The mock title ‘rat livers: so fascinating’ made me laugh, out loud, in a very quiet library. Whoops!

Thanks, Rex, for writing this article, which I have used time and time again trying to tame my thesis into a more coherent argument and away from ‘this shit is interesting (to me)’.

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In the sociology of knowledge both Weber and Marx will get us to a foregrounding of conflict as the/a substrate of knowledge construction. Mannheim more schematically but still. And of course the critical traditions in cultural studies broadly speaking: feminism, critical race theory, postcolonialism. Point being that to see perspectives as inherently synthesizable (of course they may be, from time to time) or to think that there’s a domain of fact behind perspectives that can be used to reconcile them is already to take a stand against a pretty heavy tradition. For better or worse.

Jordan was a great basketball player, but oddly enough the things that made him so seem to have also made him worse than useless as a teacher of basketball. He takes his own talent and drive for granted, applies them uncritically and harshly as a standard of judgment, and is unable to take the perspective of others less gifted. As a result he regularly breaks the spirit of lesser players he decides to mentor.

I have read a ton of yeoman local studies that open with a blast of hot air about their world-historical significance, usually some half-digested fad-theoretical goo that has only the most tenuous relevance to the work. It’s painful and anything we can do to get less of that would be a service to the human race. I wonder if it’s driven less by any actual reader-response effect than by the humanities’ own radical insecurity about the value and durability of our investigative practice. And we’ve done that to ourselves, for better or worse.

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1) you’d be surprised how few people find the kind of International Relations topics I do research on to be of interest to them — even if perhaps they ought to be interested because, say, they’re running a postwar reconstruction project in a country they’ve just invaded. But I digress. The broader point here is that it’s a depressing commentary on the state of things if the only way to make case-specific analyses appear of interest to a wider audience is to adopt statistical-comparative ways of framing the project in terms of the impact of general forces/factors (which is how I understand Rex’s suggestions 3 and 4 in the original post). Since I can’t accept that such methodological language in any unique sense accurately mirrors the way that the world is, I can only regard the dominance of that language as part of a cultural project of some kind — and in that way, refusing to use the language is some form of intellectual resistance to the project.

2) apropos the dead voles post, the problem with the superposition of perspectives is, I think, not in their superposition, but in the often tacit assumption that such superpositions will add up to some coherent whole. That’s clearly encoded into the techniques of large-n statistics, and also into most “qualitative” case-comparison techniques too. All of which is why I prefer the Weberian disclosure of irreducible value-commitments at the heart of methodological perspectives, because that highlights agonism rather than synthesis.

[It must be fascinating not to have to labor under the burden of "science" in doing one's empirical work. That's not a luxury that we have in my discipline; "scientific status" is often the sine qua non of being allowed to proceed. But you will notice that the only place I have been successful in getting some modest research funding from has not been the NSF, but the NEH. Make of that what you will.]

3) if I were a basketball player, I certainly wouldn’t delude myself into thinking that I could play just like Jordan. But would I study how Jordan played — not what he said about his playing, but how he actually played — and learn what I could from that? You bet. Would that make me Michael Jordan? Not necessarily; not even likely. But I’ll bet that it would make me a better basketball player.

And in point of fact, in my forthcoming book on the philosophy of science I actually identify four discrete methodological positions as a way of getting beyond the Punch-and-Judy binary John references (and we both, I infer, find inadequate.) I don’t think that 2-squared is actually the final answer, but at least it’s “progress” in the sense of transformatively operating with existing cultural resources to produce room for something novel. I hope.

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http://deadvoles.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/is-this-good-science/

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I do, however, offer two observations.

1. Michael Jordan has a lot to say about how to play basketball. How many of us can play like that?

2. Your work is in international relations. The cases in question are nation-states or transnational systems. They and their stories are already of interest to lots of potential readers. Philosophically, there is no reason that studies of obscure villages in Africa or Bolivia couldn’t be conducted in the same way that you study Germany. But how many readers will they attract if not linked to larger issues?

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Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2008. Foregrounding Ontology: Dualism, Monism, and IR Theory. Review of International Studies 34, no. 1: 129-153.

Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2006. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Also, not by me but very configurational, Nexon, Daniel H. 2009. The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Is this methodology as easily routinized as laboratory experiments? No, probably not. But that doesn’t make it any less scientific, IMHO. My extended argument on that score is in my forthcoming book with Routledge called “The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations,” although the focus there is philosophical rather than operational. Still, such philosophical underlaboring can be useful, especially if the majority of one’s field equates explanation with covering-law hypotheses and simply proceeds from there.

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This is, of course, a rude question to ask; but it is, I suggest, an essential one. If it turns out that the method in question can only be successfully implemented by a genuine genius like a Weber or Tilly, where does that leave the rest of us?

One of the virtues of the usual sort of scientific method is that it provides a lot of hack work to be done, experiments to be repeated, that sort of thing. Thus, not every scientist has to be a genius. Can you demonstrate that the same is true of the method you advocate?

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Just to remind people what I actually wrote: anthropologists think it is a good thing to be able to move from a topic to a problem. A concern for funding and other official apparatuses is one of them — if you don’t believe me look up the NSF’s guidelines for intellectual merit or Wenner-Grenn’s dissertation fieldwork grant. A second reason is that having a wider project is more intellectually fulfilling and gets you in touch with more of the community. Despite anthropology’s ideographic focus, we really are not, say, epigraphers — there are people more ideographic than us, and we like a bit of problem now and then and students have trouble with that sometimes. Thirdly, it was about learning to translate our concerns more broadly to other people who think in different ways about science.

A couple of comments have argued that I terribly misunderstand science. I can see how people who don’t know me (or the blog) could get that impression. For the record, I do think that most lab work is more about fooling about with the exploration space created by your experimental system (Google “Savage Minds field experimental system”). Some scientists recognize this. Many do not, or misrecognize their work in the lab as a result of the strong cultural emphasis American lab science has on ‘hypotheses’ and ‘the big picture’.

Pick up any ‘how to write a research proposal’ book and you can see this. Locke’s “Proposals That Work” is a good example — here the emphasis is on deductive methods to help the researcher find a problem in ‘equipoise’ and then conduct an experiment to move it out of equipoise, while the ‘inductive’ qualitative research logics get discussed only because Locke’s editor made him do it.

So it is obvious that there is a discourse of problem-based science out there — there has always been a camp of anthropologists who even believe this stuff. Whether you agree with its reading of science or not, this is a language anthropologists should try to learn how to speak.

And of course, trying to think outside your disciplinary box is a good exercise because you just might learn something as well.
One comment I didn’t get, whose absence surprised me, was the position that anthropology is nothing but ‘theory’ and has gotten away from its ideographic past. I am sympathetic to the critique, and that trying on different conceptions of ‘science’ for size might be a way to help us get back to that detailed ethnography — but only by a process of stimulus diffusion. I’m not the reincarnation of George Murdock.

Which leads me to Michael Smith’s very intelligent concept about anthropological archaeology, whose mix of empirical focus, thoughtfullness, and comparative scope is really interesting to me. So in fact yes Michael — I think you might be on to something!

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The misreading is probably inevitable, because of where we each come from. Tilly, to anthropologists, plays like a call for general knowledge; to political scientists it plays like a critique of generalization. The word “general” — like, perhaps, the word “theory” — simply means different things in these different contexts. In that case, read my comment simply as a cautionary note, perhaps for an issue of which you are already well aware. A call to consider the general can, I fear, tip all too easily into the kind of ridiculousness that forms the unquestioned backdrop of knowledge-construction in many of the other social sciences. And that’s all I wanted to signal.

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But what Rex knows, and I know, too, has to do with communication, with getting people in other disciplines and, yes, the people who fund research to see value in what we do. A Charles Tilly-style analysis can be a great thing (I, too, am an admirer of Tilly); but the topic has to speak to more than what happened in one small place that people who have never been there simply don’t care about. If you want to make them care, you have to relate it to something general enough to touch their lives or interests as well. The touch can be emotional instead of analytical; but in that case you’d better be a damned good writer, on a par with say Ruth Behar (_Translated Woman_) or Bob Desjarlais (_Shelter Blues_).

But to write that well, guess what? You have to be able to read closely and come up with something besides clichéd claptrap based on misreadings.

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