Why anthropology is ‘true’ even if it is not ‘science’

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed documented the latest ‘issue’ in anthropology making its way around the Internet: anger amongst ‘scientific’ anthropologists that the executive board of the American Anthropological Association has rewritten the mission statement of the association and removed language which describes anthropology as a science. Now, I have no intention to defend the executive board of the AAA, and I have no objection to labeling myself a social scientist. However, I am concerned that objections to the new statement 1) do a bad job of understanding what ‘science’ is and 2) fail to understand that the knowledge anthropology produces can still be ‘true’ even if it is not ‘scientific’.

The narrative at work seems basically to be this: for decades real, objective, scientific anthropology has been under assault from interpretivists like Clifford Geertz who do not believe in truth. With the new language in the AAA mission statement, anthropologists have given up on truth altogether.

I wish that this were a parody or simplification of the argument, but it is not — this is honestly as it good as it gets from the critics of the AAA: Clifford Geertz is the thin edge of  a wedge inserted into the social sciences by Creationism, Sarah Palin, etc. etc.

The fact that the model used by ‘scientific’ anthropologists has as much complexity as an average episode of WWE Smackdown — with a distinction between the evil ‘fluff-head’ cultural anthropologists and the good ‘scientific’ cultural anthropologists — should be the first sign that something fishy is going on. Is it true, as they claim, that anthropology will lose its public credibility, commitment to accuracy, and claim to speak the truth if the knowledge that we produce is not ‘scientific’? Obviously: No. To see why, consider whether the following questions could be accurately and knowledgeably answered:

  1. Did the Battle of Hastings occur on 14 October 1066 or 14 November 1066?

  2. Was the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson a major influence on Thomas Jefferson when he drafted the Declaration of Independence?

  3. How can we best punctuate the classical Chinese on this stele to recover its meaning?

  4. What languages are Ugaritic related to?

Are these unanswerable questions? Is the discipline of history impossible, or riddled with postmodernists? One astute blogger noted that by removing the claim to science from the mission statement anthropology opened the door to recognizing the truth claims of indigenous forms of knowledge. This is true, but we don’t have to go that far afield to recognize forms of knowledge that are rehabilitated when anthropology jettisons its label as ‘science’: history, epigraphy, historical linguistics, and the humanities in general. The opposite of ‘science’ is not ‘nihilitic postmodernism’ it’s ‘an enormously huge range of forms of scholarship, many of which are completely and totally committed to accuracy and impartiality in the knowledge claims they make, thank you very much’.

Now, someone might argue that historical work that is committed to accuracy, submits its claims to evidence and scholarly scrutiny and so forth is not actually a form of the humanities, but is itself a kind of ‘science’. In fact one person has made such an argument: Franz Boas.

Throughout his career — for instance in his classic short piece ‘The Study of Geography’ — Boas made a distinction between not between the ‘natural sciences’ and the ‘interpretive sciences’ but rather between generalizing sciences (which study things that happen over and over again, like gravity) and the ‘historical sciences’ (which study things which happen just once in history, like the Battle of Hastings). Boas was not alone in this — he was drawing on a wider strain of epistemological work that he got from Germany exemplified in the work of authors like Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Thus for Boas something could be ‘scientific’ even if it did not ape the manners of a chemist in his lab.

On the one hand, then, we need to recognize that knowledge is still knowledge even if it is not ‘scientific’. I think it important that anthropology stand up to people who push narrow and impoverished definitions of understanding and insist that what we do counts, matters, and is important even if it does not look like the kind of knowledge production they are used to

On the other hand, I think it is also important that anthropologists fight to maintain their right to speak within the scientific community to define what science is. The version proffered in the blog posts I’ve read is incredibly unnuanced, unreflexive, and simpleminded. We cannot let voices like this own the definition of scientific work.

At times I feel like the real distinction here is between thoughtful people who are aware of the complexities of knowledge production, and those who are for psychological reasons strongly committed to identifying themselves as scientists and everyone else as blasphemers. This approach is, of course, not very scientific and verges on being the close-minded inversion of the fundamentalist Christianity that thinkers of this ilk so love to oppose.

I think it would not be hard to write a history of how this brand of ‘scientific’ anthropology came to be so meaningful to its practitioners: the loss of epistemological subtlety in anthropology in the post-war period as guileless enthusiasm for ‘science’ overwhelmed the most humanistic training of the earlier Boasians, the important institutional position of know-nothings like Marvin Harris who taught a generation to equate close-mindedness with rigor, the inability (or lack of desire) to move beyond rehashing 80s debates about postmodernism, narrow technical training that blinds one to the wider horizons that a university education is supposed to offer.

I don’t want to descend in ad hominem about/explanations of the views of the people I disagree with here. My point is simply that positions which argue anthropology must be science or it is nothing have not just forgotten a vast amount about the philosophy of science and the other departments they share their universities with, they have forgotten a tremendous amount of the history of our discipline as well. There are lots of reasons to be critical of AAA leadership, but no one is well-served by this shallow, knee-jerk reactionism.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

102 thoughts on “Why anthropology is ‘true’ even if it is not ‘science’

  1. Yes, some blog posts do fit the description you give, and they are wrong. But should we give up discussing the AAA decision just because someone on the internet gets their philosophy of science wrong?

    The lack of regard for truth is not just a bogeyman conjured by “shallow, knee-jerk reactionaries”. In some anthropology departments, the word “truth” gets exactly the same sneer as the word “science”.

    Of course, this is just a shallow quarrel of words, labels and appearances. But words, labels and appearances are what proclamations of the AAA are about: they are supposed to define the identity of a discipline for a larger public. This new definition clearly turns its back on many scientific anthropologists, and, arguably disregards their claims to truthfulness.

    Hard-scientific truth is certainly not the only kind of truth. But the AAA seems to see it as a kind of truth that mainstream anthropology no longer needs. And that does raise questions concerning its commitment to truth in general.

  2. I am not an anthropologist. I followed a link here. Please excuse me in advance for the intrusion.

    My concern is that within the space of a blog post, you can raise many questions without suggesting answers.

    It is all well and good to open the door to techniques beyond the scientific method, but how wide does the door swing open? This kind of thing scares me (from another blog I followed links to):

    > Indigenous knowledge is only recently being understood and accepted by those in the West (and in anthropology) as the equally complex (and equally valid) indigenous counterpart to Western science.

    It’s a very short step from there to “Creationist’s understanding of the history of the planet is equally valid to that of ‘science’.”

    We can move beyond the rehashing of these debates when Realism is truly safe from competition with Post Modernism. If this debate is still going on (which shocks me) then I think that the AAA should be clear about its position on the Realist side of the debate.

