Author: Dr. Holly Walters, a cultural anthropologist at Wellesley College, United States. Her ethnographic work focuses on religion, pilgrimage, and politics in the Nepal Himalayas. Her research also addresses material culture, divine personhood, and ritual practice throughout South Asia. Drawing on theoretical frameworks in religion, psychological, and linguistic anthropology, her current work focuses on the roles of sacred landscapes and digital/online religious revival in the relationships between Hindus, Buddhists, and Bonpos who venerate sacred ammonite fossils, called Shaligrams. Her recent published work on this topic is a book titled Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Holly is a regular contributor to TFS. You can follow Holly on her blog, Peregrination and on Twitter at @Manigarm.
“The answers you get are the products of the questions you ask.” Paraphrased from historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn, this line has been the opening salvo of just about every methods argument in anthropology I have ever heard. This is because it encapsulates so much of how the social sciences view knowledge, but it also presents a challenge to anyone working in research or analysis. How do you know what you know, and how do you know it for certain?
To this end, I always start off by introducing my students to two particular models of knowledge. Which is to say, I explain to them that what we know academically and how we know it comes with a particular history and a set of criteria that are not often openly discussed. Especially if we have been taught to take anything labeled as “objective truth” at face value.
Positivism and Phenomenology
The briefest version of this discussion that I can outline here essentially focuses on two philosophies of scientific inquiry: Positivism and Phenomenology. The first, Positivism, is the most readily understandable since it is the underlying model of knowledge that supports the standard Scientific Method almost everyone learns beginning in grade school. In short, this philosophy posits that any knowledge that is considered “real” must meet three criteria. First, it must be observable (in some fashion accessible by the senses). Secondly, it must be empirical; generally meaning ‘testable’ and ‘falsifiable’ by some means, and thirdly, it must be repeatable. Knowledge produced in this way thus confirms what Auguste Comte, the 19th century founder of modern Positivism, believed to be evidence of universal, generalizable laws that governed both the physical world and all of human society.
In this model, however, all other forms of knowledge-making, such as intuition, introspection, or faith are considered meaningless. Positivism therefore has never been particularly effective at answering systematic questions that seek to understand culture (For our purposes here, this refers to social, psychological, and traditional logics that result in various ways of being in the world.) This is because it often takes anything that does not fit a modern western European conceptualization of rationality (à la Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) as backwards, primitive, or superstitious. Or, in other words, it’s why Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, feels eminently qualified to comment professionally on religion without having to actually learn anything about the disciplinary study of religion.
For this reason and many others, Positivism is often summed up as “all knowledge, the answers to all questions, already exists. One need only to figure out a way to discover it.”
This is, of course, in contrast to Phenomenology. Phenomenology takes, at its core, the question of human experience and generally views “objectivity” and “subjectivity” as forms of cognition or perception, and not as actual descriptors of expertise (à la Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty). This is why Phenomenologists tend to be somewhat agnostic about the “self-evident reality” of the external world and consider, instead, how the world is experienced by individuals and by groups. For them then, objectivity and subjectivity are matters of social consensus based on how knowledge is defined and what criteria are used to confirm it.
In anthropology, Phenomenology is used to demonstrate how all truths, all forms of knowledge regardless of how they are acquired, are therefore situated within cultural, historical, and psychological ways-of-being that change over time.
This is especially important to the social scientist because it reveals the creation of subjectivities.
Subjectivities refer to the holistic ways of existing in the world that include an individual’s unique conscious experiences, memories, emotions, perspectives, feelings, beliefs, desires, perceptions, and social position (including such factors as race, gender, class, caste, ability, and ethnicity). This subjectivity then informs, consciously and unconsciously, how that person acts, makes decisions, wields power, forms an identity, and creates meaning in their life. It also affects what that individual accepts as true or false.
Objectively Subjective
Unfortunately, this is where things get complicated, and it is often difficult for people both inside and outside of academia to understand the tangled philosophy we too often get ourselves wrapped up in. This is partially due to the fact that the Euro-American world affords a tremendous amount of cultural authority to Positivism and often treats “Science” in this case as the only genuine kind of knowledge there is. This is not to say, in any way, that Positivism doesn’t produce useful, necessary, and meaningful knowledge! Of course it does! What we’re talking about here is the cultural supremacy it enjoys as the “objective” side of the objectivity versus subjectivity debate.
