Beyond explanation and understanding: Anthropology and hermeneutics

Conclusion

The fact that Ricoeur's influential essay on the model of the text was published twenty years ago has not in any way reduced its significance for addressing critical issues of interpretation in the human sciences. However, Ricoeur's suggestion that we turn to structural linguistics as a basis from which to develop a critical interpretive theory rooted in the logic of the human sciences has since been challenged, but not superseded, by the post-structuralist assertion that text, or human action as a text, lacks coherence. Jacques Derrida and his followers have argued that the objective of their method is to deconstruct a text which means to discover what it excludes through its representation.¹ It is, therefore, a fiction, Derrida maintains, to presuppose that one can unveil the meaning or truth of a text, as the reading of a text must necessarily take place in its margins.

Whatever may be the practical implications, or implications for praxis, in the assertion that a text lacks a unity or truth, I contend that the key question raised by Ricoeur, and not to my knowledge resolved by post-structuralism, is how to maintain a sense of action as meaningful while being able to grasp it critically. This question establishes a point of tension between human agency and the objective structural constraints to which it is subject, thus, as I have asserted, connecting the formal properties of a text to the conditions of its generation. Although I have argued that Ricoeur's moment of structural or semiotic mediation is faulted in that it locates oppositions or contradictions in the avowed worldlessness of the text's interior rather than in the historical process of humanity's self-formation, this weakness does not altogether eclipse the merit of his analogy between the interpretation of texts and human actions. To the contrary, Ricoeur has shown how it is possible through rejecting the methodological implications of an explanation and understanding dichotomy — or how emics and etics have come to be used in contemporary anthropology to distinguish types of theoretical constructs — to develop an interpretation theory with critical implications based on the logic of the human sciences. Anthropologists who resort to an exclusive explanation or etic position, through the drawing of nomological hypotheses, fail to recognize that cultural phenomena are intentional in that they owe their generation and identity to a historically constituted intersubjectivity. On the other hand, anthropologists who privilege the understanding position, which is highly prevalent in contemporary symbolic and interpretive anthropology, conceptualize this process as the logical reconstruction of the subjective intentions of actors, or in a more complex sense, the identification of meaning with context. Ricoeur has argued that the pursuit of an exclusive explanation or understanding theory is based upon an epistemological reduction. The privileging of theories based upon natural science explanation reduced the intersubjectivity of meaning to the classification and verification of facts, while theories based upon understanding reduce the dialectical movement of meaning to the ostensive reference of context. From either the exclusive explanation or understanding trajectories, the critical potentialities of anthropology are vitiated because the reflexive dimension of the interpretive process is absent. As Ricoeur has repeatedly emphasized, knowledge of remote historical periods, texts, or other cultures not only produces a comprehension of these phenomena as radically other, but also casts light onto our own life situation.

Ricoeur's theory is important, therefore, for anthropologists and other students of the human sciences, because it combines an emphasis on mediation, or the critique of naive consciousness, with the conceptualization of human actions as intentional, communicative events. It therefore goes a long way towards bridging some of the deepest objections raised by the scientistic outlook against the method of versteben, while retaining the latter's emphasis on a hermeneutic understanding of social life. This bridge has been built without resorting to the objectivism of the natural sciences and by pursuing the logic of a method that is in concert with the unique object-subject of the human sciences.