  3. The main problem is that there is a certain contingent of cultural anthropologists who use the word “science” to mean a certain type of anthropology which “tests hypothesises.” This contingent includes both anthropologists who see anthropology as “scientific” (see for example the guidelines for NSF funding) and critics who argue that anthropology can never be “scientific.” I personally think we can have a definition of social science which is broad enough to encompass a variety of different approaches in cultural anthropology instead of the problematic narrow debate about hypothesis testing. Hypothesis testing is not the be all and end all of science (even in the hard sciences).

  4. > 4. What languages are Ugaritic related to?

    Is this very different than the biological question: “What species are marmots related to?”

    Or astrophysics questions about the origin of the solar system?

    If one is not science, then probably none are. If one is, then probably all are.

  5. Here is where I am stuck on this debate. I was never under the impression that the AAA’s long range plan was to be the same long range plan as the scholars that make up the discipline of Anthropology. Debates of “science” in anthropology are scholarly debates about the methods and research that we do and belong in the research and the writing that we do. I feel that it is the place of the AAA, not to make sweeping decisions on what is and is not Anthropology, but to facilitate and aid anthropologists to accomplish things that would be difficult for an individual to do alone, including mass producing anthropology journals and organizing meetings attended by 6,000 people. Thus the change in the language signaled to me that the AAA was taking a firmer stance in the direction of facilitating and aiding anthropological research rather than declaring the absence of science from the discipline.

    One area that we as a discipline struggle in is enhancing the public understanding of anthropology. While bloggers and others have taken significant steps toward public anthropology, there is a great distance yet to go. I believe that the AAA could help fill this niche (even if some members are skeptical or jaded about this move). The structure of academia (publish or perish) places great emphasis on enhancing our own understanding of human kind but fails to encourage public understanding. Could this change in the mission statement not open up a host of new opportunities for public anthropology through the structure of our discipline’s largest collective in North America?

    That’s my two cents.

  6. Thanks for a great post, Rex, it really puts a lot of this into perspective. Curious to see what anyone makes about removing “and its use to solve human problems” while at the same time adding references to public and medical anthropology.

  7. > 4. What languages are Ugaritic related to?

    Is this very different than the biological question: “What species are marmots related to?”

    They may be slightly different questions. For one thing, it depends on how one defines ‘species’ and there is a need for recognition that languages are generally able to cross-pollinate (as it were) much more freely than fauna. But I would not say that they are very different questions. Biologists did borrow the term ‘genetic’ from philologists, after all.

  8. Scientistic blockheads vs. po-mo fluff-heads has been a long and often bitter conflict since I first discovered the discipline as an undergraduate in 1988. After a futile search of aaanet.org for any kind of mission statement, google turned up the blog post below that reproduces the original text marked up to reflect the changes. That had a link to this blog where Alex makes some good points. What I find most interesting, however, is not the challenge to scientific epistemologies, which is highlighted in the pieces at Inside HigherEd and the Chronicle and many blogs, but the opposition between science and political action.

    I am reminded of the well-known battles at the dawn of the founding of the AAA, which in practical terms was a merger of the NYC-based American Ethnological Society, which was pretty much run by Boasians and full of professional anthropologists and the Washington Anthropological Association, which was dominated by federal government employees, very few of whom had any kind of professional training in anthropology (or arch/geography/etc.). The AES was much like the ASA is now–a professional organisation of highly trained elites who earned that status through fieldwork and peer recognition as a professional anthropologist. The WAA was a gentlemen’s club of antiquarians and federal bureaucrats interested in Indians (not terribly unlike the RAI). Boas lost the battle to close membership to the new AAA to amateurs and reserve it for professionals. Biographers like Cole and Darnell argue that he won the war because the AAA eventually came to be a professional organisation dominated by academics and other anthropologists with at least some formal training. Perhaps that war never ended? I see the ghosts of Powell and McGee enduring as the advancement of ‘anthropology of a science’, which I read as the professional consolidation and buttressing of the discipline, is replaced with the goal of improving the ‘public understanding of humankind’. Note the impact value, policy relevance of the latter.

    I also noted the deletion of the word ‘American’, which makes me wonder if the AAA really believes that it can serve the interests of all anthropologists all over the world? It is invading Canada next year. Perhaps the long-term goal is to make EASA irrelevant? Interesting that there is nary a comment on that change by US-based commentators.

    I would like to ask now how many anthropologists and non-anthropologists had read (or ever dreamed of wanting to read) the AAA’s long-term mission statement before those pseudo scientists (as my friends with biology Ph.D.s would put it) in the SAS sent out their pissy email?

  9. I like the post, Rex, and some really interesting comments, too.

    “We can move beyond the rehashing of these debates when Realism is truly safe from competition with Post Modernism. If this debate is still going on (which shocks me) then I think that the AAA should be clear about its position on the Realist side of the debate. ”

    It’s a bit odd to include in a call for intellectual integrity a demand that, as a precondition, there be no debate about the nature and production of knowledge. Nonetheless, you are unlikely to get your wish, since I’m pretty sure a majority of anthropologists do not define themselves as scientific realists — although they might not be post-modernists either. We’re sort of in a post-postmodernist phase where knowledge-production studies is just another speciality, IMO. 😉

  10. Yes, I think some of the concern expressed in the blogs I refer to read the changes to the long range plan as an attempt to Destroy Science when really they are just trying to update language — for instance by removing language designed to solve a political issue regarding the AES and including language which reflects its institutional structure: thus, for instance, including visual and medical anthropology in the statement.

    Additionally, some seem to think that removing the language of science from the plan means that the executive board believes that there is no place for science in the AAA. Wouldn’t a more charitable reading indicate that the executive board merely believes anthropology must not necessarily be scientific? I’m not sure how a making anthropology’s tent bigger implies kicking some people out of it.

  11. As a student of a related discipline (a “social science?”), I have watched the implosion of anthropology over the last few decades with great dismay. I’m a great admirer of anthropology, but have found the developments of recent years all very depressing.

    There is an interesting story here, one that would seem to cry out for explanation. I get it…to a point, but here goes: The traditional subjects of cultural anthropology have all now more or less passed into history, so one must find something else to do. But, wait, the economists, political scientists, sociologists, etc. already have all things “modern” and contemporary covered, and they cover it with “scientific” tools that the anthropologists can’t match. Thus the tilt toward the humanities/literary theory. But, wait, there is no funding there and, again, people in the already have that covered, and cover it with “humanistic” tools that the anthropologists can’t match. Ergo… How is it that so few in the field foresaw the trap that cultural anthropology has walked itself into?

  12. fixing the typos, sorry…

    As a student of a related discipline (a “social science?”), I have watched the implosion of anthropology over the last few decades with great dismay. I’m a great admirer of anthropology, but have found the developments of recent years all very depressing.

