Working knowledge

Wolpert’s definitions appear to be purely a ploy to reserve the prestigious S-word for white males. The fact that contemporary international science owes a great deal to Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other scientists—and to their cultural traditions—is conspicuously ignored in his book.

The various ploys critiqued above depend to some extent on a highly overdrawn contrast between the rational (or rationalized) knowledge of the “West” and the experiential, intuitive knowledge of the “rest.”

There is a real contrast here, and it is between knowledge learned from actual practice, especially in “the bush” (whether it be farm, forest, or fishery), really is phenomenologically different from book-learning. It is embodied; it is situated in particular places; it is associated with particular events. It is learned through total personal experience, involving physical action with all senses typically alert. It is, because of these factors, normally taught by example and by personal and traditional stories, not by rote memorization of lists (Nadasdy 2004, 2007).

People exaggerate the differences and polarize their ways of knowing. Mario Blaser (2009) has coined the term “political ontology” for the selective and politicized deployment of theories about the world. Bureaucrats and indigenous peoples, liberals and conservatives, scientists and humanists all have their claims about being, and often greatly overstate these and overemphasize the differences when they are jockeying for control in a given situation. Blaser’s example was a conflict between scientists and local indigenous people over hunting and its sustainability in Paraguay; evidently both sides cut corners on practice and rhetoric. (See also Nadasdy 2004, 2007.)

A superb study of the complementary roles of experiential learning and book learning, and how they are perfectly integrated in cattle ranching, has been provided by Kimberly Hedrick (2007). Far from being incommensurable, experiential and rational learning are totally dependent on each other in a real-world modern enterprise like ranching, or fishing (as my own research has revealed), or farming.

The contrast of experiential and academic knowledge is based on a still deeper contrast of procedural and declarative knowledge. The former is a matter of how to do something, the latter of remembering words and similar symbolic chains. The former nests in the motor and emotional centers of the brain, and is hard to translate into words and symbols. The motor centers, like the smell center of the brain, are rather poorly connected to the language center (which is usually in the left temporal lobe); so we have trouble talking about physical and olfactory sensation. Many of us have had the task of teaching our children to ride bikes, swim, and skate; we know how hard it is to teach by words, and how easy to teach through guided practice. Experiential knowledge of hunting and fishing is overwhelmingly procedural, and the Native people are right not to waste much time talking it out.

Arturo Escobar has recently written a major book, Territories of Difference (2008), that has much to say about science and knowledge. He (2008:122-128) classifies scientific knowledge into several useful categories. He begins with “epistemological realism,” and separates positivist science from systems science. Either way, epistemological realism is the standard scientific view: we know the truth through observation, hypothesis, test, and experiment. Positivism founders on reefs of indeterminacy, imperfect knowledge, and tendency to fragment reality and look only at what can be tested easily. Systems science gets somewhat beyond these.

There follows “epistemological constructivism,” including several positions that see science as culturally constructed. Escobar is somewhat, but only somewhat, aware of the fact that science is constructed through interaction, not in a vacuum, and thus that it usually constructs knowledge that checks out increasingly well with reality (a point independently made by myself, 2000, and Latour, 2004, 2005:90-100). Of course science and scientific “facts” are constructed. But “constructed” does not mean “wrong” (Anderson 2000; Latour 2005). It takes a great deal of work, thought, and interaction with the world to produce a scientific fact. This is true even of ones as obvious as that birds lay eggs, and that rattlesnakes can bite you fatally. It is correspondingly more true of modern discoveries. The theory of relativity and the germ theory of infective illnesses are no less true for being constructed.

The truth is, rather, that culture is knowledge we need and use to adapt to our environments (see, e.g., the good discussion of this in McElroy and Townsend’s classic textbook of medical anthropology, 2008). There are no “cultural constructions” hanging out there in spirit land; there is only cultural knowledge instantiated in individuals, as part of their learned knowledge.

Most of that knowledge is factually correct, and is tested all the time against reality. A culture that taught that strychnine was good food would change or die out soon. The level of sophistication of folk science is shown in the very widespread ability to identify poisonous plants and mushrooms, telling them from edible ones that are almost identical in appearance.

Culture always includes several alternative plans or courses of action for any given situation; the individual actor must decide which one to use. He or she then learns to fine-tune these plans in the light of reality. To say that people all mindlessly follow one cultural construction is to say that learning and change cannot exist.

“Phenomenological perspectives” are even farther from realism in Escobar’s view, and are associated with Tim Ingold’s ecological writings (Ingold 2000) as well as with phenomenological philosophy. Escobar takes phenomenology as showing that all is viewpoint, and that the world is what we see, not what “is.” Again he seems unaware of the hard-headed scientific background of phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and their common-sense views of what we can know through science and what remains basically “viewpoint.”

