Symposium in Lisbon

From ICS (Lisbon) we have received the following information:

An epistemology for anthropology
International Symposium

20-22 September – Sala Polivalente

Our question:
What are the epistemological implications for the undertaking of both anthropology and ethnography today?

Organizers:
João de Pina-Cabral, ICS/UL (Portugal); Christina Toren, St. Andrew’s University (Scotland)

Financial support:
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York; USA
Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon; Portugal
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, MCTES, Lisboa, Portugal

Venue and Dates:
September 20-22, 2007
Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Av. Prof. A. Bettencourt, 9
1600-189 Lisboa, Portugal – Tel. (351) 21 7804700

Secretariat:
Margarida Bernardo – margarida.bernardo@ics.ul.pt






PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME


Thursday, 20th September 2007
15h00 – Introduction
15h30 – 16h30 – André Gingrich (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
“No evidence from socio-cultural anthropology?”
16h30 – 17h30 – Jadran Mimica (University of Sydney, Australia)
“The Project of Ethnography and the Critique of Epistemology”
17h30 – 18h00 – Coffee break
18h00 – 19h00 – Christina Toren (University of St Andrews, Scotland)
“Inter-subjectivity as epistemology”

Friday, 21st September 2007
9h30 – 10h30 – Gillian Evans (University Manchester, UK)
“What is Culture that Sociologists and Politicians in Britain are turning to it?”
10h30 – 11h00 – Coffee break
11h00 – 12h00 – Peter Gow (St. Andrew’s University, Scotland)
“What the shepherd thinks of the mountain: on the ontogeny of an anthropological epistemology”
12h00 – 13h00 – Márcio Goldman (Museu Nacional, Brazil)
“What is an Orishá? Ontology and epistemology in Afro-Brazilian religions”
13h00 – 15h00 – Lunch break
15h00 – 16h00 – Henrietta Moore (London School of Economics, UK)
“Epistemology and ethics: perspectives from Africa”
16h00 – 17h00 – Martin Holbraad (UCL, UK)
“Definitive evidence, from Cuban gods”
17h00 – 17h30 – Coffee break








17h30 – 18h30 – João de Pina-Cabral (Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon)
“The all -or-nothing syndrome”
21h00 – Conference dinner

Saturday, 22nd September 2007
9h30 – 10h30 – Filipe Carreira da Silva (ICS-UL)
“Critical theory, pluralism, and modernity: Discussing the epistemological conditions of hodiern human and social sciences”
10h30 – 11h30 – Yoshinobu Ota (University of Kyushu, Fukuoka, Japan)
“‘Strange Tales from the Road’: What To Do with Ethnographic Surprises?”
11h30 – 12h00 – Coffee break
12h00 – 13h00 - Susana Matos Viegas (ICS/UL)
“Can anthropology make valid generalizations? A classic solution to an old problem.”
13h00 – 15h00 – Lunch break
15h00 – 16h30 – Final debate


17h00 – Book launch Learning Religion (Berghann, Oxford/NY),
presentation ed.s David Berliner and Ramon Sarró;
debate Mike Rowlands.






Paper abstracts:
(as of June 13th 2007)

Martin Holbraad (UCL, UK)
“Definitive evidence, from Cuban gods”
Based on evidence collected during fieldwork among practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion in Havana, this article seeks ‘recursively’ to redefine the notion of anthropological evidence itself. It does so by examining ethnographically practitioners’ concern with the ‘evidence’ deities give (e.g. successful divinations, divine cures, etc.), by virtue of which people’s relationships with deities are cemented. To the extent that this indigenous concept of evidence is different from notions of evidence anthropologists take for granted in their own work, it occasions the opportunity to transform those very assumptions. But such a procedure is itself evidential – pertaining to the relationship between ethnography and theory. The article sets out the virtues, both ethnographic and theoretical, of this circularity.

Márcio Goldman (Museu Nacional, Brazil)
“What is an Orishá? Ontology and epistemology in Afro-Brazilian religions”
The central axiom of this paper is that, for anthropologists, the only epistemologies that need to be taken into account are those offered by the peoples with whom they work. Based on fieldwork on Afro-Brazilian religions and bibliographic data from the literature on the theme, it presents some of the epistemological principles elaborated by one of these religions, Candomble. The presentation is based on an analysis of ethnographic material relative to the ontology of some of the principal elements of Candomble. The intention is not only to show that this ontology is connected to an epistemology that cannot be classified within the terms of the classic Western opposition between realism and constructivism, but that even the distinction between ontology and epistemology might not work here.

