On a local radio show (6/8/05), Bo Bernhard, a sociologist involved with a problem gambling recovery center, described the way that conceptions of gambling had changed over the past couple hundred years. What used to be regarded as a sin, he said, is now regarded as a sickness – what he called the “medicalization” of the discourse around gambling. Much of anthropology, it seems to me, can be regarded in a similar fashion – as the “scientization” of cultural difference. What used to be regarded as a failure of morality (or of mental ability, or of education) is regarded by anthropologists in scientific terms, as adaptation to particular environments or resistance to colonial oppression or the outcome of historically contingent practices or the result of cultural contact.
This process reflects, ultimately, a moral position – if, for example, the Shakers’ rejection of procreation is not, as some would and have believed, a moral failure, then in explaining such practices and the worldview that informs them, we are making a moral stand against misrepresentation, intolerance, and ethnocentrism. While our work certainly deals with the actuality of cultural practice, it also makes a claim about how cultural practices should be understood and evaluated. That “scientization” should be construed as an ethics-driven process might seem odd and even uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise after a moment’s reflection. Anthropology, along with the other social sciences, entered the academy as a reformer’s science, and it is as a reformer’s science that it has had and continues to have its greatest impact. If you pay a visit to my own graduate department at the New School for Social Research – or, I suspect, just about any other anthropology graduate department – you will meet dozens of feminists, postcolonialists, Marxists, postmodernists, queer theorists, anarchists, and others convinced that the representation and treatment of some group of people or other – women, homosexuals, 3rd world peoples, workers – is not only scientifically indefensible but morally reprehensible.
It is not a part of our discipline we are very explicit about, this moral core. But that’s not to say we do not talk about it, implicitly at least – usually under the cover of discussions of “the political” and “power”. We have developed an understanding of power in our discipline, equal parts Marx’s “control over the means of production” (and, I would add, distribution and consumption) and Foucault’s panopticon – the ability to categorize, hierarchize, and discipline difference – that offers cover for our moralizing, perhaps because we feel that a declaration of immorality is a weak argument (which anyone with half an eye on the last election should see is hardly the case) or because it would somehow betray our commitment to relativism (which did not seem to bother uber-relativist Boas and his students all that much…). This is not to say that an understanding of the workings of power in society is not important, but by obscuring the moral positions that inform our practice and theorization, this language minimizes the potential effectiveness of anthropological work. There is a stupid party game where you add the words “in bed!” to fortune cookie fortunes (“you will soon experience a great transformation… in bed!”); I propose a similar act might make clear the underlying import of our work on power, politics, oppression, and so on: add “and it’s wrong!” to each statement about power. For instance, in the first line of Avram Bornstein’s review of Jeffrey A. Sluka’s Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, he writes: “Since 1945, more people have been killed by their own state than by international, colonial, and civil wars combined, and since the 1970s, governmental respect for human rights has been in a tragic downward spiral” (Bornstein: 260). And it’s wrong!
My goal here is not to “out” anthropologists as moralists or to accuse them (us) of hypocrisy or of a double-standard when it comes to the right to make moral evaluations (what I call “relativism for thee but not for me”). Rather, I am trying to address those accusations by dragging into the light the moral principles which are – and are necessarily – anthropology’s core. Science’s moral core. Like all scientists, the practice of our discipline is premised on the belief that the knowledge we produce will somehow make the world a better place – a moral statement if there ever was one! As one of my professors once put it, every ethnography is, in some way, a reflection of its authors conception of the ideal society. That we have been so reticent about dealing with the moral underpinnings of our discipline in moral terms is a sign not so much of duplicity, I think, as of fear. For all our willingness over the past several decades to call into questions the practices by which ethnographic authority is constructed and deployed, it has been largely an internal exercise. Grounding our work firmly in the shifting sands of morality removes this process from the bounds of our discipline (and from disciplinary control) and places it in the wider context of public morality – contested, charged, uncertain public morality. In short, it makes our work vulnerable to attack from the very people and institutions we judge so harshly. But, in the end, isn’t that exactly where our work belongs?
