Anthropological debates on rationality and modes of thought

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Anthropological debates on rationality and modes
of thought

• 24.2.2005

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Readings

• Lukes, S. Some Problems about Rationality.
• 1967 In Archives Européennes de Sociologie,
• 1970 In B. Wilson (ed.) Rationality.
• Horton, R. African Traditional Thought and
  Western Science.
• 1967 In Africa.
• 1970 In B. Wilson (ed.) Rationality.

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Rationality debate

• Modes of thought debate
• Late 1960s and 70s
• Continuities and oppositions between
• religion/magic and science
• non-Western and Western thinking
• traditional and modern thinking
• Rationality
• "rational thinking" (Aristotle)
• Lay understang
• ability for abstract thought
• ability to reason logically in everyday life

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Rationality debate

• Winch
• The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to
  Philosophy (1958)
• Horton
• African Traditional Thought and Western Science
  (1967)
• Wilson (ed.)
• Rationality (1970)
• Horton Finnegan (eds)
• Modes of Thought Essays on Thinking in Western
  and Non-Western Societies (1973)

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Rationality debate

• Roots
• Ancient Greek philosophy
• Relativism vs universalism
• Protagoras
• "Everything is relative"
• Socrates
• Attempt to find universal human categories
• 19th c anthropology
• psychic unity of mankind (Adolf Bastian)
• all members of the human species have comparable
  mental faculties

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19th c anthropologists

• Max Müller
• there is truth in all religions, even in the
  lowest
• Herbert Spencer
• primitive people are not irrational
• their inferences valid and reasonable in their
  own context
• Edward B. Tylor
• primitive man ancient savage philosopher
• preliterate religious beliefs and practices
• essentially consistent and logical gt rational

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19th c anthropologists

• James Frazer
• Trifurcation of thought
• magic vs religion vs science
• Magic
• Logically more primitive than religion
• Methodologically closer to science
• Both manipulate the laws of nature
• bastard sister of science
• Based on sympathetic principle
• Homeopathic or imitative magic
• eg. golden ring cures jaundice
• Contagious magic
• eg. nails and hair

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Early 20th c anthropologists

• Durkheim
• Western thought scientific
• Primitive thought protoscientific
• But essentially logical
• The explanations of contemporary science ...
  do not differ in nature from those which satisfy
  primitive thought.
• Malinowski
• Trobriand Islanders
• essentially practical and down-to-earth
• Magic
• complementary to science/common sense
• Evans-Pritchard
• Azande witchcraft
• a theory of causation
• supplements the theory of natural causation
• Nuer and Azande are little more than "black
  Englishmen"

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Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

• Primitive Mentality (1922), How Natives Think
  (1926)
• Primitive thought
• essentially mystical
• invested with supernatural entities
• There is not a being, not an object, not a
  natural phenomenon that appears in their
  collective representations in the way that it
  appears to us.
• stones and trees are never just perceived as
  natural objects
• radical violation of the non-contradiction
  principle
• eg. totemism
• gt not rational/logical but prelogical
• not bad but different reasoning

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Lévy-Bruhl

• "mentality"
• "a definite type of society, with its own
  institutions and customs will, therefore,
  necessarily have its own mentality"
• primitive vs civilised mentality
• differences are fundamental
• against intellectualist arguments
• Evans-Pritchard
• first to criticise Lévy-Bruhl on an empirical
  basis
• Les Carnets (1949)
• revised his radical thesis
• two mentalities coexist in every culture

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Claude Lévi-Strauss

• La pensée sauvage (1962), The Savage Mind (1966)
• attempt to disprove Lévy-Bruhls ideas
• yet many similar arguments
• Tries to avoid rigid dichotomy
• nothing is more dangerous than for anthropology
  to build up two categories, the so-called
  primitive peoples and ourselves.
• Cold vs hot societies
• cold societies
• primitive
• mythical mode of thinking
• "hot" societies
• rapidly changing, historicized
• scientific mode of thinking

