Anthropology and Political Science

A Convergent Approach

Myron J. Aronoff, Jan Kubik

• Verlag: Berghahn Books
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857457264
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Cultural & Social Anthropology

What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that "bridge" both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of "anthropological" concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the "autonomy of the political" assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Answering Grand Questions from Different Epistemological and Ontological Stances

Recent dramatic changes on the political map of the world, including the fall of the Soviet system, the ensuing “third” wave of democratizations, and the acceleration of the globalization processes, contributed to the reinvigoration of the two fundamental debates in the social sciences:

• Can all political phenomena be described, interpreted, and explained by the same universal theory (epistemological dimension)?

• Do all societies operate according to the same set of political and/or economic principles, encapsulated in the “universal” laws of, say, the socioeconomic development or reconstructed in the model of the rational choice behavior (ontological dimension)?

There is no agreement among social scientists on how to answer these questions, but there are clear disciplinary tendencies. With a number of important exceptions, today’s political scientists tend to give positive answers to both questions, while anthropologists tend toward negative responses. This is, of course, related to the fact that the “mainstreams” of these two disciplines have, by and large, privileged different conceptualizations of their subject matters, methods, and strategies of theory building. It is also important to note that those differences in ontological and epistemological stances systematically influence the execution of the third important task of any social scientist: providing “normative evaluations of states, institutions, and policies” (Sen 1989: 301).¹

Both political science and anthropology are quite diversified and each is divided into a number of theoretical approaches or schools (see, for example, Munck & Snyder 2007). Trying to come to terms with this diversity is beyond the scope of a single, moderately sized volume. Our goal here is much more modest; we are interested mostly in two smaller subfields of each discipline: political anthropology and comparative politics. The choice is not only influenced by our professional training and affiliations; it is primarily dictated by the fact that these two fields share one common characteristic: an ambition to produce systematic knowledge about the exercise of power and politics (understood broadly as an institutionalized, collective effort to solve problems of collective existence) in various types of societies, from the simplest to the most complex. At the same time, despite this common goal, each discipline produces quite different bodies of knowledge. Disciplinary epistemologies, languages, assumptions, and methods are sufficiently different to produce often dissimilar if not contradictory interpretations or explanations of the same events or processes. We want to study those different pictures of political reality, contrast specific disciplinary findings and poke under the surface of different, specialized disciplinary terminologies in order to learn more both about each discipline and about the phenomena they study.

The best way to compare these two disciplines is to work through a series of specific analyses of concrete events or processes. Several chapters in this book offer such closely knit analyses. Yet, before they are offered, it is useful, if not necessary, to provide a basic road map that explicates several basic differences between comparative politics and political anthropology. It must be remembered, however, that the contrasts outlined below refer merely to the most central tendencies in each discipline; one could easily point to examples of anthropologists pursuing quite “political scientific” agendas or political scientists engaged in anthropological studies tout court.

Putting aside the areas of overlap (which our own work exemplifies) for a moment, comparative politics and political anthropology can be contrasted in several ways. Perhaps their most significant difference is related to the differences in the epistemological/methodological and ontological foundations of the broader disciplines: political science and cultural anthropology.

Goals and Methods: Universalism and Explanation (of Political Science) versus Particularism and Interpretation (of Anthropology)

With all possible caveats necessitated by a considerable number of important exceptions, it is safe to claim that anthropologists prefer focusing on single cases, favor rich narrative descriptions of their “material” (idiographic focus), and define their discipline’s goal as interpretation of specific features of the cases they study.² By contrast, political scientists are more comfortable with a larger number of cases whose features are distilled into variables that are seen as related to one another. Those relationships, captured by propositions, are hypothesized and then tested due to procedures of “science.” For most of its practitioners, the ultimate goal of political science is explanation.³

A more extensive exposition of various issues related to the concept of explanation in social sciences is not possible here (see, for example Brady 2008; Little 1991; Miller 1987); suffice it to note that scholars sometimes distinguish two basic types of explanations: (1) genetic and (2) nomological-deductive. According to the former, to explain an occurrence of a phenomenon is to reconstruct the chain of its causes or to determine the “causal effect” that brings the phenomenon about (King, Kohane, & Verba 1994: 77–85; Nagel 1961: 567–58).⁴ According to the latter, to explain a phenomenon is to offer a set of propositions from which a sentence stating the occurrence of this phenomenon can be logically deducted (Hempel 1962; Popper 1959: 59).