In this debate, as it tends to play out in social media and in the news, all sides typically treat objective knowledge and subjective knowledge as polar opposites. The first is viewed as a set of straight-forward facts that exist independently of any person or perception. As in, they exist as actual, substantive things (they are ‘positive’) and are true whether we want them to be or not. In that way, “real” knowledge is seen as free and clear of the biases of culture or the messiness of human misconception. Subjective knowledge, on the other hand, is then viewed as entirely dependent on a particular viewpoint, situated within a specific historical and social context. Hence, it is “socially constructed” because it comes into existence through structural imposition and communal agreement. Subjectivity and social construction as terms are then immediately associated with something that is simply being “made-up” in the imaginative sense, and thus the definition of ‘subjective’ and ‘socially constructed’ become synonymous with “opinion.”
But this is not what anthropology means when it says subjective. Rather, anthropologists tend to view all knowledge as socially, culturally, and historically situated in a way that breaks down the objective/subjective divide and turns it into more of a mosaic than a spectrum. All knowledge is socially constructed because it is made by people using methods, instruments, standards, and prior knowledge also made by people, under situations and circumstances that shape and constrain what it is possible to know. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
The Reflexive Turn Around and Around
Much of the so-called “science wars” in the Humanities and Social Sciences, along with the “denial of objectivity” charges that came after them, can be traced back to the rise of Post-Modernist philosophy in the 1970s. While Post-Modernism had a tremendous amount of influence across the academy, from art and architecture to history and technology, it had a particularly notable effect on anthropology, resulting in an era that is now referred to as the Reflexive Turn.
Because Post-Modernism brought with it a specific kind of skepticism towards claims of objectivity, along with a rejection of singular historical narratives or grand unifying theories, and a suspicion of reason, anthropology functionally used the new philosophy to turn a mirror onto itself. Before, anthropologists had viewed themselves as objective scientists of universal social laws, but in turning the ethnographic method onto themselves, they saw a very different reflection that upended much of what had been previously assumed about the study of humans.
Given the challenges they faced from feminist critique, colonialist and post-colonialist critique, Marxist critique, and Deconstructionism, anthropologists had to seriously ask themselves if it was even possible to create an objective study of a culture when their own subjectivities were inherently involved in what they could learn or experience. Moreover, would it be possible to objectively describe a culture through the writing of ethnography given the same problems? In the end, weren’t we studying ourselves just as much as we were studying other people who were also studying us?
Though much of that discussion still remains important within anthropology today, it had broader implications far outside of the social sciences. This was because anthropologists had not only come to see their own methods of knowledge-making in a subjective light, but they had also come to see that all human knowledge was dependent on the way in which humanity navigated its worlds. This rise of a new qualitative critique, however, was not met with particularly great enthusiasm, mainly because it challenged the cultural authority of Positivism to determine what was and what was not “real.” And because it also led to a crisis of uncertainty.
One could argue, for example, that very little empirical knowledge has any kind of physical (positive) form beyond its written or spoken expressions, but yet it still retains profound value as methods for describing and analyzing our universe. One could even argue that mathematics isn’t real, in this sense, since mathematics is a human-invented system of symbolic designs that apply order and predictability to the phenomena we observe. The world then often conforms to our sense of numbers even though those numbers and their operations, such as 2+2=4, don’t exist in and of themselves outside of written notation and a mental concept of what they should refer to.
This then brings us to the heart of the dilemma. Many people have long argued that science was to be our best hope for finally realizing true objective knowledge. And when it did, it would do so because it was free of any and all influence, biases, and values that were not purely epistemic. Meaning that the only real barrier to pure knowledge would be in its validation and acceptance by others.
As Kincaid et. al.’s 2007 work in the social study of science shows, however, nothing is ever so simple. Cultural values and predispositions surface in numerous aspects of the scientific enterprise and play various roles in the assessment of evidence, in the choice of measurements and benchmarks, and in the interpretation of results. As such, each author in the ensuing volume is forced to examine the implications this has for any high-minded ideal of objectivity. In the process, they then consider a range of concrete examples in economics, evolutionary biology, medicine, neurophysiology, and environmental science, even including empirical meta-studies of scientific practice itself. While theorists understandably differ on many of the specifics, the research comes to the same overall conclusion. Science can never be an either/or endeavor. Rather, it is already a complex middle ground that lies precariously between the contrarian views that have dominated this debate since the very beginning: that ‘feelings’ have no place in science versus a science that is nothing but politics.
