A Study in Anthropological Dialectics

by Hugh M. Lewis

Professional journals constitute central forums about which an academic discipline defines its identity. The journal provides the main vehicle and voice for new ideas, findings, insights by which a community of scholars delimits itself within a bounded subject area of expertise and defines itself as separate from other possible theoretical orientations. Thomas Kuhn uses the presence of a scientific community as one of the basic criteria for paradigmatic unity of a scientific field--"A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm...." (T. Kuhn, 1970: 176) Such a community carries on its own dialect in a characteristic jargon which requires years of education to master and which is for the most part inaccessible to the untrained laity or other professionals beyond its border.

The journal forum provides a discursive framework, complete with jargon, which facilitates both dialogue and argument, as well as which serves to demarcate the boundaries of the field and to obfuscate the privileged domain of expertise to outsiders. The journal also provides an important context in which the scholastic tradition of Dialectical Disputation, dating back to Aristotle's distinction between logic, dialectic and ertistic, continues in a primarily textual, perhaps 'secondarily oral' form. The focal mode of literary representation, information, articulation, communication and publication of Anthropological ideas and data remains embedded in this tradition despite its bifurcation into separate camps of scientific logic and demonstration and humanistic rhetoric and ertistic. Furthermore, the journal provides clear-cut, ready-made documentary evidence for both kinds of phenomena to which Paul Ricouer has referred to in his interpretation theory as 'the productive distanciation of surplus meaning' and the 'aesthetic augmentation of reality.' "...Constructivism is only the boundary case of a process of augmentation where the apparent denial of reality is the condition for the glorification of the non-figurative essence of things. Iconicity, then, means the revelation of a real more real than ordinary reality...."

This general spatialization of knowledge is complete with the appearance of printing. The visualization of culture begins with the dispossession of the power of the voice in the proximity of mutual presence. Printed texts reach man in solitude, far from the ceremonies that gather the community. Abstract relations, telecommunications in the proper sense of the word, connect the scattered members of an invisible public. (Paul Ricouer, Interpretation Theory, pg. 42)

Long traditionally an oral exercise, the dialectics of academic discourse have become transformed by print into a kind of secondary orality that is premised upon the predominance of full-fledged literacy. The presence of spatial diagrams that are so characteristic a trait of any journal articles which lay claim to scientificity, is in this sense a testimonial to the authority of the written, as opposed to the spoken, voice, in discursive forums.

Ricouer writes of the emergence of a new kind of dialectic between distanciation and appropriation that is the result of the hermeneutics of writing and reading. "...By appropriation I mean the counterpart of the semantic autonomy, which detached the text from its writer. To appropriate is to make one's own what was alien. Because there is a general need for making our own what is foreign to us, there is a general problem of distanciation. (ibid. pg. 43)

The emphasis of spatial metaphors in scientific discourse and literature is well regarded. That space-like models of science have preeminent status over and above time-like representations is explained by Dunnel, (1982). "In the view designated space-like, reality is assumed to be a unified, locally heterogeneous, universally homogeneous system. Quantity is thus a critical issue. In this framework, entities are assumed to exist as bounded phenomena. Seeing the world is comprised by 'things' is a serviceable ontological position..." (pg. 8). The basis of much of the post-structuralist and post-positivist critique of scientific objectivism has been the rejection of its reliance upon such spatial metaphors and space-like models as representationally valid forms of an eidectic, isomorphic, Euclidean essentialism underlying experientially real events which are actually complex in their historical determination and chaotic in their epi-genetic, 'cosmographical' unfolding.

One consequence of the predominance of spatial metaphors in scientific discourse and theory has been the implicit devaluation of the importance of time, and therefore, of the problematics of history in the interpretation of the effects of time. Time, from this conventional standpoint of space-like sciences, is held implicitly and necessarily as a universally homogeneous and invariant Constant. This presupposed absoluteness of time constitutes the single most accurate and stable basis of measurement available to science, even though the temporal relativity of the physical universe, much less of phenomenological reality, has long been demonstrated. The qualities of this Absolute, or Atomic Time, is that it is perfectly linear, predictable in its periodicity and universally even in its interval. It is this presumption of Absolute Time that anthropology has applied uncritically in most of its discourse upon the
"Other."

The critique of this use of time in anthropological discourse has been elaborated by Johannes Fabian, who refers to the schizogenic divergence of the use of time that Anthropologists make between fieldwork and academic discourse. The superimpostion of our own Time upon the indigenous point of view amounts to an implicit denial of the coevalness of the other in the world.

 It is not the dispersal of human cultures in space that leads anthropology to "temporalize" ... it is naturalized, spatialized Time which gives meaning (in fact a variety of specific meanings) to the distribution of humanity in space. (1983:pg. 25)

If there have been fossilized Others in our anthropological dialectics, there have also been many petrified texts "whose convention-clad significances and value have been in a sense "anti-iconoclastic" and rather unproductive in the anthropological march of ideas. "Technically speaking, the attempt to bind in a self-contained meaning, to make a text mean only one thing, can be referred to as a homonymic test....Petrified texts pass the homonymic test; unpetrified texts do not....It was once commonplace to argue that for a text to be properly scientific its meaning must be petrified (fixed and unitary), although that view is no longer so common or well placed." (Richard Shweder, 1991: pg. 350-1)

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Except as texts, ideas do not have an independent existence apart from the people who think them. Ideas are not disembodied from real lived existential contexts in which they originated, to which they related. Ideas have their reasons and reasons have their ideas. Texts are dead until they are revitalized through their critical reading and evaluation and discursive elaboration. It is not difficult to find much evidence for basic linguistic or anthropological ideas that predate the academic anthropology by several centuries. Many such ideas have long been the topic of debate, if often in rather primitive and unsophisticated form. What has changed have been the world in which the ideas have been framed--the ideas have become fleshed out and rendered relevant to the world, their implications have been elaborated and demonstrated in ways which are not just metaphorical or symbolic. Before then, all ideas exist only insubstantially in an endless imagined field of possibility.

Ideas themselves do not exist in hermetic isolation from other ideas--ideas have always influenced one another in a veritable mindscape. Following Gregory Bateson's notion of the ecology of mind, ideas have a kind of natural selection that governs the adaptive success of some and the extinction of others. Ideas cohere into groups and coalesce into entangled complexes of meaning, implication and reference. The emergence of such complexes of meaning sometimes constitute the basis of the construction of an elaborate superstructure that becomes in time the science or discipline of inquiry. Such complexes accrete readership, followers and promulgators, and because they often carve out some region of reality--albeit imperfectly--or stake their claim to a certain domain or quality of experience, to a certain range of insights and understandings.

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Recast as a time-like science, Anthropology has always been a form of historical discourse whose special subject matter is appropriately humankind and the human condition, as well as the fictions, ignorance and alternative realities which have always informed this inherently problematical and paradoxical subject. As human history anthropology has always fallen methodological short of the puzzle-solving character that Kuhn attributes to authentic scientific paradigms. As history, its cosmographical patterning has proven to be peculiarly intractable to the parsimonious and positivistic covering-law model that is held to characterize the more space-like sciences.

If Anthropology is to be framed as a kind of history, then this might also be a kind of philosophical history the dialectical structure of which reflects its broader philosophical underpinnings and implications.

The history of anthropology has constituted a special kind of academic dialectic--a dialectic with both intrinsic and extrinsic forces shaping its growth. This dialectic has been very similar to the kind of dialectic which has been apparent in the history of Western Philosophy. The basis of this dialectic makes the growth of anthropology and the development of its sub-disciplines a different kind of science than that that has been imputed to the physical sciences in Kuhn's paradigmatic history of science. The kind of dialectic proposed here is neither Hegelian nor Marxian, but rather a complex dialectic whose patterning is the result of more than a single set of critically contraposed factors. While it exhibits some features of what Kuhn identifies as defining a science--development of exemplary models, community, etc. It also exhibits other important characteristics that are not shared by other sciences upon which Kuhn's analytical history had been based. The dialectics of the field have been identified as non-paradigmatic, pre-paradigmatic, poly-paradigmatic. It is the contention of this paper that anthropology from this perspective is actually semi-paradigmatic or, more appropriately, quasi-paradigmatic. As such it is both something less and simultaneously, paradoxically also more than what is supposed to pass as a full-fledged paradigm. This inherently ambiguous status of Anthropology tends both to cast a skeptical value over what is meant by 'paradigm', as well a critical shadow over as what is supposed to constitute a genuine science versus a somehow something-less-than or other-than-science approach.

One can only speculate on what actually accounts for and constitutes the dialectics of anthropology, and for that matter the dialectics of any academic field. Roy Wagner makes the distinction between collectivizing and relativizing tendencies. This is similar in conception to what Melford Spiro has referred to as making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. It does not entail a great deal of insight to see how these obverse tendencies might in fact be mutually complementary, forming a second order feedback process. But other bases for the dialectics of Anthropology might be identified as well. The dialogue between self and other, or between subject and object, emic and etic, are just as much a part of the overall process as are the dialectics of deductive/inductive, or rational/empirical or positivist/humanist, etc. The point is that such dichotomization of fundamentals is not only "good to think" in the way that Levi-Strauss identified as the basic structure of mythology, but such dialectics are also quite necessary and appropriate in the dialectics of the academic discipline. Such dialectics provide the antinomial tension without which Anthropology would not be so pliable to words and the imagination.

Crudely, a thematic history of Anthropology may be set in periods distinguished by the unfolding dialectics of Anthropological Geist between collectivizing and relativising periods and images of the World and of Anthropology's place and role within the World. From its dialectical development Anthropological thought emerged from the mists of crude stereotypes into the mystifications of sophisticated metaphors of Identity and Difference.

This dialectic has been continuously unfolding through the periods. The main thematic orientation has always been a collectivizing one stressing a scientific, spatialized, cross-cultural, evolutionary framework--from the great Chain of Being and Creation to the modern multi-linear models--within which the Western Ego could be conveniently configured in context to the prototypical and universalized Other. Minor relativizing periods were defined in antithetical reaction to preceding collectivizng orientations and were followed by new collectivizing synthesis. Each period contained its own contrapuntal contradictions between relativizing and collectivizing orientations in any context of anthropological discourse, even though collectivizing orientations have always remained  predominant, even if only implicitly so.

It is the dialectical structure of anthropological discourse which informs its own history of thought and which has allowed anthropology to transcend the Two Cultures in which Academia is somewhat conventional bifurcated.

The individual Anthropological Ego, as a professional, similarly transcends the separation of collective representations of the Western Self and Non-Western Other by means of the same dialectic, whether this is in fieldwork, archival research, cross-cultural analysis, or in textual construction and deconstruction. This dialectic structures anthropology's relationship with the world whatever the roles in which the Anthropological Ego is serving--whether as diplomatic representative, culture broker or mediator, change agent, assimilationist, authoritative appropriator, translator, or as a medium, vehicle or voice of the muted Peoples without History.

This dialectical tradition is fundamentally Western and constitutes the basis of the rationalistic orientation of what has become the predominant, hegemonic Western World-View. Anthropology's role within this tradition has been the collectivizing/relativizing mediation of the boundaries between the Western notion of the "Self" as a collectivizing, objective representation, and the fundamentally Non-Western sense of "otherness" as relativizing representations of Identity and Difference. The individual anthropological ego becomes the personifier and the ethnographic other the personified in the authorial, authoritative mediation of these contraposed representations.

This framework makes it important to regard Anthropological discourse as "hetero-/Orthodox" dialectics of the Western Worldview of the Self in relation to others. As Heterodoxy, Anthropology is construed from the point of view of the opinions of the other. As Orthodoxy, Anthropology is construed as representing the objective judgments of the Self over the heresies of the other. Heterodox Anthropology presupposes multiple competing viewpoints while Orthodox Anthropology presumes a single, unitary, homogenous and monothetic worldview subsuming or subsumed by the many variations and differences in the world.

Writing within the same framework of both the history of anthropology and of anthropology as history suggests the inherently reflexive nature of the anthropological enterprise of inquiry into the human condition. Anthropological understanding strives for a metalogical discourse, or metalogue with the world, such that the structure of the text itself reflects and is indeed integral to the meta-linguistic message that the text conveys. The human capacity for such metalogue forms the basis for anthropological understanding in the world as a way of knowing that is distinctive. It is by achieving such a metalogue that texts are rendered unpetrified in offering the possibility of multiply productive perspectives.

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The argument that this paper hopes to demonstrate is the value of an alternative point of view that steps outside of the dialectics that inform the discursive practices of the discipline. It helps to define anthropological ideas and the idea of anthropology as something that is in a sense trans-dialectical and meta-paradigmatic in the sense of being both in terms of paradigmatics and above and beyond paradigmatics. Such a framework pushes for casuistry as well as greater sophistication of our understanding and our rhetoric, as well as forever greater empirical precision and rational coherence of our science. The value of anthropology is not to be found by commitment to any single and exclusive point of view or set of ideas, but in a comprehensive perspective which accommodates and effective synthesizes many seemingly contradictory and incompatible points of view at the same time.

In stepping outside of the dialectic of ideas in anthropology, it remains possible to engage critically on either or both sides of the debate, and to take up either contrasting point of view or opinion for purely heuristic and hermeneutical purposes, while simultaneously remaining uncommitted to the vindication and promotion of such ideas at the expense of other possible candidates. It is possible, in other words, to keep one foot in the arena as participant, and the other outside as spectator. It is this inherent ambivalent inter-positionality which provides the creative tension for the anthropologist.

The special and distinctive importance of Anthropology in its multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary contributions and standing, is not to be found in its critical engagement in scientific and anti-scientific or humanistic and anti-humanistic debate, but in its critical disengagement and transcendence of the issues as a dialectical hetero-orthodoxy. The principle theoretical and methodological role of Anthropology is thus construed as being fundamentally different from its conventional representations, and a unique and distinct region of Anthropological mindscape is implicitly outlined as separate from either a strictly scientific or humanistic orientation. A Third Culture within Academia is indicated, shared by psychology, sociology and related fields, whose philosophy of inquiry is fundamentally different from either a philosophy of science or a philosophy of the arts. It is rather a kind of philosophy of history. The appropriate criterion of substantiation, operation and validation within this Third Culture is irreducibly different from either kinds of criteria applicable within the arts or the sciences. Anthropology may one day come into its own as both semi-paradigmatic and as apperceptively reflexive of its own Third Culture relations and values in the world. Anthropological theory and praxis will then stand upon its own within without the need to be informed by reference to either the sciences or the humanities.

Fabian, Johannes

Time and the Other, Columbia Univ. Press. New York 1983

Heelan, Patrick A.

Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1983

Kuhn, Thomas S.

The International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 2. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1970

Ricoeur, Paul

Interpretation Theory The Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976

Rembert, James A. W.

Swift and the Dialectical Tradition St. Martin's Press, New York 1988

Shweder, Richard A

Thinking Through Cultures Harvard Univ. Press 1991

Wagner, Roy

The Invention of Culture The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1981