ASA Science Humanism 5 13 06
SCIENCE AND HUMANISM:
UNIFYING ANTHROPOLOGY
Susan Parman
Department of Anthropology
25th ASA Annual Anthropology Symposium:
“The Future of Anthropology in a Changing World”
Saturday, May 13, 2006
I would like to read you a passage from the American
Anthropological Association:
…anthropologists
have always prided themselves on their devotion to the overriding wholeness of
the subject matter and have usually insisted that professionals become somewhat
knowledgeable in the major areas of anthropology—social anthropology, physical
anthropology, archeology and linguistics.
In recent years, however, the centrifugal tendencies have been virtually
overwhelmed by the tide of publications coming from all areas of
anthropology. Even those most devoted to
general anthropology find it more and more difficult to maintain an adequate
knowledge of the field as a whole.
This was written not in 2006
but in 1970 in a publication by the AAA called Current Directions in
Anthropology: A Special Issue. Every few years, American anthropologists review
the tenets of their discipline and examine questions about its future. One of the most recent versions of this
tendency occurred in Anthropology News (January 2006) on the topic “To
At the symposium today, most participants for the most
part supported the implicit unity of anthropology, each person speaking to the
role that their subdisciplinary focus plays in the overarching drama of
anthropology as an integrated discipline.
For example, Linda Light discussed the contributions of linguistic
anthropology to capturing the diversity of languages as adaptive devices (and
like species, they are rapidly disappearing);
Jayne Howell discussed the role of field schools in integrating the four
fields and promoting anthropology; Laurie
Walsh described her fieldwork among indigenous Australians, calling attention
to their involvement in transglobal communication; Elizabeth Miller discussed the future of
forensic anthropology as an applied part of biological anthropology. An underlying theme of advocacy infused many
of the speakers’ presentations—the responsibility of anthropologists to save
languages, help poor people, affirm the right of people to change rather than
be fixed in the past or in some essentialist definition of culture. Archaeology emerged as the subdiscipline most
likely to contribute to healing the rift between the sciences and the
humanities. Terry Jones said that while
there are some benefits from self-examination, empiricism is beleaguered by the
postmodern political agenda and he chastised the discipline for wasting time
attacking its practitioners instead of doing the real business of anthropology,
which is fieldwork. Carl Wendt quoted
Phillips 1955 article in the Southwestern Journal of Archaeology
(11:246-250), “Archaeology is Anthropology, or It is Nothing” and argued that
archaeologists require training in both evolutionary theory and humanistic interpretation
and analogy. John Patton presented
evolutionary anthropology as the anthropology of science.
Most
textbooks define anthropology as a discipline that is in both the natural and
social sciences as well as in the humanities, and many anthropologists describe
themselves, like Kroeber, as being half scientist and half humanist. Eric Wolf described anthropology as “the most
scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences.” However, within Western culture in general, the
sciences and the humanities are often portrayed as antagonistic to one another,
sort of like parallel universes that would annihilate each other if they ever
really came in contact, like matter and anti-matter--C.P. Snow’s “two
cultures.”
From
an historical perspective, science and humanism are not enemies but part and
parcel of a common enterprise to understand the world from a naturalistic
rather than a supernaturalistic perspective.
The foundations of science and an acceptance of the scientific method
were laid during that most humanistic of historical periods, the Renaissance,
when the Western mind turned away from the theological model that dominated it
during the medieval period. Thus in its
focus on human experience in the world rather than the supernatural world of
the medieval imagination, science itself is, in an historically broad sense,
part of the humanities.
Debates
over being scientific or being humanistic can sometimes divide
departments. In such departments, you
might hear spurious arguments such as the following: “A scientist uncovers real phenomena by using
sampling techniques, technology, and statistics, whereas interpretive humanists
are relativists lost in speculation and poetry.” Or, from the other side: “A humanist captures the empirical reality of
being human by developing methods of qualitative analysis that retain the
complexity of symbolic universes, whereas scientists are confined to studying
only those phenomena that are easily quantifiable.” I say that both arguments are spurious. Without understanding the meaning of the
categories used in hypotheses, we cannot begin a scientific study; and without being committed to the scientific
method as a variety of procedures by which the world is investigated
empirically, our discipline will founder.
