about their own growth. The important thing for some natives was the effect it might have on disciplinary integrity and intimacy: In fact, that is probably something I am becoming even more convinced of. I think... that the academic world takes itself seriously in a way... that I am increasingly uncomfortable with. I realized [that] during the last time I went to a very big academic meeting. The American Anthropological Association. I flew there on public monies in order to give a paper. I listened to lots and lots of papers that I found unrelentingly boring, and should never have been presented publicly. Along with lots of others that were extremely good of course! And I realised as I was riding up the escalator passing 350 people coming down all of whom had Anthropological Association 'Hi, I am so and so!'. None of whom I knew, that I was diminished by being in this atmosphere. Where there were literally thousands of people who did the same thing I did whom I did not know! I realised that I probably was not going to go to any more of those big mega-conferences because I felt it was taking myself seriously in a way that I was not really comfortable doing (1960s). The institutional culture of anthropology and other disciplines did not abate in its pressure on faculty. Part of this pressure concerned their abilities to teach. Speakers suggested the pressures got even more complex over time. The following is one account of this institutional context of disciplinary inheritance. It took place at a famous university. This institution's rhetoric of the value of education was well known. However, such rhetoric turned out to be equal only to its ruthless administrative policies. These policies concerned hiring and firing of faculty. The university also had an equally arrogant expectation of those it had previously hired: The university handled, I think, the Vietnam war situation very badly. They were rather crude and nasty at some points when they did not need to be. I mean it made the environment a lot less pleasant for the students and for the more progressive faculty than they had to. It was incompetence. It was not really political. I mean, it was reactionary! But it was also a combination of sort of reactionary and incompetence at the administrative level which began making the place rather unpleasant. And they were also seeing down the line that 287 they were going to institute a system that given the fact that they saw money beginning to dry up. To institute a system more like Harvard and Yale. Where you hired people into the university in a junior position and the assumption was that one out of four would stay. But that to me was not a problem. I had tenure there. But the plan for the future was one in which ... the administration, much against our protests, but they were doing this to the university as a whole, said that they were going to introduce this new system in which it was like one out of four. And a number of us decided that we could not live with that. That was no way to run a university!! And that fact that they did it at Harvard and Yale was not a legitimating factor for us! So over a two or three year period [we all left]. And again, these were not individual negative tenure cases, which really surprised them. You know 'Why would we object because we already had tenure!' But it was that sort of mentality. 'Why should you complain, your job is not on the line'... (1960s). Q: 'You are already part of the system so...' You are already part of the system', they... (1960s). Q: ...must have thought you were crazy... Yeah, we were totally crazy. And we were very happy when we left. Because we obviously were not game-playing to the degree that they thought that serious... men should behave. And we were all men at that time. So I mean, the department does still exist. But it is not very large. And I think that they may have even dropped a graduate program. Because of the number of people you would need! I mean, a lot of people are unwilling to work in that kind of environment... That you should be 'thankful for the job' and then immediately begin looking for another one! (1960s). Yet more and more institutions began to operate under just these assumptions. Those who were hired into them at a junior position must also have made different assumptions. What do these kind of pressures do to the quality of teaching anthropology? What do they do to its reflective capability? The building of personal political alliance networks does not occur without expense. It may occur at the expense of studying, writing, thinking, and working with students. This is bound to have a direct effect on scholarship. Certain areas like epistemology and theory are influenced in this manner. Faced with a limited amount of time, people tend to stick with what they already know. They expand in directions which they have already explored as 288 safe bets for publishing. They do this in order to present themselves as job-worthy in this self-same system. Anthropology seems to have hired for a lengthy period based on culture area expertise. Hence, theoretical concerns might remain in the background. They would remain so for lengthy periods in individual careers. They might appear at the tail end of one's institutional journey. However, this appearance may have a remedial quality. Furthermore, the employment situation currently is not what it was. There will be no tendency to ameliorate any seen theoretical vacuum. This is so even if more positions are based on theoretical work. Elements which are marginal to reproductive discourse may remain so in a stable economy. Looking at anthropology as primarily an academic based institution which it is in terms of numbers. And that is not likely to change say in the next ten years, anyways. As to what universities and other places are going to look like what are the economies like. What are the universities like? The situation that created the opportunity for people like me to do what I do was a certain period of university expansion. [This] was preceded by a period of much larger expansion. So what I would want to know in answering that question would be how that is going to look over the ten, fifteen, or twenty years, and so I really do not know! Probably not good. But you know on the other hand, it so easy to say not good. There is no money. There are no jobs. A few more years and it will all be over. That may or may not be the case (1960s). This brings up the question of just what is a university about? There are conflicting reports on this topic from anthropologists in this study and elsewhere. Sapir sarcastically opined: That an individual possesses the bachelor's degree may or may not prove that he knows, or once knew, something about Roman history and trigonometry. The important thing about his degree is that it helps him to secure a position which is socially or economically more desirable than some other position which can be obtained without the aid of this degree. Society has misgivings about the function of specific items in the educational process and has to make atonement by inventing such notions as the cultivation of the mind (1949:567[1934]). This seems to be part of what university education is about. Perhaps the recent call for relevance of academic knowledge to the outside world makes this aspect more important. Yet this can be contrasted with the 289 following quotes from this study. These suggest that both personal and scholarly skills can indeed assure better understanding of the general society. They can help one cope with the whole gamut of human employment experience: Having discovered the issue of a good friend and the excitement of committee work which got me to know people in other disciplines very, very well, your phone starts ringing and you start talking to people all over campus. Not simply sticking your head in one of your neighbour's doors when you cannot stand it any more! And you want to talk to someone. These two things have quite changed it for me. And even though if somebody had told me at the beginning of my career that I would spend thirty-five years in the same job I would have told them they were crazy! I am now absolutely delighted to be doing that after twenty-five years here. You know the folklore and you know the gossip. You remember the history. And you become a senior member. And that is a very, very pleasant thing to happen! (1960s). Sometimes the university can change from the bottom up. Sometimes such changes are taught to the ground floor of the student career: What university is about, is about helping people learn how to think critically. And there are lots of ways you can do that. You can do that by adopting a kind of informed skepticism as a positivist. Even a Popperian person teaching in a psychology department in experimental design would tackle this approach. I think which is the notion of skepticism, of an informed skepticism while constantly trying to test things out. I may disagree with their findings end of it, that they have actually discovered what they think they have, or negated what they think they have. But the approach is still a critical sense. And one of the major problems that students come to us with, and that society has as a whole... that is, they cannot think critically. In that they cannot postulate an explanation other than the first one that comes to mind. If you ask them how someone else would explain that, they would, say, 'Well if I was someone else, then I would not be me, and I would not know', you know! Or something like that. Or, if you ask them to give an alternative explanation that might be sound, they cannot. 'This is the one I believe'. All teaching... is other than what is given to us. That comes to us from that taken for granted realm, parents, schools, television, media, the culture that they live in. That there might be another explanation. That there might be an alternative description, an alternative interpretation, just an alternative. Whichever one of those you suppose to be. I do not see how you can do that in class unless you do it reflexively (1970s). 290 These ideals may be noble. However, for others it still comes down to institutional opportunity. The transmission of these ideals in and as education must be afforded by such an opportunity. Such ideals may run counter to institutional ideology. They are all the less likely to find a home in that same institutional context. As this speaker implied, it is up to the teachers of these ideals and ways of thinking to translate them effectively. This translation should bear no loss of potential radicalism. Such ideas can be transported into contexts which are accepted by other institutions and political ideologies. Opportunities for this may or may not improve in the future. However, most speakers saw little doubt in the notion that change was inevitable. The pattern of such change might even be cyclical: I think that what we say as much as what we do quite frankly will be a function of who has the opportunity to say something. And who has the opportunity to do something in a particular place in a particular time. And I do not know where that is going to be. If it is going to be at Harvard or if it is going to be at Calgary. There will be a difference in what people are going to be saying. You cannot predict what that difference will be but there will... be a difference. So the university world is too unsettled as well as the world in which it is located... There may be institutional changes happening which are in a way reminiscent of the post-war period... Just look at the discipline after World War Two, and the scope of the difficulties different parts of the world are in is at least about the same! Right now. And [it] has probably gotten more so over the past few years so that there are certain parallels for the field to the sort of 1948-9 period except that they were optimists in those days! So it is that, but without the optimism! How we position ourselves is a little unclear. I do not think that you can. Prophecy at this point is really hard (1960s). Knowledge of the entire human condition can be overwhelming. The evils seen during the period this speaker discusses necessitated optimism. This optimism can be seen directly reflected in an edited volume at the start of this period (Linton 1947[1945]). There is a doomsday introduction written in August of 1944. The Second World War reached a peak of allied effort at this time. However, the dedication reads: \"To all those who have applied the techniques of science to the solving of human problems\" (Linton 1947 frontispiece [1945]). Could such a dedication be written today?\" 9 9 Published the same year, and pointing to a nascent revision of some of socio-cultural anthropology's subject, Cayton and Drake's Black Metropolis has the following dedicatory 291 Some speakers spoke of the currently perceived crisis in more casual tones. There was, however, still some menace: When our Dean, who said in reply to me 'Well, the university has had 800 good years, maybe that is over'. The Dean said, 'Well, the age of reason has had 400 good years, maybe then that's had it too!' But I can face that with some personal equanimity at least, I will be retired by then! (1970s). Dark humour has replaced optimism for some anthropologists. Some speakers were born and bred into an era when the assumptions were that the university was about to come of age. Certainly the idea that it was about to disappear did not occur. There may be analogous limits to theories of knowledge. These may reach their heights of explanation exactly when they find their limits. There seems to be a shadowed area regarding epistemology which not even the most astute critics can access: Once again, in the educational system the people who most need to change - say in terms of a broader educational pedagogy and learning, the real practice of educators - their conception of cultural capital, are in fact those the least likely to change. For example, when the continental icons are invited over here, you know they are also wined and dined and put on a pedestal! So there is some jealousy over . this in terms of people saying \"Why should we change just because he or she says so?\". But on the other hand, there is not much serious critique of these people. Like Bourdieu and Derrida for example. Because most of the criticism [is] motivated by jealousy or other things like that! Yet even Bourdieu is working within the system he exposes so well (1970s). Perhaps this residue of mystery helps the social scientist keep working. However, I will leave the last word in this chapter to another extract. This one discusses the institutional milieu commenting on its manner of professionalization are commented upon. This statement is neither malicious nor sarcastic. It is not humorous quote on its respective frontispiece: \"Anthropology, the science of man, has been mainly concerned up to the present with the study of primitive peoples. But civilized man is quite as interesting an object of investigation, and at the same time his life is more open to observation and study. Urban life and culture are more varied, subtle and complicated, but the fundamental motives are in both instances the same.\" (Drake and Cayton 1945; frontispiece). This book was also mentioned by one anthropologist as a favorite. One can note the universal presumption of humanity underlying the variations of culture. This motif is echoed in others' expressions in the text that anthropology studies whatever is human. 