Anthropology Of Knowledge Research Paper

This dual sense of evolution in history and in the complexity of social forms was basic to Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915) and his Primiti e Classification (1963), coauthored with his nephew, Marcel Mauss. Durkheim’s goal was to study the most ‘elementary’ societal forms in order to discern the basic social elements out of which ideas of time, space, causality, category, and person are constructed. Using the example of Australian aborigines, which he considered the best documented ‘elementary’ society, Durkheim argued that religious thought, like all forms of thought, derived from collective social action.

Durkheim sought to synthesize the two major prior approaches to categories of thought, the ‘apriorist’ and the ‘empiricist’. The apriorist approach, exemplified by Immanuel Kant, viewed categories of thought as immanent in the human mind. The empiricist approach, exemplified by John Locke, saw these categories of thought as derived from experience, with individuals independently constructing similar perspectives. Mediating between these two approaches, Durkheim argued that categories of understanding were neither innate nor derived from individual experiences. Instead, they were the product of a ‘collective consciousness’ created and sustained through shared ritual action. This social basis of knowledge and categorization applied as much to the classification of objects and the natural world as it did to religious thought, at least in ‘elementary’ societies.

For Durkheim, the notion of the ‘collective consciousness’ (‘conscience collective’) joined assumptions of the fundamental faculties of the human mind with the creation of collective representations. Durkheim’s argument was elegant but in synthesizing the main currents of European social philosophy, he was unable to demonstrate the primacy of the social in ‘causing’ forms of classification. At the least, his argument suggested an analogy between the social order and forms of knowledge, and his psychological assumptions concerning collective representations were quickly superceded. Nonetheless, his work profoundly influenced successive generations of anthropologists interested in the ethnographic representation of cosmologies and religious beliefs and their relation to the social order.

2. The Ethnography Of Knowledge

An example of how the work of Robertson Smith and Durkheim influenced ethnographic writing in the first half of this century is E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Nuer of the southern Sudan (1940). Evans-Pritchard cites neither of these predecessors in his text, although their influence is evident in the structure of his argument. He depicted the Nuer as a cattle-herding people with a simple material life and minimal social and political differentiation, highly dependent on their local environment and seasonal migrations. Evans-Pritchard described these in detail, indicating how ecological conditions shaped Nuer social life and cosmology, or ideas of religion, causality, and the order of things. He showed how the structure of Nuer lineages, age-grades, and political units corresponded to their ideas of time, space, and political relationships.

Like Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard allowed readers to infer that Nuer categories and classifications derived from the structure of their social and political life. As with Durkheim, however, all Evans-Pritchard demonstrated was common schemas or homologies of form among a ‘traditional’ social structure, ideas of time and space, and cosmology.

The anthropological tradition represented by Evans-Pritchard remained dominant through the mid-twentieth century, inspiring other work on cosmology and social structure in other African societies, including John Middleton on the Lugbara and Godfrey Lienhardt on the Dinka.

The roots of Durkheim’s influence continued well beyond mid-century and could be seen in the work of anthropologists such as Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas (1966). Such studies suggest the extent to which people go to maintain or distinguish conceptual kinds and boundaries among animals, plants, genders, foods, peoples, and types of activity. Claude Levi- Strauss (1966) also focused on the forms of classification implicit in both the kinship structures and in the myths of ‘elementary’ societies, exploring similarities across cultural traditions that suggested common ‘structures’ in myths, for example, akin to those studied by structural linguists. Levi-Strauss’s work encouraged a focus on how analogies are made between different cultural domains.

Some anthropologists, such as Maurice Godelier (1986), sought to join Durkheimian concerns with categories and classification to a Marxist-inspired linking of ideas of knowledge to modes of production. As with Durkheim’s work, however, the emphasis in these studies remained primarily in the classificatory schema implicit in systems of knowledge and in analogies between symbolic representations and material/economic life rather than in how people created, imposed, and altered, ways of knowing.

3. Psychology And Anthropology

Until the 1920s, the lines between psychology and anthropology significantly overlapped. It was often psychologists more than anthropologists who engaged in comparative work across societies and explored the extent to which humans thought alike. Some anthropologists argued that human intellectual and cognitive processes were essentially similar and varied only on the level of evolution of their culture. Others, such as the French philosopher, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, argued that there was a great divide between the pre-rational and ‘primitive’ forms of thought and the ‘rational’ thought of modern societies. Levy-Bruhl’s argument had a strong resonance in French colonial lobbies, and was even offered to explain the presumed inability of the Muslim societies of North Africa to abandon social forms and beliefs supposedly inadaptive to the colonial, modern world.

