COMMENTS ON GAZI ISLAM’S REVIEW OF

ANTHROPOLOGY THROUGH A DOUBLE LENS

Thanks to Gazi Islam for his thoughtful review of Anthropology through a Double Lens and to Janet Dixon Keller, the editor of Ethos, for an invitation to comment.  I’ll start with a remark about the book’s overall objectives and then address some of the detailed questions raised by Dr. Islam.

Dr. Islam correctly observes that my aim is “to revive the individual,” who has been reduced to a near-zombie in recent mainstream anthropological theory.  My general position, a sharp critique of culturalism paired with a vigorous defense of person-centered anthropology, is hardly unique, as readers of Ethos well know.  Unfortunately, most anthropologists remain skeptical (or unaware) of person-centered approaches and do not incorporate them into their teaching or writing.  That is why it is important for us to continue to build a critical mass of alternative theory.

I doubt I will persuade many of the skeptics, because the postulates that underwrite scholarly careers are not easily dislodged.  It’s certainly worthwhile to dispatch a tart note of dissent into the theoretical field and hope that people take notice.  But to be candid, I think it is more important to carve out a place to stand for those, especially undergraduate and graduate students, who are uneasy about common culturalist approaches and seek persuasive alternatives.

The chief points I insist on are the inescapability of a model of the person for any theory of human beings and the consequent imperative to fashion a credible one.  Whether our theories draw upon psychodynamic, cognitive, phenomenological, existential, or consciousness models of the person is secondary.  I have my own candidate – I am inclined to a model, colored in existential, biographical, and phenomenological tones, that features what I call “reflective consciousness”– but any of the versions employed by psychological anthropologists is superior to the tacit “null model” (blank slate) of mainstream anthropology.  That model presumes that human beings are forged by culture or conjured through discourse.  The possibly apocryphal statement attributed to Einstein comes to mind: “I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest is details.”  The usual thick cultural descriptions or discursive exegeses often strike me as ill-conceived attempts to access Society’s thoughts.  Instead I advocate thin descriptions of symbols and thick descriptions  of subjectivities.   Yes, the devil is in the details.

The null model yields a powerful anthropological theory but one that is also circumscribed and distorted by its single cultural lens.  We can do better.

Dr. Islam raises several important specific issues.  Let me now turn to those.  My comments should be taken as clarifications and elaborations rather than objections.

It is hardly surprising, Dr. Islam suggests, that I discover significant idiosyncrasies in meaning-making,  given that I focus, for example, on people coping with harsh political regimes or engaging in long-distance migrations.  Indeed, such existentially fraught situations tend to spark heightened reflection and therefore variations and discontinuities in perception and thought.  To me, the analytic challenges are to determine the specific conditions favoring the activation of reflective consciousness, which I take to be a panhuman mental capacity, and then to describe its operations and consequences.  Such analyses depend above all on adopting the perspectives of particular persons rather than simply reading those perspectives from public evidence or mechanically inferring them from social coordinates within macro structures.  There are surely strong links between phenomenal streams and macro structures, but it seems hazardous to assume that the former issue directly from the latter.

Second, Dr. Islam suggests that my exhortation to “treat persons as tangible, consequential realities” might be more suitably placed in a conclusion, as the end point of an argument based on hard evidence, than, as it is, in the book’s introduction.  I understand his desire for a categorical demonstration of the premise, and I’m sure many share it.  But we are in the realm of generative axioms, which are not conclusions to be verified but points of theoretical departure.  They don’t come out of nowhere, for they are condensations from observation, experience, and practice, but ultimately they are provisional, and they will always be controversial.  I am not seeking to demonstrate their truth but rather to provide a view of the ethnographic world that opens up from them.  Whether or not a reader finds the view illuminating, stimulating, or challenging is the test of the book.

Third, although I do not think that either individualism or holism are dirty words, because either can be a fruitful aproach to a given problem, I do not subscribe to the individualist dictum that people are self-contained monads and that society can be seen as the sum of their internally driven actions (Fay 1996:30-32).  That is, I am not promoting an autonomous, closed model of the person.  As Dr. Islam notes, methodological individualism is alive and well in some social sciences.  I did graduate work in economics some decades ago, and overdosed on methodological individualism in those days, so I am not about to renew a habit.  In advocating for a double lens, I am instead arguing that for most anthropological problems we need to characterize public and personal realms – we need both a model of society and a model of the person.  I imagine that those models bleed into each other through complex feedback loops.  This again is a broad position with a long lineage, one that I am trying to formulate in a fresh way in light of recent major trends in cultural anthropology.

It might be objected that I see consciousness and experience as attributes exclusively of individuals.   True!  I reject any notion of “collective consciousness,” which strikes me as a misleading characterization of first-person (i.e., experiential) phenomena and hence an abuse of terminology.  Too often anthropologists invoke the language of experience to describe insensate things, as if a symbol or society or discourse could have or transmit feelings and thoughts.  Admittedly, such talk is sometimes an unavoidable shorthand (mea culpa), but the telegraphy plays into the seductive tendency we all have to regard language and images as imbued with meaning, as somehow mindful.  From there, if we’re not careful it’s a short slide to deleting human beings from our theories.

I take it as self-evident that consciousness can only arise in a sentient being: no brain, no body, no experience.  But this is not to say that brain+body are sufficient to produce a given flow of experience, since experience is importantly dependent on the embeddedness of any person in a specific communicative, interactional, and physical environment.  Again, we require a model (in this case, of consciousness) that is significantly open: experiential phenomena are the products of the entire system even though the phenomena manifest themselves solely within the personal component of that system.

Fourth, I concur with Dr. Islam that the philosophical can of worms, especially the one opened and spilled by philosophers of mind such as Nagel, Searle, Chalmers, Levine, McGinn and others, is highly pertinent to our debates about consciousness, experience, meaning, and communication.  The chasm between first and third person perspectives offers fiendish challenges to ethnographic representation and anthropological theory.  The worms are slippery and uncooperative.  Whether we can corral them is an open question.

Finally, I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Islam that “to establish the primacy of individual minds in anthropological study is a tall order.”  I have not filled the order with Anthropology through a Double Lens, which abounds in loose ends, lacunae, imponderables, conjectures, and, no doubt, contradictions.  I do hope to have formulated certain pertinent questions in a striking manner, offered some tentative new directions, and persuaded some, especially younger scholars dissatisfied with the dehumanized theory that currently flourishes in our field, that such a revisionist project is worthy of their most serious and sustained engagement.

REFERENCE CITED

Fay, Brian

1996 Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science.  Oxford: Blackwell.

- Daniel T. Linger

   Santa Cruz

   January 18, 2007