If there were an astronomical version of Writing Culture, it would be that Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler are all trying to state too much. Sure, the sun appears to rise today, but maybe it won’t tomorrow.

But then the question arises, what criteria to use. The usual candidates are simplicity and precision. Given two theories with the same degree of precision, choose the simpler one. Given two theories that are equally simple, chose the one that is more precise. But what about the case in which the more complex theory is also the more precise? That’s a judgment call; but other things being equal choose precision over simplicity.

In the history of physics, for example, Copernicus’ solar centric cosmology and Ptolemy’s terra centric cosmology are equally precise. Both predict the movements of the planets with an equal degree of precision. But Copernicus needs fewer epicycles to account for retrograde movements. The palm goes to Compernicus. Then along comes Kepler, who postulates elliptical instead of circular orbits and needs no epicycles at all. Now it is Kepler’s turn for the limelight. Newton’s mechanics explain why the orbits are elliptical and then, noticing that, even given the precision of Newton’s calculations, Mercury doesn’t appear to be where it ought to be, Einstein develops the theory of relativity and explains the bending of light, a new complication, that explains more precisely why we see Mercury where we do. Thus science progresses.

In anthropology, however, theories are virtually never mathematical laws. Even our most elegant theories are, at best, sketches for stories. That said, the same general principles apply. Given a set of observations, our data, and two competing stories, we are in the position of Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. We are looking for the simplest story that accounts for all the facts at hand. Given two stories that account for the facts, we prefer the simpler one. But if the simpler story fails to account for facts that a slightly more complicated story explains, we choose that one instead. The real fiction here is the notion that only a certain small, finite set of facts are relevant,
In the field, we are still struggling to discover what might be relevant and, truth be told, there is always more to be learned.

Thus we have to keep in mind all the elements of Chomsky’s model and remember not only that a new and better third theory may come along, e.g., Kepler coming along after Copernicus and Ptolemy, but also that new evidence may reverse a previous judgment. In the best of all possible worlds, our new theories don’t replace our old theories. Instead, they offer improvements on them, improvements judged to be improvements either because they are simpler or they account for new evidence.

I’d say we do have a form of replicability testing in anthropology, and it consists, as the Mead example discussed above suggests, in people working in the same area.

Yes. This is precisely the kind of replicability we should be going for. It probably won’t answer the kinds of questions spoken of in the post – Carnival in Trinidad, etc; I should think that varies quite a lot. The number of lineages in a Batak village, their names, and their rules for recruitment, however, are much more concrete and stable. It’s easy to check something like that – about as easy as visiting the USA and finding out that it’s a nation with a President, whose name is Barack Obama.

I think the Mundugumor example reflects well on anthropology. It doesn’t reflect well on Margaret Mead, though.

In any case, empiricism is great, but you can have too much – so much that you’ll never be satisfied with any kind of generalisation or abstraction. Writing Culture is very much in that camp.

In 1971, before my first trip to the Trobriands, I thought I understood many things about Trobriand customs and beliefs from having read Malinowski’s exhaustive writings. Once there, however, I found that I had much more to discover about what I thought I already knew. For many months I worked with these discordant realities, always conscious of Malinowski’s shadow, his words, his explanations. Although I found significant differences in areas of importance, I gradually came to understand how he reached certain conclusions. The answers we both received from informants were not so dissimilar, and I could actually trace how Malinowski had analyzed what his informants told him in a way that made sense and was scientifically significant—given what anthropologists generally then recognized about such societies. Sixty years separate our fieldwork, and any comparison of our studies illustrates not so much Malinowski’s mistaken interpretations but the developments in anthropological knowledge and inquiry from his time to mine.
This important point has been forgotten by those anthropologists who today argue that ethnographic writing can never be more than a kind of fictional account of an author’s experiences. Although Malinowski and I were in the Trobriands at vastly different historical moments and there also are many areas in which our analyses differ, a large part of what we learned in the field was similar. From the vantage point that time gives to me, I can illustrate how our differences, even those that are major, came to be. Taken together, our two studies profoundly exemplify the scientific basis that underlies the collection of ethnographic data. Like all such data, however, whether researched in a laboratory or a village, the more we learn about a subject, the more we can refine and revise earlier assumptions. This is the way all sciences create their own historical developments. Therefore, the lack of agreement between Malinowski’s ethnography and mine must not be taken as an adversarial attack against an opponent. Nor should it be read as an example of the writing of ethnography as “fiction” or “partial truths.” Each of our differences can be traced historically within the discipline of anthropology.

The Cambridge students were perplexed. They were used to writing essays based on the idea that everything in The Nuer is true because certified as objective by the profession. This is the muddled premise of scientific ethnography. It means that anthropologists are trained from an early age to suspend disbelief. What they are not trained to do is to exercise critical judgment, as they are in the main humanities.

So how to gain anthropological knowledge from reading fiction, something you know was “made up”? Yet some ethnographers report snippents of casual conversation as if they were objectove fact and some novelists spend years researching their topic to make sure that don’t instert something counter-factual. If Writing Culture taught us anyhting it was that we can’t afford to suspend critical judgment when it comes to understanding the poetics and politics of ethnography.

I tried to answer the students’ question by saying that development is about making a better world and how we go about that depends in part on how we make worlds of the imagination. Works of fiction and ethnographies both do that with more or less success. One thing we can learn from studying them both is how.

Well. I can’t remember who it was – I’m thinking Nancy Scheper-Hughes, but I’m not sure – but somebody went and fact-checked in New Guinea decades later. Mead’s original fieldnotes were also checked. They asked about the word Mead had supplied for the system of alternating descent, and found out that it just meant, “rope”, and not “alternating descent”. It also turned out that the Mundugumor had corporate patrilineal descent groups, both when the facts were checked and when Mead was writing. Mead wrote about them in her fieldnotes.

Which means, I suppose, that perhaps fieldnotes would be a good place to start verifying.

True, but not entirely true, and there may be the solution to the problem. Am I wrong to believe that today’s anthropologists are more likely than not to work in places that, if not already studied themselves, are located in regions where a lot of anthropologists have also been working? In places where, as Marcus and Fischer pointed out in Anthropology as Cultural Critique, the anthropologists aren’t the only ones. As Geertz notes in the introduction to Islam Observed, ethnographers work in microscopic situations but their insights, if, indeed, they are insights, are tested in larger conversations, and nowadays those conversations include historians, other social scientists, journalists, and, yes, the natives themselves, in any or all of these roles. Consistency with or explainable difference from what others’ observe is a powerful test of validity.

Then things went much better than expected!

You hit the nail on the head linking the recent fraud cases to the prestige economy of academia, which in scientific research communities is manifest in a bias toward publishable work and thus the production of false positives.

Good show!

Signed,
A scientifically inclined anthropologist named Benjamin