Widok The strange rapprochement? Clifford Geertz and the natural sciences PK XIV/1 2012
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(2) 2. Jacek Małczyński. acteristic method – thus contributing more to the strengthening of the division into the humanities and the natural sciences than to its overcoming – this time emerges as an advocate of a rapprochement between these branches of knowledge. I believe that by tackling the issue of naturalism, the high point of the analysed polemic, the author of The Interpretation of Cultures touches upon the essence of the problem troubling contemporary humanities, which have been looking for their identity on the wave of successive turns. When we take into account the simultaneous “return to things”, the performative turn or the increasingly popular studies into animals, plants and relations between human and non-human agents, it turns out that many scholars increasingly look for inspiration in the natural sciences, especially biological sciences. Bioart, experimenting with the genetic material, or biometrics, exploring new ways of identifying humans thanks to DNA, have made it necessary for the humanities to become well-versed in genetics. On the other hand, neurophysiological developments, filtered through psychology, provide us with new explanations of human actions, including those associated with culture. Geertz begins his polemic with Taylor by referring to his obsession with naturalism, manifested in an “ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences”5, to which the author of The Ethics of Authenticity confessed. Naturalism is usually manifested in two variants: substantive and methodological. The former is about a certain vision of the world assuming its unity and continuity and reducing all phenomena to a single level. The latter is about assuming that the entire world can successfully be studied by means of methods offered by the natural sciences. Both versions of naturalism usually complement each other: decisions concerning the method of studying reality are in most cases based on some ontological assumptions, even if they are not expressed explicitly. The anti-naturalism proposed by Taylor, as presented by Geertz, is primarily methodological. It is against the use in the natural and human sciences of the same procedures to “clear a space in those sciences for ‘hermeneutic’ or ‘interpretivist’ approaches to explanation”6 in the latter. Thus the Canadian philosopher continues the tradition that has its source at least in Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy, which juxtaposes the natural sciences – free from value judgment, seeking to formulate laws, explain and predict – with the humanities, based on understanding and interpretation. Geertz assumes, perhaps too hastily, that the process of the humanities liberating themselves from the dictatorship of the natural sciences, begun at the turn of the 20th century, is coming to an end before our very eyes. It seems that the hermeneutics-influenced humanists have come to terms with the uncertain status of their knowledge and do not need anymore to refute the naturalists’ accusations of 5 . C. Geertz, “The Strange Estrangement: Charles Taylor and the Natural Sciences”, [in:] idem, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Polish translation by Z. Pucek, Kraków 2003, p. 180. 6 Ibidem, p. 181.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 2. 2014-06-26 08:46:45.
(3) The strange rapprochement? Clifford Geertz and the natural sciences. 3. impotence. A question, therefore, arises whether the humanities, enriched by the experience of their otherness, should not again get closer to the natural sciences, which have changed considerably since. These changes prompt the American anthropologist to rethink again the relations between the two. In his opinion, The beginning of such a reframing would seem to involve taking seriously the image (and the reality) of a loose assemblage of differently focused, rather self-involved, and variably overlapping research communities in both the human and the natural sciences – economics, embryology, astronomy, anthropology – and the abandonment therewith of the Taylor-Dilthey conception of two continental enterprises, one driven by the ideal of a disengaged consciousness looking out with cognitive assurance upon an absolute world of ascertainable fact, the other driven by that of an engaged self struggling uncertainly with signs and expressions to make readable sense of intentional action. What one has, it seems, is rather more an archipelago, among the islands of which, large, small and in between, the relations are complex and ramified, the possible orderings very near to endless7.. The changes of atmosphere in the relations between the human and natural sciences, called for by Geertz, question his earlier views in which he repeatedly opposed attempts by the natural sciences to conquer the humanities, e.g. under the guise of sociobiology. The American anthropologist’s intellectual quest can be seen in his book published in 1995 and entitled After the Fact. Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, which is a kind of scholarly autobiography, in which personal threads are intertwined with changing research orientations. In it, Geertz presents his love affair with anthropology from the 1950s, when he studied at Harvard University, which at that time was under the influence of Talcott Parsons, who dreamed about integrating social sciences and create a general theory of action – from which the author of Local Knowledge distanced himself – through his stay at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, when the idea of transforming ethnography into symbolic anthropology was taking shape, until becoming a professor at the elite Institute for Advance Study in Princeton. As he recalls, the metamorphosis in which he was instrumental consisted in placing the systematic study of meaning, the vehicles of meaning, and the understanding of meaning at the very center of research and analysis: to make of anthropology, or anyway cultural anthropology, a hermeneutical discipline8.. The author of The Interpretation of Cultures expressed his attachment to the hermeneutic tradition in the epilogue to a collection of essays by different authors, The Anthropology of Experience, published in 1986, in which he argued that the main task of ethnography should be the study of means of expression resembling Dilthey’s “life-expresions”. “We cannot,” he wrote, “live other people’s lives and it is a piece of bad faith to try. We can but listen to what, in words, in 7 . Ibidem, p. 189. C. Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Polish translation by T. Teszner, Kraków 2010, p. 120. 8 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 3. 2014-06-26 08:46:45.
