WE ARE ONE SPECIES -- The Most Scientific of the Humanities

THE MOST SCIENTIFIC OF THE HUMANITIES – We are one Species

Anthropology, the study of Anthrop or Man, is a subject that has dominated human thought for millennia. Prior to the scientific revolution, the study of man, as an intellectual discipline, has been the province of philosophy and religion.  As a practical discipline, anthropology was found in the study of history and governance that have focused on what we might call, “proto-anthropology”

Proto-anthropology is based upon human observations and practical experience as these related to the daily life and survival of human groups, aka social units. Early humankind was aware that, individually and collectively, humans are both similar to and different from one another. The more intense the individual and collective experience, the greater these similarities and difference were experienced as the existential reality. The less intense and/or less frequent the experience, they were more likely conceived ideationally and envisioned in local myths and belief systems.

Joseph Campbell, in the Hero of a Thousand Faces, is, probably, the most well known of anthropologist/folklorist. With the help of Bill Moyers,  Campbell’s observations and analysis were popularized on PBS TV series in the 1980s "The Power of Myth." Campbell documented the universality of the human themes that he found in his study of myth and folklore. Using the comparative method, he found that these folktales and stories reflect humanity’s ideals for life and their fears about the uncertainties of the universe. Over time, these themes appear to morph into new forms as a society’s socio-economic structure developed increasing complexity over time. These ideational structures also varied with humankind’s relationship to its ecological universe. One may conclude that the ideational domain of culture developed and evolved along with the organic development of humankind’s existential experience.

These myths and folklore are “ideational” representations of a world that is a mystery to the people, who hold these views. They express a statement of the unknown framed in terms of the known. They combine elements of personal experience with elements of the collective speculative. They gain their meanings from how they help to explain the unknown and uncertain. Archaeologically,  we can imagine that the famous cave paintings of  Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave  and  Lascaux, and the early carvings of the Earth Mother figurine are artifacts of storytelling. They demonstrate through the ideational representations on the walls and crafted figurines the unrecorded words of the story teller/teacher/priest. These artifacts maybe our first existential evidence of the ideational domain of Human culture in the form of religion. Today, we can speculate about their meanings, an ideational act in itself. Metaphorically, they are the tree that falls in the forest that we do hear.

The term “humanities” stands for a classification for a wide range of scholarly disciplines that include history, art, crafts, and religion. It represents a form of scholarship that emerged in Western Europe  The common feature of these disciplines is their focus and speculation about the human condition and social experience. They evolved from the human existential experience filtered through the individual’s mind and emotions. They are expressed through some manner of physical behavior a resulting physical act or structure. The important feature of the humanities is that they are a shared experience. The sharing may be a temporary fad or become a foundational belief or ritual practice incorporated into the culture.

The important part of a “humanity” discipline is the relationship that it attempts to express between the individual and the individual’s universe. It represents a structure into which the creator of the experience can express his/her feelings. These individual “feelings and insights” are converted by the individual into an ideational representation. The creator, using his or her individual skills, attempts to communicate their vision to others through his/her creation. The act of expression comes from within, as an act of self-reflection.

Self- reflection involves a conversation with one’s self. “What is this feeling that I have about this experience?” “How can I express it?”  The importance of the ideational expression is in the creative process and not the existential reality. It calls for playing with the available structural elements to create a more interesting structure. That structure becomes an analogy of the experience. The creation is the analogy that is shared with others. The individual's “purpose” is to find “meaning” in the experience. “Meaning” is the function that humanistic structures create – “personal meanings”, and “collective meanings”. Or, what we call, the “superorganic” or “culture”.

Anthropology is the Humanity that approaches its subject scientifically through the process of comparative analysis of the observations of and participation in human activity and experiencing its physical products. In this regard, the anthropologist acknowledges the uncertainty of life. They also seek to understand life by demonstrating how humans have and do attempt to take control of their individual and collective lives.  Humanists and Anthropologist seek out the ways humans give “meaning” to the unknown and their uncertainty about it.

As anthropology became more scientific in its methods and theories there has arisen a counter-movement, "humanistic anthropology" One element of this movement is something called "autoethnography" We will be discussing this method and approach in future articles here in the Superorganic Blogg.

