2.7 Predicting and interpreting

discuss its usefulness in defining a valid unit of analysis for the study of linguistic practices.

2.7Predicting and interpreting

A basic distinction among different theories of culture as well as among different theories of language – some of which we will examine in more detail in the next chapters – is the extent to which theorizing means providing predictions of individual occurrences of phenomena as opposed to an interpretation of individual events, performances, dialogues, speech acts, utterances, and even individual sounds.14 The tension between these two approaches is not unique to anthropology and continues to permeate much of the current metatheoretical debate within the social sciences. Such a tension, of course, is not new. The very inception of such fields as sociology and anthropology in the nineteenth century was characterized by a debate about the extent to which doing a science of people should follow the methods of a science of the physical world. Can we predict human behavior in the same way in which we can predict the motion of solid bodies in physics? Should we be more concerned with what is unique about a group of people or with the features of their language or culture that make them part of the larger human species? Can we speak of scientific “laws” when we are dealing with human actions? Each of the anthropologists mentioned above (Boas, Malinowski, Goodenough, Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, etc.) has his or her own more or less original answer to these questions. I have of course my own preferences, which will become more apparent in the rest of the book as we move into other, more specific topics of discussion. Before concluding this chapter, however, I want to offer a few general principles implicitly or explicitly assumed by most contemporary social scientists thinking and writing about language and culture:

1.Social actors themselves, and hence speakers, must have ways of making predictions in their daily life, otherwise they would be living in a state of constant chaos and uncertainty that would be too unstable to ensure their well being. People make predictions such as which language or dialect is appropriate to speak in a given situation, that a question is likely to be followed by an answer, and that people will laugh at their jokes if they are friendly.

2.Social actors, however, are complex beings who participate in complex systems. This means that there is always the possibility that people will behave in unpredicted (if not generally unpredictable) ways (e.g. not speak at all when

14I am leaving out the issue of the particular method to be used in either one of these two enterprises. Thus, I am not discussing the merits or problems of, say, deductive vs. inductive methods. Either method can be used to pursue the universalistic or the particularist interest.

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Theories of culture

questioned or not laugh at a good joke). In particular, it is possible that certain behaviors will not be easily interpretable (either by the actors or by the analyst). Rather than seeing these cases as anomalies, the student is advised to treat them as the manifestations of the not fully predictable (not pre-determinate) nature of human conduct, an important component of the meaning-making mechanisms that characterize human social life (both Geertz and Bourdieu, among others, have stressed this point). In addition to being open to the possibility of different interpretations (by different people, at different times, in different languages or styles), we must actively engage in the suspension (or “bracketing”) of the most obvious interpretation, an act that phenomenological approaches have often seen as a crucial step for the rational understanding of the world. As students of human behavior, we must realize that what might appear “natural” about any one interpretation may in fact be extremely “cultural” and hence that confessions of ignorance or uncertainty are just as important as the reasonable explanations provided by our favorite consultant or our favorite theorist.

3.Regardless of whether or not one uses statistical methods, it is important to give other researchers a sense of how common or recurrent a given phenomenon is or, rather, how frequently it appears in our data. How often something happens (is said, heard, written, done) is important in people’s life.

4.The extent to which a given phenomenon is seen as an occurrence of a more general category is partly due to our interpretive frame. This is true of individual sounds and words, which are never pronounced exactly in the same way (see chapter 6), as well as of types of speech exchanges or verbal performances. This means that we always have two choices: look for the general in the particular or the particular in the general. The theoretical question is always also an empirical question: what is the ground for our generalization? Where did we get our categories? Where did we look for evidence?

5.Social actors themselves are involved in the work of making their actions and their interpretations fit into particular “models.” An actor-oriented approach tries to understand those models through an analysis of the participants’ specific actions. The following chapters are about the ways in which such an analysis can be done.

6.In general, metaphors are good to think with, but they should not get in the way of new ways of thinking about a problem. This applies to formal representations as well. Formalization is a tool and like all tools is designed for a certain job. More generally, as researchers, we must understand the advantages and limitations of the analytical procedures we employ. We must monitor our own procedures. This does not mean, however, that we should make such monitoring the exclusive or principal subject of our work.

7.Finally, all theories are mortal.

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2.8 Conclusions

2.8Conclusions

Culture is a highly complex notion and a much contested ground within contemporary anthropological theory. Many of the basic assumptions that guided anthropological research only a few decades ago have been critically assessed by new generations of researchers. Current theories have tried to avoid an allencompassing notion of culture in favor of more context-specific and contextdependent practices or forms of participation. In all theories of culture presented here, however, language always plays an important part. For the notion of culture as learned patterns of behavior and interpretive practices, language is crucial because it provides the most complex system of classification of experience. Language is also an important window on the universe of thoughts that interest cognitive scientists (see section 2.2). As psychologists and linguists have been saying for several decades, linguistic and cognitive development are closely connected and a complex communicative system – whether spoken or signed – is a prerequisite for a rich intellectual life. Human languages are also powerful metalanguages (see section 9.3), communicative systems that can be used to talk about other communicative systems, themselves included (as demonstrated by any linguistic textbook!). Furthermore, languages imply or express theories of the world and thus are ideal objects of study for social scientists.

So much of our social life is conducted, mediated, and evaluated through linguistic communication that it should be no surprise that social scientists like Lévi-Strauss used concepts developed within linguistics as tools for the study of culture (see section 2.3). Language also provides us with a useful link between inner thought and public behavior. Even when we articulate our thoughts in our own mind we are only partly doing something “private.” We are also relying on a set of cultural resources (including categorizations, theories, and problem-solving strategies) that probably belong not only to us but to a community. The public nature of language is what allows ethnography to exist (see chapter 4). An ethnographer uses language both as a resource for knowledge (what people say, what people say they think, what people say they do, what they do by saying, etc.) and as a tool for the representation of such knowledge (see chapters 4 and 5).

Language is also the prototypical tool for interacting with the world and speaking is the prototypical mediating activity. Control over linguistic means often translates into control over our relationship with the world just as the acceptance of linguistic forms and the rules for their use forces us to accept and reproduce particular ways of being in the world (see section 2.5). Finally, the view of language as a set of practices emphasizes the need to see linguistic communication as only a part of a complex network of semiotic resources that carry us throughout life and link us to particular social histories and their supporting institutions.

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Theories of culture

Each of the theories presented so far highlights a particular aspect of linguistic systems. In this sense, each theory contributes to our understanding of culture as a complex phenomenon and points toward a different set of properties that can be studied. Each theory implies a different research agenda, but all of them together form a broad mandate for the study of culture and for the analysis of language as a conceptual and social tool that is both a product and an instrument of culture. The chapters to follow will examine in more detail some of the methodological and theoretical foundations of such a research agenda.

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