Contents Introduction 1 1 Interpretive ethnography and theoretical anthropology 9 2 Apparently irrational beliefs 35 3 Claude Lévi-Strauss today 64 Notes 95 References 99 [Page numbers are as in the printed book] ON ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE Introduction What is anthropology? A philosophical tradition going back to classical antiquity, an academic discipline established in the nineteenth century, a method developed in the last few decades. The Sophist Protagoras claimed that his teaching would make good citizens. Socrates wondered: can virtue really be taught? Is it, we would ask today, innate or acquired? Protagoras first answered by means of a fable. The gods, having shaped the mortal species, gave Prometheus and Epimetheus the job of dividing all desirable qualities among these species. Epimetheus took charge. He gave each species the means to survive: to some he gave strength, to others speed; to some he gave claws or horns, to others wings to flee or underground shelters to hide. He protected them against the weather by means of hides, furs, and hooves. To each species he assigned its own food. He made some species carnivorous, and endowed their prey with great fecundity. Alas Epimetheus - whose very name evokes lack of foresight - forgot the human species. Prometheus arrived too late: while all other animals were well provided for, man stood naked and defenseless. In desperation, Prometheus stole from the gods fire and crafts and gave them to man. Thereafter, humans honored the gods, acquired speech, and learned to build houses, make clothes, and till the soil. But they were scattered on the surface of the earth and were prey to wild beasts. They still lacked the political skills required to form cities. Zeus, eager to ensure the survival of the species, ordered Hermes to give all humans the necessary sense of respect and justice. Protagoras's fable nicely exposes a paradox which, since the Sophists, has been at the core of Western anthropological thought:1 humans are, by nature, deprived of natural qualities. Other animals are naturally equipped to survive. Humans owe their survival to empirical, technical, and moral knowledge which they acquire progressively. Other animals live naturally in what we would call today an ecological equilibrium. It is by becoming civilized 1 that humans, for their part, adapt to their natural environment and establish harmonious mutual relationships. If virtue may appear to be natural, if it may seem to Socrates that there are no teachers of virtue, it is, on the contrary, argues Protagoras, because everybody helps to teach it: "just as if you were looking for a teacher of Greek, you wouldn't find one" (Plato, Protagoras, 328a). In this respect, language and virtue which are transmitted by society as a whole, contrast with arts and crafts which have appointed masters. It is, however, not a contrast between nature and culture, but one between shared culture and special knowledge. Today's anthropologists echo Protagoras when they insist: "everything is cultural." What are the common and specific attributes of humans? This question, central to anthropology, can only be answered in a speculative fashion. Human languages, cultures, and social systems are specific to the species, but they are not universally shared: they are, on the contrary, the main source of differences among humans. If humans share specific attributes beyond anatomy, these must be the mental capacities which make possible the development of a variety of languages, cultures, and social systems. But what are these capacities? This has been the central issue of philosophical anthropology. For empiricists such as Locke, these capacities amount to an indefinite malleability and receptiveness, so that knowledge owes all its content and structure to experience and to the environment. For rationalists such as Kant, human cognitive capacities comprise innate categories and principles which structure human knowledge and limit its variability. From the fifteenth century onwards, the rediscovery of Classical Antiquity and the discoveries of the great travelers brought about a much greater awareness of the diversity of cultures. Philosophers however showed limited interest. In 1799, a Society of Observers of Man was founded in Paris. Although short-lived, it foreshadowed modern anthropological associations. Joseph-Marie Degerando contributed some "Considerations on the Diverse Methods to be Followed in the Observation of Savage Peoples"2 in which he pointed out, not without reason, that "philosophers spent time in vain disputes in their schools about the nature of man, instead of uniting to study him in the area of the universe" (Degerando, 1969: 65). It took until the middle of the nineteenth century for philosophical anthropology to give birth to two well-established empirical disciplines, with their chairs, their associations and their journals: psychology, which studies mental capacities through their manifestations in individual behavior, and anthropology, in a new and more restricted sense of the term, which aims to throw light on what humans are by studying who they arc. The new anthropology had two main branches: physical anthropology, 2 partly discredited since because of the racist and eugenist theories that developed within it (but, thanks to advances in biology, it has now taken a new start), and cultural anthropology, which has become so prominent that it is commonly referred to as simply "anthropology."3 Cultures are the collective output of human mental abilities. In principle, then, cultural anthropology and psychology should have a close and fruitful relationship. They deal with different outputs of the same general device: the human mind. This was self-evident for people such as Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Tylor. Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, also wrote a ten-volume anthropological treatise. Tylor, often considered the founder of modern cultural anthropology, was guilty, in the eyes of his successors, of the sin of "psychologicism." Actually, the two disciplines soon parted company. They did so on theoretical and on methodological grounds. Anthropology and psychology developed in an empiricist atmosphere which they themselves helped perpetuate. From an empiricist point of view, the study of mental mechanisms sheds no light on the content of cultures: the mental malleability of humans is thought to be so great as to allow cultures to vary without any constraint other than those imposed by the social or natural environment. Conversely, the study of cultures sheds no light on mental mechanisms apart from the fact that their diversity is taken to illustrate the malleability of the human mind. For a psychology and an anthropology sharing such empiricist foundations, there was little left to do in common. After Tylor and until Lévi-Strauss, anthropologists showed little interest in the psychology of the intellect. Some of them, Malinowski or Ruth Benedict for instance, did pay attention to the psychology of emotions, which had hardly been touched by the debate between empiricism and rationalism and which had benefited from the contribution of psychoanalysis. Today, most anthropologists acknowledge the legacy of Durkheim, Max Weber, or Marx rather than that of William James, Wundt, or Freud, and going further back, that of Hobbes or Montesquieu rather than that of Hume or Kant. Such acknowledgments are beyond dispute: in matters of intellectual filiation, it behooves the descendants to appoint their ancestors. By the same token, it is not inconceivable that the next generation of anthropologists will take its inspiration from psychology rather than from sociology, from the philosophy of mind rather than from the philosophy of law. It is not absurd either to hope that, rather than having a mere reversal of allegiances, a fruitful balance might be struck between the two traditions. The split between psychology and anthropology is not only due to a theoretical bias, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to a primacy given to methodological issues. Most experimental psychologists have acknowledged 3 as psychological only facts and assumptions that come out of laboratory experiments. Most anthropologists have been exclusively concerned with problems encountered in collecting, presenting, and classifying cultural data: "anthropology" for them is just a better sounding synonym of "ethnography". Bronislaw Malinowski, a young Polish anthropologist living in Britain, happened to be visiting Australia when the First World War broke out. Because he was an Austrian subject, and therefore, technically, an enemy, he was forbidden to go back to Europe till the end of the war. He took advantage of this forced exile to study the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands. For two years, he set his tent in their midst, learned their language, participated as much as he could in their daily life, expeditions, and festivals, and took everything down in his notebooks. In 1922, he published Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which became a model for ethnography and which still is, in spite of criticisms and revisions, one of its masterpieces. Actually, well before Malinowski, missionaries and colonial officers lived for long periods of time among faraway peoples and learned their language. Some of the descriptions they published are of a quality and wealth of detail not always matched by today's professionals. Among anthropologists themselves, Morgan, Boas, Rivers and others already had done fieldwork in the nineteenth century. What