Hard Problems in Anthropology

In 1990 [1900], the renowned mathematician David Hilbert laid down a challenge to future generations: 23 hand-picked mathematical problems, all difficult, all important, and all unsolved. Since then, countless mathematicians around the world have struggled to solve the 23 ‘Hilbert Problems’ (ten have been resolved; eleven are partly solved or simply cannot be solved; and two remain at large). Most important, the pursuit of the solutions had a profound and fundamental influence on the roadmap for 20th century mathematics, testament to Hilbert’s foresight.

So begins an announcement about a Harvard symposium aimed at identifying a similar list of problems for the social sciences. I thought it might be interesting to poll our readers about their own ideas for a list of “hard problems in anthropology.” Does it make sense to compile such a list? What would you put on the list? What would it mean for cultural anthropologists to “solve” a problem.Are there any such problems from a previous era that we’ve already solved?

Off the top of my head, I can think of two typical anthropological “problems.” Each posing different challenges to a Hilbertesque approach to defining a list of such problems.

The first might be phrased as “What’s the matter with Kansas?” That is, why do people seem to act contrary to their own class interests? But even asking the problem causes problems. Larry Bartels famously asked: What’s the Matter With ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’, which undermined many of the premises of Frank’s book. The difficulties of defining “class interests” in the first place makes this question so much messier than a mathematical problem.

The second is more typical of contemporary anthropology and could be stated thus: “What are the cultural logics that make X actions thinkable, practicable, and desirable?” (Paraphrased from the introduction to Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship.) Having observed some phenomenon, anthropologists then collect the stories people tell about that problem and interpret them in light of our own understanding of how institutional and cultural practices shape such stories. Here the problem isn’t so much the question, but identifying under what conditions we might consider the problem “solved”? One can’t jump in the same river twice and so each anthropologist who asks such a question will very likely come up with different answers.

So what do our readers think? Does it make sense to compile such a list? If so, what would you put on it? And how would you define a problem as being “solved”? If not, might there be a better way to focus the efforts of cultural anthropology on a set of common problems?

(Hat tip to Ennis for the link.)

50 thoughts on “Hard Problems in Anthropology

  1. Question No. 1: Is culture enough? Especially if analyzing culture is

    “What are the cultural logics that make X actions thinkable, practicable, and desirable?”

    Am currently reading Mike Davis (1999) Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, which is, among other things, a compelling demonstration of what can happen when cultural logics run up against material conditions in a space where sudden, wide fluctuations in those conditions are the local norm.

    No question about it that the interpretive anthropological critique of simplistic x therefore y models of material, social or economic explanation were important and have lead to richer understanding of many cultural phenomena. One wonders, however, if even our thickest descriptions aren’t too thin without close attention to more than the cultural logics of thoughts, practices and desires.

  2. What would it mean for cultural anthropologists to “solve” a problem.

    Is the highlighting to be read as “rather than the other three subdisciplines” or as “rather than social”?

  3. The nice thing about math is that once you’ve provided a proof for something, it stays proven. More or less.

    Anthropology’s object is moving, and it has a reflective surface.

    So at best the “hard problems” might turn out to be a bit “meta”. Something like “is there a consistent and broadly acceptable model of proof, or at least, of useful basic information, regarding the object of Anthropology?”

    I think many people would be happy if Anthro split into a humanity-camp, which basically sees the discipline as a self-critiquing collection of literature defined by a style, or as empirically-touched philosophy maybe; and a geography/sociology camp that sees itself as focusing on interviews and naturalistic observation within the context of those (social) sciences.

  4. Andrew, is it possible to read “empirically-touched” as “nutty”?

    On a slightly more serious note, how would you feel about replacing “interview” with “conversation”? When I hear the the word “interview,” the images that come to mind are a journalist thrusting a microphone in someone’s face or a social scientist with a clipboard collecting data from a subject for later analysis. In the classic mode of ethnography, the process begins with moving in with strangers with whom you will live for a protracted period of time, watching what they do, building rapport, asking occasional questions but mainly engaging in conversations of undetermined length — some may continue intermittently for weeks or months. Haven’t reached any conclusions yet, but at this point “conversation” feels truer than “interview” for what actually happens in the field.

  5. “but at this point “conversation” feels truer than “interview” for what actually happens in the field.”

    I think that has more to do with the current situation. I’ve had fewer conversations with people in the field than interviews, even when they are conversations. I don’t have the same time as an academic to hang out for a couple of years, or to go back to the same site over decades.

    Anyway, this is an interesting thread for me, because the groundedness of physical and social science is something that I think we often dichotomize in a way we maybe shouldn’t, simply because we are largely unaware of these conversations happening in the physical sciences. Like it or not the purpose of something like physics is the ability to manipulate matter, and the result of social science is behavior change. I’ve looked into this and I wrote an essay about it a couple of years ago. I’ll repost a small bit here:

    …A concrete example of this phenomenon within the academic community took place at a mathematics congress held in Europe in 1901. Mathematicians met to deal with the emerging crisis in the discipline caused by trying to deal with the incongruence between the incompatibility of mathematical models, and proofs, with real world phenomenon. The chairman of the committee opened the congress by saying that is was though mathematicians had been “constructing a building by beginning from the second floor” (Hagen, 1995).
    The chairman of the congress was trying to pin down the problem at the scale of the ‘discipline’ or group level (in this case mathematics), which was rooted in the minds of its individual practitioners. What I mean is that the incongruence between the discipline’s paradigms and the empiric world, were rooted in the incongruence between the practitioners’ mental concepts and the empiric world. While they were exploring this incongruence at the scale of the discipline, the problem is no different at the scale of the individual practitioner from which the problem ultimately derives.
    Here we are still at the level of Bourdieu’s argument about “doxia” (1989). In order to be more certain of our beginning point of analysis so that we as anthropologists do not also begin construction on the “second floor,” we must set our foundation in something more solid, or at least something more sure. Levi Strauss attempted to show that one could localize the locus of such doxia within brain structure itself, which seems solid enough. After all, biology is a natural science and where better to begin than with a positivist, natural science explanation. We tend to think of physics as the most sure and secure of sciences, so I prefer to begin there. It has absolute and immutable laws, which apply everywhere and every when, yet it too is based on a series of unproven assumptions.