I’m not talking about activism here. There have been many activist anthropologists, pretty much since the beginning of our discipline, but they have struggled under the burden of a forced distinction between activism and research – between applied and theoretical anthropology, theory and praxis, anthropologist as scientist and anthropologist as “private citizen”. This is exactly what the David Horowitzes of the world want – for us to feel that we somehow cease to be anthropologists the moment we bring the knowledge and experience gained in the field, the archive, and the library to bear on the political (read: moral) world around us. It is the stuff of the “gentlemen’s agreement” I wrote about earlier. Our place, we are told, is as consultants, advisors, expert witnesses – let the politicians, the military, the bureaucrats, and the party functionaries resolve our knowledge into action. Thus we are asked to give up our autonomy and our expertise in the service of others’ interests and goals – a sacrifice, I cannot help but note, that nobody expects of our fellow social scientists, the economists!
This false distinction has meant that our activism has been relegated to the status of “extracurricular activity”, as something outside the bounds of our “real work”. And this status is maintained at least in part, I propose, by our refusal – despite all the other navel-gazing we have indulged in – to address the essentially moral nature of our discipline head-on. In fact, it seems that the more we reflect on the politics of representation and positionality, the more we undermine our potential for action. It strikes me as significant somehow that Boas – who famously avoided making general statements about culture on the grounds of insufficient data – felt no such qualms about throwing himself into the greatest public debates of his day. While we congratulate ourselves for our more sensitive research methodologies and representative strategies, it might be worth reflecting on the near-total invisibility of anthropology on the public radar screen.
Work Cited
Bornstein, Avram. 2001. Review of Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. American Anthropologist 103(1). Pp. 260-261. [URL: http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.2001.103.1.260;jsessionid=n8x9kMX0xRS6?cookieSet=1&journalCode=aa. Last accessed 6/9/05.]
While I agree that there are necessarily implicit moral claims in all scientific work, I am skeptical about our ability to make these coherent or explicit. This is not to say we shouldn’t try, but to elaborate on what I think is one of the major contributions of anthropology to the study of moral values: not the often touted “moral relativism” of anthropology (which doesn’t really exist), but our understanding of the complexity of moral values. Anthropology has reacted against the Parsonian notion of social norms by emphasizing the role of social power, conflict, resistance, etc. Anthropologists are no less subject to these forces than the people we study. To say that there is an “ideal” world implicit in every ethnography makes our moral world seem much more coherent and ordered than it actually is. While anthropologists might be able to state a few general moral claims that they adhere to (less inequality, more diversity, etc.) it is not clear to me that this would serve to sufficiently elucidate the moral values implicit in our work. Moreover, I do not believe that there is a one-to-one relationship between specific moral positions and the types of research that they produce. In short, without a solid anthropological theory of values, moral claims run the risk of being little more than a “stupid party game.”
A few comments:
I think there’s a serious difference between “morality” and academic or industrial ethics. Scientization may be as much the result of amoral curiosity (or the need for a community of the amorally curious to develop group standards of conduct and discourse, which may or may not result in condemnation when violated) as a fire-against-fire response to the usual (for our culture) notions of morality. The only “moral” value here might be that it’s worthwhile to know the truth, with perhaps a corollary disapproval of oversimplification.
Though the po-mo-po-co anarcho-feminist green queer theorists may be the majority in academic anthropology, there are also those anthropologists whom we pick on: the Montgomery McFates (isn’t her name just delightfully dastardly?), the Felix Mooses, the capitalist rotors… We can say their analyses of how our knowledge can affect society are wrong. We can say that their moral choices are wrong. But can we say that they’re not anthropologists? And if we can’t, then is it right to claim a “moral core” that is concerned primarily with representation and treatment? Yes, every time we write about culture and power, we’re doing something political, and we’re probably doing something that involves moral judgment, but the politics and the morality may not be at all those of social justice movements.
“Like all scientists, the practice of our discipline is premised on the belief that the knowledge we produce will somehow make the world a better place…” I’m not sure this is true. I believe that a lot of scientists (anthropologists included) enter their disciplines not to change the world, but out of personal curiosity or because they took a few relevant courses too many in college and then pursued the obvious degrees because, what the hey, it’s a living.
That said, I mostly agree with your final three paragraphs: Our work should be more public and less invisible; walls between anthropological practice and private politics should be shaken, if not Joshuaed. But I don’t believe that this “should” is inherent to our discipline: It’s something we as… disciplinarians? bring.
Doh. Looks like you can’t use ordered lists. Way to read the instructions, Bob.
The take home message for me as I finished reading your post, oneman, is Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” (sorry not exact quote).
I agree with most of what you wrote, and welcome wholeheartedly the spirit behind your post. Your musings on the political value of ethnography is right on.
