Postmodern Anthropology Versus René Girard
Where a "hard science supremacist" examines his epistemological anxieties
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I'm currently going through a minor epistemological crisis. In the past months, I’ve been grappling with the truth and the meaning of my written work. I’ve spent most of my time reading and writing, believing that I am figuring out and representing some aspect of reality. And I feel called to continue to do so for the next years, possibly decades. Postmodernism, particularly its militant siblings—"critical theories" like Marxism, feminism, post-colonial nationalism, critical race theory, and gender theory—question this belief. Am I naive in believing I can access reality and represent it through writing? Is power more primal than truth, and, therefore, should scholars embrace their unavoidable political role to contribute to social justice?
I'll explore these questions by looking at James Clifford's “Partial Truths” through the lens of René Girard's critique of Nietzsche and postmodernism.
“Partial Truths” is an introductory chapter to the book Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by Clifford and George E. Marcus and published in 1986. The book is a collection of seminal essays in postmodern anthropology.
The chapter opens with a depiction of some giants in the field: Stephen Tyler in the middle of ethnographic fieldwork in India, Margaret Mead interviewing villagers in Bali, and Bronislaw Malinowski writing inside a tent while some Trobrianders stand outside, observing him. Clifford tells us how writing, for this pioneering generation of scholars, "has emerged as central to what anthropologists do both in the field and thereafter." It is as if anthropologists were mere transmitters of data, where writing was "reduced to method: keeping good field notes, making accurate maps, 'writing up' results." Clifford then brings us to postmodernity.
The essays collected here assert that this ideology has crumbled. They see culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; they assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes. They assume that academic and literary genres interpenetrate and that the writing of cultural descriptions is properly experimental and ethical. Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts. It undermines overly transparent modes of authority, and it draws attention to the historical predicament of ethnography, the fact that it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures (Wagner 1975). As will soon be apparent, the range of issues raised is not literary in any traditional sense. Most of the essays, while focusing on textual practices, reach beyond texts to contexts of power, resistance, institutional constraint, and innovation.
Some key points I noted down as I read the article:
"Literariness" affects the representation of culture. As a writer, I make stylistic decisions to keep the audience's interest, produce some emotional hooks, and (perhaps unconsciously) follow my own style and aesthetics. Each writer's literary choices surely affect the presentation of the cultures they observe.
The context of the work of writing also affects the representation of culture. I like this list from the chapter:
(1) contextually (it draws from and creates meaningful social milieux);
(2) rhetorically (it uses and is used by expressive conventions);
(3) institutionally (one writes within, and against, specific traditions, disciplines, audiences);
(4) generically (an ethnography is usually distinguishable from a novel or a travel account);
(5) politically (the authority to represent cultural realities is unequally shared and at times contested);
(6) historically (all the above conventions and constraints are changing). These determinations govern the inscription of coherent ethnographic fictions.
Clifford describes the perspective of the collection as "more Nietzschean than realist or hermeneutic," wherein "all constructed truths are made possible by powerful 'lies' of exclusion and rhetoric."
He also mentions the rise of "indigenous anthropologists," insiders who study their own culture. This naturally leads to a critique of anthropology produced within the system of colonialism and which questions the epistemology of "The West." Clifford lists down newer approaches: "hermeneutics," "structuralism," "history of mentalities," "neo-Marxism," "genealogy," "post-structuralism," "post-modernism," "pragmatism," and also "alternate epistemologies": feminist, ethnic, and non-Western. Said's "Orientalism" gets a special mention.
Clifford then presents the evolution of anthropological writing towards epistemic self-awareness. Before the sixties—from Malinowski, to Mead, to Firth, to Radin—the "subjectivity of the author is separated from the objective referent." "In the sixties this set of expository conventions cracked. Ethnographers began to write about their field experience in ways that disturbed the prevailing subjective/objective balance."
Next, Clifford mentions the missing female perspective in some ethnologies and later in the chapter explains why a feminist essay is missing from the collection they have edited.
The last section of the chapter aims to highlight the impact of this postmodernist trend in the field of anthropology. It has dislodged "the ground from which persons and groups securely represent others."
A conceptual shift, "tectonic" in its implications, has taken place. We ground things, now, on a moving earth. There is no longer any place of overview (mountaintop) from which to map human ways of life, no Archimedian point from which to represent the world.
I'm recruiting the French social theorist René Girard to guide me in navigating this crisis. He has critiqued both Nietzsche (“Dionysius Versus The Crucified,” among others) and Derrida (“Lévi-Strauss, Frye, Derrida and Shakespearean Criticism”). For this current exploration, I'm using Duane Armitage's 2021 book Philosophy of the Violent Sacred, which conveniently weaves together Girard's critique of Nietzsche and postmodernism in one place. All quote blocks below are from this book.
To be appropriately postmodern, let me be upfront with my "positionality." My academic training has been in engineering and biology. You could say that my epistemic bias is that of a "hard science supremacist." This is probably the source of my anxieties. The scholarly domain I find myself in today is way outside Popper's demarcation. Like anyone trained in science, I am a realist—I believe we have access to reality and can describe it. However, without the mooring of Falsifiability, I feel insecure. Ultimately, what motivates this exploration, I think, is a feeling that probably stems from my inability to articulate how my writing is or can be true. Can I actually speak truth?
Nietzsche says No. From Philosophy of the Violent Sacred:
In other words, atheistic modern science has failed to realize that if God is really “dead,” then the idea that the human intellect can track an intelligible order to reality—intelligibility itself—remains nothing more than a metaphysical hangover from theism, insofar as theism believed that reality itself was intelligible and rational precisely because it was designed by a Designer. Faith in “truth” (or reason’s a capacity to find it) is for Nietzsche tantamount to faith in another world, a meta-physical, supersensible world—the very same world that God occupied in Christianity and thus continues to occupy for science insofar as science still rests upon a metaphysical faith in truth as what “is,” over against the phenomenal world of becoming. In short, science represents nothing more than the latest instantiation of what Nietzsche terms the “ascetic ideal,” the ideal that would deny this world in favor of a transcendent one.
This denial of realism is the foundation of Nietzsche's rejection of science.
We could say then that Nietzsche’s thinking atheistic modern science through to its essence leads Nietzsche to his own perspectivism, which we would call today his “postmodernism.” There are no truths, only perspectives, or, as Nietzsche sometimes puts it, “There are no facts, only interpretations”—even this itself being an interpretation—and “so much the better.” As we have seen earlier, Nietzsche sums up his perspective as such: “The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fable . . . it is ‘in flux,’ as something in a state of becoming, as falsehood always changing but never getting near truth: for—there is no ‘truth’”.
The other metaphysical option that Nietzsche rejects is our age's unquestioning preference for the downtrodden. To him, this is an arbitrary choice that has been brought about by the Judeo-Christian influence. To Nietzsche, siding with the weak stems from "slave morality" and is a choice against life. He contrasts this to the wild Dionysian world of our pagan past, where "master morality" reigns.
Returning again to Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality here can prove helpful. Essentially, Nietzsche asks us to consider something obvious, so obvious that it is often overlooked: if there is no truth, no being, then what remains is relativism and perspectivism, and if relativism and perspectivism, then morality and even reality simply amounts to power relations (a claim Marxism readily concedes insofar as it understands the world as a history of class conflict); yet if reality is simply about power, will to power, then reality will inevitably bifurcate into those who have power and those who do not. In other words, there will be those who are strong and those who are weak. Now, concerning the strong and weak (or rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim, etc.), why should we assume that it is best or virtuous to side with the weak, with the oppressed? Why assume their perspective? Why not assume the strong and powerful perspective? The seemingly innate instinct we have to side with the weak, to feel pity and compassion for the persecuted, for Nietzsche and Girard, is nothing more than the result of two thousand years of habituation—catechesis—in Christianity.
Postmodernism has adopted Nietzsche's relativism but has retained the Judeo-Christian preference for the victim. The alternative epistemologies that Clifford lists all have their own chosen victims to defend: the proletariat; women; the colonized; and oppressed races, genders, and other identities.
Yet siding with the weak, victimized, and oppressed is precisely what “we” as a culture, a postmodern culture, do. Again, to even question this moral absolute results in public scorn, for our entire Western morality is based upon it. It seems therefore our postmodern culture is anything but post-Christian. Rather it represents an ethic saturated in Christianity, a hyper-Christianity of sorts, where the axiom of concern for victims remains, in a way, the sole moral absolute.
There are very few scholars who have the psychopathy required to follow Nietzsche all the way to his Dionysian ideal. Most cannot let go of the transcendental desire to do good in the world, even with skepticism to truth. This skepticism might even have a moral grounding. According to
, the horror of the holocaust challenged the philosophers of Europe "to a profound revision of the central tenets of many inherited belief systems, including but not limited to theological ones, and of the ways in which they are held and deployed." They blamed metanarratives like nationalism and religion for the unprecedented scale of violence that erupted in the continent.What, then, is the alternative?
Girard's own scholarship has given me an example to imitate. His Mimetic Theory is barely falsifiable, yet it is the idea that has had the greatest impact on my life, in terms of mastery over desire, since I learned about practical virtue ethics in my teens (I talk about it here). In fact, if I look back on my life, the ideas that have produced the greatest good in me and the people surrounding me were likewise unfalsifiable.
I also want to imitate Girard’s openness to ideas and thinkers despite his disagreement with them. He avoids scapegoating anyone. He disagrees with Nietzsche on a fundamental level, yet he appreciates and utilizes Nietzsche’s ideas to speak truth. Likewise, his disagreement with postmodernism does not prevent him from utilizing its approaches, such as deconstruction.
That is, as noted above, Girard has often made explicit his debt to deconstructive hermeneutics; however, Girard does not allow his affections toward deconstruction to result in a relativism simpliciter. Facts and interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Rather Girard believes there are in fact certain objective truths, among which are the truths of mimetic theory, revealed by Christianity, namely the victim mechanism. Thus, Girard could not in any way maintain a consistent perspectivism (if it is possible for such to be consistently maintained at all), since he indeed believes that one perspective—that of the victim’s—is the “true perspective.” Mythological perspectives are from the perspective of the crowd, which thinks the victim is guilty; thus, myth distorts the truth and is therefore false.
I read Clifford's introductory chapter with interest and with this openness. Knowing the philosophical grounding of the essays presented in the book allows me to approach them as a craftsman would in engaging with other practitioners: to understand where they are coming from, learn from them, and bring back what is valuable for my work.
The crisis is not yet over. I'm currently studying David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. His criteria for "Good Explanations" are broader than Popper's falsifiability and can include Girard's theories. I will use this criteria to compare Girard's book The Scapegoat with Darwin's On The Origin of Species. With this, I hope to figure out what kind of knowledge I am producing in my work, especially in relation to the sciences within Popper’s demarcation.
Nice.
I've also wrestled with this question of reconciling postmodern conceptions of truth, with attempts to "really understand" the world in some positivistic way. Reading this encouraged me to start to articulate some of my thoughts.
The framework I think I've come away with is to adopt an instrumentalist orientation, where we are all just embodied information processors optimizing objective functions, with more or less useful models of the world at our disposal.
With this approach, one can say the social world is often so highly complex and noisy that the cognitive algorithms in two different minds can fit equally predictive, but mutually inconsistent models to the same data.
While some models will have less internal coherence than others--so complete postmodern epistemological explosion can be avoided--there really is much more latitude to descriptions of the world--especially the social one--than a positivist-minded thinker would comfortably admit.
This approach also sheds light on the power question: with two equally predictive models of a system, an embodied information processor optimizing an objective function (that is, you or me) chooses the model that has the added benefit of cybernetically feeding back into the system itself to steer it in a favorable direction.
So I view the big postmodern like, "There's no truth and it's power all the way down," statement as more of an aesthetic posture than the most useful epistemological model available. But that doesn't mean there aren't deep insights there that can serve as components of a more useful model.
...my two cents, lol