Theories and Tools

The following is something I wrote for a thread on Savage Minds. The topic is the relation of theory to ethnography. In it I recommend that we take seriously the metaphor that likens anthropological theories to tools and see training in anthropology as preparing people with a toolkit filled with a rich diversity of tools, some of which may prove useful at the sites where we do fieldwork.

Once we get past the “love a theory and apply it” trap — the one with the consequences implicit in the maxim that to someone who only has a hammer everything looks like a nail—the virtues of entering the field with a diverse toolkit of theories and methods quickly become apparent. Whatever else ethnography is, it is clearly exploratory research, an attempt to get oriented in a space that at first is largely unknown. Every fieldworker rapidly discovers both unanticipated opportunities and unexpected barriers to doing what their grant application says they are planning to do.

Could I have anticipated that a Daoist healer I met in Taiwan would pull me aside one day and tell me about a vision in which the Jade Emperor had told him that I should become his disciple? No way. Should I have foreseen that, while Victor Turner worked in Africa with a people who live in villages with an average population of a couple of dozen people, I would be working in a Chinese market town with a population of 35,000, with people who keep much of their lives private behind the brick walls of their houses? Probably, but nothing in my training had taught me to think like that.

And it wasn’t just me. I remember a seminar in which Terry Turner told us about going to Brazil intending to do the kind of extended case studies of social dramas that Victor Turner had done in The Drums of Affliction. He quickly discovered that, while the Ndembu might have long memories and be ready to tell you who did what to who going generations back, this wasn’t at all true of the people he found himself studying. What they would rattle on about was myth.

I also remember hearing something that made the opposite point, someone remarking on how the African peoples studied by British anthropologists all had complex social structures but the African anthropologists studied by French anthropologists all had complex cosmologies.

The point of all these anecdotes is a recommendation that we avoid looking for the Theory with a capital T that will be our key to understanding everything and, instead, see theories as tools that direct our attention to some particular aspects of whatever we happen to be studying. Take the toolkit metaphor seriously. No one gets much work done by staring endlessly at the hammer, screwdriver or wrench that catches their eye when they look in the toolbox. The work begins when we recognize that, for this or that particular problem, this or that tool (or, more likely, combination of tools) is what we need to use. Some of us may recognize that for the problem they are working on, none of our tools works very well, and invent a whole new tool. But trying to do that without first becoming familiar with the uses and limitations of the tools already in the toolkit is foolish, indeed.

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Comment by Huon Wardle on June 25, 2010 at 2:41pm
human beings are featherless bipeds who walk upright, have forward-facing binocular eyes...

I imagine that Needham would have pointed to the contrast of 'physical and ideational'

Brent Berlin's work on color classification that demonstrated consistent foci for color categories across a wide range of cultural variation

Well Berlin used to be taught as gospel in first year courses, but the Berlin Kay research has had some fairly serious doubters. Before B&K Conklin put forward some types of evidence which prefigure Needham's discussion of polythetic categories and give (retrospectively) an example in the form of Hanunoo colour classification. More recently, Saunders has unpicked some of the B&K evidence: so I guess unless one is an expert in studying perception cross-culturally one has, to some degree, think which theorist(s) one is going to rely on.

Here is a paper by Saunders.http://www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/saunders.html
Comment by John McCreery on June 25, 2010 at 1:44pm
In social life, that is, there are no established phenomena, in the form of isolable social facts for instance, which correspond to the elements and particles in nature.

Huon, isn't this going a wee bit too far? One thinks of such old-fashioned observations as the facts that human beings are featherless bipeds who walk upright, have forward-facing binocular eyes and opposable thumbs, are born as helpless infants who require prolonged postnatal care before they can take care of themselves and, even then, will, to be able to reproduce, require food, shelter, mates and operating genitalia.

The notion that social facts are inherently more polythetic and mutable than biological facts may be one of those pieties that needs revisiting. One thinks not only of Brent Berlin's work on color classification that demonstrated consistent foci for color categories across a wide range of cultural variation and Lévi-Strauss's provocative thought that there is a limited set of universal contrasts to be discovered in myth, but also more recent work by George Lakoff in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and Philosophy in the Flesh.
Comment by Huon Wardle on June 25, 2010 at 1:13pm
Though it doesn't discuss the rise of theory, this 70s paper by Needham does point to why 'theories' characteristically give people the hope of stabilising their knowledge about the social. Theories can act like monothetic categories that make the material look like it is one solid object.

Your own narrative about Victor Turner suggests something else though - anthropologists very typically use a specific exemplary anthropologist to locate their own fieldwork concerns and interests - as you do here when you frame your own fieldwork by a contrast with what Turner might have expected in his own theoretica-cum-empirical field of research.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/65935/Rodney-Needham-Polythetic-Classific...
In the natural sciences the features by which polythetic classes are defined have generally a real, distinct, and independent character, and they can be clearly stipulated in advance. Such features
are, in zoology, skeletal structure (a definite number of bones functionally arranged in a certain order); in botany, roots, leaves, pistils; in bacteriology, chemical elements, compounds, and their reactions; in many sciences, at a deep level of analysis, molecular structures and the particles of which these are composed. This is a rather rough and ready characterisation, of course, and it becomes less appro- priate when ultimately the character of 'fundamental' particles comes into question, but it serves all the same to make a crucial contrast between the natural sciences and social anthropology. In what has been presented here as the most relevant example of taxonomic method, namely quantitative bacteriology, the researchers are in no doubt concerning what is or is not lactose or about whether it is or is not present: it can be exactly defined in advance, and its chemical properties and reactions are known or testable. This kind of certainty about the materials under study (whatever ambiguity may attend the discrimination of forms or the assessment of degrees of resistance, etc.) permits the method of classification by differences: a definite feature can be definitely determined as either present or absent. But in the realm of social facts this aspect of polythetic classification is hardly to be found. A main reason is that in social anthropology the determination of the constituent features of a polythetic class cannot be carried out by reference to discrete empirical particulars, but entails instead a reliance on further features of the same character which themselves are likewise polythetic. In social life, that is, there are no established phenomena, in the form of isolable social facts for instance, which correspond to the elements and particles in nature. The disparity between the natural sciences and social anthropology, in taxonomic method as in much else, reflects a contrast of kind between natural entities and social facts. This contrast is the most marked when the materials for an anthropological classification are collective representations. More generally, in any case, there is no reason that a classificatory technique that is appropriate to one kind of evidence should be applicable to another, and all the less is this so when the evidences in question are contrasted as physical and ideational.
Comment by John McCreery on June 25, 2010 at 4:45am
An interesting take on the issue under discussion: Discovered the following thought by George Dyson in the Nieman Report via Edge.

In the North Pacific Ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.

The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results—maximum boat/minimum material—by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.


Theorizing in an era of abundant, easily accessible information may become something quite different from theorizing in a past when information was scarce and hard to lay hands on and finding and using every possible scrap was highly valued.
Comment by John McCreery on June 24, 2010 at 4:34pm
However, what you are proposing is going to be an ever-mounting and very prodigious task, giving that the body of literature isn’t going to shrink anytime soon.

Not the problem you think it is. The clue lies in what you write here.

Also, where do we draw the line in what we stick in that toolbox? Certainly figures like Malniowski and Levi-Strauss go in there. Does Marx and Durkehim? What about Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin? Sartre, Proust and Baudelaire?!

If we wanted to include everybody, that would be impossible. But we don't. We don't want to include everybody. We don't, in fact, want to include anybody, except for grateful acknowledgements of where ideas came from.

Check out a basic physics textbook. Yes, we see a few names. "Newton" points to classical mechanics, "Boyle's law" points to basic thermodynamics, "Einstein" points to relativity. But the book isn't about Newton, who wrote more pages about astrology than he did about gravity or mathematics, or Boyle, who was, says Wikipedia, "also noted for his writings in theology," or Einstein, who, again from Wikipedia wrote "over 150 non-scientific works....and commentated prolifically on various philosophical and political subjects." The focus is on the big ideas, of which, when you come down to it, there aren't that many.

I may be prejudiced here, having once had a philosophy teacher, Hal Walsh at Michigan State, circa 1962-66, suggest that there were no more than 75 significant ideas in the whole history of Western philosophy. That said, my proposition is that if we focused on the ideas instead of what amounts to a dumbed down intellectual history of the discipline with appropriate bows and obeisances, we might actually get somewhere.
Comment by Joel M. Wright on June 23, 2010 at 10:30pm
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Elsewhere on OAC, I have argued that theory should be approached not as a reflection of the Truth, but as a set of heuristic devices that anthropologists can use to direct their craft.

However, what you are proposing is going to be an ever-mounting and very prodigious task, giving that the body of literature isn’t going to shrink anytime soon.

It also seems to me that the development of anthropological theory is fraught with a certain kind of know-it-all mentality. “You are wrong, as is evidenced by point X1, X2...Xn. So, we’re going to sacrifice your theory on the altar of emancipation.”

Also, how do we deal with the heterogeneity that will surely be a part of scrutinizing any given theoretical toolbox? What I means is, if you get 10 anthropologists in a room, you're likely to get at least 11 different opinions on a given subject. Some of this heterogeneity might simply come from differences in who is more or less familiar with which tools.

Also, where do we draw the line in what we stick in that toolbox? Certainly figures like Malniowski and Levi-Strauss go in there. Does Marx and Durkehim? What about Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin? Sartre, Proust and Baudelaire?!

Also, how far back can/should we go when applying theory? In some ways, I think that issues of differentiation and specialization are really relevant factors to understanding the force-of-nature-like ebb and flow of our consumerist, free-market economies; yet I find myself embarrassed, almost guilty, in thinking that far back into the annals of theory. Plus, I bet I'd get a rousing lambasting for even trying.

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