We are humanistic scientists who must make their way between the Scylla
of arrogant scientism and the Charybdis of arrogant postmodern solipsism. Both are deadly shoals on which a department
can sink if it sails too close to either.
What
we have in common is our commitment to the natural world. To study the natural world, we need all the
tools of scientific method developed from the Renaissance onward—a commitment
to empiricism as a way of knowing, methods of testing hypotheses and
constructing theories, distinguishing cause and effect and correlation,
differentiating independent and dependent variables, knowing how to distinguish
results that are valid and reliable, and so on.
But
being human in the natural world also means that it is vital that we include
training in the study of language, meaning, and values because that is the
environment we humans live in. The
temptation to reduce meaning and values to other variables such as genes and
hormones greatly limits the questions we can ask. Some people consider the “biocultural
synthesis” in anthropology to be the future of anthropology. But as Yanagisako and Segal point out in the
Anthropology Newsletter (January 2006:10), “the so-called ‘biocultural
synthesis’…seem[s] most often to have been designed to control and limit
cultural-social anthropology” by reducing the cultural and social to the
biological and ignoring the way humans create complex cultural realities that
can never be reduced to a precultural state.
They point out that “calls for biocultural integration are often thinly
disguised attacks on those strands of cultural-social anthropology—specifically
interpretive and constructivist approaches—that are most visibly in tension
with positivism.”
Narrowly
defined, science is a method of controlled experiments that are verified by
independent observers. Broadly defined,
science is a self-conscious attempt to understand physical or conceptual
realities. All humans use the scientific
method to survive and thus all humans are scientists. We develop and test models that approximate
reality using a variety of adaptations, including the construction of complex
symbol systems. Humanistic scholarship
is equally scientific in its dedication to the verification of facts.
Science
is method; it does not in itself have
any meaning but is the process by which human beings build up models of
“reality.” Criticism of science (either
positivistic or humanistic) comes from a misunderstanding and misuse of
scientific data. If, as some critics of
science have said, science and the “scientific worldview” have failed, it is
because the humanities have failed to interpret science in a meaningful
way.
Science
does not exist and develop in a cultural vacuum. The availability of funds for particular
kinds of scientific research and the socio-political climate shape the questions
that scientists ask, and promote or minimize the use of certain scientific
discoveries. An investigation of the
nature of disciplines and their linkages to social and cultural factors must
not be construed as a rejection of the validity of the disciplines. Rather, such an investigation helps to
eliminate bad or vulgar science, reduce the misuse of science, and promote or
enhance the significant contributions of science.
In
his book Science, Ideology and World View (1981), John Greene develops
Thomas Kuhn’s seminal contribution to the study of the history of science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962), Kuhn pointed out that the common assumption that scientific knowledge
systematically eliminates error over time is erroneous. Scientific knowledge is predicated on the
effectiveness of the dominant paradigm to answer questions. A paradigm is a model of scientific inquiry,
a way of explaining phenomena, that defines the legitimate problems for a
discipline and the methods of research.
But gradually, as hypotheses are tested, anomalous data crop up, results
that are not expected. Ptolemaic
astronomy, for example, was predicated on the assumption that heavenly bodies
moved around the earth on crystalline spheres, but when the number of spheres
required to explain the erratic movements of the planets became so numerous, the
Copernican “revolution” was virtually assured because it explained things more
simply and elegantly. Scientific
paradigms, from Kuhn’s point of view, have a distinctive internal logic that
dominates research questions and answers;
but when they fail to provide satisfying answers, they are replaced by
paradigms that do.