What I’m going to say has basically been covered by Kerim and Bob, but I wonder if making the moral core of anthropology explicit is a bit Stalinist? Aren’t claims to truth always ideologically charged? Wouldn’t making explicit an anthropological code of ethics, whether moral or scientific in tone, foreclose the very foundation of an ethical engagement with the world?
In another words, you can can never be completely true to a set of codes, but only to yourself and the people you encounter.
I hope I’m not being too provocative here (esp. with the Stalinist comment), but please note that I’ve left a comment here in the hopes of starting a dialogue about this really great post! 😉
Can’t agree at all about this “moral” stuff at all. I don’t agree that anthropology entered the academy as a “reformer’s science”, and as far as I know, science doesn’t have a “moral core” either (if it did, since there’s absolutely no reason to believe my own work would make the world a better place, I can only presume, if what you say is generally true, that I’m working within a science which has degenerate morals)
I found D’Andrade, Roy (1995) Moral Models in Anthropology. In Current Anthropology. V 36(3): 399-407. was very good about all of this.
Interesting comments all. Tak’s statement sums up what I think is the thread through them: “Aren’t claims to truth always ideologically charged? Wouldn’t making explicit an anthropological code of ethics, whether moral or scientific in tone, foreclose the very foundation of an ethical engagement with the world”
This is my contention, actually. The thing is, we anthros look at all manner of different societies and abstracts values from behavior that the people themselves don’t think of as morally-charged (which led me to the earlier post “Nothing is Just”) — but when we look at our own discipline, we stop short, somehow. (Which is, I should add, no surprise — as a historian of anthropology, I find very few anthropologists willing to look at our own history the way anthropologists look at anyone else’s). That doesn’t mean that there are *no* moral principles underlying our work — nothing is *just* curiousity, or *just* the value-free quest for scientific knowledge for its own sake or *just* making a living, or whatever, if for no other reason than that these motivations involve us in research that involves other human beings (and I’m being generous).
I am definitely not speaking about “codes of ethics”, though — remember, in an earlier post, I borrowed Anne Galloway’s discussion of ethics codes as “alibis” that forestall the need for the kind of thinking about our discipline I’m talking about here. I had started a section on the AAA Code, but scrapped it when I couldn’t manage to find the words to say what I wanted, but the essence is this: the Code is largely instrumental, in that it sets out a set of guidelines that make ongoing research possible, i.e. not endangering our subjects, not endangering fellow anthros, etc. But while generally there are practical problems that arise from morally wrong practices, I want to bring into focus the *moral* problems.
The bottom line is, our work *is* morally grounded — at the least, we think it’s ok to do research, to represent other people and other lifeways, and so on. The main thing I have in mind here is the argument against ethnocentrism, which is an argument about the way society should be — pluralism over essentialism, open-mindedness over intolerance, etc. What’s *wrong* with the Evangelist argument that Shakers are all sinners because they have foresaken God’s commandment to “go forth and multiply”? It presents a biased view — but what’s *wrong* with that?
The morality is already there, and as we anthros know, it is in the nature of society that moral claims are contestable. That we hide them behind a facade constructed of ethnographic authority and scientization seems to me at best intellectually (and morally!) dishonest, but worse, I think it seriously restricts the impact of our work. This is not to discount ethnographic authority or the scientific method as a model of information-gathering and argument-making — I think our moral arguments carry more weight than the “average Joe’s” because they *are* grounded in experience and study.
I don’t have access to the D’Andrade article, but was able to find this summary (at http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/pomo.htm):
If that is an accurate summary, I see nothing that contradicts what I’m saying (although I disagree with the notion of a possible objectivity, but agree that total objectivity isn’t necessary). All the more reason to make explicit the moral nature of our work, to make those elements of ourwork open to debate. Actually, I think they are already being debated, just not by us and in ways that certainly do not flatter our discipline.
I think you’ve switched your argument slightly to specifically ethnographic matters (anthropology, after all, contains workers like me who don’t work with human beings). The general point that
seems to me to be casually refuted by this famous quote by mathematician Henry John Stephen Smith:
Alright, maths isn’t strictly speaking science, but the idea that it must have a point, or morality beyond intellectual curiousity seems an odd a priori position to me. Since it is a priori, rather than fieldwork-based it seems oddly non-ethnographic as well.
