This collection of essays comes to focus upon the Anthropology of Knowledge, including theoretical problems of the differential distribution of knowledge and ways of knowing in our world, how knowledge may be historically and culturally situated, how it may change in some ways and remain unchanged in others. It concerns the problem of human acquisition of cultural knowledge, and the influence of our biology upon how we know, and even what we may know. It also deals with the so-called "worldview problem" and the related problem of the epistemological status of "common sense." It treats the problem presented by artificial intelligence, the problem of mind and the possibility of different mindscapes. It also broaches the problem of the anthropological construction of reality, the problem of collective representations" of symbols, symbolization and symbol systems, mythology, ritual, religion and magic, the unanswered question of the relativity and universality of structures of knowledge. It deals with the problem of the representation of knowledge versus the presentation of experience, the problem of the history of knowledge, the role of emotion, alternative states of consciousness, and pathology in knowledge. It concerns the problems of structure and meaning, the strategic, evolutionary and cultural status of knowledge, its function, its natural design, and how human knowledge systems may constitute complex adaptive systems that are cybernetically self-sustaining and evolving.

Though there are, have been and will long continue to be many unanswered questions, there has been significant research achieved in many different fields of inquiry which provide many critical insights into the general problem of human knowing and knowledge. The anthropology of knowledge is not just interested in the myths, taxonomies, kinship or superstitions of exotic indigenous cultures. It is a uniquely interdisciplinary approach that offers a means for tying together the work in many separate areas to coherently address the more central problem of "what is human reality" as this is defined as a product of our human knowledge and capacity to know.

The Anthropology of Knowledge thus offers an unprecedented degree of systematic integration of the wealth and confusing complexity of information and understanding which is only available if one crosses many academic boundaries. It offers the additional advantage of achieving such general theoretical order while remaining as close as any discipline has gotten to its central object of empirical study, the human being and its human-made world.

The purpose of these essays then is not only to suggest that such an order may be possible, but that it is already available in a roughly recognizable, if unfinished, state. The object of these essays then is to provide in a systematic, succinct and objective manner a set of theories and insights that are or strongly seem to be supported by empirical evidence drawn from different fields of inquiry. Except for one section of essays treating the issue of the paradoxes and reflexivity of human knowledge, these essays stay away from currently fashionable questions regarding the "post-structuralist" and "post-positivist" or "post-humanist" critique of "objective human knowledge" as well as the problems of the a-historicity of anthropological knowledge, or its anti-subjective character and the lack of a ground for subjective knowledge in the human sciences. Though these questions are interesting and important in their own right, and cannot be ignored in a larger view of the anthropology of knowledge, they remain unresolved and irresolvable within the framework of the objectives of this collection of essays, and tend to muddy up what otherwise may be a rather clear picture of human knowing and knowledge.

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These are designed to suggest new insights and possibilities of thinking about some very old and complex problems which have been at the center of much spilt ink in anthropology and related disciplines of psychology and social science, not to forget philosophy, linguistics, history, literary theory. Though the currents in the field have been shifting, as the world rapidly develops towards its own ends, these essays represent some problematical issues in the field which remain perennial, if not classical, favorites.

As an anthropological concern, the problem of making sense of Human reality is infinitely complex. There are no simple solutions or pat formulas that will cover all cases and explain all possible facets. We cannot simply say that all human reality is symbolic or metaphorical without thereby being over-reductionistic. It is not satisfying enough to leave the issue with the answer that human reality is inherently ambiguous or paradoxical and is therefore irresolvable in terms appropriate to science. It is not enough to claim that anything or everything in human reality is relative, without then stipulating precisely what it is relative to.

There is little hope of progress in our ideas or our world if we hold that the principle of progress is intrinsically evil or that all ideas are equally interesting and equally representative of the reality they claim to explain, and if we refuse to acknowledge the validity of any and all criteria, or claim that because no criteria can be completely, purely objective, no criteria for the evaluation of our ideas are available or acceptable. Our minds are not well served if we leave problems of understanding human realities as irremediably political, asymmetrical or ideological.

On the other hand, our science is not well served either by simplistic notions which reduce the complex subtleties of human reality to simple schematic diagrams and to highly hypothetical and eidetic 'Structures' or 'Systems' which are claimed to be directly invisible and yet to underlie the patterning of all our experiences.

To claim that there are no simple solutions is not the same as saying there are no possible solutions whatsoever. What is called for is sophistication, not simplification, and elaboration, not reduction. To say that our human sciences lack the same level or criteria of absoluteness of objectivity of knowledge found in the physical sciences is not to say that such criteria of relative objectiveness is not possible. To claim that all knowledge is bound by hermeneutic horizons of ideological representation and psycho-social construction is not to conclude that our human sciences lack any empirical foundation or any kind of objective coherence independent of those who know of it.

