The decline and fall of anthropology - controversy over the quantitative and qualitative measure of societies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 15, 1993 | by Stephen Goode

Summary: Anthropology has lost much of its luster in recent years. The glamour days of Margaret Mead are long gone, and the discipline's leaders now squabble amid increasing irrelevancy. At issue are questions that go to the foundation of academic study - how to measure one society against another and whether one con judge based on one's own values.

Time was when anthropology was the most romantic of academic disciplines, luring students with the promise of studying in the South Pacific or doing field work in the far north among the Eskimo - a discipline, too, that dubbed itself the science of man and promised to unlock secrets of human behavior and how societies were formed.

No longer. In many of the cultures once studied firsthand by such famous researchers as Margaret Mead, anthropologists have been declared persona non grata, busybodies whose help Third World governments don't want and whose snooping is deemed deeply suspicious.

At a deeper level, the discipline itself is in crisis. Stephen Tyler, professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, says that with the exception of economics, no field is now more "dishonest" in its pretensions to scientific truth and precision.

Among anthropologists, Tyler claims, there is "dissatisfaction with the way we do things." At bottom, he says, "it is a crisis of discourse" - a failure of communication so profound that anthropologists have little left to say to one another, let alone the public.

Marvin Harris, longtime anthropologist at Columbia University and now at the University of Florida in Gainesville, fears the field may degenerate into little more than "a literary form," with specialists merely talking about what earlier anthropologists have written. Much of contemporary anthropology he describes as "dadaism, ego-tripping and self-gratification."

To an outsider, these comments don't seem far off base. Academic stars of the profession, such as Tyler and Clifford Geertz of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., have called into question whether various societies can even be usefully compared, because languages and cultures differ o radically Stanford University's Renato Rosaldo has written, "My own group aside, everything is alien to me."

Anthropology's past, too, is suspect. The work of onetime greats such as Mead and Ruth Benedict is in disrepute these days, in part because their excessive zeal led them to paint rosy pictures of the societies they studied, in part, too, because they deliberately (according to critics) omitted data that contradicted the pictures they painted of harmonious, happy (nonmodern) cultures. As one prescient critic of the field put it many years ago, an anthropologist is someone who believes every cultural pattern but his own is good.

What, then, do anthropologists do if they find their field so undermined by the limitations of language and culture, and their own culture so dissatisfying?

Says Robert Edgerton, "When asked that question, their answer is typically lame. They reply that our duty is to go into the field and point out how distorted previous accounts are." Edgerton, a professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of just such a corrective. His recent book, Sick Societies, not only takes to task many colleagues but also outlines criteria for judging societies as sick and in need of help.

The idea of judging other societies flies in the face of the most treasured orthodoxies of modern anthropology, a widely accepted tenet of which is that every society evolves the institutions it needs. Related to that is the belief that it's certainly not the duty of outsiders to subject those institutions to critical scrutiny based on the attitudes of the researcher's own society

Edgerton, by contrast, comes down heavily on practices he regards as wrong. These include foot binding in China, the burning of widows on their husband's funeral pyres in India, tattooing, and institutionalized feuding that leads to murder.

Each of these traditions - and the full list is much longer - has been justified by anthropologists in Darwinian language as "adaptive," a society's way of handling its unique problems. Adaptive traditions, by definition, are above reproach because they are necessary, just as a bird needs feathers to fly. Removing ritual feuding from tribes in Papua New Guinea would be like removing feathers from a bird. The result in both cases would be disaster.

Edgerton calls all this nonsense - and notes that anthropologists defend in other societies practices they would never tolerate in their own. His larger purpose in the book is to attack the notion that small, premodern societies are harmonious and well-off in ways that large, modern societies are not.

The message has not made him popular inside or outside the profession. In letters and on radio talk shows promoting the book, he has been denounced as ethnocentric, indicted for attempting to judge the world by American standards and values. Edgerton says he's unhappy about the charge since "it's precisely what I'm not trying to do." His goal, he says, is to establish guidelines for determining when things go wrong with a society - guidelines that can be applied to all societies at all times.