292 nor critical. It looks at the institution not philosophically, but anthropologically: ...Professionalization is not a book of rules or a constitution or a code of ethics. But it is certain aspects of that hundred year history that we either choose to keep or are stuck with. The way institutions are structured. The way our work is put together. The kind of moral stances we tend to take. Those are sort of attributes of that hundred years. That hundred years of not quite solitude! And so... that is my approach to presenting the profession as something that we all share a relationship to. But each a different one being at different career stages... And that does not get down to certain specifics of what it is like doing anthropology exactly in this moment in Canada say. There are other courses that do that. At least there are supposed to be. So... that is how I think of it. And that is why I spend so much of that time dealing with issues of that sort in introductory courses. Because there is that. And students sometimes at the [first year] level find that kind of discussion delegitimating it does not incite them to further thinking. But it sort of says 'Well, you know, if you do not know what you are doing, maybe who does? Why are you there?' And so in first year you need to establish your authority in the classroom. Which I do not find a problem! But you cannot then delegitimate that authority by dwelling too much on the stupidities of either the past or the present. Because... there is sort of still with the nature of the profession I find it to me there is this anthropological question. There are the institutions, the ideologies, and the agencies, and whatever. And to put that out on the table and say these are the parts I see, that compose what we consider to be a profession. And that is what I try to do. And the next book is on that! (1960s). There may be opportunities in the institution for radical critique. This critique can be directed at anthropology. As well, it may be directed against the reproduction of knowledge in general. The taking of such an opportunity is perhaps a movement towards an anthropological praxis. This praxis is not strictly positivist. It is also not strictly post-positivist. However, one would first have to subvert the very history of recent anthropological theory as it tells itself its own story. Speakers' thoughts and analyses concerning the cultural influences on anthropological knowledge construction are part of the culture of the educational institution. Persons, places, schools of thought, departments, administration, publishers, students and course media are all important factors that in a sense decide what knowledge is known at what time, and by 293 whom. These gatekeeping facets of the inheritance of anthropological knowledge were seen to severely limit what students of anthropology could and did know about their field at any one time or place. This is reflected in the knowledge of the different speakers. Hence, knowledge may be as situated as ethics is. 294 CHAPTER SEVEN - WHY ANTHROPOLOGY? THE ETHICAL VIEW What Anthropologists Say is Important and Why: I became interested in the creation of culture as opposed to describing societies which were becoming extinct all over the place. Just a kind of the naturalist's metaphor within this whole district around and I do not see that happening. Like a lot of the forces of late stage industrial capitalism were genocidal. And there is some obvious interpretive war of ethnocide going on as opposed to genocide by the forces of competition inside industrial societies. [It] makes life rather meaningless and the competition that these people rely more and more on a similar ethnic groups. And that creates emergent ethnicity in societies which are trying to erase it! Or wipe it out somewhere else. There is a resurgence of aboriginal groups everywhere. So culture is being created at the same time. And those processes really interest me because they are a part of the potentially more positive ways of living amongst human beings as well as negative ones. All culture that is created is not good! (1970s). The diversity of human cultures by definition implies varying concepts of morality. To ignore them for some previously stated supposed universal reality denies the very ethic of anthropology (Whittaker 1981:445). In this chapter, I will present speakers' comments on ethical issues along with some conclusions. They concern the questions surrounding the raison d'etre of anthropology. Why do anthropology? What is it good for? What contribution does anthropology make to greater humanity? Does it make such a contribution? These questions seem to be more important for anthropologists in this study than are questions about theories of knowledge. It is important that culture continually create itself. Anthropology as a culture also does this. This section listens to anthropologists speak about how anthropological knowledge gets created. It also tells us in part how anthropology keeps itself going. Anthropology can be seen as a culture in which a continual re-writing occurs. How this occurs is complex. Anthropologists in this study suggest, however, a few outstanding features which motivate this process. Such motivations, though, are sometimes judged good or bad for anthropology. The comments that follow can be lumped into the two categories of 295 teaching and research. The two are intimately related. I also encountered the folkloric opinions of 'I teach in order to do research', versus 'I do research so that I can teach' opposition. Most anthropologists were well aware of this academic folklore. However, few fell fully in either category. Hence, what follows is a very loose organization of two important themes. First, how to educate, and second, what and when was anthropology at its best? A number of speakers spoke directly to these issues. Speakers said they involve incredible amounts of work. I think the ideal is the combination of teaching and research in which anthropology is seen as a crucial piece of turning out educated human beings. And in that sense I think there is much to be said about increasing the pressure on institutions to offer undergraduate anthropology as part of a general core curriculum. And I think that we must insist that one who simply takes the position outside the mainstream is absolutely crucial to that notion of living in the world well. And I think if those of us who are relatively senior do our jobs responsibly, that there would be more jobs, not less. So I have a commitment in that direction. I think that you cannot teach without doing research... It means that we teach them to think and be involved in the world and they end up doing all kinds of things. And they may not have disciplinary labels of any kind or not. I have a lot of former students who say, 'Gee, I am not doing anthropology anymore'. But they come back to check in with their friend. And I listen to what they are doing, and of course they are doing anthropology! It is a manner of seeing the world. Now in the sense that we are losing a professional generation because it takes so long to get down to having a real job, that I regret immensely... (1960s). A lot of what was deemed important by speakers is summarized in the preceding quote. In general, anthropology is seen as an excellent course in teaching the student how to think. The idea of critical thinking, and putting oneself in another's viewpoint, are central to this pedagogy: Unless you say Think about your assumptions' here, you can still teach anthropology's object to your heart's content while doing it. It is not a difficult task really. It is a conceptual revolution that a person just has to have, I mean. And one that you hope your students will get. That they will be able to think critically about themselves and how they feel and see things not about externalising that as how a society I am a member of deals with that. Because there is no knowledge in that. It is exteriorized. It is just another othering step. I do not believe that you can teach it any other way. I do not believe you 296 can teach much of anything any other way! (1970s). This is similar to the idea of doing fieldwork in another part of the globe. Fieldwork can enhance our consciousness of our own culture. The presentation of these experiences is a part of the pedagogical strategy of anthropology. It is also central to ethnography courses. It is designed to decentre received opinion about one's own culture. For some, this decentring of received opinions is the greatest contribution socio-cultural anthropology makes to teaching. Hence it could be seen as the most important thing about anthropology in general: Well... I think the greatest landmark that anthropology has been able to produce is its emphasis on what we used to call reflexivity. And I now call it the examination of the discourse. I honestly, even though history has historiography... I really truly think that anthropology is at the head [of this]. And I have done psychology and I have done sociology. And it is followed fairly closely by something like literature. Literature manages to scrutinize its own texts within itself but not the means of their organization, and [this is] what I like about anthropology. Maybe this is my very favorite thing about. It can not only scrutinize its own texts, but it's whole world is scrutinization. And that is rather rare in the academic disciplines. I do not know about even philosophers. I think we do it more rigorously even than they do. I have to say... and I felt truly satisfied to have done what is the right thing to do. And it is not about teaching a lot of facts about ethnography. But that teaching anthropology is a way of living a life. And I have always felt that way. At least that is why I am in the discipline (1960s). Students need to realize viable and lived alternatives to their own. Hermeneutically, then, this constitutes the shattering of previous prejudices through an education critical of one's assumptions. Where there is this close intensity of exchange of new discoveries and the excitement of new discovery, that is the level of exchange that I am increasingly becoming comfortable with. That teaching is becoming, as I age... an increasingly consuming question. I have always approached teaching as a combination of evangelism and vaudeville... This course will change your life! And after you will never see the world in the same way again'. And you know it is amazing how often in their evaluations at the end of the course mention that experience of saying that on the first day, which essentially set them up with such a self-fulfilling-prophecy maybe. Or a set of expectations 297 where all year long they were considering every thing they came up with and thinking 'I wonder if this is the thing he said was going to change my life?' By the end they had found lots of things. Including a very different perspective that is the anthropological perspective -which is excitement in the face of otherness (1960s). On the other hand, there must be a structure to this negation of prejudice. This structure must be recognizable to other teachers of anthropology. Critical thinking in general is deemed important. However, there seems to be an anthropological manner of being critical. This is also presented as being critical of pedagogy and education: ...the courses are broadly enough defined so that there is room to maneuver. But not an idiosyncratic maneuver. I would never make a course into something other than what it seems. I know that there are people who do that and then it does become too idiosyncratic... I have had experiences with students in classes who will say 'But I took anthropology [second year] and we never discussed Y , and given that you cannot discuss everything in every course. But these were really things where, you know like 'tribes' or 'lineages', or something!! And you know then it appeared that there was a very idiosyncratic version of the field that somebody was teaching... I think that there is an ethic. There is an ethic there that implies that you do not do that... Just as I think there is more agreement on certain ethnographic issues in the way we would like to think. In one way we have a great investment level, in that it is all exciting, and human difference is changing and chaotic. And in another way it is not. But... there is a pedagogical culture in anthropology, at least I think in North America, of what certain sorts of courses look like. So that if a student takes another one in the department he will not be cheated. They will not feel cheated or they will not be cheated. And the ethical violation of this I think is quite serious (1960s). Anthropology must exist in spite of the internal differences, political factionalism, and theoretical debates. This brand of anthropology exists for speakers in a very real and meaningful sense. Important then are an ethics of obligation to students and to the discipline. The \"idiosyncracies\" in the above refer not merely to a \"this is what I think\" proposition. This statement is always trivially true. The professor is speaking, the class is listening. This is true especially in introductory courses. Yet in these courses it is seen as particularly necessary to instill a sense of anthropological existence to students. This existence should not be undermined by showing 298 anthropology's shreds and patches too closely. One usually leaves this for graduate school. The reference to soliptically inclined courses is to expose an ethical violation. The idiosyncratic teacher violates the norms of a bounded discipline. However, some anthropologists were seen as parochial: I think a lot of people just want to protect their academic turf! I think as far as expansion goes there is so much knowledge that has been discovered, created. 