The Perils of 'Positivism' in Cultural Anthropology Author(s): Paul B. Roscoe Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol.

97, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 492-504 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/683269 . Accessed: 07/08/2013 16:59
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Anthropologist.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

OF MAINE PAULB. ROSCOE / UNIVERSITY

he Perils of 'Positivism' in ult'ra

Anthropology
OVERTHE LASTTWOdecades, a widespread conviction seems to have emerged that positivism is an intellectual conceit cultural anthropology can no longer afford. The target of relentlessly withering commentary, its program has focused the fire of disciplinary disenchantment with the post-Enlightenment project, and its perceived failings have provided a rallying point around which the identities of interpretive, deconstructive, and postmodern movements have formed. Despite the race of the intellectual mill to which it has become grist, however, it is surprisingly difficult to establish what anthropological positivism is, who its adherents are, and what precisely is the nature of their sins. Critics seem ready to identify positivism in almost all they see, but they seem reluctant to identify its followers by name, and they afford the concept neither rigorous explication nor sustained critique. In contrast to social sciences like sociology and economics, where positivism has formed the subject of whole papers and even books, cultural anthropology seems content to caricature and criticize positivism and positivists in abbreviated-often crypticterms on the apparent assumption that the references are familiar to all.1 As with art, critics seem unwilling or unable precisely to define their subject, apparently believing they know it well enough when they see it. In this article, I wish to step back and question some of these complacencies. By examining how the termpositivism has been deployed in cultural anthropology, I attempt what I think is a long overdue deconstruction of its image in our discipline.2 Notwithstanding a jumble of referents that appear breathtaking in their breadth and chaos, I shall argue that this image is comparatively coherent, albeit grossly reified, and the criticism launched at it relatively well founded. What is questionable, however, is the conclusion to which many critics seem to think their analysis leads: that the methods of the natural sciences are inapplicable to the study of human culture and society. Ironically, they seem to arrive at this conclusion by grounding it in a positivistic-and hence quite inadequate-notion of natural science. In so doing, they overlook the hermeneutic nature of natural science method, which renders science indistinguishable from the anthropological interpretivism many critics advocate and destabilizes the security of the critical movement they commend.

The Image of Positivism in CulturalAnthropology

More than a century ago, John Stuart Mill (1965 [1865]:2) wearily observed that "though the mode of thought expressed by the terms Positive and Positivism is widely spread, the words themselves are, as usual, better known through the enemies of that mode of thinking than through its friends." His complaint remains as true today as it was then; in modem cultural anthropology (hereafter simply "anthropology"),the image of positivism is almost entirely a construction of its critics. With remarkable success, these commentators have transformed a term once synonymous with progressive liberalism into one of pejorative conservatism. Positivism is now cast as a faith, a fool's gold, or a vice, its adherents by implication dogmatists, dupes, or degenerates. Thus, Rabinow and Sullivan (1987:9-10, 11) characterize "positivist orthodoxy" as a "fascination"with reductionistic models and quantification, promulgated by "dictum"rather than debate. Murphy (1971:106) talks of "simple positivistic faith," Shalvey (1979:97) of a "doctrine," Harkin (1988:100) of "a naive positivism," Geertz (1973:119) of"vulgar positivism," and Holy (1987:15) of the "hard-corepositivistic approach." The tone of this rhetoric echoes a broader critical chorus in the social sciences.3 Yet it is surprisingly difficult in practice to establish precisely who or what in anthropology is the target of attack. Although positivists are readily fingered among the long dead-Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown are particular favorites-only Ulin (1984:64-67), to my knowledge, has breached academic

B.ROSCOE PAUL is Associate ofAnthropology, Professor, Department of Maine, ME 04469. University Orono,

( 1995,American American Association. Anthropologist 97(3):492-504. Copyright Anthropological

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PERILS OF'POSITIVISM' / PAULB. ROSCOE 493

courtesies to accuse the living-namely Horton and Jarvie. Occasionally, scholars like Ottenberg (1990:157) will gloomily conclude that, despite their best intentions, they must be positivists, and even more occasionally one such as Bernard (1994:169) will defiantly flaunt the identity. Usually, though, the indictment is indirect: works but not individuals are labeled positivist. If academic criticism should be mounted ad opus rather than ad hominem, this is perhaps as things should be. Unfortunately, shifting the focus of inquiry from scholars to scholarship does little to ease the deconstructive task, for the coyness critics exhibit about identifying present-day positivists is matched only by the diversity of what they consider positivist thought. In abridgments, adumbrations, and asides scattered through well over a hundred cultural anthropological sources, I have found positivism variously identified with or detected in the work of British and French thinkers from Bacon and Descartes to Saint-Simon, Comte, and John Stuart Mill; the work of Victorian anthropologists who esteemed these thinkers; logical positivism; Popperian falsificationism; empiricism; methodological pragmatism; methodological naturalism; scientism; natural science; social science; the comparative method; holocultural methodology; participant observation; anthropological experiment; mechanism; intellectualism; sociocultural evolutionism; environmental determinism; functionalism; Marxism; Whitian culturology; cultural materialism; Levi-Straussian structuralism; conflict theory; action theory; methodological individualism; behaviorism; situational logic; logical atomism; "totalizing"theory; Bloomfieldian linguistics; Chomskian linguistics; generative semantics; British anthropology into the 1960s; Anglo-Saxon social science; British intellectual life; Protestant culture; and Western culture.4 To confuse matters further, "cryptopositivism" (Friedrich 1992) has been detected in the work of positivism's arch critics, Clifford Geertz and his postmodern descendants (Bourdieu 1988:11;Sangren 1988:405, 409), while Marxist writings and those of Malinowski and Levi-Strauss are fingered as positivistic by some yet championed as nonor antipositivistic by others.5 In short, it seems, everybody is a positivist save critics of positivism-and they turn out to be "cryptopositivists." Clearly the concept is radically underdetermined and, if matters were left here, one might conclude that positivism has suffered much the same fate in anthropology as in philosophy and sociology-used, as Giddens (1974:2) puts it, "so broadly and vaguely as a weapon of critical attack... that it has lost any claim to an accepted and standard meaning." A more charitable reading of substance and context, however, suggests that in anthropology, at least, there is a relatively coherent image behind the bewildering and seemingly fragmented objects of attack. Positivism emerges as a set of historically contingent, descriptive, and/or prescriptive precepts about the

subject and method of natural science that, supposedly, have become a pervasive habitus for social and natural science and even modernity itself. If the referents of positivism seem bewildering and fragmented, it is perhaps because these articulations are never fully spelled out. The core of anthropology's image of positivism is what sometimes is called the "received model" of natural science: a set of philosophical or epistemological conceptions about the nature ofthe universe, the place of humans in it, and the specific (scientific) means by which "objective" or "true"knowledge of it is, or can be, generated. This positivistic model is said to predicate the existence of an "objective" reality independent of human perception and interpretation; it asserts the ability of humans to perceive, via the sensory organs, cognitively and linguistically unmediated aspects of this reality (facts); and it aims to construct a "perfectly impersonal or objective," "valuefree," cognitive representation (or "mental map") of reality as a whole (theories).6 In its details, this image has some striking ambiguities and contradictions. The means through which positivists supposedly seek their goal are variously represented as involving or comprising the collection of facts; the construction of an ideal language of science; controlled comparison; abstraction; theoretical formalism and quantitative measurement; induction; deduction; verification; falsification; replication and disconfirmation; hypothesis testing; hypothetico-deductive method; and/or the logic of the experiment. Nor is there agreement on whether positivistic method is description, prescription, or both: some sources present it as a model of, others as a modelfor, scientific practice, and yet others tender it as both. In addition, it is left unclear how positivists supposedly perceive the products of this practice: is it a body of authoritatively established truths to which details may be added but which is not subject to basic revision; a body of knowledge that, while not necessarily constituting the "truth"now, eventually will constitute it; a body of knowledge that is "cumulative and progressive in character"; or some sort of "universal"or "deterministic laws," or "generalizations" about reality?7 In the rhetoric of its critics, positivist philosophy is often represented as though it were some sprawling malignancy that has infiltrated its tendrils deeply into Western thought-an image that explains how positivism can be detected in so many seemingly diverse intellectual subcultures and movements. It is said to have originated in the philosophical accompaniments of the scientific revolution of late medieval and early modem Europe and to have matured during the Enlightenment. Its French origins are commonly traced back to Descartes through thinkers such as Condorcet, Turgot, d'Alembert and Montesquieu; its British provenance is fixed as Francis Bacon through Hume (e.g., de Waal Malefijt 1968:58). As a philosophy bearing the name, however, positivism suppos-

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

494

* VOL. 97, NO. 3 * SEPTEMBER AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 1995

edly did not appear until the middle of the 19th century, its founder variously identified as Henri de Saint-Simon or his secretary, Auguste Comte.8 With Saint-Simon and Comte, positivism reputedly ramified. In philosophy, it was communicated, via Mach and Avenarius, to the neopositivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Society for Empirical Philosophy.9 Under Comte's influence, however, it also spread beyond philosophy into the newly emergent social sciences. In sociology, it reputedly influenced Spencer, Durkheim, Mauss, and later Aron, Shils, and Parsons. In anthropology, 'it is identified in the thought of Maine, Maitland, Lubbock, McLennan, Tylor, Morgan, Rivers, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown, whence it supposedly spread through virtually all branches of modernist anthropology, unmning especially amok in cultural materialism, comparative anthropology, and self-styled "scientific" anthropology.'? If many of positivism's confusingly diverse referents stem from this image of a historically contingent set of philosophical precepts, most of the remainder can be attributed to two extensions that, though quite distinct from these precepts, are seen as deriving from or articulating with them. The first identifies positivism with methodological naturalism (or "methodological unity"). Since positivists reputedly believe scientific method-and only scientific method-produces "truth"or "objective knowledge," they advocate its application to all forms of subject matter and its displacement of all other means of knowing. Metaphysics and philosophy are thus purged, and the only worthwhile pursuit becomes perfection in the application of scientific method-"the reduction of epistemology to methodology," as Ulin puts it (1984:65; see also Habermas 1971[1968]:67-69). With respect to the social sciences, methodological naturalism asserts that the social world is part of, or of a kind with, the natural world and that, therefore, the methods of the natural sciences can and should be applied to the study of the social world.11 The second extension of positivism is an anthropological idiosyncrasy that, I shall argue, confers particular moment on the image: positivism becomes identified with science. In some cases, this link is directly forged. According to de Waal Malefijt (1974:331), positivism is "a scientific method using verifiability as its code" (see also Ardener 1971:460-461). Diener and Robkin (1978:506) comment that physics "has largely abandoned" the "methodologies" of a "dated positivism," by which they clearly mean that these methodologies once constituted what scientists did. In other instances, the identification of science as positivism is covert: thus, both Tyler (1986:122125) and Ulin (1984:68) talk of "science" and "scientific thought" even though they are apparently referring to positivist philosophy or scientists with discursive allegiances to that philosophy. Hammersley and Atkinson (1983:3) refer to positivism as a philosophy, but in expli-

cating its major tenets, they frequently equate it to what physical and social scientists actually do (see also Peacock 1986:69, 108-109). In at least one instance, this willingness to conflate positivism and science derives from an identification of the former with Newtonian mechanics and pre-quantum, atomic physics (Samuel 1990:17). More commonly, it seems to stem from an assumption that positivism's philosophical precepts underwent a subtle metamorphosis in their post-Enlightenment history, becoming a kind of scientific habitus (Bourdieu 1990:52-65)-a "commitment," "model," "paradigm," "world view," "orthodoxy," "doctrine," or "faith"predicating the practice of natural and, especially, social scientists.12 Withpositivist precepts thus recursively linked to physical and social scientific practice, positivism becomes science. With this shift, positivism is also portrayed as spreading beyond the academy into Western-especially Protestant-culture in general, becoming in Ardener's words a "lay positivism," a "religion" of the "compulsorily educated masses" (1971:461462; see also Diamond 1974:10).

Positivism and the Interpretationof Science

Positivism seems to have blossomed into anthropological consciousness around 1971. For the 25 years prior to that date, I could locate just four references-three of them in histories of anthropological thought referring to Comte and his early successors-but at least six then appeared in 1971 alone, and 17 in the period 1971-75, most of these in works assessing the direction of anthropology. One early critic, Fabian (1971), treated positivism thoughtfully and without vituperation, grounding his critique in well-developed expositions of positivism beyond anthropology.13 Other critics of the time also may have drawn their models of positivism from external sources, but a tendency for caricature to occur in inverse proportion to careful citation and critique of sources was already apparent (e.g., Geertz 1973:119;Murphy 1971:84, 106). If anthropology's positivism did begin from a secure grounding in sources beyond the discipline, this might explain why much in its image seems unobjectionable enough. Broadly brushed, it seems to capture, albeit in highly pejorative light, important philosophical and sociological trends in Western intellectual history. What transforms it from an intellectual curio to-anobject of academic moment, however, is the pivotal role it has played in generating hostility to the idea of a science of society, thereby setting the stage for anthropology's hermeneutic turn and its postmodern concern with reflexivism and textual representation. The means to this end have been twofold. First, consonant with the idea that positivism's philosophical claims have become a scientific habitus, some critics have repre-

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PERILS OF'POSITIVISM' / PAULB. ROSCOE 495

sented positivism as science, and then, by pointing out the obvious failings of the former, have appeared to demolish the latter and, with it, pretensions to a science of society. In his "framingstory for a post-modern ethnography," for example, Tyler (1986:122-125) represents what I take to be the positivist camp in the positivist dispute in German sociology as "science" and the recognition of its inadequacies as the collapse of "scientific thought." Believing that he has disposed of science and, hence, of a science of society, he then proceeds to explore postmodern ethnographic alternatives. Unfortunately, Tyler's argument classically exemplifies Jarvie's complaint that positivism is a device to debunk science "by reducing it to a crude Aunt Sally ... which can easily be knocked down" (1988:428). Ironically, this kind of base reductionism collapses under the very weight of positivism's failings. Positivism's characterizations of scientific method as induction, verification, falsification, and so forth all encounter well-known and formidable logical tangles, not least the problem of theoretical underdetermination: there is, in principle, always an infinite number of possible theories to fit any finite set of facts. As a programmatic statement, moreover, positivist philosophy is doomed by its inability to justify within its own terms the criteria it specifies for the generation of knowledge. As a result, positivism cannot possibly constitute the habitus in which scientific practice is grounded, as Tyler apparently supposes, for the simple reason that, being flawed, it is impossible to execute. To be sure, many scientists discursively entertain highly positivistic notions about what they are doing, clothing their practice in a rhetoric of objectivity, the disinterested collection of facts, and the like. But to suppose that this accurately reflects what they are really doing is to mistake what the natives say they do for what they actually do. Contrary to Tyler, therefore, the positivist dispute did not lead to a collapse of scientific thought: what collapsed was positivism's representation of scientific thought. If Tyler's attack on a science of society seems obviously deceptive, the second strategy by which the image of positivism is deployed to undermine the idea of a natural science of society seems deceptively obvious. It draws on hermeneutic tradition to attack not science itself but methodological naturalism. Foreshadowed in the work of 19th-century German idealist philosophers, and developed by scholars like Weber, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, it asserts that scientific method, developed with reference to the natural world, is inappropriate to investigation of the social world. Among modem anthropological critics, Holy (1987) and Ellen (1984) make the point in particularly explicit terms. In advocating methodological naturalism, "positivist anthropology" fails to recognize that "social phenomena"