The political-scientific preoccupation with explanation is linked to the general universalizing tenor of this discipline, while anthropology’s stress on interpretation reflects this discipline’s particularizing tendency. To illustrate this contrast one may recall Geertz’s (1983: 57) distinction between an “experience-near concept” which a person would use to define “what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine,” and an “experience-distant concept” employed by specialists, e.g., ethnographers to further their scientific (or other) aims. “Clearly, the matter is one of degree, not polar opposition.” (1983: 57). The goal is to produce an interpretation of lives that is sensitive to, but moves beyond a group’s mental horizons. For example, the concept “human individual” is universal but has enormous cultural variability. For it to be understood in non-Western contexts requires not just “empathy,” but putting aside the Western notion of the person and, according to Geertz (1983: 59), “seeing their experiences within the framework of their own idea of what selfhood is.” Anthropology tends to rely more on experience-near concepts and work from the particular to the universal or to find the universal within the particular. As Geertz (1973: 23, emphasis added) says, “Small facts speak to large issues.” Political science has tended to work with experience-distant concepts and reason by beginning with abstract theory and gathering data to test it.

Level of Epistemological Doubt and Self-Awareness

In a conventional picture, mainstream political scientists tend to accept the ideals of the positivistic philosophy of science and share the optimistic belief in progress of scientific knowledge, while anthropologists are far more consumed by epistemological doubts and are quite sympathetic to critical paradigms of social scientific theorizing. This contrast may be overdrawn these days,⁵ but it usefully signals the dominant philosophical tendencies in each discipline. It is enough to remember that Marxism, feminism, critical studies, and postmodernism, to name just the main paradigms, have easily moved to the center of the (cultural) anthropological enterprise while they have remained more peripheral in political science.⁶

Moreover, at least since the publication of Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) anthropologists engaged in a thorough reevaluation of their discipline’s assumptions, goals, and methods, concluding that the interpretation of other cultures rarely, if ever, is politically neutral; it usually creates knowledge that helps, even if inadvertently, to justify the power of colonial empires (the West, the “whites”) over the “natives.”⁷ Political scientists, by contrast, tend to focus on what they perceive as the beneficial effects of the “Western expansion”: the spread of democracy and the market economy (capitalism).

Anthropologists have also become highly self-aware and self-critical of the distortions and limitations of the knowledge they produce that results directly from the nature of the medium through which this knowledge is conventionally conveyed: a genre of “ethnographic narrative” (Clifford 1988; Clifford & Marcus 1986; Marcus 1998; Marcus and Fischer 1999). Interestingly, this heightened awareness of the problems related to the specific disciplinary genres or styles of writing has also led to a thorough self-examination of the narratives produced in sociology (see, for example, Seidman & Alexander 2001) and history (White 1978). In political science, such problems have been less central to various epistemological and methodological debates, though they have gained some prominence with the emergence of the “Perestroika” movement. The movement, which came into existence in October 2000, eventually attracted scholars who were practitioners of “political history, international history, political sociology, interpretive methodology, constructivists [sic], area studies, critical theory and last but not least—post-modernism” (Monroe 2005: 10). They came from a variety of approaches, but were united by the conviction that limiting political science to the work built on large n studies or game-theoretical modeling was insufficient. Since 2000 the “raucous rebellion” of Perestroikans has arguably contributed to the profound transformation of the discipline: qualitative methodology has acquired sophisticated institutional⁸ and intellectual elaboration (Collier 1993; Brady & Collier 2004; George & Bennett 2004), conceptual analysis has been revived (Goertz 2006; Collier and Gerring 2009), historical methods have returned to the center of many approaches (Mahoney & Rueschemeyer 2003), ethnography has been rediscovered as a utilizable tool (Schatz 2009b), and interpretive methods have begun vying for equal status with quantitative and qualitative methods (Bevir 2010; Yanow & Schwartz-Shea 2006).

Almost invariably, “critical” approaches favor more complex, multidimensional portrayals of social reality, while the more “scientific” or “positivistic” approaches tend to value parsimony.