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Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Preliterate vs modern cultures
• essentially two types of scientific thought
• Savage mind undomesticated thinking
• precondition for Neolithic revolution
• metallurgy, weaving, and the domestication of
  animals
• modern vs primitive man
• lingenieur vs le bricoleur

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Lévi-Strauss

• engineer
• systematic, rigorous, and abstract
• thinks with the aid writing, numbers, geometrical
  drawings
• gt rational thinking
• bricoleur
• a jack-of-all-trades
• not systematic, rigorous, and abstract
• thinks with the aid of physical objects directly
  observable
• gt Empirical thinking

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Lévi-Strauss

• eg. understanding of the biosphere
• Western thinking
• guided by Linnaean classification
• an a priori schema
• primitive thinking
• the logic of the concrete"
• takes account habits, habitat, smell, and other
  plain facts
• bricolage also part of Western culture
• Eg. music and poetry

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Peter Winch

• The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to
  Philosophy (1958)
• extreme relativist position
• reality and rationality are context-specific
• all knowledge is culturally produced
• including Western science
• gt no universal criteria of truth, logic and
  validity
• gt no objective reality
• concepts used by primitive peoples
• can only be interpreted in the context of their
  way of life

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Peter Winch

• Evans-Pritchard
• "objectively" and "really" witches don't exist
• Winchs critique
• EPs criteria of rationality are alien to the
  context
• Azande witchcraft
• no evaluative judgments can be made about it
• gt Reality in its own context

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Peter Winch

• Criticism
• Lukes
• there are universal criteria of truth and logic
• existence of a common reality
• precondition for understanding another culture /
  language
• Gellner
• relativism is intellectually empty and worthless
• everything and anything cannot be true
• absurdity, inconsistency exist

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Robin Horton

• African Traditional Thought and Western Science
  
• 1967 In Africa.
• 1970 In B. Wilson (ed.) Rationality
• African traditional thought vs Western science
• Similarities
• Differences

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Horton

• Similarities
• A theoretical activity with explanatory functions
  
• both aim at grasping causal connexions
• Both can be effective
• Eg. Malaria
• Gods and ancestors
• Germ theory
• Puts events into causal context wider than that
  provided by common sense
• "Like atoms, molecules, and waves...the gods
  serve to introduce unity into diversity,
  simplicity into complexity, order into disorder,
  regularity into anomaly.

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Horton

• Differences
• African traditional thought
• A closed system of thought (Popper)
• Theoretical concepts expressed in a personal
  idiom (spirits, witches)
• Words carry magical powers
• Lack of self-criticism
• Lack of skepticism

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Horton

• Criticism
• 1) equates African traditional thought with
  religion
• why African rather that Western religion compared
  with science?
• if religious beliefs are to be compared with
  scientific ones, it might be thought more
  instructive to compare them in the same cultural
  context. (Beattie)
• Sogolo
• traditional African beliefs vs traditional
  western beliefs
• Jesus walked on water and witches fly

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Horton

• Criticism
• 2) Western science
• Kuhn
• Scientfic thought not open
• paradigms
• Marcuse, Habermas
• purpose of Western science
• not truth but domination
• Human over nature gt Human over human

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Symbolist approach

• Eg. Leach, Turner, Firth, Douglas, Beattie
• Discussion on rationality/irrationality of
  beliefs useless
• Religious beliefs
• symbolic statements about the social order
• Leach
• Discussion on rationality of religious beliefs
  and rituals
• scholastic nonsense
• Douglas
• Discussion on the efficacy of rituals
• an intellectual blind alley

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Symbolist approach

• Beattie Ritual and Social Change (1966)
• Religious beliefs
• Symbolic statements
• Ritual
• expressive behaviour (like art or drama)
• "Primitive" thought
• "explanatory", but in a very different way from
  science
• No sensible person subjects a sonnet or a sonata
  to the same kind of ' examination and testing as
  he does a scientific hypothesis, even though each
  contains its own kind of truth
• gt it requires its own distinct kind of analysis
• investigation of the meaning of symbols

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Literacy and modes of thought

• Thought ltgt technology
• technology shapes and directs human action and
  thought
• Eg. technology of time measurement
• "the most authoritarian, efficient and socially
  repressive invention" (Lewis Mumford)
• Writing and literacy
• psychological theories
• Lev Vygotsky
• rationality ability to use abstract concepts
  (eg. signs)
• change in sign systems gt an alteration in
  intellectual processes
• anthropological theories
• Lingenieur vs bricoleur (Lévi-Strauss)
• prehistory and history (Goody)

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Jack Goody

• Literacy in Traditional Societies (ed. 1968)
• The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977)
• Emphasis on the technology of intellect
• mode of thought ? mode of communication
• Transition to literacy
• crucial for shift between modes of thought
• domestication of the savage mind
• gt Modes of thought
• Not
• Religion vs science
• Traditional vs modern
• But rather
• Oral vs literate

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Goody

• scientific thinking
• based on skepticism
• cumulative growth of knowledge
• impossible without literacy
• writing
• depersonalized
• allows formalism, contradiction and rationality
• decreases the monopoly of knowledge
• separates the utterance from the context of
  uttering

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Goody

• Criticism
• Graff (1987)
• Literacy myth
• enabling rather than a causal factor
• not only a tool of liberation, but also a means
  of social control
• Parry The Brahmanical tradition and the
  technology of the intellect (1985)
• Hinduism in Benares
• textual (shastrik) vs oral tradition (lauklik)
• textualization
• verbatim reproduction of ideas
• disables skepticism, debate and pluralism of
  ideas.
• closed

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Tzvetan Todorov

• Conquest of America (1982)
• Literacy
• Enables to perceive and conceptualize otherness
• Cortés vs Montezuma
• Linear vs cyclical worldview
• Open vs closed worldview
• Cortés taken for Quetzalcoatl

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Marshall Sahlins vs Gananath Obeyesekere

• Sahlins Islands of History (1985)
• deification and death of Captain Cook on the
  Hawaii
• appearance of something radically new
• not understood in everyday but in mythical terms
• Obeyesekere Apotheosis of Captain Cook European
  Mythmaking in the Pacific (1992)
• Sahlins is an intellectual imperialist
• Hawaiian and English thinking are similar
  (rational)
• Cook not taken for the god Lono
• Sahlins How "Natives" Think About Captain Cook,
  For Example (1995)
• Obeyesekere is a politically correct
  revisionist
• distinctive Hawaiian mode of mythical thought
  existed

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Critique of Western rationality

• Irrational behaviour is systematic in modern
  societies
• Frank and the tennis-courts
• Tversky/Kahneman and the theatre tickets
• Weber/Fechner and the psychophysical law

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Approaches to rationality of religious beliefs

• Morris 3 approaches
• Intellectualist
• Contextualist
• Symbolist

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Approaches to rationality of religious beliefs

• Intellectualist
• Religious beliefs
• Attempts to undertand and explain the world
• Rational in form but not in content
• Müller, Tylor, Spencer, Frazer
• Eg. Evans-Pritchard (Azande), Horton

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Approaches to rationality of religious beliefs

• Contextual
• Rationality is culture-specific
• religious beliefs are rational (in their own
  context)
• Eg. Evans-Pritchard (Nuer), Hollis, Winch

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Approaches to rationality of religious beliefs

• Symbolist
• The question of rationality is irrelevant
• Beliefs are symbolic statements about the social
  order
• Eg. Leach, Turner, Firth, Douglas, Beattie

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Approaches to rationality of religious beliefs

• Lukes 5 approaches
• Intellectualist, contextualist, symbolist
• Other beliefs are incomprehensible
• Best, Seligman
• Religious beliefs are irrational / prelogical
• Lévy-Bruhl