arenot externalto manin the way in which phenomenaof the natural worldare;theyareconstitutedbymeaninginthe sense thatthey do not exist independently of the cultural meanings whichpeople use to accountforthem and hence to constitute them. [Holy1987:5-6; see also Ellen 1984:28] In contrast to physical facts, "social facts are thus not things which can be simply observed" (Ellen 1984:28).The only phenomena in social life observable in the positivistic sense are physical-the physical actions of individuals, for example-but actors experience these only in the light of preconceived criteria that render them socially meaningful.'4Unless researchers want to distort the meaning of the actions they observe, they-like actors-must experience these actions simultaneously through senses and through thought processes. For many critics of positivism, the anthropological consequences of this train of argument are momentous. First, in studying the social world, anthropology must replace the methods of the natural sciences with a hermeneutic or interpretive method: A logicalcorollary of the theoryof social worldas constructed meanthroughits members'interactionsand as intrinsically ingful is ... a theory of its cognitive availabilitythrough participation in the construction of its meaning. [Ellen see also Holy 1987:6] 1984:29; Second, if the ethnographer is not a detached observer of "social facts" in the unmediated fashion posited by positivism but instead is an interpreter inescapably implicated in their construction, then neither in practice nor in principle can ethnographic "knowledge" be objective-that is, uninterested or value-free (Diener and Robkin 1978:505-506 and Dumont 1978:46). Consequently, the processes by which data emerge from the fieldwork process and are subsequently rendered as text become deeply problematic. To illuminate the influence of the investigator's attitudes on the behavior of the investigated, Dumont insists (1978:46), ethnography must say something about the dialectics of this process and its influence on the data collected. To manage the influence of interests and theoretical preconceptions on the collection, or selection, of "facts,"Diener and Robkin advocate Fabian's (1971) "methodology of 'dialectical dialogue'," a "dialectical interaction between the researcher and his subjects or subject matter"(Diener and Robkin 1978:505506). In subsequently rendering our ethnographic narratives, Marcus (1986:184) argues, hermeneutic sensitivity must impose "standards of puritanical honesty upon claims... about who speaks for whom, and what is actually being authentically represented." The flaw in this train of argument is the puzzlingly conservative, hermeneutic conviction to which Holy and Ellen give voice: "thatthe social world is not a real objective world external to man in the same sense as any other objectively existing reality (natural world)" (Ellen

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

496

* VOL. 97, NO. 3 * SEPTEMBER 1995 ANTHROPOLOGIST AMERICAN

1984:28;see also Holy 1987:5-6). If the hermeneutic movement is right that humans are suspended in webs of significance that they themselves have spun (Geertz 1973:25), then how can the natural world escape these meshes? Like the social world, it, too, must be a human construct. Notwithstanding the claims of the natives (i.e., scientists), physical facts cannot be out there waiting to be discovered; rather, they must be in our minds waiting to be constructed. Though phrased in different ways and with varying opinions on how thoroughly idealistic "the facts" are (and even on whether the issue is epistemologically relevant [Rorty 1982:3-18]), this proposition has long been accepted in the philosophy of science.15 As Rorty, criticizing Rabinow and Sullivan (1979:5), phrases the matter, when it is said that "interpretation [of the humanas opposed to the naturalworld] begins from the postulatethat the web of meaningconstitutes humanexistence,"this suggests that fossils (for example) mightget constitutedwithout a web of meanings.... To say that humanbeings wouldn'tbe human, wouldbe animal,unlessthey talkeda lot is true enough.Ifyou can'tfigureout the relationbetween a person, the noises he makes,and otherpersons,then you won't know much about him. But one could equallywell say that fossils wouldn'tbe fossils, would be merely rocks, if we couldn't grasp their relationsto lots of other fossils. Fossils are constitutedas fossils by a web of relationshipsto other fossils and to the speech of the paleontologists who describe such relationships. [1982:199] Likewise, rocks would not be rocks, would be merely hard, gritty things, were it not for their constitution as rocks by a web of meanings. Hard, gritty things would not be hard, gritty things were it not for their constitution as hard, gritty things by a web of meanings. And so on around the hermeneutic circle. "Anything is, for the purposes of being inquired into, 'constituted' by a web of meanings" (Rorty 1982:199;emphasis in original). The processes to which Rorty refers have been ably documented by sociologists of science. Tracing the intellectual evolution of the pulsar, for example, Woolgar (1988: chaps. 4, 5; see also Latour and Woolgar 1986:105186) shows how a group of astronomers first created and constituted its existence from interpretations of documents (texts) such as radio-telescope charts, previous results, detection apparatuses, the astronomy literature, prevailing opinions in the scientific community, and so on. This achieved, a subtle process of splitting and inversion occurred: although the object had been constituted in virtue of the documents (and more generally the social networks of which they were a part), it was now interpreted to be a separate entity that had been "outthere" all along and had given rise to the documents. Finally, the interpretive and rhetorical details of this process of construction were minimized, denied, or backgrounded as

history was rewritten to give the discovered object its ontological foundation.

InterpretiveScience and Ethnography

By no means have all of positivism's critics overlooked the interpreted nature of physical facts. Ulin rightly observes, for example, that "consciousness never merely copies [physical and social] facts but rather is responsible for their constitution through a complex, linguistically mediated sociocultural learning process" (1984:68).16Yet even these critics fail to draw out the important consequence of this point: the equivalence of the methods of natural science and interpretive anthropology. If physical facts are just as constructed as social facts, then they cannot verify or falsify theory in the manner envisioned in positivism--the dilemma known as the Quine-Duhem equivocality of experimental and observational result. Physical science, like social science, ceases to be the objective construction of "mental maps" of reality through recursive comparison with externally given, neutral facts. If facts have the same interpretive status as theories, scientific method becomes instead a subjective juggling and modification of interpretations in terms of subjectively perceived consistency and problematicity, and scientific advance comes to rest on the interpretive capacity to render rival hypotheses implausible (see Campbell 1986:125-126). This being the case, it has to be asked how physical science differs from interpretation as this is conceived in anthropology. Unfortunately, interpretivists are often as reticent about their own methodological underpinnings as they are cryptic about the details of positivism. For Rabinow and Sullivan, following Ricoeur (1971:547, 550), interpretive method is a "dialectic of guessing and validation" (1987:9). For Geertz, it involves "guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses" (1973:20). "In observing people's behaviour we derive hypotheses from our cultural knowledge to describe and explain their actions, and we test these out against further information" (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983:16; see also Peacock 1986:101-102). In the absence of more detail, it is unclear how these methods are supposed to differ from a scientific method often described as hypothesis or conjecture followed by validation or refutation. When more detail is furnished, any differences seem to vanish. Consider Paul Ricoeur's ideas on textual interpretation, in which Rabinow and Sullivan (1987:9, 12-13) and many other interpretivists find their immediate methodological inspiration. Textual interpretation, Ricoeur (1971:547-553, 1976:75-88) proposes, is a dialectic involving erkldren and verstehen.

