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Measurement in Economic Anthropology
E. Paul Durrenberger
Department of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University
2005
Encyclolpedia of Social Measurement. Vol 1:723-732.
I.
Theory
II.
Systems
III.
Variables
IV.
Mental vs. Material Variables
V.
Decision-making
VI.
Conclusion
GLOSSARY
substantivist—assumes all economic systems are unique and understandable in their
own terms
methodological individualism—assumption that institutional forms emerge from
individual decisions
formalism—approaches based on methodological individualism
institutional economcis—people create institutions to minimize costs of information
gathering and transactions.
practice theory—knowledge is a function of everyday activity.
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ANTHROPOLOGY IS DIFFERENT from other social science and humanities
disciplines because it is at the same time holistic, comparative, and ethnographic.
Anthropologists think in terms of whole systems rather than part systems. We think as
much of the interconnections among economics, politics, religion, demography, ecology,
and other systems as we do about the variables that modern scholarship isolates for
separate study by different disciplines such as sociology, political science, economics,
demography and biology. Because we seek to generalize our conclusions, we situate our
findings within a matrix of world-wide and findings from many times and places. We
attempt to expand our historic coverage, and thus our range of comparison, by the
recovery and interpretation of archaeological remains. Where we can observe social life,
we are ethnographic--we base our findings on the meticulous observation of everyday life
in particular locales. While ethnography may be theory-driven, theory in anthropology is
highly constrained by ethnographic observation and archaeological findings. There are a
plethora of issues and problems that center on measurement and interpretation of
archaeological remains which I shall not address.
Issues of measurement arise from being holistic, comparative and ethnographic,
but perhaps most directly in ethnography when we describe the workings of concrete
economic systems. Because we must strive for reliability and validity, measurement
issues are paramount in comparative studies as well. How shall we recognize an
economic system when we see one in a society that is radically different from the ones
with which we are familiar? How shall we compare different economic systems? What
kinds of samples allow cross-cultural generalization? (Moor 1961, Naroll and Cohen
1970). The holistic approach also relies on measurement to the extent that we wish to be
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able to show relationships among different aspects of cultures—for instance, security of
land tenure and allocation of labor.
Because the assumptions we bring to a problem determine what and how we
measure, all questions of measurement start with questions of theory. In economic
anthropology the technical problems of how to measure variables are almost trivial
compared to the theoretical problems of what to measure and the units for which to make
observations and measurements. On the other hand, the details of measurement are
always important because upon them rest our assessments of validity and reliability. If
we don’t measure what we think we are measuring, the measurement is invalid. If others
cannot repeat it, it is not reliable.
In the next, second section, I briefly discuss some issues of theory in economic
anthropology to show how our theoretical assumptions shape our conceptualization of
issues of what and how to measure. In the third section, I discuss concepts of systems
and how our understanding of systems shapes our view of what variables we
operationalize and measure, the topic to which I turn in the fourth section. Throughout I
contrast economic anthropology with the discipline of economics. Economic
anthropology is not simply the transportation of economics to exotic locales. It is, rather,
a different way of conceptualizing the phenomena of economics, a different set of
theoretical traditions, and hence, different issues of operationalization and measurement.
One of the assumptions of economics is that institutional structures emerge from the
aggregate of individual rational decisions. Decisions area mental phenomena while their
consequences are often material. One of the questions anthropologists debate, discuss,
and study is the relationship between the mental and the material. In the fifth section, I
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discuss this issue, and in the last section, I return to discuss some measurement issues
entailed in studying decision making as mental and cultural phenomena. Here we move
from the measurement of material phenomena to the measurement of mental ones,
culture.
I. Theory
Economic theory proceeds from the cautionary assumption that we hold all other
things equal. Does a feather fall faster or slower than a cannonball? If we abstract away
atmosphere and weather and think of them in a vacuum, they fall at the same rate. This is
fine for physics, but engineers know there aren’t any vacuums in practice, so, while the
insight might be of interest to the formulation of theory, it is of little practical importance.
In their aspiration for the same abstract level of theory as physicists, economists define
similar uniform if imaginary “all things equal” environments. They then proceed to
derive the logical implications of the set of assumptions about human nature.
Anthropologists build their discipline on the fact that things are never equal.
Neoclassical economists assume that ideal economic persons know all of the alternatives
available to them and can assess the results of one decision relative to another and thus
chose rationally among possibilities. Economic anthropologists dare to challenge the
basic assumption and suggest that human beings not only do not operate in this fashion,
they cannot (Henrich 2002).
In the pristine theoretical world of neoclassical economists, Garrett Hardin could
argue that self interested herders increase their livestock to extract as much from a
common resource as possible for their short term benefit before others, acting according
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to the same logic, do so and leave them with nothing. The inevitable and tragic result is
overgrazing the common pasture until it is useless to anyone. But real people are not so
rational. Since Hardin’s article, numerous ethnographic examples have shown that such a
tragedy is not inevitable (Durrenberger and King 2000; McCay and Acheson 1987). No
matter what theoretical sense Hardin’s model may make, it is not an accurate description
of the experience of people who depend on resources that are not privately owned (King
and Durrenberger 2000).