    Astronomer John Barrow quotes the scientist Michael Polanyi in his book, “The World within the World” (1988):

    …the metaphysical presuppositions of science… …are never explicitly defended or even considered by themselves by the inquiring scientist. They arise as aspects of the given activity of inquiry, as its structurally implicit presuppositions, not as consciously held philosophical axioms preceding it. They are transcendental preconditions of methodological thinking, not explicit objects of such thinking; we think with them and not of them.

    That sounds suspiciously like a verbatim application of Bourdieu’s doxia found in culture applied to natural science. Barrow goes on to list these presuppositions of science, eight in all. Here are a few:

    1. There exists an external world which is external to our minds, and which is the unique source of all our sensations.
    2. This external world is ultimately rational. ‘A’ and ‘not A’ cannot be true simultaneously.
    3. The world can be analyzed locally without destroying its essential structure.
    4. The elementary entities do not posses what we call freewill.
    etc… (1988).

    The reasons behind why these axioms are unproven suppositions, not facts in and of themselves, is beyond the scope of this paper and would require a book level explanation. The understanding of the shaky ground upon which the physical sciences are founded has become a common theme in the popular literature of science, even if they have remained invisible to many social scientists (Barrow, 1988; Hagen, 1995; Herbert, 1985; Penrose, 1990).
    Steve Hagen offers an anecdote about a meeting in 1987 of physicists and philosophers at Notre Dame to discuss the philosophical implications of quantum theory (1995). He recalls a lively conversation between a scientist and a philosopher during the meeting:

    Physicist: Are you then saying that it’s neither a wave nor a particle?
    Philosopher: No, I’m asking what you mean by “it?”

    Nick Herbert (1985) then lays out this problem for us to consider:

    …if you assume that electrons possess contextual attributes that stem from ordinary objects inaccessible to measurement but whose innate attributes combine ‘in a reasonable way’ to simulate the electron’s measurement – dependent behavior, then these entities likewise must violate quantum theory’s predictions. Thus, according to the quantum bible, electrons cannot be ordinary objects, nor can they be constructed of (presently unobservable) ordinary objects. From the mathematical form alone, Von Neumann proved that quantum theory is incompatible with the real existence of entities that possess attributes of their own.

    What we have here then is a category mistake, caused by the misconception of the perception of relative position and scale. As one moves from the micro, quantum level of scale to the macro, observable level of scale something happens. A border is imagined, but that border exists nowhere in the observable world, only in our imaginations and conceptions (Biological sense perception and human cognition, brain structures). A world composed of “non-ordinary objects” cannot itself be made ordinary. There can be no magic imposed upon the world, because the world itself is magic.
    This assumption of a concrete, positivist world laying a foundation for individual and social behavior underlies the writing of all social sciences. This is also why each of them falls into contradictions when moving from the scale of the individual operating in a concrete world, to the scale of groups interacting upon individuals. The category mistake is therefore not dissimilar for either the natural or social sciences. A philosopher of science could easily turn his gaze toward the social sciences and ask a question like this:

    Anthropologist: Are you saying that a subjective self is produced by neither agency nor structure?

    Philosopher: No, I’m asking what you mean by “self?”

  6. The biggest question facing anthropology is “How do we prevent anthropology departments (or majors) from being eliminated from universities (for either financial or political reasons)?” In the current financial climate, I am surprised that this isn’t an important issue in the anthro blogosphere.

  7. If we’re to prevent their elimination, presumably we have to first establish that anthropology is actually a subject. I’ve realized (as another grad student guy) that if in three years I’m working in a geography or political science or similar department I’m not sure I’d really notice.

    Except there would be a lot less handwringing about the discipline being doomed.

    Note that I’m not trying to say, in a dismissive way, that anthropology /definitely isn’t/ a subject. I am ready to be convinced, and to convince myself for that matter. But I think it’s a pretty genuine problem.

    It should be appended to Rick’s tale that in significant ways those mathematicians /failed/; Godel and Russell took away the idea of the “really real” model of the mathetical basis of reality. Math and reasoned inquiry continue, of course.

  8. Much of the AAA conference: Who are we? can we really be sure about what we’re doing?

    Arrogant Young Grad Student: who gives a shit? Get back to work. <3<3Nancy Sheper-Hughes<3<3

  9. “we have to first establish that anthropology is actually a subject.”

    I think we have to understand anthropology as much as a way of seeing the world, as it is a body of methods and theories. Because it is the most holistic of the social sciences, the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences, we frame questions and define answers differently. This is a real difference.