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PERILS OF POSITIVISM' / PAULB. ROSCOE 497

Inquiry begins with an initial guess about the meaning of the whole text, moves to procedures for "validation,"and finally moves back to a more developed understanding of the text. Now, it is in the procedures for "validating"the initial guess that Ricoeur sees the critical difference between scientific and interpretive method. In textual interpretation, these are "comparable to the juridical procedures used in legal interpretation" (Ricoeur 1976:78). They are closer to a "logic of probability" than to a "logic of empirical verification" (i.e., scientific method) for, unlike the latter, juridical validation produces only a "probable," not a "true,"interpretation (1976:78). We must suspect something is awry, however, when an attempt to distinguish hermeneutic methods from those of natural science deploys the same, juristic metaphor to characterize the former that some philosophers of science have used to represent the latter (Popper 1959[1935]:109-111). The problem lies in Ricoeur's positivistic notions of natural science. Contrary to his presumption, "empirical verification" produces not "truth" but only an interpretation. Subjectively at least, to be sure, this interpretation seems more probable than others in the light of a comparative and evaluative process that juggles interpretations (facts and theories) with different, subjectively perceived degrees of problematicity. But there seems no difference in principle between this and Ricoeur's notion that in hermeneutics An interpretation must not only be probable,but more probable thananotherinterpretation. Thereare criteriaof relative superiorityfor resolving [the] conflict [between competing which can easilybe derivedfromthe logic of interpretations], subjectiveprobability.[1976:79] Holy and Ellen provide an alternative exposition of interpretive method couched in the idiom of participation. Yet their proposals, too, appear indistinguishable from the interpretive manner in which natural science is actually practiced. In the interpretive methodology, Holy (1987:6) contends, "the notion of the researcher's participation in the subjects' activities replaces the [positivistic] notion of their simple observation as the main data-yielding procedure." Ellen expands on what is meant: Itis a methodologywherethe notionof success replacestruth as criterion of validity and where the participationof the researcherbecomes the mainmeans of verifyinghis account. If able to interactsuccessfullywith and towardssubjects,i.e. if able to pass for a member, the anthropologist'sunderstandingof theircultureis right.Andit is, of course,the group which defines the terms of acceptanceand rejectionof new members.[1984:30] Yet these descriptions would seem also to describe the means by which physical scientists verify their accounts of the (constructed) facts of the scientific world. It is not some inherent truth or falsity that permits them to determine the validity of the facts but whether their

construction of the facts facilitates their competent participation in scientific life. If able to interact successfully with and toward other scientists, then they can be assured that their understanding of the physical world is "right." Conversely, if their statements or practices elicit puzzled looks, polite corrections, or outright ostracism, then they know equally well something is "wrong." By extension, their attempts at scientific innovation (e.g., the discovery of a new stellar body) succeed or fail by the same process as attempts at cultural innovation: namely, whether or not they meet with social acceptance. In sum, when Holy (1987:8, 12) notes that anthropology has recently redefined itself as "an interpretative humanity concerned with cultural specificity and cultural diversity, rather than as a generalizing science," he is remarking on an artificial wedge that many interpretivists have driven between their own activities and those of science. Likewise, when Tyler represents a postmodern ethnography as a "cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality" (1986:125), he is doing no more than making explicit what natural science as much as ethnography is all about.

Science, Interpretation,and Observationaland RepresentationalAuthority

Given anthropology's traditional emphasis on the interpreted nature of any worldview, and given how widely recognized is the hermeneutic nature of natural scientific knowledge in philosophy and sociology, it is puzzling that so many of positivism's anthropological critics should need reminding of the point and its implications. Perhaps the pretensions of positivists have diverted them into an overly mechanistic view of natural science that has obscured not only the thoroughly hermeneutic nature of science but also the thoroughly scientific nature of their own hermeneutic ethnography.17 Or perhaps the unfocused nature of their image of positivism, which can so easily prompt the erroneous conflation of science and positivistic conceptions of science, leads them temporarily astray. If there is a difference between scientific and ethnographic practice, it surely lies in the greater observational and representational authority that pragmatic circumstances confer on the ethnographer. In the natural sciences, the ubiquity of the physical world, coupled with liberal funding, traditionally has furnished a comparatively democratic access to observation and representation: the solar spectrum, for example, is accessible to, and describable by, almost any astronomer with access to the requisite equipment. As a result, individual authority over observation and representation is relatively unsta-

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

498

* VOL.97, NO. 3 * SEPTEMBER 1995 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

ble and, in a community that customarily transforms the fruits of skeptical behavior into symbolic capital, this helps ensure the critical scrutiny, "validation,"or "refutation" of published facts and theories long recognized as the "scientific method." In anthropology, by contrast, the ethnographer-the lone fieldworker-typically monopolizes observational and representational authority, a capital that he or she traditionally has buttressed through rhetoric that "enacts a specific strategy of authority ... [involving] an unquestioned claim to appear as the purveyor of truth in the text" (Clifford 1983:120). Access to a non-Western cultural world is generally much less democratic than access to the natural world, constrained by the spatiotemporally circumscribed nature of cultural worlds, the premium placed on exploiting virgin ethnographic fields, the number of available ethnographers, pitifully inadequate research funds, and disciplinary codes that discourage the checking of other ethnographers' facts as somehow impolite while sanctifying the privacy of fieldnotes at least until-and often beyond-their owner's death.18Consequently, published claims (interpretations) about a cultural world are seldom subject to scrutiny, "validation,"or "refutation"for the simple reason that no one but their ethnographic author commands the necessary observational and representational authority for the task. Still, the scientific nature of ethnographic construction sometimes emerges in ethnographic reanalyses or when two ethnographers work the same field. Thus, Evans-Pritchard's data on the Nuer frequently have been deployed to rebut his functional interpretation of their life in favor of new constructions. In an exercise as scientific as any laboratory experiment, Fortune (1939:27, 36) sought to challenge Mead's (1935) representation of the peaceful Mountain Arapesh with data such as a survey indicating that, at contact, one half of all adult males had killed. Similarly, Lewis, "inthe interest of science," empirically challenged Redfield's ethnographic construction of the Mexican village of Tepoztlan on issues ranging from the origins of the barrios, through land ownership, to the symbolism of cloth bound around a mother's abdomen following a birth (1963[1951]:x, 19-20, 125-126, 360 n. 12, 428-440). Cultural anthropology has tended to problematize such cases as the "Rashomon effect," but they might better be represented as normal science. Were it usual for several noncollaborating fieldworkers (rather than just one) simultaneously to study a community, their subsequent public scrutiny of one another's constructions would make fully apparent the scientific nature of the interpretive method. As much as any of positivism's supposed excesses, I suggest, it is this monopoly of ethnographic observation and representation that accounts for the rise of postmodern preoccupations with the problematic integrity of the fieldwork exercise and its textual representation. In the

