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ANTHROPOLOGY AND NATURAL SCIENCE
An interview with James Bellis

conducted by John Clay
via email, January 2001

introduction

Jim Bellis is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, USA. In his trademark style—frank, conversational, sometimes irreverent, and always informative—Dr. Bellis here discusses the field of anthropology, in historical and interdisciplinary perspective.

interview

CLAY: As you see it, what is the current state of anthropology, in historical perspective?

BELLIS: We are a discipline which, at least in the United States, got snagged or hung up in the nineteenth century when folks like Max Weber were trying to define a new level of science, namely that of the superorganic or social stuff in general. The hang up came when some schools of anthropology decided that the nature of human nature was so special that we deserved a separate status and realm of scientific inquiry all alone. I think the British and French schools thereafter decided that anthropology needed never again to examine its longterm evolutionary relationships with other living critters. We were different in kind, not in degree. Therefore, one could not benefit from any further use of the natural-historical model of scholarship, because with culture we were somehow not in the same game as the other life forms. Those folks still argue that way...got a few in my department. In a nutshell, they descend from an intellectual tradition which focused its study on what made humanity unique in the course of evolutionary history.

The other side of the equation, most notably surviving in the United States, is most powerfully represented not by biological anthropology but, oddly enough, by archaeology. My guess is that this is because the archaeologists were the first to begin to comprehend the enormous amount of time the evolutionary journey has taken, while bioanthropology was buying white lab coats and trying to deal with their Freudian physics envy by talking about cells and stuff and leaving the bones behind in the heavily racist dust of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Anyway, the archaeologists learned that amongst their most exciting analytical models was ecology and adaptation, and so from about 1950 onward, armed with a whole host of new dating techniques to control for the first time the variable of temporal sequence, we began to explain not just how humans came to be, but why they came to be from an evolutionary angle. Because of this group, we see the use of a model of analysis which spends more time learning about what we have in common with the rest of nature than about how we differ from it. This group has a lot of relatively aggressive loose canons on the deck, ranging from primatology to sociobiology, but to my way of thinking, it is in this natural history half of our discipline that the most exciting and fresh insights are developing, while the social and cultural anthropologists are still wrestling with the postmodernist critique which in a nutshell was the rediscovery of the universality of ethnocentrism—wow, big deal! Well, this should be enough to get me in trouble for now.

CLAY: What is the current relationship of anthropology to the other sociocultural sciences, and what distinguishes anthropology from these others?

BELLIS: I think we are struggling, in anthropology, with some of the same forces as all the other disciplinary approaches, but I also think we have a few unique stress fractures exclusively our own. I realize I must overgeneralize in order to say anything in a short space, but what the hell, let's generalize a bit. Most recently came the whole postmodernist critique. Lots of people in anthropology really freaked over this one. For example, some folks I know said that whatever we do, no matter the care and methodological planning, it's all so subjective in the end as to be meaningless. So, instead of writing, or rather attempting to write, a serious, scientific ethnography, we should just be honest and write a novel based on our experience. Better an honest novel than bogus science. And since we are all so damned ethnocentric, subjective, egocentric, et cetera, et cetera, eleven ways from Sunday, it's all over for any effort at comparative or scientific research on the human condition.

It seemed to have thrown a lot of anthropologists for a loop. But not all. I think the ones who were most impacted by the rediscovery of the eternal presence of mental biases were the cultural anthropologists who had come to believe their own rhetoric about being scientists and objective in the first place. When I listened to these folks talk over beers about their experience, I knew they were biased as hell about how the folks over there smelled and so on, but the trouble with most cultural research is that no one ever goes to the same place to provide a comparative take on the cultural happenings there. Freeman's critique of Margaret Mead shook the world, and not just that of the anthropologists! I had friends go off on "How the hell can two scientists go to the same place and come back with such different stories?" Personally, if these two people had gone to the same place that far apart in time, one a man, and one a woman and had come back with the same reports....I would have assumed that one or both were lying in the first place.

