Oneman recently asked anthropologists to think about the moral core of the discipline. I’d like to ask anthropologists to look at our discipline’s theoretical core. Do we have one? Or is it just a jumble of empirical issues and methodological approaches tied together by a few catch phrases which pass as theory?
To ask the question in another way, are anthropologists collectively working together to construct a theory of human society, or are we just, as the anthropos-lab folks put it, “a multiplicity of heterogeneous discourses and practices which put anthropos in question”?
I would argue, using similar phrasing to that used by Oneman, that implicit in every ethnography is a theoretical model trying to get out. But that raises the question: What are the theoretical models at the heart of contemporary ethnography?
is this even a question that makes sense? in any discipline centered on humanity, i do not think that you can have a theoretical core. You will have several systemic axiologies all of which compete to provide explanatory power for any event. Some may be more powerful or less powerful depending on the situation and context, and thus better or worse theories. There is certainly a core set of cases and readings in most disciplines, but those readings do not necessarily form a theoretical core. Here my experience is in my readings of the anthropology of science and technology and theoretical pluralism seems to be the governing rule. So I think we need to be wary of thinking in terms of core and periphery, because someones periphery may be someone elses core
in regards to a ‘moral core’, i think you have the same situation. there are disparate and noncommensurable goods. some people will be tied explicitely into a liberatory project, for others that might be encapsulated in the project of modernity, for others that might be tied into post-marxism, or critical theory…. and some people might be pursuing an enlightenment ideal of knowledge creation, and some people might right the same situation as participating in a cultural response to capitalism. Everyone thinks they are doing something good, but there is no way of reducing that to a core without creating conflicts.
some of these insights, or lack thereof, arise out of some recent work on ‘regimes of justification’ and the idea of legitimation.
To Jeremy’s comment, I’ll just say that the conflicts are already there — we’re just not engaging them, because we’re too busy insisting they don’t exist.
On our theoretical foundation, I’d have to say that the functionalist perspective is still the primary mode of analysis in anthropology. Granted, how we understand and interpret “function” has changed a lot since the days of R-B and Malinowski — for instance, one of the things a practice or object can do now is function to carry or invoke meaning, a la Geertz or Turner. But we are still primarily concerned with what things *do*, however many ways there might be to determine that.
Real quick response: I don’t believe that there is an overall theoretical core in anthro. In fact, I believe anthro can be done without theory. I know some will scoff at the latter claim but I also know that this line of thinking has acceptance in certain anthropological circles. Will expand on this in a future blog, I think.
I think my title has misled people. I am not arguing that there is a single overriding theory guiding anthropology, but that there are a set of overlapping and contradictory theories that nonetheless constitute the core of the discipline. Just as one cannot say that all American’s agree on “family values”, but one can say that “family values” are a hotly contested but central issue in contemporary American culture.
Regarding doing anthropology without theory… do you mean without being explicit about your underlying theory, or do you mean that it is acutally possible to not have a theoretical framework whatsoever?
Even if you claim to not to have a theory, you will have a theory, there is no access to anything empirical without a theory of some sort. I’ve personally never read an anthropological article or book that did not have either an explicit or implied theory. More often then not they have clearly identifiable ‘schools’, that work within a well defined theoretical/empirical milieu, that quite a few take as factual, which might explain the a-theoretical claim.
I think that for anything to be a discipline that there must be a canonical set of readings (and its requisite subalterns). Usually these are noted by what you teach undergraduates and what you teach first year graduate students, either as the readings you assign, or in the bibliographic corpus of the readings. sometimes you have to go back two or three generations in the bibliographies to find the common points of reference though.
I just ran across your blog… It looks interesting..
Anthropology is mired in a theoretical quagmire. In our department we can’t even agree on doing science… much less agree on coherent theory.
Anthropology’s framework ‘should’ be evolutionary theory. That doesn’t mean we give up the concept of culture though…
I’m reading
Richerson, Peter J. and Robert Boyd Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/16460.ctl
What kind of ‘evolutionary theory’ are you talking about, Darwin? If you’re referring to Darwinian or neo-Darwinian natural selection, how do studies of meaning fit into anthropology? Or do they?
