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Consider, for example, the bow. Numerous animal behavior studies show that lowering the head and averting the gaze is a sign of submission that normally triggers the end of aggressive behavior in the other animal at which the bow is directed.

Why the bow should, in imperial China, take the form of the kow-tow (kneeling, lowering and knocking the head on the floor—three kneelings and nine knockings), while elsewhere it takes the form of a brief nod, plainly requires additional explanation.

Ditto for the effects of submissive postures. Why should, under the Geneva conventions, surrender result in civilized treatment instead of torture or massacre? Why, in S&M settings, should submissive postures stimulate an increase in aggressive behavior on the part of “the master”? Here again, a straightforward extrapolation from animal behavior to cultural models is clearly too simple.

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Without going in to too much detail (for now) I’ll just mention that I have recently been reading ‘Being human: the problem of agency’ by Margaret Archer (2000). In essence, she argues that practice takes primacy over language, and therefore comes before socialisation. Of particular relevance to this discussion, she writes, ‘… it is only as embodied human beings that we experience the world and ourselves: our thought is an aspect of the practice of such beings, and thus can never be set apart from the way the world is and the way we are’ (p. 145).

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One segment of the ensuing debate of particular interest to anthropologist is Durkheim’s take on Kant’s response to Hume’s assertion that all knowledge is rooted in sense data. Kant argued, in effect (I am using more modern language) that the human mind comes pre-equipped with categories (time, space, cause, self, etc.) in terms of which sense data are processed and become relevant as evidence for or against purported connections among them. Kant, however, believed that the categories in question were (1) universal and (2) already known in the forms provided by Newton’s physics and, underlying Newton’s physics, Euclid’s geometry. Durkheim accepted the proposition that pre-existing categories are required to organize sensory input, but observed that empirically notions of time, space, cause, etc., vary widely and cannot, thus, be seen as human universals. He proposed, instead, that society provides the categories, which are, originally, structures implicit in forms of social organization.

That there is some connection between cultural categories and social organization can hardly be denied. Guy Swanson, for example, finds statistically significant correlations between different forms of the state and the ways in which gods are conceived.

What precisely that relation is in any particular case is, however, something that needs to be carefully explored. When, for example, I began to study Chinese religion, it was commonplace to observe that gods were heavenly bureaucrats, ancestors kin, and ghosts non-kin (presumed to be hostile). Since then there have been numerous studies of liminal (partly divine, partly demonic) members of the Chinese pantheon and growing recognition that the way in which it “mirrors” any historical Chinese empire is imperfect at best. How what goes on in Chinese temples today relates to the state organization of the Peoples Republic of China on the mainland, Taiwan or Singapore only poses this problem in a particularly acute form, stimulating debates in which Chinese as well as non-Chinese, anthropologists and non-anthropologists, participate. The theories brought to bear come from a wide variety of sources. None, returning to where we began, is “based” in any simple sense in the observations brought to bear to defend or attack it.

I am sure that with a little thought anyone here who has done fieldwork and wrestled with trying to write ethnography can provide similar cases.

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Anyway, that’s enough rhetorical questions for one thread…

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Consider, for example, the case of Einstein. We know that the Theory of Special Relativity was stimulated in part by Einstein’s observations while riding in elevators. In what, if any sense, is the theory “based” on those observations? In what sense are they foundational to it?

And what, by the way, was the purpose served by Einstein’s theorizing? Besides, of course, his project of developing a physics more comprehensive than Newton’s?

Or, another example, what purpose is served when a mathematician says, “Let us assume that Euclid was wrong and parallel lines converge” and then proceeds to generate a body of theorems describing this wholly imaginary world?

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My point is not that ‘theorizing in of itself is bad’, but that it is impossible. All theorising is based, first and foresmost on observation, and serves a purpose.

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On the other hand, anyone who believes that all mathematics and logic can be practically applied to real life situations plainly doesn’t know a great deal about mathematics or the history thereof. A lot of mathematics consists of mathematicians working out elaborate what-if scenarios (a.k.a.,proofs of theorems) based on axioms that may have some bearing on what we call reality—but, then again, may not.

Who do you know who lives in Flatland?

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Surely we can all agree that, at some point, theory must connect with the reality in which we live, whatever we judge that to be? Ultimately, all mathematics and ‘logic’ can be practically applied to real-life situations.

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Mon 3 Oct 2005
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Could the author mean the sort of theorizing that goes on as a purely abstract game, with no reference to particular ethnographic or historical data? If so, I wonder, isn’t he then asserting that logic and mathematics in and of themselves are bad?

Or, at the other extreme, is does he adhere to brute empiricism, imagining that his observations or whatever his informants tell him will, through some pure “intuition” unmediated by any conceptual apparatus whatsoever to interpretations that are more than personal fantasies?

“Intuition,” I suggest, is a weasel word, i.e., a term which, on investigation, turns out to be either a pointer to a class of unsolved problems or simply a confession that the author hasn’t a clue how his or her conclusions are reached. Assuming the first and more charitable reading, allow me to suggest a bit of reading in the now substantial literature in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, starting with Gary Klein’s Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.

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I will agree with arguments that theorizing in of itself is bad since theory needs to be connected to “real life” or it is worthless.

This is the nub of Flyvberg’s agrument. He is saying that it is essentially impossible to connect what we usually call theory to real life, and therfore we should stop trying. Indeed, it is true that most scholars seem to either do good theory or good ethnography, and even when they do both they often fail to connect the two together in a particularly convincing way. But he makes an absurd jump to then argue that we should somehow abandon theory altogether. To be fair, he does have some concept of theory – as a set of contextual meta-narratives arising out of the ethnographic process itself, but I think he here becomes as idealistic as Habermas since no ethnographic process is sufficient to create such theory entirely on its own.

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