I’ve just picked up her latest book, which is a slim volume, Thinking in Circles, about ring structures in stories, from the Old Testament and Homer to Tristram Shandy. Here her work is primarily analytic and descriptive, showing that certain (non-obvious) schemes exist in well-known tales.

Suppose, for example, that Sahlins vs. Silverstein are taken to exemplify an opposition between ethnographic storytellers and constructors of analytic diagrams. Abbott’s theory predicts that if schools form among the disciples of these two founders and they, too, split in the next generation, the splits within those schools will involve the original opposition. The storytellers will split between those who just tell stories and those who incorporate diagrams in pursuit of analytic rigor. Meanwhile some of the diagrammers will start incorporating stories into their presentations while others elaborate diagrams in increasingly abstract forms. Similar, albeit now more subtle splits, will appear in the third, fourth….nth iterations of the process.

How empirically valid Abbott’s theories are is subject to debate. Just thought, however, that they offer an interesting perspective on the debates here, which seem focused on the oppositions that appear within a single generation.

It’s interesting to note perspective: the degree to which fractures between perspectives appear large or small depends in part on where you are standing. There are notorious divisions (of theoretical, political, and obviously personal kinds) within anthropology departments, say, within the U.S. For people in those departments, I think they are often very real and important and get elaborated in highly formal (journal papers) and less formal (I dunno, small talk) ways. But for people *outside* those departments, the divisions that are reported often seem irrelevant: from outside, everyone seems to be basically on the same page.

Mohawk: Just a quick thought regarding the theoretical imitation to which you refer. So much of anthropological theory is embedded in unique rhetorical styles. Often the imitiation of rhetoric or discursive style then seems to pass for the elaboration of theory or analytic. Usually this is unfortunately, because those styles are not infrequently irreplicable. I point readers to the discussion of Bill Maurer’s Mutal Life, Ltd. that was had here at SM a while back.

Chaos of Disciplinesuses fractals to explain the patterns of disciplines, and then applies them to key debates that surround the social sciences. Abbott argues that knowledge in different disciplines is organized by common oppositions that function at any level of theoretical or methodological scale. Opposing perspectives of thought and method in…. history, sociology, and literature are…radically similar; much like fractals, they are each mutual reflections of their own distinctions. Abbott extends this concept to social structure and moral action in the book’s closing chapters. He demonstrates how self-similar social structures arise, considers their implications for individual experience and solidarity, and then shows how self-similarity makes sense of the debate over politicization in academia; ultimately, Chaos of Disciplines contends that the political wars in the humanities and social sciences involve far less disagreement than we think.

Which doesn’t for a moment reduce the narcissism of small differences to which Freud points, a tendency exaggerated, I believe, in crowded job markets.

Boas : R-B
Idiographic: Nomothetic
particularizing : generalizing
geography : physics
mds : mslv

Geographer v. Physicist anyone?

Take the Captain Cook stuff — the first reference that I know to this is in 1976 (iirc) in the “State of the Art in Sociocultural Anthropology” article. We then get the monograph 1981 (Historical Metaphors) and a series of essays, only partly about Cook, in 1985. The final Big Book of this period is Anahulu (with the exception of 1995 How Natives Think, which was a response to outside stimulus).

We then get a period of work on “the economics of developman” that comes through in a series of essays. At the same time we get important statments on Fiji developing the strucutral-historical model of the 80s in Return of the Event (1990), Discovery of the True Savage, etc. and now with Apologies to Thucydides, which incorporates work on the Greeks, Elian Gonzalez, and baseball.

All scholars reduce, reuse and recycle and of course there are continuities in their work because they are biographically continuous beings. but in light of all this doesn’t it seem like there’s a contrast to be had here?

I can, however, confirm Sahlins and Silverstein’s very active presence at Rex’s defense… I even remember when Rex quite solicitously asked Silverstein’s permission to describe his own project as a ‘natural history of discourse’ (an Anthro dept workshop around 2003).

At the AAA meetings this year I saw an appallingly bad paper by someone using Pierce by way of Silverstein to explain how people interpret, think about, and talk about certain sounds. The memory of that paper makes me think that an interesting thread of this discussion might be how people think with Silverstein and Sahlins when it comes to their own empirical evidence / data / ethnographic information, whatever you want to call it.

There seems to be a form of imitation when some people use Silverstein that makes their work impossible to understand. And I don’t find Silverstein impossible to understand – simply hard-going when reading it and then when I get it, I get it – but some of his fans use his ideas in ways that bludgeon their own research into nothingness. This makes me sad because you can often tell that embedded in the imitation-laden muck there is really good stuff.

And allow me, if you will, to try and connect this thread to the Gajdusek-off from a week ago. It is exactly the sort of fixation on ‘fame’ and / or notoriety that I was trying to critique in my comments about how many academics think that intelligence is a moral virtue per se. I see this fixation as part of reason behind the endless imitation of Silverstein and other stars in the discipline.