The problem here is that I don’t see why the constellation of “feminists, postcolonialists, Marxists, postmodernists, queer theorists, anarchists, and others” would necessarily agree what was wrong about it. What if some do disagree from a consensus? Does that make their anthropological morals degenerate?
(In fact, Nancy Scheper-Hughes in the next paper after Roy D’Andrade castigates the post-modernists because their ideas run contrary to her moral position!)
The D’Andrade paper is very good. The summary doesn’t really refer to the moral models he is talking about, rather referring to how science can produce “accounts are objective enough to be proved or disproved no matter what anyone wants to be true”, (which quite frankly is simply how it works). I really don’t think there is a morality underlying anthropology. I think its like arguing that cultural relativism, even though its essentially an amoral thought experiment, must have a morality because it can’t be “just” an amoral thought experiment.
But the argument that “anthropology does not have to have a social purpose” is a moral argument… I should point out, because I guess I did muddy this point, that I am not advocating a *single* morality that all anthropologists much subscribe to — a “prescriptive morality”. Rather, I am advocating something akin to the linguist’s descriptive grammar — what are we using, where are the points of conflict and points of contestation, according to what values (moving away from the linguistic now) does what anthropologists do (ethnographic and other research, writing books and articles, blogging) make sense? There are some that are, I think, uncontested — we all value scientific honesty, for instance (by which I mean not faking our data).
The claim to amorality is, itself, a moral claim: “it is moral to act in an amoral fashion”. But that aside, it bears noting that mathemeticians and others have struggled (and continue to struggle) to maintain a “moral-free” zone for their work — to convince society that it’s worthwhile supporting their efforts — but I really don’t think that this is a struggle that I, or anthropology in general, would be best off continuing.
Er… Mathematicians don’t have to struggle with this at all, that’s what comes of being engaged in a purely rational discipline. There simply isn’t any jumping on or off point for moral categories. It really is largely done out of intellectual curiousity and to assert otherwise is I’m afraid asserting a priori ethnocentric categories.
Since you seem to assert a priori ethnocentric categories, I’m not convinced that the approach you take would lead to any understanding of any organic structure of morality (if it is there at all), largely because I think it rather myopically assumes it is going to be there. I think this merely reifies the categories you’ve decided exist.
I absolutely disagree that anthropology necessarily has a ‘moral core’ and that we are living in bad faith and lying to our students when we present our ourselves as authorities who ought to be listened to for our expertise and judiciousness. Of course there is a broad populism in American anthropology’s academic culture, a certain ‘laundrey list’ of popular ethical positions, and many anthropologists are interested in politics and activism. But that this is somehow integral (and not just historically cooccurent) to anthropology’s project seems fundamentally incorrect to me. The idea that a 19 year old the fundamentalist Christian student in my class at a public university ought to be told IN CLASS that anthropology considers their religion ‘wrong’ because they don’t embrace religious pluralism is absolutely shocking, and they would be right to bring the incident to the attention of the Dean.
This argument seems particularly ironic in a period when lefty academics lament the rise of value-laden, sectarian thought in evolutionary theory and so forth — a rise which is similar to the position you’ve articulated, but with the valuation of diversity and tolerance reversed.
Given anthropology’s roots in colonialism, I think that the issue of morality comes out in the ways anthropology, as a tool, is used. What are the reasons for which an anthropologist does her research? What will s/he use this knowledge for? I’m not sure I completely get what Dustin is articulating here but I think that maybe it has something to do with the issue that, no matter what value system one bases herself on when doing anthropology, this value system justifies and rationalises her work, just like a religious or political ideology informs an individual’s behaviour and beliefs about anything else.
The anthropologists who worked for colonial powers had their moral code that made whatever they were doing OK to them. The contemporary positivist anthropologist is convinced of the righteousness of her work because it can be used to help people understand how “culture(s) work(s). The postcolonialist ethnographer (like myself) justifies her work by believing that it can somehow contribute, either directly or indirectly, to the social well-being of the people s/he works with.
So, although there is no universal morality that is inherent in anthropological practice, each anthropologist understands and justifies her work according to a moral code, or set of assumptions about what can/should be done in and out of the field.
Have to disagree with you, Dustin, about the morality of claims to amorality — that presupposes the universality of morality, which is something on which I don’t think there’s anything like consensus (here in Modernistan, we’ve got a lot of [often crypto-]nihilists). The claim to amorality isn’t so much that it’s moral to be amoral, as that it isn’t immoral.
