Anthropology Of Common Sense Research Paper

Thus, for example, in her justly famous explorations of ‘self-evidence,’ Mary Douglas (1966, 1975, pp. 276–318) presupposes the existence of a set of rules—a taxonomy—despite the ironic circumstance that even this assumption represents the common sense of the relatively stable, ordered world of bourgeois experience. Yet the genius of her approach should not be overlooked; indeed, it paves the way for this critique. Douglas shows how attributions of purity and pollution are defined in terms of failure to fit taxonomic schemes already in place; and the metaphor of place is central, for she defines ‘dirt’ as ‘matter out of place’ (1966, p. 48). In this reading, however, the conceptual cartography is already ‘in place’: the lineaments of the taxonomy are already known and accepted through-out the culture, often assumed in this approach to be a clearly bounded entity: ‘Where there is dirt there is a system’ (Douglas 1966, p. 48). Such sharp delineation of boundaries, however, is itself a historically specific production of order created by agents exercising highly variable degrees of conscious volition, and commonly takes the form of the bureaucratic logic of nation states, for which the metonymic construction of the people as a social unit such as a kinship group serves to ground national identity in an apparently unchallengeable timelessness (Herzfeld 1992, 1997).

In such situations, the logic of ritual pollution and taboo may also infuse systems that claim the status of a universal rationality. While experience may show that democracies often fail to live up to their goals, for example, people often invent secular theodicies to explain failure—‘it’s the venality of those who have power, not the organizational structure itself’—rather than attempt to challenge the rationalizing rhetoric whereby those who manage the structures of power seek to perpetuate the status quo. Thus, rationality itself becomes a symbolic system, with its own hostility to the ‘contamination’ of alternative logics—as witness official hostility to, for example, New Age religious and medical practices (see Badone 1991, Danforth 1989). Here again, logical structure is mapped onto the distribution of power in such a way as to make seemingly deviant or alternative rationalities directly threatening to the bureaucrats and other power brokers of the state. Moreover the idea of a sharp mind–body, subject–object discrimination is so deeply embedded in the ontology of most educated Westerners and many others that in itself it comes—in the guise of an opposition between the sensible and the sensual—to constitute the very grounds of common sense in general.

Thus, Douglas’s vision of common sense has the virtue of relativizing what might otherwise be taken as absolute and universal, but it can be extended much further through a conceptual shift of analytic emphasis from conceptual structure to the agency behind the deployment of rhetoric—to the uses, rather than simply the forms, of classification. This allows us to see why common sense so often appears to be static even when historical evidence shows it to have changed in content and logic: its authority appeals to assumptions of permanence but actually often rests on strategic opportunism. Since taxonomy constitutes the basis of knowledge, however, the realization that differing systems of classification both reflect and produce widely divergent understandings of how the world works was a crucial step in the process of relativizing the universalist intellectual claims that, in the West, find their popular expression in folk models of common sense.

Methodologically, it is those moments at which ethnographers are made to feel foolish that the locally dominant version of common sense makes itself felt. When, at last, I discovered that the shepherds among whom I was living in a Cretan mountain village were engaged in extensive, reciprocal animal theft and asked them why, they responded, as though it must have been obvious to anyone but an idiot, ‘To make friends.’ This baffling response provoked me to an entire ethnographic inquiry, in which I was able to show that, in an extremely demanding physical and social environment, agonistic relations that took the form of systematic, reciprocal animal theft provided en effective means of determining who would be both worthy to serve as ‘friends’ and tough enough to do so in a practically advantageous way.

Yet one of the criticisms made of the resulting study (Herzfeld 1985, cf. Gilsenan 1986, Loizos 1986) was that it overlooked both gender and (incipient) class inequality. In retrospect, I consider these critiques to be largely justified. A reflexive consideration of how I came to see the situation in the terms of the dominant group may now be of value in revealing the extent to which a structural view of social values can entail the uncritical acceptance of locally dominant models of common sense—a revealing convergence of anthropological generalization and local hegemony. My delight in ‘discovering the logic of the system,’ to use a phraseology popular in the structuralist era, obscured the clear evidence—which others were able to extract from my ethnographic descriptions—of inequalities, that such assertions of perfect reciprocity effectively masked by reproducing the image of an idealized past (‘structural nostalgia,’ Herzfeld 1997, pp. 109–38) in the less-than-ideal present (about which the villagers themselves had few illusions).

This example of how encounters between different notions of common sense produce ethnographic in-sight and can lead to a better understanding of the concealed operation of power is also useful for another reason. When we speak today of the exercise of power, we often—at least implicitly—mean a nation-state bureaucracy or a colonial state. But power is frequently diffused throughout a society in such a way as to be exercised at many analytically separable levels. The common sense of the village ‘big men’ was emphatically not that of the state, although its bearers called the latter into question by pointing out that the heroes of national independence had themselves been guerrillas known as ‘thieves’ (kleftes).

Notions of common sense infuse and legitimate claims to power at many levels. Such assessments of a culturally defined common sense as Bulmer’s famous question, ‘Why is the cassowary not a bird?’ (1967), are thus not confined to the relatively ‘harmless’ zones of ritual and taboo. In a society in which it is said that harm will eventuate from any violation of taboo, the misuse of categories is never an insignificant matter. But in self-avowedly modern and rational societies, the issues take on a magnitude of scale that lends them particular force, although the logical principles remain fundamentally similar: virtually the same classificatory logic that we find in the taxonomic organization of cosmology also informs extremely violent practices of exclusion and even annihilation.

The theory of taboo enunciated by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966) has thus proved extremely useful in understanding the treatment of exiles and refugees (Malkki 1995) and of outsiders more generally (Herzfeld 1992). These expansions of her theory, in turn, have necessitated recognition of the kinds of agency involved in the activation of categories for specific social and political ends.

A similarly appreciative critique can be addressed to Clifford Geertz’s approach to common sense (1983, pp. 73–93). Geertz represents common sense as a cultural system, utilizing a model through which he has exercised an enduring influence on the discipline. But if common sense is systematic, where does that quality lie? It must be in the rhetoric of those who invoke the idea of a unitary logic, rather than in the logic ‘itself’—the cultural ‘system.’

Akhil Gupta (1998) has shown with notable clarity how ideas of common sense reinforce hierarchy at several mutually encompassing levels. Drawing on his fieldwork in an agricultural village in western Uttar Pradesh, India, he shows how the rhetoric of science validates a particular view of common sense that supports the interests of the global economy at the expense of the villagers who are nonetheless expected to resign themselves to its authority.

The phrase ‘common sense’ implies universality, and in this respect shows that the concept originates in Enlightenment hopes of discovering a universal logic. Yet in the concept of sense, as in that of taste, the Cartesian separation of mind and body had not yet supervened in pre-Enlightenment times and does not seem particularly logical in many another culture (see Classen 1993, pp. 1–3).

Is common sense ideology? I would prefer to treat it, in Bourdieu’s (1977) terms, as an example of doxa— that set of principles that both governs and is embedded in the culturally inculcated dispositions to which most daily routines are subject. It shares with doxa the quality of unreflexiveness: while it can be made the subject of explicit speech, for example, its authority depends on its immunity to questioning. In writing this research paper, for example, I am questioning the Enlightenment presupposition of universality on which European notions of common sense are, at least implicitly, predicated.

But common sense is only revealed through practice. It is the invocation of common sense as a reason for doing things that gives it its ontological status in the world. A speaker who argues that something ‘stands to reason’ may wish to imply that what is invoked has universal status; but to the extent that this is the impression created, it simply testifies to the per- formative efficacy of the utterance. Thus, the task of the ethnographer is to document such utterances and to gauge their effect. In discussing the status of lying in rural Lebanon, for example, Michael Gilsenan (1976) demonstrates that calling the bluff of a liar by dint of another lie shows both what everyone knows (that lying in social life is inevitable) and that in the specific case a liar’s failure to realize that he was being lied to showed him up as the less talented liar. Here common sense consists in realizing that everyone lies and not expecting to be believed oneself. Such a judgment would be considered a great deal less commonsensical in, for example, an academic debate (in which empirical reality probably approaches Grice’s (1975) culture-specific maxims of conversation more closely than in virtually any other context (see also Briggs 1986, p. 83, for an assessment of these maxims and their relevance to fieldwork)). Especially in agonistic societies that find themselves advancing competing historical and cultural claims in the context of nation-state ideology, however, such notionally ‘pure’ commitments as the ideal of historical truth can prove more rhetorical and strategic than literal (see especially Shryock 1997). Moreover, the idea of a disinterested academic search for pure fact is itself riddled with rhetorical claims about both common sense and science, the latter often serving as the legitimating framework for a particular reading of the former. In other words, it is the local cultural rules that constitute the grounds for any appreciation of common sense; but it is the performance of social relations that provides the opportunity for the current understanding of common sense to be made manifest and graspable.

Finally, what of psychological inner states? Ac-cording to the conventional anthropological wisdom, we cannot know the inner workings of informants’ minds, still less generalize from these to the collective psychology of entire populations (e.g., Needham 1972, on ‘belief’). Yet a degree of empathy seems to define one version of common sense, according to which the ethnographer usually manages to make precisely such intuitive judgments without difficulty and to the apparent benefit of the description overall (Leavitt 1996). To be sure, this may reflect the embedded common sense of the scholarly community rather than a careful analytical deduction: it implies an equivalence between empathy and knowledge. From another perspective, however, we may extrapolate the specific common sense of a given culture from informal judgments that reveal shared assumptions about what people think (‘what they must think’) under any given set of circumstances (e.g., Rosen 1995).

Implicit in the foregoing is a comparative project. If Leavitt is right in his demonstration that our own common sense allows us to accept what the logic of our profession prohibits, we see that, even internally, common sense does not necessarily possess the consistency or coherence it claims. More than that, however, contemplation of the limits beyond which we are not prepared to push our assumptions about shared human responses reveals significant cultural and historical differences about what constitutes common sense—what, in some contexts, constitutes the underlying ideology governing the use of language itself. We may then prefer to adopt a posture in which the discipline of anthropology becomes, quite simply, the comparative study of common sense. In that case, however, the common senses in question are not unchanging systems but constitute symbolisms in use, and the questions anthropologists ask concern both the formal content of these symbolisms and the principles and contingencies governing their use. This methodology underlies the more serious attempts to produce a genuinely reflexive form of anthropology, one in which the cultural, social, and political pre-suppositions of ethnographic practice become part of the critical analysis of cultural relativism itself.

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