natural sciences, data elicitation and textual representation appear relatively unproblematic: if in doubt, members of the scientific community can always "see for themselves" and "render for themselves." In anthropology, where only one member of the academic community typically can "see for him- or herself," observational and representational integrity comes to seem much more problematic. Because they generally fail to address the bases of this ethnographic monopoly, the remedial prescriptions postmodernists offer, laudable though they may be, can be no more effective than positivism's prescriptions for objectivity. Herdt and Stoller (1990:352), for example, advocate the ethnographic inclusion of extensive detail about the fieldwork process to facilitate "unpacking"of the ethnographer's interpretations (see also Dumont 1978:46). Yet they fail to engage the authority that the lone ethnographer exercises not only over the interpretations made but also over precisely which fieldwork details are included and omitted. When Marcus (1986:184) urges ethnographers to adopt "standards of puritanical honesty" about who is speaking for whom in their texts and what is actually being authentically represented, he likewise disregards the typical ethnographer's status as the only person who can know and represent his or her standards as of "puritanical honesty." "Monological authority," as Clifford (1983:134-135, 139) notes, is not eliminated; the problems thus remain. It is no coincidence, I think, that postmodern concerns have had rather less impact in economics, sociology, and psychology than in anthropology. With the empirical attention of most of their practitioners focused on Western society, access to observation in these disciplines is more democratic and hence seems less problematic than in anthropology. It may be, therefore, that anthropology would be better served by contemplating a path that leads less to postmodernism than to pragmatic ways of breaking down observational and representational authority. In this brave but more brutal new world, multiple ethnographers might be pitted one against another in the same field, or anthropological journals and book editors might invite literate members of a society to critique ethnographies of their culture.

TranscendingCultures:TheLimits of Scientific Method in Anthropology

If interpretive and scientific methods are one and the same, then the proposals of positivism's more sympathetic critics (M. Jackson 1989:182-187) that anthropologists avoid the crude either-or dichotomy of science versus interpretivism in favor of epistemological openness, or an inclusion of both, are rendered moot. So too is the defense that verstehen, or interpretive method, is in-

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PERILS OF'POSITIVISM' / PAULB. ROSCOE 499

tended not as "an alternative to positivism and the scientific method, as it is sometimes said to be, but as a corrective against the too mechanical application of this method" (Parkin 1988:21). If interpretivism and scientific method are one and the same, then clearly the one cannot be a methodological correction of the other. What is really at issue, I believe, are not methodological corrections but rather empirical and theoretical ones. On the one hand, what some interpretivists really want to correct are positivists' supposed notions that the "real" data are "social facts"-norms, institutions, networks of "actually existing relations"-rather than the specific actions and utterances of individuals in dialogical interaction with one another and with the ethnographer (Ellen 1984:20 and Murphy 1971:84, 106). On the other hand, interpretivists object to a common theoretical presumption among positivists that ideas are not an autonomous force in human behavior but are reducible to other parameters of existence. This latter issue can be illustrated by considering a further concern that some of positivism's critics harbor about a science of society. Many interpretivists seem to take their prime intellectual goal as understanding and representing a single culture. As Holy (1987:7) summarizes the matter, analyses "aimed at understanding a culture 'internally' ... 'in its own terms' ... or 'from the actor's point of view'.. . have characterized most of symbolic or semantic anthropology, resulting... in the proliferation of descriptions and analyses of particular societies and cultures." Fired by the principle of methodological naturalism, however, positivists supposedly insist on going much further. Just as natural scientists go beyond collecting and representing facts about rocks, floral and faunal species, stellar bodies, and so forth and construct theories of what lies "behind"the behavior of these physical phenomena, so positivistic anthropologists seek to identify a second order of (scientific) interpretation "behind" first-order ethnographic interpretations-a totalizing theory embodying transcultural laws and causes that account for behavior both within and among human societies. For critics, this quest is fatally flawed. It erroneously presumes a "determinism"of human action, one that positivists usually render theoretically via a reduction of mind to material and/or functional exigency. It takes humans and their behavior to be no different analytically from physical or biological matter and its behavior.19For some critics, in fact, this quest is not just flawed but offensive. According to Schultz and Lavenda, "Anthropologists can be charged with being insensitive to the humanity of their research subjects when their positivistic reports treat human beings as if they, too, [like rocks or molecules,] lacked thoughts, feelings, dignity, the freedom to choose" (1990:52). Diener and Robkin (1978:506) believe that "the very process of'objectifying' human subjects" in this 'posi-

tivistic' manner leads to ethical problems such as the operant conditioning of deviants without their consent, and Skinnerian calls to move beyond freedom and dignity. It is difficult to evaluate these criticisms because, in anthropology at least, neither their grounds nor the precise meanings of highly problematic terms like laws, causes, and determinism are spelled out. Still, the general form of the argument is familiar, and in what follows I shall consider the outline offered by Anthony Giddens and by Ira Cohen, who summarizes and expands Giddens's discussion.20 According to this argument, the application of scientific method unavoidably presumes a uniformitarian principle, a metaphysical faith in the existence of an Order of Nature, of regularities or recurrences in the world. Without such faith, scientists would be unable to formulate "universal (empirical) laws" of the sort, "If initial condition(s) A obtain(s), consequence(s) B will always follow." If identical experiments or circumstances always, or even just sometimes, gave rise to varying results, then, the argument goes, the scientific method would collapse. In the case of natural science, faith in an Order of Nature is justified-or so positivism's critics seem to suppose-because the physical universe is held to be a deterministic one in which entities are wholly governed by a trans-spatial, transtemporal order of forces or relationships. Humans, however, have certain, possibly unique characteristics, variously identified as self-awareness, reflexivity, creativity, intentionality, rationalization of action, and purposiveness, that confer on them freedom to dictate their action. In consequence, there is no thoroughgoing determinism of human agency in the sense that there are forces to which humans must respond automatically as do atoms, molecules, and the like. Universal laws of human behavior, always valid within or among cultures, can never be formulated, because humans, unlike atoms, have the ability to detect lawlike regularities in their affairs, build them into their assessment of their situation, and so in principle undermine them. The problem with this argument is that it works only as a critique of positivistic notions of natural science method and what it produces. Contrary to its implicit assumption, the success of natural science depends neither on a thoroughgoing determinism in its subject matter nor on the universality ofthe uniformitarianprinciple; and its method does not and cannot produce universal laws. First, of course, if human behavior is nondeterministic and nonlawlike then so too must be the physical world, to the extent that humans are in that world and affect its behavior. According to chaos theory, moreover, certain physical processes, such as turbulent gaseous and liquid flow, population dynamics in predator-prey species, even multiple mechanical collisions, can never be captured as universal laws even were their behavior wholly deterministic. Finally, as the quantum foundation of modem phys-

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

500

* VOL. 97, No. 3 * SEPTEMBER 1995 ANTHROPOLOGIST AMERICAN

ics now tells us, there is no thoroughgoing determinism in the physical world, and, consequently, no law can ever apply to all space and all time. Recognizing that the physical world is neither wholly deterministic nor wholly regular or recurrent in its action, natural scientists get on with analyzing those aspects of the physical world that do seem to exhibit regularity or recurrence. Social scientists could only be prevented from following suit were there no regularities or recurrences at all in human behavior. It is doubtful, however, that even the most committed idealist could entertain such a notion. Even if humans could, in theory, act to subvert all regularity in their behavior, it is unlikely they would do so in practice if for no other reason than that cultural reproduction-indeed, human reproduction and survival-would become impossible. In fact, though human reflectivity, creativity, and freedom of action may inject a degree of indeterminism and irregularity into human behavior, there is reason to suppose, as Giddens (1984:343-347) notes in some detail, that agents can never be wholly autonomous. They are always subject to social and material constraints that they are unable to change; they are subject to the dialectic of control-their asymmetric access to resources; and there are limits on the range of practices they are capable of competently performing. As for their ability to predict and hence, in principle, undermine regularities in behavior, there are a whole set of circumstances under which this knowledge can have no transformational consequences. Not least is when the empirical referent is to past events; when reflexive knowledge is used to sustain rather than undermine existing circumstances; and when those who seek to apply this knowledge are not in a situation to be able to do so effectively (Giddens 1984:341-343).

The Perils of Positivism

The perils of positivism, in sum, are of two sorts. On the one hand are those putatively associated with adherence to the positivist ideal in anthropology. As I have sought to show, these are less threatening than they seem; whatever damage positivism can cause has been self-limiting since, by virtue of its flaws, it is impossible to put fully into practice. As in the natural sciences, whatever anthropological positivists (and their critics) thought they were doing was assuredly very different from whatever it was they actually were doing. On the other hand, there are the perils that unreflective deployment of the image of positivism poses for anthropology. The most important, I have argued, is the ease with which this image facilitates-covertly in some cases, explicitly in others-rejection of the methods of natural science as applicable to
social science.

Given its manifest failings, it must be asked how so underdetermined and conflicted an image as positivism has not only survived but prospered in the ecology of anthropological ideas. Whatever its substantive merits, the image may have flourished in part because its underdetermination rendered it a powerful vehicle of intellectual consolidation and attack. Capable of meaning many things to many people, it may have fostered an impression of much broader intellectual agreement about positivism's deficiencies than obtains in actuality. As a sketchy and contradictory representation of complex ideas and criticisms, moreover, it has confronted those who might want to respond to the critique with an extensive preliminary interpretive exercise, while simultaneously exposing them to the easy rejoinder that they have misrepresented what was intended. The pragmatics of academic discourse, however, fail to explain the particular image that positivism represents. Clearly, critics feel they have identified a movement that has led anthropology astray. Yet the vitriol heaped upon positivists and positivism seems out of all proportion to the sins of omission and commission that their precepts purportedly have wrought. Where a measured response might seek to build on the foundations of the past while avoiding its fissures, too many of positivism's critics have seemed bent on reducing it all to a useless rubble. Such ire suggests the covert presence of a further target, and I suspect this is scientism: the unreflective, epistemological, and theoretical arrogance with which positivists supposedly deploy the precept of methodological naturalism, smugly deriding all knowledge not generated by what they take to be scientific method. Scientism has an early and distinguished ancestry in Bacon's (1900[1605, 1620]:319) reductive dismissal of all philosophy prior to his "positive doctrine" as just "species of idols [that] beset the human mind." It perhaps antagonizes positivism's critics for two reasons. The first is the scientistic mien itself-the unreflecting derision that many of us have experienced at the hands of positivism's heroes, the natural scientists, and at least some anthropological acolytes who pontificate about scientific method in astonishingly naive terms. The second is scientism's implicit political agenda. Scientism deploys the term science as though it were a magical talisman guaranteeing the authenticity of whatever half-baked ideas are trotted out under its aegis. Unfortunately, such claims do exercise a sort of magic over the uninitiated-the lay populace and politicians who vote on funding priorities-thereby continually threatening to disenfranchise humanistic inquiry and other forms of inquiry as nonscientific. If I am not mistaken, however, the scientistic boast is hollow: most forms of humanistic inquiry are as scientific as quantum physics; they differ only in their subject matter.

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PERILS OF 'POSITIVISM' /

PAUL B. ROSCOE

501

If scientism is indeed the real target of antagonism, this would explain the general failure rigorously to engage and critique positivism's claims: simply put, critical interests have been elsewhere. It also would account for the readiness to collapse science into positivism; in arrogating natural science to their epistemological cause, the scientistically inclined have trapped incautious critics into accepting at face value their claim that the positivist program is science. Where modern critical anthropology perhaps went awry was in failing to follow a lead laid down by its radical forebears-scholars like Berreman and Scholte especially (1974[1972]) (1971, 1974[1972]). These rigorous and persuasive critiques of "scientific" anthropology deployed positivism only incidentally and innocuously; scientism was their explicit target, and their object was not to reject a science of society but to place it within a humane rather than a scientistic framework 92-94 and Scholte (e.g., Berreman 1974[1972]:88-90, Almost 1971:782,784, 801). certainly, their use of the term derived from science but scientism--etymologically nonetheless clearly differentiated from it-helped prevent the intellectual legerdemain of rejecting science along with scientism. Unfortunately, in the discourse of many subsequent critics, scientism got folded into 'positivism', thereby blurring the etymological distinction and allowing the image of positivism to drive a wedge between cultural anthropology and the possibility of a science of society. Anthropology's image of positivism, then, has served to camouflage significant faults in the grounding of recent anthropology. Toward reconstruction, I think, a reassessment of the status of a natural science of culture and society is long overdue. At the very least, those who advocate the methodological of natural distinctiveness and social science need to specify in more sophisticated terms than they have to date wherein the differences lie. To this end, detailed comparisons of the practice of natural science and ethnography will be invaluable, though this task must await accounts of the latter equivalent to the detailed examinations already undertaken of the former. Postmodernists have furnished us with many autobiographical accounts of fieldwork, but their representational makes these monopoly superficially self-critical works poor substitutes for the kind of biographical accounts of natural science typified by Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1986) (Rubinstein 1991:20-22). In the meantime, reflexivists and postmodernists might reconsider their grounds in light of the differential distribution of observational and representational authority in ethnography and physical science. And the discipline as a whole might begin to discuss pragmatic ways to destabilize the self-confirming, selfserving, authorial monopoly that most ethnographers still enjoy over their subject matter.