(4) 4. Jacek Małczyński. images, in actions, they say about their lives”9. Do the fears presented in the polemic with Taylor signify an abandonment of these declarations? What, in fact, would the desired rapprochement between the human and natural sciences mean? As Geertz argues, the Canadian philosopher fell victim to a false image of the natural sciences, an image that, popular as it is in the humanities, brings more losses than benefits to them, making them a disabled science or leading them astray into relativism. In his view, the image of the natural sciences to which humanists have become accustomed is far too hermetic and static, for it is based on a 17th century, mechanistic model of science, derived from physics and promoted by Galileo, Descartes and Newton (and even on its later, 19th century version). This is a model that already in the 18th century became a subject of philosophical polemics prompted by the interest in natural history and vitalism10. However, as the American anthropologist reminds us, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – a book he described elsewhere as “the right text at the right time”11 – suggests that the history of science is more of a history of break-ups and changing paradigms. He saw Thomas S. Kuhn’s work as groundbreaking, because through it the natural sciences became “infected” by the sociology of knowledge, with their immutable image separated from history undergoing revision. What apparently escaped humanists’ attention were the transformations that began to occur in the natural sciences in the 19th century, i.e. on the one hand physics giving up some of its cognitive aspirations, also because of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Max Planck’s quantum theory, and on the other – the birth and development of biology. The latter, impossible to be confined to the physicalist model, became a new “archetype of scientific enquiry”12. That the physicalist model became very inconvenient for biology, especially evolutionary biology, can be seen in views expressed by Henryk Skolimowski, who called for a rejection of the positivist “restrictive harness of a rationality” reducing all phe 9 . C. Geertz, “Making Experience, Authoring Selves”, [in:] The Anthropology of Experience. With an Epilogue by Clifford Geertz, ed. V.W. Turner, E.M. Bruner, Polish translation by E. Klekot, A. Szurek, Kraków 2011, p. 393. 10 J. Zammito, “Naturalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Use of Spinozism in the Philosophies of Science of Diderot and Herder”, Polish translation by Z. Zwoliński, [in:] Rozum i świat. Herder i filozofia XVIII, XIX i XX wieku, ed. M. Heinz, M. Potępa, Z. Zwoliński, Warsaw 2004. As Zammito claims, “Already in the early 18th century mechanicism as a model for explaining various phenomena went into decline even in physical sciences” (ibidem, p. 120). Discussions about the power and inertia of the matter going on at the time involved scholars like Diderot and Herder, who in their shared conviction about the continuity between the matter and life seem to Zammito to have been naturalists. His book on the beginnings of anthropology (Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago 2002) was favourably reviewed by Geertz in a brief note published in Common Knowledge 9, 2003, no. 3, p. 541. 11 C. Geertz, “The Legacy of Thomas Kuhn: The Right Text at the Right Time”, [in:] idem, Available Light..., p. 202. 12 C. Geertz, “The Strange Estrangement...”, p. 186.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 4. 2014-06-26 08:46:45.
