One of my professors used to say, “Everyone is born a little Aristotelian or a little Platonist.” The tension around the best way to understand people has been around for as long as there has been anthropology. Should we consider humans from the perspective of ideas or material conditions? How does evolution apply to culture, society, mind, language? How can science be applied to humankind?
I began high school right after Sputnik, when it seemed the survival of the US depended critically on educating us in science. In high school, I won several awards for scientific accomplishments. When I got to university, I was ready for a challenging scientific career. I majored in pre-med. It was a rich curriculum: biology, chemistry and a lot of philosophy and math. Like my peers, I came out well-educated in the methods and theories of science.
After deciding against medical school, I found a comfortable niche in anthropology. I adapted the approaches that I had learned as an undergraduate to the broad and complex field of anthropology. My department had little formal science training so my scientific background was important. I knew science and what to do with it. I built research protocols, collected and interpreted data and learned to be generous in considering the role of bias and error in my work. I got a tenure-track job in a four-member university department. We all taught cultural anthropology and we each got a “field” of anthropology to cover. I became the biological anthropologist. I learned still more about science in anthropology as I taught others how to think about human biology, evolution and race.
I moved out of the academy into practicing anthropology in 1984. It was difficult to see how what I had done in anthropology could apply to my post-academic life. Eventually I landed on my feet as a program evaluator for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The clients—physicians, nurses, epidemiologists—were scientific in their orientation. In fact, this was often their only orientation. But for CDC to practice public health, they needed to know how their activities linked up with the cultural context in which people lived their lives. They brought me into projects to help them do that—scientifically. It was a perfect job for me.
For a while, developments in anthropology were eclipsed by the demands of learning my new job. After five years something significant seemed to have happened in anthropology. Everyone was talking about post-modernism, embodiment and globalization. I didn’t hear a lot about science and what I did hear made it sound like an activity of questionable ethicality. I couldn’t figure out where I fit into this new anthropology. In my job I used science every day. Did I still have a place in anthropology? Was I even still an anthropologist?
Now I’ve turned the corner again. I’m teaching, writing, advising graduate students and I’m much closer to the academic endeavor than I have been in some years. As is always the case when I make a career turn, I needed to catch up on post-modernism, post-post modernism and other things, some of which came and went as important modes of anthropological thought while I wasn’t looking. I needed to read up quickly to understand the anthropology in which my students are developing. They are studying anthropology as it is now. And most of my students are headed for careers in practice.
What do I tell them? I say to them that an understanding of and comfort with scientific thinking will be essential to what they do. Much practicing anthropology informs policies, activities and production within interdisciplinary teams that are at least partly scientific in their approach. In the world outside of anthropology, there is no sign that we are approaching a post-scientific era. It is our job to promote an anthropological science that is technically sound, beneficial to the people that we work with and grounded in justice. To do that we must know science.
The scientific method is easily taught. But science is more than a method for investigating things. Intrinsic to thinking scientifically are mental habits that serve us well in practice. Many of these are part of the basic thinking of anthropologists. We know that the reality of human life is embedded in the perspectives of many people with different assumptions about how the world works. Science for us teases out the common elements of a situation by gathering as many points of view as we can find. In this way the field in which everyone operates begins to emerge from the noise of conflicting positions.
We also develop skepticism about what we are told. As I wrote this, the Boston marathon bombings were dominating the media. In that moment of media saturation, I kept asking myself, “How do they know that?” “Is this true or even feasible?” “Where did they get that information?” Drowned as we are in information, it’s wise to be skeptical of what you see and hear. This is a habit that I learned as I cross-checked what people told me; struggled to hold contradictions in my mind rather than to run to resolution; and to suspend judgment on outcomes until the data are in.
When I became an anthropologist back in the 1970s, there wasn’t much doubt that anthropology was—or at least could be—the science of humans. Anthropology has changed since then. I am not suggesting that anthropology must be scientific by definition. There is certainly room for other modes of thinking and acting. For anthropology, many perceptions contribute to our thinking about humans and to our strength as a discipline. But when the linkage of findings to some kind of evidence is what gives a study its value, science is a more productive way to view things. As professionals we use science in developing the understandings that we provide to others. As teachers we must give opportunities for our students to practice these skills.
Mary Odell Butler and Barbara Rylko Bauer are contributing editors of Anthropology Works, the AN column of the AAA Committee on Practicing, Applied and Public Interest Anthropology.
via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/07/01/science-and-the-practice-of-anthropology/
