You can use a mix of the critical approach and the anthropological approach to either (racism and science/religion), but seeing the difference means that the critical approach is going to be “right” for racism and the anthropological approach is going to be “right” for magic/science/religion, and, finally, that the fact that racism intersects with religion or with science (which we all know has happened and does happen) doesn’t make them phenomena of the same order.

Essentially, you appear to be arguing that Dawkins is wrong because he is not an anthropologist. And that is entirely correct; he is an advocate for a particular moral position; one that religion is wrong and evil. Affirming that they are both sociological domains is not the same as affirming that they are morally equivalent. Or that they provide equally reliable and useful knowledge about the world.

Kerim’s remark that Dawkins is ineffective because his critique is not informed by the right knowledge may be nearer the mark as an effective critique of Dawkins’ approach.

Dawkins constructs a type of religiosity (demolished by Eagleton)

It would be more correct to argue that Eagleton constructs a type of Dawkins, which he proceeds to demolish by the familiar procedure of an onrush of ad hominems and rhetoric (excellent rhetoric), some sleight of hand (My favorite: “The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever.” Now that is a rhetorically brilliant bit of midirected hack. I’ll have to steal that structure someday. Orz Orz Orz.) interspersed with unsupported claims that anyone with a knowledge of New Testament studies can easily show are arguable, if not outright wrong.

Carry on. It’s fascinating to watch a bunch of anthropologists discuss Dawkins.

Michael

Some things that prescriptivists say about language are demonstrably false, others are roughly accurate. Its relatively easy to understand the origin of the roughly accurate rules: observation and generalization. The inaccurate, or wildly false, rules, however, are very interesting. The fact that they are so inaccurate is a sign that something very interesting is going on, and that there is something remarkable for the anthropologist or linguist to figure out. So in part, distinguishing between true and false prescriptivist claims is a way of locating ideological hotspots in the social phenomenon of language prescriptivism. But the distinction between true and false prescritivist claims needn’t necessarily be wedded to a critical project.

Another plausible reason for distinguishing between true and false prescriptivist claims is that the very falseness of these claims is important in understanding their social efficacy. I think a good case can be made that erroneous prescriptivist rules are means for accruing linguistic/social capital precisely *because* they are based on bogus arguments about how a given language works. As a consequence, they must be arduously learned in educational institutions and continually reinforced in social interaction, which means that these bogus rules become great resources for the social construction of asymmetry.

Prescriptivist rules that are essentially accurate statements of language structure do not have this quality because, well, people `know’ these rules by just being everyday speakers of, say, English. They are not good resources for creating asymmetry.

So here, I submit, is a situation in which knowing whether a prescriptivist statement about language is true or false helps us understand the social life of prescriptivism, without necessary being part a critique of prescriptivism.

Clearly, my comments are narrowly focused on language prescriptivism, but I think that you can see how they might extend to other areas of inquiry.

John — I wrote a brief post yesterday with a link to an article on Maya language standardization and some others on cognitive linguistics. It didn’t post, however: I got the message that the post was “awaiting moderation” (maybe it was the URLs?) Hopefully our Moderating Overlords will let it through ;) .

But more generally, it’s a bad-faith argument, intended to accomplish something other than what its manifest content suggests. This is exactly Dawkins’ critique of religion (it’s also my critique of GG&S and Freakonomics), and it is the form that many social-scientific treatments of m/s/r take. I’m not saying those treatments are wrong in every specific instance (nor that Dawkins is wrong in every specific instance — many a hypocrite has sat in a church pew. See sepulcre, whited, for more detail).

What I do think is wrong is the idea that such treatments really get at what make m/s/r social-scientifically interesting. I mean, that they are potentially and often actually motivated by some kind of latent content (will to power, loneliness, whatever): sure. You’ll get no argument from me (or anybody, which is why that line of analysis is a bit low-wattage).

But that m/s/r are completely explained by those kinds of analyses: absolutely not. The analyses that I find *most* compelling are the ones that say, hey, let’s take a “flat” (rather than an “ooh, I can see through THIS”) approach to what m/s/r is all about and see where it gets us. It’s a much more difficult kind of analysis to do and one that yields much more illuminating results.