The Two Cultures of Anthropology

When we speak of anthropology, most often we are referring to the cultural sub-field or the socio-cultural sub-field, of the discipline. The question of whether anthropology is a method or science really only arises in the cultural sub-field. Here is where the dualism between mind and body, individual and society, history vs science, subjective vs objective, are played out on both the theoretical level and the practical level. This is the zone C P Snow labelled the Two Cultures.        http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Cultures-Scientific-Revolution/dp/1614275475

We, as cultural anthropologist, use a method we call ethnography as our basic research method and ethnology as our analytical approach. The former is conducted, we claim, by a combination of participant-observer field research where we look for and document the emic and the etic domains of our "subjects." We practice a form of natural history. Our focus is the qualitative data, meaning we seek to describe a society and its culture rather than measure it.

Our analytical method, ethnology, is based on a set of three principles -- holism, relativism, and comparative analysis. We apply these principles when we study the similarities and differences in the ethnographies that comprise the our corpus of ethnographic data. In this regard, "culture" is the guiding concept, or filter for our analysis. Here we seek to arrive at some understanding and consensus of "cultural/social" universals and processes at work in human existence. It is here where we attempt to link our ethnographies with our discoveries from the physical, linguistic and archaeological sub-fields to obtain an overall picture of what it means to be human and what it has taken to become human. This is the goal of the academic research branch of anthropology.

The applied branch, on the other hand, seeks to apply the principles and understanding of the human and institutional processes articulated by the academic branch to the solution of practical problems confronted by individuals and society in the real world of every day life.

In this regard, the academic research branch is free to move between the two cultures of science and humanities, while "applied" branch, whether it is recognize or not, is morally, ethically and possibly legally bound to an application of techniques and principles which can withstand at least the minimal standards of good science, i.e. validity and reliability. The practitioner must balance "generally accepted 'anthropological" standards" with the academic "state of the art."

The divide between Theory and Practice within the discipline has been a costly one for both the development of the discipline and for the thousands of students trained in anthropology who have not been able to find a professional acceptance as professional equals within the broad definition of anthropology as a discipline.

 [In the interest of full disclosure, I am a four field anthropologist (and two branch "academic research" and "applied")].

Applied Anthropology - The Second Branch

A recent comment appearing in The Anthropological Network stated the following about the role of applied anthropology and business. "In particular, it seem to me that anthropology hasn't been very successful at 'marketing' its method to industries and businesses (with some exceptions, of course). The author of the comment then asked  

"Would you agree?" 

The fact that the author was looking for an explanation of this state of affairs speaks volumes about the realities of the anthropological profession and how it approaches its role in society and to society. The traditional third world, non-literate, socially isolated, tribes and bands that spawned the development of cultural anthropology and ethnography, are today very rare and for all practical purposes no longer isolated. Instead we find ourselves today entering fields well populated by the multitude of social and behavioral sciences that arose during the 20th century. As a late comer, the professional institutions established to recruit, train and support anthropologists have been faced with a crisis of identity.  Is anthropology simply an academic discipline or does it have a distinct application to the real world?

The Institutional Structure:

 

I would say the problem is to be found in the formal professional institutions controlled by Academic anthropology -- professors, departments, and the "professional" associations. These institutions do not understand the business world or its language. Even more than the lack of understanding is a narcissistic moral "contempt" directed toward business and government organizations displayed by academic anthropology.

For those of us, and there are thousands of us, who have found a home in these non-academic institutions based on our anthropological perspective and training -- we have long ago accepted that fact that our academic colleagues look down on the work we do. We know that we are often judged by their applying academic standards that have no significant meaning nor add value to our work. 

Fifth sub-discipline or Second Branch:

 

 Applied anthropology is not academic anthropology. That is, it is not the 5th sub-field. It is the second branch of anthropology. It is client focused, service orient, and problem solving. It uses the anthropological perspective but is not constrained by academic orthodoxy, fadism or current fashion. Instead, it is pragmatic, realistic, specific and ethically relativistic. Most of all the applied business anthropologist lives in the world and culture of business and a business institution. The applied anthropologist can have many different status names and play many different roles. In this environment, these names are determined by the local organizational chart. Rarely is the name "anthropologist."

The academic lives in the world of the university, college, research institute or the museum, also known as the ivory tower. Here anthropologist have a few, well defined statuses and roles they can occupy based on the academic social structure. One of these status/roles is based on the discipline one was trained in and hire for within the institution. Most often this is as an "anthropologist."

Preparing for a Career in the Business world: 

There are similarities between academic and applied anthropology. Applying anthropology to the business world begins with the basic steps that one would take to do an ethnographic study of a tribe in some far off location.

1. Learn the language
2. Read up on the history and context in which the tribe exists. Since businesses are literate institutions, read the basic business literature (such as a text book or popular "how to" or history book on the business subject area you are interested in studying
3. Read what applied anthropologists have written about business cases that are related to your area of interest from the anthropological perspective.
4. Study the business media to keep up to date with the social, political, and economic forces affecting your particular business interest, subject, or institution.
5. Find a problem that THE BUSINESS wants to solve and apply an anthropological perspective to solve that problem for them (not just the reviewers for the American Anthropologists) 

Is this anthropology's public image?

Anthropology tends to be viewed as an exotic branch of the social sciences by the public. They tend to define us in terms of paleontology/evolutionary biology (bones) and archaeology/prehistory (stones). Yet, the core of anthropology is ethnography, a subject that is little known or understood outside of academia.

So the questions are: What does an ethnographer do? How does the public get to see what we do?

Today, YouTube contains hundreds of video clips by and about ethnographers and ethnographic topics. To answer the question about what is anthropology and what do we do, may be we need to look at ourselves and how we present our selves and are viewed by others, our subjects, our colleagues, and by the general public. These public videos on YouTube are a place to start. Here is an example of what one can find.

"Director José Padilha brilliantly employs two provocative strategies to raise unsettling questions about the boundaries of cultural encounters. He allows professors accused of heinous activities to defend themselves, and the Yanomami to represent their side of the story."

Where is the theory in applied anthropology?

People ask “How does academic anthropological theory, and  training in ethnography have so little use to the applied anthropologist?" The question this raises is, “Where is the theory in applied anthropology?" This is an old question and one that I have dealt with for the past 40 years. Here is what I have learned.

First, the simple answer. It not the job of academic anthropologist to do so. Academic anthropology is based on the university’s paradigm of professionalism and not that of the external world of the applied anthropologist.

This paradigm (using Kuhn’s definition) is part of the larger institutional culture of free and open dialogue and sharing of information directed toward finding “Truth.” The research subsystems of scholarship and science promote the search for truth by limiting the questions to be addressed to those arising from the dominate paradigm(s) of the discipline at the time — regardless of the policy questions facing society or its members.

The applied anthropologist's world is very different. The applied anthropologist's role is that of a technician who works in the real world outside of the academic department. He/she is hired by a client to provide answers (not to ask academic questions) that will help the client to make a “practical” decision that serves the client’s self interest.

The applied anthropologist must understand the client and the purpose they have in mind when they hire the anthropologist as a consultant or adviser. He or she is asked to play the role of an expert who applies ethnographic knowledge to get practical answers, not as the collector of academic data and to prepare a pragmatic report.

The client is expecting the “bullet points” in the executive summary. They will judge the value of the information based on its applicability to their problem and its solution. Even if the anthropologist writes a detailed report, the client will not read it, her staff might. The details only serve later to justify the consultant's conclusions after the fact, especially in the event that the decision is questioned.


Another question often asked, is, “How can academics create theories that speaks to the applied fields and industry?” This is the wrong question. The theory already exists in the broad sweep of behavioral and social sciences.

The real question is “How do you package the proven theory into a user friendly mode that will be meaningful to the client?” The academic community should not be asking, "What theoretical training do we our students need to pursue an applied career?" Rather, they should be asking, "What skills does take to prepare an anthropological trained student to compete in the real world of solving social problems?"

One of the most important skill areas is communications. The academic writes for other academics. The applied anthropologist is a culture broker who write for a non academic audience. They bridge the academic and real world cultures of their particular “people" by learning their language and using it. To bridge this gap and, before they are hired, to teach and prepare students for an applied career, the academic applied anthropologist should have had a real applied experience as an anthropologists.


Finally, when I've been asked the question, I often draw an analogy to the legal profession. There are law school professors who research, write and teach about jurisprudence. There are others who have had experience in private practice and teach students how to practice their craft in the real world. These law professors train their students to apply their legal training to help clients avoid problems; or as trial lawyers to help their clients defend or advocate their interests.

 Applied anthropology lives in this real world. The student applied anthropologist needs the training and support from his/her profession in the proven theory and skills to apply that theory to real problems that enable her to survive and prosper there. This will be good for the student and a real contribution to the discipline.