    So, for geography as you listed it as an example, has borrowed very heavily from anthropology, but while many geographers have theories that come close the the level of holism that we do, they don’t have a methodology to measure it. So, while I love geography, and I’ve learned GIS and find it very valuable, the idea of thinking of things in spatial terms (archaeology) is neither new to us, and more easily incorporated into an anthro analysis, than culture into a geographic one. Culture is still largely something that is static in the other sciences.
    Currently, I’m working with environmental scientists, and their literature tells us that we need to exploit “social capital” for green development. A neighborhood is the locus of global sustainability, but while that is understood, they have zero idea of how to actually do that. Every other discipline that I study has a piece of the pie, and some more than others, but none have as many as anthropology. Geography, politics, biology, economics, psychology; they all matter, and none put them together like we do.

  10. Dear Friends, I have taken the liberty of mentioning this thread in a couple of other place: Open Anthropology Cooperative, Dead Voles and Anthro-L. Would anyone object to my copying and pasting their contributions to those destinations?

  11. Perhaps you could just link to those threads so the interested can join in those conversations if they wish? Thanks for doing this.

  12. I’ve thought about that, and the conversation starters already include the link to this site. Seems to me, however, that some of what is being said here deserves broader exposure than it’s likely to get if people have to click through to see it. I think some of what Rick, in particular, has written deserves a bit wider in-your-face distribution. Let’s see what other folks say.

  13. I don’t disagree that holism is a strength of anthropology, but insofar as this approach is valuable it’s someting that should be spread across many subjects of study, right? Environmental Science and Human Geography and such would be improved by anthropological methods — but if that’s all we can say about anthropology, that it’s a method, I think we can expect to see it crowded out of social science faculties by disciplines that can define themselves in terms of an object.

    The whole structure of disciplines, of course, has afforded would-be governors a neat little “divide and conquer” tactic. But even if so, defending a particular patch of turf out of nothing but a sense of shared tradition isn’t necessarily a good counter-strategy.

    You call out “culture” specifically as the turf of anthropology, but no one really agrees on what it is, or even more recently whether it exists in a meaningful way. Honestly I’ve been trying to avoid using the word just to see if I can be more precise. Is that our Object? It makes things easier to explain at parties, I guess.

  14. I always thought that the great problems in Cultural Anthropology came down to defining the concepts that we use.

    What is Culture?
    What is Society?
    What is Identity?
    What is Agency?
    What is Power?
    What is Knowledge?
    What is Structure?
    What is …?

  15. “but if that’s all we can say about anthropology, that it’s a method, I think we can expect to see it crowded out of social science faculties by disciplines that can define themselves in terms of an object.”

    I see what you’re saying. I don’t think it’s just a method either, because we share so many methods with others, and we take as many as we give. Qualitative methods are no longer ours alone, although we are simply trained in them better. In the business world what passes for qualitative methods, or for culture, simply wouldn’t fly in our world. Our domain are humans, everywhere, and every when.
    So, I think if we are to survive, as you say, then the proof will lie in the pudding. At the end of the day our value will lie in what we bring to the table, and what we can do for people. I’ve never heard of an anthropologist having nothing valuable to add to a multi-disciplinary team. Perhaps, ignored by economists, but that’s another matter.
    The group I’m working for now has noticed a rather extreme difference in what I’ve offered them in relation to consultants in the past. The simple fact that I actually get out and walk around, and talk to everyone, and do more than surveys, etc… and ground what I say in actual, local context is a big deal. It’s total common sense to any of us, but I’m amazed at how little it is either done or understood by others. No one had ever worked with an anthropologist, or knew what we did, but now everyone in the org. wants one. I have been going out of my way to find people to bring on for good contract jobs, and I can’t find them. There is a labor shortage here for anthros.!
    BTW, if there’s anyone who does urban anth. and speaks fluent Spanish, in the Texas area, I would like to talk with you.

    I think a great way for us to become more relevant to others, and to increase everyone’s value and pay, is to have talented grad. students, that perhaps are inclined towards less esoteric work (If you really want to use the word “ontological” in a thesis title, then applied work might not be for you), go out and interview with orgs. (public, or private), that work in whatever area they are interested in and try to sell themselves to the org. It is a much more challenging and educational exercise to be given a problem by someone else, and use theory and method to customize a research design around it, and come up with solutions for them, than it is to simply use whatever theory you personally like to study something of personal curiosity.
    You kill a lot of birds with one stone. You get the discipline wider name recognition, you increase our demand, which increases everyone’s pay, and you increase our ability to have the name recognition that we need to make a difference. You’ll also pump a lot of new knowledge into the system. Students will gain access to worlds they wouldn’t otherwise, and answer questions they wouldn’t otherwise.

  16. Hablo espanol y practico l’anthropologia de la ciudad (y de la ciudadania) pero no estoy acerca de Tejas, y no me gustaria ir. 🙁

    Again, you’re not saying anything in particular that I take argument with, but I don’t think people in anthro departments will be very happy with the notion of having to “brand” themselves or rely on applied work to build up their “value” — and to be fair, while I’m an advocate of such “practical” anthro, it’s not at all clear to me that our sister disciplines face the same level of scrutiny by ‘capital’; ie, there’s lots of fairly “useless” psych or soc around that is academically interesting but unmarketable.

    And while in some ways History and Language Studies are under even more pressure, no one serious seems to believe that these subjects have /no subject matter/. It doesn’t really come up. Or does it?

  17. What do you have against Texas?

    I think that anyone with a minor in any social science or humanities is going to have a hard time marketing themselves. I think a BA in poli. sci. is universally known as something you do before 1. going to law school, or 2. interning with government.

    Everyone knows what psychologists do, because they have an group of licensed practitioners, and are very visible in popular culture. I’m not sure sociologists have it any easier, but people can get that they study society. Everyone knows what a historian is, and know what English is, but I don’t think anyone goes into those fields thinking they are going to do anything but teach, go into academia, or write. If you want a job in a social science, you are going to grad. school. I knew that going in.
    I don’t think there is any other common field that is on every campus which elicits the response, “Oh, what is that?”

    If anything the question that people have is what makes us different from sociologists. People, and anything they do as a group of more than one, is our subject. Anyone that doesn’t know that just doesn’t know what anthropology is, and it’s up to us to educate them. There are too many anthropologists that don’t know how to market themselves, and don’t realize there are jobs to be had out there. If you want to explain what anthropologists do, and what are subject matter is, then think about what it is that you can do for someone else. That’ll clear it up real quick.
    How would you go about researching a real world problem, and how would it be different? If you think that any of the other soc. sci. would frame the question the same, research it the same, analyze and interpret the data the same, and use the same theories, and the same recommendations, then we shouldn’t exist.

  18. I’m just an archaeologist and so not really invited to this conversation, but I must admit to a little surprise (well, not really) to see the vagueness of the kinds of problems being proposed. How about problems that could conceivably have an answer:

    What are the cultural conditions underlying transmission of malaria, or HIV-AIDS, and how can an anthropological understanding of these reduce the transmission rates?

    Sure, it would be nice to have a consensual resolution of “what is culture”, but to get there would mean getting back on board the universalisms train, and I don’t see many cultural anthropologists doing that. So, as long as the trend in the sub-discipline is towards particularism, then actual solvable problems are going to be particularistic. Can’t have it both ways, I don’t think.

  19. I think anthropologists who do ethnographic research should work more closely with cultural geographers, historical anthropologists and others on questions to do with socio-cultural processes that originated in the near or distant past but are still unfolding, e.g. the uneven spread and appropriation of Pentecostalism across many countries in recent decades, and its broader cultural and political consequences. These are the sorts of middle-range problems that lend themselves well to comparative, historical-cum-ethnographic research.

  20. @qmackie I never said archaeologists weren’t welcome – I just wished to focus the question of “problems” in terms of cultural/social anthropology in order to narrow its scope.

    Your question “What are the cultural conditions underlying transmission of malaria, or HIV-AIDS, and how can an anthropological understanding of these reduce the transmission rates?” Is an interesting one, and not like the two I listed in my post in that it is motivated by policy making imperatives. One starts with the need to reduce transmission rates and then looks to see what anthropologists and the “cultural concept” can contribute to this discussion. However, it would be difficult to compile a definitive list of such problems which would remain relevant a century from now, as the issues of concern to policy makers shift with the times.

  21. Would it be a hijack of this thread to propose some “hard” problems? By which I mean problems that are important for all of the work we do, but don’t seem likely to admit of easy (much less permanent) solutions:

    1. Can we find ways to talk about the agency and intention of actors in relation to its cultural context and at the same time understand those actors as having the complexity of motivation and the varying levels of consciousness about it that psychodynamic investigations would suggest they must?

    2. What is the role of iconicity in cultural symbolism? (Which might be the same question as how to talk about ideas and associations that are common but not universal across the ethnographic record?

  22. I think we should follow archaeologists’ lead and get it mandated into law that any proposed development or change to an area require an ethnographic study. ;^)

    “However, it would be difficult to compile a definitive list of such problems which would remain relevant a century from now, as the issues of concern to policy makers shift with the times.”

    I don’t see the issue with this. We are “social” scientists, and therefore our focus of study, analysis of problems, and solutions for problems will change over time. We study people and people change; genetically, culturally, we change our environment, our language, everything. The speed of light is a constant, humans aren’t. I think if nothing else, this is our greatest strength. I think the fact that most of the base assumptions upon which most of economics is based are on 300 year old philosophical musing of human nature, is not a good thing.
    There are certain things which we can be deductive in, and we are for many things, but it is our comfort with the inductive that makes the difference. It’s how variables coalesce in a unique way, in a unique time and place than makes our analysis more valuable when looking for solutions to actual situational problems. What works to reduce AIDs in Uganda probably isn’t going to be the same thing to reduce AIDs in Texas. My particular current fieldsite in the middle of a city is very unique in relation to other communities that are demographically like it; either in the state or the U.S. It has completely baffled everyone that works there, and it really wasn’t that hard to figure out what was going on, because I didn’t show up with a head full of deductive assumptions about what I would find and what solutions would be.

    It is other sciences that think we can understand real world, complex variables in deductive models (even though very few repeat studies are done outside of the physical sciences to show replicability, and the strength of our quantitative understanding of the socio-cultural world is weaker than most people think).

    Real example: If you want to know the best seeds to use in an area to increase biodiversity for a certain ecological cline, in order to reduce water for irrigation, and pesticides, etc… You will probably go to a biologist or ecologist, yet what we understand scientifically about specific plants in specific places if very small, and it takes a very long time, and money, to gain an understanding. Or, and I know a guy that does this, you can call a enviro. anth. who specializes in seeds, and he will work closely with local indigenous, and non-indigenous gardeners, farmers, and others, and find out what works and what doesn’t.

  23. Your question “What are the cultural conditions underlying transmission of malaria, or HIV-AIDS, and how can an anthropological understanding of these reduce the transmission rates?” Is an interesting one, and not like the two I listed in my post in that it is motivated by policy making imperatives. One starts with the need to reduce transmission rates and then looks to see what anthropologists and the “cultural concept” can contribute to this discussion. However, it would be difficult to compile a definitive list of such problems which would remain relevant a century from now, as the issues of concern to policy makers shift with the times.