After the 1920s, however, there was an increasing separation between psychological and anthropological approaches to cognition and knowledge. Psychologists more than anthropologists explored issues of cognition, the capacity and processes by which individuals learn, classify, and make associations and analogies. Psychologists thus focused on how the brain is ‘hard-wired’ for certain thought processes, including the ability to learn languages. Anthropologists dealt more with culturally learned forms of knowledge and classification. Only a few anthropologists, such as Gregory Bateson (1972), continued to envision a common ground between the two disciplines.

As Dan Sperber (1985) noted, anthropological work always had two dimensions. Some anthropologists have been more interested in the interpretation and analysis of particular cultural and social groups. Others have been more concerned with the cultural abilities and dispositions of humankind in general. Studies in cognitive anthropology, as the latter focus became known, underscored this distinction. These were the anthropologists most inclined to explore the link with psychology. The 1960s again brought scholars from the two disciplines into close collaboration. In one key study, for example, color perceptions, a domain that anthropologists previously assumed to be culturally transmitted, became recognized as having a more limited range of variation than was initially supposed, suggesting underlying cognitive principles (Berlin and Kay 1969).

The focus of the Durkheimian tradition of the anthropology of knowledge was always in the ‘outer’ frame of knowledge—how classificatory schemes for understanding society and the world related to the social order. The work of the cognitive anthropologists studied the order internal to particular schemes of knowledge—such as botany, color, disease types, firewood, and kinship and relationship systems. Michael Cole (1996) called this renewed collaboration between anthropologists and psychologists the ‘second psychology,’ in which the two disciplines explored the frontier between culture and ‘mind’ in understanding cognitive development, the acquisition of literacy and numeracy, and language acquisition. In this vein, Holland and Quinn (1987), for example, use the term ‘schema’ to refer to standard learned patterns of activity, such as ‘going to the post office,’ by which members of a society learn cultural patterns and habits to accomplish routine tasks, freeing individuals to focus instead on less predictable situations.

4. Intellectuals

Another component of the anthropology of knowledge is the role of intellectuals in society and the social production of knowledge. Until recent decades, anthropologists were primarily concerned with those bodies of cultural knowledge shared by all members of a society. Anthropologists such as Radin (1957) in American anthropology and Griaule (1965) in the French tradition portrayed intellectuals as possessing an especially intense awareness of the sacred center of their society and an ability to reflect and explain its categories of knowledge. A classic essay by Victor Turner (1967) on the knowledge and character of one of his principal informants on Ndembu symbolism, comparing him to an ‘Oxford don’ also broke from an earlier tradition in which individual producers of knowledge were subsumed in larger collectivities.

An influential approach to defining intellectuals in relation to theories of modernization and modernity was Edward Shils (1972). For him, intellectuals were those imputed with an ‘innate need’ to understand and articulate ideas and concepts that are more general and profound than those faced in practical, everyday concerns. For Shils, all intellectual work originally arose from religious occupations, but religious orientations in modern times have attracted a diminishing share of the creative capacities of an elite oriented toward more ‘modern’ concerns. Shils’s approach assumed that not all knowledge was equally shared, and it also encouraged anthropologists and other scholars to think of varied types of intellectuals and their relation to the different political and social contexts in which knowledge is produced and valued. Whether they were called intellectuals or entrepreneurs, anthropologists shifted their focus away from discerning classificatory categories and cosmologies and toward the economic and political contexts in which knowledge is produced and shaped.

In this shift to understanding knowledge and its social distribution as process and as historically rooted, the strategies used for comprehending ‘elementary’ societies—to invoke Emile Durkheim’s term—were adapted to depict ideas of knowledge in advanced, ‘complex’ ones. Thus Pierre Bourdieu compared the cognitive style implicitly learned at the Sorbonne to that transmitted by Bororo elders in the Brazilian Amazon. For Bourdieu, the verbal maneuvers learned by students preparing for the lecon at the Sorbonne furnished a model for the ‘right’ mode of intellectual activity in the French context as much as the dualistic spatial layout of Bororo villages embodied Bororo cosmology as interpreted by dominant elders. The dualistic method of the lecon, which establishes a traditional ‘two views’ on any subject, is subsequently applied to discussion of a wide range of intellectual problems, to the exclusion of alternative, less culturally valued approaches.

