From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: communities
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 15:00:43 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA





> >   I don't understand this answer.   Why does it matter whether the 
> >   aboriginals (not just in Australia, but anywhere) understand or
> >   appreciate these questions?  I think what matters is whether
> >   anthropologists studying their culture can frame and maybe even
> >   answer such questions.   
>
>You are asking THEM (whoever they are) the questions, aren't you? Don't
>your questions have to make sense to them so they can frame their answers,
>which will in turn make sense to you?

  I have no idea because I don't know what kinds of tools are
  available to anthropology.   As I said earlier, I don't know 
  a thing about linguistics, but I can still speak and write and
  a linguist could probably find linguistically significant 
  content in what I say.   

  I presume (maybe wrongly) that it's not necessary to frame
  questions to aboriginals in anthropological terms, any more
  than it's necessary for me to know anything about biochemistry
  in order for a doctor to access the ppO2 in my blood.   I 
  presume (maybe wrongly) that anthropology has tools which 
  allow it to study a culture and discover things even if those
  things would be meaningless to those being studied.



> >   Or maybe it's entirely possible that framing questions like this
> >   is beyond the state of the art for anthropology, or that anthopology
> >   does not quite deserve the moniker "science" just yet. 

>We, along with History, Philosophy and Religion, INFORM Science, and
>always did. Science represents a mere subculture developed to carry out a
>particular clearly defined role on behalf of the culture which spawned it,
>funds it, decides its priorities, and limits its scope.

  To me science is a methodology to discover how the universe works 
  in ways which *transcend* cultural differences.   A smallpox
  vaccination will prevent the subject from getting smallpox 
  regardless of whether he believes in germs, or even knows he's
  been vaccinated!   An atomic explosion will kill you just as dead
  regardless of whether you know about, or believe in, atoms or
  atomic nucleii.   A correctly predicted eclipse will happen
  whether you know about the prediction, believe it, accept the
  model it's based on, or are even there to experience it.  
  A practictioner of TM who believes he can levitate will 
  accelerate due to gravity at the same speed, if pushed off
  a cliff, as a Presbyterian minister who doesn't believe he
  can levitate.   

  When people talk about science serving a particular cultural
  or political master they are usually referring to how scientific
  truths are *employed*, (e.g., making bombs, justifying government
  policies, etc) or talking about attempts to dress up political
  and cultural biases in scientific clothing, e.g., attempts to
  "prove" one race superior to another, etc.  But this isn't real
  science.   Science is merely a methodology for trying to get
  at the objective truth of a thing.   It doesn't always succeed
  and there are plenty of areas where it currently has no handle,
  e.g., personality, consciousness, etc, but in those cases we
  would simply say there's no science of these things.  (I would
  add "yet")

  So the question still stands: does anthropology have any tools
  which allow it to make cross cultural generalizations about human
  societies, specifically in this case, about the kinds of things
  I'm calling "community"?

                  
>                                              The Aboriginal
>Dreaming, by comparison, represents a major world culture at least
>40,000 years old, spawning its own sub-cultural activities which arise
>to meet the contingencies of the centuries and decline again.
 
  I'm not sure what the point of this comment is.  If you're saying
  that Australian Aboriginal culture is too complex or alien for
  anthropology to get a handle on then fine, we won't try to 
  use it to tell us anything at this point.  But maybe there are 
  cultures which we do understand.   On maybe not.  That was the gist
  of my question.


>Peter, I am sorry if you are disappointed, but Western Science is
>very much in its infancy. A babe at its mother's breast and often
>behaving as irrationally as one would expect an infant does; so
>stubborn, inquisitive, destructive, nowhere near yet realising its
>own potential for good.

  See this is where we part company.  To me, when we start talking
  about "good" and "bad" we are getting beyond science.  Good and
  bad may refer to how we use the discoveries that science may make, 
  and it may refer to the effects that scientific inquiry may have
  on people or others in how it carries out its research (e.g.,
  vivisection).  But ultimately "good" and "bad" are defined culturally
  and scientific truths should transcend cultural interpretation,
  as I indicated above.   "I=E/R" is not "good" or "bad", it just
  *IS*.  


>In the meantime, those whose knowledge was being used to make this
>fortune remained impoverished, dependent on social welfare and
>suffering all the deprivations of such extreme dislocation and
>poverty. If their knowledge is of such interest and importance, how is
>it that they have not been awarded the academic degrees, and been made
>welcome on the lecture circuit . . . and so on?

  A touching story, but I don't see how this is relevant to the 
  question at hand.  
                     

>Anthropologists already have knowledge of their own as members of
>their own culture and society, while anthropological knowledge is
>always only second hand. What standing has it, then? What are the
>legal questions associated with its receipt by a third party?

  As you say, these are legal questions.  


>The wider ethical question arises from the manner in which those whose
>knowledge it is are ignored and impoverished while the anthropologist
>is enriched?

  As you say, this is an ethical issue.   If because of societal
  ethics or that of anthropologists it is impossible to get the sort
  of data that would be required to build a reasonably rigorous 
  science of anthropology, then we should just say so.   But I asked
  a staightforward question about whether anthropology as a science
  had managed to learn something about community.  If the answer
  is "no" then I really don't care if the reason is methodological,
  legal, ethical, or something else.  "No" is good enough for me.

  
  
>           Does a software outlet take all the credit for the
>material it handles, or does a large part of the remuneration and
>credit go back to those who wrote it?
>
>Knowledge should be freely shared? People spend years of their lives
>studying and developing their own knowledge base and culture, to
>achieve an appropriate quality to their environment which will enable
>them to prosper.
>
>While this thread now tangential to your immediate purpose

 To say the least!



>Perhaps not at this stage. When you are out there by yourself suffering
>from an extreme bout of culture shock (which is NOT a joke), please
>ring me and I will explain it again. You will probably needs some more
>comforting by then anyway.

  As I say, I don't want to do field research myself.  I want to read
  the conclusions others have made.  I want to, as Newton said, "stand
  on the shoulders of giants".


>You should be asking *how*. That is what you NEED to know. There
>is no such person as "the field of anthropology" who has "already
>worked out some practical methodology".

  Well most other fields ending in "ology" have, that's one of the
  things which allows them to call themselves "science".  Pardon my
  error.


>Another example: Apart from my association with China, my primary work
>is in Aboriginal Australia with a meta-interest in Oriental Esoterica,
>since it is of such value HERE, in understanding how THESE people think
>in order to frame valid questions, and to make sense of their answers
>in terms which are comprehensible to Westerners with an interest here,
>and vice versa. It probably does not make any sense at all to, say,
>an American anthropologist working in the Detroit Auto Industry, with
>the view to writing up an ethnographic survey for the Pentagon.

  So this seems to be the answer to my question:  that anthropology
  (and therefore sociology?) has NOT discovered any unifying themes,
  concepts, etc, across cultures.   


---peter