CLAY: How did you, and other anthropologists outside of cultural anthropology, manage to keep your footing?

We archaeologists, and a lot of biological anthropologists, never believed that deeply in our own objectivity. Rather I think we always knew the effort at objectivity was at best flawed and needed constant attention, explication of the problems, and replication by our colleagues—especially replication. In short, I always knew coprolites smelled like shit. (Coprolite is fossilized excrement.) I struggled with that opinion, but no matter how I tried, the opinion was lasting. But we archaeologists have a field where replication is possible and where replication is a part of the whole research process that helps flesh out our stories and flush out our biases. We have, I think, been much more likely to dig an important site for the same reasons more than once, with more than one principal investigator, and with more than one method. What do we find? Flaws and biases of course, which lead us to further refine and keep trying to find the patterns in the data. Same with the biological anthropologists. Actually, our experience in field and lab archaeology is much more varied when we talk about the stuff of the ethnologists, that is living folks, like the people who live on the sites we dig, or who own the sites we want to dig, or who descended from the folks we are digging up. Then, it is personality versus personality, and objectivity is much more absent. In fact, the subjective differences in our experiences is what arms and animates our beer-hall war stories about "the last time I dug a site in the Ohio Valley" and so on.

Now I think we are moving past that postmodernist rediscovery of ethno, or ego, centrism and getting back to work. One of the things that has been possible to do in this return to the trenches is to reaffirm the original natural science home of anthropology from which we—but mostly the cultural anthropologists—had strayed. Archaeology and bioanthropology struggled against great odds not to be drummed from the discipline by the mid-twentieth century cultural anthropologists—those who claimed even before the postmodernists that it was all relative. (Kurt Vonnegut said he learned at University of Chicago in the 1930s as an anthropology major that no culture, no where, at no time could ever do anything wrong. I think I botched the quote and it may not even be a close paraphrase, but the thought was his.) One of my old teachers at Indiana University, a devoted disciple of M. Herskovitts, said: In the end the most profound question we have after we do our research is "So what?" At about the same time, the cultural anthropologists who dominated the field, and still do, were calling for the bioanthropologists and archaeologists to account for their sins. They were saying something like "Why the hell are you guys in our department in the first place? What you do is not even relevant to anthropology. Go away."

CLAY: What would you say in response to that?

In some ways, they were right. We were of no use to the theories developed in cultural anthropology, because our data base had very little to do with how they had come to define cultural process. I'm here talking about things like Walter Taylor's critical evaluation of archaeology in his dissertation (memoir no. 69, American Anthropological Association). Actually, it was probably his mentor's vexations to which he gave voice, old C. Kluckhohn, but nonetheless, it called us to account.

But it was the combined response of archaeologists and bioanthropologists from the 1950s onward that saved our collective asses from exile and developed a strong return to the models of natural science that had given rise to anthropology in the first place.

I refer to the emergence of a whole new, or better to say, newly stated synthesis of culture and biology in an evolutionary model, and the beginning of discussions of a biocultural adaptive process. This whole discussion had been verboten since Franz Boas and was rekindled only with the greatest struggle. But it is from these new fields that a whole new and fresh face has been put on anthropology at the end of the 20th century, saving anthropology from the mass mediocrity of its fellow social sciences and showing the way for us to reintegrate the field of anthropology. This comes after a seventy-five year period of centrifugal forces had almost destroyed it, with economic anthropologists joining economics departments, social anthropologists joining sociology departments, and so forth. For nearly a century, we forgot our collective roots. We are, in the end, most unique because we are not practitioners of a humanistic discipline nor a social science. Some anthropologists are, but then they should go like the others into these other disciplines, because they have nothing unique to offer as anthropologists; they are just doing the sociology of "other folks", comparative economics, and so on.

What we have that makes us different, what we have that makes us whole, what we have that makes us successful, and what we have that only we are doing with rigor and discipline, is the return of the study of the human condition to natural science and natural history.

© 2001 John Clay