Anthropology’s peculiar ways of knowing

Erika Milam: One of the questions I have had about anthropology in recent years boils down to this: What do anthropologists share as a subject? It used to be culture. Bruno Latour tried to shift anthropologists’ collective attention to the social, which made room for relationships between humans and non-human actors. Latour also, of course, argued in We Have Never Been Modern that the modernist presumption severing culture and nature belied the very real, messy connections that continued to bind the two together—despite modernist rhetoric, humans are not separate from nature. This past spring, I taught a historiography of science graduate seminar in which we read classic texts in the field. Latour on the heels of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, and it struck me for the first time that the project Foucault described as coming into being with modernity—the idea of universal Man, in all its gendered universality—was over even as he wrote. Where are we now?

Webb Keane: So one thing cultural and social anthropologies have in common is a search for some larger context that would make sense of us that doesn’t come down to human intentionalities—the specific intentionalities of self-conscious actors who know exactly what they’re doing.

Culture as an explanation for human behavior has become a cliché. The cliché, you know, is a sort of terrible caricature of Boasian anthropology (the American tradition) but there’s some seed of truth in it: “Honest officer, I couldn’t help it. My culture made me do it.” Once meant to be illuminating, over the last few generations the idea has muted to become a way of explaining things once attributed to racial differences, like poverty, crime, addiction, and so forth.

Milam: Right.

Keane: British and French social anthropology say the same thing: “Honest officer, it’s not my fault. Society made me this way.” If you think of the social or the cultural as larger contexts within which we come to be who we are, that is already some kind of decentering. At least in a weak sense. You could say this is why agency became a question. It became an interesting problem precisely because whether you focus on the social or you focus on the cultural, it seemed that agency was not part of the story.

Milam: It’s interesting. Historians as a crew are, I think, obsessed with causality. There are different uses of history. Some historians seek to understand the past on its own terms. The incorporation of anthropological theory into history came because scholars like Peter Brown, for example, wanted to understand the logics of historical cultures in the past that worked according to vastly different principles and assumptions than in the present. This is the idea that “the past is another country.” Other historians—Lorraine Daston’s work on the history of rules comes to mind—are instead keen to use narratives of the past to explain the present so as to understand how the present came to be. Then causality is crucial. The factors that explain the origins of the present reveal how to imagine the present as otherwise.

In this causal framework, agency is seen to counter the ubiquity of victim narratives when it comes to telling certain kinds of histories. Rather than always painting histories of oppression as victimhood narratives, for example, some historians hoped to tell stories in which their historical subjects made a difference despite the odds arrayed against them. Take, for example, Alondra Nelson’s excellent work on the Black Panther’s fight against medical discrimination. As Walter Johnson argued in 2003, there’s a tricky relationship between agency and structural constraint. Over-emphasizing agency in historical accounts risks underestimating the structural constraints of the times. The worry here is that saying “this person had agency” can fundamentally misrepresent their life circumstances and presupposes a recent liberal subjecthood.

Keane: Right. So, on the one hand, you could say that agency was a way to say, “Grant people their dignity.” On the other hand, then, agency is in danger of becoming a form of victim blaming as well.

There was, of course, a Marxist tradition in anthropology that was always explanatory. But it really fell in disfavor for many reasons. Structural Marxism, which was particularly strong in anthropology, seemed to eliminate agency altogether. But more importantly, it also eliminated people’s self-understanding. Scholars like Peter Brown or Natalie Zeman Davis or others who were influenced by Geertz turned toward these logics. They emphasized understanding the logics and the meanings of a particular given world.

And Geertz famously said: “You don’t go to Macbeth to find out what happened in medieval Scotland. You go to Macbeth to find out what it is to gain a kingdom and lose your soul.” In effect he’s saying that anthropologists are not interested in what happened—that’s what historians do. We’re interested in “what happens,” which is something more existential, more general, in a sense. And so that sort of eliminates causality as the central thing that you want to understand.