    There is an interesting story here, one that would seem to cry out for explanation. I get it…to a point, but here goes: The traditional subjects of cultural anthropology have all now more or less passed into history, so one must find something else to do. But, wait, the economists, political scientists, sociologists, etc. already have all things “modern” and contemporary covered, and they cover it with “scientific” tools that the anthropologists can’t match. Thus the tilt toward the humanities/literary theory. But, wait, there is no funding there and, again, people in the humanities already have that covered, and they cover it with “humanistic” tools that the anthropologists can’t match. Ergo… How is it that so few in the field foresaw the trap that cultural anthropology has walked itself into?

  13. Probably very impolitic to share this story, but whatever. Back in like ’04 my grad program had a visiting lecture from then-NSF cultural anthropology director Stewart Plattner. He was of course the big science defender, such that cultural anthro in the NSF directory had a special red asterisk next to it saying “Must be significantly scientific in approach” — unlike sociology, geography, economics, etc. Anyway, he gave a bland talk on how to write an NSF proposal, but during the Q-and-A a prof tried to stir things up:
    Prof: So Stew, I was hoping you could tell us what you think about where anthropology is heading these days.
    SP: I’m glad you asked. I think anthropology these days is going downhill fast. Back in the 70s we were refining our scientific methods and really getting somewhere; the other scientists were starting to take us seriously.
    Prof: That’s interesting, Stew; why do you suppose that happened?
    SP: I’d attribute that to applied anthropology, which has tried to turn our discipline into social work; and to the women’s movement, which is inherently anti-male and anti-science.
    Prof: [long pause] I’m surprised that no-one has any rebuttals to that…
    Fellow grad student, beside me, whispering: That’s because we all agree!
    And yes, that is verbatim. Plattner and my classmate among others went on to form that Society for Anthropological Sciences group which is mostly raising the fuss now. So I have a hard time taking it too seriously. Interestingly, a few weeks later we had a visit from Hugh Gusterson, who wrote a couple of great books about nuclear weapons scientists. I mentioned the story to him and asked what his research subjects thought of his methods, of anthropology as a science. He laughed: particle physicists don’t even think chemistry or biology are real sciences, so there’s no way any kind of anthropology would ever show up on their schema.

    I haven’t really thought of myself as a scientist in quite a while, and the Plattner episode just confirmed my sense of those anthros who tend to be most vocal about it. Interestingly, though, I would separate that factor completely from the issue of our 4-field heritage and the unwrapping of the sacred bundle and etc. Plattner himself, for example, applied his “scientific” anthropology to art and artists: local markets, prices, etc. Not a whisper of conceptual connection to evolution or material culture over time, even if he used the same kind of statistical regressions as an archaeologist might. A lot of the other “scientists” do natural resource related stuff, which is often useful, but only sometimes engages with the actual body of thought in anthro’s other subfields. The most satisfyingly four-field work that I know of, the only stuff that does anything really “holistic” nowadays comes from the other methodological extreme, the most humanistic of cultural anthros: Tim Ingold, Eduardo Kohn, Sarah Franklin, Emily Martin, Hugh Raffles, Anna Tsing, etc. The Society for Cultural Anthropology meetings I went to in Santa Fe this spring (quite a story, that) had not a “scientific” anthropologist in attendance, but the theme was Nature/Culture and papers everywhere dealt with evolution, bodies, illness and health, cultural ecologies, archaeological and even geological time, etc. Methodologically as far from scientific anthro as it gets, but in every other way much more four-field and I would argue of interest to other scientists than anything coming out of the Society for Anthropological Sciences. And that’s not to mention folks like Agustin Fuentes and Jonathan Marks, bioanths who are much more involved with critical deconstruction of “nature” and “culture” than in yet another social network analysis of North Carolina fishermen.

    The one thing I do think about this mission statement business is that it reflects the extent to which the AAA as an institution has become overwhelming dominated by cultural anthropologists, regardless of their methodological and topical preferences.With some exceptions, archaeologists and bioanths just don’t come to AAA meetings and haven’t for years. And I think that’s too bad, for the sake of exactly the kind of work I’m talking about. But the change of language is only the latest symptom of that overdetermined social fact, and taking that on by the roots is more than my poor brain is up for.

  14. As a Richard Rorty-an when it comes to philosophy of science, I pretty much agree with Andrew Galley’s comment. In fact I was about to post I feel pretty post-postmodern myself.

    I recently saw “Secrets of the Tribe” at the AMNH Margaret Mead festival. A woman was handing out a letter before the screening deriding the film as representing (you could see the sneer while reading it) postmodernism, and rejecting reality.

    The truly sad thing was that it was a terrible film, which seemed like it was made in the 1980s in terms of anthropology as a discipline. Marshall Sahlins already made the film and its making irrelevant almost a decade before its production.

    I continue to feel like some people just have a bone to pick.

    To me, post-modernism is reality-based. It’s based on a reality where we, as cultural anthropologists, are like agents running around in a massively complex computer network of millions of agents who are sharing, modifying and redistributing their own programming code on the fly, and we’re trying to write down what everyone’s programming is. There’s no way to do this in a manner consistent with the scientific method. We can’t stop the network, we can’t be outside it, we can’t ethically set up multi-generational isolated experiments. All we can do is keep working at our analyses and approaches.

    To what end? I suppose, to empower all participants in the system to better understand the system and their interactions with it. Does that mean everyone has to adopt one culture? I hope not. Cultural diversity is, I think, as important as biodiversity in evolution.

  15. I think one problem with this debate is that it is posed in terms of “realism” as opposed to “postmodernism” as if these were two coherent positions, and the only two epistemological commitments that exist. The term ‘postmodernism’ in this context is almost meaningless — it is more a term of abuse than a coherent position whose positions ‘realists’ are refuting. I think it is telling that people who reject ‘postmodernism’ almost never engage in any sustained debate in which they quote and refute a particular scholar’s work — a sure sign that they are attacking a strawman.

    Equally, what “realism” is as a concrete epistemological position is never really explained, except that it seems to mean taken-for-granted assumptions about the world employed by people with labs. How did “I believe in, like, REALITY” get to be considered an adequate theoretical grounding for natural science? Especially after, like, you know, Quine?

    A major problem with this proponents of “science” is that they have a strong emotional attachment to a way of life, not a reasoned commitment to one coherent epistemology which is more defendable than other possible contenders.

  16. Oh, and if it wasn’t clear, I’m not the same Adam who posted the Plattner anecdote, but I did find it and his other comments very enlightening.

    Guess I should start commenting with my last initial…

  17. “To me, post-modernism is reality-based.”

    This was a good paragraph. A quote of Bruno Latour’s I love to mangle on the subject is that a skyscraper is socially-constructed. This does not mean you can drive your motorbike through it if you choose to believe it isn’t there. It means that its (material) existence depends upon social relations — of labour, of architectural communication and planning, of professional practice, of capital distribution, etc. etc. — that deserve to be understood. Indeed, depending on your aim, demand to be understood.

    Rayna Rapp is not a scientist but I’m not sure how you can read “Testing Women, Testing the Fetus” (one of my favourite ethnographies) as anti-science, or anti-reality, just because it discusses the social life of a laboratory in which results are produced and interpreted.

  18. Great discussion. @Rex: “I think one problem with this debate is that it is posed in terms of “realism” as opposed to “postmodernism” as if these were two coherent positions…” I also think it is problem to frame concern about the future of the field as a debate over “realism vs. postmodernism.” For some within the field, perhaps it is. For the rest of us, however, it is hard to see how such hand-waving – on either side – will dissolve the practical problems I touched on in my earlier comment. Given how cultural anthropology has moved to position itself in the last few decades, what is it, in crass, realpolitik terms, that anthropology can now deliver that isn’t already being delivered by the “social scientists” and the “humanists?”

  19. In response to Nefa:

    You correctly pick up on the paradox which lies at the heart of anthropology. It is, as Rex pointed out, the paradox Boas wrote about in “The Study of Geography”, but was perhaps most elegantly summarized by Kroeber:

    “Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.”

    But, you are wrong to think it a weakness. All the great work in anthropology and here I think of Mead in Samoa on the cultural side and Goodall on primate behavior on the physical side in particular, has flowed out of what Malinowski called the imponderabilia of a given situation. Dead data, to borrow from Malinowksi, isn’t enough. It is necessary to put assumptions to the test and the best anthropological work as always served as a corrective to overly assumptive deductive frameworks.

    Induction has always been, and still remains, a scientific enterprise even if it is, perhaps, ambiguous and equivocal in character.

  20. I am curious, not sarcastic, in asking these questions because the answers are not at all clear to me.

    Who benefits from this change in mission statement? Some group of people must have intentionally pursued this course of action and invested it with their time and energy because they thought it would be a good thing (at least for some). Not that this has to be a zero sum game, but who winds up on top here?

    What good will come of this? Presumably the AAA has elected to make this change in order to accomplish some sort of goal.We have the RACE initiative. We have these exhortations to be more public. President-elect Leith Mullings is looking for the AAA’s next thing to bring anthro to the people. How does this change of mission help the discipline and what its trying to do?

    In sum I want to know: what do “we” get for giving up the label science?

  21. “what is it, in crass, realpolitik terms, that anthropology can now deliver that isn’t already being delivered by the “social scientists” and the “humanists?””

    Well, from my admittedly-limited experience, anthropologists are still queens and kings of naturalistic/participant observation and holistic methodology in the social sciences. Anthropology itself may — I stress may, I don’t want to present myself as any kind of expert here — be better defined as a pedagogy and methodology than as a “discipline” in the sense you mean. Ethnography seems to be borrowed from but seldom duplicated.

  22. It seems to me, Nefa, that you are arguing that anthropology is “the study of primitive people” and since “primitive people have vanished” we no longer have an object of study. I don’t agree with this definition of anthropology, and hence don’t see that anthropology has a problem in this regard.

    I do think that Matt has a good point — the AAA executive board really gains nothing by these changes except some enemies.

    I want to push a little against Michael Scroggin’s use of Kroeber’s quote. It’s a nice quote, of course, but it does not actually connect to Boas’s argument in The Study of Geography, nor is there a paradox in that article. In this quote Kroeber makes a distinction (traceable to Wilhelm Dilthey) between “naturwissenschaft” or the natural sciences and “geisteswissenschaft” or the sciences of the human spirit, i.e. the humanities. This is NOT the same thing as Windelband’s distinction between generalizing and particularizing sciences. For Dilthey, the OBJECT of study determined the nature of the science (whether it was a science of ‘nature’ or of ‘meaning’) but for Boas it was the SUBJECTIVE interest of the analyst — generalizing or particularizing — which determined the nature of the discipline. That’s why 4 field anthropology was possible: different objects did not require different modes of study. It didn’t matter if one field studied bone morphology and the other studied folk tales.

    Compare Boas’s discussion of the nature of science to our contemporary debate. What do proponents of ‘science’ mean by the term? I have yet to see any clear account which we could bring into dialogue with other forms of knowledge — for instance, work done by historians. In this debate science is increasingly becoming a vacuous term. Everyone wants to be it, but there is no sufficient account of what would or would not count as science that would allow us to get real traction on whether sociocultural anthropologists do or do not meet the criteria involved.

  23. You have papered over the rejection of the concept of science from the AAA mission statement with a glossy history of the debate, as if the fact that there was a fruitful debate on the subject makes the rejection palatable. But of course, history is written by the winners. You write about knee-jerk reactionaries while willfully ignoring the revolutionary fervor for anti-science on the part of those who brought us to this point.

    I see no reason that the AAA mission could not have described the discipline as being “engaged in a continuing pattern of hybrid practices between humanism and science to investigate the human condition,” or some similar terminology. Note my willingness to even give “lower-case” science second billing ;-).

    The ideology which demands that there can be no hybridity, no mention of methodology which is vital to a large segment of the professional and practicing population, no middle ground, is frankly unanthropological. There is nothing in the scientific method of evaluating observations through trial-and-error which denies there are many cultural modes of human knowledge. Failures to recognize the validity of science, and the limits of science both arise from the sorts of ignorance of human cultures which the AAA claims it is working to alleviate.

    Of course, as plenty of good anthropology has shown, the hybrid may frequently be derided by purists in all of the sources from which it draws its inspiration.

  24. How does saying ‘not everything has to be science’ imply that ‘nothing should be science’?

    I think people are reading way too much into the AAA statement, which says nothing about the status of the discipline one way or the other.

  25. I sort of agree with, albeit maybe in a converse way with Graduate Guy…I think “science” for its proponents who self-identify as doing “science” (especially “hard science”) is code for hypothesis-testing (not always possible in anthropology, despite many of us having had to think one up for our NSF proposals in grad school, because at times formulating a hypothesis would require a prior knowledge of emic perspectives and significant categories, which in many cases have to be recursively defined) or for replicability, which, again, as was pointed out already, is not really possible with ethnography. I also think that the use of “science” in that context has been a tool for the self-identifying scientific anthropology contingent to say that many valuable directions in cultural anthropology work are not living up to its own disciplinary standard (“we are a social SCIENCE–where is the SCIENCE?)–which is pretty funny because if we go way back the idea of anthropology as a “science” is rooted in all kinds of wacky colonial and racist origins. Not that that is a useful or productive argument, but it is a useful footnote to any reification and dehistoricizing of the concept of “science.”