We might assume that the realm of the economic is defined by those decisions
individuals make to allocate their limited resources among competing needs or demands.
Marshall Sahlins (2000) discusses this assumption as a peculiarly western cultural
construct. This fundamental assumption, this culturally given ideological axiom of
economics, is called “methodological individualism,” the assumption that institutional
forms and structures emerge from the aggregate of individual decisions. Decisions are
independent variables and institutions are dependent variables. In economic
anthropology, approaches based on this assumption are called “formalism” or the
“formalist approach.”
An alternative view is that individual decisions are highly constrained or
determined by institutional forms. This rests on the idea that there is a social and
institutional order of experience beyond the individual. Social constraints are
independent variables and individual decisions are dependent variables. These social
forms are widely variable and define different economic orders and different rationalities.
In anthropology, approaches based on this notion are called “substantivist.”
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Another school of economists, institutionalists, observe that as soon as we
introduce one note of reality into the neoclassical economists’ system of assumptions, the
whole theoretical groundwork shifts. People are in fact not equally well informed.
Information is costly. People have to allocate resources to gain information. Making any
decision entails costs. The time it takes to make one decision detracts time from other
possible decisions. Thus the cost of making one decision is not making another that one
might have made with the same time and effort. A story has it that a wealthy financier
quit smoking cigars when he weighed the minute by minute gains of his ventures against
the time it took to unwrap and light a cigar. At the rate of return on his time, it wasn’t
worth his effort to smoke a cigar.
Institutional economics assumes that institutions emerge from individual
decisions, but that the decisions are constrained. This view recognizes that people do not
have perfect knowledge, are deceitful and self interested, and that incomplete information
or disinformation increases uncertainty. Thus people try to gain more information, but
the effort to get information is costly. Even in terms of economic assumptions it is costly
to use markets. People therefore create alternatives that short circuit the process to gain
more certainty. These are institutions. These institutions then guide further decisions
(Acheson 1994, 2002).
A major response of economic anthropology to abstract theoretical formulations
has been to ignore them in favor of detailed ethnographic accounts of people in locales.
This approach so characterizes American anthropology that it is called American
particularism or historical particularism. Barrett (1996) sums up the features of this
approach. First, there is a limited interest in history. This approach assumes that habit
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and custom, rather than individual decisions, guide social life, so it emphasizes values,
norms, and emotions. This leads people to emphasize interior views rather than external
ones. The emphasis on relativism and the associated assumption that cultures are loosely
organized and unique implies that little generalization is possible. The emphasis on
ethnographic description of individual examples, meant, as Robin Fox (1991: 19) put it,
that fieldwork replaced scholarship and thought.
The substantivist approach assumes that all economic systems are unique and
understandable in their own terms. The formalist approach that assumes that all people
share the mentality that economists attribute to people—that they allocate scarce means
among competing ends with perfect knowledge of alternatives and hierarchically ranked
objectives. In his studies of domestic production among Oaxacan metate producers and
their relationships to a larger capitalist system of which they are parts, Cook (1982:4)
came to appreciate a number of limitations in economic anthropology that both
approaches share as a consequence of their adherence to the underlying assumptions of
particularism. He summarized the limitations as:
(1) a tendency to reduce explanations of complex processes involving
inter-related and contradictory variables to descriptions of isolated events;
(2) a tendency to explain economic process at the empirical level and a
failure to develop any conceptual framework to expose underlying social
dynamics;
(3) a pervasive focus on individual agents;
(4) an almost completely 'circulationist' view of the economy.
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He found that economic anthropologists see events as unique and unrelated
because they stay close to the empirical, do not analyze systems, and do not understand,
appreciate or develop theories and are most concerned with the exchange rather than the
production of objects. This is in keeping with a long tradition of empiricism in American
anthropology (Barrett 1996, Salzman 2001).
The decision of what to measure depends on understandings of what the variables
are and how they are related. The problem of measurement is more than simply
operationalizing measures for variables. Tannenbaum's (1984) study of anthropologists'
use of Chayanov's concepts in the United States underscored Cook's conclusion.
Chayanov argued that Russian peasants did not employ wage workers, they were
not engaged in business and, without a category of wages, standard economic could not
apply. The annual household product less production costs was the ent product which
could not be divided into wages, capital, and rent, since there were no such categories in
the system. In Chayanov’s view, this net product was determined by theinteraction of
several variables: Size and composition of the working family, number of workers,
productivity of labor and how much people work. The composition of the household was
only one variable in the system that contributed to the household’s total demand.
Household composition changes over time with the developmental cycle from a married
couple to a couple with non-working children to a couple with working children to an
older couple with working children and their spouses. Households with more consumers
to support would work more land and have larger household incomes than those with
fewer consumers. Chayanov considered this to be a major but not the only factor that
determined economic differentiation among peasant households.
