While anthropologists often do get “theory fatigue” and often use particular theories in a very peculiar manner, I believe what is more important is that one operationalizes their understanding of theory in a clear and understandable manner. If they are wrong in their definition, then at least it can be clearly seen where and why they are wrong. Furthermore the anthropologist, even if wrong on their usage of theory, may have inadvertently committed the sin of theory development which, in and of itself, is very useful. I come from an applied cultural anthropological approach so for me theory development is not the main goal. It is primarily a tool and as such is discarded if it does not prove useful in understanding a particular culture.

I also (and this is what got me in hot water in graduate school) reject the notion that you can not use different contradictory theories within one research project. In my own research I came upon this idea not from any academic source, but rather from the science fiction author, Frank Herbert, author of the “Dune” series of novels. He calls this “Mentat philosophy” named after the ancient Roman chariot riders who would stand on top of two horses, one foot on each, but going to the same path.

What this philosophy describes is the process of removing one’s self from a rigid theoretical framework and instead shift between several in order to analyze an issue from multiple points of view, including those radically opposed to one’s core beliefs (critical in peace and conflict studies for example).
I believe firmly that this philosophy answers many of these issues that social scientists have struggled with, yet I have never read any form of social theory or scientific philosophy that clarified such ideas as succinctly as Frank Herbert has done.

It’s primary weakness however is that it is geared primarily towards applied anthropology. The process of theory building, testing, and development requires one to focus on a particular theory and as such, Herbert’s ideas would be of little interest to those who do such research. However, for those who are struggling with figuring out which theoretical framework to work with in applied work, Herbert’s ideas may be incredibly illuminating and inspiring.
To demonstrate what I am speaking of, I’d recommend for anyone interested to read some of Herbert’s non-fiction essays that are compiled in a book called, “The Maker of Dune- Insights of a Master of Science Fiction” edited by Tim O’Reilly. It’s a difficult book to find, but well worth it short of reading the entire Dune series of novels.
I would however recommend the entire series of Dune novels to any anthropologist as they fully develop his non-fiction ideas on such areas as ecology, the Messiah complex, culture, history, gate-keepers, modes of government, the nature and function of tyranny, the function of revolution, economics, peace & conflict, religion, psychology, sociology, and ultimately tying all of those issues together seamlessly. That is something which I always thought was profoundly anthropological and is what inspired me to become an anthropologist.

At any rate, here is an example of one of his best non-fiction essays- “Listening to the Left Hand” so that you may judge for yourself his usefulness in addressing the issues put forth in this topic:

http://www.aeriagloris.com/Resources/FrankHerbertEssay/ListeningToTheLeftHand.htm

There are several chapters to this essay, so hit the bottom arrow button to go to the next chapter.

I’d like to hear some opinions of whether or not they think this essay addresses some of the issues pointed out in this topic and in anthropology in general.

My blog readers will be interested in your post so added a trackback to it on CatholicTide…

No, most of it was from the 1980’s to 2009 and one from 2010. I basically taught myself SNA for this project, so a formal course would really help. I’ve been looking for an online course, but it seems only a handful of people even teach it.
I think a difference is the point of emphasis and context. A difference between a low-income, inner city community in the US versus a community in Japan is probably more of an effect of fear and ethnicity in the former and a rural/urban dichotomy in the latter. It is absolutely true that who you know affects who you know, but it also true that regardless of who you know, probabilistically who you know won’t be at random distances from where you live and work. I created a flowchart outlining the various social categories that a person can fall into in the area, which is intended to be used to predict who they should know, which is something I think you’re talking about. I’ll email it to you, so you can look it over for weaknesses.

One of the things I had to convey to my client was that the common demographic labels they use (Black, Hispanic) are not parsimonious with actual groups. Although, if someone was black about 98-100% of the people in their personal networks was also black.

In the North Pacific Ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.

Theorizing in an era of abundant, easily accessible information may become something quite different from theorizing in a past when information was scarce and hard to lay hands on and finding and using every possible scrap was highly valued.

Publishing Archaeology

I’m not sure whether I should feel liberated by the work of Hedstrom and other sociologists, or whether I should feel depressed that I can’t get much help from cultural anthropology.

No need for you to feel depressed. It is hard to see what interpretive/phenomenological approaches would contribute directly to prehistoric archeologists, who don’t get to talk to the people whose lives they reconstruct or squeeze information from available documents. Seems to me that the tools, such as they are, simply aren’t appropriate for the problems you deal with.

The problem is on the cultural anthros side, where failure to attend to material circumstance, except in the grossest political terms, leaves them with nothing much to say to policy wonks and other folk who say, “Show me the numbers.” Add in obsession with meta-theoretical issues which, let’s be honest about this, have never attracted the interest of more than a tiny minority of a certain class of intellectual geeks (OK, I’m one of them), and you have a ready answer to, “Why won’t anybody listen to us?”

Ouch. Would you like some compliment with that backhand?

bq. As an archaeologist looking for help with “middle-range theory” (again, NOT how archaeologists Binford or Trigger use that term), also called “empirical theory” in some quarters

Not my question, actually. I asked about your middle-range theory vis-à-vis Trigger’s middle-ranging theory (see ch. 9 of his _A history of archaeological thought_). That the 2006 festschrift is titled _The archaeology of Bruce Trigger: theoretical empiricism_ suggests that his usage bears some resemblance to your own.

