The Philosopher of Anthropology

Abstract

This chapter recalls Gellner’s views of anthropological method, based on a measure of scepticism towards the view that meaning makes the world go round. Differently put, the claim was that anthropology can only work on the base of Western scientific knowledge, thereby limiting claims to cultural relativism. The argument suggests that Gellner’s view remains correct.

Comment on John A. Hall’s ‘The Philosopher of Anthropology’

Ian Jarvie

Department of Philosophy, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

jarvie@yorku.ca

John A. Hall’s commentary on five central and brilliant papers of Ernest Gellner takes my breath away. He commands both the overview and the local details, the sweep of Gellner’s thought and its sharpest points. And here, more than a decade after his biography of Gellner appeared, he offers a new, comprehensive interpretation of Gellner’s thought as a whole and the challenge it constitutes today. It was Gellner’s resistance to idealism, that is, to social explanation that takes ideas as unproblematically primary, that always intrigued me, since my own teacher, Popper, was a great advocate of the role of ideas in society and especially in social change.¹ Gellner’s neglected second book, Thought and change (Gellner 1965), was his sustained attempt to confront this problem. He was, it transpires, a robust materialist. Thought had its contribution, but the hard facts of life had a first call on our explanatory attention. It was in this book that Gellner first offered his thoughts about the rise of one strand of modern thought, political nationalism.

I have no quarrel with Hall’s reading of Gellner and I agree strongly with his claim that Gellner’s thought has not been confronted in two of the fields he worked in, philosophy and social anthropology. At the end of his paper Hall looks at an exception, Talal Asad’s critique of Gellner’s ideas on the anthropology of Islam. Asad’s critique, however, is not of the ideas themselves but of the very attitude of being an anthropologist towards other human beings, of the very project of doing science. Asad seems suspicious of descriptive language itself and of attempts to use it to describe other ways of life. They could perhaps be better represented by music or dance. Who knows what motives could drive the presentation of such arguments? I can only admire Hall’s style in keeping a straight face as he quotes Asad imagining that a dance could be a contribution to anthropology. Asad’s words typify the abdication of some anthropologists from the very project of doing social science, of trying to explain social life. Apparently, to use Hall’s phrase, ‘any explanation of human behaviour is morally insulting’. It could just as easily be claimed that taking an explanatory interest in the other is a form of honouring. In my view, those who hold tenure appointments to profess social anthropology have a responsibility to do so and not to offer morally bogus transcendental arguments against the doing of social science as such. In my chapter I quote a semi-sympathetic description of the moral condition of anthropology. It is dire and confused, and Ernest Gellner, despite his best efforts, could not head that off.

References

• Gellner, Ernest. 1965. Thought and change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

• Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Mannheim, Karl. 1929. Ideologie und Utopie. Bonn: F. Cohen. Trans. 1936 as Ideology and utopia, London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner.

• Popper, Karl R. 1945. The open society and its enemies. London: George Routledge & Sons.

• Popper, Karl R. 1970. Normal science and its dangers, In Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Proceedings of the international colloquium in the philosophy of science, London, 1965, volume 4, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 51–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.