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Many considered family composition or the demographic cycle to be the key
element in Chayanov’s analysis. Chayanov,in contrast, held that the key factor in
determining household production was the balance between the marginal utility of value
produced and the disutility of labor to produce it. Fertility of land, distance to markets,
market situations, availability and costs of labor and technology all contributed to the
determination of the productivity of labor and its inverse, the disutility of labor. The
marginal utility of value produced is determined by factors such as rates of taxation, rents
or other costs of access to means of production, debt, costs of labor and technology as
well as the ratio of consumers to workers. Nor did he make any assumption about
whether peasants were producing for markets. Value produced could be rubles or
potatoes (Chayanov 1966; Durrenbereger and Tannenbaum 2002).
Tannenbaum concludes (1984: 940) that misuses of Chayanov's ideas are part of a
more general trend of conceptual distortion, preference for method over theoretical
reflection, and an empiricist outlook that equates statistical summaries with theory and
attempts to develop theories from "data" rather than to understand systems of
relationships in theoretical terms and develop relevant methods of measurement from
them (Durrenberger and Tannenbaum 2002). Issues of measurement depend in large part
on our understandings of how to describe systems and how they operate.
II. Systems
The first problem of measurement is to specify a system. Our assumptions may
provide the answer—from the global to the household, but the definition of the system,
its parts, and their relations with each other will determine the variables of interest.
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These assumptions specify the relationships we can possibly see among events and
individuals. This kind of analysis is qualitative but it specifies the variables and
relationships that raise the questions of measurement.
From an ecological perspective, we could say it is always important to trace
energy flows. If the inputs are greater than the inputs, as for instance, in industrial
agriculture, we know immediately that the system is not sustainable. This approach does
not tell us is why anyone would engage in activity that has no possible future. But our
observations show us without doubt, for instance, that modern states and corporations do
engage in such non-sustainable agricultural practices.
From a purely economic perspective if we look at all market transactions, we
ignore the institutional systems that support the market. For instance, people may sell
their labor on markets, but a commodity approach cannot ask or answer the question of
the source of the labor. The people are created somehow. Furthermore, markets require
vast legal and institutional structures to support them. They are not natural. They are
costly to maintain and someone must bear the costs. Seeing economic systems in this
way is a consequence of anthropology’s insistence on holism—seeing the relationships
among demography, markets, law, and households.
As Marshall Sahlins (1972,2000) points out, if we only ask questions of
production, we ignore the uses to which people put the things they obtain, their reasons
for valuing them. So cultural questions have material consequences even if we argue that
material relations determine cultural awareness.
Eric Wolf (1997) argued that anthropology, like the other social sciences,
straddles the reality of the natural world and the reality of people’s organized knowledge
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about that world. This is the distinction between the exterior view of what is, and the
interior views of different people of different places and times—what they think or know
about external realities. Some analysts treat the problem that this poses by disregarding
the impasse between the interior and the exterior realms. Some discount the mental and
consider behavior in the material world as primary. Others focus on the mental schema
that people define for themselves and consider behavior in the material world as
epiphenomenona or irrelevant. Still others assign equal importance to both spheres and
do not discuss how to reconcile them.
Wolf argues that the key to the resolution is in focusing on the intersection of
material and mental events by paying close attention to the exterior relations of power
that mobilize labor and the internal patterns of thought that define who does what. This
challenges us to show how tasks and mental constructs are distributed among genders,
age categories, and classes. Such questions call for measurement of mental artifacts, an
issue to which I return later. Wolf asks how knowledge is built and used to accumulate
power and how some forms of knowledge come to dominate others. This is the program
he carried out in his later book (1999), Envisioning Power.
Wolf (1997) defines the units of observation as modes of production or different
means by which people have organized production with their concomitant institutions,
social relations, tools, and forms of knowledge. The units of observation are as
important as the systems we define and equally dependent on the questions we ask. If
our units are villages, firms, modes of production, or nations, we cannot compare
households. If we focus on households or villages we may lose sight of modes of
production, nations, or global relations.
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Gwako (2002), for example summarized research that finds no relationship
between the security of land tenure and the productivity of agriculture. In this work,
households were the units of analysis. In Africa, men may own land and be heads of
households, but it is women, not men, who do most of the agricultural work. Gwako
found that if we look at security of property rights by cultivated plot rather than per
household, it does predict the level of agricultural output. Women put more into those
plots whose product they control. Using households as units obscures this relationship
between security of property rights and allocation of effort.
Diane Wolf (1992) challenges the validity of households as units of decision
making as well as the concept of strategic decision making itself. Her qualitative work
among rural Indonesian households whose daughters work in factories shows that in this
context of factory jobs, people in poor households make decisions experimentally and ad
hoc. They do not have strategies. They don’t enjoy the luxury of being able to plan into
the future. There may be household coping mechanisms or household practices, but no
strategies or planning.
