In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.
In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.
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In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374220 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2016 |
| Series: | The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 772 KB |
About the Author
Peter van der Veer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen, Germany and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. He is the author of several books, including The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India.
Read an Excerpt
The Value of Comparison
By Peter van der Veer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7422-0
CHAPTER 1
THE COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Despite general agreement that there is a variety of materials (film, video, audiotapes, music, sermons, documents) that anthropologists are working with and a variety of methods applied to these materials, the empirical part of anthropology continues to be primarily based on the ethnographic method, which consists of a long stay "in the field," a familiarization with the "way of life" of the people one studies, and thus in many cases a long linguistic preparation to acquaint oneself with the local language. The rather vague term way of life suggests a "holistic" approach in which a society is examined in its entirety. As one knows, it is practically not possible to have such a total vision, unless one fantasizes societies as outside history and outside a larger world of interaction. In the early stages of the development of anthropology, students of small-scale societies may have been tempted to isolate their fieldwork sites, but no student of an Indian or a Chinese village would have been able to sustain such a fantasy (despite the questionable focus on the "village" as a self-contained unit in the 1950s and 1960s). What ethnographers do claim, however, is that their study of everyday life in a small setting allows them to interpret a larger entity (local, regional, national, or even global) and that that knowledge cannot be gained through the deployment of large-scale surveys. The claim here is that through close study of a fragment one is able to comment on a larger whole and that an understanding of the larger whole allows one to interpret the fragment (whatever that particular whole or fragment may be). It is the choice of a particular fragment of social life that determines what its relevant context is or what the larger question is that one wants to address. While this resembles the hermeneutic circle of textual interpretation, one needs to recognize that social life is not a "social text" and certainly not a closed text and that the openness of social change is multidirectional. Similarly, one needs to steer clear of a universalizing approach that first defines some kind of essence, like "ritual" or "prayer," and then studies it comparatively across cultures.
At this point it is important to emphasize that what I am suggesting is not to be misunderstood as a process of generalization from the particular. The purpose is not to come to some general truth but to highlight something that is not general, something specific without any pretense to general truth, but definitely of broader significance. What is general is often banal, and while anthropologists deal with ordinary life, they strive to say something about it that is not banal. This is also the reason why anthropologists, however much they are prepared when going on fieldwork, generally have to change the questions they ask and the general direction of their fieldwork while confronted with the real-life situations in the field. Moreover, these situations are in fact processes and can only be grasped in dynamic terms. They change during and after the fieldwork, and this process implies that the findings are often difficult to replicate in later fieldwork by other fieldworkers. This problem is compounded by the fact that ethnographers do not ask the same questions and thus come up with different pictures of the societies they study. There is a significant difference not only between ethnographers who continue to study a particular society for most of their professional lives (for example, Kenneth Dean on Fujianese society or Chris Fuller on South India) and those ethnographers who spend a fieldwork period in one site after the other (the prime example is Fredrik Barth on the Pathan, on Oman, on New Guinea, on Bali, on Bhutan), but also in the kinds of questions asked. Anthropologists study historically evolving, open configurations, and the anthropologists themselves are part of them.
The emphasis on fieldwork should not be taken as a far-reaching empiricism in which it suffices that the minutiae of social life are recorded in exasperating detail. As Marilyn Strathern wrote in 1998, "if at the end of the twentieth century one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to grasp the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the social anthropologist's ethnographic practice." Such a purpose cannot be sustained by precision of observation and description (extended case study or situational analysis) alone or by claims to producing a representative sample. The perspective I offer is obviously close to that of Clifford Geertz in his famous essay on "thick description," where he argues that the ethnographer seeks to give an interpretation of "what our informants are up to, or think they are up to." Geertz also offers an enticing example of what comparison can offer in his essayistic comparison of Islam in Morocco and Indonesia. What I do not agree with, however, is the Geertzian penchant for generalization, as in his definition of religion as a universal entity (as a "cultural system"), a definition that fails to reflect on the nature of the global Western political expansion that enabled the universalization of this concept as a way to explain and govern practices all over the world, or in what in his work on Indonesia he calls "the general Javanese religious system."