5. Knowledge And Power

Bourdieu’s work on education, social class, and knowledge in the 1960s linked together several longstanding themes in the anthropology of knowledge, but also indicated a shift from earlier concerns with categorization to the practice of creating and distributing knowledge. Bourdieu, like Bloch (1985), Fardon (1985), Godelier (1986), and others, related knowledge and social classifications to the distribution and control of resources. In the specific case of education in France, Bourdieu depicted how the style and forms of knowledge of French higher education converted social classifications into school ones, relating mastery of the ‘symbolic classifications’ and habits of thought of formal schooling to both class and social capital.

The theme of the historical problem of change in dominant ideologies of higher education and how these ideologies were related to the conflicting interests of class and social groups in complex societies was raised at the beginning of the century. Durkheim’s (1977) neglected lectures on the evolution of higher education in France is a case in point. It was only by the 1970s, however, that such ideas rose to the forefront of anthropological thought. Studies such as Bourdieu’s on higher education in France, and others on themes such as the internal logic and changing social context of Islamic ideas of knowledge (Eickelman 1985) and the process by which dominant ideas of religion and tradition shifted in Indonesia (Hefner 1985) joined the long-standing anthropological concern with tacit knowledge in religious experience with how social actors derive meaning from public symbolism and continually shape and renew bodies of knowledge in differing social and historical circumstances.

Fredrik Barth’s (1987) account of local variations in the cultural traditions of the Ok of highland New Guinea illustrates both the shift to understanding how people produce and use knowledge, and the erosion of the earlier distinction elementary and complex societies. The Ok use their ritual occasions to create and alter systems of knowledge as much as seminars and innovative lectures accomplish the same objective in contemporary European societies. Departing from earlier accounts such as Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer, Barth emphasized the processes of thought and innovation at work within a system of knowledge, producing multiple variations and developments.

Approaches such as Barth’s also had profound implications for the idea of culture. Rather than viewing culture implicitly as internally homogeneous, shared, and sharply bounded, culture instead is conceived as a perpetually interactive social organization of communication in which individuals reproduce and alter representations and symbols. Knowledge is thus produced in the enactment of the ‘regulated improvisations’ (Bourdieu 1977) by which people express thoughts, organize, and interpret social action. Social practice in specific historical contexts thus produces ‘objective’ structures (economic and power relations) that in turn produce cognitive and affective dispositions of the social world common to members of given social groups or classes.

Current trends in the anthropology of knowledge thus encompass two related concerns. One builds on new collaborations between anthropology and psychology, exploring new ways of relating public and institutionalized cultural expression to cognition and mental representations (Shore 1996). The other focuses on the social production of knowledge and its relation to power, value, communications, and control. The earlier concern with the values, cosmology, and ways of knowing that are, common to all people in a given society, has given way to how ideas and innovation are communicated in more bounded and explicit fields of knowledge. Such studies include the diffusion of knowledge and ideas in Silicon Valley, the genome project and in biogenetic engineering, and the implications of new communications media on ideas of religious and political authority. The processes by which change is embodied in implicit shared ideas of gender and sexuality, and authority and responsibility, also forms a component of current concerns in the anthropology of knowledge.

Bibliography:

1. Barth F 1987 Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
2. Bateson G 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine Books, New York
3. Berlin B, Kay P 1969 Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
4. Bloch M 1985 From cognition to ideology. In: Fardon R (ed.) Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches. Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, UK
5. Bourdieu P 1967 Systems of education and systems of thought. International Social Science Journal 19: 338–58
6. Bourdieu P 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, New York
7. Cole M 1996 Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, UK
8. Douglas M 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Frederick A. Praeger, New York
9. Durkheim E 1915 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London
10. Durkheim E 1977 The Evolution of Educational Thought. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
11. Durkheim E, Mauss M 1963 [orig. 1903] Primitive Classification. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
12. Eickelman D F 1985 Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth Century Notable. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
13. Evans-Pritchard E E 1940 The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK
14. Fardon R (ed.) 1985 Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches. Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, UK
15. Godelier M 1986 The Mental and the Material. Verso, London
16. Griaule M 1965 [orig. 1948] Conversations with Ogotemmeli. Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, London
17. Hefner R 1985 Hindu Ja anese: Tengger Tradition and Islam. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
18. Holland D, Quinn N 1987 Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
19. Levi-Strauss C 1966 The Sa age Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
20. Radin P 1957 [orig. 1927] Primitive Man as a Philosopher. Dover Books, New York
21. Robertson Smith W 1972 [orig. 1889] Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. Schocken Books, New York
22. Shils E 1972 The Intellectuals and the Powers. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
23. Shore B 1996 Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford University Press, New York
24. Sperber D 1985 On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
25. Turner V 1967 [orig. 1957] Muchona the Hornet, Interpreter of Religion. In: Turner V. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY