Anthropology of Knowledge-Crick

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Ann. Rev. AnthropoL 1982. 11:287-313 Copyright if) 1982 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
ANTHROPOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1982.11:287-313. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by Katholiek Universiteit Leuven - KU Leuven on 05/03/12. For personal use only.
Malcolm R. Crick School of Social Sciences, Deakin University, Victoria

INTRODUCTION
3217,
Australia
Since the Annual Review of Anthropology series has not previously con tained a discussion of the anthropology of knowledge, this review will look at literature published since the mid- 1970s. Volumes sporting phrases such as "anthropology of knowledge" are still comparatively rare (42, 47), de spite the fact that such a label is quite appropriate for that rich tradition stemming from Durkheim and Mauss's work. The work covered below is normally referred to by more familiar labels such as cognitive, categories, classification, universals, ideology, symbolism.l Some colleagues would no doubt like to see the establishment of a subfie1d in the discipline called "the anthropology of knowledge." I have not advocated this despite the fact that there exist a "sociology of knowledge" and an "archaeology of knowledge," There have been too many fields enthusiastically developed within an thropology which have grown increasingly remote from the main stream until their officianados vanished in their own epistemological spaces. I suggested in 1976 that semantic anthropology (36) is not a subfield but merely a reminder of what anthropology is centrally concerned with. I have taken the theme "anthropology of knowledge" in the same way. After all, some would wish to define our basic concept of culture as a process of acquiring and displaying knowledge-of rules, values, and beliefs. The concepts "knowing" and "knowledge" are definable in a field of contrasts which includes concepts such as action, feeling, ideology, and it could be counterproductive, given the fundamental importance of these matters in the understanding of social life, to set up the anthropology of knowledge
review elsewhere
II have not dealt with medical anthropology because this forms the subject of a separate in this volume. 287
0084-6570/82/1015--0287$02.00
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as a specialist branch of the discipline. This review ends with a reflexive focus, for any survey looking at what anthropologists have written about knowledge must also raise the issue of what sort of knowledge anthropology itself represents. Such a perspective makes the whole of anthropology rele vant to the interest in the anthropology of knowledge. We do not want a stress on knowledge therefore to lead to a further fracturing of the disci pline.
LINGUISTIC AND COGNITIVE APPROACHES
Any survey of the anthropology of knowledge is bound to look at linguistic and cognitive approaches, given the earlier blossoming of such approaches, especially in America. Much of the earlier confidence has left this tradition in anthropology, and queries have been raised about the whole topic of linguistic models in anthropology (36). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it would appear from recent work (112), is not in favor. Many claim that much of what Whorf stated about the influence of language on shaping experience and knowledge is simply false (59; 112. p. 497). It is also clear that in many cases what has been said of language, logic, and modes of thought is less a scientific inference than a case of the scientist's own grammatical categories being projected onto the other language ( 114). Hau gen (76) suggests, however, that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, despite its present disfavor, will continue to emerge in various guises. Some find its very vagueness attractive. Robins (138) suggests that the transformational generative model itself allows new formulations of the insights contained in it. Walz ( 166) suggests testing it by studying brain wave emissions. Whatever the status of particular approaches, some very general queries about the whole language approach to knowledge have been raised in anthropology recently. We feel language and knowledge to be intimately related; we suggest that knowledge is best articulated in language. Is this just a cultural bias? Does language adequately represent our knowledge of anything? In what sense is language a system of knowledge, and what is the relationship of this knowledge to our knowing how to be competent socio linguistic performers? Chomskyan linguistics has highlighted these prob lems, but a good many epistemological issues are unsolved in his work. Moreover, fundamental aspects of language use such as the creativity dis played by metaphOrical usage are not adequately explicable in his terms (9). Keesing (9 1) has suggested that we know virtually nothing of how to represent the knowledge we possess and act upon as social creatures. Part of the problem here is to know how to formulate the relationship of language to the rest of cultural knowledge. Keesing (92) has suggested that the concept of "linguistic knowledge" is faulty if it implies a clear distinction between linguistic and cultural knowledge, for knowledge of
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language has to include knowledge of the culture of its speakers. Linguistic knowledge as a self-contained system is nonsense. It is clear, for instance, that to be a competent party to a conversational interchange involves far more than a shared knowledge of linguistic rules
(68).
Communicative
competence involves far more than knowledge of language; it involves a knowledge of social rules, apperceptions of contexts, understanding what is not and need not be said. Linguistic pragmatics is providing important insights here, and as Silverstein suggests
(155),
this stress dispenses with a
piece of folk knowledge which linguistics has swallowed, namely that with
language reference is primary, which tends to reduce all the rest to a kind of ragbag. Language as a complex social institution, intimately involved with social activity and capable of serving a range of ends, is obviously a more useful anthropological conception. Whether the notion of rule which is emphasized in much of the more sociologically oriented linguistics is a powerful enough concept to do all the work required of it is a moot question, however. Cognitive anthropology is a paradigm which may have lost some of its former impetuousness but is certainly not forgotten. Some claims have been abandoned but new interests emerge..One recent extension in the field is the grappling with problems at the discourse level ( 109). It is probably true that those previously unconvinced of the value of such approaches will not be impressed with the new extension. Efforts like those by Werner
( 167)
to
simulate semantic fields by including a machine in the dialogue would strike many as an artificiality that heads away from the central concerns of social anthropology, especially because so much of the methodology of such for
mal approaches overlooks how much we all already know as speakers in our
ordinary lives. Tyler
( 164),
formerly a leading contributer to cognitive
anthropology, now attacks much of the formalism of these approaches and rightly claims so many of the linguistic approaches to be mere parodies of the real sociocultural situation. Haviland
(77)
also casts doubt on the value
of formally eliciting data and suggests a prime value in the subject of gossip for grasping cultural competence in that ability to gossip requires real comprehension of rules, contexts, and metarules. Some mention of the larger field of psychological anthropology must also be made here, for many of the foci of interest of practitioners in the field--enculturation, cognition, etc-are clearly relevant to an an thropology of knowledge. While such topics are important, there is consid erable doubt as to the cross-cultural validity of much psychological anthropology. What is clear is that psychologists and anthropologists are often speaking about very different subject matters so that there is no agreed framework for making the connections between the disciplines. Even when the terms they use are the same, the interests may not be identical
(95).