Her meticulous quantitative data on landholdings and household budgets allow
her to conclude that there is a relationship between the resources available to households
and the likelihood that their daughters will work in factories. However, she also shows
that while households of factory workers are poor in land, women from the poorest
families with a high number and ratio of dependents do not work in factories because
their presence is needed for daily work of maintaining the household or to take care of
their own children.
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She insists that rather than assuming that households have strategies, rather than
assuming that a relationship between resources and availability for wage labor, we must
describe the details of household budgets and individual decisions. These fine grained
observations allow for wider conclusions that are devastating to the theoretical
assumptions that inform the concept of household strategies.
Diane Wolf’s quantitative data support the expectations that household models
suggest between access to resources and factory work, but the qualitative data do not
support inferences of the models about reasons. The Chayanovian, Marxist and
neoclassical models do not indicate process (Wolf 1992:177). In isolating and measuring
variables such as access to resources and household cycle, Wolf was able to ask questions
about the relationships of the inferences of various models and the processes she could
observe ethnographically.
In contrast, Mary Beth Mills (1999) argues that cultural and ideological factors
bring rural Thai women to work in factories. The lack of any quantitative data on
household budgets or access to resources makes the assessment of her conclusions
impossible. Diane Wolf empirically assesses the implications of various theoretical
models while Mills simply asserts relationships without any data. This contrast suggests
the importance of measurement for ethnographic description, and the importance of
ethnographic description for testing assumptions.
If we assume that all economic activity is market directed and profit oriented, then
we measure only those transactions that leave some historical trace in the records of
transactions. For instance, we could measure money paid in wages, rent, and capital to
determine the profitability of various enterprises. With this definition of the economic,
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we would not see unremunerated activity or production or any activity that was ‘off the
books’ in the informal sector.
If we use this concept of the economic, we must confine our empirical enquiries
to one sector of capitalist economies. Work in households to raise children, produce
food, process or sell food or other commodities is invisible (Haraldsdottir 1994). Any
segment of any economy that does not work according to the principals of firms is
invisible. Thus the range of our empirical enquiries is either very distorted or very
limited (Smith 1990)
One response to the limitations is to assume that all economic activity follows the
logic of firms. Such an assumption is not ethnographically or historically supportable. It
introduces even further distortions into the characterization of economies.
If we single out one economic phenomenon for attention, we may lose sight of the
system of which it is a part. If we only trace money, we are likely to overlook other
important kinds of value such as unremunerated work. If we only look at production, we
may ignore the circulation of goods and the reasons for their production. If we look only
at exchange we may ignore the organization of production.
The technical problems of measurement will vary from place to place and from
one sense of problem to another. This is as it should be, because if we worked from a
single perspective we would not be able to admit the considerable detail that empirical
observation demands and upon which anthropology rests. On the other hand, the cost of
such eclecticism, as Cook pointed out, is that there is little in economic anthropology that
is cumulative. Studies do not build one each other. The dialectical and critical
relationship between theoretical and empirical work is underdeveloped (Durrenberger
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1998).
III. Variables
Each set of assumptions suggests different units of analysis and different variables
to measure. The first technical methodological question is how to operationalize each
variable so we can recognize it. The second related methodological question is how to
measure each variable. These decisions and categories do not depend on or necessarily
reflect locally relevant systems of thought.
If we assume that economic activity is that which produces, exchanges or uses
something, we measure amounts of time and goods as people produce, exchange and use
them. This opens all realms of activity to our analysis. The invisible labor of households
and the informal economy can become the subjects of inquiry and we can develop less
distorted and more realistic descriptions of economic systems.
One method of measuring allocation of labor is Time Allocation Studies. The
objective of the method is to record what a sample of people are doing at a sample of
places and moments of time. From this information on the number of times people do
specific activities one can infer the amount of time they spend doing different things.
Bernard (1988: 280-287) discusses the problems and potentials of this method. One
problem is that observers affect the behavior of the people they are observing. It is
difficult to control for this reaction effect of people being observed. This method
assumes answers to the questions of whom to observe, how frequently to observe them,
how long to observe them, when to observe them and where to observe them. A truly
random sampling strategy would have to consider each dimension except perhaps
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duration. A less than truly random sampling strategy introduces questions of bias that
can never be answered after the fact. Another question is the validity of the categories of
observation. How do observers categorize actions to count them? What counts as an
instance of a given category of activity?
Such studies can produce valuable data if they are integrated with participant
observer accounts, but without due consideration to the problem of classifying activities
and sampling, they may be exercises in spurious precision.
In 1972 Marshall Sahlins based his notion of the original affluent society—the
idea that people adjust their needs to their resources and do not work incessantly to
supply insatiable demands--on such data from hunting and foraging peoples. Dobe of the
Kalahari desert in South Africa work an average of 2 hours and nine minutes each day to
support themselves and their dependents (Sahlins 1972:21), an observation that led
Sahlins to challenge the assumption that hunters and foragers spent most of their time
working to feed themselves.
In 1953 Sol Tax suspected, based on his observations of 1936, that the
Guatemalan Indians of Panajachel worked “more than is typical either of primitive
tribesmen or of urbanites” (Tax 1953:85). He classified activities as community
service—time for church and state including “military service, sporadic assistance on
public works. . . and service in the formal political-religious organization” (1953:16)—
personal and social including personal hygiene, sickness—when people call shamans--,
nursing infants, birthing children, baptisms, marriages, funerals—and economic activities
including time devoted to different crops and animals as well as hunting and fishing,
household tasks, weaving, sewing, providing firewood and marketing. On the basis of
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his observations, he prepared a time budget for all men, women and children of the
village. Given the computational apparatus at his disposal, this was a major statistical
accomplishment.
The units of analysis are significant. From figures aggregated by the village it is
not possible to check for variation among households. This effectively removes
households as units. Tax does preserve the distinction between women’s work and men’s
work and by ethnic category, so it is possible to draw conclusions on the basis of gender
and ethnicity. Here, household work is very visible, but not per household.
These approaches assume that people move from one meaningful category of
activity to another. One challenge is to understand the categories [e.g. calling a shaman
to deal with a sickness] and another is to adequately measure the allocation of time to
activities. If time allocation studies have the problems of sampling and observer effect,
Tax’s approach fills in the gaps with observation, measurement, and assumption. He
observed and measured the time specific individuals spent doing specific tasks, and then
generalized on the basis of age, gender and ethnicity to estimate a time budget for the
entire community. This approach may be less technically sophisticated than time
allocation studies, but, given the problems with them, is probably just as adequate a
representation of realities.
When Nicola Tannenbaum and I were interested in similar questions of household
labor and resource allocation among Shan in Northwestern Thailand, we developed a
third method of measuring time use. Like Tax, we relied heavily on participant
observation for the definitions of locally relevant categories of effort, expenditure, and
return. We measured effort and expenditures by visiting interviewing members of every
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household once each week to determine their weekly expenditures and work. We cross
checked these reports against other reports and against our own observations
(Durrenberger and Tannenbaum 1990).
Those interested in markets and economic transactions have shown how they
cover great areas via periodic markets, traveling merchants, and relationships of credit.
Skinner (1964, 1977) showed that the Chinese villages clustered within three miles of a
market town formed a meaningful unit of kinship, marriage, and culture. These units
themselves clustered around larger ones related through the literate elite. This example
provided an apt illustration of central place theory.
Von Thunen explained the intensity of agricultural production in terms of central
lace theory as a function of distance to market centers. Boserup explained it in terms of
demographic pressure as a function of population density. Carol Smith tested both of
these approaches in Western Guatemala where there is considerable variability in
production intensity, population density, and distance from market centers. Peasants
may produce most of their subsistence goods, produce some specialized goods for the
market and buy goods on the market or specialize in non-agricultural occupations such as
handicraft production or long-distance trading. Because Carol Smith didn’t have data on
the allocation of effort or time for these alternatives, she ranked them from lowest to
highest based on observations that she and other anthropologists made.
To measure the importance and size of the 250 local marketplaces, she developed
an index based on the number of different kinds of goods each market offered and the
number of sellers. She used census data to estimate sizes of peasant holdings and
population densities. Her empirical work suggested that the Von Thunen’s central place
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and Boserup’s demographic approaches are compatible and that each is incomplete.
While they are reasonable if all things are equal, all things are never equal. Boserup
assumed that farmers would consume their own production and Von Thunen assumed
that farmers have only single market centers. Both assumptions are wrong.
Following Skinner, Smith (1985) discussed central place theory in her analyses of
regional economic and political structures that global forces influence. She
differentiated different market functions and sizes in her meticulous empirical study of
the types and locations of Guatemalan rural markets to show the dynamic relations of
regional systems that enmesh villages (Smith 1985). Others, (e.g. Appleby 1985)
expanded these concepts of regional and central place analysis to different geographic
areas.
In her study of the California strawberry industry, Miriam Wells develops
quantitative data on many variables from many sources including government
documents, observation, and interviews. This allows a meticulous comparison of areas
within the state and illustrates historical forces at work so she can assess the causal
factors at work, for instance, in the re-emergence of share cropping arrangements after
they had all but disappeared. She found that different factors affected different regions in
different ways, something that a theoretical approach, whether neo-classical or Marxist
could never have shown because no matter what it’s assumptions, it would have assumed
a uniformity that was unrealistic.
In his 1965 assessment of the civil-religious hierarchy the Mayan community of
Zinacantan, Frank Cancian (1965) meticulously measured the wealth and prestige of
individuals to understand how they are related to participation in the system over time.