Then follows “poststructuralist antiessentialism,” basically the view that there is no truth or reality and that all is political power games. Interestingly, the backers of this view are the most dogmatic of all epistemologists in asserting the absolute and unquestionable truth of their statements. They dispute only the statements of others. This puts them in the odd position of categorically asserting their own profoundly debatable views, while dismissing claims that water is wet and that trees grow.

Finally, Escobar’s own view, heavily influenced by the excellent and thought-provoking writings of Manuel de Landa (esp. 2002), is “epistemological neorealism.” This holds that reality exists and is more or less knowable, but is a vast process rather than a set of discrete facts. (De Landa claims that his views come from Deleuze, but it appears to me, after reading De Landa 2002 and checking it against Deleuze’s writings, that de Landa came up with his own view and then scoured Deleuze for random remarks that could support it. It is hard to imagine Deleuze having concrete or specifiable views on anything. In any case, the view really comes from Heraclitus, millennia before either de Landa or Deleuze; it has been passed on in Western philosophy continuously.) It produces and is produced by differences of various sorts, but the various differentiated parts are united into a system. This means that one must take full account of other people’s views (surely one did not need to read philosophy to know that).

In addition to de Landa’s Heraclitan realism, there exists “holistic realism,” which looks at systems, self-organizing processes, networks, and other emergent features of complexity (Escobar 2008:128; Escobar is deeply devoted to self-organization, because he works with community organizing, but is unfortunately silent on how it happens in biology or society). As noted above, Escobar long wished to find a way to avoid essentializing the world, or speaking about it from one perspective. He has found his epistemological niche.

It seems to me that the above classification of epistemologies is a good one, not only useful in itself but directing our attention to questions of why people think such different things. After all, almost everyone agrees that there is a reality out there but that we can’t know it easily. For the rest, no one has been more aware of human error and bias than postivists from Ernst Mach to Karl Popper and Philip Kitcher. Their procedures are specifically designed to minimize these problems. If they fail, they can answer that the need is for even more careful procedures and verification strategies (Kitcher 1993).

Conversely, constructivists and phenomenologists direct their attention to human experience and perception. Therefore, they take full account of those errors and biases as much as to factual perception. They are often, if not usually, more interested in understanding the biases and perspectives than in eliminating them. But this does not mean that phenomenologists live in a dream-world. Some do, or at least they push the envelope awfully hard (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1966), but most are interested in seeing how we experience the world, rather than in denying the existence of both the world and the experience (Merleau-Ponty 1960, 1962, 1968, 2003).

Escobar has a balanced accomodation, one close to many current views on the matter. If we see reality as flux, unified at some level but highly differentiated in our experience, we can get a better understanding of both immediate realities and basic truths about the universe.

Of course, as we shall see in more detail, these views are conditioned by the backgrounds of the authors. Positivism began and still nests among classical physicists, who can do experiments and not worry overmuch about bias. (Other sciences try, and are accused of “physics envy.”) Extreme relativism and constructionism are commonest among critics of racism and sexism, fields in which the most blatant lies and nonsense passed as “science” for generations, discrediting the whole scientific enterprise in the eyes of many.

Intermediate positions like Escobar’s nest among people who combine several fields in anaylizing real-world phenomena. Biology and social science seem especially prone to produce such intermediate zones. They privilege solid predictive knowledge but are also anti-essentialist, process-oriented, and aware of alternative views. Escobar points to many systems biologists as well as social scientists (and see Anderson 2000; Latour 2004, 2005).

Escobar adds a powerful voice to the many who have critiqued the concept of “nature” (Cronon 1983; Escobar 1999, 2008; Hvalkof and Escobar 1998; for a vast compendium of “nature” views, see Torrance 1998). It is clear that “nature” is a highly contested culture-bound category that cannot be essentialized, and that, as Escobar points out, an essentializing political ecology would be hopeless nonsense. We are looking at processes, and usually at ill-defined ones.

On the other hand, there is a difference between Jasper National Park and Times Square, and a difference between the most remote Amazon forests and downtown Sao Paulo. The difference is highly relevant to human survival.

The sort of all-or-none thinking that equates such disparities is found in a great deal of academic writing, about a great many subjects. For instance, the concept of “tradition” once implied extreme stagnation over centuries. This has been quite properly and actively critiqued (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1985), but some of the critiques go to the other extreme, and deny the use of the whole concept. However, speaking English is more “traditional” in London than in Singapore, Scottish fiddle music on Cape Breton Island follows very old rules in spite of the new tunes constantly emerging, and sleeve buttons remain on coats. Of course traditions change and adapt. This does not prove that they do not exist, any more than the fact that I have changed greatly in the last 70 years proves that I do not exist.

Thus Escobar, like Latour (2005), quite properly makes the point that de-essentializing concepts does not consign them to the garbage bin; it makes them more useful.
Decolonizing Science

Escobar and some others have further argued that modern international science is in some sense “colonialist.” This is true in that it was associated with European expansion. Also, colonialism often drew on science, usually bad science, for justification. However, the corollary that modern science is a strictly colonialist enterprise, dedicated to domination and repression, is wrong. Claims that are indeed colonialist are better described as pseudoscience: racism, old-fashioned unilinear cultural evolution, and so on. Colonialism influenced genuine science in exactly the opposite way: knowledge from the colonies stung scientists into waking up and seeing a wider, more interesting world, in which nonwestern knowledge was valued to the point of lying at the very heart of modern science.

Escobar goes too far in branding what he calls “European” science as innately colonialist or racist. In fact, the racist shoe is entirely on the other foot: The racists are those who refer to modern international science as “European,” thus writing out of history the thousands of Asians, Africans, creole Americans, and others who contributed to modern international science. Old-fashioned racist ideas that contrast the superior, rational, empirical Science of “the west” with the mystical nonsense of the rest are still sometimes aired (e.g. Wolpert 1993), but few scholars take them seriously.

Escobar clearly does not mean to attack the whole scientific enterprise; he evidently refers more to a type of pseudo-rational, pseudo-scientific discourse in the modern world. That discourse is indeed pernicious, but it is both more and less than colonial. It is more, because it deludes and traps educated Europeans and Americans as much as it does the Third World; too many of the former confuse it with real science and real sense. It is less, because it is not really part of the colonial project, which was more about direct deadly force and brutal repression, though it used and uses mind-games when useful.

Escobar, otherwise dedicated to the thoroughly desirable and valuable goal of anti-essentialism, makes a sad exception for “colonialism,” a term he uses in a mystical way. Similarly, he uses “modernity” to refer to an imaginary and thoroughly essentialized thing that can somehow act: “modernity…aimed at the purification of order (separation between us and them, nature and culture)” (Escobar 2008:166), and so on. Besides the obvious absurdity of such verbiage, blaming world problems on abstractions gets the real humans off the hook. If “modernity” forces people to act in a certain way, there is no difference between Bush and Obama, Hitler and Gandhi, or the Ku Klux Klan and the ACLU. All of us are equally innocent (modernity drove us to it) and equally guilty (we all participated in the “modernist program”). As a corollary, we do not have to push reforms.

“Colonialism” is here, as it is quite widely, used as a cover term for projecting hegemonic Euro-American values on small-scale local peoples (Karen Capuder, pers. comm.; Smith and Wobst 2005). As such, it can refer to such things as separating local “science” from “religion” in knowledge systems that do not separate these. Such analytical violence is not really “colonial,” just foolish, but one can appreciate how indigenous peoples feel about having their traditions sliced and diced for the convenience of people who represent the dominant society. I shall retain “colonialism” in its original meaning, however, because the scientists and analysts who do this slicing and dicing do not usually mean to be colonial; they are merely doing their job, however imperfectly. They usually do not have the true colonial mind-set. Colonialism deserves to retain its real meaning: deliberate takeover and subjection of a population by an alien elite. Projection of Euro-American views onto colonized peoples is often a part of this takeover, but such deliberate missionization deserves to be separated from serious science.

Consider the pros and cons of one critique. Smith and Wobst (2005:5) write of archaeology that it “is a colonialist endeavor. It is based on, and generally perpetrates, the values of Western cultures. Privileging the material over the spiritual and the scientific over the religious, arcaheological practice is solidly grounded in Western ways of knowing the world.” It is indeed deplorable to elevate scientistic (not scientific) analyses above all else. It is much more deplorable to shut out indigenous voices and knowledges (this is the real theme of Smith and Wobst’s book).

But there are problems here. First, the Enlightenment attitude in question was developed exactly and specifically to counter the strongly religious, ethnocentric, autocratic attitudes that actually drove colonialism (including slavery and imperial expansion). Second, the Enlightenment view was developed explicitly with reference to Near Eastern and Chinese thought, which were seen as liberating. Also, the Chinese developed a quite rational and even scientific archaeology in the Song Dynasty (960-1278), long before the west did. Third, academic archaeology spread to Mexico, India, China, and other parts of the world before 1950, and been enthusiastically adopted by local scholars. Fourth, archaeologists differ; many, if not most, of them are far less dogmatically scientistic than implied by the quote. Fifth, comparative analysis does have value, and the fact that it may have come with conquering powers does not make it automatically bad. After all, inoculations and other modern medical techniques are clearly valuable and effective, however (wrongly) identified in some circles with “western” medicine and colonialism.

On the other hand, recapturing and revalorizing traditional ways of thinking may be, and is, properly be described as “decolonizing” (e.g. Smith and Wobst 2005), and this raises thoughtful issues. I certainly cannot be dogmatic on this or any other terminological issue; I do not intend my working definitions to be “hegemonic.” I merely try to use terms consistently and usefully.
Anthropology has been particularly tarred with the “handmaid of colonialism” brush, because of several unfortunate truths about its early history. Early anthropologists included a fair number of racists, colonialists, and excessively zealous missionaries. These influenced theory, not only in regard to races and “inferior” peoples, cultures, and religions, but in the propagation of unilinear cultural evolutionism. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, Europeans loved to classify people as “savages,” “barbarians,” and “civilized,” always working their way up to whatever modern person is writing the story. The Chinese had something very similar, seeing an evolution from “raw barbarians” to “cooked barbarians”—those somewhat Sinicized—to those finally assimilated into Chinese civilization.

However, this was not the end of the story. Racism and unilinear evolutionism were demolished by anthropologists, specifically Franz Boas and his school. Boas also moved more and more toward integrating Native Americans and other indigenous people in his programs, and toward getting people from a given culture to do the ethnography of that culture, rather than (or as well as) sending outsiders. Boas realized that both insider and outsider views could be valuable. Even before Boas, Native Americans and other indigenous minorities had been involved in anthropological scholarship, and a large literature by indigenous and minority scholars exists from the early 20^th century.

The Boasian tradition flourishes largely in North American anthropology, but also in France and elsewhere. British anthropology remained more colonial for a longer time, and thus Britain has been the main locus of criticism of anthropology as a colonial discipline. However, even British anthropology was influenced by findings from other cultures. Moreover, just as Boas moved from doing his own ethnography to training people to study their own traditions, Bronislaw Malinowski, the prototypic colonial anthropologist, wound up strongly supporting his student Jomo Kenyatta, the father of independent Kenya (see Kenyatta 1962). There are learning curves in the world.

A point too rarely made in anthropology is the enormous influence of traditional cultures on theory and method. Veronica Strang and several discussants dealt with this issue in a major paper (Strang 2006), but there is more documentation needed; some will emerge in the present work. Suffice it to say here that cultural theories, like the rest of science, are now the product of an international or global enterprise. In any case, Strang and her varied interlocutors agreed that anthropology has taken account of other cultures and has not been a monolithic European enterprise with a unified European gaze.

So, very briefly, anthropology and anthropologists have ranged from apologists for colonialism and hierarchy to stinging critics and opponents thereof. Instead of blanket condemnations or praises of the field of anthropology, there should be three other actions: first, eliminate vestiges of racist or judgmental rhetoric; second, differentiate anthropology’s rather heroic critical and progressive tradition from the less enlightened parts of its past; third, carry on with the progressive tradition, to continue incorporating all types of views and above all to continue training researchers to study their own cultures and use their own cultural knowledge.

X: Some Theories of Complex Cultural Knowledge

From all the above—all the rules, models, classifications, causation inferences, and erros—people construct their world. Cultures “construct” in a different way. Cultural constructions and cultural representations are emergents in the Durkheimian sense (Durkheim 1995; Kronenfeld 2008). Cultural constructions diverge from cold objective reality—often quite far. Thus “cultural construction” has come to mean “phony” or “nonsense” in some quarters. Of course, this is exaggerated. Culture is an adaptive mechanism, allowing us to cope with the world.

Cultural, and social, construction goes beyond models, to embrace the universe. A classic book by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1967), said it all in the title. Mark Gottdiener’s The Social Production of Urban Space (1997) summarizes a great deal of work on the ways societies literally construct their worlds on the basis of their cultural beliefs. From cultural constructions of reality, and of what a city should look like, a society constructs actual buildings and highways.

There is not space in this chapter to discuss theories in detail; full treatment of the latter can be found in their cited works.

Several explanatory endeavors turn on the belief that culture exists to help people achieve particular goals. Such explanations are termed functionalist. They postulate that cultural lore has particular functions, for which it is adapted. They are thus sometimes called adaptationist, especially if they have a time perspective.

Culture, for example, might exist to get human material needs satisfied. This position was advocated, briefly and rather thinly, by Malinowski (1944), but a much more extreme position was argued at much greater length by Marvin Harris (1968, and many subsequent books that add little to his argument). Harris argued that culture and all its institutions must be understood as ways to get calories and protein. All other functions are dependent on this or are downright illusory. Harris was especially scornful of theories based on “cultural irrationalism,” his term for the idea that many cultural ways might involve nonmaterial causation. Harris’ notions were extremely influential at the time. They blended, at the time, with a narrow Darwinian school that saw all animal behavior, human included, in terms of “optimal foraging” (Winterhalder and Smith 1981): individual maximization of the benefit/cost ratio of food-getting.