'Discovered'! Well, that is a whole other issue! But I mean it is part of a political process and the surroundings of the discipline, we have to rationalize what we have to contribute. So I think that in a large part dictates the boundaries. I do not know what it is that [type of thing] makes. I mean anthropology is set up. It is uniquely North American. You do not see this four sub-field approach to any large extent in other parts of the world. Archaeology is part of history and prehistory, and physical anthropology is part of biology in other countries. So the diversity, it appeals to me. And when I say we do not have to know all the details of what is going on in the other sub-disciplines, as long as we have a rudimentary knowledge that is enough, and as long as we know what is going on in our own sub-discipline (1990s). The detail of such a project can only come from written work. This occurs in comparison and conference with others. This may shunt individualism aside for the time being. However, it also helps to open one's mind about the possibilities of being an individual within a discourse. One cannot make up one's mind about the unknown: The difficulty is that it takes up a great deal of time, for both the students and the person doing the papers, and it cuts down on the options for developing theories and interests which makes being in a required course possibly less, rather than more, rewarding. The carrot could be, well, even within the context of this course you can follow your own star. But with that kind of assignment it is... difficult to follow your own star. I do think that you do not learn something. You do not learn textual material unless you write about it... I have a real [sense] it is not just an idea, but that it is better to write than not... You need to put in order in your head, [and] until you write it down [you cannot]... Many of us do not have experience doing that (1960s). The importance of this is to enable one's students to make an educated choice. It is unfair to them if you present very narrow versions of aspects of anthropology. Although each speaker has his or her own specialty, 299 narrowness is considered unethical. This is because the student in turn will not know much about anthropology. If this type of teaching dominates the university in general, then students will not know very much about anything! Each discipline and culture would be sold short. This would confirm the popular description of higher education as irrelevant to societal concerns at best. At worst, it would have no internal coherency.100 There seems to be a change of consciousness associated with coming into contact with a proselytory anthropological pedagogy. One speaker discussed some of these issues at some length: About the shock issue: Students who grow up in suburbia for the most part are often shocked to the degree that they are susceptible to and actually believe or listen to much of what you say to them in a first year class. They often are. They come from middle or upper middle class backgrounds. Quite privileged in the world and in the country they live. Their discovery that all is not right can turn to feelings of betrayal, cynicism, negativity, and so on... Especially in medical anthropology where the state of the health of the world's children is just appalling, I mean hamsters respect their young. [They] do a better job of raising their young than we do in human systems at this point. And suggestions that long caring relationships and long socialization is a characteristic of the human species is basically not true. They are vast overstatements. So that when you present material like that you need to make sure that students understand that there are also people who are trying to address those issues and that there have been successes. That world literacy is rising. It has been for some time. That public health institutions in nations have greatly reduced infant mortality in some places... (1970s). If prejudices must be shattered, they can be replaced with others which inspire students. Inspired students may work to change the world. According to some speakers, this is also one of anthropology's achievements. The presentation of other cultures occurs in juxtaposing the students' culture and that of another society. Hence there is with such content presentation, an effort to teach critical and reflective faculties as a strategy for reading and 1 0 0 In addition, there are increasingly present questions of logistical pressures: \"Well, it is a question of a lot of universities cutting back on small programs. A lot of universities not having enough funding to offer to students. This year I understand that McGill admitted two students with money to its Ph.D. program. For this year, and I sort of go 'What?!'. It is not the case that only the small number of students that are supported by SSHRC are worthy of continuing. This is not the way you produce society's intelligentsia. And that is what we are losing as people do not go on. And I am very sad about this. And I do my bit where I can figure out a way to. I have arranged a number of real shoestring positions for a number of people over the years...\" (1960s). 300 observing. People start questioning themselves and the world around them. Later on, they may even begin to question anthropology: The questions being raised on how do you think about it, and what does it mean to raise questions about relations between thought and action and history and structure and things of that sort, are talked about very intelligently. And in the concrete as well as in the abstract. At least he tries to be concrete so that people will be also dealing with particular works of literature as they are or particular events as they are trying to think through the questions. These are questions very similar to questions anthropologists raise. But at that point, at least, anthropology was not very reflective about those questions. It was always to discover the relation between thought and action, 'Gee is not that nice! A-ha'. As if it were a new thing and something without a great deal of freight and difficulty and minefields! And a great deal of discussion that had already occurred as to the ways out of those minefields (1960s). Anthropology in general has something to teach other disciplines. What is taught is the critical process that another culture presents to us. Ultimately, the ethical importance of this was also seen as promoting a kind of self-valuing. Such valuing is respectful of others and other cultures. However, it is always critical enough to stop short of the point where respect turns to fashion: So many of the young turks are born again liberals that our Vice-President said 'I would rather be an alcoholic'. Lots of people seem to have a need to be popular, faddish, to be on the right side of everything. I do not have that need. The key is to keep your sanity whilst remaining an individual. People succumb to intellectual fashion and peer group pressure. Hence I retreat into skepticism, almost to cynicism. But my sardonic sense of humour saves me from becoming this completely. You have to be hard minded, bloody-minded even, to stand in the line up being the only one facing the wrong way. This is not for the faint of heart. Joining a movement is a great substitute for thinking (1970s). Hence, an important gift anthropology can give its students is the consciousness of an open mind. This is coupled with the responsibility of someone who understands more intimately the processes of the construction of culture. \"To think about others whilst not letting others think for you\", could 301 be a credo of the kind of anthropology presented by many speakers. Anthropology in general seems to have this sense of intimate distance. This is evident both amongst its practitioners and between these and its students. Such was deemed important by many speakers. They also discussed why they felt this way. Sometimes this was phrased in terms of policy work: Well, I think that anthropologists have this belief. I think they have to have some clue and reflexivity about things. We are an incredibly powerless discipline. Of all disciplines that deal with human beings we probably have the least amount of power and influence, so that I personally have written about this in a book. We did on some of these issues and nobody pays any attention to us. Except the people we work with, the local people, the indigenous communities and so on. And what I like about anthropology, I suppose, is its grounded approach to change. It tends to look more at change from the ground up in Canada. In America it is a little different, especially with native American stuff. I have had these debates with Americans for many years. They still feel that anthropology should be attempting to influence the political realm at the level of, say congress and state legislatures, policy at that level, and I do not think that is what anthropology should be doing. That is appropriation, okay! Because you are making representations to state structures on behalf of groups who are quite capable of making those representations themselves... Canadian anthropology, certainly with respect to aboriginal people, is much more grounded in the community. It sees change as something that comes from the ground up and that is why we function a little bit differently here (1980s). This quote directly bridges to the following. In the latter, respect for others is allied with critical reflection on ourselves. In policy work, anthropology has immense responsibilities to those outside of anthropology. However, these obligations are also due its students: Of trying to accommodate as much as possible the needs of the community and [so that] my needs would never supercede it. They might complement. They might be put aside by things the community wanted to do for a while, and ultimately things I wanted to do would be helped by that as well! Well, it does have an instrumental value but to always try to work with the community, develop community partners, instead of key informants. [That is] a kind of military metaphor! Or a spy one. Or collaborator, which is also [that]. Instead - friends. And to develop what to do and why you might want to do it. And you are given an opportunity to modify that if it really does not make much sense. Likewise you have an opportunity to modify their views on why that 302 might actually make sense! It is a negotiation. You do not just capitulate your own interests. After all, they may be mistaken interests, and they need the opportunity to dissuade you from what you want to be doing. It may be risky. It may not be important, even to you. And to know that. Likewise, at some distance, you may have developed certain perspectives on knowledge which would be helpful if they gave it a second thought (1970s). Q: So there is a real sense of dialogue in the best sense... Yeah, dialogue, and all that stuff that Tedlock started talking about. The dialogical. And then gave it a theoretical sort of sense. [It] was very much a conversation. And there are very much two sides, initially. And eventually there are four or five, because the culture does not have one voice and nor do you! Or one hat to wear (1970s). These anthropologists walk a tightrope between taking control of a cultural situation and violating another voice. This rope is negotiation. This walk is dialogue. Socio-cultural anthropology seems to stake much of its premise on the opening up of a cross-cultural dialogue. It is seen as important to bring to the students of anthropology the full impact of another voice. Much of the work of anthropology can be seen as accomplishing this contact: So a big part of my challenge with graduate students is to get them to bring them[selves] into collaborative work with people of other disciplines along with their community. In supervising the work that I do, and say this is what works, this is where there is funding. This is where you can get a lot of personal satisfaction out of this job. A vocation, whatever it is going to be for you. And that other route that is very individuated, very isolating. I mean it can still be inner driven, inner directed, and have an internal drive and morality and all that stuff which I think we talked about earlier. But you need to do something with that besides serve yourself and gaining an individual reputation. And most of those rewards come from working together with people (1970s). There is a syncretic tightrope of different voices and one's own experience in ethnographic authority. There is also the ethical fine line of being true to one's own self. Anthropology has need of both. This is due to its immense content knowledge about world cultures. As well, anthropology is itself ensconced within a culture and history of its own making. This contact is most often made with its sister disciplines 303 in the university setting. This setting is where most ethnographers are most of the time. The ethnographer also maps out the place where the university culture is going to be. This duty is part of the content of a teaching discourse: One of the difficulties now that has surfaced is that the focus is so much on the fieldwork situation as icon. Maybe because it is a lot of fun! I think, or was, anyway. After a certain point I do not know! That what we do most of the time is not that. As anthropologists, what we do most of time is what we are doing now. Except not one to one... One of the reasons why in doing the history of anthropology, I have oriented my own reading and the courses towards the histories of universities and other anthropological type institutions, [and] I am still trying to gain an understanding of how our own academy is as it is. I would not know how else to do it, except in part to do it historically (1960s). Hence, the structure of anthropology in general is that of an academic discipline. Anthropologists must come to terms with this. Academia is for the most part not of their own making. Anthropology has a respected place in the catalogue of disciplines. It can, however still be regarded as marginal. This is so to the extent that it holds itself aloof from practicing self-ethnography. One speaker suggested this was the main reason for anthropology's most frustrating moments in terms of pedagogy and inheriting its culture: I think the first thing is that as a woman the size of visibility of women. Not in anthropology itself because there are a lot of women. But the visibility of their work. To me doing this sort of work is important and it is interesting. And to never have our own discussion of women's activity, women's work, women's involvement in those issues. It is not enough for people to say well, that is the way it was in that time. We are talking about a discipline that claims to study people. Whereas I know that people are comprised of both women and men. So that is something that I have to deal with. And some of the feminist response to this is also problematic because it is too strong the other way. [It is] a sort of reification of women, and what women are... And the other thing I think is my experience of anthropologists who are sort of tired of being listeners, so they develop into persistent talkers. And they are very rarely interested in what their students think...'I am doing this, as a researcher and you are just going to listen to me'. And I have seen it a lot and I am always amazed. It is a kind of arrogance that assumes you are a humble little nothing that has nothing to add, nothing to say, and nothing to engage in. And you are just talked at!... I see it as a generational thing, actually. A certain kind of people have come out of it. And perhaps in those days when they sat at the foot of... 304 whoever, and today we are also expected to do that. (1990s). Some of anthropology perhaps needs to renegotiate with its students its pedagogical relationship. Anthropology may be eventually forced to do this. This renegotiation was deemed very important by most speakers. A number of them told me dramatic stories regarding these relationships. Here is one of the more detailed: We had an idea of anthropology as some sort of integrated knowledge of something. It is not exactly holism or something, but something bordering on that. And here we find theoretical enemies who are political allies. How can David Aberle and David Schnieder take the same position...? The fact that you were arguing with Margaret Mead was not surprising but! The shakeout was for the politics for both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, and in particular the role of universities in relations to that. Should there be sit-ins? Should there be teach-ins? Or is that a violation of a functional university? That was tearing apart departments! At that time as well, people had disagreements about that. Serious disagreements. They did not shake out on... theoretical sort of 'my approach to anthropology' lines. And that created a kind of internal anomaly, as it were. Where many people had come to think of the way in which to have to some degree a useful world. Because me and Marvin Harris living on the same side does not compute. But it did, it has! So that was also one of the causes