    Readers’ mileage may vary (and please do comment if yours does), but I think this exchange brings to light one of the differences that matters within the subdisciplines. My impression is that the majority of archaeologists orient any project around a problem statement—more than once I have e-mailed an archaeologist soliciting his/her expertise for a paper or presentation to receive a preliminary reply of “What is your research problem?” My understanding is that the problem statement is meant to not only orient the researcher over the course of the project but also to aid readers of the ultimate report or publication in their evaluation of the data presented.

    So I think it would be a real mistake to be dismissive of small and medium scale research questions. In the way that archaeologists tend to utilize them they produce exactly the kind of data needed to answer the big questions and do so in a way that is respectful of the fact that future scholars will be utilizing that data after contempo research agendas and priorities have long since changed.

  24. Just to clarify: I am not dismissive of such an approach, just wondering to what extent it provides our discipline with a set of problems we can agree upon? So my question back to you is whether you think the way archaeologists “tend to utilize” such problems is applicable to cultural/social anthropology as well? If so, how? And would doing so constitute a transformation of our discipline, or just business as usual?

  25. Another intrusion from an archaeological interloper (nice remarks, qmackie)–

    Immanuel Wallerstein suggests that the current organization of the social science and historical disciplines gets in the way of advances in research (“Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines,” Current Anthropology 44:453-465, 2003). He doesn’t give any kind of list of the big questions, but the implication is that such lists within disciplines would be partial or limited. I don’t see much progress in the first 30 comments toward any such list (wasn’t this the charge of this entry?), but I suspect that the reason has less to do with the transdisciplinary nature of major social science problems than with the view that cultural anthropologists have of their discipline.

  26. Hi Kerim,

    I think the “how” is just how I phrased it: a do-able project, a problem with an answer, an answerable question. In essence, it struck me that there is a difference between seeking hard problems and seeking impossible ones and some of the ideas upthread struck me as closer to impossible.

    The emphasis here is on a certain pragmatism, of getting things done, and not being paralysed by the intractability of it all. Similarly, archaeologists get paralysed if we focus too long and hard on questions like “ethnographic analogy” and the basic epistemology of archaeology – important, to be sure, but also not really open to resolution; impossible to resolve.

    Whether it is business as usual, I can’t say: I know there are many “applied anthropologists” who are pretty goal-directed; I also know there are many cultural anthropologists who are so in awe of all the possible ways they could be generalizing or essentializing or appropriating, that they literally never get anything useful done. A coarse index of “utility for the people with whom I work” is not a bad thing when thinking of problems.

    If the goal is “problems we can agree on” then I think that is out of synch with the desire to not generalize cross-culturally which has dominated cultural anthro for 30 years. Solve that problem, and you solve the other.

  27. So my question back to you is whether you think the way archaeologists “tend to utilize” such problems is applicable to cultural/social anthropology as well?

    I think it is as applicable as funding allows. As Rick alludes to, there isn’t really a cultural anthropology equivalent to CRM. It’s interesting to compare successful proposals to the NSF Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology programs. Both have an expectation that the results of the funded work will contribute to general theory. I assert that the successful archaeology proposals demonstrate that the program demands a tighter research design than the cultural anthropology program does while the successful cultural anthropology proposals demonstrate a premium on large scale research problems. Go figure.

    If so, how?

    On the level of the individual project, by emphasizing questions that have some hope of being answered as qmackie suggests. One of the things that I feel really plagues cultural anthropology is that fieldwork isn’t motivated by the desire to collect data to answer a question so much as it is by a desire to collect quotes from the volk to pepper into a “theoretical” treatise. Theoretically Wittgenstein and Bakhtin have something to say, but did they ever really ask any answerable questions?

    On a higher level, by making fieldwork more palatable to local concerns. As Bruce Trigger pointed out 30 years ago, when processualists justify excavation of a particular locale on the grounds that it contributes to the knowledge of humanity as a whole unconsulted descendent communities have more than one reason to bristle.

  28. 1. Can we find ways to talk about the agency and intention of actors in relation to its cultural context and at the same time understand those actors as having the complexity of motivation and the varying levels of consciousness about it that psychodynamic investigations would suggest they must?

    2. What is the role of iconicity in cultural symbolism? (Which might be the same question as how to talk about ideas and associations that are common but not universal across the ethnographic record?

    I like these questions a lot.

    Re 1: I offer the suggestion that we closely examine what narrative historians, biographers and other authors of long-form non-fiction, e.g., John McPhee or Mark Davis, do and ask what, if anything, we can do better. Just last night I heard a marvelous interview with McPhee on a New Yorker podcast in which he mentioned that 90% of his topics are things that he got interested in as a kid — last night the example was lacrosse. My takeaway was reinforcement of something I learned while helping to hire copywriters for a Japanese ad agency. If you want the writing to be persuasive, find somebody who knows and loves what he or she is writing about, who can get you inside what people are saying because they have been there themselves. Critical distance is also important; but too often it leaves the reader stuck in the middle distance where neither the big picture nor the intimate details are visible.

    Re 2: For two weeks starting April 27, there will be an online seminar on the Open Anthropology Cooperative discussing a paper I have written about Chinese god statues titled “Why do the gods look like that?” It is directly concerned with the issue of iconicity, the tendency of anthropological interpretation to look through what we see, searching for something behind it instead of looking at the thing itself, and, finally, the way in which the question of iconicity raises the question of an-iconcity: in the case of religion, why believers in some religions (ancient Greece and Rome, Hindu India, and China come to mind) prefer anthropomorphic representations of gods while others (Judaism, Islam, and Shinto, for example) explicitly reject such representations. Fun stuff to think about. Anyone here is more than welcome to join in.