To reverse what is rapidly becoming a trite cliché of the post-structuralist critics of the social sciences, "the possibility of translation is its impossibility." Anthropology, with its panoptic anthropologos, may have been born and brought up within a colonial mentality, and contemporary anthropology may remain a post-colonial compromise. Colonial imperialism of our bygone era has been supplanted by a new kind of economic imperialism of a hegemonic capitalist world system that promises to generate greater and greater social asymmetries in the process of its modernization and development.

But not all anthropology is the handmaiden of modern development, and not all development anthropology is equally the servant of USAID. Those who want to destroy anthropology by their destructive criticism somehow fail to appreciate the point that anthropological knowledge can be a tool as much as it may be a weapon, that it can be used for beneficial purposes in combating human evil as readily as it can be employed for the perpetration of evil in the world. We must take the contemporary critique of anthropology seriously, but we must not take it so seriously that it stultifies our anthropological sense of balance and proportionality about human reality. Taken as a lens or a mirror it can be used to sharpen and clarify our field of view, to assist us in exercising our judgment about what is right and wrong with the world. But taken as a scientific substitute for our humanity it can only blunt the edge of our vision.

If Anthropology has somehow failed, it has done so in its inability to keep pace with the amount of change happening in the modern world epoch. Its empire has come home, and all those people who were once upon the periphery of civilization have instead become incorporated if unequal citizens of a world system that is completely impersonal and increasingly exploitative and consumptive of both human and physical resources. The peasant of the countryside has now become the urban migrant of the city-scape, and social entities once described as cultures have become but ethnic enclaves and ethnically organized social institutions competing with one another for increasingly scarce resources.

Anthropology can no longer afford the elite snobbery of dealing exclusively with the foreign, the exotic and the bizarre to the neglect of the immediate, the familiar and the commonplace. Anthropology can catch up with all the changes of its world, and can amend its practices, methods and theories to better serve the understanding of human reality as it is and has become, instead of what it might have been or is supposed to be. Anthropology, always an ambivalently mixed discipline, can still be servant to both science and humanity at the same time.

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Cultural psychology is a relatively new and emerging orientation within anthropology that nevertheless is the direct descendent of a long tradition of an older Culture and Personality and psychological anthropology, as well as those ethnoscientific approaches that fall under the rubric of 'cognitive anthropology'. As such, cultural psychology reiterates a basic theme that has been the unifying impetus of these anthropological sub-fields--the theory of cultural relativity as originally espoused by Ruth Benedict, and the related linguistic relativity hypothesis. But it does so with a renewed awareness of the shortcomings of the old concepts of modal personality or basic personality structure, of the possibilities for organically based universal structures of cognition and perceptual awareness and for the important limitations of the conception of relativity in cross-cultural contexts and comparison.

Cultural psychology emerges as a fertile and renewed interest in old problems that have plagued cultural anthropologists for several generations and which had served as a unifying focus for those anthropologists who distinguish themselves as "cultural." It plays with new conceptions of cultural cognition and cultural models, of post-modern notions of relativism, of culture and psychology as construction. It also deals with the reflexivity of an anthropology of knowledge, a new sophistication and interest in ethno-semantics and general basic categories of cognition in naming and classification, in applications of artificial intelligence, and in methodological problematic of hypothesis testing and empirical verification.

Cultural psychology emerges as a field that is of central and focal theoretical interest for general anthropology as a whole. It is neither a residual category of study to be defined away as merely a cross-cultural variant of scientific psychology, the purview of a "transcultural psychiatry," or the derivative of either structuralist or post-structuralist theory. Cultural psychology has come to represent the primary field of convergent interests at the theoretical and empirical center of rather diverse fields of study such as cross-cultural psychology, trans-cultural psychiatry, ethno-science, social psychology, symbolic anthropology, psychological anthropology, artificial intelligence, systems theory, and sub-disciplines of linguistics including psycho-linguistic, socio-linguistic, ethno-linguistics, the ethnography of speaking and communication, discourse analysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, constructivism and critical theory, Gender studies, psychic and psychedelic anthropology and the study of paranormal psychology, the anthropology of power, hermeneutics and textual studies, philosophy, history, including psycho-history, ethno-history, social history, oral history, life history, the study of ethnicity, transactional anthropology and the anthropology of performance, psycho-geography and cultural geography

Cultural psychology contains and effectively combines elements from many different fields of study, but it is not exclusively any one of these. It stands on its own as inherently complex, cross-disciplinary, multi-dimensional and multi-faceted in its concerns--and yet it also stands as a unified and systematic study of the foundations and varieties of the human experience and the human condition.

Cultural psychology also takes as its central concern the problematic interconnections of what is glossed as 'The World View Problem," including the problem of human acquisition, cultural conditioning and constraint, interpersonal variation, intercultural variation, problems of personality, or personal identity, individuality and psychology, the study of emotion, cognition, perception, imagination, reason, creativity, etc., the question of the centrality of the role of language in the articulation and inter-mediation between culture and cognition, status-role positioning, the problem of normality/abnormality and "deviance," the problem of cross-cultural contact, acculturative processes, the related problem of change, the role of environment and the ecological foundations of experience.