It looks like some of us have misunderstood what you were saying. Is your position basically that:
1) moral positioning is a universal in all anthropological work;
2) anthros should be more explicit in this, and they oughtn’t fear dirtying their science by mixing it with politics; and
3) other anthros should try to be aware of the moral standpoints underlying their colleagues’ work?
I feel like I’m still missing something.
I agree with oneman. He corresponds exactly with a) Max Weber on methodology in social science and b) the (british) Cultural Studies Approach.
This is on ´how do I enable the reader to contextualize the text she is reading allready by the text itself`, which means ´how do I contextualize my work/my perspective/my research focus`.
And it should rather be understood as Leitmotiv, as methodologic goal–just to subscribe to Kerim`s scepticism of how reflexive we can go in reallife.
Speaking of Cultural Studies has anybody here seen this:
Military Cultural Education ???
I don’t think it’s Weberian at all.
As I have read everyone’s insightful discussions about morality, I wonder how one might even attempt to think about it, how even the act of conceptualizing morality is in itself a moral endeavor, and if “morality” is a language or culturally-specific concept…and my mind gets all tangled up in knots.
Here are a few of these tangled knots I need to have others unravel for me:
1. I wonder if someone is brave enough to define what morality is. I have come up with two ways in which morality is being discussed.
In the first sense, ‘morality’ is being used to mean something like “a set of rules on how to behave,” or an ideological, religious, or cultural “viewpoint.” In another words, some entity that is objectified, seen in its totality as such. Very much in the vein of cultural relativism — an old school approach to other cultures. This perspective is based on discerning difference between worldviews.
But during more “a priori” or “universal” moments, morality is used to mean “a set of rules for being a good person” or “an unquencheable thirst for social justice.” In this second sense, the term “morality” invokes some “beyond” which we humans all share, some universal good, some calling that comes from an elsewhere. I don’t know what this “beyond” is, but it is shrouded in the mystery we call humanity.
I have not yet read the two articles mentioned by tigerbear, but I believe Scheper-Hughes mentions Levinas, whom I sort of rely on in my thinking of this question.
Personally I’m more for the second sense of ‘morality,’ although I’d be lying if I said I’m not a closet fan of the first sense. I like the second sense more because it emphasize similarities more than difference…and who needs to emphasize difference now in this war torn world we live in?
2. I cannot agree with the notion that the physical / experimental sciences, or for that matter, even pure mathematics, does not base itself in a moral claim. All claims of objectivity, that is, all truth claims, are also claims to some notion of goodness. (I’m thinking here of Nietzsche.)
I also believe that this very notion that pure mathematics does not stand on moral ground or is free of any ideological constraint, is a culturally and historically specific idea. Just think of those ancient Greeks who thought that prime numbers were mystical, or how certain numbers obtain sacred meaning in religions.
3. I wonder if instead of talking about the entire discipline of anthropology, we should limit our discussion to methodology, and specifically, to ethnographic fieldwork.
After reading some of the more specific case examples given by Rex, Nancy, and oneman in the original, could it be that sociocultural anthropology’s commitment to the ethnographic method already has certain “morals” built in?
For me, the most powerful thing about the ethnographic method is its attention to specificity — to a particular instance. It trumps “theory” any day of the week.
Through the ethnographic method, I think I have something like a “moral commitment” to the ethnographic detail, the ethnographic enoucounter, and my own person. Maintaining a commitment to all three might be difficult, but I’d like to think of this triadic endeavor as an ideal to aspire to.
Not that it would be moral of me to push this ideal onto anyone else… 😉
Auto-trackbacking is so meta.
I think that’s a rather culturally and historically specific reading of Nietzche. In fact, I think this whole debate has been bound up in a peculiar form of the hermeutics of suspicion.
Of course its a culturally and historically specific idea, though I’d argue that your criticism of it is even more so. By the way, any definition of pure mathematics that would consistently place numerology within its sphere, isn’t particularly accurate.
I suppose I should define my terms. By morality, I am definitely not referring to some universal standard by which anthropological work should be evaluated — although I can’t help but note that there is at least an implict one by which all anthropological work *is* evaluated. But my usage is meant rather to point at the process of evaluation, and particularly the values and principles that are bought into play in any human endeavour. Morality might be defined, then, as the process by which practices or behaviors are evaluated and the values they express. And I’m trying to get at not so much the idea that we should declaim certain practices or oppose certain institutions (though certainly I have my list of practices and institutions that I have problems with)but rather that in engaging in anthropology (whatever *that* is!) we are already engaged in the process of moral claiming.