  29. “The emphasis here is on a certain pragmatism, of getting things done, and not being paralysed by the intractability of it all. Similarly, archaeologists get paralysed if we focus too long and hard on questions like “ethnographic analogy” and the basic epistemology of archaeology – important, to be sure, but also not really open to resolution; impossible to resolve. ”

    I don’t think the two can really be compared in this way. I was trained by some pretty good archaeologists (in Texas they tend to be Mayanists), learn environmental anth. from an arch., and took a dissertation writing class with an archaeologist and a 4-field group of students.
    From the dissertation seminar, I found that the physical anths. and archaeologists, asked very bounded and traditionally scientific questions. One woman was going to go to New Mexico and Arizona, and look for pottery scherds to get a better understanding of the migration route of a currently non-existent native group. So, she’s gonna go out there and look for something, and if she finds or doesn’t find something then the hypotheses are either rejected or not. Another person was going to go to Africa and look into Chimpanzee shit to see how the GI tract of Chimps affect the germination of a particular seed. Pretty straight forward. Unbelievably boring to a guy like me, but easy to grasp.
    Then one of the cultural people was going to compare one tribal African group who have successfully incorporated birth control with another of the same linguistic group that hasn’t, so she could recommend culturally appropriate strategies to reduce HIV for the other group. You see how that’s just a messier question. You have no idea what you’re going to find before you get there.

    It would be analogous to an archaeologist going to a dig site and having things rearranged each time.

    This also gets at the heart of relevance. There is often a difference between academic relevance and practical relevance. This goes to the heart of why you are asking a question, not just what question you are asking. When I first heard about the Chimp-seed-shit project, my first thought was, “cool, if you’re able to show that chimps are integral to a seeds germination, then you can add that knowledge to conservation efforts of the importance of biodiversity and primate protection.” That wasn’t even really one of the researchers concerns.

    It was then that I realized I needed to transfer to an applied program. So, the point of that spiel is that the original question isn’t really the right one to be asking. When asking a question it is important that there are enough of us that consider how answering it can have practical significance in everyday lives. If you can’t explain to the average person in 5 mins. why your research is relevant, then why are you asking the question? If you are asking the question to get tenure, or to satisfy personal curiosity, or present a paper, then that is your reward, and you shouldn’t expect anyone outside the academy to give a shit, or care about who you are.

  30. “1. Can we find ways to talk about the agency and intention of actors in relation to its cultural context and at the same time understand those actors as having the complexity of motivation and the varying levels of consciousness about it that psychodynamic investigations would suggest they must?”

    25 posts up, I posted a bit of an essay that I wrote that deals with this. It’s hard to get from that little bit, but the essay was about answering this question. The point is that in the physical universe there is a split between the micro and macro in physics. I feel that this split is largely a product of the human mind. We intuitively feel that the universe is rational, that physical things are solid and more permanent than they are. So, when we study them at a certain level of scale, and they cease to even try to behave in rational ways, then we get pissy. This produces a paradox. But, paradoxes are never real in the real world, they are just things you don’t understand correctly. You think things are one way, and then when you actually observe them to find that they are another way, then you feel cognitive dissonance, and the human mind is a dissonance reducing machine. That the basic idea of behavioralism. E.g., the earth is flat, yet I see that ship slowing dip below the horizon, and they come back. This is a paradox, because what is observed and what is believed are in conflict. What is observed will always trump what is believed, and that is always the answer to solving paradoxes. The structure/agency paradox is no different.

    Skip forward a bit, and the reason economics is largely a failed, although popular, social science is because it is based on a macro level by the assumption that if you can predict the choices and behavior of one individual, that you can do the same for many individuals at once. This is wrong on many levels, but the one relevant one here is that it assumes that agency is unidirectional. That a collective is the sum of its parts, and that those parts have essential natures. They are self interested and those interests are rational.

    But, just as no physical object has an essential nature, other than the one we imagine, neither to people. We get pissy, because we come to the question with an answer. In consulting they call this the “Wicked Problem,” when a company gives you the answer, and they want you to find the problem.

    We assume a self with agency, and a structure that is the collective of individual agencies, and a force acting upon those agencies. The closest popular anthropology has come to realizing this is assuming that we are like corks floating in a river, or like clay that is continually being molded. There is no solid cork in the river, there is only the river. I know that’s rather Zen, but again it’s only paradoxical, because reality if bumping up against belief and producing dissonance.

    But, there are an infinite number of variables comprising a person, each of which are products and producers of an infinite number of variables, all the way up and all the way down. None of these variables is essential, i.e., none of them exist independently in some magic state. Society and culture are no different than the individual and the individual no different than society, in any essential, ultimate way. They are simply at different scales.

    Personal agency is an assumption based on the idea that individuals have some essential, core, not changing over time, essence, i.e., a self. When you assume an essential self, rather than understanding that all evidence tells us that an essentialized self is a cognitive illusion, then you come to a paradox and start asking about the how structure and agency interact to affect each other. When you align belief with observation, then the paradox disappears and you can go about your day and realize that studying relative questions and getting relative answers, that are irrelevant to any ultimate reality is ok. You can take comfort in knowing that you will never answer the question about what is actually going on in an ultimate sense, and that no body ever will, and that’s ok.

    Again:

    Anthropologist: Are you saying that a subjective self is produced by neither agency nor structure?