Greene argues that the history of science is a
transformational process. A dialectical
relationship exists between science and its socio-political context. For example, Greene discusses the paradigm of
“natural selection” that Charles Darwin systematically formulated and presented
in 1859. In most historical versions of
Darwin’s contribution, the concept of natural selection is presented as a
naturalistic explanation of life triumphing over a religious explanation; and this biological theory is then thought to
have provided a justification for competition in social, political, and
economic realism (hence the term “Social Darwinism”). However, Greene argues that rather than
determining socio-political philosophy of the 19th century,
Within
anthropology, the ancient organic analogue, or the metaphor of the organism,
was revived in the 19th century and manifested itself in concepts of
social structure and function, and social/cultural change and development. Before that, Newtonian physics provided the
metaphor of the machine to conceptualize human society and behavior. The Great Chain metaphor of the Church
fathers has continued to be important for taxonomy. The language analogue, with its reference to
communication and information, has become popular in contemporary
anthropology.
It is sometimes said that a
discipline can be considered mature when it begins to look closely at its
founding fathers and mothers (as Freeman did to Margaret Mead) and reflect on
the biases of their times. Every
generation has its own biases and controversies, and the studies that are
generated during certain periods cannot be understood simply as science’s
continuing efforts to reveal truth.
Scientific method may be neutral, but why a scientist finds certain data
meaningful is not. For example, Roger
Lancaster, in an article called “Sex, Science, and Pseudoscience in the Public
Sphere” (Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 13
(2006):101-138), finds it curious that in this period of time when there are
dramatic changes in the way race and gender have been reexamined in relation to
power rather than biology, there is a resurgence of biological explanations of
sex, gender, and human nature. At a time
when races are replaced by the complex analysis provided by population genetics
and men and women are breaking free of old stereotypes, they find themselves roped
back in and hardwired for certain roles, and social traits in general are
reduced to genetic causes.
We
can never be free of our biases, but we can control for them by understanding
where they come from. The study of the
history of anthropology should help to maintain anthropology as a unified
discipline and at the same time help us avoid turning half-baked theories and
biased data into myths that serve the needs of particular groups.
Anthropology
in the late 20th and 21st centuries has undergone radical
change in its ability to project a distinctive subject matter. At the beginning of the 20th
century its identity was clear. Its
purpose was to investigate culture.
Archaeologists investigated ancient cultures, physical anthropologists
studied the biological foundations of culture, linguists analyzed the role that
language played in shaping culture and thought, and cultural anthropologists
accumulated detailed ethnographic descriptions of cultures of the world, from
which they derived general laws of culture.
The discipline was united by a sense of shared commitment to the role of
the four subfields to reveal truths about culture and cultural variation across
time and space.
Since
the 1970s, the concept of culture is more likely to be found in departments of
cultural studies, and multicultural sensitivities pervade the social sciences
and the humanities. History is now World
History rather than the West, English Departments are now Comparative
Literature, Sociology has transcended the boundaries of the urban West to
include the Mbuti and the Ik.
Philosophy, Music, and Art all draw heavily on cross-cultural examples
to widen the scope of their students’ understanding. The writings of anthropologists, such as
Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, were
hijacked to form the basis of gender studies.
The work of people like George and Louise Spindler on education in
different societies has been hijacked by programs in education. The lone ethnographer armed with a notebook
and a pencil has been largely replaced by teams of multidisciplinary scientists
who use a vast array of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.
When
you say the word anthropology to the general public today, what comes to mind
are Indiana Jones and CSI. One of the
major areas where students can get jobs is in applied archaeology, associated
with state and federal environmental laws that were passed during the 1960s and
70s. You are more likely to find
linguistic anthropologists working in schools and businesses to help them deal
with linguistically diverse populations than in ivory towers speculating about
the relationship between Basque and Scythian.
Rather
than serving as an integrating mechanism, the term “culture” now divides
departments. Afraid of the pueriles of
postmodernism, many anthropologists have migrated to the positivist end of the
pole, branding themselves with the legitimacy of statistics. Afraid of the scientistic reductionism
associated with many of these studies, others are driven toward self-reflection
and the qualitatively complex descriptions of interpretive ethnography.
In
other words, the discipline is struggling to find a shared mission for its
subdisciplines, and in many cases it gives up and seeks a divorce from the
overarching unity of Anthropology as a four-field, integrated discipline. In 1988, the anthropology department at
What are the long-range consequences of divorce besides unhappy
children? Dysfunctional departments face
a reduction in university resources.
Unable to replace retiring faculty, they shrink and sometimes disappear,
as happened with departments of geography in the 1970s and 1990s. The long-term result is the collapse of
disciplinary autonomy. Physical
anthropology will seek membership in biology, cultural anthropology will be
differentiated into comparative sociology, comparative psychology, and
comparative linguistics, and archaeology will become part of history.
How
do we turn our diversity into strength rather than warfare? Is it possible to confirm our common
commitment to the holistic perspective of the traditional four fields? Like living in a multicultural world, is it
possible to embrace diversity and strive for ideological and theoretical
coherence in our common focus on anthropology as a humanistic science trying to
understand human experience in a naturalistic world? There are models out there. The
How
do we study human experience naturalistically, as scientists, without losing
the complexity of meaning and value that make the human enterprise distinctive?
For
example, how can we understand the concept of “race” if we don’t know the
history of colonialism as well as the principles of population genetics? How can we ask interesting questions about
diet without knowing both nutrition and the meanings that people attach to food
and the processes of consumption?
To
unify anthropology, it may be that we need to have fewer specialized courses
and more courses that emphasize integration of the four fields and integration
of positivism and humanism. For example,
Dr. Canin taught a graduate seminar this semester called “The Anthropology of
Islands” in which he explored islands from a four-field perspective as sites
for biological adaptation, archaeological depositories of migrations, colonialism,
and the imagination. A few years ago a
course called “The Anthropology of Dreams” explored dreams as an evolutionary
byproduct of an enlarged mammalian brain, and as a universal process that took
on different types of significance in different cultures. A graduate seminar on race would benefit from
the insights of population biology that show that there are no distinct human
races, as well as the insights of cultural analysis that show how the concept
of race emerged from the 17th century on in relation to the
expansion of the West.
A book called Genetic Nature/Culture (2003) explores the theme
of “Anthropology as Science—Beyond the Two-Culture Divide.” The editors Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and
Susan Lindee note the following (2003:xvii):
Maintaining
a four-field integrated department requires vigilance against the forces of
specialization, and vision that facilitates conversations across intellectual
divides, that encourages the use of multiple methods and theoretical
perspectives. Holistic training should
enrich our lives and enhance our appreciation of the complexity of human
phenomena. Students with training in
four-field anthropology who appreciate what scientific method and humanistic
perspectives have to offer are, like diverse gene pools, better able to survive
changing environments. As R. Brooke
Thomas comments (Anthropology News January 2006:9), there are too many
problems in the world to solve for us to spend time squabbling among ourselves.
The
task is difficult; the alternative is worse.
We may disagree with each other, but we have much to gain from
cooperation. I am very much a scientist,
but I am also very much a humanist. I’ve
gotten grants from both the National Science Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. I’ve
published statistical findings in Cross-Cultural Research and ethnographic
descriptions in the American Anthropologist, and I’ve published poetry
in mathematics journals. Scientists
pride themselves on their ability to count things in sophisticated ways. As anthropologists we certainly need to
count; but we need to count things that
count—to ask interesting questions using all the tools available to us in our
Renaissance discipline. As we move
forward into the future, I hope that we continue to talk to each other across
our respective disciplinary preferences.
To quote the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote these words in 1939 on the verge
of WWII, “We must love one another or die.”