Notes
Acknowledgments. An early version of this paper was presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in the session "Scientific and Humanistic Ways of Understanding in Anthropology," organized by J. Tim O'Mearaand chaired by Richard Shweder and Melford Spiro. For comments and criticisms on that and other versions, I am deeply grateful to Robert Borofsky, Johannes Fabian, Terry Hays, Alice Kehoe, Bruce Knauft, Cindy Mahmood, Henry Munson, Tim O'Meara, Don Pollock, Paul Roth, Ray Scupin, and Stephen Tyler, none of whom bears any culpability for my viewpoints or mistakes. 1. Works by sociologists and economists on positivism include Adorno et al. 1976[1969]; P. Cohen 1980; Giddens 1974, 1977:28-89; Giedymin 1975; and Habermas 1971[1968]. 2. Archaeology has gone through wrangles of its own over positivism. Without reluctance, I restrict this examination to social and cultural anthropology, since the growing intellectual and social separation of the two subdisciplines has produced significantly different images of positivism. Archaeological positivism, it is my impression, has received greater exposition and more rigorous critique than in cultural anthropology, and it is more tightly integrated with logical than Comtean positivism (Kelley and Hanen 1988:5 and Watson et al. 1984:3). 3. P. Cohen 1980:141; Giddens 1977:29;and Giedymin 1975. 4. Defining a cultural anthropological source is as problematic as defining cultural anthropology itself. Here, I take such a source to be one written by a cultural anthropologist or clearly intended to include cultural anthropologists as a major component of its audience. 5. Diamond 1974:330; Dumont 1978:45; Paluch 1988:80; Sahlins 1976:128, 146; and Shalvey 1979:97-98 identify these writings as positivistic. Ardener 1971:460; Jerschina 1988:145; Leacock 1981:214; and Rigby 1985:49-50 identify them as nonor antipostivistic. 6. Berreman 1974[1972]:93; Dienerand Robkin 1978:505-506; Ellen 1982:16; Fetterman 1989:16; Friedrich 1992:211; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983:4-5; Harkin 1988:100; McGrane 1989:3-4; Peacock 1986:68, 86, 101; Samuel 1990:20;and Schultz and Lavenda 1990:50-51. 7. Ardener 1971:460;Bidney 1967:264,429; Borofsky 1994:24; R. Cohen 1981:206; de Waal Maleflt 1974:331; De Zengotita 1989:103; Ellen 1982:3; Fettennan 1989:16; Friedrich 1992:211; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983:4, 12; Harkin 1988:100; Marcus and Fischer 1986:179; Peacock 1986:69, 86, 95, 101; Samuel 1990:20;Schultz and Lavenda 1990:50,51; Stocking 1987:323;and Ulin 1984:65. 8. Bernard 1994:169; Bidney 1967:89; Borofsky 1994:24; de Waal Malefijt 1974:108-113; and Harris 1968:60-63. Acton (1989:253-254), however, makes a persuasive case for Bacon's primacy in furnishing not only the philosophy but also its name (see Bacon 1864[1623-24]:345). 9. Bernard 1994:169; De Zengotita 1989:107; Gellner 1985:467; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983:3; Marcus and Fischer 1986:179;and Rabinow and Sullivan 1987:10-11. 10. Diener and Robkin 1978:505; Geertz 1973:199; Holy 1987:2, 15; M. Jackson 1989:180; Karp and Maynard 1983:484; Marcus and Fischer 1986:179; Murphy 1971:14;Paluch 1988:80;

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

502

* VOL. 97, No. 3 * SEPTEMBER 1995 ANTHROPOLOGIST AMERICAN

Sahlins 1972:154; Service 1985:3, 241, 259; and Stocking 1987:190. 11. Ellen 1984:20-21; Hanson 1975:x; Holy 1987:5; Peel 1971:238, 249; Schultz and Lavenda 1990:50;and Ulin 1984:65. 12. Holy 1987:6; Murphy 1971:106; Rabinow and Sullivan 1987:9-10; Schultz and Lavenda 1990:50-52; Service 1985:259; and Shalvey 1979:97. 13. Kolakowski 1968;Adorno etal. 1976[1969]; and Radnitsky 1968. 14. Ellen 1984:28-29; see also Diener and Robkin 1978:506 and Rigby 1985:30. 15. Feyerabend 1978:31, 69-80; Hesse 1980:63-86, 172; Popper 1959[1935]:59, 79-81, 93-95, 107; and Quine 1966:208-214, 233-241. 16. See also Jarvie 1975:258 and Peacock 1986:68-69. Some critics appear to make a similar but subtly different point: positivism fails to recognize that values, interests, and epistemological, theoretical, and pretheoretical conceptions frame the act of selecting observations or facts (Rigby 1985:30 and Schulz and Lavenda 1990:53-54). While this is indubitably true, it overlooks the point that the observations or facts selected are themselves interpretive constructions. 17. Carrithers 1990; Giddens 1979:258; and Rubinstein 1991:19-20. Some scholars progress partially toward this conclusion. Hammersly and Atkinson (1983:17), for example, "view social science as sharing much in common with natural science while yet treating both as merely the advance guard of commonsense knowledge." While rightly grounding both physical and social science in commonsense reasoning, they draw back from asserting their complete identity and pursuing the ramifications of their point (see also Hanson 1975:86 and Peacock 1986:101102). 18. Campbell 1986:128;J. Jackson 1990:8-10, 22; and Salzman 1994:35. 19. De Zengotita 1989:112; Murphy 1971:85, 101; Sahlins 1976:206; Sangren 1988:409; Schultz and Lavenda 1990:50, 52; Service 1985:133;and Shalvey 1979:97. 20. Giddens 1976:84-85,1977:80-89,1979:242-245,1984:334347, and I. Cohen 1989:24-25.

References Cited
Acton, H. B. 1989 Positivism. In The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers. J. O. Urmson and Jonathan Ree, eds. Pp. 253-256. London: Unwin Hyman. Adormo,Theodor W., Hans Albert, Rolf Dahrendorf, Jurgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, and Karl Popper 1976[1969] The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. New York: Harper and Row. Ardener, Edwin 1971 The New Anthropology and Its Critics. Man, n.s., 6:449467. Bacon, Francis 1864[1623-24] On Principles and Origins according to the Fables of Cupid and Coelum: Etc. In The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. 10. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, eds. Pp. 343-399. Boston: Taggard and Thompson.

1900[1605, 1620] Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. London: Colonial Press. Bernard, H. Russell 1994 Methods Belong to All of Us. In Assessing Cultural Anthropology. Robert Borofsky, ed. Pp. 168-177. New York: McGraw-Hill. Berreman, Gerald D. 1974[1972] "BringingIt All Back Home": Malaise in Anthropology. In Reinventing Anthropology. Dell Hymes, ed. Pp. 83-98. New York: Vintage Books. Bidney, David 1967 Theoretical Anthropology. New York: Shocken Books. Borofsky, Robert 1994 Diversity and Divergence within the Anthropological Community. In Assessing Cultural Anthropology. Robert Borofsky, ed. Pp. 23-28. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bourdieu, Pierre 1988 Preface. In Un Ethnologie au Maroc. Paul Rabinow, ed. Pp. 11-14. Paris: Machette. 1990 The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Campbell, Donald T. 1986 Science's Social System of Validity-Enhancing Collective Belief Change and the Problems of the Social Sciences. In Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and Subjectivities. Donald W. Fiske and Richard A. Shweder, eds. Pp. 108-135. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carrithers, Michael 1990 Is Anthropology Art or Science? Current Anthropology 31:263-272. Clifford, James 1983 On Ethnographic Authority. Representations 1:118146. Cohen, Ira J. 1989 Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life. New York: St. Martin's Press. Cohen, Percy S. 1980 Is Positivism Dead? Sociological Review 28:141-176. Cohen, Ronald 1981 Evolutionary Epistemology and Human Values. Current Anthropology 22:201-208. de Waal Malef?yt, Annemarie 1968 Religion and Culture:An Introduction to Anthropology of Religion. London: Collier-Macmillan. 1974 Images of Man:A History of Anthropological Thought. New York: Knopf. De Zengotita, Thomas 1989 Speakers of Being: Romantic Refusion and Cultural Anthropology. In Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility. George W. Stocking Jr., ed. Pp. 74-123. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Diamond, Stanley 1974 In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Dutton. Diener, Paul, and Eugene E. Robkin 1978 Ecology, Evolution, and the Search for CulturalOrigins: The Question of Islamic Pig Prohibition. CurrentAnthropology 19:493-509.