Hi Bob,
Well, first we can assume that meaning is not capricious. That seems fair, no? If we can agree on that, we can try to get a handle on it from an evolutionary perspective.
Meaning is an application of evolved human brains; brains that grow during ontogeny in specific cultural and environmental contexts. Meaning applied to people, events or symbols ‘is’ a social construct. That doesn’t mean it’s not real – meaning ‘is’ reality based. Lineage identity, for example, is a socially constructed reality, but it is very useful for organizing folks into corporate groups. Lineage identity has a certain meaning for people and this is useful because it motivates them to think and behave in certain ways that may be advantageous to themselves and other lineage members. Chimpanzees can’t do this sort of thing… Humans have the ability to share meaning. What’s more, I know that I share meaning with others. This a cognitive tipping point.
I agree that evolution is useful for understanding differences between Humans and Chimpanzees, but I don’t see the relevance for understanding differences between and within contemporary Human societies.
Howdy, Darwin.
I can see how meaning, in general, could be produced through natural selection. I don’t see how, say, a Balinese association between the cockfight and concepts of status hierarchy and self-regard could have been produced in the same way. Are you advocating a sort of cultural materialism, perhaps? In that case, I can see how an evolutionary theory would help us try to determine the semiogenesis of identified cultural concepts, but I’m not sure how it could help us to tease these concepts out of the viscera of tangible experience. That is, I see how one could argue for a particular cultural evolutionary theory of the history of (interpreted) meanings, but I don’t see how any cultural evolutionary theory could help us to interpret those meanings in the first place. You dig?
Doubly convolutedly yours,
Bob
I must admit I’ve been meaning to pick up _Not By Genes Alone_ for some time. But I still dont’ think evolution is very relevant for most anthropologists. For instance, I study the different ways people design legal regimes to register and assign ownership of land that was previously under ‘native’ tenure. This involves understanding the relationship between kinship, residence, and right and how they interact with highly regimented bureaucratic institutions (which have their own imaginations of kinship, residence, and right) like governments and corporations. I suppose the whole chimp/people thing provides a big picture (although it’s not like we haven’t known this for a LONG time) but I can’t see it gets me very far in my research otherwise.
Hi Kerim,
The argument that evolutionary theory cannot help explain differences between groups of people is an argument I often hear. It’s wrong. People seem to think that genetic variance has to explain the differences between groups for evolutionary arguments to be valid. Evolutionary theory is much more sophisticated than the idea that we are “preprogrammed by our genes” to do this or that… In fact, genetic variance is not a prerequisite for evolutionary arguments to be potent.
I had a discussion once with a colleague who was biological anthropologist. He asked me if I thought polygyny and monogamy genes programmed people one way or the other. I replied, “No, that is absurd.” He went on to argue that if I didn’t believe that genetic variation explained the behavioral diversity, how could I use evolutionary theory?! [This was the same researcher that examined physiological response to cold and high altitude – phenotypic changes that can occur in the absence of genetic change.]
Evolutionary social theory predicts that in contexts where males can control or monopolize resources, polygyny will be more common (an idea developed by Gordon Orians [1969] from his research on red winged black birds). This falls directly from sexual selection theory. The most recent test on humans is by Sellen and Hruschka (2004) who used Joseph Jorgensen’s data on Western North American Indians. They found that..
“Male control of hunting and fishing sites that supplied a substantial part of the diet predicted high societal prevalence of polygyny (10% unions).”
They are NOT supposing that the Northern Almosan-Keresiouian people had genes for polygyny and Northern Hokan did not. The variance found in mating systems is nonetheless explained by applying evolutionary principles.
“http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/contents/v45n5.html”
But what if the society has a prohibition against polygyny? I suppose we could explain that by some historical precident where they existed in a different kind of environment and had different evolutionary pressures, and thus the prohibition is some kind of a hold-over. But don’t such arguments fail to explain why such a hold-over might continue despite evolutionary pressures to the contrary?
Rich and powerful men have many sexual partners: you had to observe black birds to figure this out?
Rich and powerful men have many sexual partners: you had to observe black birds to figure this out?
First off, that was hilarious, though I wasn’t able to determine if you were missing the point on purpose or not. Females being driven to rich and powerful males makes sense as far as sexual selection goes, and that’s a domain we’re pretty sure genetics plays a big factor in.
