Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins writes:
When native Australians or New Guineans say that their totemic animals and plants are their kinsmen – that these species are persons like themselves, and that in offering them to others they are giving away part of their own substance – we have to take them seriously, which is to say empirically, if we want to understand the large consequences of these facts for how they organise their lives. The graveyard of ethnographic studies is strewn with the remains of reports which, thanks to anthropologists’ own presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact, were content to ignore or debunk the Amazonian peoples who said that the animals they hunted were their brothers-in-law, the Africans who described the way they systematically killed their kings when they became weak, or the Fijian chiefs who claimed they were gods.
My first thought was . . . wait a minute! Whazzat with “presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact”? That animal is or is not your brother-in-law, right? They’re either doing inter-species marriage in Amazonia or not, no?
But Sahlins does have something reasonable to say, and it’s relevant to my own research in political science. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first here’s Sahlins, continuing:
We have to follow the reasoning of those Australian Aboriginals for whom eating their own totem animals or plants would be something like incest or self-cannibalising, even as they ritually nourish and protect these species for other people’s use. We thus discover a society the opposite in principle of the bellicose state of nature that Hobbes posited as the primordial condition – an idea which is still too much with us. Of course the native Australians have known injurious disputes, most of them interpersonal. Yet instead of a Hobbesian ‘war of every man against every man’, each opposing others in his own self-interest, here is a society fundamentally organised on the premise of everyone giving himself to everyone.
In the earlier Germanic version of the natural science controversy, this human science alternative was called ‘understanding’, the implication being that the subject matter at issue was meaningfully or symbolically constructed, so that what was methodologically required was the penetration of its particular logic. The human scientist is not in a relation of a thinking person to a mute object of interest; rather, anthropologists and their like are of the same intellectual nature as the peoples they study: they are our alters and interlocutors. . . .
He then goes on to make some statements, with which I disagree, on the topic of natural science. But let’s forget about that and just go with the quote above. What struck me is the relevance of this “anthropological” mode of thinking to political science, where we must have understanding and sympathy for a wide spectrum of political opinions ranging from opposition to interracial marriage (supported by 46% of respondents in a recent poll of Mississippi Republican voters) to support for the nationalization of the means of production (still a popular position in many European countries, or so I’ve heard). As a political scientist studying public opinion, I have certain tools and academic experiences. But I am fundamentally the same kind of object as the people I am studying. It’s an obvious point but still worth remembering. This is the sort of thing that Dan Kahan writes about.
This has incrediblle relevance and is one of the best arguments for a broad diversity in the academy.
Example: Upper middle class people do not generally experience the deprivation, associated traumas, and constrained worldview that are frequently associated with poverty. (All cultures constrain. That’s what they do.) Those same folks often don’t understand the things that people from a poor background may have that they don’t, either, such as the rich family, neighborhood, or faith ties. They might be able to imagine it to some degree but typically don’t have a grasp of it because they never experienced it themselves. This affects health and mental health professionals who come from a relatively privileged background as they try to help clients, lacking a solid foundation in the culture. It affects educators making policies about children coming from those backgrounds. It affects urban planners making choices about housing and transportation.
I’m not saying that you have to be from a given community to study it, or serve it more broadly. There are some real advantages to an outsider perspective. De Tocqueville is the prime example. He saw and was able to articulate things that Americans themselves likely wouldn’t have seen and is still rightly held up as an example of good comparative research. You can be too mired in your own community to see what boundaries it puts on you (see upper middle class professionals ;).
Unfortunately, diversity is tricky to define and it’s easy to reify what that means based on the equivalent of US Census categories (which, it should be noted, change every 10 years). For instance, in an odd sense, in New York City I am a diversity hire. I’m much younger than most of my colleagues (generational), haven’t been in New York City for the vast majority of my life, having grown up in “flyover country” (geographical), wasn’t educated in the Northeast (educationally geographical), and came from a mixed blue collar background (class). Does that make me a “diversity” hire? Probably not, but that’s why it’s worth having people with different perspectives around. The fact that my outgoing department chair is a Panamanian immigrant was helpful. He saw a lot of things that the rest of us didn’t.
The difficult question usually isn’t whether diversity is important. That’s easy.
The tough question is how important is it and is it worth sacrificing other goals / metrics (and by how much) to gain diversity?
Should a Panaman get a nudge to be department chair, just because he is Panaman?
A lot of people mouth the words. Agreed that there are tradeoffs, but if you don’t really think out the tradeoffs, chances are other concerns will trump. As to whether a certain person should get the nod, it’s hard to say. Rarely is it the case that any one person is completely comparable to another.
Monocultures are very, very vulnerable, though.
I got my PhD from Engineering in a field that has traditionally few women. The lengths my Department was going to woo and hire Black / Hispanic / Woman faculty in the middle of the last decade was legendary and no secret. Was quite annoying actually.
Agreed, that the Department had one woman and none of the other two cohorts but I don’t think this was a conscious discriminatory bias. Conversely had they had a diverse, multi-ethnic faculty I doubt it’d have made an iota of difference to the pedagogical / research quality.
I’m all for anti-discrimination, but to go hunting for diversity (at the expense of other attributes) seems comical to me.
Yeah going to desperate lengths to hire *someone* who checks the census category boxes is going to be pretty crazy, but in an area like engineering it’s going to be tough to find a person like that who’s a good researcher and is willing to go to your school (as opposed to the seven others giving them offers). They were probably getting pressure from administration or an accrediting body. There are a lot of ways not to be a monoculture, but administrators don’t tend to think that way. A lot of academic departments simply don’t try at all, and then don’t do the things that would be supportive if they do manage to hire someone who isn’t right in their obvious group.
Speaking of statistics (hah!) it’s relevant too. I’m a psychometrician, and thus am kind of a translator between statistics and substantive psychology/education. Without a translator who understands both languages those two camps would have an incredibly hard time talking. This is important because psychometrics (and I suspect other “metrics” disciplines) exists in a great deal of tension between these two disciplines. For many years, psychometrics got pulled further and further towards statistics, but there seems to be a backswing growing.
“I am fundamentally the same kind of object as the [objects] I am studying.” Hardly unique to the social sciences. A physicist could say the same. Surely what characterizes the “anthropological” mode of thinking is the use of empathy as a research tool? A physicist studying an assemblage of particles has no need to “stand in the shoes” of the particles, to “see things from their point of view,” to “understand and sympathize with their weltanshauung,” whereas the behavior of human beings is so complex that political scientists, in order to model it, may have to rely on dedicated hardware in their own brains.
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