Added to this is a great divergence of method from the experimental,
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methodologically prim approach of much psychological work to the more informal participant observation of the anthropologist. The pertinent ques tion to ask of the former is what sort of knowledge does the results of psychological tests represent and what are they knowledge of. Much psy chology is not even valid for subgroups in one's own society, and so much work of cross-cultural psychology is simply ethnocentric: the tests are culture bound; there is scarcely any conceptualization of the translational problems involved or any notion of cultural relevance (90). Some works show a sensitivity to these issues but many do not. We can therefore ask (21) just what psychological anthropology is about. If it is true that all "etics" are really "emics," then cross-cultural psychology is no more than cultural arrogance, since it foists our cultural constructs onto others as if they had some inherent superiority. These epistemological suspicions are the more pertinent when, as Fernandez claims (49), there may often be a subtle racist sense of superiority lurking behind the statistics involved in inquiries into cross-cultural intelligence and the like. These remarks are the more significant in that Hallpike (71) has based his recent work into human mentality on Piagetian developmental psy chology. It is true that much anthropological work about "modes of thought" is vague, so that one scarcely knows what authors are talking about let alone how to test their propositions. In that sense Hallpike, by detailing some cognitive mechanisms rather than just talking about modes of thought, provides something specific with which to argue. He is certainly correct in suggesting that his work on the foundations of primitive thought will be controversial. Some will argue that Piagetian psychology has not yet been adequately tested cross-culturally; others will, disclaimers notwith standing, find Hallpike's work offensively racist and a piece of European academic arrogance. The selection of collective representations around the world which show that the mental capabilities of most people in preindus trial societies do not mature to the level of Western adults will remind most of Victorian ethnology. Indeed, most of that nineteenth century cosmology opposing white, middle class, European, educated adult to uneducated, black, rural, child, working class illiterate is resurrected in the book. It will be interesting to see whether the discipline accepts as knowledge in this day and age the suggestion that language in primitive societies is not a concep tual tool or that primitives lack refinement in their grasp of inner states (71, pp. 421, 487). What is also intriguing is the way anthropology here incar nates a Western philosophy of mind and values highly those intellectual gifts which are useful in academic life. There is nothing in Hallpike's volume to reveal awareness of the sophistication in the analysis of the human mind achieved by other cultures in comparison with which our own scientific psychology often looks puerile ( 135). The Buddhist analysis of mind, for instance, goes further in analysis than have any of our Western
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psychologies. Piagetian analysis concentrates on a limited number of opera tions very much located in an area of the brain which overlaps the language area (38, p.
164).
Since this is so, what we often call "intelligence" or
"cognitive abilities" are paltry metonyms of the skills of the human mind. Studying them does not add up to a valid disquisition on human mentality, primitive or otherwise. Many have felt, unlike Hallpike, that the analysis of collective representa tions does not show us how individuals r,tually think. When pressed, however, most anthropologists have little to say about the actual workings
of the human mind,let alone the brain. There has in the past few years been a renewed interest in alternative logics (35,70,147) with the expressed hope of clarifying the nature of peculiar beliefs by using concepts like indetermi nate truth values. Ethological models have also been suggested, which see classification and knowledge as a matter of adaptive strategies, as responses to environmental pressures (51, 169). Meaning and choice have in one ethological formulation become necessary aspects of the human ethogram (52). Crook has recently boldly attempted to embrace the higher human psychic attributes of personhood within an ethological framework (37). For the most part, however, anthropologists speak of the creation of know ledge, of thought, and consciousness without detailing any processes or mechanisms. There has in the last few years been renewed interest in the relation between human knowledge and sociotechnical context. Hallpike suggests (70, pp. 5-6) that primitive thinking may be arrested in nondemanding intellectual social environments. But the way in which thinking reflects or uses such environments is not clear. How does technology influence our imagery or symbolic modes? Prehistorically, is technological accomplish ment a source of cultural evolution or an index of mental evolution? One of the most interesting recent fields of speculation in this area has been on the influence of literacy on human thought. Goody (64) has protested about the gross binary contrasts-"open"/"closed," "rational"/"mystical" etc used to discuss differences in thought between "them" and "us." He sug gests breaking the problem down and looking at specific variables. Literacy he regards as a significant "technology of the intellect" in this regard, having profound effects on the nature and functioning of the mind and significantly affecting the relationship between social organization and knowledge (65). The shift from temporal organization (language) to spatial (writing) also affects mental operations. Records also allow a decontextuali zation of knowledge and forms of manipulation and collaboration ruled out in oral cultures. Goody's arguments have not been firmly established, but they spark many trains of thought. If culture is a communication system, obviously changes in patterns of communication are bound to be significant. What has
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happened to the thought processes of the West since we entered a McLuhan esque postliteracy multimedia era? Perhaps of more relevance in this con text: what will be the ramifications for an anthropology of knowledge given the up till now predominant situation of literate anthropologists studying nonliterate cultures? Can anthropologists adequately conceive of how ritu als, speech, and action form the pattern of meaning in nonliterate societies (49, pp. 57-58)? Can anthropologists really sense what it is like to think without knowledge being stored in written language? This is the important question, for as Goody says (64, p. 54), many of the ways anthropologists have analyzed symbolism have, by using analytic tables, for instance, used as presentational devices things which are not available in preliterate cul tures. We may by virtue of our assumptions about knowledge coming from a literate social context be systematically mistaken in our efforts to compre hend symbolisms without the device of writing. Literacy places such reli ance on left hemisphere functions of the brain that perhaps anthropologists are stultified ally involve the powers of the right hemisphere rather more (128, p. 126). One very important recent trend which is in some ways quite the reverse of psychological anthropology is that shown by a range of writers inquiring into different cultural notions of the human person (11, 56, 107, 129). Efforts to describe the "experience" of people in other cultures using West ern psychological notions often look highly artificial. Of more validity isthe effort through the analysis of collective representations to construct each culture's understanding of the human person, his mentality and capacities. However one evaluates Needham's analysis of "belief," the general point that one cannot simply assume that Western psychology or the English language is an adequate registration of essential human capacities is obvi ously true. A "person" is a semantic construct held together by agreement. Others have followed Mauss in showing us some of the complex linguistic conceptual history behind our idea of the self (80). Leenhardt brilliantly showed (100) how a very different sense of the person and his experience exists in Melanesian cultures. The significance gested that many anthropological problems would be solved by more atten tion being paid to the particular cultural construct of the human actor (36, pp. 115-16). Rosaldo's excellent analysis of 110ngot headhunting (139) shows how superficial is the view of our task which divides cultures into complicated symbolic realms and cross-culturally straightforward realities. Her study shows that this symbolic straightforward distinction is false. We cannot assume we understand human actions and emotions even when they look everyday rather than mysterious because of the cultural definition of
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the person and his powers. What we assumed straightforwardly empirical are also cultural constructs. We are also forced to reflect in a more subtle way on exactly the status of the cultural knowledge we ourselves take to the ethnographic task. One of the earliest declared aims of the cognitive approach in linguistic anthropology was to reach cognitively salient findings, to come up with valid models of cultural knowledge, by using techniques which enabled one to get to what was "inside" the informant's head. But of course one naivete of the whole enterprise, as those familiar with he Rylean concept of mind and mental language remind us (73), is that the construal of the "mental" as "inside the head" is a misunderstand ing of our own conceptual system. The recent work of Dumont (43) also serves forcibly to remind us of the situation confronting us in the anthrp pological enterprise by contrasting home aequalis and homo hierarchicus. Tracing the rise of the modem conception of the individual, it is clear that, given the broad cultural history of mankind, we are idiosyncratic. Given the anthropological task of writing about human nature, a starting point must be that our own self-knowledge, the very terms in which we picture ourselves, may be very odd; of necessity the knowledge we formulate about "the other" is bound to be refracted through the knowledge we have built to define ourselves.
CATEGORIES AND UNIVERSALS
The terms category and universal summarize two basic foci of interest in recent developments in anthropology which have emphasized meanings and cultural knowledge. They also raise a refexive l questions about the nature of anthropological knowledge. Does an an thropology that studies categories and systems of collective representation tell us how human beings think? Are taxonomies cognitive at all; do "com ponents" in linguistic analyses correspond to anything meaningful? Does the realm of human categorization reveal our creative semantic powers or is it a realm of knowledge corresponding to natural distinctions? What do anthropologists need to know before they can sensibly claim something to be a cultural universal? The question of "semantic creativity" or "folk knowledge" reminds us that there are several quite different approaches to human categorization. There are symbolists of a generally neo- Durkheimian persuasion such as Douglas (40), numerous scholars in the ethnosemantic field utilizing lin guistically inspired methods, and students of folk science. As Hunn, a practitioner of the last specialism says, cooperation across the various fields is minimal (85). His encyclopedia of Tzeltal folk zoology (84) sees classifica tion as a registration of natural phenomena. He rejects any social origins
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for Classification, denies the free creativity of the symbolist school, and claims that fundamentally natural science and folk science are the same. Science uses explicit methods; folk science is more varied (46, 84) and less systematic but is an organized subset of natural science. Indeed, it is possible to describe exactly the level of correspondence between the two (83). No one will deny the great value of the studies of folk classification. We now know that in some spheres preliterate people know more than our own scientists (20). It is also right to point out that symbolists should not ignore features of the real world when accounting for symbolic schemes. There are
also some intricate problems in defining how elaborate symbols relate to more mundane categorizations (29, 158). But the opposition recognition/ creation is hardly exclusive. As Sahlins (144) has suggested, in a semiotic approach to color classification there is an "appropriation of nature" which includes recognition, elaboration, and creation. There is, moreover, the far more general problem of what is the value in comprehending social life of detached systems of knowledge; what, in other words, can one do with an encyclopedia? Is not the cultural knowledge that anthropologists need to know about socially contextualized and historically rooted thought (48)? A more general problem still has been posed which, when considered thor oughly, raises fundamental problems about the nature of anthropological knowledge. We have all tended to use "symbol" and "category" unreflec tively. Sperber, however, suggests that the idea of symbol, with all it implies about meaning-making, may be a cultural construct of our own, an ernie category, and therefore not simply to be employed in analyzing meanings in other cultures (150, pp. SO-54). In a like vein, Reason (137) has raised the possibility that categories and classifications in other cultures need not represent anything at all in the sense that representation is one type of meaning but not a necessary one. Another major emphasis in recent work about systems of knowledge which challenges an earlier tendency is the stress on "fuzzy logic." Cate gories have often been seen in a clear-cut crystalline manner; there are clear definitions, clear principles of inclusion and exclusion. But it is not clear how such formal logical models actually correspond to how we think (72). Barnes (6) advocates an empirical study of natural rationality-how we actually argue, infer, and so on. There is perhaps what Lakoff (22, p. 221n) calls a natural system of logic which deals in concepts with fuzzy edges, overlapping significances, and a state of affairs where membership in a category is a matter of degree. This general notion of fuzziness has been widely employed of late (22, pp. 109, 113, 123; 101; 131; 164). Kempton (93) has argued that its use will reveal many significant features of folk classification, and Ellen (46) has suggested that many anthropological prob lems have resulted from the error of assuming that concepts were Aristo telian.
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A concept similar to "fuzziness" has been employed instructively by Needham (119). This is the concept of "polythetic classification," derived in part from Wittgenstein's notion of "family resemblances" (see also 5, 34, 140). The notion has been used to solve certain problems of definition in anthropology (157). Indeed, once we acknowledge that there may be no universal criteria for "rational" or "true," that here too we are dealing with fuzzy ideas with an overlapping series of criteria (152), then a great number of anthropological as well as philosophical problems about systems of knowledge are changed. One additional trend has been to query the overall coherence of systems of thought. Several authors (8, 28, 67, 117) have alleged recently that anthropologists may have greatly exaggerated the systemic aspect of beliefs in other cultures. They have all looked at systems where ideas are amor phous and systems very poorly integrated. This raises a serious problem, for anthropological representations af cultural knowledge may really only be tray the articulateness which academics feel knowledge should manifest. Geertz (55) has usefully pointed out how unmethodical is our own common sense thought; Schweder (153) attempts to parallel much of our ordinary thinking with the "lazy" magical thought of other cultures. One aspect of this stress within anthropological work in cultural classifi cation and knowledge has been an emphasis on intracultural variability. Just how collective are collective representations? When we talk about systems of cultural knowledge, we have to ask whose knowledge this really represents. Informant variability is an important issue here (45, 54). It is clear, when describing beliefs and ideas in other cultures, that we must allow for the fact that males and females, old and young, rich and poor may understand different things by certain symbols; some may be ignorant of what is knowledge for others. We cannot eliminate all the differences and call an ironed-out system "cultural knowledge." An opposite tendency has also been visible in recent anthropological writings: the search for universals. An earlier phase of anthropology very much stressed cultural relativism, but in several areas anthropologists have tried to establish cross-cultural phenomena of such widespread occurrence that they can be called universal. The problems involved with establishing universals are many and of both empirical and philosophical kinds (36, pp. 150--51, 168-69; 134; 154), and there is no agreement on either the status of the claimed universals or on their interpretation. Some of the more structural or semantic universals of human knowledge-metaphor, rever sal, and so on-have recently been much stressed (4, 12, 50, 149). It was in the domain of color classification that universals of categoriza tion and orderliness in evolutionary development were first claimed. Since then similar claims have been made for the botanical and zoological realms (25, 27). Whether these regularities represent natural discontinuities or
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principles of thought and naming is a matter of controversy. Other claims have been made: Pinxten (l32) has attempted to establish the notion of space as a universal of human knowledge. Also, inferences have been made from classifications to neurological organization. Brown (26) argues that his work is evidence for a general information processing model of the brain and not for the Chomskyan "detailed wiring" model. Further controversy has existed on the interpretation of data. Bousfield much of the work on color terms is experimentally suspect. Making dis criminations between color chips is not a standard experience of color phenomena nor a culturally normal use of color terms. Added to this type of problem is the more general one of whether universals can be claimed if not always culturally instantiated or lexically registered (69, 170). In addition to the more linguistically inspired American work on univer sals is the recent writing of Needham (120, 121), who has sought by a comparison of collective representations to isolate characteristics which can be claimed as direct manifestations of human nature, to be the foundations of human consciousness. The underpinning for these claims is that "pri mary factors" are a direct manifestation of properties of the human brain. There are several difficulties with this line of approach. The degree of empirical evidence required is staggering. Also, simple belief in the facticity of collective representations weakens the status of the conclusions. Some (81) doubt whether an empirical discipline like anthropology can really come to grips with philosophical problems about human consciousness. Another difficulty is that while it has become standard for those interested in anthropology of knowledge, classification, the "fundamental structures of the human mind," "direct manifestations of the brain," or any other variant on this theme, most anthropologists doing so say nothing more about the brain at all. Indeed, given the training in many anthropological traditions which excludes neurological and biological concerns, "the brain" often functions as a dead-end concept rather than an area for further investigation, which cannot be a happy state of affairs for anthropological inquiries into knowledge. It is of course problematic just how much relevance to our concern with thinking or classifying are the events on the level that neurolinguists and neorophysiologists study, but an effort has to be made when the brain is mentioned to specify some mech anisms, states, or processes, otherwise "predisposition" or "direct mani festation" are just metaphors. Some of the efforts to specify actual neurolog ical or physiological mechanisms (57, 106, 1 l 3, 160) make it clear that anthropology must forge some serious links with the neurobiological sciences if it is to get anywhere. Certainly we need sophisticated neurobio logical accounts of the human symbolic capacity in general (97). It might be thought that a section on categories and universals would make central mention of structuralism and the work of Levi-Strauss. In fact,
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very little genuinely structuralist work is being done nowadays (94). The more basic reason, however, is that despite references to "the human mind," "logic," "toward the intellect" and so on, it has never been exactly clear in what sense the structuralist universe really addresses itself to meaning, knowledge, and cognition as these are normally understood. Despite the appearance of a second volume of Levi-Strauss's collected essays (102) with an introduction less bold than the first, certainly not the case, as Carroll contends (31), that Levi-Strauss's logical structures are similar to the cognitive structures that social psychologists talk about. As Levi-Strauss has made apparent in his analyses of myths, structuralism is not about how human beings think. Structuralism is about seizing the properties of any level of the natural world (and this includes culture) and attempting to generate intelligibility by a nondisfiguring transformation of these properties into another code (36, pp. 41-51). Mean ing means translatability [Levi-Strauss (103, p. 12)], but we should be aware that in structuralism translation is a formal and anonymous conversion of coded properties. The aim is to adduce the possibilities of such transforma tions as evidence that the cosmos uses the same features over and over again in different realms (103, p. 10). Rossi has argued from the parallelisms established in different areas of cultural knowledge-biochemical and so on -that the cybernetic structuralist mode of discourse does promise the establishment of real universals (141, 142). Structuralism uses as a basic analytic tool the concept of binarism but only to assert fundamental unities of mind and body, of nature and culture, of man and the cosmos. For an anthropology of knowledge, structuralism is interesting in one way because it is an antiepistemology. Its radical decentering, the rejection of the Cartesian cogito, which is so basic to Western theories of knowledge, is basic to structuralism, and it is therefore difficult to know how to link the Levi-Straussian effort to what others say about knowledge. This interpreta tive problem has led to structuralism being criticized by a number of schol ars using completely wrong criteria. One feature of structuralism, however, is worth noting; namely, that it is a system devoid of self-knowledge in the sense that it does not reflect sense from a linguistic analogy to silent impasse ( lSI). Another reason why no large amount of space has been devoted to structuralism in this review is that anthropology is now in a poststructural phase (21, 75). It no longer makes sense to ask if society is idealist or materialist. Many questions about the relationship between language and culture now look like dead ends. We are dealing with world structures (2) that are real, that define dealing with a system whose properties generate events, that register events and define events, with a system whose information is stored in multisemi otic systems. Ardener's conception (2) provides us with the most exciting
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formulation to date of what anthropological knowledge must be about-a manifold of behavior, actions, ideas, logic and change, program and event, of language, nonlanguage, and gaps. Such a view certainly seems more exciting than the now dated one that anthropology will be a type of general linguistics (99, p. 160).
SYMBOLS, KNOWLEDGE, RATIONALITY, RITUAL
The increasingly semantic interests of the 1960s led to a large number of publications centrally concerned with issues of symbolism and knowledge. The earlier debates between literalists and symbolists over virgi birth, ritual, and magic (36, pp. 54-61; 156) involved problems of whether beliefs are evidence for knowledge or ignorance, what anthropologists know that entitles them to attribute meanings of a specific actions, what sort of interpretation is permissible when one resorts to frame works not produced by the actors involved. Some of the debates have run themselves dry without being resolved. The problem of spirit conception and physiological paternity continues (115, 143, 162). It is clear that events may be surrounded by more than one semantic framework, and thus for the Aboriginal groups studied by Tonkinson, certain types of discourse, biologi cal and spiritual, are never brought together. Sackett (143) concluded his study of Aboriginal conception beliefs by raising queries about what "know ing" involves. One of the reasons for the decline in contributions to the semantic debates of the 1960s is perhaps the sense that a bifocal framework was forced on the data. Increasingly it is clear how numerous problems in anthropology are established by the unreflecting employment of the categories of knowl edge from our own cultural backgrounds. "Supernatural" is often used in describing the religious beliefs of other cultures, yet this is a notion of enormous complexity in our past (146). In the case of witchcraft (36, pp. 109-27; 110) it has been suggested that a problem has wrongly been defined by our concepts preventing the correct establishment of the semantic field in which the topic of witchcraft can be dissolved. For other cases, too (88), it is clear that our knowledge categories such as economics and politics act to prevent the actual coherence of conceptual schemes appearing in an thropological analyses. Some of the literalists are still not enamored of the more semantic ap proaches. Jarvie (87), for instance, finds pitiful waste of time. Of course, the problem of justifying a mode of interpre tation is real, but the semantic oddity of the rational atmosphere Jarvie feels he occupies is itself a matter of great anthropological interest. The rational ity debate itself has not lately exercised the level of attention it previously
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did. Hanson (74) has looked at some of the old arguments and argues for both context-dependent and universal criteria in the evaluation of beliefs. Turner (163) reminds us how very closely the issue of decisions about rationality is tied up with our translational practices. It is easy enough to make anyone look stupid just by translating in a certain way. One of the difficulties is that rationality is a concept which produces basic evaluations but there is no agreement on how to use the term. The suggestion that rationality is less a universal standard than the incarnation of our particular set of cultural values should be taken seriously (130, 150). Rationality is part of a world which values the achievement of goals, efficiency, and control; it thus appears as the subjection of nature (technology) and the SUbjugation of man (imperialism). The evolution of this value system itself requires ethnographic examination (130). The question of how to interpret systems of beliefs and actions has a wider signifcance i debate. Can anthropological interpretations be valid if they imply meanings that actors do not know? What do anthropologists have to do to justify the interpretative framework they use? Douglas (41) continues her attempts, using Bernstein's work to draw correlations between symbolic modes and social structural realities. While such procedures are now well established, and it has become standard to look for boundaries, social categories, and the like when making symbolic systems intelligible, others protest at the effort to trace symbols to social realities. Spiro (161) wants psychology fully reincorporated into anthropological analysis. Why, he asks, should a myth about murder be a coding of social concerns? Why not view it in literal terms as about the violent energies of the id? Another crucial problem which has surfaced with the increasing semantic orientation of anthropology is how to construe the relationship between knowledge and social context. Functionalism very much saw meanings as lubricants in an interconnected set of social activities. In some modern anthropological traditions the opposite pole has been reached with lifeless taxonomies or elegant symbol structures presented with no indication of how they are a part of the ongoing life of social groups. Clearly all the while the main aim of anthropology is to make social life intelligible, knowledge must be seen in social context. Culture, after all, is a continuous creative, inventive process (165), it is not a dead representation. Bourdieu (22, pp. 2, 26-27) points to the inherent difficulties of anthropologists adequately conceiving the nature of social practice which this contextualization in volves. By their scientific spectacle not a practice. Some cases where knowledge and social context are intimately tied are well known. For instance, Fry (53) explains how a diviner articulates consensus and therefore his task depends upon monitor-
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ing local knowledge. Concepts seemingly abstract or factual may substan tially express social situations ( 19). Even where beliefs acquire a logical form that gives them a template structure so that they are not mere reflexes of particular circumstances, still they significantly interact with specific event sequences ( 127). It might be thought that an anthropology of knowledge is particularly concerned with ideas as opposed to any other cultural systems, but this would be too narrow a view of "knowing" and too narrow a view of human semantic powers. For some reason which may be no more than cultural bias, we closely link "knowledge" and "language," but knowledge is not only coded in linguistic systems. As Mauss pointed out long ago, the human body is a cultural, semantic, and knowing instrument, and for that reason "somatic" anthropology [an anthropology of the body ( 15)] is a necessary part of semantic anthropology. In fact, there is a central area in the an thropology of knowledge concerned with the semantics of human move ment ( 168) which can never be accorded its theoretical import while it is regarded as an arcane specialism. Of course "ritual" has always been a central concern in anthropology, and recent work has posed some difficult problems about its relationship to knowledge. Lewis (105) has recently stressed the need to pay attention to emotion in understanding ritual, and Kapferer (89) has well demonstrated the central semantic and cognitive role of emotion in the operation of ritual. Luc de Heusch (78) challenges the Levi-Straussian contention that ritual is the bastardization of thought, arguing that thought and action are part of the same system. However, the matter of how ritual and knowledge are related and, in particular, how ritual conveys information is highly com plex, as Barth shows in his study of the Baktaman (8). There are, in fact, a range of problems here. How does ritual embody cultural knowledge? What knowledge does an anthropologist possess that is justification for accepting his proferred explanation? How do you explain in language a cultural phenomenon that is itself not in language? One way, of course, is to suggest that ritual is a language. Some anthropologists like Sperber have recently raised the problem that symbolism in general is not like language at all, that there is not a decoding of a code because symbols evoke and gather what has not been systematically organized ( 159, pp. 85-87; 160). But there is the problem of the sense in which nonlinguistic systems are language-like if the Sperber argument is rejected. Gilbert Lewis (105) argues strongly that to liken ritual to a language might be to miss many of its central properties. There is also the general problem of the relationship of linguistics to semantics. Why regard ritual as linguistic-like; why not regard language as ritual-like? There is a serious epistemological problem here. Language possesses some highly special features which other communication systems do not.
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Partly this may be derived from the physical nature of the articulatory organs. But language is particularly associated with the left hemisphere of the brain, the right side being associated with pattern recognition and intuition rather than "rationality." While anthropologists have normally spoken of modes of thought varying cross-culturally, it is obvious that there are different modes of thought, different modes of processing information, different types of knowledge, and different methods of apperception within each human brain (37, pp. 32+-29; 128). To conceive of ritual as linguistic, to explain it in language, is, therefore, among other things, to let the left brain explicate right brain formulations. Neurological studies of trance in fact emphasize the importance of right hemisphere functions in ritual phe nomena ( 106). Since we can perceive and know without language, this semiotic transmutation whereby language is the privileged system for expla nation will certainly distort the phenomena being explained. It is fitting to conclude this section by considering the work of Castaneda (32, 33), whose accounts of coming to understand Don Juan's world are brilliant examples in the "anthropology of not-knowing." Indeed, they show clearly how anthropology, as a system of knowledge with profession ally defined goals and registrative devices for recording events, leads to failure to comprehend. Castaneda is, as Don Juan claims, dumb. He tries to use language to record what is outside language, to "know" what is actually a matter of "being"; while concentrating on professionally taking notes he fails to see the show. Knowing is competence in a certain game. You have to know the rules, you have to know the point of it all. It is a parable of the limitations of anthropology that when Castaneda drops his notebook when frightened, Don Juan and Don Genaro scratch around in the dirt and hand him filth in exchange (32, p. 48). The world of Don Juan is not about articulateness in language or recording in language. It is about will, being, and experiencing. With his cultural and professional biases as to what constitutes knowledge, Castaneda comes through as a rank amateur who misses the experience. A warrior is a witness to the flux of life, not a recorder of explanations. Castaneda's work has had a mixed reception. For Maquet, anthropology is not a spiritual path, it is an academic discipline concerned with knowl edge ( 1 1 1). Such a view misses the point, however. If Don Juan is odd in his own culture, so too is the anthropologist in his. The role of knowing and writing in the life of an anthropologist is atypical of almost all the people he studies, whether in his own culture or in another. When anthropologists write about knowledge or social life, that is a lesson to be remembered. Making sense is a game, a collective undertaking. While studying other cultures it is vital that anthropologists ask themselves what the rules of the anthropological game are and what the point of it is. Littleton ( 108) suggests that Casteneda is leading us to a new anthropology. Certainly his works
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raise in a more extreme form than any others basic epistemological ques tions. How do the rules of producing anthropological accounts limit what we may know of other types of experience? We must never forget how much culture there is buried in anthropological knowledge. The anthropologist's difficulties with the rationality of other modes of being besides those with which he is culturally familiar is fascinating in this respect. Leenhardt ( 100) writes a remarkable account of the Melanesian cosmomorphic sense of being and ends up expressing the hope that Chris tianity would enable the Melanesian to outgrow this fiction and come to a true grasp of psychological individuality. Levy-Bruhl, although toward the end of his life he abandoned notions about different logics, was perplexed by the primitive emphasis on participation. It is indeed the notion of partici pation rather than prelogicality that sums up his later thought, and his earnest struggles, evident in his notebooks ( 104), to find a way of faithfully expressing this concept of finding the right way of translating utterances about participation is a model which anthropologists ought to emulate. Anthropologically, the puzzlement of Westerners about participation or cosmomorphism is no less intriguing than the beliefs themselves. And it is only one example of the anthropological penchant for concern for symbols in a sense which implies "they" have constructed patterns to represent a reality they have not truly grasped. Rarely does one see their thought treated as valid knowledge of or intuitions about reality. Many peoples have a profound intuition about the oneness of life and see themselves as essen tially a part of that fluxional unity; as Levy-Bruhl put it, to be is to partici pate. Whereas individualism might appear to some as the ultimate in cognitive maturity, for others a profound sense of oneness with all things is to grasp the reality of the situation and a belief in the reality of the individual (especially when defined by the ego) as merely a being caught in a semantic fiction. Not only do Westerners find the participation view odd, suggesting it to be the result of cognitive confusion, they characterize their own sense of separateness as rationality. The social conditions that make for conceptual inventions which deny the participation view are anthropologically perplex ing. Is "rationality" invoked by those people to generate meaning when symbolic self-consciousness is near zero and when the languages for resur recting a unity have all died? Bateson, with his skill for synthesizing dispa rate fields of knowledge, has recently written of the ultimate unity of mind and nature ( 10). It is perhaps a matter of taste whether one regards this cybernetic-biological view as a scientific version of the irrational utterances of mystics or as a pale version of what people in cultures very unlike those in which anthropologists live have always assumed to be the case. It may be argued that "primitive" cultures do not formulate this fundamental sense
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of unity adequately, but then what would an adequate formulation look like? By definition, a sense of unity will not be adequately registered in any one semiotic system. Perhaps the sense of unity is in the realm of what Don Juan calls the nagual rather than the tonal,' it is a matter of will, of attitude, and stance toward life; it is not a matter of statement or knowledge at all.
KNOWLEDGE, POWER, IDEOLOGY
There is a well-established tradition in the social sciences which revolves around the idea of the social construction of reality. Stressing creative semantic powers, the traditions of phenomenological and ethnomethodo logical sociology have usefully analyzed our everyday social knowledge. Society, of course, is one of the shared realities we construct. No doubt this emphasis was a healthy reaction to more positivist approaches in sociology, but it does not go far enough. One of the important aspects of everyday knowledge is that it keeps certain people in power and certain others in the dark. Symbols can be constructed as much to mystify people as to portray social reality. There is, in other words, a social misconstruction of reality with the power structures in society partly relying on the fact that reality misdescribed cannot be seen for what it is. There is in that sense also a social construction of ignorance, with symbolic constructs playing a leading part in the process. When we consider that misrepresentation can be a source of power, that symbolic constructs can produce and be parts of false con sciousness (66), the anthropology of knowledge takes on a new dimension. That knowledge is bound up with power is well known. Literacy, for example, makes wider bureaucratic control possible (64, p. 15). A far more general perspective, however, is that knowledge is a resource. The analysis of power relations and the analysis of knowledge creation and distribution are inextricably related. Several anthropologists have recently stressed this power side of symbolic life. Asad (3) protests against the minute semantic obsessions of many anthropologists. The key problem, he asserts, is not meaning, but the politi cal issue of how certain symbols become established and how they are changed. These are issues of social power. Classifications, symbols accepted in society, are dominant; they represent knowledge because dominant ideas are part of the ideology of those who dominate (46, pp. 24-25). They are constructions that are imposed and pass as knowledge only because the symbolic imposition is accepted as an act of power (22, p. 185). "Natural" symbols here are especially important for their power to represent social artifice as ifit were part of the unchangeable order of things (79). Bloch (16, 17) has taken up a slightly different theme. He protests that symbolic phenomena and ritual are not languages and do not explain. They are
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cultural formalizations that express power and disguise reality. Bourdillon (23) is certainly right to protest at the simplistic binarism of Bloch's argu ments. Cultural phenomena simply do not divide into informative and disguising systems, but Bloch's departure from the simple Durkheimian view of symbols and social structure is valuable. If this power aspect of cultural knowledge is valuable, so too is the recent emphasis on the political aspect of the uneven distribution of knowledge. Many recent analyses of "secrecy" (8, 14, 30, 105, 1 1 8) make it clear how the distribution of knowledge creates categories of the knowledgable and the ignorant; the former have power over the latter, whether the latter are women, children, or any other social category. La Fontaine (96) interprets initiation rites as a confirmation of the knowledge of those who organize them and therefore of their social power. The anthropology of knowledge has two obvious ancestors. The seminal contribution of the Annee Sociologique school is now fairly well recognized. The contribution of Marx is still not sufficiently widely recognized in the discipline. Histories of the subject often omit all reference to him, and Levi-Strauss, a generation ago, was one of the few in the discipline con sciously writing about cultural knowledge as superstructure. Thanks to the efforts of the French structural Marxists, this situation is now being recti fied, but it is still controversial to refer to Marx's seminal views on knowl edge and socioeconomic formations. This itself is a subject for the anthropology of knowledge. There is, of course, much that is dead in Marx's thought, and what is required is a critical exploratory Marxism, not a ponderous exegesis by intellectually stunted experts. The Marxian conceptual system is powerful. Its ideas of dynamic social totalities, contradictions, structural causality, hierarchies of interdependence, of tension between praxis, knowledge, and power could be valuable analytic tools in anthropology. The intellectual power of the system has been recognized by those who have argued for a dialogue between Marxist structuralism and the new poststructural an thropology (2, 75). Basic to the richness of the Marxist approach is its critical attitude toward concepts. Marxism is in one aspect a critique of language, for its view of representation and cultural knowledge as possible masks of social reality implies a healthy skepticism as to the conceptual adequacy of the tools used in any anthropological analysis ( 1 3, 23). This power has already been shown in the history of anthropology by the ability of Marxist approaches to transcend the sterile and seemingly endless debate in economic anthropology between substantivists and formalists. Both per spectives grew into self-contained systems of knowledge: another system of a higher order of conceptual power and integrative potential was required. Stereotyped versions of Marxism have been discarded by the French anthropologists influenced by his thought. The superstructure/infrastruc-
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ture division, and other classic formulations, always were problematic in their application to noncapitalist systems. Godelier (62) argues, however, that binarisms like infrastructure/superstructure are misleading, for in a socioeconomic formation, any structure can perform any function; what is required only is a sense of hierarchy of function with the sphere of economic life being ultimately determinative. Thus it is no argument against Marxism that in so-called primitive soci eties kinship dominates social life, or that in others religion is of central importance. The point is, Godelier would argue, that in such situations kinship relations or religious ideas become parts of the forces of production, and it might almost be said that it is the total technoeconomic situation that plays the role in determining what particular spheres of social life will be dominant by virtue of the constraints it imposes. In some primitive societies where kinship is dominant, economic relations are "realized" as kinship relations, productive and redistributive networks are "rewritten" as kinship systems. This modem Marxist perspective could be vital for the anthroplogy of knowledge if it made us wary of pitfalls in our comprehension of the workings of social systems and if it sensitized us to the way knowledge can hide from actors the inner operations of a social formation. Marx has analyzed some of the dominant rewriting rules of self-knowledge in capital ism. Social relations, for example, are expressed as if they were relations between things and thus written about as "price." In many ways this "thingification" is the obverse of the idiom used in other societies where relations between things are thought of as if they were relations between people. It is the task of Marxism to unmask these rewrites for they disguise the inner dynamics of social life. Thus religion in the Inca state is part of the relations of production while economic and political relations are re written as if they were about relations between man and nature (60). Struc tural Marxism is not reductive. It respects the partly autonomous properties of each domain, and it disavows advance knowledge of what functions as what in any sociohistorical situation. Sahlins has written an important book (145) on the practical and the meaningful in cultural life. He does not have the standard vulgar image of Marxist thought that some critics (and even supporters) have. On the other hand (123, 124), he does not see the full value of the Marxist framework either. Marxism is not simply the defective self-consciousness of capitalist society. Moreover, Marx, though he stressed the role of the economic, also stressed meaning: man for Marx is a social being and a meaning maker. The practical in his work is always bound up with systems of ideas, knowledge, and total sets of social relationships. It is not even feasible to oppose the practical and utilitarian to the semiotic and semantic: they are always interfused. Godelier has stressed that there is an ideel part in all praxis (63,
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764): ideas and knowledge are a part of the relations of production,
indeed they are basic to technology itself. Cultural knowledge in this way is part of even the most crudely viewed version of infrastructure. Marx
would not disagree with Sahlins (145, pp. 72, 1 85, 220) that capitalism is writ large but a very definite cultural order with its own symbolic character. If in the Marxist view it is the forces and relations of production that are
not efficiency and rationality determinative in the last instance, there is obviously ample scope for sophis
ticated inquiry before the last analysis is reached. This particularly applies to those realms which fall within the interests of the anthropology of knowledge. Godelier quite rightly points out that ideas like "tribe" are ideological (61, p. 96), but there is much anthropological discourse that hangs around similar ideological notions. It is strange that "tribe" should
have been spotted whereas other notions like "kinship" alld "magic" are
analysis with little evidence of suspicion that they may be more trouble than they are worth. It would be a strange upshot if the categories of empirical anthropology became the opiate of Marxist an thropologists. Many of Godelier's own analyses-of religion and magic, for
handled in Marxist instance (6 1)-are weak (125), even Victorian, and do not adequately re
spect the properties of each domain by any stretch of the imagination. Inevitably a consideration of knowledge, power, and Marxist structural ism leads to the problem of ideology (7). Many systems that might be called classifications could be called ideologies. But there is not within an thropology any very clear formulation of what ideologies are or what their functions are. Is ideology a distinct kind of knowledge or something mas
querading as knowledge, or is it an aspect of all knowledge, namely the
social aspect whereby knowing and acting are related? Then again, is
ideology that aspect offormulation which systematically disguises the social
reality connected with it? There has been a great deal written on ideology by anthropologists in the last few years and a big problem poses itself: should an anthropology of knowledge formulate a theory of ideology or
remain open-minded, accepting that it is impossible in advance to specify what functions ideology has in any particular set of circumstances (3)?
Ideology has often been used more or less as a synonym for "untrue," but there are many situations where what ideology does in regard to knowledge and ignorance is simply to blur the distinction (36, p. 157). What is clear is that ideology has intricate connections with social action or justification of action. Recently it has been suggested that ideology can articulate a social
structure in reserve (86, 148), indicating the transformational potential of
ideology. On a more philosophical level, Gellner (58) has pointed to the reality defining properties of ideology, except that it is a paranoid system since it always seems to need to defend itself against something else. If ideology conjures up images of disguise, falsehood, or practical involve-
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ment, the obverse, that is knowledge pure and simple, is customarily thought to be embodied by natural science. Precisely because this is so an anthropology ignorant of the actual practices of science is crippled. More over, since science is so significant in our own cultural backgrounds it obviously exerts an influence on how we perform cultural translations. During the past two decades a number of the debates about symbolism, traditional thought, and rationality have been based on an image, often unexamined and uninformed, about the nature of science. If anthropologi cal knowledge must be based on cultural self-knowledge, it obviously makes considerable sense for anthropologists to make inquires into the conceptual schemes in their own societies in the same way they do elsewhere (36, pp. 129-53). Such an anthropological scrutiny becomes the more important in view of the recent blossoming of social studies of science. Studies in this realm (98) reveal how many accounts in science and the philosophy of science are mystifications, for they disguise the social relations which produce scientific knowledge. Other work ( 1 8) suggesting that social imagery is at the heart of scientific evaluation and even of logic itself obviously enables us to approach the comparison of scientific and other knowledge systems in different ways. Evans-Pritchard, in his study of Zande witchcraft, a classic in the anthropology of knowledge, made some insightful remarks about evidence, coherence, and values. Bloor ( 18) has suggested that logic is actually social authority because what is taken for granted is a convention and therefore social; arguments are to be appraised by standards that are "appropriate," and this is again a social matter. In the light of such sugges tions, the comparisons and contrasts drawn between science and nonscience by anthropologists can be looked at afresh. Certainly modern developments in the social studies of science should become an important source of inspiration in the anthropology of knowledge to take us beyond the explora tions of Douglas (40), who has already pioneered the sociological theory of knowledge beyond the field in which Durkheim was happy to confine it.
CONCLUDING REMARKS: HISTORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, TRANSLATION
This review has looked at a number of areas of anthropological literature published since the mid-1970s which have been concerned, in one way or another, with sociocultural knowledge. This conclusion does not attempt to summarize these trends, but rather explores briefly a more reflexive line of inquiry in order to sketch other aspects that must be a part of anthropologi cal studies of knowledge. Anthropology is part of itself. Any statement about culture is also a statement about anthropology, and the self-knowledge of the discipline is
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vital in any development of the anthropology of knowledge. Unfortunately, anthropology has a scandalously small measure of historical self-under standing. The number of scholarly texts dealing with the sociohistorical contexts in which anthropological knowledge has grown are few, although a conscious concern for the nature of various anthropological traditions (39) is now evident. This historico-social locating of knowledge is vital, for anthropology is not simply knowledge of "others," it is a knowledge which grows out of a fundamental dialogic of self and other that are mutually defining (36, pp. 165-69; 44). Anthropology, therefore, rests on self-knowledge; we can even speak of a "personal anthropology" in a way which is epistemologically significant (133). Some of these general issues about the status of anthropological knowl edge have presented themselves and will continue to do so in a political rather than philosophical guise. The politics of anthropology (82) raises the whole question of the relative silence of former generations as to the colonial context in which their knowledge developed and for which, some allege, it was highly appropriate. Third World scholars (1 16, 126) are now asking for a decolonization of knowledge and alleging that much of our renowned ethnography is useless, flimsy, and arrogant. Such remarks should not come as a shock when honest reflections are made ( 136) on the very method of fieldwork which underlies the production of anthropological knowledge. We write books about other cultures often having had less than a year's familiarity with them. That unspoken background knowledge which eth nomethodologists have stressed is vital in understanding social interaction can rarely be acquired by the anthropologist as investigator. And indeed, for much of his period in the field he will function with the social and linguistic competence of a small child. On a different level, though also undeniably part of the politics of anthropology, we know ( 1) that the male bias built into our discipline at both empirical and theoretical levels makes anthropology truly a study of men rather than knowledge of humanity. Our final remarks must be reserved for the subject of translation, for translation is the generative art which produces anthropological knowledge. Strangely, despite this centrality, anthropologists say little about translation (36, pp. 153-69). Certainly there is no unanimity about what translating is, but a discipline so intimately bound up with translation is silent on the very basis of the knowledge it purports to represent. Translation is a communica tive act ( 122), but that point merely forces us to think further on the social context of anthropology, the audience, and our motives for speaking. The subject of translation, then, like the other themes we have explored in this review, reminds us how intimately related are an anthropology of knowl edge and the needed reflexivity in the discipline as a whole.
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LINGUISTIC AND COGNITIVE APPROACHES

this stress dispenses with a

ordinary lives. Tyler

formerly a leading contributer to cognitive

also casts doubt on the value

Added to this is a great divergence of method from the experimental,

Since this is so, what we often call "intelligence" or

764): ideas and knowledge are a part of the relations of production,

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32. 33. 34.

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it-child in a Western desert culture. See

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