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These examples, and others like them, show that how the anthropologist defines the
system indicates the variables to measure and that sets the problems of operationalization
and measurement that the anthropologist must then solve. The solutions are different for
different units of analysis—from agricultural plot to household to village to market area
to nation to global system; from production to consumption to exchange; from questions
of marketing to questions of prestige.
IV. Mental vs. Material Variables
Is there any empirical way to investigate the relationship between the material and
the mental that Eric Wolf posed, or must it forever remain in the realm of speculative
philosophy or assumption? Parallel to the distinction Eric Wolf (1997) drew between the
mental and the material was Malinowski’s (1922) differentiation between internal views
of the people he was trying to understand as “ethnographic” in distinction to his own
external constructions which he called “sociological.” Marvin Harris’s (1999) distinction
between the emic and the etic captures another difference that Sandstrom and Sandstrom
(1995) discuss at some length. The people we are trying to understand build emic
statements from discriminations they make.
If Sahlins is correct that what people think affects their economic action; if Wolf
is correct to suppose that relations of power affect people’s patterns of thought, then our
study of economics necessitates measurement of cultural artifacts, patterns of thought as
well as patterns of action.
If we attempt to put active people into the equation, individuals making decisions,
we must consider the question of agency. Again, we can assume rationality or we can
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investigate it empirically. Our concern for understanding agency shifts our attention to
the relationships between thought and action and our concern for culture focuses our
attention on the relationship of thought to structures such as class. Posing the question
“culture is related to what, how?” D’Andrade (1999:100) agrees with Geertz’s critique
of symbolic analysis:
The danger that cultural analysis, in search of all-too-deep-lying turtles,
will lose touch with the hard surfaces of life—with the political,
economic, stratificatory realities within which men [sic] are everywhere
contained. . . is an ever present one. The only defense against it. . . is to
train such analysis on such realities . . . in the first place.
D’Andrade continues that the solution is not to add to the stack of turtles with further
analysis of cultural meanings, social exigencies, and cognitive capacities but to
understand the relationships among social and economic systems, cultural forms, and
action, a program congenial to Wolf’s last work (1999) which explores the connection
between ideas and power to describe the ways cultural configurations articulate with the
power that arranges the settings and domains of social and economic life, especially the
allocation and use of labor.
Casting his eyes back some hundreds of years to understand varied social
formations, Eric Wolf analyzed the ways relations that organize economic and political
interactions shape patterns of thought that make the world intelligible to the people we try
to understand. In contexts as diverse as Kwakuitl, Nazi Germany, and Aztec, he answers
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D’Andrade’s question by describing the workings of class and power to analyze the
relations among power, ideology, stratification, and the allocation of labor to show the
role of power in defining the cultures that determine how people understand their
situations and lives.
Hannerz (1992) reviews the literature on these topics and recognizes that peoples’
views of things depend on the positions from which they see them (Durrenberger and
Pálsson 1996). People construct meanings from their location in social structures from
the flow of available experiences and intentions. “Through the interaction of
perspectives, culture is produced. How many people have to be involved in order for us
to see culture as a collective phenomenon? As few as two, or as many as millions”
(Hannerz 1992:68). Concrete personal experiences are the basis for generalized
understandings and generalized understandings are frameworks for interpreting
experiences. Shared meanings are tied to specific shared experiences of people in
settings. Because Brumann (1999) has reviewed the literature and arguments about
culture there is no need to repeat them here. The question is how to operationalize these
insights and incorporate them into the practice of ethnography.
V. Decision-making
In 1956 Ward Goodenough argued that if anthropologists impose outside
categories such as Malinowski’s ‘sociological’ or Harris’s ‘etic’ categories, on a culture
they cannot understand how people make the important decisions that guide their lives.
He was discussing residence rules that specify where newlywed couples live after they
get married. The categories were some of the most precisely defined in anthropology, yet
23
Goodenough found that they did not guarantee reliable interpretations of data. Another
anthropologist had collected census data that were similar to Goodenough’s, but arrived
at different conclusions about post-marital residence. Goodenough argued that the
problem was that neither anthropologist had understood how people actually decided
where to live after they were married. He proceeded to outline the factors that were
relevant to the people and how they balance them in making residence decisions. His
more general conclusion was that accurate ethnography would depend on describing how
people think about and decide things—the internal, “ethnographic” or “emic” view-rather than imposing exogenous categories.
This paper informed a ensuing work in cognitive anthropology, much of it
collected in Steven Tyler’s 1969 book, Cognitive Anthropology. When Roger Keesing
(1966, 1970, 1971, 1972 ) returned to the issue of how to understand how people make
allocative decisions, he distinguished between statistical models that describe the
observed frequencies of possible outcomes and decision models that specify how people
decide on allocations in terms of their own categories and judgments of salience and
importance.
In 1987 Christina Gladwin and Robesrt Zabawa agreed with anthropologist’s
rejection of neo-classical economists’ explanations of increasing farm sizes and
decreasing number of farmers in the U.S. This critique rejected the idea that such social
phenomena were the net result of the decisions of rational self-seeking individuals and
argued in favor of a more institutional, sociological, structural or materialist view that
emphasized social relations, class structures, patterns of ownership, and conflict among
sectors, regions and countries. Like Keesing, they argued that these structures do not
24
themselves account for changes, but that changes in international markets, technology,
monetary policies, and inflation shape farmers’ decisions. They argued that people
change structures by their decisions. This is consistent with Gladwin’s other work (1975,
1980).
More recently, Joseph Henrich (2002) argues that while we can understand
phenomena in terms of individual decision making, people do not in fact base their
decisions on the weighing of costs and benefits. It is incorrect to assume, he argues, that
people use their abilities to reason to develop strategies to attain goals. In fact, people
have to operate in terms of limited information, cognitive capacities, multiple goals, and
constraining social structures. He argues that the way people learn creates changes in the
frequencies of ideas, beliefs, values and behaviors without cost-benefit decisions. Thus
do cultures change.
The notion that thought determines action is widespread. From advertising to
education there are modern institutional structures dedicated to the proposition that the
way to change people's actions is to change their minds, a proposal that rests on the
assumption that thought determines action. When Jean Lave (1988), attempting to
understand how people learn and use that most cerebral of cognitive skills--mathematics-challenged transference theory, the notion that we can isolate abstract properties of
systems and communicate them to others via symbols, she advocated expanding our
understanding of cognition from something that happens in the mind to a process that
stretches over the environment as well as time into past experiences and future
expectations. In doing so she offered a new definition to a movement Ortner (1984)
25
detected in the attempts to synthesize and sort out anthropological theorizing since the
1960's, a trend she tentatively called practice theory.
Some who called themselves cognitive anthropologists described well structured
patterns of thought they understood by talking to people. In a precursor of the now
fashionable "linguistic turn" (Pálsson 1995) some (Black 1969) even argued that because
cultures were things of the mind embodied in language anthropologists had only to talk to
people to understand their cultures.
Other cognitive anthropologists questioned the salience of such language centered
patterns. Van Esterik (1978) showed that there were no static taxonomies of spirit-ghosts
in Thailand and concluded that, “the process of creating guardian spirits is continuous . . .
. ” (Van Esterik 1978:405). Durrenberger and Morrison (1978) expanded on that finding.
Challenging language-centered analyses, Gatewood (1985) discussed the complex
patterns of cultures that are not encoded linguistically, not available for labeling, and not
accessible to language or language-centered investigative techniques. People learn some
things not by hearing about them but by doing them. Actions, he said in his title, speak
louder than words. A decade later Pálsson (1994), reflecting on similarly nautical
experiences, reached a similar conclusion.
Few today would argue that any structures--cognitive, political, economic-endure. We have seen too much change in patterns of economic, political, and cultural
relations for the premise of systems in equilibrium, even dynamic equilibrium to be
persuasive. The riddle repeats an earlier one--what are the directions of causality? From
thought to action as structuralists and cognitivists would have it? Or from structures of
power and other relationships to thought as materialists would have it?
26
One solution is the extreme postmodernist one, which argues that structures of
meaning are not anchored in the outside world (Layton 1997:186). Another might be
extreme holism--to affirm that everything affects everything else and we cannot sort it all
out because it's too complex. At best, this view suggests, we can provide an appreciation
for the complexity by some attempt to recapitulate it in another mode. In the postmodern
view, explication of reality needs no mediation--only experience, not reflection, analysis,
or depiction. This is counter to the principles of both art and science which highlight
some dimensions and underplay others to organize and filter reality rather than replicate
it. While it may be true that everything is related, we do not see hurricane forecasters
watching butterflies to detect how the beat of their individual wings will impact el nino.
Here I return to a practical issue and the work of Jean Lave. If patterns of thought
are situational, determined by changing social structures, then it is not effective to try to
change social patterns by changing minds. The prevalent model of education in the
United States seems to be “transference” of abstractions from teachers to students.
Alternatives involve learners in practice and more or less closely resemble apprenticeship
programs. Jean Lave (1988) challenged the currently popular view of education as
transference of knowledge that centers on the idea that scientific research abstracts the
principles underlying phenomena, teachers transfer these to students in classrooms, and
students then apply them in their work and lives. The idea of transference is that people
learn by assimilating abstractions that are transferred to them in classrooms. This is the
logic of the safety courses that have no relationship to accident rates and the classroom
education of fishermen which has no relationship to their subsequent success
(Durrenberger 1997). Lave centers her account on computation, mathematics in practice,
27
to show that the principles that teachers teach are not the ones that people use--that the
knowledge of mathematics that teachers transfer in classrooms is not used or useful
beyond classrooms.
