A paper presented in the session Science in Anthropology: Late 20th Century Debates at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Central States Anthropological Society, April 3-6, 1997, Milwaukee,Wisconsin
The underlying saliency of this debate may be political. Which set of paradigms should be the basis for teaching cultural anthropology to graduate students? Which set should be the basis for forming a scholasticism to be entrenched in academic bureaucracies? Which set should receive grant money. Which set should be the basis for granting tenure? I suggest that much of the heat surrounding these debates is due to their academico-political consequences rather than to an essential incompatibility. Cannot several ways of knowing coexist?
Let us consider how knowledge is stored in culture. Anthropologists have recognized that culture is primarily a mental phenomena. Yet culture belongs to a group without single mind other than an artificial mind imposed by ideological pressures. The true mental content of culture must be stored and transmitted symbolically from human to human. The mechanism for storing the mental content of culture, cultural memory, can have profound consequences for the evolution of cultural knowledge.
The kind and quantity of knowledge that a culture can hold depends on the means for storing it. My appeal to anthropological thought about this problem takes its first glimpse of humans on the plains of ancient Africa where some early hominid hunters were observing their quarry. They observed the animals for many seasons, and eventually tales of the hunt were told. The storytellers passed on this animal lore to succeeding generations by telling glorious stories of the hunt. The best way that they could retain what people had to know was in a good story that everyone loved to hear. Under these conditions the modern human brain evolved its capacity for holding cultural knowledge.
Social organization was also evolving at that time, so tales of what other hominids were doing were also useful. The gossip about others may not have been easily accumulated in a cultural form since it contained so many lies; however, it clearly was narrative. So the ability to create and remember narrative had a double advantage for early hominids. It provided a way of encoding valuable shared knowledge and it stored secretive personal knowledge that helped one deal with conspecific competitors.
My appeal now shifts to a young Ph.D. who is trying to find her first job. She too has heard job hunting tales, but now there are other ways of learning things: There are lists of academic departments. There are announcements of job openings. There are printed reports of what is going in her field. There are Internet mail lists. One can see that culture has new forms of memory and communication. In the Paleolithic, the mental content of culture was stored in the biological memory of storytellers. In modern times cultural knowledge it is stored in external forms as well as in human memory. 1
When writing and other visual storage techniques were invented a threshold was passed that profoundly affected the fitness of the people in the cultural group. There was more to the explosion of population that followed the agricultural revolution than the ability to produce surplus food. The surpluses were distributed unevenly. Elite classes controlled cultural knowledge and made use of newly developed external forms for storing that knowledge.
This change from narrative memory to external memory affected the nature of cultural knowledge, and some even suggest that it is having an effect on the evolution of the human brain (Donald 1991). The skills of story telling are no longer the only ones needed to transmit cultural knowledge. However, storytelling still has great appeal because human psychology evolved during a time that narrative knowledge reigned supreme. Today journalists use the latest information technology to disseminate mind-gripping tales that draw people to television sets like flies to honey. There they are sold products worth billions. Storytelling still has its place in the economy. Ethnographic films with tales of personal adventure, whether they are accurate or not, also bring in millions. However the culture core, the basic energy extraction process that supports survival and reproduction, is now more solidly based on another sort of knowledge, the knowledge contained in external memory, books, papers, documents, statistics, etc. In modern civilizations formal education imparts the skills necessary to deal with this knowledge, the ability to read, write, do mathematics, etc.
Narrative knowledge is still useful.2 A good tale is easy to remember because it follows the flow of individual experience, the most primary pattern of neural activity. Narrative knowledge encodes and recreates experience. Writing and other forms of external memory can also lexically encode narrative knowledge and disseminated to many people. Narrative knowledge supports religious organizations, political systems, and ethnic identity. Narrative knowledge can be refined in the development of myth or in case studies of law. It carries day-to-day information about people in one's social world. Narrative knowledge has been amplified by film and television giving it an extra dimension of visual symbolism. It proliferates because it was the way that biological memory held cultural memory during the time that modern humans evolved their cultural mode of adaptation. The human brain is finely attuned to appreciate and disseminate narrative knowledge. Narrative knowledge is the oldest form of knowledge and the natural form for most social knowledge.
However knowledge stored in external memory is evolving in a different direction. Externally stored knowledge does not degrade with time like biological memory. Since the mental content of external knowledge exists outside a single human memory it can be worked on and refined by many persons. It can be made more explicit by defining symbols in external form. It can be tested over and over again by many people under many conditions. The results of these tests can also be stored in external memory and communicated widely. The invention of printing and other means of mass symbolic communication made the refinement of this knowledge much more rapid. 3
The refinement of externally stored knowledge eventually led to science, which has proven to be very useful in creating wealth, political power, and even the overall improvement of human life. The physical sciences have created many useful technologies. This was particularly true once the Industrial Revolution got underway. Medical science has led to fantastic curative systems. Economics has improved the efficiency of businesses and national economies. Other social sciences have helped to create more humane political systems and to solve social problems. The systematic objective approaches of the sciences have created and encoded knowledges that are put into practice more efficiently than narrative knowledge. They have done so by making use of external memory and by developing special intellectual skills.
