| fashionable modern absurd credulity by a respected intellectual.5 But there is truth, there is reality, and there are accepted criteria for judging. First, all day and every day, all humans deal with unquestioned reality; they are perfectly capable of talking about it to each other in comprehensible language. The timetable states there is a 10.19 a.m. train. If I go the station, either a train will arrive close to 10.19 a.m. or there will be massive evidence that one was expected, usually with an explanation of why it has not come. There is obvious truth, masses and masses of it. Of course, humans misperceive, misremember, draw false conclusions, are socially and culturally conditioned, are gifted with fantasy and confuse constantly their fantasies with reality. The boundary between experience of reality and experience - for example, delusions - of something else is massively fuzzy, so there are many puzzling cases. But minute by minute, there is reality and there is truth. The natural sciences pose more complex problems. Human fantasy constructs models of reality, and tests them out. All foragers survive by socially tested and accumulated practical models of reality, many of them true, more or less, and many of them false. Once humans invented writing, and could record, pass on, revise, and replace complex practical models, including mathematical models, ‘science’ became a possible activity of a small elite in a few human societies who talked to and wrote for each other. The idea of systematically questioning, and testing by evidence and logical controversy, all ideas current in a society, however authoritative, became, by accident, acceptable to political authorities in the sixteenth century in Europe. (Gellner 1986). The discoveries that have followed with accelerating rapidity since are not arbitrary social constructions. The central core ideas of the natural sciences are true; and well tested procedures are agreed for dealing with the huge penumbras of doubt. Scientific knowledge is cumulative, interlocking and largely mutually consistent, and confirmed by results. Science in this sense lends four handles to relativists. First, a questioning scepticism implies, even insists on, provisionality. On certain issues, what yesterday’s scientists took as scientific truth, today’s scientists today massively amend or even reject; who knows what scientists will say tomorrow? This applies only to the peripheral areas of new research. The major areas of basic science are certain. Secondly, in some areas scientists currently ( Does anyone know of serious professional natural scientists who are radically relativist ?) do not yet agree about the line between what is explicitly provisional |
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| 1.4 Fantasy Humans have an amazing, an almost infinite capacity for fantasy, for imagining, for invention. I heard recently a well illustrated seminar paper on Yoruba masquerades; what structures of invention. I, Frazer (all twelve volumes), all of us, know of a huge variety of stories, assertions, practices and institutions; we also know that many - not the majority - of them become accepted as true, valid, normal; even as morally or cosmically obligatory. Tylor, Frazer, Levi Bruhl, Evans-Ptitchard and a myriad of others asked the question, why do primitive and ignorant people ( including ancient Greeks and Romans) believe so much palpable rubbish? Why do they treat as beyond question, even as sacred, things which ‘we’, the rational, see as so foolish that one established usage of the word ‘myth’ is ‘false nonsense which others foolishly believe’. Why do they credit people, plants, animals, objects, actions, words and so on with such a variety of ‘magical’ powers? A good question. What they did not seem to notice is that this kind of credulity is no less prevalent in ‘modern’ society than it is, or ever was, in other societies; and that many people whose profession entails tough rationality are as prone to credulity as all the rest of us. The evidence for contemporary non rational credulity is all round us. One of my older Turkish village friends remarked, sitting among his goggle eyed young, with his back firmly to the newly acquired television screen, “It’s all lies”. In a profound sense, so it is. Millions buy products advertised by blatant and totally irrelevant sex. Even serious, argumentative, educational programmes use conscious trickery as well cliche ridden fallacies to get their messages accepted. Humans are no less given to fantasy and credulity because they, or a few of them, play the internet, manufacture nerve gases, send space craft to Jupiter, engineer genes, and argue in mathematical detail about the Big Bang. 1.5 Reality When I assert that humans are credulous, I am saying that they often accept all kinds of ideas and stories on insufficient evidence or on faulty logic. So I am implying that sometimes evidence and logic can be cogent. And rightly so. Relativism is fashionable. I actually heard a colleague shout from the back in serious indignation at an ASA conference “There is no such thing as truth”. (A parallel with “All Cretans are liars”? Is “There is no such thing as truth” itself true?) A marvellous example of |
| this conditioning. We all suffer from ‘false consciousness’. |