Partial Truths
In any kind of research, there is more than one way to interpret what we are observing. The Positivist intent though, would be to find the “correct” interpretation that would lead one to the objective, universal truth, discarding all other interpretations as the useless results of human bias, error, and preconception. But what if, instead, we stopped searching for the One Truth (which may or may not even exist, and even if it does, humans might not be able to directly access it) and began to view truths as plural. That each piece of knowledge we gain is really a part of something larger, with a whole picture that only begins to come into focus the more of these partial truths we amass and fit together.
“Partial Truths” was name of the introduction in James Clifford’s 1986 edited volume Writing Culture. In it, he sets up a powerful criticism of cultural representations, noting specifically that no ethnography (or book, or film, or photograph) can ever capture the whole of a people or place. An anthropologist can only present something of themselves and the people they work with such as they existed at a particular time and in a particular way. It’s also because there is no “real culture” to get to (culture is, rather, a shifting and transient category). But this does not mean that the knowledge they do produce is therefore meaningless. Rather, Positivism and Phenomenology aren’t mutually exclusive methods of knowing something. Instead, they are complimentary ways in which we can know about something. For more examples, see Thompson’s 2007 Mind in Life (neurophenomenology), and Lende and Downey’s 2012 The Enculturated Brain (neuroanthropology).
Furthermore, as Carlo Ginzburg and Anna Davin discuss in “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” this concept of the partial truth isn’t actually unique to the social sciences or Humanities at all, nor to our perpetual arguments over subjectivity and objectivity. It’s a core element of the scientific method itself!
The basis of Ginzburg’s argument is about how people acquire and organize knowledge, what frameworks they use to fit information, observations, and interpretations together, and how the concept of ‘science’ went from a broadly systemic method of exploring the world to a narrower reference to Positivism alone. But more importantly for this discussion, he notes that virtually every famous investigator and champion of the scientific method all relied on a partial truths approach that he names the Cases and Clues Methodology. For example, the police detective who uses clues, measurements, and links between pieces of data to build a case that will lead to the perpetrator. Or the doctor who uses a combination of lab tests, physical examinations, scans, and the patient’s own recollections to build a case that will lead to a diagnosis. Or, most famously in his mind, the art historian who used distinctive brush strokes, ear and nose shapes, repeated color palettes, and paint mixtures to link Medieval artworks to their unnamed artists. In every situation, both empirical testing and qualitative reasoning blended together to create a series of partial truths that led to a more comprehensive conclusion. Not the whole truth necessarily, but a good enough portion of it.
Concluding Collages
To bring all of these complicated musings about knowledge and philosophy together, let me summarize the problem one more time by way of an important example: COVID-19. When asked if COVID-19 is real, most people will reply yes (though they might qualify what they mean by ‘real’). But when asked what exactly COVID-19 is, you’ll get a wide variety of answers that range from infection by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, to a list of symptoms, to a line on a rapid test, to a mass delusion, to an experience of long-term fatigue and persistent heart problems. That’s because COVID-19 is not actually a ‘thing.’ It’s a category of experiences embedded within a political and historical moment. It includes Positivistic partial truths, such as the virus itself, its transmission vectors, its receptors and replication process, its behaviors when exposed to certain anti-virals and other drugs, etc. But it also includes Phenomenological partial truths, such as individual experiences of infection, varying symptoms, different recovery times, attitudes towards vaccines, death and loss of loved ones, prior illnesses or disabilities, and the social panic around the inconsistent pandemic narrative.
Hence, COVID-19 is subjective.
But the most vital part to understand from this statement is that it does not mean that COVID-19 is ‘not real.’ As the partial truths grow, in fact, it becomes more real than ever before. That’s nothing to do with any matter of opinion.
Bibliography
Clifford, James. 1986. “Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press.
Fassin, Didier (ed.). 2012. A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell.
<https://www.wiley.com/en-us/A+Companion+to+Moral+Anthropology-p-9781118290583>
Ginzburg, Carlo and Anna Davin. 1980. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop. No. 9 (Spring, 1980), pp. 5-36 (32 pages). Oxford University Press.
Kincaid, Harold (ed.), John Dupré (ed.), and Alison Wylie (ed.). 2007.Value-Free Science? Ideals and Illusions. Oxford Academic. <https://academic.oup.com/book/9983?login=false>
[Image of the setting sun on a misty lake is by Johannes Plenio sourced from Unsplash.]
The Familiar Strange 