(5) The strange rapprochement? Clifford Geertz and the natural sciences. 5. nomena to the laws of physics, which could be discovered by means of scientific methods, in favour of “evolutionary rationality” making it possible to study more complex and dynamic systems. As Skolimowski writes, the language of positivism has almost become the official language of science. In contrast, the phenomenon of life in its development might be characterised by its inherent fuzziness. How can we grasp adequately the fluidity and fuzziness of life having at our disposal only razor-sharp concepts?13. And although this is most likely about a different kind of life, the doubt expressed by the Polish philosopher seems close to the humanities. A similar expansion of physics into anthropology was opposed also by Geertz. In his opinion, Interpretive explanation – and it is a form of explanation, not just exalted glossography – trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs, all the usual objects of social-scientific interest, mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs and so on they are. As a result, it issues not in laws like Boyle’s, or forces like Volta’s, or mechanisms like Darwin’s, but in constructions like Burckhardt’s, Weber’s or Freud’s: systematic unpacking of the conceptual world in which condottiere, Calvinists or paranoids live14.. Thus, the author of Local Knowledge did not agree to life, this time spiritual, being described by the categories of laws, functions or structure – concepts deriving from the natural sciences, which, as he believed, were replaced in the social sciences by the game, drama or text analogy. “What the lever did for physics,” he wrote, “the chess move promises to do for sociology”15. A game, though not without rules, is never played the same twice. Geertz’s reluctance to look for laws like Boyle’s in the humanities can also explain his ambivalent attitude to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, which he called “higher cryptology”16. The creator of interpretive anthropology is not interested in the structure or system of meanings that would be separated from an acting agent. His opposition to mechanistic explanations can also be found in the “epilogue” to The Anthropology of Experience: If what James Boon [...] calls the Machinery of culture is not to spin on in some frictionless paradise where no one fears or remembers or hopes or imagines, nobody murders or rescues or revolts or consoles, it must engage some sort of felt life, which might as well be called ex perience17. 13 H. Skolimowski, “Problems of Rationality in Biology”, [in:] Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, ed. F.J. Ayala, T. Dobzhansky, Polish translation by A. Chmielecki, Literatura na Świecie 1991, no. 5, p. 222. This problem was also noted by Władysław J.H. Kunicki-Goldfinger, “Reduk cjonizm w biologii: biologia a nauki ścisłe i społeczne”, [in:] Wizje człowieka i społeczeństwa w teoriach i badaniach naukowych, ed. S. Nowak, Warszawa 1984, pp. 215-228. 14 C. Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, Polish translation by D. Wolska, Kraków 2005, p. 31. 15 Ibidem, p. 32. 16 Ibidem, p. 43. 17 C. Geertz, “Making Experience...”, pp. 394-395.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 5. 2014-06-26 08:46:46.
(6) 6. Jacek Małczyński. In his polemic with Taylor the same issue returns under the guise of intentionality and objectivity. Geertz refers to the words of Gerald M. Edelman, an American neurophysiologist, according to whom this field cannot be contained in the physicalist model of cognition either. As Edelman wrote, Just as there is something special about relativity and quantum mechanics, there is something special about the problems raised by these physiological developments. Are observers themselves “things” like the rest of the objects in their world? How do we account for the curious ability of observers [...] to refer to things of the world when things themselves can never so refer? When we ourselves observe observers, this property of intentionality is unavoidable. Keeping in line with physics, should we declare an embargo on all the psychological traits we talk about in everyday life: consciousness, thought, beliefs, desires?18. It is not difficult to guess what sort of answer to that question would have been provided by the author of The Interpretation of Cultures. Thoughts, beliefs, desires, just like emotions, hopes and dreams, are recurring topics in his work. However, the American physiologist’s opinion is primarily to convince the reader that the image of the natural sciences shared by humanists has little in common with research practice of natural scientists, and the problems with which they have to grapple resemble those they themselves have to deal with. The frequent references to neurophysiology as well as psychology in Available Light allow us to conclude that for Geertz these disciplines provide a platform on which humanists and natural scientists can meet. Geertz’s attention was drawn by, among others, views expressed by the psychologist Jerome Bruner, who began his career in behaviourism, went on to explore cognitivism, only to end up dealing with cultural psychology. His effort “was intended to bring ‘mind’ back into the human sciences after a long cold winter of objectivism”19. Studies, carried under the banner of cultural psychology, into the ways children share meanings emphasise the decisive role of narrative in development, as through the narrative people give meaning to the world. According to Geertz, Bruner did not fully realise the significance of his views to biologically-oriented psychology as well as anthropology: To argue that culture is socially and historically constructed, that narrative is a primary [...] mode of knowing, that we assemble the selves we live in out of materials lying about in the society around us and develop “a theory of mind” to comprehend the selves of others; that we act not directly on the world but on beliefs we hold about the world, that from birth on we are all active, impassioned “meaning makers” in search of plausible stories, and that “mind cannot in any sense be regarded as ‘natural’ or naked, with culture thought of as an add-on” – such a view amounts to rather more than a mid-course correction20. 18 . G.M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind, Polish translation by J. Rączaszek, Warsaw 1998, p. 23. Cf. C. Geertz, “The Strange Estrangement...”, p. 190. 19 J. Bruner, quoted after: C. Geertz, “Imbalancing Act: Jerome Bruner’s Cultural Psychology”, [in:] idem, Available light..., p. 236. 20 20 C. Geertz, “Imbalancing Act...”, pp. 244-245.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 6. 2014-06-26 08:46:46.