What I came to was that some of the differences had to do with the difference that Rex noted between Silverstein’s interest in describing in general terms the way action emerges in time in relation to what Lily (following Silverstein) refers to as “relatively perduring understandings” (what the rest of us usually call culture). Sahlins seems to me to be only intermittently interested in that sort of model building—one of the best examples in his work of such modeling is the notion (discussed extensively in the last chapter of _Islands of History_) that one of the ways cultures change is when signs are “risked” in acts of reference: they are applied to new things (partly as a way of comprehending those things), but can thus change in value as the qualities of the things referred to become part of meaning of the sign with which we refer to them. Thus ( _Islands_ 149) _tabu_ is used in the regulation of trade, and the idea becomes “objectified as a commercial and proprietary right”—This is Sahlins in a very Silversteinian mode, but mostly his interest is not in constructing a “more-or-less universal and ahistorical model of how (social) structure happens” (Lily’s words, which _do_ work for Silverstein’s project), but in describing particular histories—untangling the complexities of cause and event in particular places and cases, with special attention to the ways in which these are ordered by the sorts relatively perduring understandings that actors bring to their participation in events.

In Boas’s terms Sahlins would more of a geographer, Silverstein more of a physicist (see Boas’s “The Study of Geography” in _Race, Language, & Culture_). The difference in interest may be related to a difference in scale and subject matter as well: there is more implicit interest in describing the particularities of why Hawaiian’s were interested in brightly colored cloth (vs Northwest Coast Indian interest in Hudson’s bay blankets—see Sahlins’s “Cosmologies of Capitalism” reprinted in _Culture in Practice_), than there is in the status contest of two Chicago grad students (Silverstein 1998 “The Improvisational Performance of Culture in Realtime Discursive Practice.” In _Creativity in Performance_, edited by R. K. Sawyer). Moreover the general theoretical point that Sahlins is making—that the culture _qua_ relatively perduring understandings that actors bring to events matters crucially for things like economic activity and political struggle—is undemonstrable except in terms of the particularities of different situations.

Whereas for Siverstein the important thing is the argument that culture doesn’t so much exist as a set of meanings somewhere but is knowable only as invoked:

bq. By this account, ‘culture’ exists only by virtue of its being invoked—indexically called into being—primarily in discursive action . . . .This means that anyone can know about culture only by studying language-in-use as a form of social action . . . . Further, culture has continuity beyond the microsociological moment of its invocation only as it perdures, with gradual consequential change, in a macrosociological order of virtual communication over multiple, improvisational, invocational performances “of it.” [Silverstein ibid]

This makes sense but it leaves a lacuna in Siverstein’s work: there is no real attention to the question of how to describe a particular culture—as Rex says, no fully developed ethnographic accounts. The different goals also have something to do with the ease of replication (or perhaps with whether influence is easily recognizable). “Theory” in Silverstein’s case, consists of describing and refining the model. Someone else can use it by showing that indeed the model describes a different empirical situation, and we can recognize that they are doing it by the jargon they use (an intended careful semantico-referential function-sub-1 use of language that in practice amounts to a clear indexical, i.e. function-sub-2, usage). As I noted “here,”:/2007/01/06/pop-quiz-who-made-this-diagram/#comment-46646 for Sahlins, theory works best by pointing to certain kinds of ethnographic facts as possibly important (it’s a colonial context, is there a “structure of the conjuncture” here?) but the point is as much or more to understand the particular situation as it is to elaborate the model.

That said, there is something unsatisfyingly abstract about understanding structure mainly as a Saussurean structure of differences (as Sahlins generally does, at least explicitly): For one thing it doesn’t tell us anything about how people acquire culture or much about how they bring it to bear on particular situations. One of the ways I resolve this to think about structures as being implicit in certain genres of practice—a way of looking at cultural particularity that already points to the ways it is discursively invoked. By describing those genres, and the meanings implicit in them, one can then describe a culture. Seeing culture as a collection of things in this way (rather than as a unitary system) also makes the question of cultural unity an empirical one rather than a logical necessity, opening up the possibility of seeing the “unit cultures” of classic anthropological description as neither ethnographic fantasy nor human universal, but as one of the ways human semantic and social fields might be organized (an thought I owe to John Kelly, though he made the argument in somewhat different terms). Two further thoughts (to wrap up this too-long comment). First, that in Sahlins’s actual descriptions of particular situations, he often describes culture in ways that go beyond conceiving of it as Saussurian structures precisely because by trying to see how it shapes history he is describing it as invoked, in language use (and other meaningful social action). Secondly that sometimes Saussurian oppositions do capture something about the way people understand the world, since they aren’t really always so abstract as Saussure (or Levi-Strauss) imagined them, but are implicit in the built environment (the Kabyle house anyone?), or ritual scripts that deploy such simple poetic devices as repetition with variation.

That’s a question I posed in the only article of mine ever to make it into American Ethnologist, where the problem is the uses of language in a Taiwanese Daoist healer’s exorcism. There I write,

Like Kapferer (1991), I, too, attempt a middle way between structuralist/semiotic approaches and the process/performance orientation of Victor Turner (see, for example, 1969). From both I take a sharp focus on aesthetic detail, that “logic in tangible qualities” (Levi-Strauss 1969:1) which keeps ideas from floating free in pure abstraction. From Turner I take particular concern for the sequence in which the steps of he ritual drama unfold. Accounting for sequence as well as type–what linguists call syntagmatic as well as paradigmatic relations–in the properties of ritual language adds force to interpretation.

Detail and sequence have been my touchstones for rigor in qualitative analysis ever since.

REFERENCES

Kapferer, Bruce (1991) A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1969) The Raw and the Cooked. John and doreen Weightman, trans. London: Jonathan Cape.

Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Harmondsworth: Penguin.