Suggested questions for the list already are beginning to be too broad and too philosophical in nature. “why do people seem to act contrary to their own class interests?” While there are many factors that play into the answer to this question, there may not BE a correct or incorrect one – or group. On Harvard’s list for problems in social science, one of the top categories remained “World Peace.” Problems within the world peace category are liable to be just as broad as the category it lies in.

If a list is compiled, it needs to contain very specific questions that can only be answered by a definite and verifiable solution. One way to do this would be for anthropologists to utilize other fields such as Chemistry, Astronomy, Theology, and Mathematics to tackle the problems within anthropology.

One question that I continue to flop around with in my head, and very well might use for a paper soon, is the tragedy of contaminated artifacts and archaeological sites. This can be narrowed down even further. Much of the contamination of a site or artifact occurs on site during a dig by volunteers. Archaeology, bless its heart, has become a field that is open to the public for varying amounts of time – a day, or a week- but many of these volunteers have had no training or experience whatsoever. This is the paradox; how can site managers and archaeologists decrease site and artifact contamination by giving volunteers basic training, while still keeping the open, youthful, vibrant spirit of archaeology alive in the public’s mind and heart? On one hand, archaeologists need to do everything they can to preserve artifacts and the sites they are found in; on the other hand, the open spirit of archaeology has allowed common folk to participate in their national, or local, heritage.

I believe that finding the answer to this specific question within anthropology will benefit generations to come. Fewer artifacts will be destroyed, and therefore those in analysis will be able to compound and interpret a greater amount of data and reveal more secrets from our past. This goal can only be accomplished, however, through working with organization, training techniques and methods, the sciences, and inter-anthropological cooperation.

It saddens me to see such broad topics on the current Harvard list. Let’s think deeper; scholar & shovel bum alike.

Very cool, thanx for that link. I only read the abstract, but will bookmark that. Just from the abstract, I think they are saying what I was trying to say, but it much more accurate terminology. Basically, that the “measurement problem” in science is a problem of a priori assumptions of observer-observed forced upon the data, rather than letting, I guess, reality speak for itself.

The study of humans and the study of matter run into the same issue, just in different ways. We cannot separate ourselves from the physical universe and study it, any more than we can separate ourselves from being human in the study of humans. These are many of the issues raised by post-modernism, but without falling into nihilism. I think that is the hardest thing to understand about this. Due to the binary nature of human thought, if something isn’t one way, then it must automatically be the other. If there isn’t an essentialized observer-observed relationship, then there is nothing. This is really a false choice and does not represent lived experience.

In Japan when you go to a Zen temple you have to walk through a gate. The gate is made up of two wooden, square pillars that have two demons facing you as you walk through, one on each side of you. You have to pass these demons to get into the temple. These are usually translated as, “Paradox,” and, “Confusion.” You have to deal with and walk past these metaphors before enlightenment can be realized.

Paradox and confusion in this context represent the cognized reality that we impose upon experienced reality. The metaphorical message of those wood statues is that there is no such thing as a real paradox in this case, because reality is what it is, and paradox can only arise when we impose beliefs and views of what reality should be, rather than just accepting what it is.

“How does one study emergent properties in a dynamic social situation, and what are the limitations of the scientific method in doing so?”

I think one of the hard problems that arises from this is the issue of prediction and explanation.

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002

Also, I think, in the Collingwoods “The idea of nature.” There are limits to approaching the world in terms of attempting to fix entities and determine necessary predictable attributes for them.

I think one of the hardest questions in Anthropology is

“How do the up-close and detailed methods of Anthropology relate to and modify the findings or coarser methodologies that give findings at a broader scale?”

Personally I am interested in the interface between ethnography, political economy and the environment. But I think the issues raised by this question actually define a sort of intellectual niche for Anthropologists, and also let you see how an awful lot of other disciplines do informal ethnography in order to make there work relevant. Freakonomics is basically more about ethnography than economics for instance.

I think that this hard question relates to the limitations of the scientific methods above, so another way of seeing the hard question is:

“How does one study emergent properties in a dynamic social situation, and what are the limitations of the scientific method in doing so?”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

(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.

(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?