(7) The strange rapprochement? Clifford Geertz and the natural sciences. 7. The American anthropologist’s attitude to cultural psychology may cast some light on the process of reframing, promoted by him, of the relations between the humanities and natural sciences. He does not believe that the achievements of various disciplines could “dissolve” or create some pallid “ecumenical whole”. It seems that it is about not so much blurring the boundaries but more about constantly crossing them both ways, about constant “reconsiderations”, “reciprocal disequilibrium”21. In his view, the role of anthropology in these skirmishes would be, first of all, to stress cultural differences. Geertz returns once again to the theme of relations between psychology and cultural anthropology, when he explores the origins of emotions in his article “Culture, Mind, Brain / Brain, Mind, Culture”, the title of which, albeit enigmatic, conveys very well the fluid boundaries between these three areas. As he argues, [T]he way toward an improved understanding of the biological, the psychological, and the sociocultural is not through arranging them into some sort of chain-of-being hierarchy stretching from the physical and biological to the social and semiotic, each level emergent from and dependent upon (and, with luck, reducible to) the one beneath it. Nor is it through treating them as dis continuous, sovereign realities, enclosed, stand-alone domains externally connected [...] to one another by vague and adventitious forces, factors, quantities, and causes. Constitutive of one another, reciprocally constructive, they must be treated as such – as complements, not levels; aspects, not entities; landscapes, not realms22.. Thus Geertz accepts neither a vision of the world based on the idea of continuity, through which the social could be explained by the biological, nor a complete separation of these spheres as fully autonomous; thus he transgresses the opposition between naturalism and anti-naturalism23. This type of “stratigraphic” understanding of reality, which would be composed of levels – biological, psychological, social and cultural – lying on top of each other, is what he opposed already in The Interpretation of Cultures: Once culture, psyche, society and organism have been converted into separate scientific “levels”, complete and autonomous in themselves, it is very hard to bring them back together again24.. Consequently, he proposes that the “stratigraphic” concept be replaced with a “synthetic” one, in which all these levels will constitute “unitary wholes”. Studies into emotions, ways of naming and expressing them, or meanings located in them, studies conducted by anthropology, linguistics or cultural psychology, prompt Geertz to again bring together what is cultural, external and public with 21 . Ibidem, pp. 248-249. C. Geertz, “Culture, Mind, Brain / Brain, Mind, Culture”, Polish translation by M. Kamińska, A. Orzechowski, [in:] Clifford Geertz — lokalna lektura, ed. D. Wolska, M. Brocki, Kraków 2003, p. 72. 23 D. Wolska, “Kilka uwag o zaangażowaniu, czyli o uczuciach i ich badaniu”, Teksty Drugie 2007, no. 1-2, p. 17. 24 C. Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man”, [in:] idem, The Interpretation of Cultures…, p. 60. 22 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 7. 2014-06-26 08:46:46.