When you asked about good introductory books on cognitive and functional linguistics I was stumped as first, but synchronicity intervened, and I came across these reviews for two new introductory books on cognitive linguistics that look interesting:

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-1166.html

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-1165.html

I don’t know of any parallel, truly introductory works for functional linguistics, so I would recommend Talmy Givón’s “Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction” (two volumes). These get pretty technical pretty quickly.

You will notice, I think, that these works take a very different approach to language from the books you mentioned by Duranti and Duranti & Goodwin. There is a fascinating story in all this about the split between linguistic anthropology and linguistics, but I think that might be too much of a tangent, even for this thread…

With magic/science/religion (and I think there are very good reasons anthropologists treat these together, as special domains with special commonalities), it’s a bit different: when people say god exists, they aren’t saying it b/c they *wish* it were true or b/c they are trying to win an argument or trying to fit in with dominant value-systems or make friends or have something to do on the weekends or whatever.

Claims of religious faith (or scientific authority, or belief in witches) are often treated this way — and no doubt in specific instances they deserve that treatment — but for the most part that type of statement has a different status *for the people making it* than the “heterosexual monogamy is normal” statement does. People making the latter type of statement know it is contested and contestable.

(I mean, I’d feel critical about that — being tempted to no avail — but not everybody would; some people might just cooly note the absence of cake).

Or do you mean something broader and more profound?

I think that you [Kathleen] would say that the critical stance is licensed only insofar as one is facing a facet of malevolent idiocy in the phenomenon at hand. Is that right? Or is it sometimes appropriate to consider the facticity of claims without adopting a critical stance?

I look forward to hearing Kathleen’s response. Again, however, I find myself contronting a pair of alternatives couched as a binary opposition and note to myself the existence of other possibilities. For example, in an article titled “Negotiating with Demons: The Uses of Magical Language,” American Ethnologist Vol. 22, No. 1, February 1995, I write,

I start with the working assumption, nicely stated by Erving Goffman, that applies as well to the presentation of self in ritual as it does to everyday life:

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. [The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959: 17]

I assume, then, that the [Taiwanese Daoist] healer is doing, in fact, what he seems to be doing: negotiating with demons. He is neither charlatan, preacher, nor pedagogue; nor is he an actor performing a play that he and others know to be fiction. He is what he says he is: a magician, trying to achieve a ceertain effect in the way he knows best, by magic.

This stance is not critical; I am not trying to tear down a theory in which I disbelieve. But neither is it credulity. I make no claims one way or the other that the demons exist or that what the magician does affects them in any way.

The respect I extend to my brother in the art–we studied with the same master, me for my dissertation, he as part of his preparations for setting up his own practice–follows Confucius’ advice that when a gentleman participates in rituals, he behaves as if the spirits are present. He does not concern himself with whether they exist or not.

But, switching topics, would you care to recommend a couple of good sources on that “modern cognitive and functional linguistics” you mention. My awareness of what’s going on in anthropological linguistics stops with an only passing acquaintance with the contents of Duranti & Goodwin (1992) Rethinking Context, and Duranti (2001) Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader .

In this respect, it is interesting how the people who I know who are working on standardization of Mayan languages are approaching the task. First, they are not elevating the variety of a given region to that of the standard (which is effectively what happened in languages like English and French). As I understand it, they fear that this would simply lead to the speakers of other varieties simply rejecting the faux-standard. Instead, they are reaching compromises by incorporating elements from multiple dialects into the standard (which of course requires linguistic work to know what the differences are in the first place).

One especially interesting thing they told me about was a pattern they have developed to deal with possible impasses in negotiating these dialectal compromises. Since there has been a good amount of historical work done on the Mayan languages, it is usually possible to determine which dialectal form (say, a given word or a given construction) most closely resembles the historically prior form. It seems that the Maya linguists and intellectuals who are working on the creation of the standard find relative faithfulness to the older form desirable, and this allows them to `break the tie’ between dialectal variants when it is not so clear which way to go.