    I also think that “public understanding” makes more sense in the context of a mission statement than “science”–in and of itself it is not as divisive as “science”–for the most part (with some exceptions), the people are taking issue with removal of “science” not with what “public understanding” stands for. “Public understanding” can include “science” without marginalizing it–an institution of a public science is a desirable value in our culture–it can also include a critique of “science.” It is a broad, and, I think, more neutral umbrella. As evidenced by this very controversy, “science” within anthropology has been often used as a tool to construct strawmen out of postmodernists
    making them some kinds of monsters out of a Dean Koontz novel (you come across the randomest books during fieldwork in remote areas, and he really has a novel where the villain is a postmodernist lit professor) and devaluing the production of knowledge within cultural anthropology as “research not worth doing” (actual quote from a biological anthropologist I used to know).

    Also what I have not heard mentioned in any of the complaints about this issue is that biological research is still explicitly included in the mission statement. I think people who feel excluded by the new mission statement feel that way because they define what they do as “science” and attach positive value to it–but by their own logic that label has often been exclusionary of a lot of work done within cultural anthropology. Now they feel excluded despite a more inclusive term that has replaced “science” and that legitimates more diverse research directions as “anthropology”–to me that sounds like logic and feelings coming from the same place that for years has denigrated cultural anthropology as having nothing to offer.

    Finally, I think that the argument that “science lends us legitimacy that we will lose” that I keep encountering in various blog posts lamenting the switch is unfounded. I kind of think that REALLY at its core it is a “cultural anthropology is BS” argument that is covered up by the placating caveat that “some cultural anthropologists are ok, they are not scientists, but at least they work with data.” Nancy Scheper-Hughes is cultural anthropologist who does “public anthropology” and her work on global black market in organ trade has certainly engaged with policy institutions and affected policy decisions.

  26. This may be too simple of an explanation, and it definitely doesn’t invalidate any of the real issues discussed here, but I think that part of the emotion involved in these responses can be described in terms of the effect of seeing the word science crossed out repeatedly throughout the posts that show the changes, as opposed to simply looking at a before and after. I’m not saying that presenting in that format doesn’t make sense, but seeing valued words like “science” crossed out of a document mobilizes all sorts of associations with censorship (and maybe even public school textbook debates?).

    Again, it’s not a huge point, but there is something about that presentation that can create a very visceral response.

  27. Nefa has made some very good points. Anthropology is now an outlier within the social sciences. In an upcoming book on social science methods, political scientist John Gerring suggests that the interpretivist orientation of modern cultural anthropology puts it outside of the main methodological and theoretical currents in the social sciences, and he barely deals with anthropology in the book:

    Gerring, John
    2011 Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework. Cambridge University Press, New York.

    Most of us who consider ourselves empirical scientists and want to document and explain how the social world works today, and in the past, will probably think that the new AAA language is a bad thing. Anthropology can be both scientific and non-scientific. Caught between the decades-long anti-science tilt of mainstrean cultural anthropology, and the simplistic approach of the anthropological science police, I have turned to sociology, geography, and political science for my theoretical inspiration (about ancient cities).

    I swing back and forth between a strong alienation with anthropology, and pride and joy in my home discipline. I was just starting to feel better about anthropology after dissing it for a year or two, but now with the AAA actions I am swinging back away from anthropology. Fine, go ahead and be anti-scientific and true. I’ll be reading sociology, which doesn’t get embarrassed to be called a social SCIENCE.

  28. Thanks for starting this debate Rex, and I am sincerely interested in your insights.

    We must always find the right path between simplistic naivety and the sort of sophism that one can use to obfuscate rather than clarify.

    So:

    I take realism to be the position that there is an objective reality that can be better or worse understood depending on the techniques that one uses to make the attempt. For example, one could sit in a room and surmise what the world “must” be like or one could do experiments. When we’ve attempted both, we’ve found that experiments tend to work better. Note that I’m not saying that experiments are the only way to know something (which would imply that even astrophysics is not science). But I’m saying that experimentation is a single example of a well-proven technique, which has been demonstrated to work better than other techniques.

    So over the last several millennia we’ve accumulated the techniques that work well into a body of processes and practices that we call science. It has its limits, because it is only about determining facts and not values or ethics. But it is empirically quite good at determining facts.

    So my first question for you (and it is an honest question) is whether Anthropology is first and foremost about the determination of facts. And second, I would deeply appreciate if you could explain what makes epigraphy and linguistics not “science.” I think we’d both agree that “science” is more than just the practice of experimentation, and I’ve said before that I see “historical linguistics” as not different in kind than “historical genetics”. If there is a line there which puts one on the “science” side and one “not” then I would appreciate your help in clarifying it.

    If you have time, I’d also be curious about your opinion of the recently made claim that

    “Indigenous knowledge is only recently being understood and accepted by those in the West (and in anthropology) as the equally complex (and equally valid) indigenous counterpart to Western science. For the AAA, maintaining the use of the term “science” in their mission statement serves to maintain the colonizing, privileging, superior positionality of anthropology that continues to plague the discipline.”

    I’m presuming here that “valid” means “accurate” — i.e. discerning of objective reality.

  29. Michael your post seems really weird to me because I actually see the line between cultural anthropology and sociology as much blurrier. In my own work for my dissertation, I am using a lot of British sociology that is ethnographically and qualitatively based and drawing upon the same sources of theory as many anthropologists (e.g. Bourdieu). In Britain especially there seems to be a lot more crossover between anthropology and sociology research. Part of this might have to do with my particular area of geographic focus but I suspect that this might have more to do with differences between American and British academic life.

    I also suspect that some involved in the “science” debate would label some of this British sociological research as “unscientific” because of the strange fetishism for hypothesis testing that I alluded to in my previous post. This is the whole problem with the debate about whether or not anthropology is a “science.” Proponents on both sides have such a narrow definition of science that the middle ground (where I suspect many anthropologists actually sit) is obscured. It is absurd to me that some of the same methods and theories used by British sociologists can be labeled as not science when they are used by anthropologists (and again this occurs among people on both sides of the debate).

  30. “Hard-scientific truth is certainly not the only kind of truth.”

    I haven’t read all the posts in this thread yet, so forgive me if I repeat something.

    I’m not sure I’ve ever liked the distinction between hard or soft science, since some of the methods simply aren’t applicable to certain questions. Most seem to be just matters of the degree of replicablility, rather than absolute “truthfulness.” Grounded theory is just as valid to get at certain aspects of reality, if done in a rigorous and systematic way and combined with other methods via triangulation. This isn’t a matter of unscientific methods, but appropriate and inappropriate ways to measure different aspects of a phenomenon. What attracted my to the science of anthropology, was the fact that we used qualitative and quantitative methods in a way which was most appropriate. We use a hammer when a hammer is called for, where most economists use a hammer even when a screwdriver is needed.

    This phenomenon is very common in Zen philosophies: the concept of the “Two Truths Doctrine.” That is there is the ultimate truth in which everything really is undifferentiated and relative in an absolute sense, yet on there are very real non-relative differences on a relative basis. Those who don’t or can’t understand the difference become rather autistic and hypocritical. If there are no relative differences or hierarchies of value, then the genocide committed by a Nazi would be no more or less ethical than any other activity. If you say that the believes and truths of everyone are relative, and equal, then you have to accept the values and truths for everyone. That’s not what anyone in the AAA actually does though. What they do is simply place any “non-white, non-Western” way of knowing as superior. Not coequal, because if that was the case then they could accept that we’d do our thing and let others do their thing. They actually believe that their thing is polluted, less pure, and inferior to others they wish they could be out of a collective and misplaced guilt. This is nothing more than what Orwell in “Notes on Nationalism,” concluded over 50 years ago:

    “Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalized by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it.”

    I think the sad thing here is simply the fact that the scientific method isn’t the only way to get at certain truths, it isn’t simply just one more way, it is superior to any other way that we know of at this point for samples of more than one. What I mean, is that there is simply no better ways to get at what’s going one beyond one person’s mind. There is no better way to test reality, or eliminate erroneous concepts or theories. It is better, and that’s something that people locked in the psychosis of absolute relativism aren’t getting. Slavery wasn’t just a coequal, relative social structure of hierarchy, it was inferior to the freedom of the individual. The equality of women and minorities are better than unequal status. The world is full of things that are simply better than other things, and this pandering to a domain dependence that pulls “science” out of being subject to this basic and undeniable truth is nothing more than willful ignorance. There is a discipline that already covers the science of mind experiments, it’s called philosophy. If you think that science is just another way of knowing, then please go where you belong.

    The other thing is that the mental masturbation of a minority of academics really affects those of us that work for a living. I’m preparing to get an MS in statistics largely, because I’m consistently forced to separate myself from the psuedo-philosophers that have branded most of my resume as a hobby.

  31. I’ll argue my point a little further.

    Boas does point to a paradoxical relation between the two forms of inquiry in The Study of Geography and he locates it in the examples of Newton’ inquiry versus the inquiry of Kant and Laplace. Just prior to discussing the differences between two approaches to science (the part of the paper most often quoted), which Boas attributes to Comte and Humboldt respectively, he demonstrates their reliance upon one another with an example.

    “His problem was the action of two bodies upon each other and thus he found the law of gravitation. On the other hand, Kant and Laplace, in studying the solar system, asked the question, Why is everyone of the bodies constituting the solar system in the place it occupies? They took the law as granted and applied it to the phenomena from which it had been deduced, in order to study the history of the solar system. Newton’s work was at an end as soon as he had found the law of gravitation, which law was the preliminary condition of Kant’s work”

    Which is not to say that Boas privileges one approach over the other, but rather that the two approaches are in a state of interrelation. Though, on first glance, at odds they are actually reliant upon each other for the advancement of knowledge.

    I would also like to add that it does make a difference if the word science is taken out because to claim science in 21st century America is to claim privileged access to knowledge. Throwing away that claim for the sake of …. ???… is puzzling at best.

  32. My burning question is: Why, after so many excellent studies of scientists at work, is the phrase “scientific method” always preceded by the prescriptive and unitary definite article as if it were all so easy and obvious?

  33. I think “science” for its proponents who self-identify as doing “science” (especially “hard science”) is code for hypothesis-testing

    I simply must disagree with Nica here.

    The anthropologists who raised this issue are the members of the Society for Anthropological Sciences. You will notice that the name of the organization pluralizes science. There is more than one science or kind of science within anthropology, and that diversity is recognized, as David Kronenfeld pointed out recently on the SASci list. In that message he suggested a number of different kinds of anthropological science that he and his colleagues recognize, ranging from natural historical approaches, lab experimentation, computer simulation, to just plain ol’ replicable methods of data collection and conservative inductive generalizations based on that data.

    Many members of that list stated matter of factly that anthropology is not, as a whole, a science, nor should it be. But they also rightly objected to the elimination of the term.

    Quite contrary to some of the unflattering depictions of scientific anthropologists here and elsewhere, some members of SASci have suggested specific alternative language which is quite conciliatory and open minded, such as:

    Section 1. The purposes of the Association shall be to advance OUR understanding of humankind in all its aspects. This includes, but is not limited to, archeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research CONDUCTED FROM BOTH (or ‘ from a variety of’) SCIENTIFIC AND HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVES; The Association also commits itself and to further the professional interests of anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation.

    Isn’t such language largely in line with the sentiments many here have already expressed?

    Finally, I might add that a number of environmental anthropologists are not too happy about it, in part I suspect, because so many of them have to collaborate with scientists in their work. I also know a few applied anthropologists unhappy with the bit about solving human problems being removed.

    Rex is right: little has been gained by this move, except perhaps enmity and the further dissolution of the discipline.

  34. Paul wrote: “So my first question for you (and it is an honest question) is whether Anthropology is first and foremost about the determination of facts.”

    That is the crucial question, is it not?

  35. I actually think it is a good thing when an Association decides not to take a stand on the legitimacy of the perspectives held by its membership. I don’t see the need for any of the capitalized additions in the middle section of Concilitator’s rewrite for example: why not just end with “anthropological research” – it amounts to the same thing, and has the advantage of not closing off any future perspectives that may emerge. I would want an anthropology association to promote anthropological research, period.

    Weirder for me are the grammatical wobbles and (unintended?) inclusiveness. The clausal structure of those first few sentences makes quite a strange claim:

    “The purpose[s?] of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. This includes, but is not limited to, … anthropological research; The Association also commits itself to further the professional interests of anthropologists …”

    Is this saying that anthropological research is an aspect of humankind, or that it is a method for advancing understanding of humankind? OK, let’s ignore that dilemma and focus on “this includes, but is not limited to [different kinds of] anthropological research”. Is the AAA really saying that it will now happily include anyone who advances public understanding of humankind, including for instance, psychologists, and philosophers, and chemists and…? Because you could kind of take it that way. Great that the AAA will ‘also’ support the professional interests of anthropologists though!

    As for this debate as a whole though, here’s the take home lesson: some people need only the barest of excuses to rehash the Science Wars.