(8) 8. Jacek Małczyński. what is psychological, internal and private. In his view, “what is at issue and needs to be determined is some sort of bridging connection between the world within the skull and the world outside”25. I believe that Geertz’s professed abandoning of a hierarchical vision of the world, his avoidance of essentialising (“landscapes not realms”), attempts to bridge the gap between what is inside and what is outside us, as well as his emphasis on the role of acting agent26, may be regarded as reasons why the author of Available Light, with his characteristic “sympathetic criticism” turned his attention to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. In his polemic with Taylor, Geertz refers to the French thinker’s science studies, conducted as part of the “anthropology of laboratory life”, which revised the common image of the natural sciences as independent of the social. Latour shows how, following many translations, the boundaries between the laboratory and the world, the micro- and the macroscale are breached. His studies into the anthrax epidemic in 19th century France demonstrate that as a result of Louis Pasteur’s invention of a vaccine, the entire French society, from the tropics to the fronts of WWI, was transformed into a laboratory. According to Latour, this was possible thanks to all kinds of “recording devices” making smaller-scale work possible (microscopes, tables, statistics, etc.)27. Geertz commented on such studies in the following manner: Machines, objects, tools, artifacts, instruments are too close at hand to be taken as external to what is going on; so much apparatus, free of meaning. These mere “things” have to be incorporated into the story, and when they are the story takes on a heteroclite form – human agents and nonhuman ones bound together in interpretivist narratives28.. However, after this comment, with which Latour most likely would have agreed, the American anthropologist raises many objections with regard to similar inquiries: As they are quite recent, such interpretivist approaches are both ill formed and variable, uncertain opening probes in an apparently endless and, at least for the moment, ill-marked enquiry. There are analyses of the rhetoric of scientific discourse, oral and written: there are descriptions of human and nonhuman agents as coactive nodes in ramifying networks of meaning and power; there are ethnographic, and ethnomethodological, studies of “fact construction” and “accounting procedures”; there are investigations of research planning, instrument construction, and laboratory practice. But, however undeveloped, they all approach science not as opaque social precipitate but as meaningful social action: “We have never been interested in giving a social explanation of anything [...] we want to explain society, of which [...] things, facts and artefacts, are 25 . C. Geertz, “Culture, Mind...”, p. 70. The question of “strong agency” in Geertz’s thought has recently been tackled by Rafał Nahirny in Losy naukowej łamigłówki. Clifford Geertz, mikrohistorie i podmiotowość, Wrocław 2011, pp. 47-52. 27 See B. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World”, [in:] Science Observed, ed. K. Knorr, M. Mulkay, Polish translation by K. Abriszewski, Ł. Afeltowicz, Teksty Drugie 2009, no. 1-2. 28 C. Geertz, “The Strange Estrangement...”, p. 194. 26 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 8. 2014-06-26 08:46:46.
(9) The strange rapprochement? Clifford Geertz and the natural sciences. 9. major components”29. This hardly resembles the objectivist, agentless “naturalism” of which Taylor is so rightly wary30.. I am not sure to what extent the criticism of the “interpretivist orientation” in the sociology of knowledge also applies to Latour. The author of Local Knowledge enumerates, one by one, the various trends in sociological science studies, which are not a uniform discipline. The key to solving this problem may lie in the difference in perceiving science as an “opaque social precipitate” or “meaningful social action”31. How ill-perceived these inquiries were by natural scientists can be seen in the attempt to appoint Latour a professor in the School of Social Science, Princeton, which Geertz’s headed in the early 1990s, which resembled the “Bellah affair” that had begun twenty years earlier. When in 1972 the author of Local Knowledge suggested that Robert Bellah, a sociologist of religion, be appointed to a position in his department, he was opposed by a coalition of natural scientists and historians. The dispute was discussed at length in the American press. Geertz encountered a similar opposition again, when he promoted the candidacy of the French sociologist of science, a fact that he indirectly mentions in After the Fact: The siege has never really lifted in the decades since. Almost twenty years to the day, the Bellah affair was virtually reenacted, this time mercifully without the attentions of the press, in connection with another proposed appointment to the School32.. It is difficult to understand why Geertz, under fire from representatives of the natural sciences and experiencing “science wars” first hand, insisted that the image of these sciences shared by humanists had to be changed. What is also surprising is the fact that in his polemic with Taylor he did not draw on his own experiences, using only studies from a broadly defined sociology of knowledge. Similarities and differences between anthropology of laboratory life and interpretive anthropology are to be found, in my opinion, on a level much deeper than the question of social framing of scientific thought. I suspect that Geertz’s attempt to find a bridging connection between the world within the skull and the world outside it resembles the “clamps” used by Latour, which make it possible to reassemble the internal and the external, and at the same time overcome the “gap of execution” between the actor and the system, without falling into the trap of either hermeneutics or positivism. According to the French sociologist, 29 . M. Callon, B. Latour, “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley”, [in:] Science as Practice and Culture, ed. A. Pickering, Chicago 1992, p. 348. 30 C. Geertz, “The Strange Estrangement...”, p. 196. 31 Geertz was also sympathetic toward the sociology of knowledge, when formulating his project of an “ethnography of modern thought”. See idem, Local Knowledge..., pp. 153-169. 32 C. Geertz, After the Fact…, p. 131. This is mentioned as an example of “science wars” by U. Segerstrale, “Science and Science Studies: Enemies or Allies?”, [in:] Beyond the Science Wars. The Missing Discourse about Science and Society, ed. U. Segerstrale, New York 2000, p. 19; also P. van der Veer, “Clifford Geertz: A Memory”, ISIM Review 19, 2007, no. 1, p. 49.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 9. 2014-06-26 08:46:46.