The trouble with the whole issue is how biological (particularly genetic) factors really bleed into human behavior in ways we don’t understand currently. ‘Sociobiology’ works pretty well for animals is the thing, because the capacity for generating new and complex behavior is mostly limited to genetic factors in animals. In humans, our behavior is governed by very complex brains which are in fact shaped by genetics but are built to be exeptionally malleable and self-reconfiguring. Neuroscience gets ignored a lot in this debate, and I think it will be useful in the long run, but it isn’t at a point yet where we can establish anything but the most tentative downward causal links yet.
I’ll talk more about the subject when biology is brought up in a post again and we’re not just wading further off-topic and WHEN I AM NOT BEING EATEN ALIVE BY MOSQUITOS.
No mosquitos at my house, so I’ll wade right in. One thing I can’t help wondering when we start to talk about sociobiology, pro or con, is what counts as a persuasive heap of evidence. take the statement (light-heartedly meant, I know) “rich and powerful men have many sexual partners”. Chortle chortle. History certainly bears that one out — harems! henry the eighth! Wilt Chamberlain!
But really, if you think about the WHOLE of human history, all the societies ever, and all the rich and powerful men in those societies — do we really have a way of grasping an average of their number of sexual partners? Versus those of poor weak men or — going down a step to the truly pathetic and worm-like, those of women? What about societies in which sexual continence is considered central to power and authority, so that the weak and powerless would be the ones getting it on? What about societies in which men spend most of their time in the company (sexual and otherwise) of other men? that kind of non-reproductive sex doesn’t count for genetic purposes; though there could, indeed, be lots of it. What about societies in which women, while publicly tied to one man, might have lots of other partners subrosa? and on, and on, and on. There is no way we can claim to have good transhistorical transcultural statistics on this.
Finally, in re sociobiology’s “good” fit to animals — consider the humble bonobo. Or don’t — but the problem with sociobiological narratives is not that they _work for animals_ but fail to get the job done among humans; the problem with sociobiological narratives is that *nowhere* are they emprirically driven in the first place.
Kathleen,
I agree on your first point. What I was trying to get across in my previous post was that while genetic factors certainly do influence the behavior of humans in many cases, the complexity of the human brain can act as an overriding factor in most circumstances. Certainly, if evolutionary models are to be useful in understanding human behavior, we have to keep that in mind and remember that they will never provide a rule in humans, only a statistical bias. Genetics will never account for the specifics of human culture. At the same time, how genetic factors influence human behavior is a valid topic of study, it’s just that sociobiologists tend to be doing it in a very questionable manner.
As for the matter of the rich and powerful being total babe magnets, I’d be willing to wager there’s a statistical bias there, across societies. This is considering the various societies you named off, which I’m not familiar with, not being an anthropologist. So, to the best of our knowlege, this sort of thing could be influenced by genetic factors.
I don’t know if I’d agree on your last point, but it’s possible we have differing views on what sociobiology actually is. Having read Dawkins and some Wilson, when I think sociobiology, I think biology + game theory, particularly as it applies to social interaction among animals. I’ve seen a lot of examples that seemed pretty empirically driven in this domain. Again, when this is applied to humans (or animals with a significant degree of higher brain function, like our friend the bonobo) genetic models don’t give us much useful information. But Dawkins himself, in The Selfish Gene, shies away from using humans as examples, even including a chapter on how the theory is not necessarily applicable to humans (granted, he did introduce ‘memes’ at this point, only serving to further infuriate anthropologists.)
Though I certainly disagree with things I have heard ‘sociobiologists’ say, perhaps I am missing the bulk of sociobiology’s outlandish claims?
J.S.,
I agree totally with the points you made about neuroscience — in fact I think a lot of discussions about the “genetics” of behavior ignore that there’s many a slip twixt gene and organism, namely, an entire developmental pathway that is far from perfectly understood.
I don’t quite get how you are using the phrase “statistical bias”, but whatever, you won’t find any argument from me that there surely are connections between genetics and behavior. But what we actually *do* know right now about those connections is extremely, extremely limited, and much of the ev psych/sociobio discussion is skulking about in the murky space created by the absence of positive knowledge. Certainly we don’t know a damn thing about the cross cultural, transhistorical properties of babe magnets.