Btw, if you enjoyed WF&DT, you would probably be gratified to know that the radial, or prototype-based, semantics discussed by Lakoff is central to much of modern cognitive and functional linguistics.

Also, nice point about Bakhtin; I’m not sure if anyone has talked about old-fashioned grammatical linguistic fieldwork in terms of dialogicality, but now that you mention it, I don’t see why noone has.

Golly! Anthropologists! What does a world in which some are immersed in culture look like and how does it work? Isn’t there also the issue of whether to just observe behavior and outward measureable manifestations, or to also get into the mind of an individual who is a master of the culture by participating and being temporarily “brain-washed” until perhaps one can say, “well that doesn’t work” — the healer can’t really heal in a measurable way, or let’s take that herb to the lab and see if it has any active ingredients. Are there any elements of religion that contain active “ingredients” that can be measured in the lab. A ritual may have elements unnecessary for its efficacy, but in a crude way may work. The theoretical underpinnings of a ceremony may be total poppycock, but if what is done induces a trance state that is used to unleash creativity or reveal the unconscious motivations and workings of a culture then the dance however silly looking may be worth doing with glee, just as a painting is worth examining however flawed the techniques used in making it may be.

Dawkins writes about religion from a starting-point of assuming its malevolent idiocy, and then demonstrating the same. I’d be the first to admit that I wrote about Diamond and Levitt assuming the malevolent idiocy of their approaches, and set about demonstrating the same. The Dawkins-on-religion or the me-on-Diamond/Levitt I’d call the critical stance.

It’s not a method I’d take with me to the field, however, nor a method I think of as properly anthropological. Diamond’s work or Levitt’s work, despite their popularity, are not phenomena at the same scale as “religion”; Dawkins constructs a type of religiosity (demolished by Eagleton) which he then takes down as malevolent and idiotic and ends by declaring he has therefore taken down “religion”. Kerim takes Dawkins’ assertion more or less at face value, and says, actually Dawkins has failed to take down religion _enough_; the take-down has to happen at a social-scientific scale. But really the critical stance isn’t appropriate to that scale.

In the case of Diamond and Levitt, you don’t have to construct a prototype taken to represent something larger; their work is already a type that can be criticized directly at the scale at which it exists. Now, the wide popular reception of their work obviously does have something to do with a larger social phenomenon (namely racism, in both cases).

But racism is not a phenomenon that is blameless in itself the way magic/science/religion are. So I don’t think the emphatic credulity anthropologists use to examine the latter is appropriate to the former (though an approach like “races! golly! what does a world in which races exist look like and how does it work?” can be quite illuminating. But that’s treating racism only in its avatar as a kind of “scientific” method for classifying people, and racism has other dimensions; as anyone who has taught 101 can attest, teaching students that races are social and not biological categories rarely makes the racist ones less racist).

Kerim suggests that just as proving the logical confusion of the “race” notion is insufficent to overcome racism, that proving the logical confusion of “belief in a supreme being” (what Dawkins does) is insufficient to overcome religion. That, just as we would have also to understand the sociological ramifications of racism, we would have to understand the sociological ramifications of religion. In short, Kerim champions taking (what I call) the ‘critical’ rather than (what I call) the ‘anthropological’ approach to religion (as one might — much more usefull in my view — to racism)

Dawkins uses the critical approach because he sees religion as something that *cannot* be blameless in itself; this is the same way that some science studies folks see science. But I think both those perspectives are quite confused, and seriously pernicious. That’s why I took issue with Kerim’s take on Dawkins (“that’s all very well, but doesn’t go far enough”)

Either you affirm that domains like “religion” and “science” are necessarily and directly sociologically motivated in the same way a domain like “racism” is, or — which I think is much the more interesting approach — you begin from the premise that they are not.

You can use a mix of the critical approach and the anthropological approach to either (racism and science/religion), but *seeing the difference* means that the critical approach is going to be “right” for racism and the anthropological approach is going to be “right” for magic/science/religion, and, finally, that the fact that racism intersects with religion or with science (which we all know has happened and does happen) doesn’t make them phenomena of the same order.