The study of cultural psychology can be effectively entered from any number of different directions, and can take as thematically predominant any of several basic dimensions. But the value of understanding cultural psychology is best gained from a generalist point of view that considers synthetically many different possible perspectives as if forming a central paradigm of study.

The study of cultural psychology has wider implications that reach into many important facets of the world. Its value extends beyond its own interdisciplinary matrix to include general and regional issues of political economy, social structure, world history and civilization, and the problematic of understanding human evolution, global ecology and changing social relations within a world-wide context.

The perspective of cultural psychology is proffered as an alternative form of science and as an anthropological antidote to anthropology. Its claims are to a basically scientific status, but one that is not directly derivative of a physical sciences model or of a biological basis in reality or human nature. Theoretically and methodologically, it constitutes a third culture which may be defined by its inbetweenness as "part-science" and "part-humanity," but which also stands separately on its own.

We must either accept a broader, more basic definition for what constitutes science, or else risk jettisoning our strictly positivistic notions of science for the sake of maintaining a vital and productive understanding of the principles and process of human action in the world. We may say that cultural psychology is at once an historical science of humankind and a theoretical and empirical philosophy about the human condition. It has scientific as well as metaethical implications. It is based upon a general orientation towards knowledge that fits science into a larger, inclusive "meta-paradigmatic" framework, which it shares with other general approaches. It is based upon a different framework for science than is conventionally recognized--a science of such scope and power that it can cross disciplinary boundaries without the loss of resolution that accompanies narrow specialization and sub-specialization.

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My experience as an anthropologist of academia has led me to conclude that a distinction between the "Two Cultures" may be an important one that nonetheless frequently gets overlooked for what it may actually imply, as well as the possibility of some "Third Culture" with characteristic aspects like that of Anthropology a d other social sciences that rest uncomfortably upon both horns. There is much evidence to suggest that people in the sciences and humanities are doing very little talking to one another, and a great deal of talking past and through each other. Scientists and poets are not only dealing differently with the same reality, but they are dealing with different realities. Not has it only and simply been a problem of translation, but there often seems to be no common ground upon which commensurable terms or understandings can be based. As an anthropologist, I've frequently enough felt the loneliness of being of neither camp, and in the sometimes hopeless effort to mediate between them, often being treated as a traitor in both.

These basic differences of Worldview must be taken as fundamental, and as underlying many of the other differences due to narrow academic specialization and disciplinary sub-specialization. But the issue of these basic differences becomes especially acute when it becomes a matter of trying somehow to desperately resolve them and strike some kind of conciliatory compromise when members of both encampments sit upon the same dissertation committee.

The more traditional academic boundaries no longer best serve the best intellectual interests of the academic community. Thus we may find an academic world order in which physicists practice philosophy, philosophers preach science, anthropologists do biology, biologists attempt sociology, etc., etc. Perhaps everything would be best if everyone just stayed well within their proper places, but human beings seem unable to do so for very long. The larger, deeper currents of dialectic which are threatening to pull Academia apart at the seams, are sweeping through entire programs and departments across the country like some kind of disease or, worse, civil war. And in such conditions, the only loser is one who comes between.

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These essays treat diverse topics, but they are unified about a central theme of the interdisciplinary structure of objective anthropological knowledge. The question of anthropology as science will be left aside, because it will be presumed to be so, from the presupposition of an objective anthropology, though indirectly this question will be implicitly addressed in each one of the essays in relation to the bearing that its interdisciplinary relation may have upon such a question.

We must reserve a notion of what is generally scientific in a broad-based field like anthropology until a wider field of view can be had that necessarily embraces all the interdisciplinary horizons of its knowledge. We cannot because of this seriously entertain a paradigmatic conception of a mature, theoretically unified, "puzzle-solving" science of Anthropology. We must find anthropology situated somewhere between the strict "puzzle-solving" orientation of the mathematical sciences and the "paradox-resolving" orientation of the literate humanities. We must look for a "problem-posing" orientation which combines some of each.

We may find such social dialectics at the level of sub-disciplinary specialization within the field, but when we refer to Anthropology in general, we are challenged with a level of conceptual organization and diversity that must be managed in a more suitable manner. If the social dialectics that prevail at this cross-disciplinary level of interchange is to be called "paradigmatic," then we must seek a modified conception of what such paradigmatic process at this level must entail. If we cannot broaden our notion of scientific paradigms, then perhaps we should abandon it altogether, at least in the special case of anthropology. And if we abandoned the label "paradigm," then what more appropriate designation can we find to take its place?

Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.

Last Updated: 03/07/05