I disagree deeply with Rex’s statement: “The idea that a 19 year old the fundamentalist Christian student in my class at a public university ought to be told IN CLASS that anthropology considers their religion ‘wrong’ because they don’t embrace religious pluralism is absolutely shocking…” What grade do you give students who hand in papers saying that the Sambia are sinners and will go to hell, because their practices are abominations in the eyes of the Lord? If you would correct that student’s “ethnocentrism”, then you are, in fact, saying that their religion is wrong — or, more correctly, that the perspective engendered by their religion is wrong, at least in relation to the understanding of cultural behavior. And why should they bother to understand cultural behavior? Why should we challenge the idea that there is a universal set of moral rights and wrongs and that anyone who doesn’t do things exactly the way *my* religion says is right is sinful and will spend eternity in hell, and for that matter I may as well help them get there? Why else bother with combatting “ethnocentrism” in our Anth 101 classes (and, of course, in our subsequent classes) if we don’t think that the anthropological approach to cultural difference (whether that’s relativistic, functionalist, structural, symbolic, postmodern, feminist, postcolonialist, or whatever) is *better*? Of course, we can argue “better at what” — but the important point here is that the argument will be, ultimately, a moral one.
On the topic of the happily amoral mathemetician, I would ask: Why should we, as a society, support the practice of mathemiatics? After all, all that useless theorizing uses resources that could be put to much better use, right? There are, of course, practical reasons to support impractical research — theoretical mathemeticians do occasionally descend from the rarefied heights and teach math to our more practical-minded scientists and technicians, who need the skills to provide services that we *do* feel are useful. And occasionally, despite their best efforts, the work of theoreticians *does* actually prove useful for something other than illustrating the dreamlife of mathemeticians. So we as a society are willing to afford them the space to do their thinking. But there’s a moral argument as well — the AAUP’s “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” (“Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”), for instance, discusses “the common good” as a goal of academic work — surely we can all see the moral process at work when we start talking about the common good! — and the “free search for truth” as a condition of it. Many of us would go even one step further and say that the “free search for truth” is not just a condition but part of the common good itself — that a free society is defined by its member’s ability to pursue freely the answers to life’s questions. This is a moral valuation.
Apparently there’s a character-limit to comments — who knew? This bit got cut off from the last comment:
Finally, I happen to be reading Richard Shweder’s Why Do Men Barbecue (2003, Harvard U. Press) right now, and there’s a quote towards the end that gets at what I’m calling anthropology’s ‘moral core’:
In fact I regularly teach male homosexuality in PNG in my intro course (Kaluli, not Sambia). When students condemn them to hell (they rarely do) I do not ‘correct’ their ethnocentrism. I mark them down for not following directions, since the topic was to analyze the cultural symbolism of the practice, not to tell me their opinion of it. Understanding something and agreeing with it, after all, are two different things.
I have no idea why anyone other than me would be interested in understanding cultural behavior. All I know is that if they are interested I can teach them how. I can only argue that my way of doing this is ‘better’ than someone else’s if we share a judgment of what counts as better. I don’t think the reasons I rely on — accuracy, explanatory power, analytic elegance, etc. — are ‘moral,’ although they are widely and deeply held by people in ‘my culture.’ Perhaps ‘understanding better’ is ‘moral’ in the trivial sense that someone values it and thinks it’s worth doing. But just because some people value analysis does not mean that the project of anaysis itself must have values. A spy, a missionary, and a scholar might want to understand homosexual initiation for different reasons (and despite this fact, they could all agree that some explanations are better than others), but this doesn’t mean that the internal logic of the enterprise (accuracy, analytic elegance etc.) somehow ends up proving one of them is a better person than the other two.
“I don`t think it`s Weberian at all”
I feel honoured, Sir.
Your statement corresponds with large parts of Max Weber reception, nevertheless Weber does not advocate value-free academic working as such.
What he claims is that objectivity within social science can only be reached by radical contextalization of the academic`s values, which are prescribtive to our subjects, to our research and in consequence to the knowledge we produce.
“In fact I regularly teach male homosexuality .. “
There is a reason you do this, right?
You believe in certain sense in it, non?