(10) 10. Jacek Małczyński. If the social framing from “outside” is not enough to complete the course of action, then the remainder of the resources has to come from the “inside” [...]. At which point positivism gives way to hermeneutics [...] while structural sociologists shift to intepretative sociology. But if this jump in method is allowed to occur, the continuous trail I have tried to keep from the beginning would suddenly be interrupted; the flat map will be slashed yet again; the scene of an individual subjective actor having “some leeway” “inside” a larger system will be reactivated; the two mythical lands of global and local will be drawn anew; Merlin’s castle will pop up again. So, in keeping with our myopic ANT [Actor-Network Theory – J.M.] obsession, we have to keep fumbling in the dark for another clamp33.. The suggested “change of topography” consisting in the “flattening of the landscape” seems to correspond to the liquid landscape outlined by Geertz. In the already mentioned article form The Interpretation of Cultures, a book to which Latour referred, the American anthropologist wrote: With the levels approach, we can never, even by invoking “invariant points of reference”, construct genuine functional interconnections between cultural and noncultural factors, only more or less persuasive analogies, parallelisms, suggestions and affinities34.. The attitude of the French sociologist to intepretive anthropology is a separate, though equally interesting, issue, especially when it comes to the impact of “thick description” on the actor-network theory. As Latour claims, “A text is thick. That’s an ANT tenet, if any”35. If the similarities between the two scholars are not just an illusion, then I believe they enable us to better understand the views of both of them. This affinity of thought can also be seen in an interview that Geertz gave in 2002. Asked about the issue of anthropology’s involvement in a technologically globalised world, he said: We are much more involved in the technological world, you know the work of Bruno Latour, beginning to try to think about objects as part of interactions with human beings, and we are much more implicated in technological culture, day by day. We are now connected through non-human interlocutors. So it is no longer possible to regard technology as simply a background or framework on which society rests. It is integrated into the interpretive structure of reality and is not just regarded as an instrument or a tool but as an actor in society. Day by day everything is much more implicated in technology. Everything that we do. There was a blackout in New York the other day and it changed everything. So we can’t regard technology as just a passive structure. That’s a real change. And I think that change has been recognized, but how to describe it or discuss technology as actors, technological instruments as actors, is the question and we are just beginning to learn how to do this, some of us inside anthropology and some outside. But I think again that interpretive anthropology is much more hospitable to this sort of thing than any other and that you get involved in science wars because the old positivist tradition is stronger in the natural sciences than the social sciences36. 33 B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Polish translation by A. Derra, K. Abriszewski, Kraków 2010, p. 301. 34 C. Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept...”, p. 61. 35 B. Latour, Reassembling…, p. 214. 36 N. Panourgiá, “Interview with Clifford Geertz”, Anthropological Theory 2002, no. 2 (4), p. 430.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 10. 2014-06-26 08:46:46.
(11) The strange rapprochement? Clifford Geertz and the natural sciences. 11. The consequences for cultural anthropology, especially interpretive anthropology, of such a warm invitation are still difficult to imagine today. However, this statement suggests that the rapprochement between the humanities and the natural sciences, so desired by Geertz, is as close to reality as climate warming or climate cooling pronounced by environmentalists now and again. As it turns out, the need to “denaturalise” the natural sciences is still a challenge, just as the “naturalisation” of the humanities, increasingly encroached on by non-humans, whose presence is more and more difficult to ignore.. *** In his article about Bruner’s cultural psychology Geertz, in order to illustrate two strategies adopted by scholars, referred to the hedgehog and fox metaphor known from Isaiah Berlin’s essay37. According to the American anthropologist, the adoption of the strategy of both a withdrawn hedgehog and a hesitant fox, guided by conflicting interests, paralyses the humanities. If, in the light of that polemic, Charles Taylor can be seen as a fox, then what kind of animal would Clifford Geertz be? 37 . 20 C. Geertz, “Imbalancing Act...”, p. 250.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/1, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. pk_malczyński-korekta.indd 11. 2014-06-26 08:46:46.
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