Getting away from sex, what I really mean by sociobiology not being empirically driven is that it starts from a strong ideological premise that all life is shaped by the twin imperatives of (1) scarcity and (2) maximization. [consider even a single counter-proposition and see if it blows your mind, man: all life may be driven by lush, otiose excess] This is just an assumption. Other assumptions consequent upon this first assumption — say, that game theory applies to biology — skew any “empirical” results.
One of the funny things about sociobio is that whenever any of its premises — taken from the human world and applied to the animal world — turns out NOT to work in the human world (game theory, for example, is turning out to be very imperfectly predictive of human economic behavior, the exact kind of behavior for which it was designed to apply), then sociobiologists do a double-reverse-flip, and say oh, WELL, we never meant this to be about HUMANS. But their premises ORIGINATED as social models!
And people get impatient with post-structuralism. jeepers. At least post-structuralists make a sort of virtue of their untetheredness — sociobiologists swing from sky hooks while shouting about being feets on the ground pragmatists.
So many things I’d like to comment on…
I’ll offer this to Kathleen..
Recent empirical, cross-cultural, evolutionary inspired experimental game theory that’s putting neoclassic economics on its head.
Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies
As this is much, much more interesting than working on my rapidly disintergrating dissertation, thought I’d drop in to this debate yet again.
Okay, to defend Darwin, I agree with the Richerson/Boyd chapter title that: “Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution”, which I think is true, but rhetorically excessive and smacks of needless imperialism. As Rex says:
.
I think one of the problems is that, to draw from what Bob wrote:
This doesn’t disagree, in principle, from what Darwin wrote:
I think this is none other than a “particular cultural evolutionary theory of the history of (interpreted) meanings”. The important part is where these things come from in the first place (ie. the variation). Is there stuff about how meaning arises in culture? Sure, plenty. Dominant Geertzian stuff, cognitive anthropology and its schemas, Mary Douglas etc etc.
I also think its important to understand what the actual arguments of “sociobiologists” are. As J.S. Nelson wrote:
Which is absolutely right. If you think its “all in the genes” why would you bother to posit a cultural evolutionary theory in the first place?
Also, we need to get away from bad arguments, like Kathleen’s:
Fan of the genetic fallacy, are you?
HI Tigerbear,
I’m not sure, exactly, why you seem so consistently to have it in for me — I think your moniker is cute, and aside from that don’t know anything about you. But again, as I have done before, I’ll just ask you to clarify what you mean — please explain how the “genetic fallacy” relates to my argument, and makes it “bad”?
-Kathleen
It simply doesn’t matter that the premises behind sociobiology once were human social models. Your argument could only make sense if sociobiologists were the economic modellers who came up with them in the first place. They aren’t.
Well, I think it does matter quite a bit where the models come from, because they set the guidelines for what does, and does not, get investigated and count as evidence. Its an immanent problem of *all* research projects – ie, it’s not a question for sociobiology alone. But it’s a real problem — basic to epistemology. In fact, it is in effect *the* basic problem of epistemology. You seem to be suggesting that because all of the (say) physicists who followed Newton *weren’t Newton*, then they were not constrained by the framework for understanding physical world that he established. This has nothing to do with the “genetic fallacy”. But again, I don’t want to interpret your comments uncharitably — if this is not what you meant to say, I would love to hear your clarification.
The models used in sociobiology refer to reproductive fitness, the ones in economics do not (I believe they refer to the choices made by rational actors, not being an economist I couldn’t tell you). Regardless of that, despite their formal similarities, we’re talking about the action of similar formal models on different substrates. Its the nature of the substrates, rather than the models, as to where these assumptions come from (I think this is why game theory has been more successful in biology than in economics – i.e. reproductive fitness is a better substrate for this sort of formal modelling than economic actors are, but not knowing enough about economics, I couldn’t say for sure).
There’s absolutely no reason not to criticise sociobiology for uncritically applying formal models of maximising reproductive fitness that work very well in other species to humans. In fact, there are plenty of good reasons to do this. However, the fact that in the history of ideas, these models (or variations of them) originally were applied to a different substrate, isn’t important.
