JOURNALISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Benjamin Smith
Journalism and anthropology are, at heart, very similar undertakings. Both begin with care for others and interest in their lives, conduct an experiential investigation of some subset of the whole, and finally write about it in a way they hope is compatible with the authors’ goals, values, and responsibilities. But the divisions also run deep. One is primarily a commercial enterprise, the other an academic discipline; one conducts very brief research, the other very extended; one focuses on rapid iteration and output, the other on long works and theoretical depth. One strives for prose accessible to the majority, the other often does not. But here what is dealt with here is one final difference: their practices of investigation and the justification they summon to defend their norms. In other words, how is anthropology’s mode of understanding human activity different from that of journalism’s?
Fieldwork in anthropology is of course no ahistorical monolith. The history of anthropology finds its roots in the Enlightenment’s interest in the laws of human activity, for instance in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau who sought to reconstruct the social development of modern society and in the early sociological projects of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, the father of positivism. The field proper got its start among the physical anthropologists who tried to discern the progression and conditions of human evolution, beginning with notable figures such as Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace. This scientific interest in the lawfulness of human development then quickly spread beyond the mere physical body to cultural practices such as religion, kinship structures, and economics. Of course the field used various methods to conduct its analyses, but at their base remained one constant: the belief that the human world was like the physical world and thus had a lawfulness that could be uncovered through fact-based investigation.
• FROM SPECULATION TO INVESTIGATION
A shift occurred in the 19th century from a dominance of what we might call speculation, under which reason – the new God of the Enlightenment – was deemed the arbiter of truth, to a dominance of investigation. Investigation as understood under positivism gave up the search for essences and substituted it with a form of empiricism that instead looked to identify the patterns and regularities of the observable world. These new scientific “laws” were meant to be observable, repeatable, and yet remain under permanent skepticism – always open to the possibility that new investigation would force a refinement or even abandonment of the old.
The results of this paradigm in anthropology were also varied. Under such fancy titles as diffusionism, functionalism, structuralism, and so on different generations of anthropologists interpreted the call to investigation based on positivist beliefs in different ways – somewhat akin to how the investigation of physics are explained in different ways under classical Newtonian explanations to those of quantum mechanics. Each was devoted to positivism, but used a different overarching theory to interpret the experimental results. Still, anthropology understood itself as a science and as such used empirical methods to try to uncover the laws of human being. In short, until the middle of the 20th century, anthropological fieldwork – like journalism – was still very much under the sway of positivism.
What began to take root at that time was a shift beyond investigation to what we might call understanding – a shift based on rising skepticism of the analogy between physical and human sciences. Anthropologists – and other human and social scientists – began to speculate that human practices were not subject to the same kinds of lawfulness that characterized the physical world and thus their modes of investigation might also need reevaluation. In truth this shift was prepared almost a century earlier by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (pron. /dill–tie/) who sought to distinguish the social and physical sciences. Dilthey was strongly critical of Comte’s attempts to apply the scientific method to human practice because, as he said, “Nature is something we explain, the life of the soul is something we understand.” To better understand exactly what this means, let me turn to a straightforward example.
• WHAT IS A HAMMER?
Dilthey’s critique was based on the conviction that human practices are fundamentally about meaning and not brute facts. To see the difficulties that the fact-based position entails, consider a simple question: what is a hammer? Enlightenment thinking – the precursor to positivism – would have sought the answer to this question in the human mind, in reason. For instance, some may recall Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy where he asks how we can know that the wax of a candle and the melted wax are the same. His conclusion was that the senses are unreliable, because they would tell us that there is insufficient similarity between the solid and liquid forms. Instead, Descartes follows the Enlightenment belief in reason – only reason (by some sleight of hand that is never revealed) can reveal to us the truth about wax. In short, everything that exists has an essence and this essence can be uncovered by reason. Thus, the Enlightenment thinker would seek the essence of a hammer.
Positivism would reject such an effort as little more than theology transferred into the human domain. Things don’t have essences, and even if they did, they aren’t available to our senses. Instead it would undertake a factual description of a hammer: a piece of wood with certain dimensions attached to another piece of metal with its own certain dimensions and form. Or it could extend this description to all instances of hammers under investigation and deliver a comprehensive, fact-based report of the various woods, synthetic materials, metals, etc. that take form as a hammer. But would this detailed report on the hammer really help us understand what a hammer is? Dilthey’s answer and later the answer of anthropology in the middle of the 20th century was no. Facts may be available to the senses, they may be repeatable, they may be verifiable – all laudable scientific characteristics – but they are not particularly useful. Why not? Because they often do little in helping us understand phenomena of our human world.
Instead, imagine how a young child might answer the question. What is a hammer? “It’s for hammering nails,” she might say. The child has apparently said very little, but that appearance is quite deceiving. Why? Because even her “simple” answer is made against the background of a full, embodied understanding of the entire lifeworld to which she and the hammer belong – one in which hammers are for hammering nails. This means that she likely belongs to a place where wood is an available resource, that metallurgy has been mastered, that houses are built with wooden frames, that furniture is made out wood, and that fastening pieces of wood together is useful and important in order to accomplish other, larger goals such as sitting upright, eating off of tables, or dwelling in houses. Were we to ask a child born to a nomadic family in which hammers were for shoeing horses or one of masons in which houses were built of stone, then to the same answer we would get very different, but equally informative answers.
What this comparison uncovers is that fact-based explanations can often be little more than excursions into knowledge the utility of which is highly questionable precisely because they focus solely on those pieces of information that can be considered objective or verifiable. By avoiding the meaning of some object, practice, or event they stay on supposedly safe ground. But this safety comes at the price of usefulness, for if I am honestly interested in what this funny object is that I’ve discovered, then the positivist’s answer will not help me use it. The child’s answer will.
How can we make sense of this initially outrageous claim that facts – the very bread and butter of both science and journalism – do little in getting at what really matters in our lives? Let us return to Dilthey. Dilthey’s focus on understanding, not explanation, stood in a long scholarly tradition called hermeneutics. Hermes – where hermeneutics gets its name – was the wing-footed god of ancient Greece whose task it was to deliver messages from Mount Olympus to the mortals below. His job was to translate between the two incommensurable worlds of the divine and the mundane. By the Middle Ages hermeneutics had transformed from the dispatch of messages to the textual interpretation of the Bible and other ancient texts. The incongruities between the wrathful Father of the Old Testament and the magnanimous Jesus of the New Testament required a certain deftness to resolve. By means of allegory the Israelites’ exclusionary claim to heaven could be broadened to include all of God’s children, forgiven by the inclusionary Christ. The word of God was read and interpreted to reveal its true spirit – more than the sum of its parts. Thus in its role as textual interpretation hermeneutics went far beyond a reading of the mere words on the page and delved deep into the lifeworld of the text to reveal true understanding. Finally, by the 19th century hermeneutics had expanded from textual interpretation to the interpretation of entire events and cultures, even if the impacts of these thinkers didn’t make a significant impact on anthropology for more than a century afterwards.
What anthropology qua subject finally realized, by the middle of the 20th century, was that fact-based explanations failed to get down to the bedrock of meaning, because that fundament was located on a different level. Meaning and facts simply don’t reside at the same place; searching out one you will almost necessarily miss the other as the example with the hammer tried to demonstrate. It’s worth looking at why this is the case.
• PROPERTIES versus PURPOSES
At its most basic, positivism sees the world as an ensemble of objects with properties. Statements about theses objects and their properties – to the extent that they are observable and repeatable – are considered valid and thus provisionally taken as true. Theories, in stark contrast to facts, are then floated to try an account for as many individual facts as possible. The validity of the facts themselves is rarely in question, but more that of the theory that is used to explain them. This is all well and good if we are dealing with billiard balls (Newton) or even different species of Galápagos Mockingbirds (Darwin), but for human practices it just doesn’t cut the cake. The reason for this is that humans don’t primarily exist in a world of physical objects with properties, but in a world that is meaningful, and meaning can essentially be reduced to purpose. In other words, who, what, when, where, and how are all considerably less central to our human concerns than why, what for.
This is already apparent in the example of the hammer. First of all, it seems clear that the physical characteristics of the hammer are less important than the meaning of it. When I ask, picking up a hammer, “What’s this?” few interlocutors would begin to point out its properties. Instead they would tell me about its purpose. And if I didn’t understand about the immediate purpose – hammering nails – then they would expand to the next level of purpose, perhaps building houses. What reveals itself through every example of this kind of questioning is the fact that things and events exist for us as humans primarily and most often as purposes, and that those purposes, in turn, stand in a network of relation to one another (hammering to nails, to building furniture, to sitting in chairs and at desks, to leading a sedentary form of life, and so on). The conclusion of this line of thought is that, although facts are not irrelevant to our daily lives, they are far less important than reasons and purposes. This is because we are first and foremost beings that live in a world not of objects and properties, but of meaning. For us, then, the question is: if it is true that what matters most to us as humans are purposes – the ‘whys’ – then should our methods of conducting research and presenting our finding differ from those of positivism?
• ANTHROPOLOGY REACTS
While it might initially seem of little more than academic interest, I think that a great deal can be learned from the various ways in which anthropology reacted to the demise of positivism. Here I want to look very briefly at three prominent responses: interpretivism, feminism/post-colonial theory, and postmodernism. Each case is interesting on its own, but I also believe it quite easy to see the lessons that might be gleaned from the point of view of journalism.
Interpretivism – most often associated with Clifford Geertz – focused very strongly on the ‘web of culture,’ that is the web of relations between all the people, customs, institutions, signs, events, and so on that make up human experience. As in the example with the hammer, interpretivism embraced the realization that every time one begins with a simple question, one is immediately thrust into a complex and endless set of interrelations between many other nodes within the network. Understanding some particular event in a comprehensive manner is thus impossible, but what is possible is – like the hammer – to investigate a sufficient number of those immediate and proximal relations such that the object of investigation takes its place within the web of related meanings and purposes. Interpretivism thus gave up any pretense of truth in the positivist sense, but by focusing on “lighting up” a node within a network of meanings won relevance by favoring a mode of both investigation and explanation that remained closer to our normal, everyday experience of the world.
Feminism and post-colonial theory in anthropology began primarily as critiques of what they saw as the chronic and structural underrepresentation of women as well as the subjects of colonial powers in the field. Furthermore this underrepresentation was seen as problematic on the part of both the subjects of anthropology as well as its representatives. As a response to this situation and to positivism in general these strands in anthropology tried to give voice to these groups, allowing them to tell their stories in ways that were outside the norm. First-person narratives, fictionalized accounts, poetry, mythology and much more were suddenly put forward as new ways of telling stories in anthropology. Vis a vis positivism, this plurality of both new subjects and modes of representation asserted that fields of meaning and purpose can never be monolithic, each individual subject has their own take and their own way of telling a story. The most ethical goal in such a landscape is to allow for as much diversity as possible.
Finally, postmodernism in anthropology turned the apparatus of literary analysis on to its own scholarly works, unveiling the extent to which the dominant mode of representation was at its base little more than a style of writing which sought to exercise its power over those it studied. This critique focused heavily on the impersonal and authoritative voice of positivism as analogous to that of bureaucratic, governmental control. In short, postmodernism laid bare the fact that anthropological writing, like all other writing, was but a style of authorship and that it embodied the dominant position of power over its subjects while simultaneously hiding behind the veil of facts and evidence.
The dominant mode of contemporary journalism could still be considered guilty of all three critiques. It does often focus largely on individual events, doing little to provide the necessary context within which the greater meaning of the story could be placed. Furthermore, the kinds of voices that are present in most commercial media channels and the accepted ways of telling stories are generally limited. And, finally, the style of contemporary journalism is still too rarely put into question and analyzed for the ways in which it actually disempowers its readers by fostering an attitude of spectatorship as opposed to engagement. So, to descend from the theoretical to the practical, what is to be done?
• TOWARD A JOURNALISM OF CARE
One major result of the understanding of meaning that I’ve presented – essentially that meaning is based on final purposes – is that how the world appears to each individual, each community depends on what it’s trying to do, what it cares about. Take the front page of the NYT for example. The front page is filled with many kinds of content, information, design and so on. It is in itself one and the same page for each person who looks at it, but because we don’t live in this world of facts this isn’t really the case. The banker may see the page and immediately look at the stock market figures, then take that information and interpret other political pieces. A typographer might immediately notice that the columns have been changed and completely ignore what’s written in the articles, only thinking about the implication of this design change. Each reader comes to the page with their own world of things that they care about and to each of them the same object – the front page of The Gray Lady – will mean something different.
Of course, at one level this observation is quite unremarkable. Yet the implications for a journalistic practice that is based on the strong belief in objectivity and the principles of positivism are, it seems to me, considerable. Even if we grant that all journalists go about their activities with the best of intentions – to serve the community, provide a record of events, to allow for an informed citizenry – then we must admit that they do so on the basis of a belief that objective journalism is the best tool to this end. Here we could say that the final purpose is still ‘care for the community’, but operating under a system that assumes facts and disinterested reporting are the ideal means. What I’ve tried to suggest in this paper is that anthropology and other thinkers within the humanist tradition have come to a very different conclusion: namely that because the human world is one that appears to us first and foremost as one of meaning, that the most direct path to knowledge is not via facts, but via an understanding of purposes.
The question that I cannot answer is how this new stance would change the standard of journalistic reporting. How, for instance, would a story on educational reform look different if the who, what, when, where, and how were all subservient to the attempt to understand why the various parties took the stances that they did? What ultimate motivations did the individuals have – political, professional, personal, religious, local – that might help the readers understand what is at the base of the story as an object of purposes and not properties? How would a story on downtown development change if one attempted to present the fundamental meaning of such proposals to the important stakeholders? How stories on local government change? I don’t know the precise answers to the questions, but my guess is that what would reveal itself is a framework similar to that we saw with the hammer. We would spend less time on the particulars of this or that, and more on uncovering and discussing what it is we want to do with and in our community, where our similarities are and where we diverge. Perhaps a network of shared meaning, of shared goals purposes would “light up” and allow us all to better see what we truly care about and how we can make those goals reality.