The ideals of science are:
Cultural knowledge has evolved from an early narrative form to other forms because culture created external memory. The adaptive advantage of such new forms of knowledge is proven by the rapid human population growth accompanying them. The following diagram summarizes these changes in culture.
Thus the anthropologists who arrived after World War II had to live with this popular conception of cultural anthropology as primarily narrative. Most did not challenge this conception of their work but many did not fully accept it. Perhaps we have to look at their political economy of cultural anthropology to understand how narrative knowledge became part of it. Scientists have always found more remuneration in popular writing than in writing scientific reports that could be read by only a few of their colleagues. The Depression had left much of cultural anthropology short of remunerative work.
The second process that put cultural anthropological knowledge into a narrative mode was an interest in the knowledge of pre-literate people, which was naturally narrative. Boas, the scientist, maintained a strict separation between the pre-literate native's way of knowing and the anthropologist's. He recorded ethnographic texts as an objective part of native culture. Ethnoscientific and cognitive anthropological methods (Colby 1966) also maintained a separation between the anthropologist's and the native's way of knowing, but they were difficult to master. The barrier that they created broke down because they were tedious and difficult to use. Thus anthropologists began to accept their own narratives as legitimate anthropological studies of culture. Since the people they were studying often used narrative to communicate their own culture to each other, why should not the cultural anthropologist use the same method? They were communicating the same mental aspects of the culture.
The use of narrative was legitimized by an interpretative effort. When narrative became "discourse" interpreting culture it entered the realm of scholarship drawing on published ideas, although it clearly stepped outside the scientific tradition. Perhaps narrative knowledge would have existed comfortably along side of scientific knowledge had not its practitioners proclaimed that they had discovered a new, better form of cultural anthropology than what was being wrought by the scientific tradition. This thrust of anthropological narrative toward academic legitimacy created the conflicts that now have surfaced.
Also the desire to investigate the mental creations of cultures led to the use of Hegelian philosophies that permitted extended tautological discourse on symbols. Perhaps this was the most important means by which narrative knowledge was legitimated. It gave it an air of impeccable philosophical scholarship. Symbols were put into binary opposition and then resolved in a structure that was intellectually satisfying, something that Saler has characterized as digitizing (1993:12-17). These structural techniques allowed narrative to become part of cultural anthropology as long as it was adequately digitized and surrounded by a logical system, no matter how tautological. Unfortunately it produced little that could be tested. It was primarily interpretive.
The success of narrative knowledge in anthropology is based on its instinctive attractiveness. It does not require the skills of working with external memory which are poorly evolved in the human brain since they have become important for gene-culture co-evolution only recently in evolutionary time. The connection of narrative knowledge with survival in a social matrix gives it a saliency for the transmission of social information. Narrative knowledge fits well within a culture that produces large quantities of news to sell in a journalistic market place. Unfortunately it does not give rise to new theory about human cultural behavior because it is not following the discipline of science.
I do not think that scientific knowledge approaches anything like an absolute good. Modern literate civilizations are oppressive and riddled with poverty and class differences. However the accumulated scientific knowledge that they have created has done far more to mitigate their oppressiveness than all the scholastic narrative knowledge that they have also created. Lacking the self-corrective features of scientific knowledge, narrative knowledge lends itself more easily to the creation of myths, political ideologies, and oppressive dogmas, and therefore has little of offer by way of moral superiority.
On epistemological grounds, I do not think that there is any reason for cultural anthropologists to choose between narrative knowledge and scientific knowledge. They should simply be more aware of what they are doing when they turn their experiences into knowledge. Cultural anthropologists should assess their forms knowledge against to the goals that they wish to achieve. If they wish to become best-selling popular writers, TV producers, dramatic teachers, or advisors to politicians, the narrative mode is very attractive. If they wish to contributed to a trans-cultural heritage of useful, theoretically integrated, knowledge that is recognized in modern civilizations as a foundation of cultural wealth, then they should get into the scientific mode.
In fact most cultural anthropologists use both modes. The delightful balance between the two modes of knowledge perhaps is, and should-be, a hallmark of cultural anthropology. The real problem for cultural anthropology is in explicitly recognizing, discussing, and teaching the nature of these fundamental modes of knowledge production without fighting over academic territory.
2 The psychology of narrative knowledge is discussed by Bruner (1986).
3 The existence of new forms of electronic storage and communication such as television and sound recordings are adding to the external knowledge of cultures, but because the raw experiential component is much larger than the refined component of the knowledge contained therein, scientific ideals are being lost. Perhaps this contributes to people’s feeling that science is dead.
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