Comments on: Morality and Anthropology

By: Grundfragen der Ethnologie

Grundfragen der Ethnologie — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 20:20:56 +0000

[...] ://savageminds.org/2005/05/19/anthropologists-as-counter-insurgents/
WAX, DUSTIN. 2005c.
Morality and anthropology.
Savage Minds,
10 June 2005. Electronic Document. Availa [...]

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By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » More on Morality and Anthropology

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:41:18 +0000

[...] y, I have been trying to keep at least part of my brain engaged with the topics I raised a few weeks ago. Let me preface my remarks by noting that I don’t have any [...]

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By: orange.

orange. — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 18:24:46 +0000

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.

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By: Rex

Rex — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:16:17 +0000

Whiskey?

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By: orange.

orange. — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 21:06:12 +0000

*smile. I disagree. surprised?

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By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 19:40:23 +0000

I think this is one of those arguments that can only be solved with beer.

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By: orange.

orange. — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:57:09 +0000

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.

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By: Kerim

Kerim — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 04:20:10 +0000

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.

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By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:24:34 +0000

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 :(

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By: orange.

orange. — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 20:23:15 +0000

.. and we differ in the understanding of the term objectivity itself. Funny, how different the same text is read.

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By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 20:16:05 +0000

On the topic of the happily amoral mathemetician,

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 would ask: Why should we, as a society, support the practice of mathemiatics?

I dunno… and neither do they, in my experience.

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.

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”?

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By: orange.

orange. — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 19:58:44 +0000

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. ;-)

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By: Lonely Donut Man

Lonely Donut Man — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 17:16:36 +0000

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.

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By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 16:58:06 +0000

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:

a systematically correct scientific proof in the social sciences… must be acknowledged as correct even by a Chinese… At the same time, our Chinese can lack a “sense” for our ethical imperative and he can and certainly often will deny the ideal [that makes us want to study one thing instead of another] itself and the concrete value-judgements derived from it. Neither of these two latter attitudes can affect the scientific value of the analysis in any way… a social science journal [the _Archiv_]… to the extent that it is _scientific_ should be a place where those truths are sought, which… can claim, even for a Chinese, the validity appropriate to an analysis of empirical reality.

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.

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By: orange.

orange. — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:10:40 +0000

“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?

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