That view is under a lot of pressure now. The generation of my graduate students is first and foremost concerned with immediate social problems. It’s very hard to understand how to deal with immediate social problems without some sense of what caused them and what might change them. But anthropologists don’t have a really good way of thinking about this analytically. Causality is more often presumed than explained, and the conceptual problems it poses are largely unexamined. Even though Geertz’s direct influence has waned considerably, the way his approach discouraged an interest in causality (“what happened . . . and why”) still affects the field. But when you’re interested in the particularities of this specific social or political problem, you may need a clearer sense of “what happened”—of who (or what) does what to whom. We have a finely tuned appreciation of particularity, but less of an analytical sense of causes and consequences.

Milam: Fascinating. I admit, I find my conversations with anthropologists intellectually productive for another reason too. Anthropologists are just terrific at conceptualizing the relationship of their specific stories to larger theoretical points and incorporating references to other scholars in an extraordinarily generous way—exactly as you have just done with Geertz. More specifically, I have found the anthropological literature on the specificities of place and knowledge to be very helpful in my own work—everything from Lisa Messeri’s terrific Placing Outer Space to Tulasi Srinivasan’s The Cow in the Elevator on the anthropology of wonder. I find anthropology so rich in combining personal experience and the affect of place to understand how knowledge and technology interact in the world. The result is a real sense of lived experience.

Keane: I agree. Those are strengths. You know, my worry is that those very strengths make it very hard for us to communicate because we require a certain amount of patience from the reader. You ask an anthropologist to explain something and they say, “Well, it’s very complicated.” There’s a cliched opening to the anthropology article: “People say X. I want to complicate the story.” But this reveals another thing that anthropologists have in common: an ethnographic sensibility—a real resistance to models, to generalizations, to universals. There’s often an enormously high value placed on particularism, contingency, specificity, detail in the concrete.

Milam: Historians are not immune from this I have to say.

Keane: Everyone else thinks that a proper explanation of something is to simplify it so it becomes clear and you can understand it and maybe use it to understand other situations.

But I deeply value everything you’ve just said about anthropology. You know, Janet Malcolm, the journalist, once wrote a book called Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. But the title was misapplied because it best describes anthropology. This gets us back to the question of what ethnography is. The fieldwork method is one that is incredibly specific. Although we all think we should be more collaborative, fieldwork is still largely carried out by individuals in a very specific time in a very specific place with a particular network of people. So one of the things that puzzles people outside the field is what can you make of such particular stuff.

And yet at the same time the idea of anthropology from its founding has been the study of all human possibilities. There’s certainly no other social science that remotely approaches that. Psychology is the study of American sophomores: The people who sign up for their experiments. So you have this strange relationship between hyper specificity and this vast background context. I spent two years living in a community in Indonesia; when I go to think about it, at the back of my mind is stuff that I learned about Papua New Guinea and rural France and about the Andes highlands. There’s something strangely paradoxical about that.

I think it makes it hard for us to explain what we’re up to. These days we don’t have a really good meta theory about this. What we’re doing and the way we do it is something that we constantly have to justify in a way that I think economists, sociologists, and even historians in some sense don’t have to worry about quite as much. No historian of the American Civil War has to explain why the American Civil War is important and no psychologist needs to explain why the study of child development is important. But when Srinivasan looks at Hindu ritual in Bangalore, the value of this research may not be as obvious. As one editor told me after I explained my first book project, “But you write about people nobody cares about.” So very early on in anthropology, the justification for our research had to in some sense respond to the question: In what way does this case contribute to some big claim about humankind? But answering that question required some kind of meta theory, I think. You would say that you were contributing to Marxism or psychoanalysis or structuralism or whatever. But at the moment, in the absence of this kind of theory, we need other forms of justification.

Milam: Historians of science seem to circulate back to a shared set of questions about the origins of knowledge: How do we know what we think we know about the world? How is knowledge generated? How do people agree that something is true? As a result, insights from other social sciences have been crucial to that project—especially anthropologies and sociologies of knowledge. Understanding the circumstances in which scientific cultures have embraced some ways of knowing and simultaneously denied others opens up a rich set of comparative questions.

