Eriksen T., What Is Anthropology

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from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, is blinking. In a certain sense, blinking may be described as a mechanical movement of the eyelids, but such a description tells us nothing about what blinking means. Its significance depends on the context in which it occurs, and the meaning of blinking naturally varies crossculturally.

Most anthropologists follow Geertz up to this point without raising an eyebrow. We may never the less distinguish between a weak and a strong hermeneutic (interpretive) programme. A weak hermeneutic programme, which most would subscribe to, accepts the importance of interpretation in data collecting and ethnographic description; while a strong hermeneutic programme, as launched by Geertz, claims that the entire analysis must be interpretive. In fact, Geertz has argued that cultures may be ‘read’ as if they were texts, and has gone far, especially early in his career, towards trying to show that cultures are integrated in a ‘logicomeaningful’ way. As in literature studies, the reading of a culture entails the continuous relating of details to the totality and vice versa; the part is only meaningful in relation to the whole and the whole in relation to the parts. Moreover, Geertz holds that most members of a culture have roughly the same world-view, the same values and so on; and he insists that a culture is integrated from within, that is through native concepts and meaningful categories. This implies that the task of research primarily consists of penetrating, understanding and describing culture systematically the way it is experienced locally; not to explain it by recourse to ‘etic’ terms of comparison or explanation, be they structuralist, materialist or otherwise. Finally, Geertz emphsises that culture is expressed through shared, public symbols, that is meaningful communication. It is thus unnecessary to guess what lurks inside the heads of informants to understand their culture; it is sufficient to study the ongoing communication that takes place between them.

Like other influential theorists, Geertz has been criticised from many quarters, and the main objections are these: cultures are in fact not particularly tightly integrated, their boundaries are fuzzy, and there is a great deal of individual and group-based variation within any culture. It has moreover been pointed out that Geertzian hermeneutics inadvertently creates a harmonious model of society where exploitation and power discrepancies

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are neglected. Finally, many feel that anthropology should have somewhat larger ambitions than making sense of local universes of meaning; it should also explain how they arise, and it should engage in systematic, scientific comparison in order to achieve more general and theoretically sophisticated understandings of social and cultural dynamics than a purely interpretive anthropology is able to generate.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY TODAY

Contemporary anthropological theory appears a bit like the crossroads described at the beginning of this chapter, and for outsiders or new students, it may seem bewildering and surprising that scholars who are concerned with similar questions and use some of the same methods in describing them, speak such different theoretical languages. However, as this overview of some main trends and twentieth-century developments indicates, there is both continuity and change in the development of anthropological theory. The changes in theoretical perspectives have happened fast compared to other sciences. Some believe that this is because anthropology is a ‘young science’, but in my view, the ongoing revision and replacement of models of explanation and interpretation are caused by some intrinsic properties of the discipline itself. First, the raw material of anthropology – people, societies, cultures – is constituted differently from that of the natural and quantitative sciences, and it can be formalised only with great difficulty and at the peril of losing significant aspects. Second, there has been a tremendous development in terms of growth in high-quality empirical material over the last century, and since anthropological theory is deeply tied to observation, it must necessarily change when masses of new data are put on the table. In the second part of this book, numerous examples will be called upon to illustrate how this happens.

Since the mid-1980s, eclecticism has been a common theoretical strategy, that is combinations of elements derived from diverse sources. There has also been a tendency towards increased modesty concerning the explanatory power of anthropology. The grand theories which aimed to explain everything from the historical growth of culture to the universal mechanics of society, have been dismissed by most practitioners. Besides, there has been a marked

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tendency towards increasingly critical self-examination within anthropology, not least because of mounting criticism from some of the research subjects themselves. Many of them now prefer to describe themselves, rather than have foreign ‘experts’ do it in ways they often perceive as demeaning and distorting.

The presentation of theoretical perspectives above has indicated that there is a tight connection between the questions a scholar tries to find answers to, and the perspective he or she applies to the world. It may be said that there are three large families (or kin groups) of fundamental questions that have been raised again and again by anthropologists. The first group of questions are: what is it that makes people do whatever they do? This kind of research question will generate analytic models that take their point of departure in individuals and relationships between individuals. Sometimes psychological mechanisms will be drawn in, and occasionally, the analyst will add a supplementary macroperspective to his or her micromaterial; that is a description of external factors (economic circumstances, the state, etc.) that create and constrain the space for activity and contribute to explaining change.

The second group of questions are: how are societies or cultures integrated? This kind of question requires another kind of empirical material, and will to a greater extent look at institutions and shared patterns of significance rather than individuals. The individuals become exemplars rather than independent units of analysis.

Third: to what extent does thought vary from society to society, and how much is similar across cultures? When this question is dealt with, the method will necessarily concentrate on systems of knowledge and their internal properties.

Actual research projects are naturally much more precisely formulated. For one thing, particular issues are associated with certain regions (peasant societies in Latin America, witchcraft in southern Africa, gender in Melanesia); and for another, there are many specialisations in anthropology (from medical anthropology to the anthropology of ethnicity) with their own agendas and concepts. Yet these, I maintain, are the main fundamental questions raised in the discipline.

As already shown, there are important differences between the kinds of answers given to each of the questions mentioned. Cultural

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materialists offer different answers to structural-functionalists concerning how societies are integrated, and a structuralist and a hermeneuticist would offer very different accounts about how thought and knowledge are organised in different societies. The theory gives a framework, a direction and not least an indication of where to look when doing fieldwork. When there is theoretical disagreement, there may be several reasons for this; there may be disagreement as to which questions are the most relevant ones, about which kind of data is the most telling, and – not least – there may be disagreement about how to interpret the empirical material.

Wandering about in the maze of theoretical orientations, some may ask if theory is at all necessary. Does not the job ultimately consist in collecting empirical material and making sense of it, and does one need theory to accomplish such a task? The answer to the final part of the question is yes. There is an unlimited potential number of facts in the world, and we need criteria to judge some of them as more significant than others. Moreover, we need criteria enabling us to order the empirical material in a particular way. Finally, we need criteria for evaluating the ultimate significance of the empirical material; does it say something about human nature, perhaps, or about power in traditional societies, or about reciprocity as a basic quality of human relationships? All published work in anthropology has an element of theory, even if it is not always explicit. The selection of issues and empirical material entails a theoretically based narrowing of the world. At the same time, anthropology carries with it an important inductive bias; theory should ideally not be enforced upon the observations, but should grow out of them. If theory and empirical material do not fit together at all, it is not the latter’s fault.

The Oxford anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt once wrote that a good anthropological monograph contained an elephant of data and a rabbit of theory, but the stew must be cooked in such a way that the taste of the rabbit was felt in every spoonful. Although it raises spectacularly abstract questions sometimes, anthropology is not a subject for abstract speculation. It can be a kind of empirical philosophy; anthropologists raise some of the same questions as philosophers, but discuss them – after having learned theoretical thinking from philosophers – by making them engage with social and cultural facts. Social anthropology

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can be a kind of microsociology, which studies power and social relations from below. Significant parts of the discipline are located near the frontier with other disciplines. The relationship between many American anthropologists and literary studies has been close in later years, thanks to some of Geertz’s heirs and critics, whose analyses are highly sensitive to questions of style and metaphor. The relationship to ecology is also close in some quarters, where the research questions concern humanity and nature. Economics and psychology also have their productive frontierlands bordering on anthropology, and the kinship with history has become increasingly evident since Evans-Pritchard pronounced that social anthropology was more like history than like the natural sciences.

Thematically speaking, anthropology is so broad that it moves, almost chronically, in the frontier areas, at the same time as it nearly always retains its own identity. The shared identity that keeps the discipline together in spite of sometimes strikingly divergent research agendas, can be summed up as an insistence on regarding social and cultural life from within, a field method largely based on interpretation, and a belief (albeit variable) in comparison as a source of theoretical understanding. Most social and cultural anthropologists (but not all) regard evolutionist theories of cultural change as irrelevant or wrong; and most (but again not all) reject neo-Darwinist theories which attempt to account for social and cultural life as the products of our evolutionary history.

In the second part of this book, it will become evident that contemporary theoretical perspectives often combine influence from the classic theories in ways which create a greater complexity than that which was formerly common. In this way, unfortunate dualistic figures of thought are avoided, at the expense of losing simple, elegant explanations. For example, no self-respecting contemporary anthropologist would propose a distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies as anything but a provisional analytic tool, to be discarded the moment one dips into the substance of social reality. We know too much about the problems associated with these concepts, the ‘mixtures’ typical of nearly every society in existence, and the variations within each category, for such a distinction to be defensible. Besides, the contradiction between individualist and collectivist (or actor-

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based versus system-based) accounts, seen as a conflict in the 1960s and 1970s, is largely gone. In its stead, models trying to grasp both the acting individuals and the systemic properties constraining them are taken for granted by most contemporary anthropologists.

What characterises anthropological research today more than anything, is the recognition of complexity; the world is complex, cultures are complex, communities are complex, and analytical strategies must acknowledge complexity. In spite of this, I intend to indulge in a few attempts at ordering and simplification in the following chapters, just as I have done in the first half of this book, and will present some of the key fields in anthropological research. A caveat is necessary. It would be misleading, bordering on being disingenuous, to claim that these are the central themes, or to insinuate that research ‘has now come so far’ that it has reached watertight solutions to the problems they raise. But if social and cultural anthropology can be seen as a multistorey building with half a dozen flats on each level, I am prepared to defend the view that the chapters that follow properly belong to the two bottom floors.

FURTHER READING

Moore, Henrietta, ed. (1999) Anthropological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity.

Moore, Jerry (1997) Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.