André Gingrich (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
“No evidence from socio-cultural anthropology?”
This presentation continues a debate that began several years ago, at a Wenner Gren-sponsored AAA panel. In a first section, I shall outline some epistemological constraints and differences that inform socio-cultural anthropology, by contrast to the other anthropological sub fields. In the second section, then, I will assess the potentials and limits of two epistemological trajectories inside contemporary socio-cultural anthropology, i.e. the "sociological" and the "linguistic" perspectives.
In the final section, I will discuss possible intersections between these two, and what phenomenology might contribute to them: a productive epistemological horizon for anthropology cannot abandon the concept of evidence.

Yoshinobu Ota (University of Kyushu, Fukuoka, Japan)
“‘Strange Tales from the Road’: What To Do with Ethnographic Surprises?”
Anthropology with its deep commitment to fieldwork has produced, through the dialectics of learning and un-learning, a contradictory self-understanding of the nature of “knowledge” it has produced: one driven by a search for certainty, while the other by a desire for surprise. I narrate a genealogy of anthropological perspective that thrives from the latter, the one that aims to undermine constantly the taken-for-granted. I report how this perspective, often underappreciated these days in places where anthropological knowledge has been required to legitimate itself on an activist ground, has affected how I, a Japanese anthropologist, understand my fieldwork experience in Guatemala.

Jadran Mimica (University of Sydney, Australia)
“The Project of Ethnography and the Critique of Epistemology”
Grounded in phenomenology, psychoanalysis and my long-term research in a New Guinea life-world this paper will outline a historical-existential perspective on Western epistemology and ontology which have shaped the dynamics of anthropological knowledge including its present-day degradation. Relative to this perspective I will focus on the modes of experience and critical gnosis which are the condition for the restoration of anthropological self-understanding and the pursuit of the truth-bound knowledge and action.

Gillian Evans (Univsersity Manchester, UK)
“What is Culture that Sociologists and Politicians in Britain are turning to it?”
Those practising at the cutting edge of contemporary anthropological theorising in Europe approach the critical study of society via ontological and epistemological debate concerning categorical differences or not between persons and things; ‘the social’ and ‘the material’ or subjects and objects. At the same time, in an equally radical and parallel phase of theorising, culture, as an analytical category and as a bridge linking European and American anthropology is becoming a redundant category. From an ethnographic standpoint, meanwhile, the whole world is talking ‘culture’: in Britain, sociologists are ‘turning to it’; the white working classes are resorting to it and politicians are relying on it. All of which begs the questions which this paper addresses: what is the object of anthropological enquiry and can it be analysed with phenomenological validity?

Peter Gow (St. Andrew’s University, Scotland)
“What the shepherd thinks of the mountain: on the ontogeny of an anthropological epistemology”
In answering a question put to me by a Yudyá woman, from the Xingú river in Central Brazil, I discovered a thing that I did not then know about myself. The paper seeks to describe the social preconditions of this ignorance in the emergence of science as a life-project in Scotland since the Enlightenment, and what came to be unknown in the process. In particular it addresses the way in which the geologist James Hutton generated a specific category of “men of scientific observation” as opposed to “men of common observation”, such as shepherds. In doing so, he like other Enlightenment thinkers transformed an existing spatial ordering of social relations into a temporal one. This formed one of the early steps in the development of a genuinely anthropological epistemology, whereby knowledge of the human lies with the “primitive” other, and with his or her knowledge of the world. Anthropology is, therefore, the scientific observation of common observation, and as Lévi-Strauss pointed out, a specific form of common observation.

João de Pina-Cabral (Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon)
“The all -or-nothing syndrome”
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, anthropologists have failed to elaborate on such theoretical concepts as “universal” or “human condition.” In face of the fact that they did not abandon their scientific calling or the label “anthropology” – this must surely be taken as surprising. In this paper, I argue that this silence is only made possible due to an ideational performance that I call the all-or-nothing syndrome. This depends on a sceptical fallacy – the condition of those that, because they cannot have it all, despair of having what is left behind. From an ethical point of view, the performance operates a shift of identifications between author/reader/actor; from a logical point of view, it treats what is only partially so as being completely so. At the start of the performance, a kind of premoral human empathy between ethnographer and informant is presumed that leaves the reader out of account; but, at the end, the process produces the perception of a moral continuity between author and reader and of a moral discontinuum between the actors and the author/reader (the “Western we”). By means of an epistemological trick, an ontological barrier is promoted. The paper explores the Davidsonian notions of indeterminacy and underdetermination as possible paths out of this quandary. It suggests an approach to ethnographic knowledge based on the principles that underscore the mechanisms of control that engineers call “fuzzy logic”.

