Anthropology as Social Epistemology?

Abstract

Anthropology—its methodology, its paths to knowing; but also its epistemology, its modes of knowing—saturates the practices of Science and Technology Studies (STS). In a nutshell, anthropology has helped STS find ways to break open the discourses of science. If we were to believe our “natives”—scientists—and accept what they say about what they do and know on their own terms, we would not be able to add anything to these stories. And so in STS, we have modified the anthropological propensity to make the strange familiar and invented the technique of making the familiar strange. Now we can reimagine our natives’ stories, note how they are told, and investigate why they are told the way they are—relating them to the practices from which they spring. Our terminological tinkering—refusing to adopt the terms of the actors—is, then, also an epistemological tinkering; we account for these practices in terms of our own.

Keywords:

• Anthropology
• Epistemology
• Science and Technology Studies

Notes

[1] See for instance: Collins (1985), Knorr-Cetina (1981), Latour and Woolgar (1986), and Lynch, Zenzen and Restivo (1982). See Sismondo (2009) for a concise description of concerns and findings of these early laboratory studies.

[2] And in Downes’ own words: “By calling this a philosophical ethnography, however, we do not mean to be uncovering what philosophers would normally regard as the ‘conceptual foundations’ of this particular line of research [human computer interaction research, mdl] which nowadays tends to go under the name ‘cognitive science.’ Rather, we are engaged in a genuine ethnographic inquiry: that is, we aim to bring out some of the presuppositions made by contributors to Behavior and Information Technology that affect their overall view of human cognition by identifying points at which their work clashes with presuppositions that philosophers normally make about the cognitive process. Like the field anthropologist, then, we are trying to render an alien culture more familiar by showing exactly where it ceases to be familiar” Downes (1987, 27).

[3] I am paraphrasing a post by Annemarie Mol on the “Eating Bodies” blog, 10 June 2012.

[4] The question of whose terms to use is a matter of concern, even within anthropology: should we use outsider terms to describe insider experiences, in order to render these experiences as transparently as possible; or should we use insider terms, assuming that accurate translation is impossible and that experiences can only be fully expressed as element of the practices (which include discursive practices) within which they occur? In anthropology, these different approaches have been named, respectively, emic and etic; they are embedded in separate philosophical positions vis-à-vis the way in which culture, practice, and language hang together—the first a functional or structural, the second an hermeneutic, interpretive, or ethnomethodological view. (The debate is related to the dispute in STS about the extent to which the STS practitioners needs to be insiders or experts in the knowledge-making practice under investigation, in order to be able to make sense of it.) A third, emerging approach, practiced by, among others, Marilyn Strathern, is to import certain indigenous terms into the analyst’s discourse, or even to make up new words to describe the experiences or phenomena of interest.

[5] See Jones (2012), Fricker (2007), for instance.

[6] Latour and Woolgar (1986, xx).

[7] Barnes (1995, 102). See also Bloor, Garfinkel, Harre, Hesse, Lynch and, of course, Wittgenstein (1953, 1969) himself. A form of life, Rouse explains, “is not true or false, nor is it a style of reasoning. It is, as Hacking puts it, what determines what is true-or-false––a candidate for truth or falsity” (Rouse 1987, 62 quoting Hacking 1982 and Wittgenstein 1953).

[8] The Dutch philosopher Theo Oudemans, in his outline of a philosophical anthropology, De Verdeelde Mens (The divided human 1980), offers what may be the most careful discussion of the term, asserting that life forms are the conditions under which human expression is possible (11); fundamental frames that define what it means to be human (13); rules that appoint the humanness of the human organism (14).

[9] It is prudent here to qualify “anthropology” as cultural anthropology; physical anthropologists (who also distinguish themselves by calling their discipline “scientific anthropology”) are not necessarily—or perhaps necessarily not—of this persuasion.

[10] Term coined by Mol in The Body Multiple (2000, xx), but mobilized, explicitly or not, in her many collaborative publications with John Law, and foreshadowed or operative in Latour’s, Callon’s, and Hennion’s work—to name but a few of those who are engaged in the praxiographical project. See especially Hennion’s anthropology of muscial education (1988).

[11] “However … The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one” (Mantel 2012).

[12] Kuhn (1996) remains salient: paradigms, disciplinary matrices, and cultural frameworks all point to the idea that it is impossible to unthink what one knows; in other words, to escape the enabling constraints posed by the culture in which one exists.

[13] What constitutes difference; what is “the same,” however? If epistemic differences reside in practices, do not the different practices of anthropologists and scientists suggest that there are indeed profound epistemic differences between the two? Or is it rather the case that, for our purposes, we may imagine scientific and anthropological practices to be pretty much—culturally, forms-of-life-wise, “the same”?

[14] Collier (2012).

[15] Epistemology—the knowing of epistemes. That knowing in itself is relative to something else—its framing, its possibilities, and its conditions for existence are offered by a particular episteme. And so, once again: epistemology itself is social in the epistemological sense.

[16] For further elaboration of physics and astronomy as a cosmology of our times, see de Laet (2006).

[17] A variation on Fricker’s (2007) and others’ concept of hermeneutical injustice; elaborated in Jones (2012).

[18] See Clifford and Marcus (1986), Clifford (1988), and Marcus and Fisher (1986). Also Rosaldo (1989).

[19] Geertz (1977, 13).

[20] For the term relational materiality, see Law and Mol (2002), Mol and Law (2004).