  36. Well “from a variety of scientific and humanistic perspectives” (my preferred variation at present) recommends itself first by placating the concerns that the scientific perspective has been abruptly excluded entirely. It also recognizes that the former statement perhaps unfairly excluded humanistic perspectives. The initial qualifier “includes but is not limited to” implies that nothing is being excluded prematurely.

    The emphasis on variety of perspectives recognizes that each of these ‘poles’ are not monoliths. And let’s be clear: there are a lot of kinds of anthropology that are not included: evolutionary anthropology, psychological anthropology, mathematical anthropology, cognitive anthropology, etc. etc. etc, as Daniel Lende notes in his excellent post at Neuroanthropology:

    The AAAs emphasis on cultural anthropology continues, and is actually reinforced in this new document. Before there were just four sub-fields – “archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research.” Now we have a list of ten – “archeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research.” The new additions fall largely within the domain of cultural anthropology – social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, and visual. Equal weighting for biology would likely demand some mention of primatology and evolutionary anthropology. I am sure an archaeologist would also have relevant additions.

    In consideration of the overwhelming weight given to cultural anthropology, and the number of science-oriented anthropologists in the other three fields, acknowledging that there is indeed an explicitly scientific perspective is not asking much.

  37. Michael: ‘My burning question is: Why, after so many excellent studies of scientists at work, is the phrase “scientific method” always preceded by the prescriptive and unitary definite article as if it were all so easy and obvious?”

    I think what you were saying about Newton vs. the others, was very close to what I was saying. However, I think it also shows the superiority of science for getting at the heart of what’s most likely happening in a given situation. Kant and others may have simply begun at an a priori starting point, but they had no way of testing their own minds. What separates the sciences from the humanities is theory. We’ve got it and they don’t. One of Newton’s plaguing issues was that of “spin.” We couldn’t figure out why water rises at the edges of a bucket when it is spun. Soon after someone felt that it was most likely rising in relation to the rest of the universe. His ideas were dismissed, and he was largely forgotten, but it was science which later was able to build a robust body of theory to validate his mental experiment as right. Science is the reason we know so much, precisely because it is the only way to eliminate faulty theory. We don’t argue the equality of man philosophically, we do so scientifically with hard data. That’s how Boas did it.
    Also, more than half of what Newton wrote was on the subject of metaphysics and alchemy, but so what? That would have nothing to do with the pretty standard definition of the scientific method. Science, like culture, is more than any one or two people. The scientific method is nothing more than a rigorous and systematic investigation of “observable” phenomenon in a very specific way, but which includes countless methods and ways to “measure” that phenomenon. The crisis in anthropology is just a measurement problems.
    Also, it is philosophers that are interested in truth. The definition of truth is that it is true, and that which is true doesn’t change. That’s ultimate reality. Science is much more interested in what is not true, and never claims truth. Hence, my statement that too many anthros. are wannabe philosophers.

  38. I’m still working on why I should care what the AAA says. I’m being sarcastic but not totally dismissive, I’m genuinely — not super clear on it. It /seems/ to me like the change is primarily about refocusing the AAA on promotion and organization as opposed to definition. I can see arguments against that, but I’m not sure it’s really worth getting into a twist about the epistlemology/ontology of a statement that is really more about organizational culture than defining modes of knowledge production. Lord knows the AAA has enough problems with conducting this basic mandate without trying to tackle the nature of reality. Really, I think we should all be /happy/ that the executive of the AAA is abandoning the quest for royal-T Truth because, given their habits, I shudder to think what they might come up with as an answer.

    I will join the chorus of problematizing the use of the word “science” in this conversation, because it seems to slip around. Insofar as science is any attempt to be rigorous in pursuing the truth, then I’m quite happy to call myself a (social) scientist, since I certainly try my best. However, as far as my family of geologists is concerned, there’s really not much I can do to satisfy them (maybe I should start telling them about the opinion many other natural scientists have of geology…)

    To be blunt, a lot of the crying of “anti-science” has the flavor of grievance and persecution found among those who cry “anti-christianity” in the States. (Natural) scientists are unquestionably a more prestigeous, moneyed, influential faction in western universities than humanists. I have yet to hear of any university administrator calling for the elimination of the physics department. It is a constant uphill battle to convince policy audiences of the validity and rigor of qualitative method and inquiry. The only people, it seems, who face genuine difficulties as “scientific” researchers are those in very troubled subdisciplines like evolutionary psychology and biological criminology, whose validity and rigor are often very much in doubt.

  39. “Is the discipline of history impossible, or riddled with postmodernists?”
    Yes.

    “History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it .”
    Descartes

    You want a list of the people who are opposed to history as a serious field?
    It’s huge. Opposition to empiricism? It’s everywhere.

    “Both dogmas, [of empiricism] I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.”

    Quine was smoking crack but no one noticed. And the paper is defense of the pipe, not of empiricism.

    It would be better think of “post-Modernism” as referring to after-modernism not after-modernity. The latter doesn’t exist. But these days we’re mostly full up with mannerism posing as new thought. The “science” of the study other human beings is the science of one man “a scientist” telling another that he’s living an illusion while the “scientist” is living the life of enlightenment and reason. And you see where that’s got us.

    Language is politics, politics is language. There is no language without interpretation. If you want to avoid politics then you have to talk only in numbers no words.
    Naturalist epistemology is bunk. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

  40. I would like to point out that Rex’s reading of the changes is somewhat naive (even if I am generally in agreement with the post). While, yes, the language of the revised document doesn’t exclude science (of whatever flavor), the removal of the word has political overtones and send a signal (whether intended or not).
    In particular, as an archaeologist who is committed to working with and being in dialogue with cultural anthrpologists, I feel like us non-processual archaeologists are being thrown under the bus by cultural anthropologists who are rightly annoyed by the processualist out fringe (our friends the hypothesis testers).

    I agree the science is a fraught term, in part because of the hystrionics of the realist vs. pomo debates. But that doesn’t remove the accretion of meaning around the word science in anthropology, where is stands in for biological anthro and archaeology.

    Rather than deleting the word science, maybe the AAA should strive to increase outreach to the public, focused on complicating their ideas of science, knowledge production, and truth.

  41. Concilitator: Whose vision of anthropology do you refer to? In my vision, the determination of facts is the main goal of social science research, anthropological and other. But many anthropologists don’t agree with this.

    I find the science-paranoia in many of these comments interesting.

  42. “I anthropology about the determination of facts or is it not?”

    Inevitably it’s both, I think. I mean, even if I agree wholeheartedly with a binary vision of rigor versus muddling — I’m certainly not about to support a witch-hunt to rid the discipline of anyone on the other side of the line. So those anthropologists who are humanistic in their approach versus those who are scientistic can coexist in the discipline, and you can value their work differently; indeed I’m not sure I see a credible alternative.