Christina Toren (University of St Andrews, Scotland)
“Inter-subjectivity as epistemology”
This paper returns to an argument I have made elsewhere: that we should insist on anthropology as science, as capable of bedrock explanations of the human condition that are enlightening precisely to the extent that they acknowledge, and bring others to acknowledge, the lived validity of ideas and practices that may be very different from our own. The central issue here is inter-subjectivity and how, exactly, it functions such that for all of us the past goes on and on informing the transforming present. The paper makes use of a study of the Fijian concept of veiqaravi (‘attendance on one another’) firstly, to discuss the space-time dimension of what we humans know, and how we come to know, about our environing world and, secondly, to argue for an epistemology (along with an entailed ontological commitment) that is not only good for anthropology, but that will enable us (with any luck) to demonstrate to other human scientists why they might want to re-think certain cherished ideas. In passing, I show why cognitive science on the one hand, and on the other ‘cultural construction’, ‘habitus’, and ‘embodiment’ cannot explain the multiplicity of human being – that is, how it comes to be the case that what differentiates us is a function of what we have in common.

Filipe Carreira da Silva (ICS-UL)
“Critical theory, pluralism, and modernity: Discussing the epistemological
conditions of hodiern human and social sciences”
Ever since the nineteenth century, the division of scientific labour has determined that, despite all the nuances and exceptions one might think of, sociologists tend to study modern societies whereas anthropologists tend to focus on traditional societies. As with all other rigid, modernist dichotomies the distinction between modern and traditional has been under severe scrutiny for some decades now. One reason for this healthy scepticism has been the postmodernist suspicion with all things modern, science in particular. In this paper, I argue that the all too common postmodernist tendency to fetishize “modernity”, by conceiving of it as a unified, coherent monolith, is the source of many misunderstandings in anthropology and sociology alike. My proposed alternative suggests that modernity, understood as a coherent monolith, is a “never was” rather than a “has been.” One should thus redefine modernity in a critical and pluralistic way, allowing for multiple variants of paths to modernity. Such a redefinition entails substantial implications for our current conception of sociology and anthropology: the last section of the paper discusses the epistemological implications of such a “variants of modernity” approach. In particular, I wish to discuss the extent to which social and anthropological theories, both products of Western experience, are valid for analysing non-Western experiences modernity. The solution seems to lie in a conception of science broad enough to include contributions from all the variants of modernity, yet rigorous enough to sustain a critical theory of human experience.


Susana Matos Viegas (ICS/UL)
“Can anthropology make valid generalizations? A classic solution to an old problem.”
It is consensual that anthropological knowledge arises from the understanding of life and living among a number of people that we are able to meet face to face in a restricted period of time we call “ethnographic present”. The way anthropologists turn that knowledge into more general reflections is to explain how we create ethnography in anthropology, and how generalization and comparison matter to this construction. In Rethinking Anthropology, Edmund Leach argued that, instead of comparison anthropology should do generalisations. He was fighting against positivism, identifying comparison with “butterfly collecting”, therefore proposing us to “have inspired guesswork” by giving our findings a “general importance” (Leach 1971: 1, 5).
Through a specific connection between regional comparative thinking (in this case Americanist) and phenomenological approaches in the writing of ethnography, I will explore in this paper ideas on the validity of generalizations and its power as a sort of epistemolgy for anthropology. The discussion will be conducted through ethnographical findings about space and territoriality among the Tupinambá people with whom I did two different types of fieldwork: the first, based on the observation of everyday life; and the second based on an extensive survey.


Henrietta Moore (London School of Economics, UK)
“Epistemology and ethics: perspectives from Africa”
There has been much discussion in anthropology of the problem of belief and of the difficulties inherent in understanding and interpreting alternative life-words. One consequence of anthropological understanding and interpretation being intimately tied to the epistemological and ethical project of contextualization is that the knowledge of others is frequently rendered as parochial, as defined by its local contexts and scope. This paper discusses the problem of belief from a quite different perspective where recent conversion to radical protestant beliefs in a community in northern Kenya has resulted in new forms of knowledge and agency that are definitely not defined as local in scope and/or context. The moral continuities and discontinuities between researcher and researched cannot in this situation be glossed by making the informants rational in context or by asserting the existence of culturally distinct worldviews. The paper explores how this sets up a series of epistemological and ethical dilemmas that inevitably shape both the research project and the research process.