I teach male homosexuality amongst the Kaluli because I know a lot about the area (so I don’t need to prepare for class) and because it is titliating and keeps students awake. Does that count as “believing in it?”
Weber argues that “values underlying the practical interest [in a topic] are and always will be decisively significant in determining the focus of attention of analytical activity” (Methodology of the Social Sciences, 58) and that the particular constellation of concerns shapes the ‘character’ of a research endeavor (in the case of the essay I’m quoting, the topics discussed in the _Archiv_ ). So indeed, all analysis is driven by values. However, as I’ve already said, this does not mean that an analysis must therefore have values. As Weber says:
IANAWS (I am not a Weber scholar) but I’m pretty sure _I’m_ the one in this discussion who is taking the Weberian line, modulo his weirdo exoticism in re: Chinese people.
I think it is a myth that the beneficiaries of moral posturing, the Public at large, will benefit in any immediate sense of the word. To patrol the boundaries of staked-out moral turf is none other than an appeasement ritual for the sake of patrons. My intution says this ritualized moral tap-dancing is at a peak due to the conservative, somewhat anti-academic nature of the current administration, and will significantly subside if and when a Liberal is elected to the Presidency.
I see we at least both are refering to the original text, though I have the german source at hand.
Where our understanding differs is how analysis can be made objective in Weber`s view.
I will work up (my english and) my argumentation on this,
Sir. 😉
I didn’t say mathematicians were amoral. I said (as far as I know) mathematics is about intellectual curiosity and a quest for knowledge (in, I might add, a rational discipline with no jumping on or off point for morality). Nevertheless, mathematicians are conscious moral agents in the same way that anyone else is a conscious moral agent.
I dunno… and neither do they, in my experience.
Hold it! What’s that second “we” doing there in that last sentence? Who are the AAUP? Oh, Googled it and its the American Association of University Professors, I think. So “we” may refer to a moral argument made by an organisation you claim allegiance to, but it certainly hasn’t got anything to do with me, nor do I particularly care about its moral opinions one way or the other. Quite frankly, the argument for academic research for pragmatic reasons fulfills all criteria needed for an explanation of academic research, leaving whatever moralistic gloss an individual organisation, or representative of state power (“we promote academic excellence for the good of the glorious motherland” etc etc) superimposes on the situation with only a cosmetic effect.
(Does academic research go away if no-one ever makes a moral argument about its nature?)
Anyone for “the catharsis of spurious morality”?
.. and we differ in the understanding of the term objectivity itself. Funny, how different the same text is read.
Orange — I’m not arguing about ‘objectivity’ in the sense of ‘true in some eternal sense’ (Weber points out this is something we strive for, not something we achieve.) or ‘anthropology is true like physics is true’. I’m just saying that it possible to do good anthropology without being a member of the left.
And about the Weber — I wish there was a better and more recent translation of that essay in English 🙁
I think Weber was wrong.
There. I’ve said it.
Weber, along with Durkheim, saw society as progressing from a world based on “traditional values” to one based on rational-legal institutions. Science, of course, is seen as the epitome of rational-legal inquiry. What this overlooks is that there were traditional institutions that were governed by so-called traditional values, and that modern rational-legal institutions are themselves governed by rational-legal values.
Now, I have no problems with Rex’s claim that one doesn’t need to be politically on the Left in order to be a good social scientist. However, I think that is a very different thing from arguing that there is no moral basis for anthropology. To put this in a different way, we can look at the difference between anthropology and economics. There are more than a few leftists and marxists doing economics, just as there are right-wing fundamentalists doing anthropology. Nonetheless, there are differences in the way the two disciplines delimit the object of their study. Economics is based on rational utilitarianism, and even those who twist and turn its models to fit with their progressive point of view are constrained by those models. Anthropology, on the other hand, eschews such reductionism, to the point of even (in the case of some anthropologists) denying the ability to employ any abstract model whatsoever.
The problem, as I see it, is to view a one-to-one agreement between the values which underly the methodological core of a discipline and what one does within the framework established by those disciplinary boundaries. There is a considerable amount of autonomy that gives individual scholars elbow room to push the boundaries of their discipline. At the same time academic disciplines are somewhat self-regulating in that those who stray too far will be either negatively sanctioned (say by a blog entry attacking CIA shills or biological reductionism), or will be pushed out of the discipline altogether.