Ontological Underpinnings of the Interpretive-Explanatory Divide

With his characteristic sardonic wit, Ernest Gellner caught the essence of the dominant cleavage of the European epistemology when he suggested that there exist two principal strategies for generating the overarching, grand visions of the social world: positivistic and Hegelian. The former produces a world “which is granular; where the grains, as in well-cooked rice, are discrete from each other and easily separable” (1984: 252–53) and their relationships are describable by theoretical formulations produced in an objective manner by professionals detached from their subject matter. The latter depicts the world of organic wholes composed of interconnected elements. “The interconnected elements have meaning for each other in that they play roles in each other’s fates and the wider plans of which they are parts. Elements in the pattern, such as actions, are what they are in virtue of what they mean to the agents who perform them, rather than in virtue of merely external traits” (1984: 253, emphasis in original). In this world researchers cannot afford detachment; they need to immerse themselves in the lives of the studied “subjects” to understand the meanings that drive those subjects’ actions. No doubt the positivistic conception of objective science, whose ideal is the dispassionate gaze of a Cosmic Exile, is considered attractive by political scientists much more often than by anthropologists, who prize immersion (rather than detachment) into whatever it is they study and have a hard time conceiving of their subject matter outside of the meaning it holds for the “actors” and in separation from moral concerns. In other words, modernist empiricism—as Bevir labels it—that is “atomistic and analytic” dominates “much of political science” (2009: 51).

Gellner was an anthropologist but also a philosopher who—like many of his colleagues—was acutely aware of this basic duality in Western thought. Arthur C. Danto organized his brilliant introduction to philosophy around it. He writes:

Bertrand Russell once jocularly divided philosophers into those who ‘believe the world is a bowl of jelly, and those who believe it is a bucket of shot’—between those who think there is one single unitary fact, everything being part of it, and those who, like Wittgenstein, see the world as a collection of logically independent facts. (1989: xvii)⁹

In a way, the main task of this volume can be construed as an attempt to facilitate a dialogue between the anthropologists’ attempt to work with the holistic image of the (social) world as a “bowl of jelly” and the political scientists’ effort to built a science of the social around the metaphor of a “bucket of shot.”

The second fundamental ontological distinction is between naturalists and antinaturalists. Extreme or hard naturalists, who argue that there is no difference between the natural and social words, are arguably increasingly rare. But there are many “soft” naturalists who assume that the social and natural worlds are sufficiently similar to warrant the use of a single method (King, Koehane, & Verba 1994).

The key question then is whether societies and their politics, populated by meaning-creating and interpreting creatures and permeated by symbolic struggles, can be studied in the same manner as “natural systems” examined by the “hard” sciences? Sahlins (2004) argues that Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War provided a positive answer to this question, thus setting Western social science on a naturalist course. Since Thucydides, the debate between naturalists and antinaturalists has run through almost the entire course of Western social reflection. In the second half of the nineteenth century naturalism and antinaturalism in the social sciences were defined and deliberated with great clarity by such German scholars as Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Max Weber (for overviews see: Bevir 2010; Bambach 1995; Bleicher 1980; Palmer 1969).

Perhaps the most influential among them, Wilhelm Dilthey,¹⁰ proposed a sharp distinction between the “positivistic” (Naturwissenschaften) and the “humanistic” (Geisteswissenschaften) disciplines and sharply differentiated it from explanation, the proper procedure of the former. Geertz revived this distinction in his trend-setting 1973 volume, as he famously declared: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical” (1973: 5).

Thus, while political science has, by and large, adopted as its ideal the nineteenth-century positivistic model of natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften),¹¹ cultural anthropology has always been much more open to the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften, with its emphasis on understanding (Verstehen) and interpretation, rather than explanation. And since the publication of Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures in 1973, this tradition has emerged as a hegemonic theoretical core of the discipline, at least in the United States. Geertz’s seminal works of interpretive anthropology have been criticized from four main directions, by those who deemed them insufficiently scientific/positivistic and excessively voluntaristic (Martin 1993; Shankman 1984); those for whom they were not sufficiently concerned with the material underpinnings of cultural processes (Asad 1983; Roseberry 1982); those who found them marred by such positivistic vices as the imposition of the writer’s authority on the way the narrative is constructed,...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Methods: Ethnography and Case Study
• Chapter 3 Beyond Political Culture
• Chapter 4 Symbolic Dimensions of Politics: Political Ritual and Ceremonial
• Chapter 5 The Politics of Collective Identity: Contested Israeli Nationalisms
• Chapter 6 Democratization in Deeply Divided Societies: The Netherlands, India, and Israel
• Chapter 7 Camp David Rashomon: Contested Interpretations of the Israel/Palestine Peace Process
• Chapter 8 What Can Political Scientists Learn about Civil Society from Anthropologists?
• Chapter 9 Homo sovieticus and Vernacular Knowledge
• Chapter 10 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index