    Philosopher: No, I’m asking what you mean by “self?”

    Did we ever bother to ask ourselves what we mean when we ask how the agency of self affects and is effected by structure? That is the original question of “what is it we mean by self?” Of, have we made the mistake satirized in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, and asked for the answer to something that we never had a question for?

    Then we can get to answering relative questions that are relevant to people’s lives, or add to the body of theoretical knowledge, and still sleep at night. The other kick in the ass here is finding out that a 2nd century Indian philosopher names Nagarjuna figured all this out a long time ago, and put it all in a book that you can buy on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Wisdom-Middle-Way/dp/0195093364/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270569747&sr=8-1

  31. Some interesting features of the Facebook page for “Hard problems in social science”:

    (1) feedback is only solicited for individual disciplines, not for transdisciplinary or nondisciplinary perspectives.

    (2) no comments are accepted outside of the discipline-specific discussion sections.

    (3) archaeology is not included as a discipline for which feedback is solicited.

  32. I posted my position on the hard problems at my blog.
    In short, no I don’t think we need a set of hard problems – I don’t think it will add anything to the discipline and may do more harm than good.
    Good post, thanks for sharing!
    Jeremy

  33. To Jeremy-

    (on your comment, and on your blog post): Well, it seems that leading scholars in many social science disciplines think that there are some important, “hard problems” out there, and that it is worth while to identify these and discuss them. So if anthropologists were to say, “we don’t think this is a useful enterprise, it will harm our discipline” – then what are the implications for anthropology within the larger community of social science scholarship? Wouldn’t this contribute to the intellectual and professional isolation of anthropology? Is that what you want?

    And as for your blog remarks that “We [cultural anthropologists] are on the verge of becoming even more relevant,” haven’t people been saying that since Margaret Mead’s time?

  34. Michael – on your comments:
    “1) feedback is only solicited for individual disciplines, not for transdisciplinary or nondisciplinary perspectives.

    (2) no comments are accepted outside of the discipline-specific discussion sections.

    (3) archaeology is not included as a discipline for which feedback is solicited.”

    On the facebook page anyone can start a new discussion topic or area to list hard problems, the ones listed are just the starting gate, if you think other specific areas need to be added please add them, e.g. archeology.

    Any fan of the FB page can just click “Start New topic” tab under discussion. Also, you can post relevant links/comments on the wall and it appears under the fan section of the wall.

  35. Michael, anthropology is a four field enterprise, so our focus is broader than any other discipline. While we all specialize, many of us are trained in the basics of all 4 fields, and are able to draw from them. I’d like to reverse the question and ask anyone what these universally accepted questions that other disciplines have, such as sociology or psychology. Surely, their sub-fields have consistently patterned themes, but then so do our sub-fields.

    Medical anthropology has a pretty consistent set of questions, as does org. anth., enviro. anth., bio anth., or any of the specific regions of archaeology.

    It seems like this is all a matter of scale and semantics. Our discipline is a very big tent discipline, but there are trees in that forest.

    ” “We [cultural anthropologists] are on the verge of becoming even more relevant,” haven’t people been saying that since Margaret Mead’s time?”

    Yes, and it was big during her time. Then the AAA said that no one could do work outside the academy for 30 years, and researchers got comfortable in the ivory towers of academia with the university expansions after WWII. We have slowly been coming back in the last 2 decades, and things are picking up again. Historical context matters.

  36. I agree completely with Rick. Anthropology has always been extremely self-critical with a ton of theories on thousands of hard questions.
    Personally I don’t think there is any need to rehash all of that when we are already supposed to have learned the history of anthropology and the evolution of theory and methods. The fact of the matter is that there are alot of different answers to those “hard problems.” Whether one answer is right or wrong is up to personal opinion based upon which answer you believe has the strongest data or insights into the problem. But even then disagreements will arise due to personal biases such as religious affiliation (or lack of), political affiliation, cultural background, socio-economic class, ethnicity, school of thought in anthropology, etc… etc…

    I also think that the discipline is far too self-limiting in its attempt to “define” itself. I actually LOVE the fact that anthropology covers such a massive range of expertise. There is more then enough room for the four-fields approach as well as more specialized approaches that some anthropology departments take. In short, I love the freedom we have to pursue research in the manner in which we believe is most effective. The only limitations to such freedoms are the institutions that we conduct research under or for.

    So honestly I think that the whole “hard problems” listing would degrade to factions within anthropology only becoming more bitter towards each other trying to prove who is superior in their knowledge. In other words, it could easily end up in a childish intellectual pissing contest.

    In applied research such “hard problems”, while interesting as an academic exercise in self-critical reflection, don’t really have much bearing as the only thing that matters ultimately is what works or doesn’t work in the real world. That in itself, may change as a population and its demographics, politics and culture changes. So its all fluid which is why I’ve always been EXTREMELY against rigid theoretical frameworks that a researcher feels compelled to stuff data into. That is no way to conduct good anthropological research. That is why I am a firm believer in a modified variation of the Glaserian school of Grounded Theory. But that’s just me. Every school of anthropology has different and useful ways of doing research (just some better then others for specific areas of research).

  37. Michael –
    Maybe I don’t have a problem with the discussion of hard problems – heck, I’m participating in it! As long as we don’t get bogged down in it. I am opposed to defining them, though, for the reasons I mentioned. But I think a healthy discussion could generate new lines of flight, new ideas, and broaden the scope of the discipline. To the extent that it does, I’m all for discussion!