for a theoretical reevaluation after those events are sort of more or less over. They are never over. We were remarking upon them and reflecting upon them and saying to yourself, 'Where was the mistake in the first place in thinking that it should not have been that way!' As opposed to thinking that it should have been that way... (1960s). It is important to recognize what it took in North America to remind socio-cultural anthropology of its own importance. Also, it was important to recognize that such changes to the inside of socio-cultural anthropology are not finished. Anthropology was seen as creating a world that it then must live in. This is reflected by certain anthropological methodology. As well, it is refracted by its epistemology. Geertz suggests, for some anthropologists, ethical concerns outweigh those which are epistemological. One example, concerns representation and ...a worry about the legitimacy of speaking for others... The 305 second concern, that about the inability of anthropologists, most of them American, British, German, or French, and virtually all of them Western trained, to free themselves from views derived from their own culture so as to see other peoples 'in their own terms', is but the worry about occluding other voices expressed in an epistemological key (Geertz 1995:128-9). This may mean that we cannot speak of certainties. We cannot be certain of others or ourselves. However, [a] probabilistic world is no degradation. We need to recognize this otherwise it may be deterministic. Even if it was, I would rather live as if I am in a probablistic situation. There is at least a chance in working with understanding while I know that there is no chance doing nothing. Now of course with everything you do may or can or will have unintended consequences. One cannot beat up on others because of this. Also there is no category of ethics, like that of the victim. No special claims can be made here or in any other place, and one must always be skeptical of putting one's own ethics ahead of others' (1970s). Ethics presents a problem. This is so because one has been in other cultures. The ethics of another culture may be unrecognizable to us. We can claim nothing with the certitude befitting an omniscient ethical position. However, anthropology has a working practical experience of cross-cultural ethics. This may help make a \"better world\". As well, it can give those whom it studies a chance to preserve and revitalize their world: All of us came out starting in the summer of... and started working intensively with individual people on how to do grammars for these languages. And we were from the first minute thrown into situations where whole communities recognized that we were the first persons to come around in a long time. That were really interested in doing what they felt had to be done, and that was providing a 'box of treasures' in the tape recorder. And a willingness to listen. And all these people which they wanted to pass on to their grandchildren and in which their children had no interest at all! No one could believe that I had come back the second year! When I came back the second year they knew that they had been right in telling you these things. And then everyone in the village came and camped out in your living room! (1960s). This chance must come down to, as another speaker suggests in the 306 next extract, the \"joy of expanding oneself through another\". If this ceases, the most important contribution to self and society anthropology in general can give might pass as well. Perhaps the raison d'etre for anthropology would also be extinguished. The speakers in this project were unanimous in their opinions that a type of ethics would cease. However, some were more vociferous than others in describing why this was so. For example: I see the field as a research field and as a teaching field. It is rather a conservative view of it. It is as it is, rather than somebody changing it in a very radical way! That is, most of us teach for a living, most of the time, mostly undergraduates, and as well as graduate students and combine that with some research interests that we see as part of that tradition and are sort of actualised now and again. Periods of continuing research time or research time off. The one part of that charter myth that I am uncertain about, is whether the charter myth has given up on direct human contact or not? Whether it is now 'reading?' I mean we have always spent more time reading than doing field work. Even reading anthropology!... I still see... the joy of doing anthropology as expanding your own knowledge and other peoples' through other peoples' as well as your own. I see that as a kind of calling that is defended in its own right. And if the overwhelming difficulties of doing person to person fieldwork seem so heavy to so many people that they are retreating from it, that would be my sadness. Where the nature of the field would change radically. That would be the single most drastic change in the field that I could imagine. There have been reasons for the field work experience being the central myth. Maybe not the right reasons! (1960s). Most importantly for anthropology as spoken here is that it is an intercultural activity based on human contact. This is the uniqueness of anthropology. As well, this is its specialty. In spite of this, there were at least two anthropologies. Others suggested that anthropology made a distinction between anthropology as a way of life and as a profession: Q: Do you have to be an anthropologist to do anthropology? I do not think so. I should say yes, but I do not think so. It all depends what kind of anthropology you want to do, and if you want to get hired into a department and teach it and are not an anthropologist. I cannot see that happening in that sense, of course. And even if you wanted to. And academic anthropology is such a strong part of what anthropology is! You would have to be an anthropologist. I mean there are some experiences that are given to you that are different. And from 307 the experience of being an anthropologist which undoubtedly you cannot do without. But in the broad philosophical sense, no (1960s). z Q: It takes us back to the sum of its parts and those problems-Yes, exactly the point I may have made before, I suppose, because I really do think some novelists are better ethnographers. And I have always said so, like Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead as a way of looking at World War Two. No ethnographer could have done that. Jane Austen's 'manners and society' in that society [of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nobody else could have done that. No anthropologist could have done as well (1960s). Anthropology as done by non-professional anthropologists is not necessarily amateur anthropology. It too can intimately present a culture. Such intimacies can generate wonder and awe in cross-cultural education. It seems that the anthropologist often struggles to become at home in the culture she or he studies. The rewards, however, according to all speakers in this study, are immense. One story of many exemplifies this struggle as very important for the doing of anthropology: An interesting personal thing happened to me. I was working with a very knowledgeable old man who had been head of the tribal council for years and years and years, and still deeply into the old world and the old time perspective. And we used to investigate the vocabulary of cognitive things as part of trying to make sense out of the way the old people thought. He was literally using language in an extremely anthropological sense. That is, trying to use language as the basic raw data for a reconstructing of a way of life that had largely given over to contemporary life, and a world view which was still alive in the mind's of the old people. And he was trying to explain the [group's ] concept of the soul. It is a very complex issue... And I thought I had it. And I had taken lots of notes on it. And I gotten down and looked at it. And so I said 'Let me see if I have this old man', and I explained it back to him. And he said 'No, no, you have not got it. You have got it all screwed up. You do not understand it...' he said 'You do not have it and I guess you never will. This is as far as I can take you'. He said 'We... believe that you only accomplish things because your guardian spirit enables you to do so, but no [one] would start out to do the most transcendent kind of thing based on their own individual power, or even the most simple things...', and he said 'You do not have a spirit. You do not have a guardian spirit. You have never gone on a vision quest. How the hell could we expect that you would be able to understand these complex things?' And then he got up and left!! And I could not believe 308 it! He literally said that this was a far as I could take you, and I was devastated, I had worked with this man for years! (1960s). This is what some anthropological natives say anthropology should be. It is not necessarily what anthropology always was, is, or will be. However, if these ideals were not the custom of some anthropologists in practice, in research and in teaching, these speakers would feel that anthropology itself could no longer make any unique claim as a discipline. In this sense at least, anthropology would cease to exist. Reasons for Anthropology: Culture is that sort of freely available and all-purpose knowledge that you acquire in general at an age when you don't yet have any questions to ask (Bourdieu 1990:29[1987]). And philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness (Derrida 1978:59[1967b]). In this section I want to present speakers' suggestions for why anthropology exists. What is good about anthropology? What is bad? What do anthropologists do poorly? What do they do best? What do anthropologists do best? They gossip! (1970s). What is anthropology? Anthropology is what we are doing right now! (1960s). That is, anthropology is speaking in dialogue in interview. Anthropology is discovering each other. This creates all other reasons for doing anthropology. As well, it gives speakers reasons for being an anthropologist. Perhaps the discovery of meaning keeps madness in check. Philosophical reflection on culture begins with the question \"why?\". Any child can ask this question. Only maturity, however, brings to it deliberation and dialogue. Anthropology begins at a very early age. We are all at first naive ethnographers of our own culture. We must adapt to it. From it we understand community. The position of the professional ethnographer can be 309 compared with the child in any society. The difference, however, is the weight of previous enculturation in the anthropologist's own society. From this comes the notion of doing a similar thing in another society. This section deals with speakers' reasons for doing anthropology and being an anthropologist. In the following quotes, all previous themes can be glimpsed. These themes are interpreted as reasons for anthropology. Anthropologists in this study suggested that anthropology was at its best when taken as an ethics. This ethics involved many aspects of anthropology. Both its holism to its relativism were used. Its ability to know whether it could make cross-cultural judgements was important. 1 0 1 These themes will be evidenced in the following extracts. The relation amongst these themes is itself a hallmark of anthropological thought. Anthropologists can see themselves as a cultural whole. As well, this whole which unites anthropology is also what unites humanity. If culture is a whole, then the study of culture must be holistic. Speakers had a variety of ways with which to characterize this endeavour: You know, I probably would not still be in the academic community if there was not the freedom to do and write things down and to discover what appears to be the other reality that the people I studied with have. And frankly, linguistics is a wonderful way. Anthropological linguistics is a wonderful way to approach these others. These communities which have such other perspectives. It is a non-threatening way. You do not have to start out as a fieldworker asking them whether they eat their mother in law after they die! You know, you can just let them be the experts and let them tell you about their language (1960s). Part of the expert opinion which was addressed to me over the course of this project is that there is no one expert opinion! This was, in part, due to specialization: Well of course we still try. And as others have told you and as you know, we still try to hold to the four disciplines. We expect people to do physical and archaeology and so on. And [we] see anthropology as a unified discipline. And there is a lot of pressure now [on that idea], of 1 0 1 The following aphoristic quote presents a nice summary of this ideal and its reward: \"Well imagine a career that is so fulfilling, and so exciting you know. If McDonald's is going to inherit the earth. It really is! There is this growing westernization and homogenization of culture all over the world. The real gift is otherness!\" (1960s). 310 course, and a lot of anthropologists do not agree with that. But in our department we still feel that we should have this integration. I certainly feel that very strongly myself. I think it is kind of sad to see it going apart. So that physical anthropologists cannot talk to social anthropologists anymore, and archaeologists go their own way and so on. I am committed to seeing the whole picture, rather than just seeing a part. You know as well, if you look at the AAA [American Anthropology Association]. I do not know. It is getting more and more fragmented. I guess people are wondering whether it is going to stay together or not. I think this is unfortunate, this eclecticism. I like the holistic kind of approach that anthropology has. Bringing together people with sort of specialised knowledge and throwing all that together onto one single sort of pattern. But maybe that is not possible anymore (1960s). The concept of culture, however, has become more and more generally-used. Culture could become more accepted as a universal explanatory concept. If so, the unique scope of anthropology might narrow considerably: Q: How do you think that became part of the larger discourse, what once was an anthropological concept of culture is now very much more pervasive? Well of course I would like to be able to say that anthropology did it! I think it is an artificial distinction that sees culture as music and ballet, do you not think?... Well, I wonder what happened?... To see the word in Time magazine. And something happened between that. And people speculated that there were more people that were quote 'university educated' end-quote. And in a similar way when these days you see the word culture most people do think about it as the anthropologists know... It is always difficult and questionable to characterize the field or these terms because the world has changed. North American culture has changed, I never speak to what the French are saying, \u00C2\u00AB c u l t u r e \u00C2\u00BB . . . are still current. Things like that, for some. Of the British, I do not know what they are thinking about society or what. I do not know how it is used there. You can throw a lot of things into it. Some of the books that have become popular: Margaret Mead. [These] have made people more aware. It is very hard to meet a person these days who still thinks that anthropology [is dinosaurs] (1960s). Culture as a general concept may be spreading outward quickly However, at a much slower pace does its tide reach inward. If there is a culture of anthropology and anthropologists, then there are also sub-cultures. What happens when a discipline loses control of its central concept? Well it has, certainly. It has lost control of the concept of 311 culture to a point. Where for a long time you do not hear the word mentioned in anthropology, and you still do not see a whole lot of work on 'what is culture'? And I mean there have been fiascos over trying to define it of course. I mean it is not definable. And we have wasted a lot of energy trying to define it. And someone somewhere along the line decided this was going to be our key concept, and so we need to know what it is, right? But it does not translate easily across cultures. So that is the problem... (1980s). The pattern of anthropological culture may never have been any single thing. Studying their epistemology first may bring us closer to anthropologists' understandings of the world. Adding ethics may provide anthropologists with a holism. Yet holism as well may be another myth of discourse. Ethnographically, it might be better to listen to speakers' reflections on what their charter beliefs are. Of what does their cosmology consist? My sense of that in part is that the charter myths are linked to the charter myths that I learned as a student. You know they are not the same. They are not the same as that the idea of a 'discipline' where it is 'material'. This 'thing'. Even those words are interesting and always put in quotes. [It] emerges out of more or less direct encounters with 'other people'. Not just with the 'other', but with 'other people'. I still have that as a charter myth. Even though my definition of other expands with every - you know! - the other might be myself on Thursday. I am not too sure! As opposed to on Sunday. There is a lot in the conception of anthropology that is part of the great tradition that I find very appealing. Not that it has not changed or its actualisation has not changed, but there are paradigmatic instances of change... (1960s). Perhaps the most important charter myth of anthropological ethics is the concept of otherness. This is created by an ironically soliptical metaphysics (there is self and other than self). As well, sometimes an aesthetic repugnance (\"that cannot be me!\", or \"I do not want this!\") enters. The idea of other people is akin to another prime charter myth. This parallel comes from anthropological epistemology. The concept of the field parallels that of the other. This \"great tradition\" is made great through the believability of its myths. Do they make sense? Do they work as people work? Are they living concepts? Socio-cultural anthropology seems to have a host of well-placed myths. These are echoed in the world of human activity. They also help 312 construct that world. One speaker summed up the thrust of these charters: Evidently the idea is to have a certain impact on society. On my own society. And when I hear some discussion today at the roundtable I had an idea but I was too confused to put it forward. Some people were restraining. They were asking what should be the place of anthropology in our society? What could it be in the future. And I was asking myself where is the position of the anthropologist right now? We are probably not conscious enough of this position and the effect of this position right now in society. And this is the first step if we want to control the impact we are going to have. Even to have some at all! And for me it is important. I think social science as a whole - I think like Bourdieu here in a way, I can trace it back to my years of militancy -1 want to play a role in improving the collective life in society. It is the main goal of my training and professional practice. But how to do this? How to do this and think. And how to do this for a living! Can you be paid for really searching for new ways of living together? I am not sure! (1980s). Where anthropological charter myths connect is of great interest to the ethnographer of anthropology. One major connection is that of an ethical stance to another's knowledge. This is seen through an epistemological lense. There is a contrast between explication and understanding, and explanation and knowing. This contrast can lead to interdisciplinary work. However, it sometimes leads to factionalism. It may be seen in a reaction to the denigration of some other anthropologist's great tradition: One of anthropology's great gifts to academia and the rest of social science has been our interest in comprehending difference as opposed to explaining it away. And using qualitative kinds of research methods which are now all the rage and have been adopted by everybody else. The problem is that most of those groups, because of disciplinary distinctiveness or need to maintain it, feel that they have invented it! They kind of reinvented the wheel. Instead of that they are using and toying and playing with things that some of us have very sophisticated long term disciplinary involvement with... I mean, do not just point at anthropology but its sister and brother disciplines. And once you do that and get past the people, they value so much the contribution that you make. It is really a wonderful experience to have to see it actually. The lights go on and people find it amazing. And we have not done a very good job of publicizing it, because a lot of people wind up resentful102 (1970s). 102 Those speakers who worked heavily in feminist anthropology in the transfiguration of at least part of the discipline by such work, often had to buck such resentment: \"As to the most 313 It seems that socio-cultural anthropology has exploded. Yet is has not lost itself. The positivist toolbox still exists. Perhaps its destiny is intact. What is gone is much of the doctrine that originally came with it. Other disciplinary workers, as well as younger anthropologists, find anthropology like an old children's game one finds at a second-hand store. It comes to us missing a few pieces and with the instructions lost. This promotes a certain confusion. However, the possibility of re-evaluation is also presented: I see it actually as a triangle. I see anthropology as having both anthropologists and anthropology as meeting their obligations to their subjects. Would be that they aided their subjects to determine what they want to study. I do not know if I believe in non-participatory research... because there are certain patterns of innovations which are historical. That I am not sure how this, say, relates to colonization or the margins of the group. So let us all work together on this research project, whatever. Sure that is feasible. And I think that structure is already in place. And what people have done with that structure takes a lot more than the tenets of participatory research. So, I think that there at least is an attempt to study what might be useful for the community. And if you go in to study something which is perhaps of interest to you, then perhaps provide people with something that is useful for them. For instance, I think to help train people in the community to do research, to write questionnaires, to do funding proposals, those are all issues for communities all around the world that deal with nations. Anthropologists really need to, I think, give something back and maybe not necessarily the research itself. But to have some kind of reciprocity that takes place. And I think that anthropology is obligated to its students. I think it has the responsibility to report honestly in the best way it can what anthropology is, to provide some skills... You know, I think a lot of anthropologists [that] are inside universities... are not doing much of anything! So I think there is a responsibility to do things which might be helpful in sorting things out. It should not be left to sociology to address the problems of our society. I think anthropology is much more humanistic and could be much better and much more down to earth in addressing certain social issues... It is sort of a three way thing with anthropology in the middle. And if we were very conscious of the people it works with and the things it takes away, the brain drain I think that goes on, to look at this and to give something back (1990s). important contribution to the discipline, I would have to identify the research being done on women cross-culturally, and specifically explicitly feminist anthropological material. [This] is extremely important, and indeed transformative, of anthropology as a discipline.\" (1980s). 314 Socio-cultural anthropology needs to return to others as much as to itself. However, this is not accomplished through the self-projection of epistemological doctrines. 1 0 3 This is so whether they are positivistic or post-positivistic, modern or post-modern. The truest self of anthropology in general, suggest these speakers, is coming to know one another. This journey is fundamentally an hermeneutic one. As one speaker mentioned, one's self may well be another at another time. This can be recognized as a part of ethnographic research. Ethnographers often return to their studies and their teachers in the field. Al l these anthropological concepts, however, have undergone changes. Such changes are experienced reflexively. The ethnographer is different. The place is different. The people are changed. Even the field concept may be slightly altered. What has not changed, at least in the realm of charter myths, is that there are still people, still places, and still ethnographers. Positivist anthropology can only become post-positivist in any serious sense if it discards these much more fundamental ontological notions. These notions include identifiable informants, villages and fields. Perhaps the world is already changing these for anthropology while we watch unnerved. Can anthropology catch up to the world? Can it regain itself as part of the world? Some speakers suggested \"catching up\" with the changing world might be a kind of cultural therapy. However, what would be the purpose of undergoing such therapy? Anthropology might make the world a better place. This does not mean much. The whole range of anthropology may have in common a theme that is the belief that 'understanding improves things'. I doubt it. This is the projection of the 'therapeutic model', one might call it. Can self-understanding improve one's actions, and ethics? Probably not. Or even no, I do not think so. Not at all. We can know ourselves and why we do things we also know as bad, but we still do them. Culturally as well. I have a lot less faith in the knowledge production now than I 1 \u00C2\u00B0 3 All of the urgencies associated with the publicised epistemic transition in socio-cultural anthropology, including those of 'occluding other voices', speaking for others, representing others, knowing a culture, taking seriously other values and 'orders of knowledge', forcing our biases to retreat only to return (evolution - neo-evolution, Boasianism - interpretivism, the primitive mind - the savage anthropologist, Rousseauist allegory - ethnographic literature, the field - the meadow), stems from this concept of other as other people, other places, other tribes, other scribes, other trivialities, other scribblers. 315 did when I was twenty! (1970s). Hence, another charter myth of anthropology is the belief that \"understanding improves things\". What, however, are these things that need improving? Al l such improvements may have their darker sides. What is more, they may be, as Derrida (1994[1992) suggested of this kind of presence, undecidable. Each change we make for the better may have, as the most recent speaker noted, unintended consequences. For example, change for the better may be seen at an individual level. However, this may be the limit of change: There is a notion that we can change anything in the world. I am not sure that anthropology can do anything like that. I think it is a personal change in that we become anthropologists and how you do it and how you think about it. I think we have a place. I really think we have a place in liberal education. In universities and in high schools. I would love to see it in the high schools instead of beginning so late at the university level. And I think we have something to offer there in making people's lives a lot easier. And I actually think we probably have something to offer in policy. Because the more I see of projects done without and that are done well, these have consulted anthropologists. There is something there that can be gained. If we cannot stop the crass machine of western politics, you know, riding over herds of peasants in Sri Lanka, and stuff like that! I do not think I am starry eyed about that. But ever since the development agencies in the first world included social scientists in their teams I think they have done a more responsible job, and a more sensible job, than what came before (1960s). Perhaps such questions are undecidable. Even so, they still have great ethnographic value. This is so because history is not neutral. Myths are not neutral. What is, returns. It may be good or bad. We may want it or not. Yet what returns for a certain anthropology is a set of charter myths. These provide reasons for doing anthropology. They also give anthropology reasons for its own existence. These reasons include the field, the other, and that knowledge is better than ignorance. Self-understanding may not be better. However, it could do something more or better with its self-knowledge. As well, the distinction between thoughts and actions is a more general charter myth. At this point, this distinction finds its way into anthropology. Speakers gave value to certain anthropological concepts. There was 316 another pattern of anthropological culture here. Another charter myth was in the making. That is, ethics themselves were of more intrinsic value than theories. This was yet another weight against the discussion of epistemology. However, in overcoming this weight epistemology changes into ethics. The common manner of changing this was through the field. There seems to be a value-oriented quality to anthropological fieldwork. Perhaps this quality is even more general: I think it colours anthropology. It colours anthropology here very strongly. I think it is a feature of who is interested in doing anthropology. I would think to get into it or get out of it. And the conditions of doing ethnographic field research which I think are radically different say in most of North America than say [elsewhere]. There are various political contexts which are a little more serious. That part of the world is more like it was in the 1950s and 1960s in the sense that people are in communities where they are open to or at least some people are interested in having other people around to talk to who like anthropologists. And the institutional network has changed. ... So you are a member of a community of scholars which includes indigenous people... And that is not the case, on the whole, doing anthropology in North America, where the organization is very different. People are afraid. Many people are afraid of the situation of the doing of ethnograph. More a fear of personal safety, or through fear of failure that I think a lot of students that I know. There are so many difficulties. There are so many ways of making a mistake, of things going wrong, that to spend two