| with explicit unhappiness - ideas about ‘groups’, ‘social structure’ and ‘social control’ acquired in four terms of study in the Oxford Department of Social Anthropology. 1.3 Anthropological Error Why are we anthropologists always to some degree wrong? Three main reasons, among others. Words have fuzzy boundaries. The word ‘ambiguous’ is quite inadequate, because important words, like brother, clan, plough, funeral, marriage, gift, weapon let alone words like classification, corporate, species, structure, love, modernity, clarity, theory, boundary, ‘indigenous knowledge’, core, meaning, and so on and so on, normally have several core meanings, and any given specific use of a word in a given sentence is likely to have at least some penumbra of possible imprecisions. Second, ‘sociocultural processes’ are infernally, hideously complex. I heard someone say on the radio that physics is appallingly complex, chemistry vastly more so, and biology another huge leap more complex; largely because at each step the role of accident increases by quantum leaps. The complexities of human conduct are another quantum leap towards accident, towards the fortuitous interactions of systems. It seems to me that we have hardly begun to come to terms with this complexity. So many factors are in fact relevant to producing any given human outcome - say the marriage of Hasan and Elmas in Sakaltutan in 1950, the Homeric poems, or the divinity of Augustus Caesar, or inflation in Turkey, or Diana’s funeral - that no one can know enough. All social models are provisional and approximate; which is why the almost universal criticism of any statement about human conduct- factual or theoretical - is that it is too simple. Third, - an issue too difficult to discuss here - we all suffer from ‘false consciousness’. Almost all of the ‘important’ and ‘professional’ words used by anthropologists are morally or politically loaded; and very often anthropologists, like other social scientists, confuse the ‘analysis’ - the construction of models designed to solve puzzles about socio-cultural processes - with their wish or self imposed duty to be social moralists, even technologists, to solve problems3, to achieve certain moral purposes. Innumerable discussions - virtuously - confuse rejecting arguments because of errors of evidence and logic, with rejecting them because of alleged moral or political unacceptability.4 |
| 3See fn. 1 4Of course,obviously all humans’ interpretation of social situations, and their use of models of social causality is profoundly conditioned both by their socialisation into given forms of knowledge (‘culture), and by their social position and social iterates. It does not follow at all that serious attempts to argue from evidence and logic are all doomed. What is totally unacceptable is the almost universal use of this style of argument with the implicit claim that the arguer and his supporters have a monopoly of exemption from |
| others never use it without stopping to ask - and answer - who is included. Anthropologists talk and writing is never - well hardly ever - crystal clear. For those who think that they are ,“scientists”, the maximum possible clarity is plainly desirable. But for good reasons and not just because of anthropologists’ collective laziness and incompetence, ‘we’ can seldom get things really clear, and then often trivially. What are we - no,no, what am I - trying to achieve? I claim to belong to a profession which studies comparatively all human societies and cultures. Wow! What arrogance! What for? Well, to ‘explain’, to resolve puzzles, to make them ‘understandable’. 1.2 Causal Models We do this by using words, and occasionally numbers and other symbols, to produce ‘models’ of ‘processes’. Though some colleagues vociferously deny it, I argue that as a matter of testable ethnographic fact, overtly or overtly, most anthropologists most of the time imply and are profoundly interested in some kind of causal connection - things are as they are because of something else, usually a large collection of interacting something elses.2 ‘We’ present models, which are always approximate and always too simple, and therefore always open to the criticism that ‘reality’ is more complicated; there are, or appear to be, some counter instances. The opportunities for mutual misunderstanding, for talking past each other, for ‘indirection’, for arguing about the meaning of words are legion. I suggest - a typical oversimplification - two kinds of models. One is descriptive. In Sakaltutan in 1950, with two exceptions, all women had been born in the village or in a similar village within four or five hours walk; only one adult woman, and about six or seven school girls, could read. When a girl married for the first time, it was universally expected that she would move into her new husband’s home, and show a high degree of obedience and deference to his parents. The second kind of model is in some sense ‘theoretical’. In Sakaltutan, I found that a ‘patrilineal’ model of kinship explained a lot of both talk and observed conduct. In writing and talking, I used - |
| 2 I do not deny that some antrhoplogists simply present alleged facts, or offer interpretations, or assert large trends or truths (‘functionalism is old fashioned’ ‘intercultural truth is a chimera’ “cause is a mistaken positivist concept), or write and say or other things, without explicitly involving causality. I have only anecdotal evidence; but how often do the same person denounce cause, and argue that anthropologists have ethical duties to make the world better, or at least to avoid making it worse? Surely all ethics of action implies causality. |