The move from fragment to larger insight is a conceptual and theoretical one and not a form of generalization. It does not come from mere observation but is theory-laden. Theory should here be taken in its original sense of observing and contemplating. This is not theory as generalization, as in "a general theory of action" (Parsons) or a "theory of practice" (Bourdieu). Therefore, I take the concept of "holism" to refer not to a form of generalization or to the ethnographical method per se but to anthropology as a conceptual engagement with a fragment that allows us to interpret another conceptual universe, in which translation plays a central role. Some observational methods in microsociology, urban geography, and actor-oriented political science resemble the ethnographic method but do not share this radical theoretical orientation of anthropology.
Anthropology's starting point is to question the universality of what in modern society is taken to constitute the separate domains of the "economy" of "politics," of "law," and of "religion," as well as the dichotomy between state and society or between the individual and society, or even between "inner feelings" and "outward appearance." In fact, these pervasive dichotomous conceptualizations have a particular history in modern Western societies and languages. The "holistic" perspective of anthropology allows us to "bracket" Western assumptions and investigate how people outside "the modern West" are conceptualizing their social life without presuming the universality of Western understandings.
My approach raises two related issues. First of all, nobody today is totally outside "the modern West," because in fact we are all "becoming modern" (Latour) and because Western modernity is one among many modernities (Eisenstadt). Moreover, there is a history of a century or longer of Western hegemony in the world. This makes it impossible to assume that there is a "pure outside" that can be investigated. Instead, what we study are various forms of interaction between different cultural worlds, forms that are in some cases of very long duration and in some cases have a nineteenth-century origin. In the latter cases we deal with imperial interactions that engender modern transformations. We find interactions also within societies, such as, for example, India's "split public," divided between the English-speaking public in India and the much larger vernacular public, or the oppositions of ethnic majority versus ethnic minorities in contemporary Europe. In fact, there is such a great variety of cultural exchanges and interactions that it is not possible to think of society as an integrated whole, despite politicians' emphasis on integration and social cohesion and the fear of society "falling apart."
Second, by acknowledging this history of interactions we turn a critical eye on universal pretensions of models that are solely based on a putatively isolated Western historical experience. The pervasiveness of ethnocentrism in the social sciences is astonishing, ranging from discussions of democracy, the public sphere, and civil society to discussions of religion, secularism, class, and the family. One of the greatest flaws in the development of a comparative perspective seems to be the almost universal comparison of any existing society with an ideal-typical and totally self-sufficient Euro-American modernity.
Comparison should be conceived not primarily in terms of comparing societies or events, or institutional arrangements across societies, although this is important, but as a reflection on our conceptual framework as well as on the history of interactions that have constituted our object of study. One may, for instance, want to study church-state relations in India and China, but one has to bring to that study a critical reflection on why one would suppose the centrality of church-like organizations as well as the centrality of Western secular state formation in an analysis of developments in India and China. That critical reflection often shows that Western concepts do not fit the social reality one wants to investigate and, in turn, may lead to the exaggerated claim that societies outside the West should be understood in their own terms and cannot be understood in Western terms. However, one cannot escape the fact that in today's world "native" terms have to be interpreted and translated in relation to Western scholarship. Moreover, such translation and interpretation is part of a long history of interactions with the West that became dominant in the nineteenth century. For example, in the Indian case it is good to realize that English, despite its foreign origins, has over the centuries become an Indian vernacular. In the case of China it is good to realize that communism, despite the prevailing notion that everything has an ancient Chinese origin, in fact did not originate in the Song dynasty but is a Western invention. Any attempt to make a sharp (often nationalist) demarcation of inside and outside is spurious in contemporary society. Comparison is thus not a relatively simple juxtaposition and comparison of two or more different societies but a complex reflection on the network of concepts that underlie our study of society as well as the formation of those societies themselves. It is always a double act of reflection.
This is not to say that Western ideas and models are not powerful. Again, what needs to be studied are forms of interaction, since no one can deny, for example, the significance and power of universal models in economics for economic policy everywhere. Such models function both as "models of" and "models for," since global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank impose their models on societies (with sometimes disastrous effects, as in the "Asian Crisis"). These models' power derives not from the fact that they are universally applicable (on the basis of the assumption that we all are in the same world and are all human beings) but from the fact that they are universalized and thus have a universal impact to the extent that they are backed by global power. What anthropological discussions of the "informal economy" and of "corruption" have taught us is that the Western ideas and models are partly uncovering reality and partly covering it up and that that is their universal characteristic.