Darwin,
Michael Chibnik has a pretty terrif (and quite critical) review of that very book in the latest issue of American Ethnologist. You might find it interesting reading.
Tigerbear, you are correct that the fact that a model originates in one context but is applied in another does not necessarily vitiate its utility. But it does help — and again, this is a basic epistemological issue — to understand this history. In the case of sociology, it remains *highly* relevant. This is because sociobiologists make strong claims to value-free argument but the framework that orients their research is extraordinarily ideological in both its origin and in its current application. This certainly does matter, and is worth understanding, if one is going to evaluate the quality of sociobiological research claims. But I do thank you for clarifying your point.
Here is a link to the review on AnthroSource.
No it isn’t. This is the genetic fallacy again. Look, if we take J.S. Nelson’s definition of sociobiology as “biology + game theory” as being correct: how come leading biological game theorist John Maynard Smith was a life-long Marxist?
Sociobiology took the formal models and applied them to a different substrate. It refined these models then added models of its own. It became a different thing from where it had started. It has also been incredibly successful in ethology.
Inevitably, ethologists, whether ideologically motivated or not were going to say “well, these models work well in animals. Humans are animals too, let’s see if they work there”.
One of the reasons that game theory works so well in biology is that biologists utilize a theoretically deduced understanding of preferences. Economists use inductively derived ‘utility’. In other words, economists don’t understand why people have the preferences they do, they just know the preferences that people have. Evolutionary theory has been a boom for the economists who have ventured there… Check out Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis for evolutionarily informed economics:
http://www.santafe.edu/~bowles/research.htm
I am tired of critics of evolutionary theory who say that its practitioners are politically motivated. That criticism can apply to any theoretical perspective. Open, transparent, scientific research with peer review and real data is the best defense against ideological driven research. In terms of sociobiologists, I know many who are leftists. I am a leftist… There are also female sociobiologists; most are feminists (Jane Lancaster at UNM, Sarah Hrdy come to mind. http://www.citrona.com/sarahbhrdy.htm.
Second, I think it is better to judge a theoretical perspective on how its hypotheses and predictions match the empirical evidence rather than on perceived political motivations of its practitioners.
The cutting edge of ‘sociobiology’ has taken a very interesting turn in the last few years. The importance of group selection is being recognized. I just heard EO Wilson at the HBES meeting in Austin and even he is reconsidering the importance of kin selection for the evolutionary of eusociality in favor of group selection mechanisms. Part of the reason is that the overwhelming selfishness that is predicted by early sociobiology is not apparent in humans. Next to the social insects, we are among the most cooperative and group-thinking species around. Most conflict happens between groups. Cultural transmission is now recognized as a mechanism that makes conditions for group selection much more likely.
Check out this paper by Joe Henrich..
http://www.anthropology.emory.edu/FACULTY/ANTJH/Website/Papers/HenrichplusCommentsJebo2003.pdf
Hi Tigerbear and Darwin,
The “successful” application of sociobiological principles in ethology is regularly followed up by re-studies overturning the earlier work, at which time the sociobiologists re-group and say they never really meant what was said before, or they mean something else now, or everyone is being mean and willfully misunderstanding them. The late embrace of “group selection” is a beautiful example of this pattern, which the field has repeated ad nauseum since the 1970s. Fine — this is how scientific progress is made. But the trend suggests that sociobiology is going to re-frame itself right out of existence. In fact to a large extent it already has — many former flagbearers now repudiate the very term, and call themselves “evolutionary psychologists”. Interesting how no one is ashamed to call him/herself a chemist (for example). This kind of basic anxiety, over what disciplinary adherents should even *call themselves*, signals a much larger intellectual crisis.
And Darwin, please *do* explain the point you were trying to make by pointing out the existence of “female sociobiologists”. I think you’ll find yourself in a rather embarrassing corner very quickly.
Hi Ozma,
You are correct; this is exactly how science works… New theory and new data give us new insight. We are reframing all the time… Only folks who know the “Truth” are unwilling or unable to admit mistakes. New data and theory are convincing folks that group selection needs to be considered …and what is wrong with that? If the data don’t support these new ideas, out they will go.
