On nature, science & culture: Part II
Cultural interpretation is data collection.
In 2014 the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland established the Marsh Award for Anthropology in the World, to recognise and highlight work that uses the insights and tools of anthropology in contexts beyond the academic bubble. The first recipient was Gillian Tett. Now a member of the editorial board of the Financial Times, Tett has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, for which she did fieldwork studying wedding rituals and ethnic conflict in rural Tajikistan. In her journalism Tett sometimes makes explicit reference to the skills and insights she gained from her studies. Indeed anthropological fieldwork and investigative journalism are not so different. The fundamental activities are observation, interpretation and writing.
It was in significant part because of this background that Tett was, famously, one of the few people to publicly predict the 2008 credit crunch and the financial crisis it precipitated. Shortly after the crisis Tett published a book, Fool’s Gold, which describes how events unfolded inside one department of one institution. Or, as the subtitle puts it, “How the bold dream of a small tribe at JP Morgan was corrupted by Wall Street greed and unleashed a catastrophe”. Note the key word ‘tribe’, an allusion to the deep similarities Tett saw between the otherwise utterly different worlds of Wall Street bankers and Tajik farmers. Reading Fool’s Gold you come to understand not just what happened in terms of collateralised debt obligations and other financial products, but also how matters looked and felt to those on the inside. It wasn’t just financial incentive.
Tett brings particular attention to things that were not discussed and indeed were not even available for discussion: the unstated, the unnoticed and the unquestioned. Such things are highly cultural, all human groups have them, and it’s part of the standard training of an anthropologist to become attuned to them. Many financiers want to believe that their activities are overwhelmingly rational and uninfluenced by subjectivity, but Tett saw otherwise. She saw inside JP Morgan a collection of unstated norms and practices about how this particular institution ‘does’ banking, and hence why some very bright people did some very daft things. Her story illustrates the value of subjective interpretation in understanding human affairs: of how internalising and habituating yourself to the norms and tacit beliefs of a group is necessary to properly understand the group, and the world of which it is part.
Which brings me back to Clifford Geertz and ‘Thick description’. In Part I of this essay I described Geertz’s central empirical observation: that human cultural knowledge—Tajik wedding rituals, JP Morgan ways of thinking, or anything else—is all interpretation, all the way down. The question then is this: If that’s right, then what is the best way understand the human? Especially those humans who are very different to ourselves.
Geertz’s answer is in his title: Thick description. Thin description is the raw, cold, plainly perceptible facts. Thick description is the rich, interpreted whole: contextualised, ripe with nuance and bursting with flavour and detail. Thin description: he rapidly contracted one eyelid. Slightly thicker description: he is practicing how to fake a wink in such a way that it will, when reproduced later, deceive his friend. Thin description: a curved piece of fabric and wood atop a metal stand. Thicker description: the iconic ‘Swan Chair’ designed and developed by Arne Jacobsen in 1958 and today symbolic of Danish design aesthetic. Thin description: rhythmical movement to instrumental sounds with hundreds of other people looking on. Thicker description: a performance of the lindy hop in the style of Frankie Manning, a pioneering figure in the early days of the dance. He passed away in 2009, aged 94, and his 100th birthday was marked with a week long event in New York City. The largest single gathering of lindy hoppers in history, it included performances consciously delivered in Manning’s style of dance. That is (just a little bit of) thick description, and the point is that it is only with this enriched description that can you understand what it is you see when looking at those dancers. Geertz himself famously used thick description to study the social and cultural significance of organised cock fights in rural Bali.
Albert Einstein once wrote, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand”. What Geertz is saying is that any fool can provide thin description, the point is to interpret so that you understand. Geertz quotes American writer Henry David Thoreau: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar”. Thoreau is generally read as saying that there’s no point going to great lengths to achieve an outcome of little real value: all you need to know is that there are a great many feral cats on Zanzibar, the exact number does not matter. Geertz is making a similar point about studying Homo sapiens. If you so much want to understand humans that you will travel somewhere exotic and faraway just to find people different to you, then when you get there don’t spend your energies trying to determine mere objective fact. It is of such little value! Try instead to interpret what is happening. One of the later books in Geertz’s career was titled After The Fact, an expression that nicely captures his view that the real work of understanding humans lies in what happens after more base observations are out of the way: that the heart of the matter is not the facts themselves, but rather how you use and interpret them.
Many of my scientifically-minded colleagues are dismissive of all this. They are quick to disregard the interpretative perspective on the simple and supposedly straightforward grounds that any move away from the standard tools of science must necessarily be a mistake. Here’s an example, a direct response to Geertz from one of my peers: “ultimately the objective tools of the scientific method—hypothesis testing, falsification, replication, quantitative statistical analyses, and so on—result in a much more accurate understanding of the world than the nonscientific alternative of compiling subjective and superficial descriptions of people’s lives”.1
But look, this point-of-view, as common sensical as it might first seem, is exactly what Geertz is trying to warn us against. The giveaway words are two: ‘accurate’ and ‘superficial’. What Geertz is saying is that interpretation and thick description give us a more accurate, less superficial picture than what we get from measurement and experiment alone. And he’s right! What’s superficial is plain, decontextualised data and measurement. To quote another anthropologist, Alessandro Duranti: if you stick just to sanitised facts then you end up “saying things like ‘people squat on the floor, grab their food with their hands and bring it to their mouth—and this, they call ‘eating’”.2
Let me put the point this way: cultural interpretation is data collection. Physicists use enormous tunnels 100m under the Swiss Alps to find out what happens when you bang particles together at high speed in a vacuum. Engineers build telescopes and astronomers use them to observe the night sky. Chemists document what happens when atoms, molecules, metals and crystals are heated, cooled, mixed and blended. Biologists view living things in their natural environment, and sometimes they bring creatures into the laboratory and look at them through a microscope. Neuroscientists ask people to lie still inside an enormous magnet, so they can measure how the flow of blood in the brain changes depending on what the person hears or sees on a screen. All these people are collecting data. And anthropologists? They go and observe other people living their lives, and interpret what it is those others say and do.
The Nage people of eastern Indonesia believe that extremely elderly people grow tails.3 Many Nage claim to have personally seen these tails in the flesh—but only by accident, because it’s taboo to actually look at the tails. Some say the elders’ tails appear only when they’re alone, and they retract their tail when viewed by others. There’s also a social norm that when visiting the house of an extremely old person you should first call out from a distance so they have time to put their tail away. The Nage people also hold a kind of mirror set of beliefs about monkeys. Monkeys walk using four limbs. Nage believe that monkeys actually stand erect and walk on two legs like humans do, but only when humans are not looking at them. And as best any outsider can tell, these beliefs are sincerely held: for most Nage people, ideas about the elderly growing tails and monkeys walking on two legs are not lore or metaphor, they are truths.
And this sort of thing is rather common. By “this sort of thing” I don’t mean beliefs specifically about elderly people growing tails! I mean rather the superset of which this is but one member: ‘apparently irrational beliefs’. These are beliefs that are on the one hand sincerely held and on the other, if not plainly false at least highly credulous and easily open to refutation. Anthropological data has revealed that apparently irrational beliefs are, it turns out, everywhere in human societies.
For anybody who wishes to understand what human worlds are and how they’re created, this is vital information. While the astronomer looks through a telescope and record what it is she sees, the anthropologist spends time with human groups, learns the language and becomes accustomed to their ways of living, and in this way she helps to describe the richness and variety of the human. This data can be complemented and enriched by other insights, including the controlled experiments that take place in psychology labs, but observation and thoughtful description is still essential, even if it is also unavoidably subjective.
But again, some of my scientific colleagues are dismissive. Frans de Waal is one of the world’s leading primatologists and he has, over the course of a long career, made many important contributions to our understanding of the minds and emotions of our primate relatives. He comments that, “We have no idea what kind of evidence cultural anthropologists bring to the table. This field seems to get by without any empirical evidence”.
This is both false and unhelpful. It’s false because anthropologists return from their fieldwork with rich, detailed descriptions of the human lives and human worlds, and what are these if not data? And comments like de Waal’s are unhelpful because they burn bridges, for they are an expression of contempt for a discipline that is in fact deeply serious—if anything, too serious—about the challenges involved in understanding the human.
We should want the contributions of anthropologists especially when it comes to data, because anthropological descriptions and interpretations are the most relevant and fine-grained data we have about human social and cultural worlds. We are a long, long way from a world in which brain scans or other forms of hard data describes people’s lives, in all their magnificent diversity, in any way comparable with the interpretations of a good anthropologist. (Or a good journalist.) Nor will we be reaching such worlds anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime. Again, apparently irrational beliefs are a good example: we know about them—we know about their variety and their ubiquity—not because we studied humans in a laboratory, but exactly and only because the masses of data that anthropologists have brought to the table.
But having agreed with Geertz that subjective interpretation and anthropological data are vital, unavoidable and indeed desirable if we aspire to understand the human, where Geertz and many other anthropologists go next forces us to part company. For Geertz concludes that since fully objective description of cultural facts is in effect impossible, it is also nothing to aspire to. The study of human lives should not even aim at scientific discovery or explanation. It should be “not an experimental science in search of law…” but only “..an interpretative one in search of meaning”.
These are revolutionary words! They are, in effect, a demand to stop at the data and go no further. Interpret each individual culture on its own terms, and stop there. Do not contrast, do not generalise. Do not observe what is similar and what is different. Interpret, as thickly as you can, and value it for that alone.
This is a mistake. In Part III of this essay, I will describe what Geertz missed—and the reasons why we must take into account how the mind works, if we are serious about understanding culture in terms continuous with the other sciences.
p.20 of Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture & Synthesize The Social Sciences. UCP.
p.85 of Duranti, A (1997). Linguistic Anthropology. CUP.
Forth, G. (2018). Elderly people growing tails: The constitution of a nonempirical idea. Current Anthropology, 59(4), 397-414.