|
|
Winks and twitches <debate> <long>John McCreery (JLM@TWICS.COM)Wed, 3 Apr 1996 07:09:28 +0900
"Geertz--and presumably Ryle--attach special importance to the supposed indistinguishability, objectively, of a wink from a twitch. I find this highly implausible, and have assumed Geertz was asserting it mainly in order to deepen the impression that the the world of meaning is ultimately inaccessible to objective study; hence, all we can do is speculate." I know that Bob is not alone in seeing Geertz' call for "thick description" as leading to a focus on subjective interpretations of meaning and, thus, away from objective science. Personally, what I took from Geertz is precisely the opposite--an argument that meaning is not subjective, hidden away in hearts and minds and thus inaccessible to observation. It is, on the contrary, a largely public matter of social conventions and codes and thus accessible to observers, including anthropologists as well as other scholars. A meaning is neither more or less a theoretical entity than, say, quarks, strings, black holes, newly emerging species, or, for that matter, Burckhardt's renaissance or Jameson's post- modernism. Considered in isolation a twitch and a wink may be physically similar. Whether the twitch is a genuine wink, an actor's imitation of a wink, or reflex response to dust in the eye depends on observable social circumstances. As another example, which Ralph Holloway may want to comment on, consider the vexed issue of trying to identify the earliest stone tools. Is a hunk of rock with a chip knocked off one side a tool? Its physical appearance suggests that it might be. The clincher is evidence that it was used as a tool, e.g., association with bones showing marks of cutting or scraping, or, more simply, finding it in a place where there are no physically similar stones, suggesting that someone carried it there. All this is not to say, of course, that different forms of theory and evidence may be required for the study of meanings from those available in classical physics, economics, psychoanalysis, etc. Geertz himself has been a great writer of prolegomena to this and that which, to my mind, have never been sufficiently followed up. (My American Ethnologist piece "Negotiating with Demons" is one stab in this direction.) But, again, there is a tendency to overstate the differences between "interpretation" and even the most physical of sciences. Here I offer one last example, which has always fascinated me. The issue is temperature. Using a conventional thermometer, temperature can be defined operationally as the height of a column of mercury. On the surface of a star, our sun will do nicely, the thermometer in question cannot exist. It will, if someone tries to put it there, be instantly reduced to plasma. What then is the relation between the temperature I read from my thermometer when I have a bit of fever and the astronomer's assertion that the surface of the sun is X thousand degrees Kelvin? Ah, yes, we have a theory...a well defined body of social conventions with a lot of institutional support. And how do we know what the theory means? That has more to do with understanding winks than twitches. John McCreery Yokohama April 3, 1996
|