She goes on to argue that schooling has become a means of legitimizing hierarchy
in terms of, to use Katherine Newman's (1988, 1993) phrase, meritocratic individualism,
the ideology of ranking individuals according to their merit and attributing their success,
failure, prestige, status, income and other characteristics to some measure of individual
merit or achievement. Schooling is a way of establishing one's merit for such rankings.
Thus it becomes its own end, its own objective, and loses references to the outside world
of practice. In the process, though, schooling becomes the measure of merit; and
becomes rationalized as the means of transferring knowledge so schooling or education
becomes identified with knowledge. Thus, when people want to change someone's
behavior, it seems obvious that education is the answer.
Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that people do not learn by transference in
classrooms but by practice, by moving from peripheral participation to more and more
central and expert roles in what they call a community of practice, people who recognize
and validate a certain kind of practice. They suggest that transference of abstractions
does not change people’s minds or behavior, but that changing the nature of people’s
everyday lives to involve them continuously and progressively in communities of
practice does effect such changes.
Analyses of this kind indicate the problem of measuring mental constructs. How
can we know what ideas people use, how they define them, and to what extent they share
them?
28
Moore, Romney, and Hsia (1999) and Romney and others (2000) developed a
means to explore and characterize and quantify similarities and differences in shared
patterns of thought. They illustrate their method by examining terms for emotion in
Chinese, English and Japanese. Culture, they argue, resides in the minds of people as
pictures that are cognitive representations of semantic domains. A semantic domain is an
organized set of words at the same level of contrast that refer to a single conceptual
sphere. Using judgments of similarity, they use scaling and visualization procedures to
make precise comparisons among what is in the minds of different individuals and they
can measure the extent to which these pictures correspond or differ.
One important dimension of culture is the shared aspects of mental pictures
people create of related sets of words. People’s judgments of similarities among an
organized set of words or a semantic domain is an ethnographic means to construct
individual mental pictures and measure their similarities to others’ (Romney et al 1996).
As Romney and Moore (1998: 315) put it, “the meaning of each term is defined by its
location relative to all the other terms.” This requires some way to measure peoples’
ideas of similarity among the items of an organized set of words. A triads test does this
by asking informants to indicate which of three items is least like the other two for all
possible combinations of three items in the set of words. In selecting one item as least
similar, informants indicate that the remaining two are somehow similar.
Thus, Durrenberger was able to assess awareness of union membership by such a
test that asked respondents to select which was most different in each combination of
“steward,” “union representative,” “manager,” “supervisor,” “co-worker.” Consider the
triad: "supervisor, co-worker, union rep.” If a person selected “supervisor” as the most
29
different, indicating similarity between workers and reps, it would imply a "union
model." They are distinguishing in terms of union versus non-union affiliation. The
choice of "coworker" would indicate a conceptual scheme based on hierarchy as "coworkers" are less powerful than supervisors and reps. Picking "rep" would indicate a
workplace proximity scheme as that is the feature that supervisors and co-workers share.
Ethnographic observation and interviews might indicate other criteria of classification
such as e.g. gender (if all co workers are women and supervisors men) race or ethnicity
(if workers tend to be of one category and management another), or age.
Weller and Romney (1988) and Bernard (1988) discuss this procedure and its
history in anthropology. For more recent discussions of the triads multidimensional
scaling representations, and further citations to the methodological and substantive
literature on the topics see Romney 1999; Romney et al 1996, 2000, Romney, Moore, and
Rush 1996; and Romney and Moore 1998.
Empirical work in this vein (Durrenberger 1999, 2000, 2002) indicates that
among the American working class, at least, everyday realities are more powerful in
determining the patterns of thought than patterns of thought in determining the everyday
realities. Thus their cultural constructs do not always agree with those of others in
different structural positions. If their consciousness can be said to be false, it is at least
realistic--it reflects the realities of power at their work places. If their consciousness is
false it may not be so much because of the hegemony of another class over the cultural
apparatus, their ability to shape ideas that form culture, but their power to shape the daily
lives of workers in their work places, realities that become encoded as patterns of
thought.
30
If patterns of thought reflect realities as Moore, Romney, Hsia and Rusch (2000)
suggest, then it behooves us to understand the realities that shape cultures, to understand
in some detail, as D’Andrade (1999) put it, what determines culture and how. Among
the most powerful determinants of social and economic realities are class practices. By
understanding the relationships among class practices and patterns of thought we can
keep in touch with the hard surfaces of life that Geertz rightly predicted we would ignore
when we turned to the analysis of ever-deepening piles of cultural turtles.
VI Conclusion
The theories we use define the systems we observe. The systems we observe
define the variables we can measure. Some variables are material; some are mental. We
operationalize these variables and measure them in order to compare our theoretical
understandings with the empirical realities we can observe. We use the insights we gain
from such work to refine our theoretical understandings, our understandings of systems,
and our measurements. By measurement and a scientific approach we can break out of
the endless rounds of “other things equal” speculation and develop reliable and valid
understandings of the variety of economic systems that characterize humanity today and
through history.
31
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