    One does not refrain from examining the methodology and rigor of a natural scientist just because they call themselves a scientist, after all! So affirming anthropology’s aspiration to scientific rigor wouldn’t excuse you from having to think about the methodological validity of any particular anthropologist’s work. Whether the AAA calls itself a scientific body doesn’t, in of itself, determine the validity of any given anthropologist’s work as a rigorous search for truth.

    One danger in putting too much stock in the mandate of professional organizations as shaping the “credibility” of the discipline is that it feeds into this distressing trend of substituting qualifications for, well, peer review.

  43. Ok look:

    It is one thing to say “you hurt my feelings and I’m mad at you” but to only be able to articulate these feelings (which Numentics and Hannah C point out) in the language “I’m science and you’re not and my new girlfriend Sociology tells me I was right all along”. Here ‘science’ means ‘my bruised ego ideal’.

    It is another thing to say “I have an implicit and strongly held intuitive belief about how data should be gathered, handled and described. I’m not a philosopher of science but to me this unarticulated sensibility counts as ‘science’ and I suspect that the unarticulated sensibility of the AAA leadership is different from that and that is why I distrust their vision of the discipline”. I think that many of the comments here wondering why philology isn’t considered ‘science’ reflect this viewpoint, despite the fact that, obviously, philology is not classified as a ‘science’ in the modern research university. Here ‘science’ means ‘a certain kind of commitment to empiricism’. (I quite like this definition)

    But when we get otherwise rational people like Michael saying things like “science is about determination of facts” and “do you believe in reality” we are dealing with a definition of ‘science’ so hopelessly vaguely and so invested with emotion that serious discussion becomes impossible.

    Azande witchcraft divination is about determination of facts, as is the discipline of history. Obviously neither of these are ‘science’ in the sense that it is normally used, because science involves distinct and unique methods for obtaining knowledge about the world. A real debate on this topic would examine what those methods are, whether they are what scientists say they are, and how anthropology does or does not, should or should not, use those methods.

    Equally, if science is just about ‘determination of fact’ than Newton’s laws of motion and Einstein’s general theory of relativity are not ‘science’ because they are not statements of facts about the world, but theoretical models which explain and predict states of affairs in the world. Obviously, science is not just about determinations of facts but acts of theory building. I hope that should be clear to everyone. A real debate on this topic would examine what those theories are, whether they are what scientists say they are, and how anthropology does or does not, should or should not, develop theory in a similar fashion.

    I think one of the things that is happening on this thread is that some people are using #aaafail as an opportunity to think about what science does (as opposed to what scientists think it does), how a discipline premised on the fact that perceptions are underdetermined by reality grounds itself epistemologically, and what interdisciplinary alignments are possible between anthropology and other disciplines. Then there are others who are just to angry and hurt to understand these discussions as anything other than ‘science paranoia’.

  44. Andrew
    Defend quine or not.

    You’re referring to rick who quotes daniel pipes.
    And as far as science fear goes I have no fear of tools only of teleology.
    Simple.

  45. Until I hear from the archaeologists and biological anthropologists on the AAA Executive Board (none of them shrinking violets I might add) that they were unwittingly forced into signing off on the new wording, then I’m not prepared to go along with the idea that this is just evil cultural anthropologists forcing their agenda on everyone else. That said, I’m not sure that I like the new wording. By making up a laundry list of anthropological specialties, few of which will make any sense to the public they are intended to enlighten, they’ve not so much redefined anthropology to be more inclusive as make it a giant bag full of stuff in which it’s unclear what anyone actually does. Reading the new statement is rather like reading the anemic “mission statements” universities like to come up with periodically, which manage to say everything at the same time as they say practically nothing. I would keep the science bit in (although I’m not an anthropologist who regards herself as doing science) but frame the statements about it differently. Whether one likes it or not, anthropology is no longer a discipline that aspires towards being a science. To designate it as a science, therefore, is simply wrong (there, I said it). But I have absolutely no problem accepting that there are anthropologists who do science and consider themselves scientists, just as there are other anthropologists whose work is based on other principles. It would be better for the AAA to strive to be more concrete in their statement so as to let the public know the many different things that we do, and how we do them, although in the end, I have to agree with other commenters that it’s hard to imagine that any of this will make much difference in the long term.

  46. I agree with the main thrust of your argument, but I fear you did oversimplify the opposite side’s argument a bit. Two points they make are important: this shift in language strengthens advocacy as a purpose of anthropology which I feel is the a step too far. Absolutely, we should do advocacy armed with anthropological knowledge (loads more of it) but the discipline itself should strive neither to advocate nor denigrate. Second, they point out that the new wording stress dissemination of of anthropological knowledge over its production. One might argue that production is implied in dissemination but explicit rituals matter.

    But I agree the posturing over ‘objective scientific’ knowledge is puzzling. I even find the label scientific anthropologist oxymoronic. I know it is there to include primatology, physical anthropology, archeology, etc. but within the confines of cultural anthropology, it makes me doubt the anthropological qualifications of anyone labeling themselves as such. Surely, anthropology is steeped in awareness of the complexity of how knowledge is constructed, maintained and communicated (not just Geertz but also Levi Strauss – who would surely have to be counted as the beacon of scientific anthropology if there was such a thing). No doubt, experimental designs and quantitative studies have their place even in cultural anthropology (and are probably underused) but they don’t make it any more scientific. They simply provide additional cognitive and expressive tools for the production and discussion of scholarly knowledge.

    And I find lack of awareness of this puzzling in anthropologists.

  47. “Second, they point out that the new wording stress dissemination of of anthropological knowledge over its production. One might argue that production is implied in dissemination but explicit rituals matter. ”

    Assuming this is intentional, is it a problem for a professional organization to draw a distinction between production and dissemination and situate itself more towards the latter? As opposed to, say, universities or NGOs or state agencies, which would be recognized, implicitly, as sites of the former — organizations that employ anthropologists? After all, other than a few prizes it’s my understanding that the AAA doesn’t directly fund a lot of knowledge production…(?) This is more or less how I view the changes to the document, for good or ill.

    “Andrew
    Defend quine or not.

    You’re referring to rick who quotes daniel pipes.
    And as far as science fear goes I have no fear of tools only of teleology.
    Simple. ”

    ¿ O_o ?

  48. “I’m science and you’re not and my new girlfriend Sociology tells me I was right all along”.

    I had a thing with Sociology on a cruise over Spring Break and I thought we really had something. But after the semester resumed we were at a party at the Dean’s house and when I said “hi” she told Poly Sci and Economics that my instrument had poor reliability and they all giggled. ☹

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