The anthropological lens enables a critique of universal modeling and is, as a consequence, outside the mainstream of the development of social science. The orientation toward comparative sociology in the era of empire has shifted since World War II to a focus on differences within national societies in the West. The dominant trend in sociology is to study one's own society, and thus American sociology studies the United States, the world's dominant society. The silent assumption of those who think that sociology is a form of universal science is that what is true for the United States is true everywhere. Much of sociology and political science today is macro-oriented, depends on large data sets, and is geared to constructing universally applicable models. Quantitative analysis is certainly an important and necessary way in economics and demography to increase our knowledge about longitudinal trends and patterns in society, as Thomas Piketty's recent book on capitalism and increasing wealth inequality shows. However, students of societies like India and China tend to have doubts about the validity of surveys and data sets in these societies. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman put it recently in a characteristically scathing opinion piece, "all economic data are best viewed as a peculiarly boring genre of science fiction, but Chinese data are even more fictional than most."
To stay with the example of the so-called informal economy, statistics based on the "formal economy" in many societies are clearly partial, and in India and China they miss a large chunk of reality, although we cannot say for sure how large, for the reasons just outlined. In my own field, the study of religion, statistics gathered on the growth of Christianity in China, for instance, have to be regarded with as much suspicion as, for example, statistics on sexual behavior in any country (see chapter 2). More generally, one needs to examine survey data with great methodological care, since nonresponse is often extremely high and responses can be socially acceptable ones that have little to do with reality. Despite the enormous importance and investment in electoral research the outcome of elections is very hard to predict. This should not lead to the lament that the social sciences are not quite "science" as yet, since sciences like geology and meteorology cannot predict earthquakes or the weather over a longer period than a few days either. Similarly, brain research is making progress thanks to new observational technologies, but despite huge claims by neuroscientists we still know very little about the brain. The one social science that is sometimes elevated to the status of "science" because of its use of mathematical modeling is economics, but we are reminded daily of the unpredictability of the economy.
One should perhaps acknowledge that instead of the great divide between science and social science (and the humanities) we are dealing with a great number of different pursuits of knowledge and evidentiary practices and arenas of argumentation that are methodologically and theoretically wide apart without the possibility of making one successful research paradigm the model for others.
Comparisons in political science based on large data sets have great and perhaps unsolvable problems. An example is the work done by the comparativists Ronald Inglehart (Michigan) and Pippa Norris (Harvard) that has resulted in the Survey of World Values. It strikes the anthropologist immediately that their categorization of China, Korea, and Japan as "Confucian" is to mistake a history of cultural exchanges for a shared system of values. Similar mistakes are made by leading political scientists, for example, the late Samuel Huntington in his concept of the "clash of civilizations" or by Peter Katzenstein in recent work on East Asia. There is a serious lack of historical understanding at work when one thinks that Confucianism is a coherent system of values and that a core value like "filial piety" does not change when family arrangements change as a result of government interventions (antifeudalism campaigns by the Chinese Communists as well as the one-child policy in China) or demographic changes (dramatic in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan). Finally, the notion that these societies are characterized by Confucianism ignores the impact of other value orientations, such as Buddhism, Daoism, Shintoism, Christianity, and, last but not least, Communism.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Thomas Gibson vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I. The Fragment and the Whole
1. The Comparative Advantage of Anthropology 25
2. Market and Money: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory 48
Part II. Civilization and Comparison
3. Keeping the Muslims Out: Concepts of Civilization, Civility, and Civil Society in India, China, and Western Europe 61
4. The Afterlife of Images 80
Part III. Comparing Exclusion
5. Lost in the Mountains: Notes on Diversity in the Southeast Asian Mainland Massif 107
6. Who Cares? Care Arrangements and Sanitation for the Poor in India and Elsewhere 130
A Short Conclusion 147
Notes 155
Bibliography 171
Index 183
What People are Saying About This
"Passionately defending a critically informed anthropological method, Peter van der Veer takes on big names and massively funded projects in the social sciences—and he does not suffer fools gladly. He exposes the 'emperor's clothes,' critically revealing the persistence of unexamined Western cultural presuppositions while challenging the tendency toward generalization and cultural essentialism in the social sciences and the political uses of notions of civilization and civility to exclude unwanted others."
"Without question, The Value of Comparison will be a widely read book among those in search of a framework for more trenchantly confronting a world and a public discourse increasingly dominated by simplistic, positivistic, and poorly informed ideas about the nature of society. Peter van der Veer is especially effective in debunking the implicit binary assumption that treats an undifferentiated West as 'rational' and an equally undifferentiated 'Rest' as 'religious.' What van der Veer has to say is of paramount importance."