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PERILS OF'POSITIVISM' / PAULB. ROSCOE 503

Dumont, Jean-Paul 1978 The Headman and I:Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Fieldworking Experience. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ellen, R. F. 1982 Environment, Subsistence and System: The Ecology of Small-Scale Social Formations. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. 1984 Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct. London: Academic Press. Fabian, Johannes 1971 Language, History, and Anthropology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1:19-47. Fetterman, David 1989 Ethnography: Step by Step. Newbury Park: Sage. Feyerabend, Paul 1978 Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso. Fortune, R. F. 1939 Arapesh Warfare. American Anthropologist 41(1):2241. Friedrich, Paul 1992 Interpretation and Vision: A Critique of Cryptopositivism. Cultural Anthropology 7(2):211-231. Geertz, Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York:Basic Books. Gellner, Ernest 1985 Relativism and the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, Anthony 1974 Introduction. In Positivism and Sociology. Anthony Giddens, ed. Pp. 1-22. London: Heinemann. 1976 New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies. New York: Basic Books. 1977 Studies in Social and Political Theory. New York: Basic Books. 1979 Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1984 The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giedymin, Jerzy 1975 Antipositivism in Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science and Humanities. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 26:275-301. Habermas, Jtirgen 1971[1968] Knowledge and Human Interests. Jeremy J. Shaprio, trans. Boston: Beacon Press. Hammersley, Martyn, and Paul Atkinson 1983 Ethnography: Principles in Practice. New York: Tavistock. Hanson, F. Allan 1975 Meaning in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Harkin, Michael 1988 History, Narrative, and Temporality: Examples from the Northwest Coast. Ethnohistory 35:99-130. Harris, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Crowell.

and RobertJ. Stoller Herdt,Gilbert, 1990 Intimate Communications: Erotics and the Study of New York:Columbia Culture. UniversityPress. Hesse, Mary 1980 Revolutionsand Reconstructionsin the Philosophyof Science.Bloomington: IndianaUniversityPress. Holy,Ladislav 1987 Introduction:Description, Generalizationand Comparison:Two Paradigms.In ComparativeAnthropology. Ladislav Basil Blackwell. Holy,ed. Pp. 1-21. Oxford: Jackson,JeanE. 1990 "IAm a Fieldnote": Fieldnotesas a Symbolof Professional Identity.In Fieldnotes:The Makingsof Anthropology. RogerSanjek,ed. Pp. 3-33. Ithaca:CornellUniversity Press. Jackson,Michael 1989 Pathstowarda Clearing: RadicalEmpiricism and EthIndianaUniversity Press. nographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Jarvie,I. C. 1975 Epistleto the Anthropologists. AmericanAnthropologist 77:253-266. 1988 Comment. Current 29:427-429. Anthropology Jan Jerschina, 1988 PolishCultureof Modernism andMalinowski's PersonbetweenTwoWorlds: ThePolishRoots ality.In Malinowski of an Anthropological Tradition. Roy Ellen,ErnestGellner, andJanuszMucha,eds. Pp. 128-148.CamGrazyna Kubica, bridge:Cambridge UniversityPress. Karp, Ivan,and KentMaynard 1983 ReadingTheNuer. Current 24:481-492. Anthropology P. Hanen Kelley,JaneH., and Marsha 1988 Archaeologyand the Methodologyof Science. Albuquerque: Universityof New MexicoPress. Leszek Kolakowski, 1968 The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist trans. GardenCity,NY:DouThought.NorbertGuterman, bleday. Latour, Bruno,and Steven Woolgar 1986 Laboratory Life:The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. BeverlyHills:Sage. Leacock,EleanorBurke 1981 Mythsof MaleDominance.New York: Review Monthly Press. Lewis,Oscar 1963[1951] Life in a MexicanVillage:TepoztlanRestudied. Urbana: Universityof IllinoisPress. Marcus, GeorgeE. 1986 Contemporary Problemsof Ethnographyin the Modem World Culture: The Poetics andPolitics System.In Writing of Ethnography. JamesClifford and GeorgeE. Marcus, eds. Press. Pp. 165-193.Berkeley:Universityof California Marcus, GeorgeE., and MichaelM.J. Fischer 1986 Anthropologyas CulturalCritique: An Experimental Momentin the Human Sciences. Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress. Bernard McGrane, 1989 Beyond Anthropology:Society and the Other. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

504

* VOL. 97, NO. 3 * SEPTEMBER1995 ANTHROPOLOGIST AMERICAN

Mead, Margaret 1935 Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow. Mill, John Stuart 1965[1865] Auguste Comte and Positivism. Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press. Murphy, Robert F. 1971 The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in Anthropological Theory. New York:Basic Books. Ottenberg, Simon 1990 Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text. In Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Roger Sanjek, ed. Pp. 139-160. Ithaca: Comell University Press. Paluch, Andrzej 1988 Malinowski's Theory of Culture. In Malinowski between Two Worlds: The Polish Roots of an Anthropological Tradition. Roy Ellen, Ernest Gellner, Grazyna Kubica, and Janusz Mucha, eds. Pp. 65-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parkin, Frank 1988 Max Weber. London: Routledge. Peacock, James L. 1986 The Anthropological Lens: Harsh Light, Soft Focus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peel, J. D. Y. 1971 Herbert Spencer The Evolution of a Sociologist. New York: Basic Books. Popper, Karl 1959[1935] The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books. Quine, W. V. 1966 The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. New York: Random House. Rabinow, Paul, and William M. Sullivan 1979 The Interpretive Turn. In Interpretive Social Science: A Reader. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds. Pp. 1-21. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1987 The Interpretive Turn: A Second Look. In Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds. Pp. 1-30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Radnitzky, Gerard 1968 Contemporary Schools of Metascience. Goteborg: Akademiforlaget. Ricoeur, Paul 1971 The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text. Social Research 38:529-562. 1976 Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Rigby, Peter 1985 Persistent Pastoralists: Nomadic Societies in Transition. London: Zed Books.

Rorty, Richard 1982 Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rubinstein, Robert A. 1991 Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax. Boulder Westview Press. Sahlins, Marshall 1972 Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. 1976 Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Salzman, Philip Carl 1994 The Lone Stranger in the Heart of Darkness. In Assessing Cultural Anthropology. Robert Borofsky, ed. Pp. 29-38. New York: McGraw-Hill. Samuel, Geoffrey 1990 Mind, Body and Culture:Anthropology and the Biological Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sangren, P. Steven 1988 Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography: "Postmodernism" and the Social Reproduction of Texts. Current Anthropology 29:405-424. Scholte, Bob 1971 Discontents in Anthropology. Social Research 38:777807. 1974[1972] Toward a Reflexive and CriticalAnthropology. In Reinventing Anthropology. Dell Hymes, ed. Pp. 430-457. New York:Vintage Books. Schultz, Emily, and Robert H. Lavenda 1990 Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition. St. Paul, MN: West. Service, Elman R. 1985 A Century of Controversy: Ethnological Issues from 1860 to 1960. Orlando: Academic Press. Shalvey, Thomas 1979 Claude Levi-Strauss: Social Psychotherapy and the Collective Unconscious. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1987 Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Tyler, Stephen A. 1986 Post-Modem Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds. Pp. 122-140. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ulin, Robert C. 1984 Understanding Cultures: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social Theory. Austin: University of Texas Press. Watson, Patty Jo, Steven A. LeBlanc, and Charles L. Redman 1984 Archeological Explanation: The Scientific Method in Archeology. New York: Columbia University Press. Woolgar, Steve 1988 Science: The Very Idea. London: Tavistock and Chichester: Horwood.

This content downloaded from 128.196.52.73 on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 16:59:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions