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http://cdy.sagepub.com/content/9/3/325The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/092137409700900304

1997 9: 325Cultural DynamicsStephen P. Reyna

Theory in Anthropology in the Nineties

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THEORY INANTHROPOLOGY IN THE NINETIES

STEPHEN P. REYNA

University of New Hampshire

ABSTRACT

Current theory in sociocultural anthropology is dismal. This article has twogoals. The first is to show why one project, that of Geertzian conjecturalists,is so dismal. The second is to present an agnoiological methodology thatmight lift the discipline out of such doldrums.Agnoiology proceeds by re-vealing ignorance. It provides information of what is unknown that needs tobe known to strengthen theory. The methodology is applied to certain aspectsof Bourdieus, the Comaroffs and Sahlinss work. It reveals that these schol-ars belong to an old, established, Hegel/Sartre theoretical order disturbed bya gaping hole. The hole, in Sartres terms, is an apparently insurmountabledualism between the social and subjective. Repair of this hole is suggested tobe a worthy project for keeping sociocultural anthropologists off the meanstreets of dismal theory.

Key Words Comaroffs Bourdieu Geertz methodology Sahlins

theory

This article contemplates four theoretical projects in anthropology. Thefirst project is Clifford Geertzs conjectural hermeneutics, especially as

presented in Works and Lives (1988) andAfter the Fact (1995). The second

project is Pierre Bourdieus practice theory, as argued in perhaps its mostcomplete form in The Logic of Social Practice (1990). The third project isone of a Gramscian idealism that has been proposed by Jean and JohnComaroff in their Of Revelation and Revolution (1991). The final project isa neo-Levi-Straussianism offered by Marshal Sahlins in his fiercely com-

bative, How Natives Think (1995). Though these projects have their

origins in the early 1970s, and though they do not exhaust the theoretical

possibilities in current anthropology, they are arguably the most importanttheoretical alternatives competing for space in the imaginations of socio-

cultural anthropologists in the 1990s.1Why contemplate them? Sherry Ortner wrote her brilliant article,

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326 THEORY INANTHROPOLOGY

Theory inAnthropology Since the Sixties (1984), in part because shefound the discipline to be theoretically a thing of shreds and patches(1984: 126). Her solution to the problem was to encourage everybody to getwith the (theoretical) program and this, of course, was her version ofpractice theory. It is now slightly over a decade since Professor Ortnersintervention and things have gotten worse.

Certainly, the anthropology of the nineties teems with lively projects.There are pragmatics, gender and cultural studies, subaltern and queertheory, the ethnography of the body, the ethnography of performance, etc.What, however, are the prospects for such projects? Debate concerns (asKnauft delicately puts it) whether the discipline has progressed in recent

years or is ... self destructing (1996:1).An optimistic conviction, expressedby Knauft, is that recent developments are not nearly as dismal as themore pessimistic views might have it (1996: 1).Amore skeptical opinion,articulated by Sahlins, is that&dquo;Culture&dquo; ... is in the twilight of its career,and anthropology with it (Sahlins, 1995: 14). Geertz prophesied that thediscipline would disappear in about fifty years (in Handler, 1991 : 612). Suchopinions appear to be widely shared (Knauft, 1996: 296). If the optimiststhink things are dismal, though not as dismal as the pessimists think, andthe pessimists are booking farewell performances for the whole show, thenperhaps it is appropriate to contemplate the dismal.

I have different goals in mind when thinking dismally than did ProfessorOrtner. Her concern was that anthropology did not have the right theory.My concern is that anthropology is not good at making any theory. So the

present articles goal is in a small way to help the discipline to see its waytowards more rigorous theory. This will be done (1) by illuminating whyanthropology has become dismal at theorizing and (2) by presenting, andapplying, a methodology that might contribute to putting the critical intocritical sociocultural theorizing, thereby helping to make theorizing lessdismal.

The paper is organized into three parts. Section one explores aspects ofGeertzs thought. It argues that conjectural hermeneutics managesimpressions in a manner that is indifferent to their truth. Such an approachmakes for dismal theory. The second section offers rudiments of a critical

methodology, called the agnoiological method, for the discovery ofpromising areas of inquiry in theoretical orders. This methodology operatesby discovering gaps, gaffes and holes; information concerning what isunknown that needs to be known to strengthen theory. Then, this method-

ology is applied in the third section. Bourdieus, the Comaroffs and

Sahlinss work is shown to belong to a particular Hegel/Sartre theoreticalorder. Gaps and gaffes are discovered, suggesting that this order hastumbled into a hole; one of, in Sartres terms, a seemingly insurmountabledualism. The article concludes by offering three priorities, suggested bythe articles arguments, that if fulfilled strengthen anthropological theoriz-



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327STEPHEN P. REYNA

ing, thereby strengthening the prospects for anthropologys varied and spir-ited projects.

The Conjecturalist World of Impression Management

Since the publication of Interpretation of Cultures (hereafter IC) in 1973 no

approach has been more fashionable in anthropology, and the humanities,than that of Clifford Geertz. In the decade between the publication of ICand Local Knowledge (hereafter LK) (1983), Geertz both initiated anthro-pology into hermeneutic mysteries and made it clear that he rejectedscience, saying he never really bought it (Handler, 1991: 608). Science isconcerned with systems of validation designed to provide more objectiveand true knowledge. Let us explore a bit where, and how, it is that Geertz

parts company with science.Geertz actually calls for the validation of interpretations according to

systematic modes of assessment (1973: 24). Now Spencer has said thatGeertz expends considerable energy on the problem of the validation ofdiffering interpretations on page 30 of IC (Spencer, 1989: 159). My readingof the page in question is that it offers no procedures for arriving at validattributions of meaning. There appears to be no other student of Geertzwho proposes he has formulated validation procedures. Further, I takeGeertz at his word when he tells readers in LKthat they would not findmuch in the way of theory and methodology in his hermeneutics (1983:5). So DAndrades judgment that Geertzs approach exhibits no methodof validation (1995: 248) seems sensible; which means that even thoughGeertz called for systematic modes of assessment he neglected to craftthem.

Similarly, Geertz reveals a lack of concern with objectivity. This is

especially evident in his Indonesian ethnography. Indonesian society at the

time Geertz studied it was riven by great differences of wealth and position.However, Geertz made no systematic attempt to inform readers wheninformation was from the viewpoint of the gentry, peasants, or for thatmatter from himself. Readers, then, do not know whether they are beingpresented with the biases of landowners, workers, or of a Cold War liberal

(Reyna, forthcoming).As for truth, Geertzs position is not that true statements do not exist.He implicitly assures readers that they do when, following consideration ofcertain assertions made by Evans-Pritchard, he says, The question is not

the truth of such statements (though I have my doubts about thoseBedouins and those women) ... (1988: 63). Rather, his attitude is one ofindifference to truth in the sense that he acts as if distinguishing truth fromuntruth is unproblematic and facile. So why bother with questions ofvalidation which, of course, explains why he failed to deliver upon the



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promised modes of assessment. Such indifference means that when itcomes to establishing the truth of interpretations, You either grasp an

interpretation or you do not, see the point or you do not (1973:24).

This

suggests, as Crapanzano has observed, that Geertzs interpretations weremade in the absence of specifiable evidence (Crapanzano, 1992: 67) whichmeans that they are pretty much conjectural, unverifiable (Cohen, 1974:5). If Geertzs hermeneutics is something of a guessing game then it isappropriate to label it conjectural. (Hereafter, I shall call practitioners ofsuch hermeneutics conjecturalists.) Now let us consider what Geertz gaveup when he abandoned science.

The science I favor is not of a get-on-your-high-horse with found-ationalist banners flying variety. Rather, it is a more modest affair of those

struggling to understand certain realities through development of more

objective systems of validation in order to have the truest possible state-ments concerning those realities. Science is interested in truth because it isthe sturdiest tool humans possess for distinguishing what is from what is

conjured (by rhetoric). The following incident helps to illustrate this point.During the 1988 George Bush-Michael Dukakis election, Bushs support-ers hired an advertising agency to make the Willie Horton televisioncommercial. The advertisement, masterfully using a cinma verit style,reveals a frightening man being released from jail at the instigation of thethen Governor of Massachusetts, a person of Greek origin named Dukakis.The man released was Willie Horton, anAfrican-American murderer who,once liberated, proceeded to rape a white, suburban, middle-class woman.The commercial effectively stated that (1) black males rape white womenin the suburbs, and (2) that the Greek Dukakis helps them do it. Dukakislost.

Ascientist is above all interested in the truth of these two statements.A

statement is true when what it asserts to be the case is the case (FetzerandAlmeder, 1993: 135).2 The types of statements science traffics in are

generalizations. These are statements of relationships between concepts,concepts which represent that certain events will happen in specificmanners in the world. Those generalizations which are relatively low inabstraction and scope and that are derived from observations are termed

empirical generalizations. Those that are inductively derived from empiri-cal generalizations and which are higher in abstraction and scope aretheories. While those that are deductively derived from theories and whichare of lower scope and abstraction are hypotheses.One suspects that a generalization is true when it is observed that events

occur as the generalization states they will occur. The statement Dukakishelps them do it in the Willie Horton commercial is something of an

empirical generalization. However, the observation that Horton was re-leased as part of a work release program and not by Dukakis suggests thatobserved events did not occur as the commercial has them; revealing that



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329STEPHEN P. REYNA

the advertisement is not so much a truth as a racist fancy. Perhaps, becauseit is so important to distinguish what is from what is delusion that even asdetermined a

skepticas Derrida insists, we must have truth ...

(1981).Systems of validation are used to produce true generalizations. Theseare procedures that guide the making of observations so that observers canknow how accurately what a generalization asserts to be the case, is thecase. One way in which this is done is through creation of procedures thatfoster objectivity, a concept with a large number of interrelated senses

(Mautner, 1996: 298).3Two senses, however, are fundamental and need tobe distinguished. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a definition of ob-

jectivity as the object of perception or thought (discussed in Sahlins, 1995:

162).Here is a first sense of the term where it is used in opposition to

subjectivity. The subjective is a realm within a person of awareness of

perceptions and thought. The objective is an external realm of the objectsof perceptions and thoughts.

Objectivity has a different meaning in science where it is the making ofobservations that exhibit independence of awareness and/or impartialityof judgment (Mautner, 1996: 298-9). Objectivity is desired because biascan produce untruths.Astudy of women that observes only men exhibits

gender bias and would be likely to produce unreliable judgments concern-

ing women. Objectivity does not mean that either science or scientists arevalue neutral. Scientists have their biases. However, scientists who seek

objectivity pursue an epistemic tolerance by suspending, as much as is poss-ible, egocentrisms and ethnocentrisms. They do this by creating validation

procedures that eliminate, where possible, such centrisms. Do these

procedures work? This is a bit like inquiring, do contraceptive techniqueswork?At present, there is no such thing as a foolproof contraceptive. Norare there procedures to perfectly eliminate bias. But simple precautions doreduce the risks of unwanted pregnancies or biased conclusions. Genderbias is reduced if one observes as many women as men. Racial bias would

have been reduced in the Willie Horton commercial if observations were

made of what white men do to women.

Validation procedures must not only strive for objectivity, they must doso in situations that are contested and approximate. Contested in that thereare different generalizations that compete to explain the same events andin this contestation the prize goes to those statements which are approxi-mately true (Miller, 1987). These are generalizations for which obser-vations better fit the case than they do for competing generalizations.Generalizations that better fit the case have more events that occur the way

they are supposed to than their rivals and so might be said to be approxi-mately true. What knowledge should conjecturalists produce if they lackvalidation procedures and are indifferent to seeking approximately true

knowledges?Geertz might be construed in Works and Lives (hereafter WL) to be



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arguing that conjectural hermeneutics should produce knowledgesdistinguished, in considerable measure, by their rhetorical effectiveness.WL examines

great anthropologists seekingto

comprehendwhat made

them exceptional.At one point in the text Geertz states, that the separ-ation of what someone says from how they say it ... substance from rhetoric... is as mischievous in anthropology as it is in poetry, painting, or politicaloratory (1988: 27). In fact Geertz does separate substance and rhetoric inWL because he ignores the substance of his subjects work and is com-

pletely indifferent to what might be true in it. Rather his only concern iswith how they say it which implies that he believes that the value of an

anthropological text is influenced by its rhetoric. Hence, writing of Levi-Strauss, Geertz

says,

It was not the odd facts or even odder

explanationsLevi-Strauss brought forth that made of him ... an intellectual hero. It wasthe mode of discourse he invented to display those facts and frame those

explanations (1988: 26). What Geertz asserts here is that what made Levi-Strauss great was not his substance (facts... and explanations) but hisrhetoric (mode of discourse).

This poses the question, how does one evaluate a rhetoric? Geertzanswers this question by noting that... we listen to some voices and ignoreothers (1988: 6) and that the factor governing what gets listened to is that:

...some ethnographers are more effective than others in conveying in their prose the

impression that they have had close-in contact with far out lives.... In discovering how...

such an impression is created, we shall discover, at the same time, the criteria bywhich to judge them (1988: 6).

Geertz proposes in this quotation that the criteria by which to judgeanthropological rhetoric is that of how effective it is in the manufacture of

impressions; and impressions, like advertising copy, are to be assessed interms of whether they are listened to. Conjecturalists, then, unconcernedwith validation, objectivity and truth, are a bit like those advertisingexecutives who made the Willie Horton commercial, for they too are in thebusiness of manufacturing a particular knowledge, that of effective

impressions.What, then, was there left to say when you had decided that your

contribution to anthropology was to exhort people to produce unreliable

knowledge? What was left to say, in some part, became the substance of

After The Fact (hereafterA TF). Perhaps, the core of which is contained inhis announcement, I have always thought that understanding social lifeentails not an advance toward an omega point, &dquo;Truth&dquo;, &dquo;Reality&dquo;,&dquo;Being&dquo;, or &dquo;the World&dquo;,but the restless making and remaking of facts andideas (1995: 117). Everywhere, at all times and in all places social under-

standing... entails not an advance.Geertz believes that understanding will not advance because he

supposes there is no fixed &dquo;Reality&dquo;, &dquo;Being&dquo;, or &dquo;World&dquo; about which



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331STEPHEN P. REYNA

there might be &dquo;Truth&dquo;. The emphasis here is on the word fixed. For Geertzeverything is unsteady.As he says, It is Heraclitus cubed and worse (1995:2). Time is larger and smaller streams, twisting and turning and now andthen crossing, running together for a while, separating again (1995: 2).There are no histories or biographies, but a confusion of histories, a swarmof biographies (1995: 2). Consequently the anthropologistmust be satisfiedwith a world of accidental dramas (1995: 2), particular events and

unique occasions (1995: 3). This is a sociocultural ontology of evanescentconfusion in which there can be no knowledge of being when being is onlyjust becoming.An appropriate question to pose at this juncture is, whatreasons does Geertz advance to justify this position? The answer to the

question is that inATF being is as Geertz says it is, take or leave it!Geertzs conjectural hermeneutics has been enormously influential.

There emerged in US anthropology throughout the 1980s and early 1990s,according to G. Marcus, a distinctive interpretive approach ... unique inthe social sciences or humanities (1994: 43). What is distinctive, if not

unique about this approach, is that its practitioners, like Geertz, rejectscience. Thus, theirs, like Geertzs, is a conjectural hermeneutics that tendsto evaluate claims in terms of the emotional impact of rhetoric (Kuznar,1997: ix). Important conjecturalist texts have been those of Clifford (1988),Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus and Fischer (1986), Rabinow (1977),Rosaldo (1989) and Tyler (1987). It should come as no surprise that theseconjecturalists do not need what Marcus termed conventional social

theory (1994: 47).What may, indeed, be unique about conjecturalists is their indifference

to truth.As seminal a hermeneuticist as Gadamer has written, no onewould dream of putting in doubt the immanent criteria of what we callscientific knowledge (1987: 111-12). Even Derrida had insisted theremust be truth. However, there is no place in any of Geertzs texts wherehe confronts the literature concerning validation, objectivity and truth and

demonstrates why truth is impossible. He just never really bought it.Rosaldo has asserted, again without the slightest evidence of any familiaritywith the relevant literature, that conceptions of truth and objectivity haveeroded (1989: 21). Clifford, following Nietzsche, apparently unaware thatNietzsche had repudiated himself (Westphal, 1984), decided that there wasno truth (Clifford, 1988: 93). Conjecturalists do not know the literature ar-

guing for and against different understandings of truth. They do not botherto formulate arguments against truth, but they do know it to be true thattruth has been eroded. Consequently, though they do not seek truthful

theory, they truly know that they represent the Other better than do scien-tific anthropologies. Further, like missionaries, they proselytize anthropol-ogists to repudiate scientific approaches as archaic and surviving in

degraded form (Tyler in Clifford and Marcus, 1986: 123).The preceding returns us to the dismal. One explanation of why anthro-



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pology has become theoretically impotent is because of the fashionablenessof the conjecturalist project which, indifferent to truth, intolerant of those

seeking it, explicitly rejects theoryin favor of effective

impressionmanagement. Conjecturalists, of course, will rush to discredit the argumentin this section by dismissing it as polemic. I would respond that it is theconjecturalists themselves who inform readers that they never boughtscience, which means that they themselves announce their indifference totruth, objectivity and validation. Readers may be relieved to learn that the

discovery of gaps, gaffes and holes provides an alternative to the conjec-turalist world of impression management.

Gaps, Gaffes and Holes

This section offers some basics of an agnoiological method, a tool forcritical theorizing. I use the term critical in a manner that is different from,though influenced by, the way it was used by the Frankfurt school. Criticaltheorists sought to provide a critique of ... [the] consciousness of the es-tablished order (Marcuse, 1989[1937]: 58). In what follows, I am not criti-cal of all the consciousnesses of all established orders, but only of a

particular typeof

consciousness;that which can be

expressedas a

general-ization and which represents something of an established order in a par-ticular brand of theory. Thus conceptualized, critical theorizing is thesearch for the non-representation or misrepresentation of reality expressedin generalizations.An agnoiological method facilitates such critical theo-rizing. This brings us to the Scottish philosopher J. F. Ferrier.

Ferrier introduced the expression epistemology into English (1854).Less well known is that, in the same work, he also proposed the term

agnoiology. Epistemology has long been a staple of philosophic discourse.

Agnoiology languished, perhapsbecause it is difficult to

imaginehow it

might be spat out in the heat of parole. But spat out it should be, becauseagnoiology deals with an aspect of knowing that is as important as thatrepresented by epistemology. Epistemology concerns knowledge; agnoiol-ogy ignorance. Knowing that there are matters of which one is ignorantfacilitates eliminating this ignorance.Agnoiological methods are those that

proceed by revealing what one does not know, but needs to know, in orderto possess fuller comprehension. What investigators need to know aretheoretical gaps, gaffes and holes.The

tropeof a necklace is

helpfulin

explicating gaps, gaffesand holes.

Ageneralization-be it an empirical generalization, a theory, or a hypoth-esis-is like a necklace. Its concepts are its jewels, and the relationshipsbetween the concepts are strands.Ageneralization necklace is a flawless

representation of a real world necklace. Flawless here means approxi-mately true.Atheoretical gap occurs when observation reveals that there



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333STEPHEN P. REYNA

is some bit of existence where events happen, for which there are no con-cepts or relationships to represent the reality.Agap, then, is a situationwhere a

generalizationnecklace has not been

completed;where the

jewelsare missing and strands are unconnected. Let me give an example of thevalue of knowing that such a gap exists. Many have long held the im-

pression that smoking was harmful. However, in the late 1950s it becameknown that there was a non-chance, statistical relationship between

smoking and lung cancer. Further, because it was evident that the onset ofcancer did not suddenly induce people to smoke, it was suspected that theassociation between smoking and cancer was because the former causedthe latter. This suggested the generalization, smoking causes lung cancer.The two

concepts,the

jewels,in this

generalizationnecklace are

smokingand lung cancer. However, there is a missing strand. It is known that it isunknown how smoking causes cancer; i.e. the relationship between

smoking and cancer remains a mystery. This knowledge is the gap.Attention now turns to generalizations in which there are gaffes. These

occur when observation reveals that there are concepts and/or relationshipsin a generalization that do not accurately represent observed realities.A

gaffe is a situation where a generalization necklace has been completed, butis composed of flawed jewels and strands. Consider, for example, that theComte de Gobineau believed every race capable of developing a civiliza-tion develops one peculiar to itself (1856: 438), and that this was the basisof a 19th-century racism that insisted racial difference caused culturaldifference. In this generalization necklace there are two concepts, raceand culture, and one relationship, that of causation. However, it was to thecredit of Boasian anthropology to have provided observations that began atradition in physical anthropology which has observed no relationshipbetween race and cultural change (Stocking, 1968). The gaffe, then, is thatrace does not accurately represent whatever it is that produces culturaldifference.

Gaps and gaffes concern the generalizations of a single thinker. Holesare located when it is observed that a number of thinkers have similar gapsand gaffes in their theorizing. Consider, for example, that not everybody isable to find work in capitalist economies. However, as Myrdal has re-marked the concept of unemployment did not enter economic theory untilthe late 19th century (1969: 45). This means, because no economic theorist

employed a notion of unemployment, that this gap kept reappearing ineconomic generalizations, suggesting that there was a theoretical hole con-

cerning employment. Consider, further, that Gobineau was not alone in his

racism, that many others subscribed to his view that race was a source ofcultural difference. Gobineaus gaffe, then, was reiterated in 19th-centurycultural theory suggesting that it was sunk in a deep, racist hole.

The identification of holes is the discovery of a particular type of bias.Much bias is the proclivity of some intellectual community to think about



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particular subjects, e.g. US popular culture seems biased to the point ofobsession with violence. The discovery of holes provides knowledge of areverse bias, of the proclivity of an intellectual community to not thinkabout certain matters. The point to grasp in the preceding is that whenobservers identify gaps, gaffes and holes, they know what they do notknow, and which if they did know would provide greater theoretical knowl-

edge.Agnoiological methods, then, are a form of critical theorizing thatcombats ignorance and bias in established theoretical orders by discoveringthem.Akey to agnoiology is to work ethnographically, which is to makeobservations pertaining to the nature of a specific reality. The goal of suchan ethnography is to reveal a regional ontology against which investiga-tors hold up different generalizations seeking to identify gaps, gaffes andholes in established theoretical orders.

Two philosophers-G. T. Hegel, writing in the early 19th century subse-quent to the devastation of Germany by France and Jean-Paul Sartrewriting in the mid 20th century subsequent to the return devastation ofFrance by Germany-have made the case for a theoretical order that isnow rather old, perhaps because it has seemed so attractive to many. Hegelhad said in his Phenomenology of Mind (1967[1807]) that there was a

reality of a thing itself (an sich) as well as one for consciousness ( fur

es)-that is, that there is existence as it is, and as people are aware of it.Sartre argued that there were two varieties of reality. On the one side, ashis able commentators, Gilson et al. say:

there stands being en soi, in itself, a monolithic mass of sheer reality, blind to itself,pitiless, inexorable in its absolute being there; on the other stands the reality which weourselves are, being pour sot, for itself, able to gather itself up for a fleeting momentinto an act of self-awareness, and because aware, because of this capacity to separateitself off from the necessary course of things, able to direct its own future (1966: 382).

This, of course, was Hegels ontology and it involves a double reality. Therewas first that of events outside of people-monolithic, pitiless, inexorable.For Sartre it was the reality of Nazi occupation. Then there was a secondinner reality, one of awareness. This was that of Sartre contemplatingFascist soldiers, before scribbling another few lines about being that was ensoi and pour soi.

Hegel and Sartres understanding of these realities roughly correspondsto our earlier distinction between the objective, in its first sense, and the

subjective. Objective reality for humans refers to everything external to

them. Objective, social reality refers to everything human, includingsystems of meaning, that is external to a particular person. Subjectivereality refers to the internal realm of consciousness, as well as the uncon-scious neurophysiology that effects consciousness. The concepts socialand subjective refer to these two realities. This suggests that there is a

Hegel/Sartre established order consisting of theories with generalization



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335STEPHEN P. REYNA

necklaces whose jewels are concepts that represent the social and subjec-tive and whose strands are further concepts that represent interrelation-

ships between the social and subjective. Sartre was worried at the end ofBeing and Nothingness that it appeared to us difficult to establish a bondbetween them [the social and subjective], and we feared that we might fallinto an insurmountable dualism (1966[1943]: 755). I shall now argue thatSartres misgiving was prescient. I begin with practice theory.

Practice theory

The Logic of Practice (hereafter LP), originally published in French in

1980, and only available to English readers in the 1990s, was a clarificationand expansion of the text which had introduced practice theory to anthro-

pology, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977). Bourdieu is explicit in LPthat there is an interrelationship between the social and the subjective. This

interrelationship is described as a dialectic of objective structures and in-

corporated (subjective) structures which operates in every practical action(1990: 41; insert added). This dialectic is represented by five concepts-field, capital, habitus, practical sense and practical logic.

Field is the major concept Bourdieu employs when considering social re-

alities. Such realities occur in a social topology (1989b: 163) composed ofdifferent fields. There are economic, political, religious, educational andother fields. These are sets of objective, historical relations between pos-itions varying according to the overall volume of capital they possess and... according to the structure of their capital ... (1989b: 17). Capital, asBourdieu says elsewhere, is his term for power (1986: 243). The social

physics of fields involves the playing of a game (1987: 248). This is thestruggle between organizations of positions with different amounts of cap-ital to achieve different outcomes.Afield, then, is a topology of powers in

contention with each other.Let us turn now to the subjective or what Bourdieu (1990) calls social

phenomenology. It is with this realm that the bulk of the text in LP is con-cerned. Ultimately what produced individual and collective practices ...is the habitus (p. 54). This latter is embodied history, internalized as sec-ond nature ... (p. 56); a system of structured, structuring dispositions (p.52) that are deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of percep-tion, thought and action ... (p. 54).

Bourdieu (1990) links habitus to field when he asserts that, The

conditionings associatedwith a

particular class of conditions of existenceproduce habitus... (p. 93); because the dispositions composing habitus aredurably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms andnecessities, opportunities and probabilities inscribed in the objective con-ditions (p. 54) of the fields in which peoples participate. Bourdieu sharesMarxs insistence upon the centrality of considering such social positions as



13/27


class. Thus the poor display a different habitus from the wealthy due todifferent objective conditions of their positions in economic fields.

Bourdieu (1990) connects habitus to practice when he states that, Thegenesis of a system of works or practices ... arises from the necessary yetpredictable confrontation between the habitus and the event ... (p. 55).However, it is not so much habitus that produces practice, because whenthe confrontation actually occurs, it is between the second nature of habi-

tus, practical sense and events; and it is this practical sense that actuallycauses practices ... (p. 69). Practical sense, perhaps Bourdieus most

engaging notion, is unconscious adjustment to the demands of a field ...

involving a feel for the game (p. 66). It is a goalie in soccer sensing what

to do the instant a ball is launched at the net. Practical sense, as an aspectof habitus, varies with social position.Arich persons practical sense of howto deal with a cop who has pulled him or her over for speeding will varyfrom that of a poor person.

Because practices occur in the manner just suggested, Bourdieu (1990)thinks that they exhibit logics. These, however, are not those of the logi-cian-i.e. the conscious formulation of conclusions based upon the appli-cation of the rules of a particular formal logic. Rather, because practices arethe result of the dispositions of habitus, social scientists may construct

generative models which reproduce in theirown

terms the logic ... (p. 92)of the dispositions that structure practice. Such generative models, inspiredby Chomskyan linguistics, because they use the dispositions of a habitus asthe formulae of a generative calculus of practice, are what Bourdieu termsa practical logic.

Practice theory, then, is a variant of the Hegel/Sartre established orderbecause it seeks to explain how the social (fields) influences the subjective(the habitus) that in turn influences the social (this time in the form of the

practices that are the games played in fields). Later I consider how effec-

tively Bourdieu avoideda

social/subjective dualism. Bourdieus (1990) gen-eralization necklace consists of three concepts; field, habitus and practice.He stipulates that these concepts are causally related when he announcesthat the practical sense of habitus causes practice and that the condition-

ings associated with a particular class of conditions of fields produce habi-tus (p. 53). Thus, if fields produce habitus and habitus causes practice, thenboth the social and subjective are strung to each other. However, let us

inspect more closely a single strand in this theory, that of the fieldlhabitus

relationship.

If it is asserted that conditioning associated with a particular class ofconditions produces habitus, then the following questions require answers:what conditionings are being discussed under what conditions?Bourdieus use of the term conditioning is ambiguous. The term is thecentral concept in behaviorist thought and refers to contingencies ofreinforcement that do create different behavioral dispositions, under



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337STEPHEN P. REYNA

different environmental conditions (Skinner, 1961). However, Bourdieudoes not indicate whether he is using it in a behaviorist manner. My senseis that he is not. For

example,in one

placein LP he

saysthat habitus is a

relation of conditioning: the field structures the habitus, which is the

product of the embodiment of the immanent necessity of a field (or of a

hierarchically interacting set of fields) (1990: 44). Now, behaviorists nevertalk of subjective phenomena and the faintest suggestion that anythingmight be the embodiment of an immanent necessity would strike themas twaddle.

If it is unclear how Bourdieu (1990) uses conditioning, it is equally vagueas to the conditions to which conditioning is subject. Readers are told thatthe habitus is a

productof

history ... (p. 54);and that it is inculcated

bythe possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunitiesand prohibitions ... (p. 54) of the objective conditions of fields. But historyis a pretty vast term, and readers are never told of what histories the habitusis a product, or by what possibilities and impossibilities, etc. it is incul-

cated ; or how this inculcation occurs. Given the preceding, I conclude thatthe fieldlhabitus relationship is unrepresented.

It might be objected LP appeared at a time in Bourdieus career whenhe had not fully developed his views on the field. Certainly he has thoughtmore about fields in Distinction (1984) and the still untranslated into

English La Misere du monde (1993); and he speaks (evoking Heidegger andMerleau Ponty) of an ontological complicity: between the field and habi-tus (in Wacquant, 1989: 43). Nevertheless, though Bourdieu is clear that afield structures or produces a habitus, he remains unclear as to how this

might occur. Thus, just as medical science concluded that there is a gap inthe theoretical knowledge of the relationship between smoking and cancer,so there remains a gap between Bourdieus field and habitus. This means

that, regardless of his intentions he has not dissolved the social/subjectivedualism, and that a gap exists in how he understands the relationshipbetween the social and the subjective.

AGramscian Idealism

The Comaroffs in Of Revelation and Revolution (hereafter R&R) describetheir project as the writing of history in the anthropological mode whichaccounts for the making of a social and a cultural world, and which com-mits them to exploring the relationship of matter and meaning ... (1991:38-9). This description suggests that they too adhere to the Hegel/Sartreestablished order; for their generalization necklace, like Bourdieus,ultimately consists of two jewels, one social and the other cultural, withit understood that these worlds of matter and meaning are strungtogether in a relationship.

Their project derives from attempts that flourished in England in the



15/27


1970s and 1980s to utilize the work of the Italian Marxist,Antonio Gramsciand his concept of hegemony (see Hall, 1986; Williams, 1977). TheComaroffs claim to follow in the Geist of Gramsci

(1991: 21). Theydo so

by situating the notion of hegemony within the context of a cultural field. Ishall argue that their account of a cultural field approaches a theory of the

subjective realm; that this theory produces a view of history as a long con-versation ; a view that is a Gramscian idealism, with only a passing concernfor the social.

Seven concepts are important to understanding cultural fields: culture,ideology, hegemony, agentive power, non-agentive power, contradictoryconsciousness and resistance. Culture is the space of signifying practice,the semantic

groundon which human

beingsseek to construct and

repre-sent themselves and others-and, hence, society and history (1991: 21).They think of this space as a cultural field, an historically situated field of

signifiers (1991: 21). (The following distinction can be made betweenBourdieus and the Comaroffs fields. The formers fields are organizationsof capital or power. The latters are organizations of signifiers.) Culturalfields have two modalities (1991: 27), one of hegemony and the other of

ideology. The differences between ideology and hegemony depend upon an

understanding of the way the Comaroffs view power.

Theyassert that there are two varieties of power, and that

ideologyand

hegemony are each associated with one of these.Agentive power is therelative capacity of human beings to shape the actions and perceptions ofothers by exercising control over the production, circulation and consump-tion of signs and objects of the making of subjectivities and realities (1991:22). Non-agentive power proliferates outside the realm of institutional

politics ... and its effects are rarely wrought by overt compulsion (1991).Its effects are internalized, in their negative guise as constraints; in theirneutral guise, as conventions; and in their positive guise, as values (1991).There are no human agents in command of other humans in this second

type of power, because the control is internalized, and so the Comaroffsbelieve it is appropriate to term this variety of power non-agentive.Hegemony is associated with non-agentive and ideology with agentivepower, for reasons detailed in the next section.

The Comaroffs define ideology, following Raymond Williams, as a&dquo;worldview&dquo; of any social grouping (1991: 24). What makes such a world-view an ideology is that it is of a group (1991) whose members are its

agents. Different groups, drawing upon the same culture, construct differ-ent

ideologies,as is illustrated

by pro-and anti-abortionist

groupsin the

United States. Ideologies are explicitly communicated by their agents sothat people are conscious of their existence. Following Marx and Engels,the Comaroffs assert that the regnant ideology of any period or place willbe that of the dominant group (1991).

If ideology is conscious, hegemony is unconscious. It is that order of



16/27

339STEPHEN P. REYNA

signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies-drawn from an historically situated cultural field-that comes to be taken-

for-granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everythingthat inhabits it (1991: 23). Hegemony is shared ... throughout a politicalcommunity (1991: 24) and like Bourdieus notion of habitus, as theComaroffs acknowledge, consists ... of things that go without sayingbecause, being axiomatic, they come without saying ... (1991: 23). It is inthis sense that hegemonies are ineffable (1991: 24); the unvoiced,unconscious forms of perception and conception of social and naturalbeing.

The Comaroffs (1991) believe that ideology and hegemony exist in

reciprocal interdependence within a cultural field (p. 25). This interdepen-dence appears to be that of a long conversation. Sometimes in theseconversations, Between the conscious and the unconscious, the silent

signifiers and unmarked practices of hegemony rise to the level of explicitconsciousness, of ideological assertion ... (p. 29). Then, the more success-ful that groups are in asserting control over various modes of symbolicproduction ... (p. 25), the more their ideology will disappear into thedomain of the hegemonic ... (p. 26). Hegemonies, however, once madecan also be transformed back into ideology. To understand how this might

occur,a

notion of contradictory consciousness is needed.Gramsci appropriated this concept from Marx and Engels, as do theComaroffs from Gramsci. In the Comaroff version, contradictory con-sciousness is the discontinuity between (1) the world as hegemonicallyconstituted and (2) the world as practically apprehended, and ideologicallyrepresented, by subordinate people ... (1991: 26). For the Comaroffs, thegreater the contradictory consciousness, that is the greater the gap betweenthe way a hegemony posits things should be and the way they are actuallyapprehended, the more that unremarked truth and unspoken conventionswill

become remarked, reopened for debate (1991). This thrusts previouslyhegemonic ideas into a hurly-burly of ideological struggle because ascontradictory consciousness gives way to ever more acute, articulateconsciousness of contradictions, it may also be a source of more acute,articulate resistance (1991: 26).

What, then, is history? History is largely, in R&R, what happens incultural fields, and what happens in such fields, as the Comaroffs reiteratein a number of places, is the long conversation just described (1991: 171,198, 213, 243). If idealism is a view that reality depends upon (finite or

infinite)minds or

(particularor

transcendent)ideas

(Bynumet

al.,1984:

199), then the Comaroffs theory of historical realities as a long conversa-tion oscillating between ideological and hegemonic ideas, certainly seemsan idealism. Such an idealism may not be especially Gramscian.

Gramsci never offered, as the Comaroffs are aware, a precise definitionof hegemony (Lears, 1985: 568). He was, however, a Leninist rotting in a



17/27


Fascist jail, with a keen sense that history ultimately resulted from changesin different relations of force. These changes involved continual fluctua-

tion between the first and the third moment, with the mediation of thesecond (Gramsci, 1988: 207). Without launching into an exegesis of theGramscian moment, readers should grasp that the third moment is that of

military forces (1988: 207). The Comaroffs understanding of hegemonyhas people acquiring hegemony after a long conversation and, then,because hegemonies are unconscious, ineffably consenting to their domi-nation. Gramscis hegemony involved a combination of force and con-sent... that allowed a dominant, fundamental group to impose a generaldirection ... on social life (1971 : 12, 80). This force, as just noted, was often

violent. The Comaroffs think they follow the Geist of Gramsci. I suggest,because they ignore force, that they are chasing a Poltergeist. The analysisnow turns to the handling of the social in R&R.

I have two concerns: (1) the Comaroffs de-emphasize observations thatneed conceptualization, and (2) they emphasize concepts whose empiricalsignificance has not been established. Consider, for example, the case ofviolent force. They acknowledge the significance of violence when they saythey do not deny the coercive, violent bases of class antagonism and racial

inequality here (in southernAfrica) ... (1991: 4). However, though they donot

denythe

actualityof violent

force, theydo

downplayit. For

example,they insist that the European missionaries were to prove themselves everybit as effective, in making subjects, as were the storm-troops of colonialism

(1991: 200). This allows them to conclude that The European colonizationofAfrica was often less directly coercive conquest than a persuasiveattempt to colonize consciousness (1991: 313). Such an assertion, of course,underplays colonizations violence because it insists that colonization wasless coercive than persuasive.Why diminish the importance of violence?After all, Jean Comaroff had

herself

acknowledgedthat there had been a

Realpolitikof

oppression(1985: 261). This involved the slaughter, wounding, rape and imprisonmentofAfrican children, women and men by Europeans. It was a product of thesystematic application by Boer and British of physical violence for fourhundred years. Colonial southernAfrica may have had its long conversa-tion but it equally had its long butchery. The Comaroffs provide noevidence demonstrating that the former was more important than thelatter in producing hegemony. Rather they merely assert that this wasthe case.

The Comaroffs offer an account of how the social influenceshegemonywith two generalizations: a first suggesting what happened and a second

identifying the agents of what happened. What happened was thatcolonialism... gave rise to a new hegemony amidst-and despite-cultural contestation (1991: 18). More specifically, missionaries were themost active cultural agents of empire (1991: 6), parts of whose evangelical



18/27

341STEPHEN P. REYNA

message insinuated themselves into the warp and weft of an emerginghegemony (1991: 12).

Readers

mightdetect a

similaritybetween a

major, 19th-centuryideo-

logical justification for colonialism and these two generalizations. Imperialpropagandists justified colonialism because they believed it broughtcivilization to benighted folk. Of course, what these ideologies meant bycivilization was European conceptions. Such a view of civilization resem-bles the Comaroffs definition of hegemony as a dominant conception(1991: 23). This means that their doctrine that colonialism producedEuropean hegemony (i.e. civilization) rather resembles that of the 19th-

century jingoists who asserted that colonialism produced civilization (i.e.

European hegemony).However, there should be a skepticism regarding the Comaroffs beliefthat missionaries were the key agents of the insinuation of hegemony. Thisis because observations that they report suggest it is by no means certainthat missionaries really were all that important. The Comaroffs say that

European missionaries did not actually convert many (1991: 311). Theyquote a 19th-century observer who describes services in which Somewould be snoring; others laughing; some working ... (1991: 247). Inaddition there were teachers, merchants, journalists and military personnelwho also dispensed European notions. The relative significance of theselatter agents of hegemony compared to that of European missionaries isnowhere established in R&R. Clearly, it is premature to offer conclusions

concerning the importance of European missionaries as hegemonic agentsuntil observations have been made that clearly establish the relative causal

importance of other suspected agents.The preceding suggests a gaffe in the Comaroffs position. Observation

of southernAfrican history documents the reality of a long butchery. Thisis something quite social and might be thought to be relevant to producinghegemony. However, violent force goes unrepresented in the Comaroffsaccount. Rather, hegemony took root as a result of the long conversationconducted by missionaries, but the Comaroffs themselves furnish evidencethat suggests this may be something of a misrepresentation. Hence, R&Rdoes not conceptualize social realities known to be important, those

pertaining to violent force, while it does conceptualize others, missionaries,of unestablished importance. Here, then, appears to be a potential gaffe.

There also appears to be a problem with the specification of how

hegemony influences the social. R&R states that new hegemonies seem tohave the capacity to generate new substantive practices ... (1991: 30). Theword generate is a synonym for cause. This means that the Comaroffs are

tentatively offering the generalization; changed hegemonies cause changedpractices. This may well be the case but there is no elaboration of how this

might occur; that is to say there are no concepts to represent how a changein hegemonies would produce a change in practices. This is a gap. There



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need to be concepts that detail the hegemony/practice relationship. Thereare none.

It is clear that what they do want to theorize about, missionariesholdinglong conversations, does not represent an important social reality, violent

force. This is a gaffe. Furthermore they seem reluctant to address howthe subjective is linked to the social. This is a gap. In conclusion, theComaroffs version of the Hegel/Sartre established order comes with a gapand a gaffe. Earlier it was suggested that R&R had an idealist tilt. Perhapsit is because of this that they are so unable to think about the social or its

complicity with the subjective, thereby furthering the dualism that Sartrehad worried about.Attention turns to Sahlins.

N eo- Lvi-Straussian structuralism

Sahlins went to Paris in the 1960s as a cultural materialist. Out of the

Parisian conjuncture-structuralism, existentialism and recreational riot-

ing-emerged a new man, a Levi-Straussian structuralist. Culture andPractical Reason (1976, hereafter CPR), which justified this metamorpho-sis, argued that there had been, and were, two firmly established theoreti-cal orders, those of practical and cultural reason.

Practical reason amounted to theories that in some way explainedhuman cultures as being formulated out of practical activity (1976: vii), beit of economic or ecological varieties. Sahlins in CPR found every theory of

practical reason wanting. He further claimed to have discovered that the

founding father of US anthropology, Boas, had believed in a culturalreason. Over the years following publication of CPR, Sahlins used Oceanic

peoples to show cultural reason facilitated the understanding of Pacificrealities (1981, 1985).Then came a problem. Gananath Obeyesekere developed an ire (1992:

8) regarding one aspect of Sahlinss work. It appears he heard Sahlins speakabout his (Sahlinss) interpretations of Hawaiian interpretations of whythey cannibalized Captain Cook. Sahlinss understanding is that this

happened because Hawaiians believed that Cook was their god Lono.

Obeyesekere thought this was wrong and wrote TheApotheosis of CaptainCook (1992, hereafterACC) to reveal that Sahlins was a lonotic.

Additionally he suggested that Sahlins was, in Sahlinss recounting of theaffair, an agent of Western violence and imperialism (1995: 18). Sahlins

responded in rage. How Natives Think,About Captain Cook For Example(1995, hereafter HNT) was the fiery product of that fury.

Commentary upon the polemics in HNT andACC has been of thesports commentator variety, with the chief goal to fathom which of thecombatants won. I shall not discuss HNT in this manner because I am

convinced that its value lies in the theory Sahlins cobbled together to

support his interpretation of Cooks murder; theory that is a variant of the



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343STEPHEN P. REYNA

Hegel/Sartre established order. This theory might be termed neo-Levi-Straussian because it adds something new to the old structuralism. Just

what this novelty might be is the subject of the next few paragraphs.Levi-Strauss, wherever he looked, discovered structure. Kin groups hadstructures. Economies had structures. Myth, dances and recipes hadstructures. Further, these structures even shared deeper structures thatcame from fundamental structures of the mind (1949). Later in his careerthis notion of fundamental structures was replaced by that of a conceptualscheme which governs and defines practice (1966: 130). The term gov-erns is strong. Something that governs something else causes what the

something else does. However, Levi-Strauss was unconcerned with howthis causation occurred.

Remember that when Sahlins returned home from Paris and publishedCPR he had decided that there were cultural reasons, i.e. causes, for prac-tices. He further believed that cultural reason involves the existence in

people of a definite symbolic scheme (1976: viii) and that the way peoplelived was according to this scheme because it organizes their lives (1976:176). Since concepts involve symbols, Sahlinss symbolic scheme was Levi-Strausss conceptual scheme. Further, just as Levi-Strausss scheme gov-erned, Sahlinss organized. SoAustralian foragers la Levi-Strauss hadtheir

binaryschemes which

governedtheir

marriage classes;while

Americans la Sahlins had their schemes of bourgeois cultural reason that

organized their titanic consumption of fat-saturated death patties (i.e.hamburgers). Sahlins, then, had become Lvi-Straussian by accepting theproposition, Schemes cause practices.

However, like Levi-Strauss, Sahlins in CPR expressed no opinion as tohow schemes governed practice. If the term agency refers to how humansdo things, then both Levi-Strauss and the Sahlins of CPR were indifferentto questions of agency. Starting in the 1970s a number of scholars, fromBourdieu

(1988, 1989a)to E. P.

Thompson (1979), beganto

complainthat

an inability to deal with questions of agency was an intolerable defect ofstructuralism. HNT puts some agency into the pencil of Levi-Straussianstructuralism.

This occurs when Sahlins is concerned to convince readers that there is

a cultural organization of empirical objectivity (1995: 160), i.e. that objec-tivity, in the first sense of the term as it is defined in this article, is cultur-

ally constituted (1995: 169). Sahlinss argument is as follows. Humansmake sense perceptions. They see, smell, etc. From these they make

empirical judgments. Theysee a

goose,

smell agoose cooking,

etc. Now,and this is crucial, a sensory perception is not yet an empiricaljudgment...because what a perception comes to be judged as depends on criteria of

objectivity (1995: 162). These latter criteria are understandings of the

objects of perceptions that are culturally constituted. This is because the

particular scheme of particular cultural reasons confer properties upon



21/27


perceptions, be these perceptions of the external world or those of onesown thoughts. Thus, when Hawaiians experienced sensory perceptions ofthe

object, Cook,because of their Hawaiian scheme of

things,Cook was

awarded the empirical judgment, Lono-a judgment that pretty muchcooked his goose!What people actually do when they formulate empirical judgments out

of sense perceptions is dealt with in an en passant fashion by Sahlins. Whencomparing Hawaiian with Melanesian schemas, as these operated duringearly contacts with Europeans, he notes, In ways reminiscent of the storyof Cook ... direct reports of Melanesians show them scanning their tra-ditional knowledge ... to find whatever parallels they could ... and thusachieve a

satisfactory interpretationor

empirical judgment (1995: 180).Sahlins appears to be on to something with the notion of scanning. I livein the country and last summer was visited by a city kid, who had the savvyyou acquire on the meaner streets of Queens. I drove him down a dirt roadto impress on him the bucolic charms of rural life. The wildlife did theirdamnedest. Deer darted out.Ahuge bird swooped, probably an owl. I was

impressed. Did you see that? He said nothing. He was scanning. Then wedrove past a run-over, very dead, very flat squirrel. Not something I feltcompelled to comment upon. However, it was something that in his schemeof

thingshe knew and he cried out, Look, a dead rat.

Sahlins does not divulge to his readers how scanning operates. However,it would appear to be a process whereby people take their sensory percep-tions and scroll them across the corpus of their schemes to arrive at an

empirical judgment. It is a process of taking a sensation of objects and look-

ing through the cultural definitions of sensations in ones scheme to matchthe perception with its cultural understanding. The city kid perceived asquished animal and judged it a rat. I perceived the same thing and judgedit roadkill.

Now we are in a

positionto offer a few statements which can

beginto

put some agency into the proposition that schemes cause practices. Thesestatements are that: (1) people make sensory perceptions; (2) perceptionsare scanned across the elements of schemes to form empirical judgments;(3) empirical judgments form the basis of practices. The second statement

might be called the scanning generalization, and it is this that makes Sahlinsa neo-Levi-Straussian because it adds something new, the realization that itis scanning that translates schemes into practice. This project, of course,is in the Hegel/Sartre established order because it has a generalizationnecklace

composedof two

jewels;a

subjectivescheme and a social

practice,with the jewel of subjectivity strung to that of the social by the process of

scanning.How comfortable can investigators be with the scanning generalization?

This question is answered by considering the following and then posinganother question.Appreciate that Sahlins provides evidence in HNT that



22/27

345STEPHEN P. REYNA

at some antecedent time humans make perceptions; that at a subsequenttime they form judgments that inform practices; and finally, that during an

intervening time scanning causes a metamorphosis of perception intojudgment. But, if so, what is scanning? This question goes completelyunanswered in HNT. The term is never mentioned in the index. When used

it is undefined. There is no attempt to specify the precise relationshipsbetween events that correspond to scanning. The reader is left to her or hisown devices to speculate, as I did, that scanning involves scrolling of

perception across the elements of a scheme. But what does it really meanto scroll across a scheme? Here, then, is a gap. We know that we are

ignorant of the specifics of the transformation of perception into judgment,and that the

acquisitionof

such knowledge would strengthenthe

scanninghypothesiss ability to account for the production of practice.There is a second area of ignorance in the scanning generalization which

has to do with the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions in

causal statements. The generalization perceptions are scanned across theelements of schemes to form judgments is causal. Perceptions and scanningof schemes are antecedents, Xs and Ys, that form, i.e. cause, subsequentjudgments, Zs. Necessary conditions are ones that must occur if events ofwhich they are causes are to occur. If X and Y are necessary causes of Z,then Z will never occur without X and Y.

Scanningand

perceptionseem to

be necessary conditions, for it appears to always be the case that judgmentsare formed after perceptions and scanning.

Sufficient conditions are ones that are always followed by the events ofwhich they are a cause. IfX and Y are sufficient conditions of Z, then when-ever X and Y occur, Z will always follow. Here is a problem. It is notuncommonly observed that different individuals of some common groupingof people, with presumably the same scheme, who make the same sensoryperceptions, nevertheless form different empirical judgments. Steve sawthe flattened

squirreland

judgedroadkill. The

citykid saw the exact same

thing and judged rat.Such an observation suggests the knowledge that while perception and

scanning may be necessary conditions of judgment, they are not sufficientconditions. Persons making the same perceptions with the same schemescan make different judgments. This means that there are certain types ofevents of which we are ignorant that are sufficient conditions of different

judgments.At present there is no concept, or concepts, to represent theseevents. This is further indication of the size of the gap in knowledge

concerninghow

perceptionand

scanningform

judgments that,in

turn,cause practices.

Ahole in the old established order?

The preceding agnoiological analysis of Bourdieus, the Comaroffs and



23/27


Sahlinss theorizing has suggested that in different ways they are all variantsof the Hegel/Sartre established order. Remember that this order is distin-

guished by having (1) two concepts, the social and the subjective and (2)two relationships representing how the social relates to the subjective andthe reverse. The subjective concepts were those of habitus for Bourdieu,cultural field for the Comaroffs, and schema for Sahlins. The objectiveconcepts were field and practice for Bourdieu, missionaries or practice forthe Comaroffs, and practice for Sahlins.

The analysis did not reveal so many gaffes in the established order.

Though it did seem that the Comaroffs insistence that the missionaries

brought a new hegemony to the Tswana was probably something of a mis-

representation and, hence, a gaffe in their understanding of how colonialsocial practices related to subjective cultural fields. There did appear, how-ever, to be three gaps in representations of social/subjective interrelation-

ships. There was the gap in Bourdieus practice theory concerning the

representation of how fields influence habitus. The gap in the ComaroffsGramscian idealism appeared in their representation of how hegemonies incultural fields influence practices. Finally, there seems to be something of a

gap in Sahlinss neo-Levi-Straussian project concerning how perceptionand scanning allow schema to organize practice.

These gaps suggest a hole. The Hegel/Sartre order has not been so goodat theorizing about how the social and the subjective are interrelated. Thismeans that Sartre was correct. The old established order of which Sartre

himself was so able an exponent languishes in a hole of an insurmountabledualism between the social and subjective.Afinal point, an ethic of the agnoiological methodology is not one of

contempt for, or rejection of, theories riddled with gaps, gaffes and holes.Such an arrogance vitiates the point of critical theorizing, which point is todiscover ignorance to get rid of it. Gaps, gaffes and holes are found to be

repaired. This is done in the case of gaffes by replacing concepts thatmisrepresent realities with those that represent them with greater approxi-mate truth. Perhaps, for example, the Comaroffs could better representsocial realities in colonial southernAfrica if they added some notion ofviolent force to their generalization necklace.

Gaps are filled by finding approximately true concepts that representunrepresented realities. For example, it seems clear that there is a gap inSahlinss knowledge of how perception and scanning allow schema to cause

practices. Now because perception and scanning utilize schema that occur

within the brain,one

way that greater knowledge of scanning might beacquired would be for biological anthropologists to investigate the neuro-

physiological events that transpire between the reception of perception andthe formation of judgment. Important here would be an understanding ofthe biological structures in which schema operate. Such studies would notbe a biological reductionism. Rather, their virtue would be to show how



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347STEPHEN P. REYNA

cultural schema and neurophysiology interact in the production ofjudgment.

Conclusion

Some serious contributors to anthropology suppose the jig is up.Anthropology is in its twilight. Geertz certainly believes there can be noadvance. I believe this articles arguments suggest an alternative conclu-

sion ; that the establishment of three priorities could promote theoreticaladvance in the 1990s and beyond. The first of these priorities arises from

comprehendingthe lesson of the

conjecturalists.This lesson is that indif-

ference to validation, objectivity and truth means that conjecturalists dolittle to distinguish the knowledge they produce from that of advertisingexecutives. Such knowledge may be effective in that it is listened tobut it remains mere impressions of unknown reliability. Why produce un-reliable knowledge, when more truthful knowledge is feasible? However,such knowledge will only be possible in anthropology if the formulationof systems of validation becomes a central priority of anthropologicalenterprise.

Theoretical advancemay

be understood as the movement of

theoryin

more general and approximately truer directions. Theory, however, needsto be reviewed critically in order to move in these directions. Critical

thinking requires a second priority, which is the strengthening and appli-cation of agnoiological methods. Such a priority involves a reorientation ofthe role of the history of anthropological theory within the discipline.Anthropological history has been sidelined on the margins of the discipline.Its studies have tended to be imagined as either whiggish or historicist(Stocking, 1968). Whiggish researches seek to employ past theory to justify

present theory.Historicist

research,on the other

hand,studies

past theoryin context for the sake of understanding past theory.Application of agnoiological methods means that one is not interested in

the past purely to better understand it. Rather the past is scrutinized to findgaps, gaffes and holes in established theoretical orders to discover their

ignorances so as to know what is unknown and, hence, needs to be known.Agnoiological methods are not whiggish, however, in the sense of startingwith a particular, present theoretical order and seeking to show how pasttheory justifies this order.Actually, the only presumption that agnoiologistsstart with is one of

guilt.All theoretical orders are

guiltyof

ignorancesso

that the road to theoretical advance is one of establishing the specificignorance of which specific theories are guilty. Such agnoiological methods,however, reposition the history of anthropology at the center of theorizing,for it is historical researches that reveal what needs to be theorized about.

The third priority follows from our application of agnoiological methods



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to the Hegel/Sartre established order which has revealed that this order

languishes in the hole of a seemingly insurmountable dualism. So a third

priorityof sociocultural

theorizing mightbe to seek

waysof

climbingout of

this hole by stringing with a greater degree of approximate truth theoreti-cal jewels of subjectivity to those of the social.

NOTES

1. Some might wonder why Giddens and Habermas are not discussed. This is be-cause, even though their work is of great theoretical import, it has less occupiedanthropology than that of those considered.

2. Science is not especially concerned with Truthi.e. with the nature of the prop-erties of true sentences. This has largely been the domain of philosophers (see

Alston, 1996).3. Megill (1994) provides a point of entry into discussions of objectivity. These tend

to be heated. One reason for this is that the term is so polysemic that interlocu-tors in conversations concerning it are oblivious to what others are talking about.

Cunningham (1973) remains useful for unravelling the terms meanings.

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