For example, in this presentation I am considering the implications of teams (in your case it could be gangs or other organizations) for the scale of networks in the k>1 (immediate neighbors) layer. The inspiration for this concern is Ego-centered networks and the ripple effect
— or —Why all your friends are weird, M. E. J. Newman, November 5, 2001, which you can find online. Newman, a physicist who works at the Santa Fe Institute, is concerned about sampling issues in what I would call lumpy networks. He writes,

“One’s immediate neighbors in the acquaintance network, are far from being a random sample of the population, and that this biases the numbers of neighbors two and more steps away.”

Since in my data, every individual is a member of a project team, every team is, by definition a clique (everyone directly connected with everyone else) and teams may be part of components (subnetworks in which everyone is connected by at least one path to everyone else) that range in size from one team to over 2000 individuals (networks above a certain size characteristically contain one giant component and a smattering of small ones), the teams to which an individual belongs dramatically effect his or her connectivity with the rest of the total population.

Taking this sort of thing into account might explain the discrepancies you have discovered, since most of the generalizations you cite appear to be grounded in early and relatively unsophisticated models of network structures.

Anyway, if you think this sort of observation might be helpful, do get in touch.

“The point of all these anecdotes is a recommendation that we avoid looking for the Theory with a capital T that will be our key to understanding everything and, instead, see theories as tools that direct our attention to some particular aspects of whatever we happen to be studying. Take the toolkit metaphor seriously.”

John – This seems to be the point of the middle-range theorizing in sociology (see the references I posted earlier). As an archaeologist looking for help with “middle-range theory” (again, NOT how archaeologists Binford or Trigger use that term), also called “empirical theory” in some quarters, I’m not quite sure why I find useful models and analogies in sociology but not in cultural anthropology. Maybe it is the Theory with a capital T problem. As an anthropological archaeologist who has gone for most of my career thinking that sociology was worthless (for my interests, that is), I’m not sure whether I should feel liberated by the work of Hedstrom and other sociologists, or whether I should feel depressed that I can’t get much help from cultural anthropology.

Yup, I sensed that. I should have asked for clarification before writing anything. You are right that what we do is far more fluid and exploratory than say what a physicist does in a lab. I do think there is also a danger of ethnographers just bumbling around in the field and waiting for inspiration, rather than having solid theoretical reasons for doing what they are doing, though.

I was thinking about my last project (please god get me a continuation grant!), in which I gathered ego networks as just one method of a larger strategy of triangulation for a rapid area assessment of information flows in an urban area. I spent a few months before hand reading up on social network theory, so I knew what to expect from dozens of empiric studies that tell us that there are patterns to social networks that are universal and constant. Here are a few of about 12 I put in my report:

• The number of a person’s significant daily influencers decreases exponentially per unit of measure with the square of that measure.
• The more people that are in a person’s social network, the fewer of those people by percentage will be strong ties, the inverse in also true.
• The longer a person is in a network the more accurately they will list the patterns of people and their relationships, whereas people new to a network give more accurate details of who was at any single event.
• The more alters listed, generally the more accurate the information they give about the network.
• A person is usually cognitively biased to believe they are at the centers of a social network, and that alters in their network have similar ties to each other.

During the interpretation phase I kept double checking my numbers, because I was getting a pattern that contradicted a few of these laws -the strongest ones. In a way I wasn’t expecting to see what the data was telling me, but I was able to explain it pretty quickly, because of work that people like Sally Merry had done working in dangerous urban communities. She didn’t do formal SNA in her communities, but what she described is exactly what I was seeing. I went back through the literature and I realized that none of the studies I read did formal SNA in low-income, urban, high-crime areas. It seems that the effects of violence and especially the memory and fear of violence affects social networks in a predictable ways, but in ways that aren’t predicted in the SNA literature. So, in a way my research was very exploratory, but it was also clearly within 50 years of consistent and necessary research. Now, what I’m supposed to do is write it up for a journal so that others can try to replicate the study and see if I’m wrong, or if I’ve found something new.

Nothing is more detrimental to effective ethnographic research than what E.E. Evans-Pritchard called “the dead hand of competence. ” Unless, that is, we are talking about my bête-noire, the cookie-cutter application of theory, which evades the scientist’s responsibility to look for counterexamples.

From the way you describe what you do, I cannot imagine that you fall into either of these traps, unless (I think of my own experience in advertising) it is one of those projects where the client is impossible and the hack’s temptation to crank out something passable and get on to something more interesting is irresistible.

I read you as saying that theory guides what data you gather and what you do with that data, and not the methodologies through which data is gathered. “theory doesn’t change the way data is gathered” I don’t know what you mean by “what tests are run” but I assumed it meant something about how you interpret data.”

I see. I was assuming that what data you gather is automatically dependent on how you decide to gather that data. However, if you decide to do an semi-structured interview to gather qualitative data, versus a Likert scale survey to gather data that can be regressed, or both, will be dependent upon a lot of things. Conducting something like a survey shouldn’t be any different from one researcher to another though.
By “tests run” I was talking about tests of the data. The questions and situation will tell you whether to run an ANOVA or a regression, factor analysis, discourse analysis, etc…