The origin of this thread was to discuss whether anthropology had a theoretical core. My point was that any theoretical core must include evolutionary theory. Why deny ourselves the tools that come with the basic theory that explains organic life…? Archeologists won’t look at data that they haven’t shoveled out of the ground. Physical anthropologists deny culture. Cultural folks deny the organic…
There is so much hostility to evolutionary thinking. It makes for strange bedfellows. It’s so odd to me; anthropologists who reject evolutionary theory put themselves in the same camp as the fundamental Christians. It’s a strange pre-enlightenment mentality (though others might call it post-modern I suppose). Humans are so privileged, the rules of nature don’t apply.
I don’t use the term sociobiology very often. The term was high-jacked by opponents of evolutionary research—similar to how the term ‘liberal’ was turned into a pejorative by the conservatives. Chemists used to be called alchemists, by the way.
I mentioned female, feminist sociobiolgists to provide support for the point that knowing someone is a sociobiologist does not mean that you know their politics — sexual or otherwise. Maybe you can describe my corner to me…
Well Ozma, I’m strikingly unconvinced that, in general, the application of sociobiological principles have been overturned in ethology, as far as I’m aware its been incredibly successful. This is why it cuts to the heart of sociobiology as necessarily ideological. Essentially, sociobiology has had two parallel histories, one in the social sciences, and one in ethology. In the social sciences its regularly considered highly ideological and partial. In ethology, its the thing that put lots of odd animal behaviours into an understandable context. If the former history had never happened, ethologists would, occasionally, still have used it on human behaviour, intellectual curiousity being what it is.
Now on the other hand, I’d agree that Evolutionary Psychology (note: capital “e”, capital “p” to denote the Tooby & Cosmides formulation) is ideological . I don’t see how asserting at the outset that they were opposed to Durkheimian sociology or Geertzian anthropology could be anything other than ideological. Sure, in 15, twenty years empirically you may be able to show that there can be no synergy but not at the outset. And the SSSM. What the point of the SSSM was, apart from to piss off sociologists, I have no idea.
If we are discussing the history of ideas here, then it is important to differentiate between sociobiology and its intellectual descendents: Evolutionary Psychology, gene-culture co-evolution (and now niche construction), memetics and behavioural ecology. These have different intellectual histories, different approaches, and some have shown much and some have little empirical success.
I wouldn’t agree with Darwin that physical anthropologists deny culture (indeed, long ago it was part of the basis of Milford Wolpoff’s formulation of the single species hypothesis, and later the multi-regional hypothesis), nor that rejecting evolutionary approaches in cultural anthropology is akin to rejecting evolutionary theory in general. After all, Evo-Psych puts an arbitrary limit on evolutionary input after the EEA (whatever the hell the EEA actually is), thus itself rejecting certain evolutionary approaches.
You know, I actually wanted to discuss structuralism, Mary Douglas’ grid/group analysis and such things on this theory thread. You wouldn’t believe it, would you?
TigerB: Thank the *Lord*, bring on the discussion of structuralism! I promise to be a believer and maybe we can even find some common ground.
Darwin: Something I hope to post on at some point this summer is how the legacy of evolutionary theory might look different if it traced its lineage to Wallace (as it very easily could have — and, I would suggest, actually *should* have) rather than to your cybernamesake. I’m not hostile to evolutionary thinking; both philosophical pragmatism and Marxism are in important respects siblings to it. But under the banner (and it really is a banner) of Darwin, some very pernicious agendas have charged forward. It’s quite telling, actually, that Darwin and not Wallace became the public avatar of evolution.
p.s. Your corner is blue with flowers.
Ozma,
Have you read “The Ant and the Peacock” by Helena Cronin? She teases apart many of the differences between Wallace and Darwin. The book is well written too…
Tigerbear: Structuralism! Check out
Human Family Systems: An Evolutionary View
by Pierre L. Van Den Berghe
He convinced me that Sahlins had something important to say…
Hey Darwin — I read an interview with Helena Cronin in the Guardian that gave me the willies, but didn’t know she’d written a book on Darwin and Wallace. Thanks for the tip, I’ll look for it.