    I don’t think it would isolate us from other disciplines to not come up with a set of hard problems. Rather, it would only to the degree that we allow it to. It’s possible, on the contrary, that having a set of hard problems defined for anthropology – and presumably another set for sociology, another for economics, another for history, etc. – might isolate us more; get us more defined along narrow disciplinary lines. Of course, that doesn’t have to be the case either, but it’s a potentiality that should be considered. Furthermore, there are probably better ways of interacting with different disciplines than a set of mutual or overlapping hard problems.

    To your last question on the relevance of anthropology. I don’t know, my experience has always been hearing anthropologists complain that nobody seems to care about what we do. I think it’s a matter of perception, though, not of fact. We are relevant – we always have been – but we are only beginning to (re)realize it. Mead and others of her generation and before took it for granted. The last couple of decades brought it into doubt, and now we’re starting to recognize our relevance (whether we’re talking applied or academic anthropology – a distinction whose value has passed, I think) once again.

    Thanks for your comment!
    Jeremy

  38. Rick, Chris, Jeremy – At the risk of self-indulgence, I must admit my ambivalence about many issues like this, which derives from current doubts about my own disciplinary identity. Sometimes I think I’m an anthropologist of the 4-fields variety, in solidarity with lots of you out there. At other times, I think archaeology is a comparative historical social science of its own whose development is held back intellectually by clinging to the historical accident of 4-field anthropology. Still other times I get cranky because many cultural anthropologists seem to think that their subdiscipline is the “real” anthropology, and that the other fields are minor hangers-on. And then sometimes I feel privileged to be related in some minor way to cultural anthropology, which is a pretty cool field. I sure wish archaeology had a blog like SM.

    So when I try to think about the “hard problems” in anthropology, or in archaeology, or in the social sciences more broadly, my views are influenced by which of these disciplinary hats I happen to be wearing at the time. But for all my hats, I do think it is a useful intellectual enterprise to think about the big issues.

  39. Michael, thanks for the clarity and honesty. It is really interesting to see issues between the 4-fields like that. Personally, I don’t think that archaeology exists in a vacuum, although I’m not an archaeologist. What I mean is that the ideas and theories of archaeology go back to the same people and times that the 4 fields are derived. From my limited understanding it looks like arch. has been subject to many of the issues surrounding the wider discipline. In the 1960-1970’s when a strong cybernetic, materialist, and ecological trend was heavy in cultural studies, in arch. you had things like Rational Choice theory, and the like. I’ve seen many papers from archaeologists who use cultural theories to explain what they find at digs. In fact part of my education came from a Mayanist that used present day ethnography from living Mayans to understand what she found at one site.

    To reverse that I wish I had the opportunity to spend a summer at a dig site. I paid for my own education so I spent my summers working. I remember one story about a cultural anth. on one of the first HTS teams, before they seemed to go to shit, and he told a story about how his 4-field training helped him by giving him the idea of turning part of the Baghdad trash dump into a dig site to compare actual consumption from the various neighborhoods in the city. It was an impromptu thing he said that came to him when he drove by the dump.
    I use GIS a lot in my work, and I wish I had more archaeological experience, because my limited arch. education made me very sensitive to spatial variations and material culture which I find very important in urban neighborhoods.
    I also think that too many cultural anths. forget about the biology of our species. I was talking with someone writing a book a couple of days ago on the gender relations in Saudi Arabia, and I thought it was interesting that there was zero reference to biology. I mean there are real biological differences in our sex, and I don’t think you can separate the biology from the cultural expression and ecology. Perhaps, it’s because I had some great physical anth. profs. that sensitized me to the issue. Maybe that’s what the 4-fields are about. They sensitize us to holism.

    That being said, I wouldn’t mind trading off interesting blogs and interesting field work with living people, to be guaranteed funding to do my job and conduct open ended ethnographies all over the US. Seriously, every time an area got developed they’d call me in to do ethnography! I think I’d make that trade.

  40. Well, IF anthropologists were inclined to think in terms of big projects with real social benefits, the Obama White House is soliciting input and suggestions for “grand challenges” in science. The description seems to include social science. The AAAS has a website on this:

    http://promo.aaas.org/expertlabs/

    That site has links to White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with more information:

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/grand-challenges-request-information

    The “Request for Information” is active till April 15, 2010.

  41. Pascal Boyer has online an unpublished 2006 paper relevant to this thread: “Ten Problems In Search Of A Research Program: Towards Integrated Naturalistic Explanations of Human Culture” at http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/PBoyerHomeSite/articles/TenProblems3.1.pdf

    Here is the abstract: “This is a concise statement of ten different problems for which a behavioural science should (and may soon be able to) provide coherent, empirically grounded explanations. These problems were chosen for their social importance as well as their theoretical interest, as demonstrations of the need to integrate psychological, economic and evolutionary factors in explanatory models. For each question, I mention pointers to incipient or possible research programmes. The questions are the following: What are the natural limits to family arrangements? Do we have an intuitive understanding of large societies? Why are despised social categories essentialised? Why gender differences in politics? What logic drives ethnic vio-lence? How are moral concepts acquired? What drives people’s economic intui-tions? Are there cultural differences in low-level cognition? What explains individ-ual religious attitudes? Why religious fundamentalism and extremism? The general aim is to propose a new approach to issues of human culture, not through an ab-stract discussion of paradigms and traditions, but through specific examples of possible empirical research.”

  42. Thanks, Dan. Allow me to mention, in passing, that Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge UP 1975) and On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge UP 1985) remain, for me, important sources of inspiration.

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