Anthropology in crisis - what, still?

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Harvey Whitehouse

Sunday, 07 June 2009

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Fifteen years ago, Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart declared that "anthropology has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember" (here). Has anything really changed? Today, anthropology remains a discipline riddled with rival paradigms, ferocious disputes, and fleeting fashions. Few basic principles of theory and method are agreed upon and even the general nature of anthropological knowledge is continually being contested. Cumulative theory building is rare and difficult to sustain. Why?

Perhaps part of the answer is that humans are not naturally adept at reasoning about complex social morphology. As our societies have grown in size and complexity, we have witnessed the emergence of a vast plethora of specialized offices and corporate groups based on a broad range of sorting principles: kinship, descent, rank, caste, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Categories of office, coalition, and class are no more than idealized models of how the social world is organized, rather than precise descriptions of how it operates on the ground but they provide robust schemas for individual behaviour, cumulatively instantiating patterns that people reciprocally interpret in terms of those schemas. These schemas, however, are a relatively modern and potentially dispensable accretion to human thinking, too recent in our evolutionary history to have led to specialized cognitive skills for reasoning about social complexity. The same could not be said of human reasoning in many other domains.

As part of our evolutionary endowment, we possess dedicated intuitive machinery for reasoning about physical properties (such as solidity and gravity), biological properties (such as essentialized differences between natural kinds), and psychological properties (such as a capacity to empathize with suffering). Our intuitive physics, intuitive biology, and intuitive psychology may have to be substantially revised in light of the discoveries ofscientific physics/ biology/ psychology but our intuitions often also deliver useful reference points and pedagogic tools. For instance, while our intuitions about the discreteness and stability of natural kind taxonomies are inconsistent with the diachronic character of evolutionary processes, nevertheless they provide a convenient on-the-hoof framework within which to conceptualize speciation.

Problems arise, however, when some of our intuitively grounded ontological commitments also serve as markers of identity.

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Why do we sometimes de-humanize our fellow humans? Some preliminary reflections

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Harvey Whitehouse

Sunday, 21 December 2008

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(This post has been jointly written by Harvey WHITEHOUSE and Justin BARRETT)

Whatever else it may entail, de-humanizing involves the de-activation of our capacity to empathize. There is now a substantial body of research in experimental psychology showing that humans have highly developed capacities for empathizing (i.e. for assessing the mental and emotional states of others). Even though the nature and origins of human empathy continue to be contested, there exists extensive and robust evidence as to the psychological mechanisms involved, the way these emerge in childhood, how they operate at the neurological level, how certain pathologies affect the operation of these mechanisms, and how human empathizing abilities compare with those of other animals (especially other primates). Although humans are naturally sensitive to the feelings and intentions of other agents it has long been recognized that empathy can be switched off for special purposes, for instance when doctors seek to treat gross physical injuries, when military leaders engage in the strategic deployment of troops, and when battery-hen farmers are calculating their meat stocks. Under such circumstances reasoning about other agents ceases to be empathetic; indeed in many such cases it simply will not be relevant to consider what the agents in question are thinking and feeling.

Some researchers have begun to investigate non-empathetic ways of reasoning about other agents. For instance, speciation (the tendency to classify our fellow humans as if they were natural kinds with essentialized heritable qualities) may be necessary for various types of reflective ideas about human types, such as racial categorizing or attribution of charisma or religious specialization (witches, shamans etc. who are thought to be inherently different from other people). Or to take another example, teleological reasoning (the tendency to view our fellow humans as instruments with specialized functions, just like tools and weapons) seems to be entailed in certain types of strategic decision-making (e.g. the idea that foot soldiers can serve as cannon fodder in a strategic advance or that civilians can serve as a human shield).

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