But I don’t think Oneman was referring to the moral foundation of anthropological scholarship in the methodological sense. In fact, I think somewhere he explicitly says he is not. I see his argument as being more of a meta-ethnography of anthropological scholarship. The question here being, Can we be explicit about the moral claims that are implicit in our work? This is one that Weber would, in fact, be quite happy with. It is not too different from his investigation of the role of Protestant Values in the development of Capitalism. In other words, what would a Weberian analysis of Anthropology as a discipline look like?
What I’ve tried to do in my comment, not too successfully, is separate two questions I see as having been conflated: First, what are the norms which govern anthropological research? Second, what are the values held by anthropologists as members of a community of scholars? It is true that these two questions overlap, but I think they are analytically distinct questions, and a failure to distinguish them means that there has been a certain amount of talking past one-another in this thread.
Rex says:
“Orange—I’m not arguing about ‘objectivity’ in the sense of ‘true in some eternal sense’ (Weber points out this is something we strive for, not something we achieve.) or ‘anthropology is true like physics is true’. “
I did not get you wrong then. It´s not that simple.
I’m just saying that it is possible to do good anthropology without being a member of the left.”
This is something completely different from what we were talking about. I don`t disagree with this statement.
I think this is one of those arguments that can only be solved with beer.
*smile. I disagree. surprised?
Whiskey?
Nope, I m fine with beer.
(Of course I am unsecured about my own Weber reception now and am rescanning what I ve read some years ago, which is very interesting to me, because it means rereading and reflecting taken-for-granteds from the beginning of my studies.)
Meanwhile let me quote Lorraine Daston on The moral Economy of Science (OSIRIS 1995, 10: 3ff):
“We are heirs to an ancient tradition that opposes the life of the mind to the life of the heart, and to a recent one that opposes facts to values. Because science in our culture has come to exemplify rationality and facticity, to suggest that science depends in essential ways upon highly specific constellations of emotions and values has the air of proposing a paradox.
Emotions may fuel scientific work by supplying motivation, values may infiltrate scientific products as ideology or sustain them as institutionalized norms, but neither emotions nor values intrude upon the core of science–such are the boundaries, that these habitual oppositions seem to dictate. The ideal of scientific objectivity (…) insists upon the existance and impenetrability of these boundaries. I will nonetheless claim that not only science does have what what I will call a moral economy (indeed, several); these moral economies are moreover constitutive of those features conventionally (and, to my mind, correctly) deemed most characteristic of science as a way of knowing.
Put more sharply and specifically: certain forms of empiricism, quantification and objectivity itself are not simply compatible with moral economies; they require moral economies.
(…) What I mean by a moral economy is a web of affect-saturated values that stand and function in well-defined relationship to one another. In this usage “moral” carries it`s full complement of eighteenth- and nineteenth century resonances : it refers to the psychological and to the normative. As Gaston Bachelard decades ago remarked, to imbue objects or actions with emotion is almost always thereby to valorize them and vice versa.
Here “economy” also has a deliberately old-fashioned ring: it refers not to money, markets, labour, production, and distribution of material goods, but rather to an organized system that displays certain regularities, regularities that are explicable but not predictable in their details.
A moral economy is a balanced system of emotional forces, which equilibrium points and constraints. Although it is a contingent, malleable thing of no necessity, a moral economy has a certain logic to its composition and operations. Not all conceivable combinations of affects and values are in fact possible. Much of the stability and and integrity of a moral economy derives from its ties to activities, such as precision measurement or collaborative empiricism, which anchor and entrench but do not determine it.
(…) Although moral economies are about mental states, these are the mental states of collectives, in this case collectives of scientists, not of lone individuals.
To extend Ludwig Fleck`s terminology, what is meant here is a Gefühls- as well as a Denkkollektiv. Apprenticeship into a science schools the neophyte into ways of feeling as well as into ways of seeing, manipulating, and understanding. This is a psychology at the level of whole cultures, or at least subcultures, one that takes root within and is shaped by particular historical circumstances.(…)”
In the following she draws a line between terms and concepts of mechanical objectivity and aperspectival objectivity in historical dimension. Have not had a look yet if its available online.
Now if one agrees there s a moral core or implicit moral economy in science, which argument would deliver reason to claim present anthropology`s formal rules would exist outside anthropology`s moral economy.
Where does anthropology`s moral economy manifest?
It is e.g. the agreement or disagreement on good, bad and excellent describtions, in ethnographic terms–refering to the formal rules that were mentioned. The present as the past ones are products of network experience.