Keane: This also becomes part of the paradoxical nature of anthropology because if we have anything close to a Hippocratic Oath—if there’s one thing we really have in common—it is the injunction to take people seriously. We then get into arguments about how seriously to take them. Like what about witchcraft?

Anthropologists have tended to be kind of evasive about this. They say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I take it seriously.” But . . . well, I’ll tell you a story.

I teach an undergraduate course in the anthropology of religion. Most of the students in it are not anthropology majors. The final assignment is to observe a religious ceremony or event of some religion other than one that you grew up in or are now a member of, take field notes, analyze, and discuss. There’s this guy who looks like a real bro: Everyday his cap is on backwards and he never says a word. It’s not to my credit to confess that I figured he was just marking time. After I announce the assignment, he comes up to me and says, “Professor, I can’t do this.” And I say, “Why not?” He says, “I cannot worship another God.” I answer, “I’m not asking you to worship anyone. I’m asking you to go be an anthropological observer.” And he goes, “Well, how do I know that even being in the room isn’t worshipping another god? Or being disrespectful to them?” And it’s clear he’s an evangelical Christian. And he’s really thinking. So I offer him alternative service: “I want you to find one of these groups that you won’t study and interview a community leader. Ask them what they think about the question about sitting in. And then I want you to go to your pastor and present your pastor with the same question.”

This guy wrote a brilliant paper. He nailed me on the paradox of anthropology. He pointed out that we are so committed to taking people unlike ourselves them seriously and that’s why we are trying to observe their religious ceremonies in a dispassionate and neutral way. But for many religious groups, that is precisely not to take them seriously. By observing them neutrally rather than actually participating fully might mean I’m going to hell. The very premise of our sort of charity toward others is in some sense a form of false consciousness. Or, at the very least, it’s a paradox. So I try to encourage our students to be aware of how paradoxical what we do is. And it doesn’t mean you stop doing it. In some sense what we do is all the more interesting because our aims are so impossible.

Milam: I find this intriguing. There is a parallel in the history of science—and this allows me to loop back to Latour, which is great—what we call anti-Whiggism. Old-fashioned “Whig” histories of science progressively built from the past to a known present. For example, even if an author started their account in 1750, they knew (and their readers knew) that the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier was destined to discover Oxygen not dephlogisticated air. As a result of incorporating perspectives from sociology of knowledge, historians instead started writing histories as if they did not know the outcome to take seriously the perspectives of all their historical actors on their own terms. For such anti-Whig histories, the future was treated as just as unknown to the author as it was in the moment about which they were writing—without presupposing later knowledge. This perspective found particular purchase in writing about scientific controversies and debates; it was no long considered sufficient to attribute success in a debate to the fact that one side was (ultimately) proven correct.

How do you do that? Latour devoted a substantial portion of We Have Never Been Modern to revisiting a debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes in early modern England over the experimental, explanatory power of the air pump and to thinking through a then-recent monograph on the debate by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer: Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Shapin and Schaffer argued they were going to take both sides seriously and especially Hobbes’ critique of Boyle’s scientific method. Hobbes, they insist, had never been taken seriously as a scientist by historians just as Boyle had never been taken seriously as a political theorist.

Are experiments a way to truth? Or are experiments so inherently social that their credibility rests on the authority of the people who are in the room? Boyle argued the first, Hobbes the second. Scientific legacy lauded Boyle. The final sentences of their book affirm Hobbes’s social understanding of scientific consensus building. They concluded: “As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right.” Writing six years later, Latour argued that in lauding Hobbes’ perspectives on science, Shapin and Schaffer failed to take Boyle seriously as a political theorist. What is even-handedness? How to judge this in a scientific debate of the past remains a central fixation of the field just as historians strive to smoothly narrate their journeys from the present-day into the past and back.