years of your life doing that while there is a shrinking job market, so on and so on, is sort of ridiculous. So find another way of trying to become an anthropologist. But that is, again, I do not see everybody needing to do the same thing. Doing the field. No one's ever done that! Again there is in the history of anthropologists. A lot of the field research done by anthropologists is very short term. There is no single pattern or a pattern of one very long term stint (1960s). Many anthropological themes return here to change our very being as anthropologists. This may happen day to day. Today the world is a different place than yesterday. Our beings might change by reading about difference as well as working within something different. However, it most often occurs as a recognizance that \"Now I am what I was not, and what I am not, I was\". ]Of course this does not happen to either a person or a culture overnight. However, it does happen. How it happens in anthropology presents some of the quandaries listed in the preceding quote. Most other speakers had something to add to this. There was also a sense of humanity 317 involved: Q: What is special about the task of choosing to be human? Especially for a social scientist, and how do we advance the task of being human? Yes, this is very important!! And to have this being at the end there is one culture. As you know there are cultures. But there is also one culture. I think it is more true, it may be more true to think [that] and it may be more true now than it was a century ago. I think with demographic pressure and communication we do not have a choice but to live together and to share. To share! To share and manage our resources. So in this, even if we do not pretend to identify one solution, we can contribute to find some solutions to both living together and sharing of knowledge and resources. It is so optimistic, but it is basic! (1980s). As well, cultural diversity made us human. Perhaps this humanity is a whole no more than the sum of its parts. Why is anthropology still a part of this whole? Well it is still around because there are anthropologists and anthropology departments. It is a very self-serving kind of thing. Like any institution. Okay, can you think of any institutions that voluntarily dismantle themselves?... One way it survives is it changes it's mandate. If they achieve the goal that was the initial goal of the institution, it finds a new goal. And academic disciplines are no different. We perpetuate ourselves in the same sense that the human species perpetuates itself. We continue to insist that we have something valuable to offer as a way of validating our positions in society. lust like the way we reproduce the species, we have to reproduce new anthropologists to continue to give legitimacy to what we do. I mean, I would not do this if I did not firmly believe that we had something to offer in understanding society and some of the issues that affect us today. But what the irony is, is that I do not think a lot of people are paying attention to us. You know... (1980s). Q: So what is it that we have to offer? I think it gives us a somewhat unique way of looking at the world. That at least on the surface attempts to come to grips with other perspectives. The ideal of anthropology is one that privileges no perspective but privileges all. That allows and promotes human cultural diversity and attempts to understand the circumstances in which that becomes a problem. And it helps people maintain their culture. This gift, as an elder might say, this gift of the creator: 318 cultural diversity (1980s). Cultures are valuable for their individuality. They are valued in anthropological debate. One reason this is so is because of their uniqueness. Indigenous peoples value their culture. Anthropologists value Culture. As a professional member of a discipline, anthropology comes first. However, how do anthropologists distinguish themselves from one another? The previously mentioned phrase might change to \"What I am not, they are, and what I am, they are not\". There are many aspects to that which is called 'anthropologist'. One critical aspect seems to be institutional. One must be recognized as an anthropologist by other anthropologists. For example: I do not know where anthropology is going. I think it is a good thing that it is linking up with literary criticism and all those other things. Although how many of our colleagues in this department do we find thinking that? (1960s). Q: Is anthropology more than the sum of its parts, the parts being anthropologists? Well, I could answer it this way or I could answer it that way! Of course it is no more, in one sense, than the sum of its parts. And you see that very clearly when you work in a department. Because you are continually constrained by what your colleagues feel... [in a] department [what] the sum of the parts that at least... has produced has been ultimately conservative... But it is interesting to transcend that department when you begin to write. If you write you join that other which is more than the sum of its parts. And that is the saving grace. For me it is the light. But when you are constrained by curricula and what you should teach and other kinds of things it is no more than the sum of its parts. Like the way I was teaching... is obviously not going to be so good for a lot of archaeologists. And for a lot of very conservative colleagues that I have. They do not believe in post-modernism, in feminism. We all have to believe in neo-colonialism, sorry, post-colonialism! I think both of those things are true. People are hired in that extent (1960s). \"The light\" or \"saving grace\" of being an anthropologist means being part of a society. This society is culturally unique. It says so through its scholarship. Yet all of this may be another necessary error. It may be rigged to mask the truth of that error as a self-misrecognition (Bourdieu and Passeron 319 1992 [1970]). We might realize that one of the collection of myths of anthropology is that it is unique. More practical are the limitations put on the quest for mimicry of other charter myths. In one case, the hypothetical and archetypal field experience presents a problem. In socio-cultural anthropology, this sort of project might be seen as a figment of the passing of the field as altogether other. It may also be a place of possible failure and fear. Even so, socio-cultural anthropology is seen by some of its natives as being much more than utilitarian. Anthropology, in general, is relevant to the understanding of all cultures. These cultures include those that are 'Western'. At the same time, the spectrum of human experience is being drastically eroded. The farther general anthropology goes in remembering what is gone, the farther this once present can return to us, and live again: That personalizes the experience and of course we are having an incredible opportunity that new age freaks would die to have. To go out and experience this kind of otherness. And that chest over there is absolutely full of fieldnotes that will be around long after these languages are gone. Because they will all go. I mean this is the century where ninety percent of the world's six thousand languages and the cultural understandings that go along with them are going extinct... To leave behind the treasury like that which will be mined for as long as humans wonder about cultural diversity in this homogenized world. I do not usually get this passionate about it, but it is hopefully fair in this situation to do so (1960s). The danger here is memorialization of cultures. This one or that one is seen as dead and gone. However, this is countered by the direct participation of these anthropologists in the use of such a memorial. Can cultures be regained and put once again to use? Our lives and memories are what is at stake. Certainly one can find relevancy in that: ...as a university professor back [here], now I guess we have back [here] something more serious. I guess it broadens your human values as a human being. As I told you initially as I got into philosophy you start thinking about some of these broader questions. Then I was wanting to look at other ways of life beyond the western one. So I guess philosophy kind of gives you a broader perspective, initially, and then anthropology even broadens it more, I think, in that sense (1960s). 320 The ability of anthropology in general to broaden itself is based on its charter myths. More importantly, it is based on the rationale that others outside of anthropology agree about these charter myths. However, they may not necessarily see them as the sole property of anthropology. Yes, travel broadens experience. Yes, meeting other people allows you to know yourself more intimately. As well, this intimacy can be created with others. Yes, studying another culture is at the very least interesting. Sometimes it is a profound enlightenment. It may be a world destroyer or creator. Perhaps anthropology is best suited to these explorations. Perhaps we should know more about anthropology. Even so, speakers suggest, we should not all become anthropologists. Maybe we already are: Well, anthropology has something unique to contribute to society, to academia. For a long time anthropology was [contributing] through the 20s, the 30s, the 40s and the 50s. Anthropology really brought it home to the average person. You know Margaret Mead's work, and Benedict, they basically made anthropology a household word by prompting people to think about their ethnocentric ideas and their prejudices about other ethnic groups. So I think that was one very important contribution to society as a whole, and I think we still need it. But that on the whole, we have come along way... I do not think we would still be around if we did not impart our strength like I said before. So, the idea of ethnography, the qualitative approach. I think a lot of other fields do not think what we do should just remain in the anthropological boundary. And what we have traditionally done, now everybody is doing! I deal more with anthropology, and I think a lot of people in other fields have become aware of what basically what anthropologists do, though to a certain extent. At the same time, I see that a lot of medical people get interested in anthropology, take a few courses, and call themselves a doctor and an anthropologist! (1990s). Then again, perhaps we are not all anthropologists! The ability of the charter myths of socio-cultural anthropology to generalize themselves is part of a pedagogy. This rhetoric has been long practiced in undergraduate classrooms. It attempts to convince the skeptical novice that indeed anthropology does do all these things. As well, anthropology does them better than anyone else does. At least, anthropology does them differently. The reasons for anthropology are in a large part reasons that it tells to itself by telling others. Hence there is a constant and continual affirmation of anthropology in the interviews. The content of anthropologists' rationales for 321 doing anthropology has patterns. Some of these have been outlined by this project. These patterns may be reinforced or refuted by further research. The affirmative context of anthropological knowledge, however, is something that cannot be denied. Another example serves to demonstrate some of the passion associated with doing anthropology: Q: Do you think that anthropology has a unique contribution for western knowledge, or consciousness, in general? What is special about anthropology? You mean you are not going let me get away with a yes/no answer!? Oh shit, I thought this was going to be an easy one! Okay, if there is one thing this world needs in order not to self-destruct on itself, it is a knowledge that goes deep into the core of every human soul. That there is more than one way of seeing the world. And that the ways of seeing are not random but are determined by people's experience and both personal and cultural. And that we really ought to be able to try to understand those positions and that that is not a threat. It is the most interesting thing you could possibly take. To learn something new that you could not do and relate to that internally, whether it be at the individual or cultural level. And without that kind of fundamental knowledge I think we are clearly on a course to self-destruction. I do not know much about the technological and environmental side of it because these are not places where I think well and comfortably. I do know how to think about ideas about cultural history and cosmology across cultures and I am pretty good at semantics and language. And I think we need to make those things clear and make them accessible to a much broader public (1960s). One can affirm anthropology as the mind's great opener. However, this affirmation occurs to the extent that the mind in fact closes off other possibilities. These others may be equally valuable in an ethical sense. They may be equally valid in an epistemological sense. How are the realms of value and validity rationalized in anthropology? Anthropologists are faced with many ethnographically known cultures. Many of these cultures were better off in the past than they are today. Anthropology must come to grips with native senses of history and time. It must also remember our own concepts surrounding memory, past, and history. Making history conscious and present is not the same as forcing it to return. In epistemological terms, the hermeneutical mandate is to make an effective historical consciousness. In ethical terms, we must listen to marginal 322 voices. This response to a voice marginal to the west hopefully displaces logocentrism. Such an understanding recognizes its own voice as potentially marginal. The response of socio-cultural anthropology to the marginal voice might be both ethical and epistemological. That is, such a voice validates its knowledge as a value. What we are to respond to ...is a cry for help from representatives of the past to restore meaning and dignity to contemporary life. Perforce, history is the direction that future research should take if comparison is to be made. This may allow us to compare more than isolated variables outside of their cultural context and thereby avoid the fatuous statistical gamesmanship to which so much cross-cultural comparison is liable (Stephenson 1991:218). Anthropology is one disciplinary voice amongst many. Anthropology does not have the sole ear of humanity. Hence, there must be a certain vigilance to the creation and writing and reading of history. What anthropology can do is to bring to these other disciplines more and different voices and knowledge. It does so through the confrontation with another's reason. Cultural reason is a powerful contextualisation of a dominant transcendent truth of analytic philosophy (Sahlins 1976:115; 120). Anthropology suggested another culture's truth was transcendental to that culture. 1 0 4 1 0 4 All this, however, does not even pass for the kind of vigilance which is necessary to read the ethnography or history of anthropology. A project such as this may be described as an introductory call for such a project. However, it tries to make the point through both ethnography and history, anthropology is already called to this constant re-writing itself. At a very basic level, this is what constitutes its vigilance: \"Whoever calls for vigilance in the reading of history, whoever complicates a little the schemas accredited by the doxa, or demands a reconsideration of the concepts, procedures, and production of historical truth or the presuppositions of historiography, and so forth, risks being accused today, through amalgamation, contagion, or confusion, of 'revisionism' or at least of playing into some 'revisionism'. This accusation is now at the disposal of the first comer who understands nothing of this critical necessity, who wishes to be protected from it, and wants first of all his or her culture or lack of culture, his or her certainties or beliefs left untouched. A very disturbing historical situation, which risks imposing an a priori censorship on historical research or on historical reflection wherever they touch on sensitive areas of our present existence. It is urgent to point out that entire wings of history, that of this century in particular, in Europe and outside of Europe, will still have to be interrogated and brought to light, radical questions will have to be asked and reformulated without there being anything at all 'revisionist' about that. Let us even say: on the contrary (Derrida 1994:186[1993]). Although no doubt one of the keenest students of culture today, Derrida does to some extent suffer from a lack of ethnographic intimacy with the very agents he often accuses of historical naivety. In fact, one of the interesting senses 'brought to light' by this project is that anthropologists here do risk 323 Yet anthropological reason has learned to be different over time. It has revised itself. It continues to do so. It has risked itself as a disciplinary entity. This risk is calculated apart from the personal risks undergone by ethnographers. As stated by the following speaker, questioning one's own assumptions is how ethnography operates. This has great ethical and political relevance to the health of the questioned culture: ...well one would hope it would be a majority, but I do not think it is in a democracy. But you have to maintain a significant part of your population with this ability to function as a society. It is a citizen's obligation in a democracy to ask to try to formulate alternative explanations often based on questioning your own assumptions, not just on a speculative thing. So I think that is a big part of our goal. If I do not see students after first year I want to make sure they can look at the inside cover of their textbook and say 'All right, there is value in this book, but where did it come from, who produced it?', all that kind of stuff. That has to be there too. For every damn thing! So that is my bit. I know I have been on a soapbox for a while! (1970s). The self-reflexivity of questioning one's own assumptions is a fundamental part of the 'negative' experience of hermeneutic interpretation. The shattering of previous prejudices occurs only when one confronts tradition. Tradition must become one's own. It makes an historical and reflective evaluation and valuation of itself. Such reflexivity occurs by asking questions. Do I want this as part of my being in history? Can I not want this? What can one do about such a historical situation in either case? The questioning and reflection moves on from there. Anthropology seems to be in a unique position to further this cultural and intellectual health of a society. This idea of health may be linked with the one of charter myths. This accusations in their teaching and research. Accusations of 'not being an anthropologist' are the most hurtful. However, one can see the lighter side to that as perhaps being motivated by the humour of a phase of anthropological existence which is itself confused about what it means to be an anthropologist. It is easier, in other words, to say what one is not. When taken into the context of some of the reasons for the anthropology which are outlined here, an accusation of lack of integrity to the discipline takes on a darker and more brooding meaning. Darker, because such accusations wish to turn the lights out on reflective study as well as necessarily keeping 'sensitive areas' in the shadow. More brooding because not only is there the chance of personal brooding over such albeit ethnographic incidents, but also a disciplinary brooding over what can become a history of anthropology cast in self-denigration, resentment, and bitterness over lost opportunity, lost ideals, and of course, the lost cultures of the Bureau of American Ethnography and Levi-Strauss. 324 linkage suggests that a sense of holism is still possible within Americanist anthropology. Some of anthropology, according to these speakers, has learned that its myths are just that. However, the myth in which, for speakers, the most important ethical concerns are immersed, is that of the 'common good'. This good in itself, that is, a general concept of ethical action, is also seen as good for anthropology. For example, Q: We talked about one myth being fieldwork, the field, the other, what are some other myths that you are aware of? I think that one that has changed - indeed that myth that things have changed is partially true - is the notion that it is really easy to figure out what is good for somebody else. I think that that is one of the central myths that has changed... Margaret Mead... did think that she could know what was best for people. And in fact a reasonably intelligent well-educated American could do that... That is right! That you did have a lever from your anthropological knowledge! Which enabled you to do good in that fashion. You could say to people that there is something wrong with your child-rearing practices... and I mean you cannot reconcile that with relativism... There is an even anthropologically informed arrogance that anthropology in some fashion I think did institutionalize, and that we are backing away from. We are being pushed away from it. We are backing away from it. And I think that is important. And I think that has a very positive and salutory sort of effect. There has been very little humility in anthropology, if you just think about it... If any discipline sort of like anthropology should feel a good deal of humility. And so as should psychology. But of course it has been quite the opposite. Sort of arrogant and imperialist. So I see that as a sort of positive kind of thing (1960s). Today, this is one of socio-cultural anthropology's most tense situations. Anthropology and anthropologists must continually make value judgements. They do so on other individuals' and cultures' actions. Sometimes anthropologists even act to prevent such actions from occurring. Most of this is done through classroom preaching. Some of it is now occurring in the more political aspects of applied anthropology. One commentator suggests that an \"ethical code\" be made more clear. If not, the social sciences in general will not escape their own imperialism and arrogance. Some speakers saw anthropologists as being especially vulnerable to both. Anthropology could also be manipulated by special interests. These 325 might include corporate institutions. The university in general is gradually becoming more intimate with these. As well, the limits of mediocrity in scholarship are constantly being tested: We could, for instance, insist that economists should openly state the limitations and empirical reliability of their models, be prepared to take cultural (or, if you like, psychological and sociological) factors into account, and desist from proffering advice on the basis of one-sided and coarsely material statistics. We could demand that the psychologists should acquire some general culture, and acquaint themselves with the subtler products of the human mind before setting themselves up as experts on human nature. We could compel the sociologists to learn about history and philosophy, and the historians about the social sciences. Above all, we need a kind of intellectual puritanism which would regard money as a clear (even though necessary) evil, and any manipulation of it as essentially polluting. Not that any great advantage would accrue if social scientists imitated monks and took vows of poverty; [not to mention chastity] but, nonetheless, no steady advance will be possible without an ethical code which would forcefully condemn mercenary trimming as intellectual prostitution, and counter the natural [sic] human tendency not only to flatter and obey, but even genuinely to adore those who control money or wield coercive power (Andreski 1972:231). Anthropologists may be relatively fortunate vis-a-vis such criticism. Yet, learning from such Weberian overtones as in the quote may be more and more difficult. The current trends in those arenas identified as clear evils continue. For example, funding has its sources and its motives in these same sources. Anthropology is seen by speakers as mimicking the cultures it studies. This mimicry presents an opportunity for self-reflection and vigilance. These can make knowledge authentic. The following is a particularly telling and contemporary example of this authenticity. It takes us from the far end of holistic origin of anthropology to the near end of diversity within itself and the world. Anthropology becomes itself by such reflection: Well, I suppose perhaps as we, as you, teach. I suppose you become more and more oriented towards what? Professorial sort of communicating your discipline. I guess when you start you are just frantic to get through the hour! And provide some information to the students that makes sense. The more you get control over the basic data the more you try to fascinate people with the discipline and ideas and 326 the way the ideas fit together and so and so forth, and breadth... In the introductory course the first thing you tell students is that anthropology is very broad. And more and more I think I have found I emphasize these ideas. Anthropology is holistic. In spite of the fact that we are all fighting about whether anthropology is going to stay together or not. I think at the introductory level these are ideas that you want to communicate. And more and more this is kind of what the proselytizing and missionizing kind of motivation I suppose comes out. [This] is what I like to present. I think anthropology is fascinating and the more I teach it and the more I think about the more fascinating I guess I think it is! The more important I suppose it is in human relationships is trying to explain to people what is going on. . . 1 0 5 (1960s). Similar sentiments can be seen above. This speaker suggests that without casting aside honesty and integrity, anthropology can be a basic window on the world. It can also have a basic 'perspectivistic' perspective. Anthropology can give us a sense of what is going on. Even if it has lost any dominant sense of how things work, anthropology can still report on the way things are working. Speakers feel it does so. It provides perspective in these troubling times. This is enough to give a reason for anthropology. Anthropology is living in very interesting times. However, it is not enough to merely say this and be done. There is something interesting about these times. It is the interest in possible worlds for anthropology to meet. It is all the possible anthropologies to do the meeting. Whether or not all of these are anthropological depends upon with whom you talk. The mere fact of differing opinions about anthropology at the individual level, while all call themselves anthropologists, is a fascinating piece of ethnographic knowledge. This can only become, like many anthropologists' interest in the discipline, \"...more and more fascinating over time\". Within this set of dialogues, the concerns and passions of the speakers and their anthropological thoughts can, in some small manner, come into their own. However, this cannot be done without an important caveat which attends all such studies: Has the anthropologist himself been convincing? Has he used 1 0 5 As well, anthropology's object will become more fascinating: \"If a lot of people knew a little anthropology the world would be a better place. For anthropologists, there will never be a shortage of bizarrely interesting human behaviours to watch, with no way of predicting the outcomes.\" (1970s). 327 sufficient [materials] to persuade his readers not to qualify his statements with modalities, and to adopt his assertions that [anthropology is both a method and a myth based on the tools of positivism, and a society based on the culture of vocation and individuation, institution and pedagogic rhetoric]? Unfortunately, the answer has to be no. He cannot claim to have set forth an account immune from all possibility of future qualification. Instead, the best our [ethnographer] has done is to create a small breathing space. The possibility of future reevaluation of his statements remains (adapted from Latour and Woolgar 1977:88). This project takes place within anthropology. It is a study of anthropology. However, this project contains and is also based upon those self-same positivist tools: observation, interview, reading and writing. It is based on those self-same rhetorical strategies and metaphysics: that ethnography can understand culture and individuals, and can recognize vocation and individuation in itself. Finally, it believes that dialogue can create and maintain important intimacies of relation. Hence, this study too falls within its own entrapment, but it does so out of love. What are the ultimate reasons for doing anthropology? Why does anthropological knowledge exist? These two questions framed the comments made by speakers in the preceding and penultimate chapter. These questions help in understanding and then arguing the thesis that ethics in anthropology is a function of the kind of knowledge anthropologists accrue through field experience and teaching. Speakers identified fieldwork as perhaps the crucial insight-forming space of anthropological knowledge. If the metaphysics of presence colours all epistemological thought in anthropology, then it is the concept of the other and the tolerance for another culture and cultural difference that drives anthropologists' ethical purview. 328 CHAPTER EIGHT - CONCLUSION Centring this project is the recording and interpreting some anthropologists' understandings of how they construct knowledge of both their discipline and other cultures. For example, there seems to be no clear distinction made within anthropological commentary between positivist and post-positivist method and theory. There does exist, however, a published record of a consciousness of such a distinction. This distinction is relevant in theory but less relevant in practice. Within both contexts such a distinction is only said to exist by direct proponents of either doctrinaire positivism or post-positivism. The appearance of such a distinction is evident in the publication record (especially during the last three decades in anthropology). As well, epistemological concerns seem to be outweighed by other interests. These interests included cultural and institutional influences on knowledge construction. Most importantly, ethics was seen as the key purpose of knowledge. In documenting part of the ethnography and history of anthropology and anthropological theory, this project helps record the memory and oral narrative of academic professionals. Indirectly, it reflects the identity of some anthropologists in Canada. Before the memory of such experiences fades and becomes a matter of textbook history, I have encouraged Canadian anthropologists to explore their knowledge reflexively, using anthropology as both subject and object. This is ethnographic in the sense that local knowledge is both documented and transformed by interpretation. Through formal and informal ethnographic interviews, and an analysis situated in both the anthropology of knowledge and education, I feel that I have come to some understanding and explication of the manner in which the anthropologists interviewed understand their discipline and the knowledge it produces. 1 0 6 In addition to the literature discussed above, previous work which is indirectly related to this project includes, for example, Freeman (1965), who provides an ethnohistory of departments of anthropology. De Boer (1982) studied a sub-discipline of anthropology in terms of how it constructs knowledge about itself (see also Wobst 1989 to this regard). Schuster and Yeo (1986) summarize the part political institutions and rhetorical artifice play in the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Wynne (1979) suggested that the gatekeeping quality of institutions and publishers had an enormous influence on the epistemological awareness of those in the sciences. Jevons (1973) undertook fieldwork amongst scientists to understand how they construct knowledge for publication purposes. Latour and Woolgar (1977) expanded the ethnographic potential to understand science as a whole culture. Lepenies (1981) reports on methods of understanding the social construction of disciplinary knowledge. Bourdieu (1988 329 What was suggested through the interpretation of speakers' comments were ideals of the individual anthropologist and of anthropology. The ideals were characterized by being placed into the realm of the epistemological and the realm of the ethical. Anthropology was cast as a theory of knowledge. The anthropologist was cast as an ethical being. Anthropology was seen as the sphere of validity, and the anthropologist occupied the sphere of values. This conscious dichotomy revealed the very foundation of the problem of the human sciences in general: how to practice objective science while being a human subject. How to practice a science of other humans as objects who are also subjects was a perennial problem. A Sense of Anthropology: Ways of thinking about anthropological knowledge, or epistemologies, conflict at the theoretical level but do not conflict in practice. Practice is defined as fieldwork and teaching. Here, theory is felt only indirectly. Theory is defined as debate about practice. Various tensions follow from these definitions. They include those between subject and object, positivism and post-positivism, value and validity, field and archive, and cultural relativism versus scientific knowledge. The concept which mediates these tensions is that of the field. Fieldwork is seen by anthropologists as an experience with both epistemological and ethical implications. Ethically, the field suggests a certain program for living and an outlook on humanity. This outlook includes respect for cultural differences. Yet, epistemologically, the field is divisive because it is cast as the promotional agent for various kinds of method, theory, and reflective analyses. These analyses include a belief in value relativism in concert with a scientific notion of validity. Although anthropologists understand different cultures' values to be equal, they suggest [1984]) studied academic culture in a similar manner, using anthropological field methods. More recently, he carries this type of study into the realm of bureaucracy and the culture of bureaucrats (Bourdieu 1996 [1988]). Embree (1989) surveyed archaeologists to try to understand their opinions of theoretical and epistemological conflicts within the discipline, and Sellars (1973) did fieldwork amongst archaeologists in order to describe their culture. As well, Fawcett (1990) undertook an ethnography of Japanese archaeologists. Finally, and most recently, Darnell (1996) attempted a synopsis of the structure of Canadian university departments of anthropology in terms of what unites their tenants and what divides them. 330 that ways of knowing another culture through anthropology are not equally valid. Theoretical conflicts are also produced in institutions. These are seen as major influences on the look of anthropology at various times and places. Departments, publishers, students and teachers are all influences on anthropological knowledge construction. Anthropological knowledge is also seen as being constructed at a personal level. Anthropologists feel the concept of vocation in the individual's life-narrative as an anthropologist is important to this construction. Anthropology is a calling or assignation. As well, the purpose of anthropological knowledge is seen as an ethical precept. The sanctity of field experiences for these anthropologists brings them together ethically but divides them epistemologically. Hence, for anthropology the following pervasive themes are extant: 1. Ways of thinking about knowledge (epistemologies) conflict at the theoretical level but do not conflict in practice. 2. Where such anthropological knowledge is produced (institutions) and their influence on the look of anthropology at various times and places was important. For anthropologists: 3. Anthropology is seen as a vocation or a calling in individual anthropologist's life-narrative. 4. The purpose of anthropological knowledge is seen as an ethical precept. Furthermore, fieldwork mediates the above four concepts, and is an experience that has both epistemological and ethical implications and connotations. Far more agreement on the ethical implications of the field (the sense of otherness and respect for it as part of being human) was present than agreement on how one should interpret field data through constructing an other's knowledge system. The implications of epistemologies for anthropology are as follows: a) these anthropologists are able to work in anthropology and understand it as a discipline because of their life experience. This includes their practice of anthropology in the field and in the classroom. Anthropology is seen as a viable practice which has consistency and continuity because of the use of the field concept in the construction of anthropological knowledge. However, b) these anthropologists agree to disagree on what theoretical options they pursue in such knowledge construction. These disagreements, however, 331 do not threaten the basic integrity of the discipline because they occur at a level abstracted from most ethnographic and pedagogical work. Sperber (1982) suggests a similar distinction be recalled between ethnology and ethnography. Anthropology is argued as being developed as ethnology: The task of anthropology is to explain cultural representations, that is, to describe the mechanisms that cause particular representations to be selected and shared among a social group. The main task of ethnography is to make intelligible the experience of particular human beings as shaped by the social group... (1982:34). Sperber (1982:34) concludes by suggesting that ethnography is \"worth the journey\" for its descriptions alone. Such descriptions cannot but further insight into a part of the human condition. Descriptive ethnography is not enough, however, for anthropology proper, which Sperber suggests must be able to generalize its disparate ethnographic findings. Anthropologists seem to differ and defer in their reflections about what gets constructed through ethnography and what it means. Hence, anthropology's mandate as a discourse is to discuss what makes culture as a general characteristic of human beings, and not what makes up cultures in particular. The implications of institutions for anthropology are as follows: a) the life experience of being trained in a particular institution at a particular time has left a lasting imprint for these anthropologists. A kind of ethnography in itself, the time and space in which one was trained created a cultural worldview reproduced in the anthropologist. Yet, b) these spaces through persons as vehicles for discourse also create anthropology as a discipline. The idea that anthropology may be an oral culture is evidenced by such an institutional inheritance of ideas and knowledge. The 'look' of anthropology is thus very much the thoughts and words of these individual anthropologists. The implications of vocation for anthropologists include: a) that these anthropologists see themselves as possessors of sacred knowledge. Knowledge may be both sacred in its respective ethnographic contexts - that of religious knowledge of a particular culture - and sacred as anthropological knowledge. What I mean by the latter is anthropological knowledge is often seen as having the power to enlighten people. Such knowledge does more than inform: it makes wise. 332 As well, b) anthropologists may be seen as being on a mission to construct and represent this knowledge to non-anthropologists and to each other. If the nature of anthropological discourse is proselytory, then anthropologists are both its pilgrims and missionaries. Finally, the implications for ethics for anthropologists include: a) the idea that anthropological knowledge has a commitment beyond its own content. This commitment is ethical in the sense that anthropological knowledge only becomes valuable when it serves a purpose beyond valid description and classification. These purposes, though often vague in interview, were obviously the source of much passion amongst these anthropologists. A key theme of such purposes is to broadcast the tolerance and respect for cultural difference. However, b) these anthropologists seemed to characterize themselves as ethical beings at the expense of analysing their knowledge construction as epistemological products. This may be problematic in the sense that if knowledge is always seen as serving a 'moral' purpose, it may lose some of its explanatory efficacy as social scientific statements about culture or other cultures. It may also become dogmatic. Certain further questions thus assert themselves. Further research along these lines will be needed to respond in a competent manner. For example, as a source for further efforts, work may be undertaken to explore at least the following questions: a) What is the relationship between the ethical life of the anthropologist and the manner in which anthropological knowledge is formulated as a theory of humanity? b) What do anthropologists say about the manner in which other disciplines construct knowledge? c) What is the narrative structure of the professionalization of the anthropologist? and finally, d) What do the cultures of other academic disciplines look like? In conclusion, anthropological knowledge is the tension between epistemology and ethics. In order to be classified as an anthropological statement, it must exist as a balance between the science of a disinterested ethnographer and the humanity of a cultural being. Anthropology is demonstrative of diverse attempts at maintaining this balance. Each anthropologist is an agent of this balance. 333 Finally, this dissertation situates itself in: 1. the anthropology of knowledge, by attempting to understand how anthropological knowledge is constructed, 2. the anthropology of education, by recording and understanding how anthropological knowledge is disseminated and reproduced, and 3. anthropology in Canada, by attempting an understanding of some of this nation's practice of anthropology both in research and in teaching. The dissertation is also relevant to the history of anthropology in general and Canadian anthropology in particular, by recording and understanding some of the elders, and others of the profession, and documenting their memories. In addition, this dissertation documents memories of the field experience for these anthropologists. These experiences bring anthropologists together ethically. They support a certain manner of living and outlook on humanity. However, the field also divides them epistemologically. 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A copy of this set of questions was distributed prior to actual interviews, to each participant. However, although the opening questioning had a biographical slant, as can be seen below, the actual interviews followed the speakers' thoughts and themes, and thus personal narrative was often transcended, as can be seen from the above extracts. The themes 'what is anthropology', and 'what makes an anthropologist', were often directly addressed by the speakers. At other times the material can be interpreted towards these themes. Three aspects were identified in the course of a formal interview: 1. How is knowledge within a discipline inherited? a) What educational training did you receive? Where and when was this received? What research did you pursue during this period? b) Who were your greatest influences educationally during this formative period? Which were your favourite books? Why? c) What professional opportunities did you encounter? Which of these did you act upon and how? How do you feel your career was influenced and constructed by opportunities available to you during this period, viz. the nature of your interests? How did fieldwork change your views on your received knowledge of the discipline? d) How long have you been teaching? In what capacities? What work was considered textbook reading during this period? Has this changed during your tenure as educator? If so, why do you think it has? e) What types of publication and what journals or presses have been available or accessible to you given your position and your research interests during this period? What has been your favourite piece of this period? Why? What do you think the most important contribution to the discipline as a whole has been during your formative period in the academy? 2. How is discourse again reproduced? a) What are you working on at present? Why do you consider it important for the discipline as a whole? b) What type of balance do you strike between teaching and research including fieldwork, or lecturing and publishing, and how do you do so? Which do you consider the more important I) teaching or research - i) for the profession of anthropology, and/or ii) for anthropological discourse as a whole? Why do you have such an opinion? How does the need to problem solve influence your decisions? Where and when do you turn to something different if confronted with a problem? c) Who do you find as your greatest influences currently within anthropology? What are the important texts in your mind in the context of i) your interests in anthropology, ii) in the area of the discipline in which you place yourself or which you teach - perhaps these coincide, and iii) in the disciplinary discourse as a whole? (go back in time as far as you want...). 3. What is the content of knowledge reproduction? a) During your training, what was anthropology about? What was it trying to do? What was its mandate? Was this mandate associated with any particular figures, as figureheads? (viz: charter myths anthropologists tell to each other, to the public, to our students). If 'the field' is such a mythic concept, why is it so? b) What were the key texts and figures for this discipline during your career so far. "@en . "Thesis/Dissertation"@en . "1997-11"@en . "10.14288/1.0088065"@en . "eng"@en . "Anthropology"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use."@en . "Graduate"@en . "Understanding the spaces of knowledge construction : interviews with anthropologists in Canada"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6759"@en .