Keane: Exactly. I wrote an essay about this many years ago after Saba Mahmood died. She was a progressive feminist. She went to Egypt and worked very hard to understand women who had taken up the veil and were becoming very conservative and pious. Mahmood saw this not as a form of oppression but as an assertion of their own agency and ethical values. This interpretation was quite controversial in many circles. But it’s another variation of this paradox, which is that her very project of taking them seriously was premised on grounds that they themselves would not accept. It was, unintentionally, at least in some sense, not taking them seriously because Mahmood’s openness to what they were doing was predicated at the end of the day on liberal values, which they were rejecting.

Milam: One of the other anthropologists whom historians of science love to read in this context is Laura Nader, especially her essay on studying up, to better understand the infrastructures of power. Most historians of science do study up: Our historical subjects are often scientists and scholars with far more political clout in their time than historians of science enjoy in ours. In recent decades histories often interrogate how and why certain kinds of science came to enjoy such power. As a result, the starting assumption, especially for graduate students and early career scholars, is that they hold less cultural capital than the people about whom they are writing—whether they are alive or dead.

Keane: It really puts pressure on that anthropological ethos. We argue about this in my graduate seminar every week. On the one hand, I lay out for them a whole series of foundational arguments against the idea of an unmasking. Unmasking their illusions—to say, for instance, that their so-called magic is in reality just a comforting psychological trick—is an assertion of epistemological privilege. It is often linked to political privilege—the claim that I know better than you what is really going on. If you want to decolonize—to reject the position of someone from the Global North whose dominant position in the world permits you to set the terms of the discussion—then you’re not going to be involved in unmasking. But of course, the ethical argument against unmasking is usually predicated on the idea that the people we’re talking about are poorer than us and less powerful than we as representatives of the Global North are likely to be. And Laura Nader tells us to turn the tables and study those who are more powerful than we are. Then we might ask: Isn’t our job supposed to be to unmask the powerful and expose the politically harmful illusions that serve them?

But you can’t unmask the powerful unless you also understand how to take them seriously, because you’re not going to really understand them if you don’t understand them in their own terms. So I think the first step still has to be to understand what they think they’re up to though that may not be the end point of the story. 

Milam: This ethical tension is especially fraught in cases when science is mobilized for horrific ends—thinking through the consequences of eugenics, for example. Merely understanding something from the perspective of the perpetrators can never be enough. It has to be a starting place.

Keane: Right. But to dismiss that perspective can’t be enough either.

You know, there’s a wonderful essay that I use in my anthropology of religion class. It’s written by Susan Harding who decided to study Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, which is a bastion of homophobic arch-conservative Christianity. This was just a brilliant decision on her part. I think it exemplifies all that’s best and hardest about anthropology. She’s not going to just work with people that she thinks are, you know, cool. What they might see as a northern, over-educated female, she represents everything that they abhor and, conversely, they represent everything she opposes. So Harding interviews one of the preachers and finds that she’s lost control of the conversation. He’s such an effective preacher that he essentially takes over and she realizes he’s even getting under her skin. She realizes that the reason he’s witnessing to her is because he understands that, although she’s “not one of us,” she is listening so openly and without challenging him. Harding thinks she is listening with an accepting and open mind because she’s being a good fieldworker. But the preacher knows that someone as un-Christian as she seems must be listening the way she does because God sent her to receive his message.

I think it was a profound project of hers. All the more so because these conservative Christians are threatening. She can’t just stand apart from what they represent to her. They are a powerful, and possibly even dangerous, part of her own world. It’s not the same as studying headhunters somewhere far from home. And she didn’t flinch from the task. At the end of the day, the book that resulted is critical but it’s criticism based on a real attempt to understand.

If I can say anything in conclusion, then, it’s that the truth we seek, as anthropologists, emerges from within the productive dynamics of social interactions. Certainly, the truth mustn’t just stay there—we’re not just transcribers—but it cannot be fully isolated from that starting place.

Milam: Thanks, Webb. I’ve very much enjoyed our conversation. The truth we seek—that seems like a wonderful note on which to end. That truth is always a process not just for those about whom we write but for ourselves.